We’re closing in on the Oscar nominations, which arrive next week, and as Film Twitter and pundits debate and argue about which movies deserved merit or not, it’s easy to forget the struggle filmmakers go through just to get anything made. And the latest directors roundtable from THR reminds everybody that a film is a mere stop on a life-long journey for each moviemaker.
Mel Gibson (“Hacksaw Ridge”), Oliver Stone (“Snowden”), Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”), Mira Nair (“Queen Of Katwe”) and Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”) all swap stories from the battlefield of the set. And Gibson in particular paints the hard realities that directors sometimes face.
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“It’s so overwhelming sometimes. If you thought about the big picture, you’d crawl back into a hole and die. You’re dropped in the middle of the ocean, a sea of troubles and people and logistical problems and cameras and in-fighting. There’s so much stuff going on, and you have to ignore it and just start swimming that way, one stroke at a time, and you’ll hit land eventually,” he said. “You haven’t really got time, once you’re amongst it, to actually be too worried because you’re just too damn busy. And you’ve got to do it fast, especially now. We’ve all been relegated to the area where we are sort of [making] independent films. This is a whole new cinematic landscape. You don’t have the luxuries that you used to. ‘Hacksaw Ridge,’ I had 59 days, right? I had twice that time on ‘Braveheart’ and more of a budget, and that was 20 years ago. I had 59 days to do three major-pitch battle sequences with the logistical nightmare of explosions and extras and soldiers and stunts and everything else. It’s like trying to cram 10 pounds of shit in a 5-pound bag, you know?”
All that being said, each director has fallen under the spell of movies, with Nair painting a pretty lovely portrait of first being attracted to films.
“Under a mosquito net in East India, where I grew up[, is where I fell in love with movies]. We had a foster grandfather-type who used to shoot man-eating tigers, and he took us to the only cinema that existed in this little town — and they showed only one film every Sunday morning, and that was ‘Doctor Zhivago,’ “ Nair said. “So the contrast of Siberia with Omar Sharif and the heat of tropical India was palpable and memorable and made me want to tell stories.”
The entire conversation is great stuff — be sure to make some time for it.