1) “I thought I was making a movie and I inadvertently made a film.” (James Cameron)
No clue what the context is for this quote, but if I had to guess... he’d differentiating a “movie” (a fun ride, a 2-hour piece of entertainment), and a “film” (something with artistic depth and meaning).
2) “The lack of film culture is one of the things that really upsets me. There’s this complete lack of interest in anything that was made longer than ten years ago…it’s like ignoring buried treasure, but it’s not even buried. It’s right there.” (Peter Bogdanovich)
Because audiences are more drawn to CGI, lens flares, and big explosions in slow-mo. The only reasons Michael Bay has a career.
Anything 10 years old or older either suffers from more primitive CGI or from a raging case of simpler storytelling (in other words, reliant on story and not FX).
One of my professor always says that the previous generation of filmmakers had disciple (planning etc, because they were shooting in film) where most of the current filmmakers lack that. is Mr. Bogdanovich talking about that or is it something else.
That’s not what the Bogdanovich quote is about. It’s about something entirely different.
Shooting on film is an absolute commitment. When you’re paying by the foot, you stop and think everything through. You plan and check and re-check before you expose a single frame. And you pay by the foot at least three times. Once to expose the film, once to develop it, and once to telecine it. Kinda like still photography on film: a roll had 24 or 36 frames with no image review, so you had to be sure before releasing the shutter.
Digital has changed this. We get to review what we just shot. Hard drive storage is dirt-cheap so conservative shooting isn’t necessary for budget. We can preview with a LUT and do almost anything we want to the image in post. It speeds up some of the workflow, but that in turn creates a more hasty environment.
I don’t think this has to do, necessarily, with the big-budget Hollywood films. Those still have plenty of people who cut their teeth the old way and they have healthy pre-pro budgets. What I see is a bunch of kids coming up in the industry, fresh out of film school or just jumping in and teaching themselves, who get a C100 or an Ursa Mini or a Sony F-something and it’s paid for. They don’t have to work for it. They never learn to have to pay off overhead so they lowball everything and take work from experienced professionals. And what is pre-production? They don’t know, or understand how to do it. The end-products show. Clients will buy cheaper if cheaper is available, even if the product isn’t as good.
Hell... you don’t have to have much capital these days to get your feet in the water. A decent camera, a gimbal, and a drone... presto, you’re a production company. Shoot all that crap at 60p, slow it down in post, and call it a day. And the clients go wild.
And the cameras do much of the work for you out of the box. Auto-whatever can yield a moderately passable image without ever knowing how to make any manual adjustments. Enough to get by, anyway. Image sensors can do fairly well with lower light levels, so more productions are using less artificial lights. Shoot it flat and leave the rest to editing. Again, cheaper price, cheaper product as far as lowball production bids.
So yeah... lots of newer filmmakers lack discipline. I’ve worked with several of them.
One of the worst: we were shooting interviews and the DP wanted to soften the background. C100 with a Canon 50mm cinema lens. He turned off all the lights in the house and lit with a couple of F&V 1x1 panels. To the naked eye, there was barely any light in the room. But he got to open the lens all the way up and get his softer background. And focus was so dang shallow that he had to keep one hand on the lens and pull throughout the entire interview because they’d go out of focus if they shifted even slightly in their chair.