"Right now on "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter"..." "I could not wait to see "Prometheus."" "And I heard you were gonna do "Blade Runner" sequel." "Yes!" "(laughing)" "How I'm gonna shoot a horse?" "Where I put the camera?" "They are very big." "If I here, I cut the hair of the rider." "Literally, I was having nightmares." "(laughing)" "I like having that dream that I want to do that is maybe unattainable." "If we capture as much of it as we can, we're fortunate-- it's magic." "(Stephen Galloway) ...we'll hear from the directors behind the year's most acclaimed films." "Quentin Tarantino, "The Hateful Eight."" "David O. Russell, "Joy."" "Danny Boyle, "Steve Jobs."" "Tom Hooper, "The Danish Girl."" "Alejandro González Inarritu, "The Revenant."" "Ridley Scott, "The Martian."" "♪" "Hello and welcome to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "I'm Stephen Galloway, executive editor, features, and let's get started." "Alejandro, you've gone from making independent films to making, you know, very expensive film." ""The Revenant"-- It is." "And last one, maybe." "(laughter)" "(Galloway) Okay, that's the issue." "Uh, what did-- what went right, what went wrong?" "What went right?" "Well, you will have to see what-- if something went right." "The film will have to say what went right." "A lot of things went right." "It's just that we have to make those things happen." "You know, we have to fight for them a lot, more than I expect." "And anybody, of you guys, you have" "Just go to the horses, snow, what is that about?" "I mean, you know, I remember that Clint Eastwood, ast year,when we were in Dallas, he said, "You are dealing with horses and not snow." ""I was offered one of those and I didn't take it." "Sorry for you." And I didn't know." "I have never shot a horse in my life." "I don't-- I have nightmares." "How I'm gonna shoot a horse?" "Where I put the camera?" "They are very big." "If I here, I cut the hair of the rider." "If I put the rider, I lose the head of this guy" "So literally, I was having nightmares discussing with you how we would shoot horses." "I mean, anyway, everything in the mountains, in cold weather and all that, everybody that has been there, it's extremely challenging." "I'm from a tropical country." "I was like" "Which, thankfully, I start doing location scouting of "Revenant" five years ago, so I got a lot of the locations that I have," "I did a lot of storyboards because this was very visual." "And Leo," "I remember the first time that I saw Leo, which was in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?"" "Which I think is a fantastic movie." "And the way he's portrayed, a very, you know, vulnerable and fragile." "There's something in Leo that I haven't seen in a long time." "And I said to Leo, you know, "I would love to see that"-- fragile, vulnerable, to see the man that can be broke, and to have obviously the complexity of the strength," "but at the same time, to allow yourself to play that vulnerability and be hit by loss, by weather." "And he was very excited about it, and he transformed himself physically." "So in a way, he went into diet, he let his hair grow, like, here." "A beard that-- it was, like, almost like Santa Claus, like that." "We were both eating our hair all day, with fleas around and pasta soup from two months before, and, you know, every kind of thing." "And I think he's in an incredible-- the most powerful stage-- state in his career." "I think I was very privileged to work with him." "So I appreciate that a lot." "And in this film, differently from other films that he has done, he has almost no words." "So all what he had to do was very difficult, which is to communicate and express or make you feel fear, anxiety, cold, sadness, uh, rage." "So I mean, all those things that are easier to convey with words than with body language and the eyes." "And all what he did was eyes movement, and the pace, the rhythm." "You can ask an actor what you want, but the tempo that that has, the pace of it, even if you block 100 times, there some internal rhythm in the actors that you cannot ask them that." "There's a limit." "And Leo has this internal rhythm that is just like a machine." "Like-- like something that is blending things, and I was very impressed by that." "♪" "My son." "The proper thing to do would be, um, finish him off quick." "(man) He's to be cared for as long as necessary." "I understand." "(muffled screaming) Get away!" "Help!" "(groaning)" "97% of the film is exterior and in remote locations in incredibly bad conditions." "And everything that we were expecting something to happen, it happened the other thing." "So once you are negotiating with weather, it's like a terrorist." "There is no-- there is no word." "There is no" " You cannot rely." "There is not-- there's" "Everything can explode in any moment." "Once we 'stablish the rules of the film and the language and the vision of what we want to achieve, we couldn't get out of that, you know what I mean?" "Usually, we cannot change and said, "Oh, let's go to a blue screen and let's--"" "Because it will collapse." "So we were in the middle and there is no way back." "When you are rock climbing-- or you go up or you die." "And we couldn't." "Well, you know, it" "One of the things that kind of prepared me for" "Because we had a lot of the same issues, the same problems." "And one of the things that kind of prepared me for that-- 'cause you're 100% right-- was watching a documentary about "Apocalypse Now"" "and-- and hearing Vittorio Storaro talking." "And one of the things that Storaro said was creating an aesthetic, creating a norm, and then once you do that, you can't go back." "And they were talking about the Duvall sequence, and not the big action scene, but just when they're talking and everything." "Helicopters were in the air, they put helicopters in the air, and they realized that, once they did that, they couldn't get them out of the air." "The whole thing collapsed if there weren't helicopters flying around all the time." "And so that means every time they roll camera, they had to, uh, coordinate with the helicopters and get them flying around and whatever and create that kind of mayhem, but that-- but it was that mayhem that they were trying to capture." "And they couldn't just settle down and just do a close-up, 'cause the helicopter still had to be doing its thing, and I told that to the crew." "I mean, "We're gonna create this certain thing and we can't go backwards, you know?"" "If it means" " When it comes to a certain snowfall that we eventually capture, if that means it takes us three months to do this scene because we have to match that snowfall, then that's what it takes, that is what we're gonna do." "This here is Daisy Domergue." "She's wanted dead or alive for murder." "When that sun comes out, I'm taking this woman to hang." "Is there anybody here committed to stopping me from doin' that?" "Well, well, well." "Looks like Minnie's Haberdashery is about to get cozy for the next few days." "Yes, it does." "Did making "Joy" make you feel more like moving on to writing or more like returning to filmmaking?" "It's always both for me." "I love writing." "You know, I wrote-- I always write scripts, they become about 175 pages now." "They are more novelistic, they have many worlds in them." "I think many good movies have many movies within them, so there's a world within the world." "This woman of Jennifer that's playing in "Joy"" "is made up of a metal garage that De Niro runs, that's for real." "Half the movie's based on reality." "You say the helicopters in the air?" "This had big sides of trucks and buses smashing down with sparks and welding." "I'm like, well, that's" "We gotta have that, that's the world." "Too bad for the sound." "Too bad-- too bad for the actors." "And there's a" " She has a little girl with her and it's like, ka-bam!" "And the kid's, like, jumping." "Did you write the part for her?" "'Cause you worked with her, what, is it three times now?" "This is the third time." "You know, we have to agree and be excited about it mutually and it has to be something we've never done before." "You said to me that David Selznick, the son of immigrants, married Jennifer Jones, an all-American girl from Oklahoma, because in America, all races and all classes can meet and make whatever opportunities they can." "And that is what you feel when you reach into people's homes with what you sell." "You said that." "This was ambitious for us 'cause Jennifer really goes from ten years old to 45 years old." "That's a lifespan thing for me." "And you have many generations of women-- you have Diane Ladd, you know, you have Isabella Rossellini." "Two great actresses I always wanted to work with." "Amazing people who have a history of working with De Niro." "So with Jennifer, we first talked about, how is this different?" "Why would this be something we've never done before, an ambition we've never done before?" "Well, she never played a 45-year-old woman, she never played-- she never played someone at 27 who had a-- who married a Latin singer who had it fall apart." "I never saw the best divorced couple in America." "What is that?" "I got, you know, "Anna Karenina" is a soap opera." "Is soap opera trash?" "No, "Anna Karenina" is a soap opera." "But she-- when she loses the guy, she throws herself on the train tracks." "Not Joy." "The real Joy, or this Joy, she keeps going." "And the guy becomes her best friend." "I haven't seen that movie." "And he works for her." "You know, Jennifer's mother is into soap operas." "So we shot a soap opera from the '60s to the 2000s with Susan Lucci and Maurice Bernard, who's like the Brando of soap operas, and those guys are, like, professional athletes." "You know, you say-- They do 100 scenes a day." "So they're my kind of actors." "You know, like, I'd go" " I'd go" ""Donna Mills, Susan Lucci, uh, let's have a catfight."" "They don't go, "Oh, wait, what's my motivation?" "They just go, bang!" "'Cause they've done 100 catfights." "And they're tireless." "Susan Lucci rehearsed a fight scene for nine hours." "This is how they do it, and she got one take to shoot it." "'Cause that's how they do soaps." "So, um..." "That might be one of the most interesting things said at the table, the power of soap opera actors." "That actually is a nugget." "And I buy it 100%." "(laughter) ♪" "♪" "Welcome back to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "We're talking with the directors at the helm of the season's most intriguing pictures." "Ridley, what was your toughest challenge on "The Martian"?" "None." "It's pretty straightforward." "I mean, the biggest thing was getting the bloody screen" "That screenplay was a very, very nice screenplay." "I didn't develop it, it was written by Drew, very good adaptation of a very good book." "So once I have that, it's pretty straightforward." "(Boyle) Can I-- I made a space movie." "Yeah, yeah." "It was brilliant." "Um, it's called "Sunshine."" "Which I loved." "Which is weird, making space movies, because you are in the footsteps of the people who've been there before, principally him, and I develop this theory, because it was so tough." "And then when the film came out and I did all the publicity," "I remember having this shtick where I said," ""I've looked at it and no director" ""who's ever been in space ever goes back to space unless he's got to do a sequel."" "And that was-- And then he's defied it, of course, with Martian." "And then he sits there and says it wasn't any problem at all." "(man) Commander, Mark is dead." "We have to go, now!" "♪ (beeping)" "(man #2) Now, you can either accept that... (shrieks) ...or you can get to work." "This will come as quite a shock to my crewmates... and to NASA... and to the entire world." "But I'm still alive." "Surprise." "Ridley, one question." "Do you-- do you prepare yourself to do a film?" "So how you maintain physically fit to get that every year, every day." "I think it's my mum, it genes." "My mum was... five-foot tall and she was like the Sergeant Major." "But you don't have a rigorous kind of diet, exercise routine that keep you, or you-- No." "No-- no, I blew knees with too much tennis and tennis was my thing, I adore tennis." "I play five days a week, but" "And that would-- 'Cause I love chasing the ball, which is doing the job, I love chasing" "How am I gonna get this going?" "And the knee's blown, I don't want to blow the other one, so I just try and be sensible about what I eat." "A bit of yoga." "That's it?" "I like red wine." "I love vodka." "What can I tell you?" "(chuckling)" "Tom, what were the conversations with Eddie Redmayne when you did "Danish Girl"?" "I mean, we-- he started-- we started prepping that about a year out, so he prepared full time for-- for a year for that role, which is extraordinary." "(Galloway) Wow." "And he-- he did a lot of outreach into members of the transgender community and men trans, women and men, and-- and was very inspired by their stories." "But-- but a lot of the work, I mean, we screen-tested." "I mean, our first screen test was seven months out." "We did another, you know, screen test three months-- three months out." "We had three weeks of rehearsal." "But a lot of it was this idea that if you are a woman and-- and your male self is-- is a mask, how do we make it feel that it's not a film about a character transforming," "it's a film about a character revealing." "So you feel that Eddie's character, that he has-- that has a latent femininity that's been revealed through the film rather than a man is becoming a woman." "And-- and-- so it involved Eddie sort of learning, getting so into what his suppressed femininity might feel like, that playing a man would feel like, a kind of suit of armor he was putting on to suppress" "his true femininity and then that could slowly, through the course of the movie, be broke down and we'd see the real self." "(woman) Lili." "We should go out tonight." "Give them something different." "Lili... you're exquisite." "You're different from most girls." "I feel I'd need to ask your permission before I kissed you." "♪" "(woman) Exactly what happened last night." "There was a moment when I wasn't me." "We worked a lot about this idea of hyper-feminization, that if you're..." "if you're a woman who's been living as a man for many years, to become a woman, you might-- you might overreach, you might almost-- you might sort of over-- overdo your femininity in order to reawaken those muscles," "those parts of you that-- that have been long, um, dormant." "Danny, when you-- when you worked with Fassbender, he'd never met Steve Jobs, nor had you." "No." "How did you..." "Well, he was amazing, because he was-- he had this enormous" " It was like 200 pages of dialogue." "Most of it was his." "So he had to memorize that and then get through that stage of memorizing, so he didn't sound like Aaron Sorkin, so he sounded like Steve Jobs or our version of Steve Jobs." "And-- and he-- he was extraordinary and he-- and he" "There were two things that he did." "One was which" " And I don't know whether you guys do this." "One was which he said-- he said to me" "'Cause we did a lot of rehearsal before we started shooting, and then we, you know, you turn up in the morning and do a little bit of blocking and stuff like that and then they go off and get ready, then we come back." "And he said to me, "Would you always shoot the rehearsal?" "Always shoot it."" "And we did." "And I would always do that now, forevermore, and-- and the crew were like" "Especially the focus-puller, because it was a practice, for professional reasons, just was a practice." "No." "And it was incredible, 'cause it lifts everybody." "They're on guard like that." "I mean, it was-- that was extraordinary." "And I'd always-- I'd always do that now." "I had three different accountants try to explain it to me." "The whole place has to be streamlined." "Start with two of the accountants." "(Jobs) I started with the Apple-- Joel, could you come off stage?" "We're gonna go back stage for a moment." "Leave him right there." "I started with the Apple II team because we don't, you know, make that anymore." "Just acknowledge the top guys." "Have a mimosa and relax." "You will not blow me off right now, Steve." "The top guys deserve-- There are no top guys." "All right?" "On the Apple II team, there are no top guys." "They're B-players, and B-players discourage the A-players." "And the other thing it taught me was that" "'Cause the big thing in there is Steve Jobs is fighting IBM at the beginning." "And he said, "Do you know where the word "HAL" from "2001" comes--"" "The great computer in "2001." We begin with Arthur C. Clarke," "Um, our film begins with Arthur C. Clarke." "Um, and it comes from IBM, of course." "Did you-- did you notice IBM, H-A-L, they are the letters before I-B-M?" "And that's where he got from." "(all) Oh!" "That's where Arthur C. Clarke got it from." "Which I was just like, "Why didn't I know that?"" "Oh, I see." "Each letter." ""I" before "H," "H"-- "B" before-- (Galloway) That's incredible." "It's amazing, isn't it?" "Arthur C. Clarke." "♪" "♪" "Welcome back to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "We're talking with the directors at the helm of the season's most talked-about pictures." "Who's taught you the most?" "Has anybody given you a piece of advice that you follow as you make films?" "I" " I remember Helen Mirren, learning something from Helen Mirren," "I was directing "Prime Suspect" for TV, and it was like one of the first days of the shoot and I'd laid this, like, long track, and she came in first thing in the morning." "I said, "You're gonna walk from here to here and the camera's gonna go like this."" "And there's these great perspectives opening up as the camera tracks." "And she looked at and said, "Well, why am I walking?"" "And I said, "Well, no, because it's great, because the camera is gonna go like this and you're gonna" " And she goes, "Why am I walking?"" "I said, "Well, because this..."" "And then I sort of started to run out of steam and she said, "I think I'd be over there smoking out the window."" "And I kind of thought about it and realized that actually, there was no particular reason why this character would be walking in-- in this moment of a guilty cigarette where she's-- the character meant to be giving up is far better." "So at that moment, I realized, um, that-- that the truly great actors have-- have a kind of mise-en-scène in their head or they arrive on set with-- even ideas about where to stage it, about their character." "It's like, if you're open to it, the really great actors have a director's mind as well as an actor's mind." "And to-- and from that moment on," "I've always" " I've always never imposed the way I'm gonna shoot on an actor when they walk on set." "(Galloway) Quentin." "(Quentin) Probably one-- uh... one of the things that me and Ridley have in common is we both made our first movies with Harvey Keitel." "And..." "(Galloway) Right, "The Duelists."" "Yeah, uh-huh." "Harvey was, you know, really took me under his wing, and the-- you know, on the film, on "Reservoir Dogs."" "And one of the things that he taught me, uh, in auditions, actors would come in and he would just say," ""Quentin, don't help them out in that very first reading." ""Don't give them any guidance." ""Don't tell them how you want the scene." ""Don't tell them what you're looking for." ""They've had the material themselves" ""and they've come up with their own thing." ""You will never, ever see what there was in their head" ""the very first time unless you let them do it." ""An adjustment is the easiest thing in the world to give," ""and you're the director, they'll do whatever you say," ""but let them do their first shot at it, what they came up with." Yep." "And I've held onto that for 21 years, I guess." "It's true." "I never rehearse, ever." "You can do one of two things." "You can start by saying, "What shall we do?"" "And you're still talking at 1:00 and you haven't turned over yet." "Or, "I know exactly what I'm gonna do."" "I walk in-- 'Cause I storyboard everything from scratch, right through." "So I've shot it on paper before I get there." "Actors will say," ""But you're leaving no room for me."" "And I've done every whichway, I've had two very good actors saying, "How about we have a go this way?"" "I say, "Fine." "Ready?" "Action."" "In the time it takes to talk about it-- All they end up doing is talking and standing and facing each other in the middle of the bloody room, and there's a sort of pause." "I said, "Cut." Long pause." "Then turn to me and say, "That was really boring, wasn't it?"" "I said, "That was terrible." (laughing)" "And so you've gotta have the plan, if you've got the plan," "I tend to go, "Right, I've got an idea."" "And they usually go-- 'Cause I try and turn it into a big team effort." "And when I'm talking to an actor or actress about will we work together or not," "I talk about everything but the bloody screenplay, 'cause I want to just know who you are." "I don't" " And Harvey's absolutely right." "Don't tell 'em what you want." "I want to see how you tick, dude." "So you can make a-- a feature film about a pen, depending what your vision is." "That-- It's just that simple." "So any story is a good story." "They say, "What's your plan?" "There is no plan."" ""Oh, I like that, I'm wanna make a film about blue pens."" "It's really how you see it and how you're" " What" "The biggest single word is vision, depending on what your vision is." "David, do you watch other films when you're preparing?" "I watch films incessantly." "I like watching films, they're like music to me." "They make me happy." "They make me want to live." "They make me want to get out of bed." "It's like great music, so I watch many of the films made at this table repeatedly." "They're all inspirations to me." "I've been watching recently a David Lean film called "Hobson's Choice." (Galloway) Oh, sure." "Which, you know, is such a treasure." "And it's so-- it's such a cousin or ancestor of "Joy,"" "because it's like, it's about a woman doing an unlikely thing with a" "Like, her father runs a shoe shop, Charles Laughton, and in Manchester, and she has to kind of" "She's underestimated and she has to go out and make herself." "And I" " It's just-- it's a fantastic, perfect film." "Which is a little bit like De Niro underestimating Jennifer's character." "You know, 'cause no greater inspiration you can give somebody than to underestimate them, some people." "Hmm." "That's like a" "That throws down the gauntlet to them." "Do you agree with that, Alejandro?" "Yes." "Yes, absolutely." "When you ask me what kind of scene I will have, more than anything," "I just remember scenes or moments of film that I quite, even now, doesn't understand what they meant to me, but they just get me in a place that I couldn't understand what I was feeling," "but I felt some revelation in myself." "Like "Stalker" from Tarkovsky, the the other day, I saw with my kid." "Like, every time that I saw that film," "I was just saying, "How he did that shot?" ""What this mean?" "Why these guys are dressed like that?"" "So all that mystery that I" "I'm just feeling a revelation of a human experience that connect me with something that I'm not thinking." "I'm just" " It's an intuition." "Instinct, instinct." "It's not about the stories, because who can say that one story is better than another one?" "There's people like this or that, but I think it's more about the point of view and-- and a singular vision, right?" "And I think the content, all of us, we can create content, everybody, because content is how you experience life." "It's just how we express it." "The language, what is that?" "The guy who better use words or camera is the best expressed your experience." "So to choose one little, single frame from the world that is everything and you just choose that, what make you choose that?" "That's already content." "You don't have to tell stories." "You have to say, "This is what I see."" "So every shot is not a resource to tell the story." "That shot reveals who you are and that shot reveals who you are, what you are experiencing." "And that's already a content without telling a stories." "When that happened in cinema is when I'm like..." "When I met somebody and I" "It reveals something that I have never thought or saw." "That's" " Those are the moments that for me, are" "But are very personal because maybe it doesn't mean nothing to nobody else." "Who are you making your films for?" "Well, I" " I think as a species, we have to look at each other." "I think if-- if I will say, if tomorrow, uh, atomic bomb finish the humanity, and I'm the only one staying alive, do I-- will make a film?" "To see myself?" "(laughing)" "I don't think so, you know what I mean?" "I think the bottom line, we are made to communicate and to express." "That's what film is about." "More inside scoop when we come back." "♪" "♪" "Welcome back to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "We're with the six visionaries behind the year's most compelling films." "You got a time capsule, you can put one moment in the history of film in that time capsule for the future, alien races." "What moment in film would you choose?" "Oh, it's the bone, isn't it?" "In "2001."" "It's that cut, isn't it?" "From the bone to the spaceship." "Maybe the best edit in history." "Yeah, there you go." "That says something about us." "You mean if this is the last film?" "(Galloway) Absolutely, it's one film." "We're gonna put in that time capsule, one moment." ""Muriel's Wedding." "Muriel's Wedding"?" "Yes." "Okay." "I've seen it six times." "Have you really?" "Fantastic." "Quentin?" "I would" " Frankly, to tell the truth," "I would probably take a really magni" "And I'm not gonna pick out which one right now, but I would probably take a really magnificent cinematic action scene." "You know, one of the really great action scenes of all time." "And I'm not gonna go through that, 'cause I won't li" "I'm sure I won't like, pressured, what I chose." "Uh, but, okay." "Okay, I will." "Okay, uh, the final climax of Jackie Chan's "Police Story 3."" "(laughter) That is directed by Stanley Tong." "That is a sequence that aliens would watch and be amazed at what they saw." "All right, and I could go for some more slickly made action scenes, and that could work, too, but that would be a thing of what cinema could do." "That could actually give you an understanding of cinema in all of its bells and whistles and movement." "There's Nick Park, the climax of "Wrong Trousers."" "That action scene." "Yes." "That's one of the greatest action sequences I've ever seen." "(Russell) I used that when I made "Three Kings."" "Yeah?" "The rhythm of it." "I just loved watching the rhythm of it." "I loved watching-- As they build the train track." "(Russell) The way they cut it, the way they cut the whole thing." "So what I thought, with the chase sequences leaving "Three Kings,"" "I wanted them to have that propulsive quality of leaving a village, a missile being fired at them, they're talking to each other in the car, it's just one" "Th-That's a fantastic-- I watched it many times." "So what would your moment in film be?" "Depends on what day you ask me, you know what I'm saying?" "I mean, right now, I loved a sequence I saw last night, 'cause I watch it until it runs out of gas for me and I'm like, oh, I'm sad, I'm sick of it now." "It's no longer new to me." "(Galloway) Tom, what about you?" "What would your moment in film be?" "That-- the image that came to mind when you said" ""what moment would you pick"" "was the-- is the match blow-- being blown out in "Lawrence of Arabia."" "That cut from the match blow to the landscape." "And I was thinking about what you were saying about what it is-- what is it that even now as you ask that question, that-- that image stays in my head." "And as a young child, I experienced that on the big screen in the-- in the Prince Charles Cinema on Lester Square, which is the only cinema in London that played those great movies." "And it was something so extraordinary about it, but you couldn't explain it or put it into words." "It had a-- it had a mystery that to this day, when I play that film at that moment in my head, it still seems mysterious, and-- and-- and-- and maybe that's the answer to-- to how do we get people to go into cinemas?" "We all keep pursuing those moments of cinema that aren't reducible, and therefore, you know, remain mysterious." "If you did something else, if you had to do some other career, what would it be?" "Well, I'm probably only gonna make ten movies, so I'm already planning on what I'm gonna do after." "You know, you said this, and you're gonna" "Are you seriously only gonna do ten?" "Oh, that's why I'm counting 'em." "That's why I-- You've got two more left." "The eighth film by Quentin Taran-- yeah, two more left." "Yeah." "Why?" "I wanna stop at a certain point." "I don't-- uh, um..." "I" " I" " I" "But what would you do ne-- then?" "What I want to do, basically is," "I want to write novels and I wanna write theater." "Oh." "Same" " Same thing." "And I want to direct theater." "Well, that's how I feel about it." "Same thing." "I gotta to see how I feel when "Hateful Eight" is over, after I get through going all around the world on it and everything, if I still have the same juice for it." "But the next thing I'd like to do is do a theatrical adaptation of "Hateful Eight," because I actually like the idea of other actors having a chance to play my characters and see what happens from that and everything." "So that's where I'm working my way into that time period, where I write novels and write film pieces and film books and story novels, and then, but in particularly, theater and directing theater." "But that's an evolution, so it's good." "Yeah, yeah, that's how I-- That's how I look at it." "Have you ever directed theater?" "No, I never have." "Have you ever written a play?" "No, I've" " You know everything I've written." "(laughter) Yeah." "(Galloway) Well, it's interesting" "(Ridley) Well, that's screenplay, isn't it?" "Well, I mean, look," ""Reservoir Dogs" could be put on stage and has been put on stage many times." "And "Hateful Eight" was done as a staged reading." "Yeah, exactly, yeah." "What did you learn from that?" "I learned that, for the most part, I picked the right actors, because the actors, for the most part, that were in that staged reading, were the ones in the movie." "The other thing that I learned, and this was a big-- actually a big part of, uh, my thought process." "By doing it, and I don't want to get lost into a technical discussion, but by doing it in 65 millimeter and wanting it to be shown in 70, and, uh" "So we're making these plans before we even shot the movie." "I wouldn't be so confident with the idea of thinking about exhibition that early on if I wasn't that confident with the material." "And the script reading really went a long way as far as that's concerned." "Hmm." "I mean, in something like "Inglorious Bastards" and "Django,"" "you can read it as a script, and you-- and I'm" " I'm very proud of it as a-- you know, almost as a piece of literature, not as a blueprint, but I still have to make it." "Uh, there still is a..." "I have to still figure it out." "It's not figured out." "It's not for sure that I'm gonna pull it off." "There's a finding it in the course of making it." "Uh, that's not the case with this." "With the case of "Hateful Eight," it was right there." "I mean, if I did-- if I had those actors and we did it in a little theater in Santa Monica Boulevard, it would kill, it would be terrific." "If I did it at the Mark Taper Forum, it would be great." "If I did it at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, it would be great." "If I shot it on 16 millimeter, it would be great." "I'm not saying the movie's great, I'm just saying that I like the material, so I had a confidence in it." "Mm." "Mm." "And so why not do it big?" "Do you have thoughts of doing something else or" "(Russell) I would also be a writer." "I was a writer before I was a filmmaker." "Screenwriter?" "Well, I was-- I wanted to write fiction." "I was always a fiction writer, and I wanted to" "And that's what it was-- My love" "My father and mother met in the mail room at Simon  Schuster." "Oh!" "My mother was an Italian girl from Brooklyn and my father a Russian immigrant's son from Manhattan, and they met at Simon  Schuster, and I'm actually making a documentary about that entir" "Fascinating world of-- These are" "I would also make documentaries, 'cause I find they blow my mind when they open up worlds within worlds." "You go all the way back to Charles Dickens trying to collect his royalties in America." "When Charles Dickens came to the United States, he was on a train." "His first experience was on a train and he thought it was snowing or raining, but it was because so many people were spitting out the windows." "Wow." "Spitting was so popular, with the spittoons in Am" "And probably the America that you're doing in your movie" "It was-- That's how disgusting." "And you" " And you would step on a carpet, it would be saturated with the spit..." "Wow." "...from the tobacco spit, and you couldn't" "There was no copyright." "He couldn't collect his royalties." "Anyway, so I'm doing that documentary." "I'm already started that, which is very fascinating to me, to do that." "The documentary is about..." "About-- about the history of the world of publishing and the magic of that world and what happened to it." "But I get so much magic and inspiration out of it, and we've-- it's such a privilege to make a movie." "You get to live in a magic world and create magic, which" " I'm" "So you pay the price." "And everybody pays the price who goes to work." "And-- and many people lose the magic, which is-- which is a sad thing and they" "And where-- How can they find it again?" "We get to try to make magic, and that always makes me want" "It gets me excited." "More with the industry's most sought-after directors when we come back." "♪" "♪" "Welcome back to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "We're getting the inside scoop from Hollywood's most sought-after directors." "Do you have any regrets?" "About what?" "Never-- nothing." "Professionally." "Nothing?" "Nothing." "Way you've behaved, choices you've made." "No, no choice." "No, I've always" "I kind of like what I've done, actually." "(Galloway) What about you, Alejandro?" "Regrets of, like, guilt feelings or" "Guilt or something you didn't do, you wish you had done." "Catholicism." "Bad man." "Anything." "Yes, Catholicism, sure." "I'm" " I come from a Catholic background, so, yeah, guilt is a big part of me." "Big part of that." "Oh, absolutely." "Well, I think that sometimes," "I will have loved to make decisions earlier than later." "You know, meaning..." "meaning that sometimes," "I have learned that when something is not working in a set, it will get worst." "And sometimes I delay those decisions, sometimes because I want to be hopeful or I want to give it chance or I'm hiding myself, attending other priorities." "And when I let those things go on..." "Mm-hmm." "...then it-- it-- it bad bad." "I mean, it came worst." "And I sometimes delay those decisions." "And it has to do with not changing something that you are thinking or even somebody that is not working that I-- you are afraid, to be polite." "You know, all those things, and sometimes that," "I will have loved to be a little bit more practical in that sense." "I'm a little bit romantic." "Mm-hmm." "And then that can be-- backfire me badly, so... (Galloway) What about you, David?" "The sa" " I would say the same thing." "I tend to be hopeful and positive about everybody and everything, and that's made me naive sometimes." "And that's put me in situations that, um," "I later look back on and go, "Oh, no, no, you should have" ""You had a voice inside your head and you saw what was gonna happen."" "Any in particular?" "Examples?" "And you knew..." "Oh, picking certain crew people you ew were not going to be in tune with you, and it turned out to be an unpleasant experience." "Not being able to cut right to the chase with an actor, um, emotionally, which I think my skills got better at that." "So feeling it right away and saying, "Let's" ""Come on, let's talk about this, let's bond about this." "Let's not-- let's go through this in a good way."" "You have to follow your intuition." "And if somebody defies it, they're gonna break down the door, 'cause they're gonna-- they're really gonna want it." "You know what I'm saying?" "Then they'll say," ""No, I really want to do it."" "(Galloway) Tom, how about you?" "I don't know, I-- I feel a lot of my life," "I'm fighting the possibility of regret." "In a certain-- Whenever you make a choice to make a movie, it's at le-- it's two years of your life." "Mm-hmm." "And it's a huge investment, and, you know, you're not guaranteed that it'll find an audience or it'll go the way you want it to go." "And-- and-- and I suppose I'm" " I'm always afraid that I'm gonna not do something and realize that that was the film to do or-- or-- or, you know, or say no to a script and realize eventually, that was the right thing to do." "And I don't think it's yet happened to me, but I feel like it's just a matter of time that I will" "I will" " I will turn down something where" "I later realize, that was my choice, but, um..." "Quentin, how about you?" "I don't think I have any regrets artistically, as far as the finished product is concerned and how I... dealt with the artistic elements of it." "But, you know, nothing that jumps out to me in that way." "I" " But, uh, in terms of regret," "I mean, the only thing that I actually really regret about my behavior when I'm making movies, especially when the film is-- it's a long shoot." "Mm-hmm." "When it's gone on for, like, a long time." "You know, every once in a while, you just get tired." "You get down, all right?" "And you just-- you just get sick of it." "You just... get..." "sick of it." "You've had it." "You've just effin' had it." "And, uh..." "And that day, I feel sorry for myself." "(laughter) And..." "I'm a grumpy A-hole." "And everyone, "Oh, Quentin's in a bad mood,"" "and "stay away from him" and everything." "And-- and I always-- I really regret that." "And what usually snaps me out of it is, like..." ""Oh... poor you." "You are living your dream."" "(laughter) "And it's so difficult." "Oh, let's everybody (bleep) cry for Quentin."" "And, uh, and it usually snaps me out of it." "I mean, the biggest ti-- the biggest example of that was, at some point, after making "Kill Bill" for almost a year," "I was in one of those moods." "And, uh, in it, um, uh, Zoe Bell, who I now use as an actress, and she's even in "Hateful Eight."" "She was Uma Thurman's stunt double." "And I had kinda taught her how to be an actress and not just a stunt double." "You know, I wanted her" "Even if she's wearing, uh, the motorcycle outfit and a helmet on her head and everything, no, I want her to think the thoughts of the character." "I want her to know what's going on, and I-- it" "You know, and, uh, at first, she kind of laughed at that." "Then she took to it almost like a duck to water." "So I'm having one of-- so I'm having one of those nights." "We're shooting a night shoot and I'm just all, like, pissy about everything and I'm sick of this." "And then all of a sudden, I hear this call," ""Zoe needs to talk to you."" "Zoe's sitting there in this yellow jumpsuit, uh-- uh-- uh, motorcycle outfit." "She's on a motorcycle, she's got the helmet on her head." "I'm like, "Yeah, what do you want?" "And, uh, she goes," "(with British accent) "Oh, well, you know, Quentin," ""I just want to know, uh..." ""uh, what do you want me to think about?" ""We're getting ready to shoot the scene," ""and I'm at the stoplight and I'm seeing Sofie Fatale." "What do you want me to think about?"" "And I just-- My heart just cracked open and I felt so happy" "I'm gonna get-- almost getting teary-eyed thinking about it right now." "It's like, "Oh, my God, I've taught her to be an actress." "I've taught her to think like an actress."" "And it just brought me back, it just brought me right back," "And it's one of these emotional moments that I've always remembered in my career." "♪" "♪" "Welcome back to "Close Up with The Hollywood Reporter."" "We're talking with the directors behind the year's standout films." "I don't know if you all saw that Japanese film "Afterlife."" "Uh..." "No." "The idea of it is, you go through sort of a way station between life and heaven, or wherever, and you're allowed to take one memory with you." "One memory of working on a film, one memory of a scene you've done." "Whoa." "Long pause." "You do not ask the easy questions." "(laughter)" "It's hard to pick." "I'm deciding between three moments right now." "There was the dance, "Silver Linings Playbook,"" "where they-- the sort of climax in the film where the braciole is being cooked and everybody's in the house, and it was-- it was-- it felt like I was living in that house with that family," "with Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro and Jennifer, and she comes in and takes over the movie, with every actor there, that was a wonderful day." "All the musical-- Two others are musical." "In "American Hustle," singing "Delilah" with Christian Bale and Jeremy Renner, and it just had such a wave of beauty about it." "And Bradley and Amy dancing to Donna Summer, it was just" "It felt like a wave of cinema to me that just was, like, propulsive, all the way through her screaming in the bathroom." "And in "Joy" there's singing in the snow." "Those-- the magic moments." "(Galloway) Danny, what about you?" "So we did-- so we, uh, we shot a scene in "28 Days Later"" "that we never used, where they sang." "They were driving around in a taxi cab through post-apocalyptic, zombie-eyed Britain, and they sang "Hotel Yorba,"" "the White Stripes song." "So it would be that." "But we never used it in the movie, but I remember that." "I always wanted to do a musical, that's why." "Tom, your-- your moment?" "This is for eternity." "Um, back here in America, there was a moment on shooting "John Adams" when the Continental Congress had to give the vote about whether to go to war with the British." "And it was one of those strange moments where one felt the import of the moment for the country, rather than you were shooting a bunch of actors putting their hands up, and" "And there was something there when I kind of forgot the theater of it and-- and felt very connected to that decision and its implications." "Ridley?" "The, uh..." "Well, it was a terrible false start on a film called "Gladiator."" "And we had no script, fundamentally, for the whole first act." "And I was shooting the German front and-- of the Roman army, where we built-- built the trenches and all that stuff, about five miles east of Gatwick Airport." "Oh, wow." "(laughter)" "Yeah, um, y-you know, you don't have to go to Everest to shoot Everest, you know?" "And I had the whole German army standing on the left of a bunch of Scottish." "They were all Scottish barbarians." "They weren't German, they were Scottish." "And the Roman army on the right and I go in the trail in the morning and Russell and I look at each other." "There's no dialogue." "So I said, well, he said, "So what are you gonna do?"" "He says, "What-- what am I gonna say when I walk out in those bofors guns?"" "I said, you could say, "Looks like snow."" "He said, "What kind of line is that?"" "I said, "Just say, 'It looks like snow.'" "What do you want, a soliloquy?"" "This is when Russell and I started to really get to know each other." "And you know, I said, "You know, before we do that," ""I want to walk down the middle of the valley, you and I," ""the army over here and Black Forest over there," ""and there's gonna be a twig here" ""where there's gonna be a bird on this twig." ""And you're gonna ponder on that bird," ""and I'm gonna start the film on that bird." ""Then I'm gonna go to you." ""Then he's gonna turn and look at the forest," ""and there's something very ominous about that Black Forest." "And then we're gonna start the movie, okay?"" "He said, uh, "All right." That's how we began." "And it was always that" "We were both very nervous, because there was nothing there." "45 minutes later, when it got to the bofors gun, it started to snow." "Mm... magic." "Wow." "Yeah, so it was a good-- it was a good omen." "Quentin." "He just looked at me, went" ""Did you do see--" I said, "Yeah, of course."" "One memory you'd like to take with you." "Well, I'm really glad you asked me to go last." "You know, I was, uh..." "I don't know if I buy your concept of that's what I'm taking to heaven, or way station or whatever, all right?" "But trying to remember one moment after-- over another as far as a feeling, and putting myself there... i.e., the feeling, uh, as opposed to a landmark or a good scene." "I guess it would be, uh, um, either once we'd finished the twist contest in "Pulp Fiction,"" "uh, or Uma's" "Uma dancing to, uh, "Girl You'll Be a Woman Soon"" "by herself and the connection that we had in doing that." "You know, it was just this thing in my head, and, you know, and that-- the twist sequence in my head would have been there if John Travolta had done it or not, all right?" "I just ended up having a magnificent dancer who actually people wanted to see dance, you know." "That was the part I didn't quite get." "That was the benefit when I saw with an audience." ""Oh, my God, they--"" "There literally is that moment when I watched it with audiences who hadn't seen it before, the first time, when he kicks off his shoes, there literally was this murmur in the audience," ""Oh, my God, he's gonna dance!"" "(laughter) I remember that." "So that was this iconic thing in my head, and then to capture it and to-- And at one point I-- and I operated the camera at some point." "Then I had to stop dancing when I was operating the camera." "I found myself go-- going like that." "But that was a really lovely moment, and, you know, and I was still very young in my career, so I had had something in my head and we put it on screen and we captured it." "And we had that whole, you know," "Jack Rabbit Slims around us, and we were-- we were there." "It was very lovely." "Good." "Perfect." "Is there a dream project you'd love to make that you've never had the chance to?" "Yeah, but then hopefully you're gonna do that in the future." "Which one is it?" "In the future." "I haven't" " I haven't" "I don't wanna-- I don't wanna say." "But there's big things I've been working on writing." "(chuckling) That's a good idea." "'Cause it, and the" "(laughter)" "(overlapping chatter and laughter)" "I'm gonna go make it, I'm gonna make it." "But, I mean, there's always-- yeah." "Don't tell Ridley." "There's things that" "It's good to have things that you want to do, when I" "He'll make it-- He'll make it next year!" "Yeah, I'm-- (laughing)" "(Ridley) We're shooting in the spring." "What I don't like is when you don't" "I like having that dream that I want to do that is maybe unattainable, and in some sense, every" "I think everybody at this table has something on our minds that we write or think that is unattainable." "It's magic, and if we get-- if we capture as much of it as we can, we're fortunate." "But I like having an unattainable thing." "That's exciting to me." "Yeah." "What's the project?" "(laughter)"