Does directing your own films make it easier to relinquish control when you’re acting in somebody else’s film?
Absolutely. I don’t want to direct someone else’s movie. I want to direct my own movies. I’ve really felt the difference since I’ve been directing. I’m much less of a pain in the ass. It’s been much easier for me to say, “Okay, well, if that’s the way you want it, that’s good.” And to just go with that. As opposed to having to have movies stand for me. The movies I act in don’t have to stand for me.
There are 120 people on a movie set, give or take. How do you keep things from devolving into chaos?
Because the director is the visionary of the movie, they get to have the party the way they want it. Your job as a line producer or first assistant director or key actor is to gauge within the first week how your director likes his life to be. Does he like people to run at him with a lot of ideas? Does he like the set to be completely quiet and nobody says a word? Does he like collaboration or does he not? Then you can help him bring all the languages of filmmaking together to get it done.
The difference between a good film technician and an excellent film technician is not so much how they hold the boom or how they tape the floor or any of the tasks that we do that, frankly, anybody could learn in 20 minutes. It’s the degree of commitment to the film. You need to be obsessed — to have the kind of mind that, for whatever reason, makes you wake up at three in the morning and say, “I’ve got a great idea.” Though people don’t usually realize it, the need for that kind of commitment extends to the film’s technicians as well as its actors. A prop man, for example, has to pay attention to who the director is, because you’re not going to bring in red wineglasses if it’s David Fincher.
Because?
He’ll throw them in the fireplace and say, “What were you thinking?” He’s never put a color in his movies. I was looking the other day at a scene in Panic Room. Forest Whitaker’s character has a file-like thing for opening up safes, and part of it is red. And I was like, “Oh, my God! That’s the first color in the whole movie!” Someone said, “Yeah, it was by accident. Those things don’t come any other way.”
Now, not everybody on your movie set is your collaborator. Your key collaborator is supposed to be your cinematographer. But it isn’t always. Very often, cinematographers can’t talk. They’re purely visual, and you don’t really know it until you get on the movie with them. Ron Howard uses a different cinematographer on every movie he makes. Most people stick with the same one. Jonathan Demme has been working with Tak Fujimoto for a hundred years; the Coen brothers have used Roger Deakins. But then there’s Martin Scorsese, who jumps from person to person because either he hasn’t found a soul mate or he really feels like each story needs to be told differently.
For me, the cinematographer is almost like an actor. He brings so much of his own style and his own vocabulary that I feel like you sort of need a new person every time you go out.
What was it like working with David Fincher? His films – ‘Seven,’ ‘The Game,’ ‘Fight Club’ — have made him one of the directors everybody wants to work with. But he’s known to be a control freak.
Without a doubt, of all the people I’ve worked with, he is the finest technician ever. He can do everyone’s job, and does everyone’s job the entire shoot. He’s the most meticulous, the sharpest, not just visually but in every sense. Sometimes there’s a little complaining about that because he doesn’t give people a lot of leverage to contribute. But he has the clearest vision of any director I’ve ever worked with.
That might mean 40 takes, if that’s what it takes. But I’m terrifically suited for Fincher, who knows exactly what he wants all day, because I like playing Twister. I like doing this [pats her head] and this [rubs her stomach] at the same time. I don’t do well with people who are not direct. I don’t do well with passive-aggressive, wishy-washy. Some actors really thrive in that atmosphere because it makes them feel more important and needed. I don’t. Directors who don’t come prepared — I can just be a mean person, because I can’t believe that you can be given all that money and all that responsibility and waste everybody’s time.
