TWBB DVD

Started by MacGuffin, February 19, 2008, 02:28:24 PM

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picolas

Quote from: private witt on February 04, 2009, 09:44:03 PM
Quote from: picolas on February 04, 2009, 09:39:54 PM
there's no correlation between doing commentaries, having children, and losing your balls.

Glad you caught my sarcasm.
your point was that being open to discussing your film means you're not pushing the envelope, right? i'm saying there's no relationship between discussing a film openly, in commentaries and making-ofs and to the press, and making an envelope-pushing film. look at the stanley kubrick archives. the 2001 section is the biggest.

Quote from: Alexandro on February 05, 2009, 12:11:57 AMIn reality, commentaries and behind the scenes are not that interesting. Maybe they are superficially, but you don't really learn from them anything you can't form the films themselves.
i totally disagree. there are shitty commentaries and making-ofs, but there are also amazing ones that educate you about the process beyond the film itself. you can't uniformly say that there's nothing new to be learned from commentaries and making-ofs.

private witt

Quote from: picolas on February 05, 2009, 12:55:10 AM
your point was that being open to discussing your film means you're not pushing the envelope, right?

Yeah, but I meant it as a joke.  I was just trying to think of two polar opposite cliches and pretend that there's no mid-ground between them. 
"If you work in marketing or advertising, kill yourself.  You contribute nothing of value to the human race, just do us all a favor and end your fucking life."  ~Bill Hicks

Alexandro

I'm not saying commentaries and behind the scenes are useless. I watch them sometimes and have fun with them, and some are great and some are boring. PTA made probably the most fun in history with Boogie Nights, and I liked the one in Michael Mann's Collateral, and Robert Altman is also very good at it, but they have more to do with their personalities than with what they say about the films. Once you see a film with commentaries, you go back to the film alone and realize everything is there from the beginning, the filmmaker just made it easier for you to "get" certain things by explaining how they did it or talking about the process. So it is like reading a book, and that's great, it's a great gift for us, but it's not something that has to be done in order to be sharing the knowledge cause the knowledge sips through the work itself.

Anyway you can read about everyone process a lot, but the true learning comes from two sources: watching the films repeteadly (because most of the time what you're after is some sort of specific result and more often than not you want a certain result that you saw at a certain film) or doing it yourself, working it yourself. The truth is that the phrase "the films speak for themselves" is spot on. They do.

In a way I think, as a fan of PTA's films, I have learned more from There Will Be Blood as it is, than from the Boogie Nights commentary. But it's a personal thing. And my original comment was regarding as to why he doesn't do it anymore. I think he's just not so full of himself anymore and he has realized anything he says on the commentary will a) trivialize the film b) be a repetition of what you're seeing onscreen anyway. Of course I can't know for sure because he has never said anything remotely like that...

private witt

I've read interviews where he's said exactly this.  He's also expressed frustration with doing interviews where the interviewer just wants him to comment on things he said as a joke on the commentaries. 
"If you work in marketing or advertising, kill yourself.  You contribute nothing of value to the human race, just do us all a favor and end your fucking life."  ~Bill Hicks