αρίστος αχαιών

A fake world is a lot less painful than the real one.

In 1953, John Cassavetes knew practically nothing about writing. Sam Shaw decided to help him by introducing him to Edward McSorley, a novelist, who gave him a crash-course in screenwriting. Cassavetes said that McSorley taught him the three most important things he knew:

1. that character was more important than plot, and that the most important thing of all was to present characters truthfully;

2. that the artist should not explain or define too much, or ‘do too much thinking for the audience’, but that the story should ‘evolve, so that people could understand it only gradually as it went along’;

I… I don’t what I’d do without you.

“Powerful lights permitted high camera speeds, crucial in capturing the high-speed alchemy of surface tension, color change, and chemical reaction that [Kubrick and his collaborators] were after. The overcranked camera shooting at seventy-two frames per second produced a smoothly nuanced “galactic” slow motion as they used toothpicks to drip blobs of white paint into the ink-thinner mixture. Reacting to the banana oil, the paint sent ersatz star flows and galactic tendrils streaming into cosmic space. A macro lens made an area the size of a playing card look like a nebula light years across. Parts of what would become the film’s trippy Star Gate sequences were conjured in this way on the Upper West Side in 1965, with Kubrick himself manning the camera…”