#thecinenotes

You only find yourself when you disobey. Disobedience is the beginning of responsibility

For me, all art is subversive in some way. That means that it cannot possibly abide by the rules of politeness and decorum that most mainstream movies thrive on. Mainstream cinema is a cinema of comfort, it’s meant to make you feel good. Even if it has some scary moments everything resolves okay and in the end it reinforces the status quo. It’s really just there to get you out of your own life for a few minutes. To me, that is not what art does. Art is reflective, it forces you to reflect on your own situation, good or bad, to think about things like the human condition, what our existence is really about. Art is subversive of the status quo. It doesn’t mean that you have to preach about political revolution, although that would be an option. So, it’s inevitable then, if you consider yourself an artist, that you’re going to bother people, disturb them.

And as film criticism written by passionately engaged people with actual knowledge of film history has gradually faded from the scene, it seems like there are more and more voices out there engaged in pure judgmentalism, people who seem to take pleasure in seeing films and filmmakers rejected, dismissed and in some cases ripped to shreds.

Yes, and you’d be surprised at how simple the scenes were, ultimately. There’s one scene in the third Ocean’s where there are a bunch of people in a hollowed-out cave, and they’re all looking at schematics of the hotel. You’ve got eight or nine people around a small table in a small space. And I just keep saying, ‘Run it again. Run it again. Run it again.’ I’ve got a viewfinder with a lens on it, and I’m trying to work my way around the space to find the shot that’s going to form the central visual premise of the scene. And I just can’t come up with a shot. It was horrible. I say to Greg, ‘What time is it?’ And he goes, ‘It’s 10:30.’ ‘So it’s too early to call lunch?’ ‘Yeah, it’s too early to call lunch.’ ‘Well, just send everybody away.’ And I’m sitting there and the cast is gone, and I say, ‘Can somebody move this table? I’m sick of looking at this table.’ So they take the table out, and I’m walking around and I sit down where the table was and then I realize, oh, the camera is the table. That’s it. We called everybody back in and put the camera basically where the center of the table was, and I did a series of two-shots. Shoot, turn, shoot again. We literally did the scene in an hour. What I’ve learned in those situations is to slow everything down. You need to put yourself in that sort of pure space in which time doesn’t exist, money doesn’t exist, nobody’s waiting around, and it’s just a pure problem to be solved. It’s like a Jedi mind trick where you just convince yourself, I’ve got all the time and I can stay here as long as it takes until I figure it out. And once you’ve truly convinced yourself of that, you figure it out. And I’ve had that happen a couple of times.