By: Rob Lowman Staff Writer
Source: http://www.dailybreeze.com
Category: Film School Online
For Brad Bird, it's about the big picture.
And that's not simply because he shot about 25 minutes of his first live-action film, "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol," in IMAX or that it will only be released today on the giant-screen format. (It comes out Wednesday on regular-sized screens.)
Until now, Bird has only made three other features, all animated - "The Iron Giant," "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille." But even picking up Oscars for the last two Pixar movies didn't make him an obvious choice to direct the fourth part of the lucrative "Mission" franchise. (The first three installments have brought in some $2 billion worldwide.) It did, however, help to have the star/producer of the films as a fan.
After seeing "The Incredibles," Tom Cruise called up and asked Bird to meet him.
"It was like (being with) an old friend talking about our favorite movies," remembers Cruise, who then told the filmmaker, "If you ever want to direct live action, please direct me."
But Bird always seemed to have other projects going: first "Ratatouille" and then a live-action film based around the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, which he was having trouble taming.
"Suddenly, I looked up and it was a couple years later, and I was still wrestling with the same problems and I needed to make a movie," says Bird, sounding a bit tired when he recently called from South Korea, as part of a worldwide promotional tour for "Ghost Protocol." Bird had also wanted to work with his friend J.J. Abrams, who had directed the third installment of "Mission," but again the scheduling never worked out. (Bird was even supposed to direct an episode of Abrams' TV series "Lost.")
When Abrams, who is producing this time around, found out that Bird was looking for a film, though, he sent him an email at about 11 one night that simply read, "Mission?"
"I didn't know that they were starting to work on one of those," says Bird. "It sounded great to me, and I got a chance to work with Tom and J.J. in one fell swoop. So I jumped on it."
Cruise says that even in his animated work, Bird shoots like a live-action director.
"His sequences are amazing, as are his characters," Cruise says. "He has great wit and sense of composition, and he knows how to keep the tension and suspense in his stories."
But moving from animation to live action obviously required changes.
Although he had often stayed long hours trying to hit deadlines while working on his animated movies, Bird says he was warned early on that it would take him about a week to get his "set legs" when directing a live-action film.
"Very quickly I learned what people were talking about," says the director, who won a scholarship to the animation program at California Institute of the Arts, where his classmates were Pixar head John Lasseter and director Tim Burton. "Even though they give you a chair to sit in, you're not sitting most of the time. You're up on your feet talking to people, moving from here to there. ... Any time you're not sleeping, basically, you're on your feet. So it's physically demanding."
Still, he says, the language of film is the same for animation and live action.
"It's still close-ups and medium shots and long shots or increasing or decelerating your rhythm, and how you plan to cut it."
And he stresses that it's important to keep relationships clear, not only emotionally but physically, especially in an action film. Bird says he's not a fan of filmmakers who shoot "tons of coverage" and then fling it at a team of editors to make sense out of it.
"It's sloppy to me when you don't know when somebody is 10 feet away or 100 feet from the other guy," he says, citing filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, George Miller (the "Mad Max" films) and John McTiernan (his "Die Hard" movies) as directors who allow the audience to know exactly what's going on even when the cuts are coming "fast and furious.
"Those are the kind of action films that I really respect, and I was interested in paying attention to that when I got to the action sequences in this film," he says.
"Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" finds Cruise's spy Ethan Hunt and his crew - this time around played by Paula Patton, Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg - on the run and disavowed by the U.S. president after an earlier undercover operation goes wrong, causing an explosion in Moscow's Red Square.
As with the other "Mission" films, this one has plenty of exotic locations - Moscow, Prague, Dubai, Mumbai and Vancouver - and an international cast - Michael Nyqvist, Vladimir Mashkov, Josh Holloway, Anil Kapoor and Lea Seydoux.
"Ghost Protocol" is also only the third live-action feature to be partially shot in IMAX. Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" had six sequences, Michael Bay's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" had about nine minutes and the new "Mission" has about 25 minutes. A number of other films have been blown up to the large format, but there is an eye-opening difference to the quality.
One of those scenes in "Mission" is a spectacular climbing sequence that takes place near the top of Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world at 2,716 1/2 feet.
Shooting a whole film in IMAX would be too costly and time-consuming, admits Bird. So he feels fortunate to have gotten to do 25 minutes and calls the film's producers "indulgent parents" for letting him do so.
One of the reasons Bird was attracted to "Ghost Protocol" was because he was allowed to put his own stamp on the film. Cruise had envisioned that each director - Brian De Palma and John Woo did the first two movies - would bring his own cinematic style to the franchise, rather than trying to fit into some form.
Bird says he was encouraged early on to do so when he was asked, "Is there anything that you really wanted to see in a spy movie that you haven't seen?"
"That's the kind of question that every filmmaker prays that the producer will ask," he says.
Even so, the fourth installment of a movie franchise brings a lot of expectations. But Bird believed he could turn that into an asset.
"I thought, `How can I zig instead of zag and instead do something unusual?"' he says.
That included reimagining the famed opening sequence with the lit fuse and what he calls "one of the greatest theme songs ever written." The director is also excited about a scene that takes place in a sandstorm, which was inspired by "North by Northwest."
"Usually suspense scenes are done in the dark or enclosed spaces, but Alfred Hitchcock went completely the other direction and put it in a cornfield at noon with an infinite field of view," observes Bird.
"How the hell do you generate suspense from it? But he managed to do it. So I thought, `What if you had a chase scene where there is no visibility whatsoever but is in the middle of the day?"'
But when he's told the fight between Patton and Seydoux, the French actress who plays an assassin, is what's generating buzz on the Internet, Bird laughs and says it's kind of a P.T. Barnum way of advertising: "Come see the girl fight."
He adds, though, that he really likes the way the scene was done because it's "a no-holds-barred fight.
"We didn't make the fight dainty because women were having it," he says. "It's just as vicious as anything the men do. It was fun to do that."
And speaking of fun, Bird says he can't complain about the intense promotional tour. Being a filmmaker is "a fun way to make a living," he says, although he's not sure what's next for him.
He has another writer working on "1906" - "keeping the pot stirred" - and several other possible projects, both live-action and animation.
"For my ideal career, the project would dictate the medium," Bird says. "Hopefully, I get to jump back and forth. It's all film, and that's really the medium that I love."
See, the big picture.
Source: http://www.dailybreeze.com/lifeandculture/ci_19556094
Source: http://www.dailybreeze.com
Category: Film School Online
For Brad Bird, it's about the big picture.
And that's not simply because he shot about 25 minutes of his first live-action film, "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol," in IMAX or that it will only be released today on the giant-screen format. (It comes out Wednesday on regular-sized screens.)
Until now, Bird has only made three other features, all animated - "The Iron Giant," "The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille." But even picking up Oscars for the last two Pixar movies didn't make him an obvious choice to direct the fourth part of the lucrative "Mission" franchise. (The first three installments have brought in some $2 billion worldwide.) It did, however, help to have the star/producer of the films as a fan.
After seeing "The Incredibles," Tom Cruise called up and asked Bird to meet him.
"It was like (being with) an old friend talking about our favorite movies," remembers Cruise, who then told the filmmaker, "If you ever want to direct live action, please direct me."
But Bird always seemed to have other projects going: first "Ratatouille" and then a live-action film based around the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, which he was having trouble taming.
"Suddenly, I looked up and it was a couple years later, and I was still wrestling with the same problems and I needed to make a movie," says Bird, sounding a bit tired when he recently called from South Korea, as part of a worldwide promotional tour for "Ghost Protocol." Bird had also wanted to work with his friend J.J. Abrams, who had directed the third installment of "Mission," but again the scheduling never worked out. (Bird was even supposed to direct an episode of Abrams' TV series "Lost.")
When Abrams, who is producing this time around, found out that Bird was looking for a film, though, he sent him an email at about 11 one night that simply read, "Mission?"
"I didn't know that they were starting to work on one of those," says Bird. "It sounded great to me, and I got a chance to work with Tom and J.J. in one fell swoop. So I jumped on it."
Cruise says that even in his animated work, Bird shoots like a live-action director.
"His sequences are amazing, as are his characters," Cruise says. "He has great wit and sense of composition, and he knows how to keep the tension and suspense in his stories."
But moving from animation to live action obviously required changes.
Although he had often stayed long hours trying to hit deadlines while working on his animated movies, Bird says he was warned early on that it would take him about a week to get his "set legs" when directing a live-action film.
"Very quickly I learned what people were talking about," says the director, who won a scholarship to the animation program at California Institute of the Arts, where his classmates were Pixar head John Lasseter and director Tim Burton. "Even though they give you a chair to sit in, you're not sitting most of the time. You're up on your feet talking to people, moving from here to there. ... Any time you're not sleeping, basically, you're on your feet. So it's physically demanding."
Still, he says, the language of film is the same for animation and live action.
"It's still close-ups and medium shots and long shots or increasing or decelerating your rhythm, and how you plan to cut it."
And he stresses that it's important to keep relationships clear, not only emotionally but physically, especially in an action film. Bird says he's not a fan of filmmakers who shoot "tons of coverage" and then fling it at a team of editors to make sense out of it.
"It's sloppy to me when you don't know when somebody is 10 feet away or 100 feet from the other guy," he says, citing filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, George Miller (the "Mad Max" films) and John McTiernan (his "Die Hard" movies) as directors who allow the audience to know exactly what's going on even when the cuts are coming "fast and furious.
"Those are the kind of action films that I really respect, and I was interested in paying attention to that when I got to the action sequences in this film," he says.
"Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" finds Cruise's spy Ethan Hunt and his crew - this time around played by Paula Patton, Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg - on the run and disavowed by the U.S. president after an earlier undercover operation goes wrong, causing an explosion in Moscow's Red Square.
As with the other "Mission" films, this one has plenty of exotic locations - Moscow, Prague, Dubai, Mumbai and Vancouver - and an international cast - Michael Nyqvist, Vladimir Mashkov, Josh Holloway, Anil Kapoor and Lea Seydoux.
"Ghost Protocol" is also only the third live-action feature to be partially shot in IMAX. Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" had six sequences, Michael Bay's "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" had about nine minutes and the new "Mission" has about 25 minutes. A number of other films have been blown up to the large format, but there is an eye-opening difference to the quality.
One of those scenes in "Mission" is a spectacular climbing sequence that takes place near the top of Dubai's Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world at 2,716 1/2 feet.
Shooting a whole film in IMAX would be too costly and time-consuming, admits Bird. So he feels fortunate to have gotten to do 25 minutes and calls the film's producers "indulgent parents" for letting him do so.
One of the reasons Bird was attracted to "Ghost Protocol" was because he was allowed to put his own stamp on the film. Cruise had envisioned that each director - Brian De Palma and John Woo did the first two movies - would bring his own cinematic style to the franchise, rather than trying to fit into some form.
Bird says he was encouraged early on to do so when he was asked, "Is there anything that you really wanted to see in a spy movie that you haven't seen?"
"That's the kind of question that every filmmaker prays that the producer will ask," he says.
Even so, the fourth installment of a movie franchise brings a lot of expectations. But Bird believed he could turn that into an asset.
"I thought, `How can I zig instead of zag and instead do something unusual?"' he says.
That included reimagining the famed opening sequence with the lit fuse and what he calls "one of the greatest theme songs ever written." The director is also excited about a scene that takes place in a sandstorm, which was inspired by "North by Northwest."
"Usually suspense scenes are done in the dark or enclosed spaces, but Alfred Hitchcock went completely the other direction and put it in a cornfield at noon with an infinite field of view," observes Bird.
"How the hell do you generate suspense from it? But he managed to do it. So I thought, `What if you had a chase scene where there is no visibility whatsoever but is in the middle of the day?"'
But when he's told the fight between Patton and Seydoux, the French actress who plays an assassin, is what's generating buzz on the Internet, Bird laughs and says it's kind of a P.T. Barnum way of advertising: "Come see the girl fight."
He adds, though, that he really likes the way the scene was done because it's "a no-holds-barred fight.
"We didn't make the fight dainty because women were having it," he says. "It's just as vicious as anything the men do. It was fun to do that."
And speaking of fun, Bird says he can't complain about the intense promotional tour. Being a filmmaker is "a fun way to make a living," he says, although he's not sure what's next for him.
He has another writer working on "1906" - "keeping the pot stirred" - and several other possible projects, both live-action and animation.
"For my ideal career, the project would dictate the medium," Bird says. "Hopefully, I get to jump back and forth. It's all film, and that's really the medium that I love."
See, the big picture.
Source: http://www.dailybreeze.com/lifeandculture/ci_19556094
