Tim Burton and moderator
Danny DeVito discuss Big Fish

For such a visually distinct filmmaker, Burton talked of how he is relying less and less on storyboards in order to maintain a freshness in the work. "Because it's so hard to get a film going," he said, "and making it is such a joyful and spontaneous experience that, even though sometimes you may have boards for certain F/X sequences, I don't really rely on them because it cuts out a really fun part of the set and shooting.

"I never made a decision to be a director," he claimed. "I just liked making things. If it was a drawing or a Super-8 film, it was fun. That was the energy, to make something. I just feel very lucky that it worked out to be directing because I enjoy it more than any of the other types of making things. It's always nice to be surprised."

Ron Howard and moderator
Barry Sonnenfeld discuss The Missing

"I've always had a hankerin' to make a Western," Ron Howard told the DGA member audience. But Howard was not without his reservations on tackling this genre: "Whenever I read scripts, and it came to the cattle drive scene or a shootout scene, I would feel that there was no way I was going to be able to compete, and it would be hard not to satirize it unintentionally."

Ultimately, it was the non-Western aspects of the project that drove him to it. "I felt that when I read this script, it didn't depend on the setting; it just utilized the setting well. The themes were original, and character relationships were original, for the genre. And even the crime, which like The Searchers, involves a girl being taken, is sort of where the similarity ends. I just felt it [The Missing] had a chance to be something unusual."

The characters in The Missing not only have to contend with each other, but also the brutality of their surroundings as well. To convey this, Howard decided to incorporate the sometimes harsh and erratic weather conditions into the actual production. "I wanted to do it in a specific time because I really wanted to shoot when we could function, but I knew it was going to be volatile."

Peter Jackson and moderator Tom Pollock
discuss The Lord of the Rings:
|The Return of the King

"A lot of the (filmmaking) process is the same whether the project is small or big," Jackson said following a screening of his massive adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy's final chapter. "You're basically trying to create good characters and tell a good story. The scale of the film obviously impacts the budget. You need to have more people helping you. You need to have stunt coordinators and extras and people who dress the extras. The size and the logistics get bigger but, as a director, I don't think it particularly makes it more daunting.

"Tolkien was the absolute master at combining the epic and the intimate," he said. "I think that's one of the reasons the book is so great. The intimate story is the most predominant. The battles are in the book but they're short, they're sharp, they're violent and then you go back to the characters again. If you don't follow the guidelines of Tolkien and keep these battles short and sharp and relatively immersed with the characters, you are going to suddenly swamp the intimate story and that was a danger. Most of this past year has been spent with the editing process and we discovered very quickly that battles do get boring very fast no matter how spectacular the shots are. So we tried to keep the characters in the forefront. We tried to see the battle through the eyes of Gandalf or Aragorn and not to go into the eye-of-God shots too often."

Nancy Meyers and moderator Bruce Block
discuss Something's Gotta Give

"I privately do a lot of work when I'm writing and then when the picture actually gets going, I do as much prep as I can ahead of time so when we (start filming), I can figure out how to shoot it and get the performances," Meyers said. "Production is not the time to pick a watch or a wall color or a lampshade. Nothing should be discussed at this point. I use lots of storyboards, even for the most simple things. I just like to have it on a piece of paper in front of me."

However, prep on this film did not include rehearsal Meyers said. "I think at times it really would have helped because it would have saved some discussions we had on the set," she said. "But sometimes you need to have those discussions on the set, at that time, in bed, when the actress is really under the covers with a guy. It's hard to get yourself in that place two months before you shoot it."

Anthony Minghella and moderator
Stephen Gyllenhaal discuss Cold Mountain

Though director Anthony Minghella thought The Talented Mr. Ripley would be his last literary adaptation project, he couldn't pass up the opportunity to bring Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain to the big screen. According to Minghella, Cold Mountain "was a spiritual destination as much as a geographical one." "The story appealed to me as enormously cinematic; yet, it allowed me to investigate the spiritual life, and walking as a penance or an atonement." Minghella spent a year constructing the screenplay, pulling inspiration from a variety of sources like The Odyssey. He also focused a great deal on his musical choices. More than 1,000 songs were considered. "Very often in making movies, the music is the last guest invited to the table; I wanted it to be there from the beginning, as a means to help the actors prepare."

Vadim Perelman and moderators
David Nutter and Philip Haas
discuss The House of Sand and Fog

"I think a lot of artists make a mistake of infusing a project with a message," Perelman said. "I think that's how you get propaganda. You get triumph of the will that way. At its basis, you get commercials, which are really just, 'Buy our soap' and then you wrap everything around that."

Jim Sheridan and moderator
Michael Caton Jones discuss In America

While not strictly autobiographical, In America, about an Irish family's experiences making New York their new home, was inspired by events in the director's life and was co-written with his daughters.

"Kirsten had written and directed a few films, and Naomi had written scripts," Sheridan explained. "They took my script, and what I thought they were going to do was fix it. But what they did was change it. My character in their script was a guy who was never in the house, his head was in the clouds, he sang songs he didn't know the words to, and when he was drunk he told them he loved them."

While revising the script further, he made the decision to give the story an even more personal underpinning. "I had the idea of taking a story I always wanted to make about my brother Frankie who died. In a way I kind of slipped in to being my father and my daughter became me."

"It seems to me that part of the job of the director is really gauging the emotions, not only with the performances, but of the entire story," remarked Jones. "Especially in a film like this which is built up of details of emotions that cumulatively bring out the handkerchiefs. How do you go about calibrating that?"

"That's the really good question." Sheridan pondered for a moment. "The human face has 800 muscles, so the sophistication of reading what's in the human face is hard, and in a funny way women, historically, have been better at it than men. I think a lot of directors are like that too."

Peter Weir and moderator James Cameron discuss Master and Commander:
The Far Side of the World

James Cameron noted how astoundingly authentic the set had seemed when he walked it himself, and that he had watched the film very closely for the hundreds of visual FX he knew were in it. "But I have to say," he said to resounding audience concurrence, "it's bloody seamless."

"The most important scenes for CG were the ship just turning," Peter Weir said. "I think that's what worried me most. Meetings would concentrate on the big sequences like the battle scenes, and I kept saying, 'let's use half of this meeting to talk about simply sailing, and trying to break down the tradition of these films before this technology,' which was essentially wide shots, and then to cut onboard to somebody in a mid shot. I wanted to get three-quarter shots."

Weir had been impressed with the great dimension Peter Jackson had achieved in The Lord of the Rings FX and consulted with him and Richard Taylor at Jackson's WETA Workshop. "To my surprise, they said, 'Well, it's all miniature.' I love that sort of classical stage work, and that pretty well determined it. The enemy ship was a 30-foot vessel with beautiful detail. We shot those dry and then put the water in, which is not the ideal way to do it, but I decided not to use digital water — we were going to see it under too many conditions." Water shots were collected by Weir's excellent second unit.

Ed Zwick and moderator
Marshall Herskovitz
discuss The Last Samurai

Ed Zwick said that, like directors who say that there are no small onscreen roles in any production because actors all think their particular part is the most important in the show, each crew contributor should think in a like manner. "After I relay my vision to them, they have to believe what they do is the most important part of the film," he said, "so that these individuals are thinking, 'This is a film about facial hair,' or 'This is a film about horses,' or 'This is a film about transportation.'

"To adjudicate between people who believe their part is the most important part in the movie, sometimes means I labor in obscurity," Zwick said. "But they are there to provide your story with value. At the end of the discussion, though, you do need people to say, 'I will, indeed, do what he [the director] says.' "

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