Jonathan Demme and Ronald also walked out of the room and went to the parking lot. They communicated along the way, and Demme shared a lot of lessons he learned in dealing with celebrities.
The two got into Niceta's car and drove to a studio with an editing room and screening room, where a copy of Demme's latest film was placed.
Niceta made arrangements and the copy started to be shown. When the screen was still dark, a song full of Caribbean style entered the ears.
As soon as the screen lit up, a garbage ship was seen passing through the sea outside Lower Manhattan in New York City. The slowly moving ship, the dilapidated and garbage-filled neighborhoods on the shore, and the bright twin towers of the World Trade Center in the distance complemented each other and became a
The opening of the movie.
"God, that's what I used to see when I was a kid," Ronald exclaimed. The scenery on the boat was when Aunt Karen brought her home from the hospital and took the boat to Manhattan every week to see the doctor.
It’s a scene you’ll see every time.
Ronald seemed to smell the special smell of rust on the ship and the stench of the garbage ships around him.
The music and influence seemed to be flowing slowly, fully awakening Ronald's memories.
At the beginning, vision, hearing, and even video and sound are mobilized to trigger Ronald's olfactory memories. It makes people blend into the background of the story that Jonathan wants to tell. This is a very clever director's technique.
Ronald tilted his head and glanced at Jonathan. Such a level should not be unknown.
When the opening piece of music ended, the stereo sound in the background converged into a point-shaped sound source. On the screen was a black guy, holding a large speaker tape recorder on his shoulder, slowly twisting forward to the Caribbean-style music.
The camera panned and focused on a restaurant across the street. The music gradually faded away, and the story officially began.
Ronald couldn't help but tilted his head and glanced at Jonathan. A very advanced mixing technique was used here, a sound environment technique invented by Orson Welles and carried forward by Walter Murch.
"This interlude is called "Loco de Amor", and there are several lyrics of "wild thing" in it, which matches the title of the film "something wild"."
Jonathan introduced some of his ideas to Ronald.
It was originally a flawless sound track like a record, but in the last two sentences, it was switched to a slightly noisy tape recording played from the tape recorder.
"Here you can use the track from the album interlude and the recorded music from the live recorder, mix them according to the ratio, and at the end, slowly adjust the ratio of the two instead of switching all at once, which will make it more charming." Rona
De told Jonathan the skills he and Murch learned.
"That's what they did in the wedding scene at the beginning of The Godfather." Ronald concluded in the end.
"Aha, that's it." Jonathan nodded and wrote down Ronald's secret in his notebook. If no one tells you this technique, you will have to think about it for a long time before you can break through.
A shot of the upper body of a man in a suit appeared in the hotel, and Ronald recognized it as Jeff Daniels, who played Deborah Winger's husband in "The Big Brother."
The man finished his lunch in a noisy cafe. Seeing that no one was paying attention to him, he secretly picked up the receipt and escaped.
A woman with short black hair rushed out, stopped the man, and finally, half-coercion and half-seduce, let him get into her car and take him for a ride.
"This is Melanie Griffith." Ronald was deeply impressed by this woman who had to fight with Tatum O'Neal and cut her hair back for a role.
We haven’t seen each other for a few years, and she seems to have aged a bit, but her figure is still very good. She was chatting about her skirt in the car and getting ready to drive, and she looked very tough.
"I'm Lulu"
"I am Charles"
The two male and female protagonists introduce each other.
Ronald could see it. Jonathan's shooting was very clever and the lens was very smooth. The two actors also acted very naturally. Jeff Daniels is a relatively famous actor. At that time, I just wanted to ask Jonathan how to make it look so good.
He acted so well.
As the movie continued, Ronald felt that the story was probably about an affair between a man and a woman, but soon, Jonathan gave him a surprise.
Lulu abducted Charles to her home and introduced Charles to her mother as her husband. The movie had an unsettling atmosphere. Lulu's mother made it clear to Charles the next day that she knew Charles was not Lulu's real "
Husband" and asked him to be careful about Lulu.
Charles also said that he has a wife and two children in New Jersey, and he and Lulu just met yesterday.
Ronald felt that the story might be a Hitchcockian suspense film.
Ronald was surprised again. Lulu took Charles to the high school reunion. At the party, Charles discovered that one of his subordinates was also at the reunion.
Could it be a movie about admonitions about cheating bringing disaster to the family?
Lulu spotted a man at her high school reunion. She looked scared and pulled Charles to leave. Charles was deceived and went to dinner with him.
In the end, the man's true identity was revealed. It turned out that he was Lulu's husband. He was imprisoned for robbery and now he escaped from prison to find Lulu.
What is this story?
In just one or two hours, the plot deviated from the channel four or five times, but the strange thing is that Ronald was not distracted at all while watching it. Although it could not fit into any genre film, the film was still very gripping.
The thought of not going out to go to the bathroom.
Lulu's husband caught the two of them and beat Charles. Charles was worried about Lulu and came back to save her. It turned out that Charles also panicked. He and his wife had divorced, and the so-called warm family was only his own.
lie.
As a result, Lulu's husband found Charles's residence through phone fraud, rushed in to take Lulu away, handcuffed Charles in the bathroom, and went back to the room to beat Lulu who was trying to escape.
As the two-hour movie came to an end, Ronald couldn't hold it in any longer, so he went to the bathroom to relax.
"In this film, there is no plot that you can guess. It is really a very good film." Ronald said, "But I really don't know how to market this film.
From beginning to end, my idea changed many times, from thinking it was a pornographic film, to a suspense film, to a police film, to an action film, to a romance film..."
"But it does look good, doesn't it?" Jonathan Demme said with a smile.
"Yeah, it's really good." Ronald hadn't had this feeling of being immersed in the plot of a movie for a long time.
"I think your supporting roles are all well chosen. What's the name of the one who plays Lulu's husband? He looks scary at first glance."
"Ray, Ray Liotta."
"Yes, where did you find so many good actors? And Melanie Griffiths. She was wearing a black wig, and she looked completely different from the way she looked with her short blond hair. I didn't even know her.
She is so good at acting. Her previous movies were very average."
"I learned this from my first boss, exploitation film mogul Roger Corman. He taught me a long lesson when he first asked me to direct 'Orange Is the New Black'
.
One thing is like this, every supporting character determines the quality of the movie. When you cut to a close-up of a supporting character, the movie belongs to him in those three to five seconds. If the character is not convincing
, then the audience’s belief in the movie’s story will drop by a few points at that moment. If you do it a few more times, your box office will definitely be affected.”
"Aren't you the Jonathan that Roger told me about?" Ronald looked up and down at Jonathan Demme.
Although I don't want to admit it, my directing skills are indeed inferior to Jonathan Demme, who has no successful films from a box office perspective.
"I think the lessons he taught me must have been streamlined. He didn't teach me this." Ronald laughed loudly and pulled Demi up to have dinner with him.
"How did you choose these good actors?" Ronald's own "Moonlight" also needs a large number of supporting roles with acting skills, and Demi's experience can be borrowed. In a high-end restaurant in Manhattan, Ronald
Ask Demi for advice.
"When I cast, I choose people who interest me and whom you want to know more about.
In the scene where Lulu and Charlie were at the class reunion party, there was a pair of extras dancing there. I liked those two actors when I was casting, but when we started filming, I discovered that they were a pair of dancing masters.
The most important thing in casting is to choose the villain, who must be selected according to the criteria of the worst villain. Heroes are set off by villains. Without a bad villain, there will be no good hero."
"Roger taught you this? I have to ask him why he didn't teach me."
"Hahaha, maybe he discovered these techniques and didn't need them in his exploitation films."
The two talked about their origins. They were both students taught by Roger Coleman, and they could be considered brothers in the same discipline.
"I still have a question. Why are the actors' performances so natural in the scenes you filmed? It seems that they have been rehearsed seventeen or eight times before, and they have become very proficient. They were shot after practicing and surviving." Ronald
I asked myself what I was most confused about. These actors were not novices. They couldn't let Demi manipulate them like this, right?
"I never rehearse. The actors' performances are all improvised on the spot. Whatever is performed is what is performed."
"Isn't this impossible?" Ronald didn't believe it. This was not rehearsed?
"In other words, I let them rehearse on film. When they perform for the first time, their emotions are often the fullest and their reactions are often the most real. If the rehearsal is the best effect and I don't film it, then I haven't captured it.
?
So I always ask them to get into position, and then notify them to rehearse. During the rehearsal, I turn on the camera in advance, and the best one is often the one. If what I see is not good enough, I ask them to change it.