Letters to Juliet's Amanda Seyfried Interview

In the 35 years that I have been sort of professionally making films the technological
change has been enormous. We have resisted it as much as possible. We didn’t move to
digital editing for 10 or 15 years after most of my colleagues had done so. We liked the
tactile feel of cutting film, of taping it together and I did not begrudgingly move to it. It’s
helpful in so many ways, digital editing, but I did so out of concern for the interns, the
unpaid interns who came because for a long while during the nineties it was sort of a
badge of honor for them to learn how to use rewinds and editing machines, analogue
editing machines, but after awhile I realized that asking these interns to do this was like
asking someone who wanted to be a racecar driver to first learn how to shoe a horse and
it was just too anachronistic and so we sort of came into the twenty-first century. We still
shoot on film though.

Though it’s been proven to me by George Lucas personally that there is no difference
that I could tell we still sort of love the discipline of film, the terror. We’ve been
speaking now for almost an hour with a tape that didn’t need to be changed and 60
millimeter you have to change every eleven and a half minutes and it’s very expensive.
It’s not reusable. You could decide, probably decide that this is a completely worthless
conversation and erase it and start over on the memory card, but you can’t do that in film
and that creates a kind of urgency, a kind of terror in a good sense of that word, which we
still like. We like to feel you know like we have to sit up straight and be on the edge of
our seats to try to get something out of the person we’re interviewing or the person or the
scene that we’re shooting or the archive that we’re engaged in. That’s an exciting
process.

So we’ve both resisted it and reluctantly welcomed new technological change. You know
it’s often said that the digital revolution that puts a TV camera in everyone’s hands makes
everyone a filmmaker. It’s bullshit. It’s bullshit. What makes someone a filmmaker is
somebody who knows how to tell a story and telling a story— I’ll tell you I’ve been
doing this for a long time, almost 40 years that I’ve been trying to tell stories with film
and I still feel like a student. I still feel like I’m learning what a good story is or how to
tell a story or a new way to approach a story and that means that it requires a kind of
lifetime of devotion. It isn’t enough just to be there when something happens. It isn’t
enough just to record whatever happens. We have to be storytellers and it’s just logical
that only a few of us are going to be able to do that and even do it in sort of flawed ways.
I don’t consider myself that great a storyteller. I’m learning. I’m learning. I’m learning.