The evolution of split-screen cinema

Imagine four cameras displayed in a cinema. Cinema for me was always very tame and very, very conservative. And so as soon as the technology said oh you can **** with it more I went, I'm up for that, let's go, you know. My background is actually live performance art of which cinema was a part of. Yeah, I trained as a musician so I had that skill. You're thinking of layers and you're thinking of harmonic ideas and you're thinking of the fugue as a kind of narrative and all of that sort of thing. Come in, Brendan. Film technology, when I came into it seemed very primitive. We were still mixing sound on these tanks. No, no. But you happen to have them with you? Well, I carry them with me. So timecode in a way was like okay, finally there's a camera that's small enough that runs for long enough that you could sort of like now start considering the ideas that you've been developing in live theatre or whatever for quite some time. You did a lot of macho things then. This is very common among transsexuals. I remember bumping into Brian De Palma at the Rotterdam Film Festival having a really great time with him but him kind of like pointing out that he'd been there a lot before me. Film experience. You don't need glasses but this spectacular new technique does require special projection equipment. It's so beautiful the way you tell your story. Where did you learn that? Did you go to school? I said okay, well let's just literally line it up on the clapper on pause and then hit play at the same time and we'll both, we'll just watch the two screens. And I was immediately so enthralled by like wow. We were both getting good footage but you were getting like this completely different kind of cubist psychology. You know like suddenly I never quite understood why I was but you were getting more than twice the amount of information you would from a single shot. The eye was suddenly liberated. You weren't just the prisoner of the edit. Anyway that kind of lodged in my head. We finished the film by watching everything in stereo as it were. I was in a very good place at the time. I'd done Leaving Las Vegas so I was kind of you know one of their favourite boys in the studio system so I was kind of still earning money. I had a deal at Sony. They liked me. I'd bought my own 16mm camera so I had my own equipment and that was a sense of liberation. I made this note in my notebook which was experimental film idea you know. Started off with just two cameras and just thinking of a kind of narrative that would be split screen and then I suddenly expanded it to four screens. Why not? Then I went well could we go to six? I said no no four let's contain it there. And I started to write this kind of bullshit story I think inspired by that sort of Truffaut Nouvelle Vague idea that all you need is a pretty girl and a gun and all that ----. Just to kind of keep the sort of conventional narrative interesting but it's not important. That just needs to basically feed this idea of four screens. And so I got the big conductor's score paper. I blocked out 95 bars on the string quartet blank and then literally I just started in pencil first kind of going. It began with Stellan's character I think and then took him on a journey through all the cameras. I started weaving in the other characters one by one until the music paper started to really fill up. And then the delight of just moving things. And then obviously once we started shooting I turned all the actors into musicians. They all had their own copy of the music paper and they were all responsible for their own line. Also exactly the same technique with the camera people. The three guys and me I shot one three other guys. We had the same digital watch which we would synchronize religiously every morning at 10 o'clock all the way through the film. And sometimes it was down to seconds. So the earthquakes had to be literally on the second otherwise it didn't work. Everyone's timing had to be perfect. When I was really into experimental performance there was some pretty pretty good stuff going on. I mean far more advanced intellectually than anything I saw in cinema. So like the Worcester Group in New York. I toured with them. Willem Dafoe I'd known him since he was 18. I also was doing a lot of reading and I started reading about Owen Piscato. And these live projections they were doing with live music and everything in Berlin in the 20s. There's no record of it of course. There's no video. There's nothing there. So you just have the kind of descriptions of it. And I was like wow, what were they doing? And then Napoleon is unbelievable, right? So the idea that people at the beginning of the century the birth of cinema were already kind of going well we could do this. We don't have to just do Hollywood ----, you know. That was very much in my imagination. I hadn't seen four screens. There were moments in Woodstock that I thought were pretty amazing when they break the screens up. And a lot of it was shot on 16, I think. So it was in the air and I was also interested in Hitchcock's experiment with rope albeit one screen. And so a combination of already a kind of dissatisfaction with montage the idea that, you know cut two, cut two, cut two fade two, cut two like it's very mono. And everything I'd done in music has never been mono. How's Sarah doing? Good. Yeah? Yeah. Good. Yeah. She wasn't here tonight. Was she? I didn't... What happened as soon as we started shooting and we got comfortable with our timing you started to look for opportunities. Sorry. The guy who was shooting Gene Tripple on the back of the limo I realized that when Kyle is talking on the phone he's ringing out Stellan he's on the sidewalk outside Tower Records and if I moved him a little bit he would... he pulled focus and it goes from Gene who's doing Coke. We were looking for economies of like having people stack up in the frame. It's actually the ultimate control because I would say it's a kind of uber tech impact. I mean there's a funny story that's very indicative of this. So I was doing a talk in San Francisco about Timecode and about how I was directing with the audio. And I said how many of you noticed that blonde stealing the book from BookSoup? I went she stole the book? I said yeah she's the shoplifter but no one ever notices. And then this one girl said I went I saw it. And I went oh that's interesting she said I'm gay. Everybody else who's watching is telling me the scars are out and some are *******. That girl's really hot I was just watching her. So yes I saw her stealing the book and I went there you go that's interesting. She managed to break out of my dictatorial kind of like manipulation because she wanted to watch that girl. So at a certain point when I was also doing a lot of you know the live mixes it's just lovely sometimes to take all the sound out and then just watching you suddenly realize you're watching an abstract film if you're not being told dialogue you have no idea what's going on so you're suddenly free to note and at those moments for me what can you do with the cameras in a purely experimental world? Lock down the entire facility immediately. Four quartets quartets are great three and four are great numbers Exponentially it gets then you have to make so many decisions about where to put the lights and so on too many options and I think you cross the line you lose contact with the audience and then it becomes an effect I think. Everybody Hi Hey Welcome to Sales Corp Industries first Zoom call the creator of Scott Pilgrim himself Mr. Brian Leo Malley in the house I find it very limited Now this isn't right is it? What we're using now is a kind of helpline device it's very unsophisticated I think this is not right and so it needs some really smart guys and women working on to get much more sophisticated because clearly even post-pandemic you know people have got hooked on so I think it's here to stay but it's definitely here to be improved I don't know how to get up I can't even get up I mean here's the deal cinema as an industry has taken a massive kicking in the last year right there will definitely be a kind of pandemic effect cinemas closing et cetera how cinema comes out of that will be interesting because the technology to replace it exists which is a tough thing to say because a lot of the people who formed the mainstream film industry the old school film industry maybe won't have a job and I feel terribly sad for them but that's never been my thing anyway and then as we discussed some of this remote stuff can be useful as part of the narrative as well because that's become also part of our language of how we communicate and they're having to use this for every single form of communication that would have been reserved for in-person meetings and things like that so all kinds of dark deeds have been done What's the final you took today? Help us with who your daughter talks to is that something you can do? Yes The problem is with mainstream productions is they use technology they don't embrace it you know they it's just a tool to them you know and so then oh you can do it like this and this and this it's just like by the numbers you know so they don't actually love the technology enough to kind of be bold I think you know A lot of young filmmakers actually did good stuff with it a lot of horror stuff is very good for that you know and edgy kind of social stuff shot on iPhones and all of that you know it certainly kind of opened the world up You know the film I made next in a way was just as interesting which was Hotel which sometimes used four screens sometimes used two screens and a lot of times just used one screen and then sometimes used a very small screen within the screen you know I became interested by well what does format tell you because we had this bizarre cameo from Burt Reynolds Burt Reynolds is a kind of cinemascope type actor so I went into cinemascope despite shooting on a PD100 Who's in charge here? And so I'd like to do one more and pick up the ideas we've discussed and take them to another level with narrative How often do you sleep together? Do you have sex often? Hardly ever maybe three times a week Constantly I'd say three times a week I am Oh nice In a way I would say cinema is about taking the deconstructed and bringing it back together because a drama has to give an audience the idea of construction or destruction We're drawn to stories because we fear destruction and so we want to be assured with construction so in moments like that you kind of go oh there is an order in the world I see things do come together coincidences are significant blah blah blah you know We did it They did it Whether that's true or not is up for grabs but in terms of how you can connect with an audience at this point now I'm an audience because I watch it It's just fabulous you know All those people seem so distant now Well I thought it might be fun to stay in I'm in the mood for a home cooked meal