Films About Ghosts

The woman next to me on the train has the same perfume as my ex-girlfriend. I've not been around this smell in three years. 

The memories come flooding back of the times that smell was most potent. Some of those were very intimate, but others were a gust of wind when we walked by the sea, or when she shuffled around trying to get comfortable in the car.

Those memories are just like movies. Little pieces of cinema in my mind. The only difference being the odours. You can smell a memory. I'm still on the train and this woman has no idea she's sent me tripping back to the past.

Films are strange because once they're done, that's it. You can go back again and again but you're rewatching the same thing.

Memories are different. They fade. They're not Blu-ray, they're old VHS copies. They wear out.

With a movie you believe that Harry and Sally stay together, maybe Alvy and Annie hold on to something.

In real life you're left with a smell. She's somewhere else now, and you're on a train dreaming of years that died long ago. They are so real, yet somehow feel like they never existed at all. They're just some movie you watched.

"If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts" -Adam Duritz.

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Dust

The hardest thing of all, is writing what's really in your heart. It's usually that very thing that makes you bolt it towards your laptop, desperate to capture in a bottle the spark of yourself that you just figured out.

But when you get there, a little something dies every time, and it blurs into ideas of stories and characters and meanings and somehow, you just lose something.

But the films you love, that you REALLY love, the ones that you cried yourself to sleep over when someone left you or when you felt all alone or when your friend died; you know those movies? The reason they resonate with you was because someone thumped their heart down on a page, or into a scene; and you saw them, you truly saw THEM ---- and because of that, you saw you. You saw your heart and soul smashed down on a page and rolled out on a screen and dumped in front of you.

But getting to those heights with your own work is the toughest thing of all. Because you tell yourself it's always too cheesy, or too personal, or too emotional, or too esoteric, or too much of a blur inside your brain.

The things you know and feel the most, the things you are so DESPERATE to say; despite the fact you know them with such definiteness and clarity -- despite that, when it comes to it; it seems you hardly know them at all. The very core of you you are, when it comes to chucking it out onto the page, it becomes a blur, a something, a speck of dust in a room of old books. Writing and directing and acting, they're all looking for that one piece of truth, yet the distractions are abundant everywhere we look. We always find a way to obscure it, to over-complicate it, to miss it.

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STEVEN SPIELBERG Interview at AIN'T IT COOL NEWS

Spielberg, he's one of us. Just a kid who loves movies. Check out Quint's amazing interview with the one and only Steven Spielberg here.

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Meaning Of Life: Cheryl Cole, Shopping Malls & Beansprouts

You ever have one of them days when you wonder what the fuck it is you're doing?

I bought a pack of raspberries. Once upon a time people grew raspberries themselves, or they went out to pick them, now you decide whether to get the cheap ones or the expensive ones, because they have both at the store. How does a raspberry become an expensive one? Does it go through training? Why aren't we growing fruit? Why are we spending all this money?

And they were selling 'The Social Network' on DVD for £4. A month ago it was £12.99. A MONTH AGO! This is how DVD sales work. Why do we pay more? Why is the immediate purchase necessary? What is the real value, 12 or 4?

Just one of them days when everything seems insane. And I happened to be in Shepherds Bush today. I went into Westfields, a shopping mall, because I needed to pee. Westfields was in the news yesterday because Tom Hanks was there, promoting 'Larry Crowne' at the cinema. Since when are movies Premiered at the shopping mall? Now you can wave to the movie stars from the 4th isle of Marks & Spencer's, then go buy some Toy Story 3 merchandise.

I walked around Westfield in amazement at how expensive everything was, and in shock at how fake-tanned everyone looked. All the women looked like Paris Hilton, but less authentic. And Paris Hilton isn't even authentic.

And I just can't help but think, surely this isn't it? The artists can't get nine people to look at their work, but the tanning people get a whole nation changing their skin colour. What meeting did I miss? What am I not getting?

I realise my thinking is outdated. I should be blogging gossip and naked Blake Lively pictures like TMZ.

Someone convinced us all that our tans are important, just like the coming and goings of Cheryl Cole (she has a nice tan, don't you think?). And the government is telling me beansprouts are out to kill me. The beansprouts and cucumbers are out to get me. 16 people died in Germany and apparently it's definitely 100% the vegetables. Our armies turned half of the Middle East into vegetables. Truth is I'm ignorant about it, I should know more. Instead they're telling me which Pussycat Doll is going to judge a talent show on television and hyping the killer lettuce. I'm waiting for the TV show, 'Lettuce Got Talent', 'Bean Sprout Factor'!

Just one of those days. You wonder what the hell life is all about.

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10 Tips For Directing Comedy

1. Welcome collaboration, but make sure the ideas resonate with your vision.

2. Do takes that are faster. It's always slower when you watch it back. Faster is funnier.

3. Make sure the actors are comfortable doing less.

4. Do as much as you can in single shots. Cutting to different angles makes it less funny.

5. Have really old people in the background and out of focus. Don't know why, but it's funny.

6. Use funny names.

7. Keep to the page.

8. Ignore the page.

9. In drama, your characters sit and talk. In comedy your characters can't talk because one is deaf and the other is trapped under the sofa.

10. Don't be too topical. Good humour lasts forever, but a joke about George Bush is an embarrassment, much like his foreign policy.

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