"- Are we shooting?"
- I watch films incessantly.
I like watching films. They like music to me.
I love it. They make me happy.
They make me wanna live.
They make me want to get outta bed.
That's like great music.
"- Let's go."
- I think cinema is better than a lot of medications
that you can change your day right around.
So every day I have to watch some classic film in part some point during the day
'cause it's like having a song in your head.
Filmmaking is showmanship. We're all from theater.
We're all from drama. We're all storytellers.
And as a storyteller, you have to, whether you're telling it to your five-year-old
or to audiences across America, you've gotta captivate them.
I got a late start. I was a late bloomer. I'm still a late bloomer.
I was never a film school kid.
You know, I never thought of being a filmmaker, really.
Never thought of it until my late twenties.
I always thought I would be a writer, you know.
I wrote fiction and nonfiction.
I wrote journalism about jazz. I wrote for JazzTimes.
I tried to write a novel, but I didn't succeed.
And I did all manner of low-income community work.
That was all the stuff I did.
You know, I decided I'm gonna try to make films now,
and I didn't know what I was doing.
You know, as a storyteller, there's nothing worse than audiences tell a story
or sing a song and not knowing how to do it.
Sally Menke, the late great Sally Manke, and her (inaudible) friends really helped me.
They were a little ahead of me, a little older,
and they had been to NYU and they knew how to make a movie.
I didn't know how to make a movie.
So on my shorts, they kind of helped me.
And on the second one, I sort of took it upon myself to try to do everything myself.
And then I got grants from the New York State Council on the Arts to make
what became "Spanking the Monkey".
I didn't really find my true passion in cinema or storytelling
until I made "The Fighter".
The lights went on and I said, 'Oh, these are the people.
These are the stories.
This is the love that I meant to make cinema out of.'
The hardest thing as a director is to not know what your inspiration is.
I'd like to make original stories with characters that are amazing,
but I also want them to make money and reach a lot of people.
It's a very small landing strip.
"- These things are never easy."
- "Spanking the Monkey" had an impact to it as a story.
It had energy in it that worked.
Then what are we gonna do next?
I wanted to do kind of a comedy based on some things I was going through.
And then I wanted to try something bigger and muscular.
So I did this movie "Three Kings".
And then I kind of wanted to do something more
independent by some of these other filmmakers I know.
And that was "Huckabee's".
Which I think has a lot of beautiful stuff in it,
but it didn't come out as I'd wanted it to.
I think I overthought it.
I wasn't coming from a place of instinct.
I hadn't found my truest voice yet.
"- Is my work doing any good?
Is anybody paying attention?
Is it hopeless to try and change things?"
- You have to stay rooted in a world that you can make personal in some way.
I feel like I found a kind of story with a kind of character
that's been three movies deep now.
You could say reinvention is the niche of the films.
Everybody in "The Fighter" sort of trying to reinvent their lives.
Certainly "Silver Linings" is about the reinvention of the Bradley Cooper
and Jennifer Lawrence characters.
"- What are you doing? - I'm getting in shape.
I'm getting trim. Getting really fit for Nikki."
- It wasn't like I was sitting around saying,
'Gee, I have to make a movie about a boxer.'
Gee, I have to make a movie about someone who
has this strange deal to dance with this girl.
I have to make a movie about Abscam.
I wanted to make a movie about the people.
So the characters were what I love more than anything.
The style of writing begins with writing the story from each character's point of view.
Because if you're going from the character's point of view,
it becomes about them and their emotions, and it's about their love and their pain.
That's really what the picture's about.
The boxing in "The Fighter".
The mental illness in "Silver Linings".
The legal and mafia situation in the predicament.
Those are engines of humanity.
Those are the engines that create predicaments
that I try to make relatable or feel relatable to anything I've ever gone through.
That's what makes us all who we are.
Are the people we love, the people we struggle with.
And with the specificity of them.
So all I know is I have to grab onto the specificity.
No one plays a loving father like Robert De Niro
because he's a very soulful, loving man.
He also credibly plays a very limited kind of narcissist
or a broken guy, which is heartbreaking.
"- Please, you want me to snap?
That's your whole routine.
- Stop.
- You like this? - Dad, no!
- How's this for snapping?
- No. - How's this?"
- With "Joy", I said, what makes up this little girl's psyche?
A metal garage that's specific.
Her mother's soap opera.
A steady, quiet grandmother.
"- You are going to grow up.
And be a strong, smart, young woman.
Go to school."
- I have to love them
including all their brokenness.
And I don't think beauty exists without ugliness.
I don't think the sublime exists without the ordinary.
And that's at the heart of our stories.
When Bradley Cooper was running through town in "Silver Linings Playbook",
I told him a rhythm that was in his head, which told him what his energy was.
I was like...
Cause his character was burning with this manic desire to put his life
back together to find his ex-wife.
And so that's in his eyes.
He's not just running.
Very often when you run, you have a rhythm in your head.
So I gave him a rhythm in his head.
Rhythm is everything.
I listen music, I write it into the script, I shoot to it.
I give the characters record players and records, you know,
that their character would listen to.
"- Who starts a song like that?
- It's magic."
- I love the musicality of how people talk.
"- Now isn't that cool, huh? - Yes.
- That's a cool thing, isn't it?
- Oh, downer. You cheat. You disgust me.
- Lady. Edith. Greensly?"
- Rhythm is character and if I talk like this, it changes who I am as a person
so they can get to character just as easily through rhythm.
Tracy Scott, who was a tremendous script supervisor.
I remember talking to her outside in 30-degree weather on the...
when we were shooting that super high shot
when Irving's car comes home in "American Hustle".
And I was imagining the next sequence, the sequence.
And I was trying to practice it even though it was days away or weeks away.
And I said to her, 'It's like a matter of rhythm
or something, Tracy, it's a matter of momentum.'
She said, 'It's a matter of music.'
And I remember standing outside with her saying, 'Yes, it's a matter of music.'
And then I started thinking of that scene only musically.
It was to Led Zeppelin, which I shot it to.
And then Jeff Lynne, the founder of VO
opened up a box of unreleased tracks from the 70s.
Where yellow did not have the west coast cocaine sound of "Boogie Nights".
It was more of like a Beatles-influenced sound
with this kind of marching and strings.
Dun dun, dun dun, and that was an amazing sound.
Rhythm. Rhythm. Rhythm. It's all music.
Any film is rhythm.
My holy trifecta is to have music, emotion, and camera in a propulsion
that is almost... it's almost as if you're breathing the moment yourself,
and then you have to go back and watch it again.
I want the movie to start, grab you, pull you
in a roller coaster of emotion and enchantment,
and then be over, you know?
And before you can say, 'Wow, that happened.'
"- That was fantastic."
- In "The Fighter", we had to very economically tell the story
of this guy used to be a champion, but now he's older and he's a crack head.
But the mother still worships him.
So how do you tell all that story without stopping the movie?
I love Steady Cam. I love the fluency it.
And the muscularity of it and the propulsiveness of it
which somehow becomes magical and different.
But you continue to make it be the best it can be in the editing room.
With the chase sequences leaving "Three Kings",
I wanted them to have that propulsive quality of
leaving a village of missile being fired at them.
They're talking to each other in the car.
"- Yes."
- So I wanted to do this big landscape of a film
to be very aggressive, cinematically about it.
And that's what that picture was about.
I tried to think of waves.
A wave is almost like an instrumental, several bars.
I know I've got you for this wave.
It's Christian Bale doing his hair.
Then he walks down the hall.
Why is he in that room?
Who's on the monitor?
Who are these people?
What are they talking about now?
Now it's about sex.
"- What is your...
- Hey, look, I never laid a hand on her, right? Is that what this is about?
- Well, technically.
That's not true."
- So that was a wave, right?
The next wave is gonna come
right now when Bradley closes the briefcase and he goes...
"- Let's go."
- That kicks off the next wave, which is Steely Dan dirty work in slow motion
as they walk down the hallway that he just walked down.
The three of them into this room and the double doors open.
And Amy walks in and it says "American Hustle".
The movie has a completely different energy because of that.
And then the editor, Jay Cassidy, and Alan Baumgarten, they're incredible.
We are tireless in our process, and Bradley Cooper's often in there with us.
And I will welcome anybody into the editing room at the right time
to take any note at certain time.
But certain people are just collaborators and those people are all collaborators.
"- And he was generous enough to invite me into the edit room as well.
So right from, you know, beginning to the end I've never been that involved."
- There's no note that I won't take.
I will take a note from anybody because I don't wanna be precious about it.
I want to be protected from my any preciousness I might have.
You know, cuz maybe I'm blind to things that would actually be better.
So I'll try any note and then I'll tell you why I think it's better one way or another.
We retry it many different ways. We learn many different things.
'Cause sometimes we have fans of one version and fans of another version.
And sometimes we switch positions and I'll say, 'Jay, I'm arguing for your version.'
He'll say, 'Yeah, but I don't agree with that version.'
That's a healthy process, you know.
Where it's not precious and you're not afraid to change it.
I'll always try things both ways, and I'll say that to actors too.
In the time it takes us to debate this.
Why don't we just do it both ways?
I'll say it to a DP and to an actor.
Let's do it both ways.
And then I'll meet you in Santa Monica at the cutting room and then we can decide.
I feel like if I haven't done that,
I haven't giving myself the chance to maximize the scene
before we're stuck in the editing room with it.
And sometimes the scenes change dramatically on the day of the shoot
or the day before the shoot where I'll say, 'This is wrong, or this is bad.'
I on "The Fighter" and other films have shot things that I wanted to shoot
that we didn't have time or reason to shoot.
That no one understood why we were shooting it, but they often ended up being gems.
So, for example, in "The Fighter" I shot interviews with the brothers
that I made up on the moment with them.
I interviewed them in character.
"- You're not gonna look in the camera with the... interviews?"
- That became in the ninth month of editing,
the opening, and closing of the movie, you know.
Where Christian Bale cries unexpectedly
when asked to describe his brother's success.
"- Who used to be the pride of law, huh?
Right here. Who's the pride of law now?
Right there, That's how it's meant to be, you know?
- And down to nothing better than that.
Nothing better than that.
He did it. I gotta go. I gotta go."
- And I start my day in the van with the crew.
I like the whole crew to gather in a van.
It's very important that it's an enclosed space
'cause enclosed spaces are very powerful.
All the power is in there and your attention is not distracted.
And I will go through the entire day with all the keys and sometimes the actors.
And I'll tell them what I wanna do with each one of these things on the schedule.
We'll talk that through.
And then everybody feels like they have their mission.
They heard it from me and we're united.
They're not off doing their department's work that's broken off for me.
You know they all feel connected to the same heart.
You know, that is the heart of the story we're trying to tell.
We're all in it together.
That's a good feeling.
I do think it is an all-consuming thing, like Major League Sports,
and it's not for everybody.
It consumes you completely.
But I get so much magic and inspiration out of it, and,
and it's such a privilege to make a movie.
You get to live in a magic world and create magic.
So you pay the price.
You have to make the film with all your heart every time.
I leave nothing to chance.
"- I never expected two decorated soldiers to get knocked out at my own home.
- No. Just one, sir.
- Well, that's right Mr. Woodman.
You were too fast for cold.
- I was."