Order Jeffrey's book from Michael Wiese Productions here.
Dave Watson: First of all, congratulations on the book
Jeffrey Michael Bays: Thanks so much for reading!
DW: Transitions, whether it’s changing shots, locations, or other changes, are key to a movie, yet often overlooked. Why?
JMB: I think as filmmakers, we tend to build our films from the ground up. We focus on the shots, the lens choices, the dialogue, the blocking of the actors, the set design, the props... Naturally as humans, we organize this chaos into categories of content - scenes. Scenes make it easy for us to schedule and budget, too. As a result it's very easy to ignore the bigger picture until the editing room, and by then it's usually too late. In ‘Between the Scenes’ I've approached filmmaking from a top-down perspective, looking at how the bigger puzzle pieces fit together. I call it “scene tectonics,” because it’s just like when the tectonic plates of the Earth's crust smash together making earthquakes, mountains, and volcanoes. In the same way, our scenes create drama and emotion when they clang together. This book focuses on what makes the best clang.
DW: Chapter Two is called “Choosing Locations that Collide.” How did this exploration and facet of the book come about?
JMB: Have you ever played chess?
DW: You betcha.
JMB: Well, in chess we have a board with black and white squares, and game pieces of white and black. It's easy for the players to glance at the board and know where their pieces are and where they can move at any given time. Now imagine if that chessboard was all white, and the pieces were all white. What a disaster that would be! The players would spend all of their time trying to work out which pieces were theirs and have no time to strategize their moves. The same is true for location choices in your film. If your locations are all the same, the audience will have trouble following the demarcation of your scenes and the passage of time. It would create fatigue and boredom. You want to create a contrast in location and aesthetic from one scene to another - indoor to outdoor, night to day, chaotic to still, etc. It all comes down to one basic principle - a scene transition is change. The audience must feel a change in order for them to internalize the emotions and track the progression of events.
DW: You also discuss the anatomy of a character at a scene change, from growth, to composition. In your experience, are many scene changes structured around character?
JMB: Well they all should be! If your audience isn't thinking about the character when the scene changes, you've done something wrong. Scene tectonics brings your mindset away from the compartmentalized scenes and allows you to focus on the true emotional exchange between character and audience. You have a choice as to whether to stay with the character as the scene changes, follow them on an emotional reaction, or cut away from them to let the audience feel an absence and process what has just happened. The scene transition is where the viewer connects on an emotional level with the character on the screen. As a big plot revelation shifts the story, the characters react. If the filmmaker allows us to share in those reactions, we feel the story.
DW: A theme of your book is the speed of transitions. Does this fit into director styles? I’m thinking of, say, Quentin Tarantino’s slower films, “Jackie Browne,” or Sidney Lumet’s discussion of slowing the pacing of films in order for them to go faster. Were you thinking of these ideas while writing?
JMB: Oh sure, each director has a unique rhythmic style just like musicians do. We expect a Kubrick film is going to be slow, for instance. The slowest film I've seen is Gus Van Sant's ‘Gerry,’ a phenomenal film which really is more about a changing landscape that mirrors their moods. As the two get more tired and exhausted in the desert, the desert itself becomes whiter and flatter. When they're angry, the terrain becomes jagged and rocky. It's a fascinating study of the use of landscape to set and then change a mood. Van Sant at one point uses a transitional shot of rolling clouds that stays on screen for three minutes. What this demonstrates is that an audience will quickly adapt their internal clock and accept a slow pace, if the scenery itself is emotionally immersive. You're aware that the pace is slow, but you get used to it.
DW: Time, time travel, and exercises in chronological narrative have been prevalent themes in American filmmaking. How important are transitions with this? Does it depend on the story?
JMB: A viewer has two things going on in their heads as they watch a movie. First, they follow the immediate plot points that are unfolding on the screen. Secondly, they piece together a larger image of the story and the overall chronology in their heads. It's a mental map. The reason this is important at scene transition is because the bigger story context manifests itself on screen as scenery, and through the sound track as music. At the beginning of a scene you use scenery and music to paint a mood, dramatize the setting, and you orient the viewer toward that broader story context or genre. When chronology is mixed up, these contextual cues help the viewer build their mental maps.
DW: You discuss tense versus calm in your book. Is this a constant dance when putting scenes and a movie together?
JMB: Too much tension over a long period of time creates fatigue in the audience. They need periods of calm to balance it. Imagine a song that went on for 90 minutes with just one constant note, no variation. People would protest. Feature films are the only form of storytelling in which we don't have built-in commercial breaks, chapter breaks, or scene breaks. So the feature director has to perform an act of trickery - giving the audience a break without them realizing it. You can't just cut to black for three minutes and make them wait like you can on the stage. Audiences need this rest to process mentally what they've seen and to anticipate what's next. They can't do that if you're blasting content at them rapid fire. Cinematic stories are like waves on a beach. A wave comes in and brings some intense plot, and then the water recedes before the next big wave comes in.
DW: Alfred Hitchcock is still hailed as the grand master, from your book to William Friedkin’s memoir last year, which said you don’t need to go to film school, watch Hitchcock’s movies. What are some of his biggest gifts to the film world as far as transitions go?
JMB: Oh that's absolutely true, and as you know I run a popular website and eBook, ‘How to Turn Your Boring Movie into a Hitchcock Thriller’ which specifically helps modern filmmakers connect with the genius of Hitchcock. We don't want his vast knowledge about cinema craft to be lost. As for transitions, I think the most significant aspect of his visual mode is that he wasn't afraid to use wide shots. Today filmmakers seem to shy away from wide shots as if they're some sort of cinematic cooties. In ‘Between the Scenes’ I talk about a Hitchcock wide shot that he kept on the screen for nearly one whole minute. It was a shot in ‘North By Northwest’ that is a form of transitional relief from a busy, bustling train station, and whisks us into an aerial shot of the flat wasteland of the Great Plains. Only a narrow ribbon of highway divides the frame, as a tiny little bus pulls to a stop, lets off an ant-like dot, and pulls away. It raises so much mystery, such kinetic curiosity about this new location and what drama going to creep into this barren landscape. Nobody is brave enough to linger on a shot like that today – it’s cut, cut, cut.
DW: Near the end, you discuss TV versus film, and many say TV has gotten significantly better, especially with cable-produced shows with A-list talent. Will this trend continue?
JMB: Cable TV is definitely where it's at right now. The best visual storytelling is being done there. I think TV has become the new cinema. Cinema on the other hand has become a strange circus-like spectacle, where these movies come to town, entertain kids with tricks and magic acts and daredevil stunts. How many more times do we need to see someone hanging from a high place and getting rescued? Today's cinema makes me yawn. As for the future I think gaming and cinema will merge, where we will be able to interact with storytelling in a virtual environment and literally become the character and make choices for them and suffer the consequences of bad decisions. People will be able to make their life’s mistakes in fiction rather than experimenting on friends and family. Now if we can only create a virtual world for politicians to play, unbeknownst to them.
DW: Sounds like a movie right away. What’s next for you?
JMB: We've got two movies in development that we are seeking funding for. One is a psychological film like ‘Moon’ where an emotionally lost person stumbles onto a time rift and meets his future and past self. Because of this unique introspective he gets a second chance in life - something we'd all love to have. Also, I’m doing a screen adaptation of my radio play ‘Not From Space,’ where we finally make fun of the insanity of the advertising industry and those commercials on TV. We create a fictional cable news channel (complete with desperate sponsors) and then tear it apart. The story did really well on radio, and will just blossom on the screen. I can just see Jimbo Thomas desperately gripping a construction beam as his media empire crumbles around him à la Citizen Kane.
DW: Jeffrey, thanks so much for your time, and all the best with your films! We'll see where editing goes next.
JMB: Thanks Dave!
You can view more of Jeffrey and his work at his Amazon page.
Dave Watson is Editor of Movies Matter, http://www.davesaysmoviesmatter.com, and lives in Madison, WI.
Dave Watson: First of all, congratulations on the book
Jeffrey Michael Bays: Thanks so much for reading!
DW: Transitions, whether it’s changing shots, locations, or other changes, are key to a movie, yet often overlooked. Why?
JMB: I think as filmmakers, we tend to build our films from the ground up. We focus on the shots, the lens choices, the dialogue, the blocking of the actors, the set design, the props... Naturally as humans, we organize this chaos into categories of content - scenes. Scenes make it easy for us to schedule and budget, too. As a result it's very easy to ignore the bigger picture until the editing room, and by then it's usually too late. In ‘Between the Scenes’ I've approached filmmaking from a top-down perspective, looking at how the bigger puzzle pieces fit together. I call it “scene tectonics,” because it’s just like when the tectonic plates of the Earth's crust smash together making earthquakes, mountains, and volcanoes. In the same way, our scenes create drama and emotion when they clang together. This book focuses on what makes the best clang.
DW: Chapter Two is called “Choosing Locations that Collide.” How did this exploration and facet of the book come about?
JMB: Have you ever played chess?
DW: You betcha.
JMB: Well, in chess we have a board with black and white squares, and game pieces of white and black. It's easy for the players to glance at the board and know where their pieces are and where they can move at any given time. Now imagine if that chessboard was all white, and the pieces were all white. What a disaster that would be! The players would spend all of their time trying to work out which pieces were theirs and have no time to strategize their moves. The same is true for location choices in your film. If your locations are all the same, the audience will have trouble following the demarcation of your scenes and the passage of time. It would create fatigue and boredom. You want to create a contrast in location and aesthetic from one scene to another - indoor to outdoor, night to day, chaotic to still, etc. It all comes down to one basic principle - a scene transition is change. The audience must feel a change in order for them to internalize the emotions and track the progression of events.
DW: You also discuss the anatomy of a character at a scene change, from growth, to composition. In your experience, are many scene changes structured around character?
JMB: Well they all should be! If your audience isn't thinking about the character when the scene changes, you've done something wrong. Scene tectonics brings your mindset away from the compartmentalized scenes and allows you to focus on the true emotional exchange between character and audience. You have a choice as to whether to stay with the character as the scene changes, follow them on an emotional reaction, or cut away from them to let the audience feel an absence and process what has just happened. The scene transition is where the viewer connects on an emotional level with the character on the screen. As a big plot revelation shifts the story, the characters react. If the filmmaker allows us to share in those reactions, we feel the story.
DW: A theme of your book is the speed of transitions. Does this fit into director styles? I’m thinking of, say, Quentin Tarantino’s slower films, “Jackie Browne,” or Sidney Lumet’s discussion of slowing the pacing of films in order for them to go faster. Were you thinking of these ideas while writing?
JMB: Oh sure, each director has a unique rhythmic style just like musicians do. We expect a Kubrick film is going to be slow, for instance. The slowest film I've seen is Gus Van Sant's ‘Gerry,’ a phenomenal film which really is more about a changing landscape that mirrors their moods. As the two get more tired and exhausted in the desert, the desert itself becomes whiter and flatter. When they're angry, the terrain becomes jagged and rocky. It's a fascinating study of the use of landscape to set and then change a mood. Van Sant at one point uses a transitional shot of rolling clouds that stays on screen for three minutes. What this demonstrates is that an audience will quickly adapt their internal clock and accept a slow pace, if the scenery itself is emotionally immersive. You're aware that the pace is slow, but you get used to it.
DW: Time, time travel, and exercises in chronological narrative have been prevalent themes in American filmmaking. How important are transitions with this? Does it depend on the story?
JMB: A viewer has two things going on in their heads as they watch a movie. First, they follow the immediate plot points that are unfolding on the screen. Secondly, they piece together a larger image of the story and the overall chronology in their heads. It's a mental map. The reason this is important at scene transition is because the bigger story context manifests itself on screen as scenery, and through the sound track as music. At the beginning of a scene you use scenery and music to paint a mood, dramatize the setting, and you orient the viewer toward that broader story context or genre. When chronology is mixed up, these contextual cues help the viewer build their mental maps.
DW: You discuss tense versus calm in your book. Is this a constant dance when putting scenes and a movie together?
JMB: Too much tension over a long period of time creates fatigue in the audience. They need periods of calm to balance it. Imagine a song that went on for 90 minutes with just one constant note, no variation. People would protest. Feature films are the only form of storytelling in which we don't have built-in commercial breaks, chapter breaks, or scene breaks. So the feature director has to perform an act of trickery - giving the audience a break without them realizing it. You can't just cut to black for three minutes and make them wait like you can on the stage. Audiences need this rest to process mentally what they've seen and to anticipate what's next. They can't do that if you're blasting content at them rapid fire. Cinematic stories are like waves on a beach. A wave comes in and brings some intense plot, and then the water recedes before the next big wave comes in.
DW: Alfred Hitchcock is still hailed as the grand master, from your book to William Friedkin’s memoir last year, which said you don’t need to go to film school, watch Hitchcock’s movies. What are some of his biggest gifts to the film world as far as transitions go?
JMB: Oh that's absolutely true, and as you know I run a popular website and eBook, ‘How to Turn Your Boring Movie into a Hitchcock Thriller’ which specifically helps modern filmmakers connect with the genius of Hitchcock. We don't want his vast knowledge about cinema craft to be lost. As for transitions, I think the most significant aspect of his visual mode is that he wasn't afraid to use wide shots. Today filmmakers seem to shy away from wide shots as if they're some sort of cinematic cooties. In ‘Between the Scenes’ I talk about a Hitchcock wide shot that he kept on the screen for nearly one whole minute. It was a shot in ‘North By Northwest’ that is a form of transitional relief from a busy, bustling train station, and whisks us into an aerial shot of the flat wasteland of the Great Plains. Only a narrow ribbon of highway divides the frame, as a tiny little bus pulls to a stop, lets off an ant-like dot, and pulls away. It raises so much mystery, such kinetic curiosity about this new location and what drama going to creep into this barren landscape. Nobody is brave enough to linger on a shot like that today – it’s cut, cut, cut.
DW: Near the end, you discuss TV versus film, and many say TV has gotten significantly better, especially with cable-produced shows with A-list talent. Will this trend continue?
JMB: Cable TV is definitely where it's at right now. The best visual storytelling is being done there. I think TV has become the new cinema. Cinema on the other hand has become a strange circus-like spectacle, where these movies come to town, entertain kids with tricks and magic acts and daredevil stunts. How many more times do we need to see someone hanging from a high place and getting rescued? Today's cinema makes me yawn. As for the future I think gaming and cinema will merge, where we will be able to interact with storytelling in a virtual environment and literally become the character and make choices for them and suffer the consequences of bad decisions. People will be able to make their life’s mistakes in fiction rather than experimenting on friends and family. Now if we can only create a virtual world for politicians to play, unbeknownst to them.
DW: Sounds like a movie right away. What’s next for you?
JMB: We've got two movies in development that we are seeking funding for. One is a psychological film like ‘Moon’ where an emotionally lost person stumbles onto a time rift and meets his future and past self. Because of this unique introspective he gets a second chance in life - something we'd all love to have. Also, I’m doing a screen adaptation of my radio play ‘Not From Space,’ where we finally make fun of the insanity of the advertising industry and those commercials on TV. We create a fictional cable news channel (complete with desperate sponsors) and then tear it apart. The story did really well on radio, and will just blossom on the screen. I can just see Jimbo Thomas desperately gripping a construction beam as his media empire crumbles around him à la Citizen Kane.
DW: Jeffrey, thanks so much for your time, and all the best with your films! We'll see where editing goes next.
JMB: Thanks Dave!
You can view more of Jeffrey and his work at his Amazon page.
Dave Watson is Editor of Movies Matter, http://www.davesaysmoviesmatter.com, and lives in Madison, WI.
