I’d highly recommend to any aspiring screenwriter or director that they go and listen to Mangold’s director’s commentary on 3:10 to Yuma, Copland, and Identity. I also have Kate & Leopold and Girl, Interrupted in my Netflix Queue, but they haven’t come in yet, but I’m sure the commentary will be as entertaining as the films themselves.
Until you can get a chance to listen to some of Mr. Mangold’s Golden Verbal Nuggets (I should trademark that name…) I will put a few of the more choice ones here.
“Some directors put a lot of emphasis on special effects, and that’s the thing they want you to remember when the film is done. The specatacle. But the one special effect I want in any of my films is a quiet interaction between two characters.”
“I want there to be moments between characters that are just so quiet and so intimate. I keep telling them to make the moment smaller, get quieter. I don’t want a lot of extra lighting in my scenes. If my director of photography can get a shot in available light, it frees me up to get the shots I want without a lot of prepwork. It drives the sound guys crazy, it drives the lighting guys nuts. They complain. But I figure, we have the best sound guys, the best lighting guys, these hugely expensive cameras. I know we can get what we came to get. And when you get it on film, the moment is there.”
Referring to the moment between Russel Crowe’s character and Christian Bale’s character meet in a bar near the start of 3:10 to Yuma, and reprise that scene in another bar later in the film, he says, “The tenor of that conversation is completely different, and it shows how much these characters have grown. If those two scenes had been identical with no change to the characters, I would have viewed it as a failure.”
