The DGA held its nineteenth annual Meet The Nominees: Feature Film Symposium on Saturday morning, January 30, 2010.
Directors Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), James Cameron (Avatar), Lee Daniels (Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire), Jason Reitman (Up in the Air), and Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds) joined moderator/DGA Special Projects Committee Chair Jeremy Kagan onstage before a standing room only crowd in the Guild’s Los Angeles Theatre.
DGA President Taylor Hackford welcomed members and their guests to one of the Guild’s most prestigious events. “This is a wonderful and rare opportunity to be in the presence of five extraordinary directors, and hear them compare and contrast their individual journeys in bringing a film to life,” said Hackford. “In this season of awards, this is a high point because the people who voted are the ones in the trenches, the professionals who know what goes into making a great film.”
Reitman referenced his father, director Ivan Reitman. “He said, ‘Your job is to capture authenticity.’ It’s very easy to lose sight of that. While you’re on the set you shouldn’t be worried about what’s funny or not because you won’t know until you’re sitting in the audience and you’re feeling it through them. But you do know what’s true. I use that all the time. It speaks very truthfully to what directing is.”
Daniels spoke of being a newcomer to the inner sanctum of celebrated directors and said that he’d received invaluable advice on how to cope with it all from fellow nominee Reitman. “This whole process has been very unique and terrifying for me. I was a wreck at the beginning and Jason said, ‘Lee, embrace it. Enjoy it and don’t be frightened by it.”
Cameron recalled the mentorship he received from director Walter Hill. “I was actually writing Aliens before I directed Terminator, and I was trying to emulate his very cursory kind of haiku style. Walter’s big advice to me when I started directing Aliens was ‘Don’t fuck this up.’ I thought that was very good advice because it was implicit that if I fucked it up, I was never going to get the opportunity to do it again."
Bigelow also recalled getting advice from Hill. “He said, ‘Spend time with people who are doing what you want to do.” He would invite me to come to the set and sit there and watch him which was incredible.” She also nodded towards Cameron recalling, “Back in my Near Dark days, Jim told me, ‘Be careful in your casting choices because those are irrevocable decisions.’ No matter how great your script is, no matter how great you shoot the film, edit it, score it, mix it, etc, if you’ve made a mistake in your casting that’s it. I’ve held onto that ever since.”
Tarantino remembered advice from a different source. “When I did Reservoir Dogs, I really didn’t know any directors. But I got a fantastic book where they interviewed a vast array of directors about the process. They talked about editing, casting shooting and everything. It was wonderful to hear so many different aesthetics and people talking about how to approach it from different ways. It showed me there was no one way to do things.”
With that start, the panel was off into a morning that offered insights into each of these motion pictures as individual works of art, and behind-the-scenes views of directors at the height of their craft. In a matter of hours, one of them would win the Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film Award, but the morning was one of camaraderie and exploration into the elements involved in creating a film worthy of one of the Guild’s highest honors.