What moviemaking techniques have you seen being used effectively in more than one movie that you would steal if you were making a movie?
SPOILERS TO COME
The “too painful to watch” shot:
In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle has had a disastrous first date with Cybil Shepherd, taking her to a hard-core porn movie. He is so antisocial that he doesn’t know what he did wrong, and calls her from a pay phone. The camera watches him as he calls her, then pulls back and off to one side so that we can hear the painfully awkward call, but not see it. It’s as if the director (Martin Scorsese) is telling us that what is happening is too horrible to show on screen.
In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufrense, working in the prison laundry, is sent to get some supplies. This is actually a setup to get him alone so that Bogs and several other “bull queers” can sodomize Andy. The camera shows the beginning, as Andy tries to fight them off, then pulls back and off to one side, while Red’s voiceover tells us that prison is no fairytale. Though not as subtle, it works again, magnifying the horror of the situation more than simply showing it would.
The “big speech interrupted” shot (horror movie).
In “Deep Blue Sea”, the current group of survivors is squabbling, and a character gets everybody’s attention and begins a big speech about working together to save everyone. The big bad appears suddenly and kills the character midspeech with no dramatic build up.
In “Final Destination”, the current group of survivors is squabbling, and a character gets everybody’s attention and begins a big speech about working together to save everyone. The big bad appears suddenly and kills the character midspeech.
I like Tarantinoesque dialogue (which is merely natural and seemingly extemporaneous) and I think it’s a shame that no one else can use natural dialogue without being seen as ripping him off. So, natural dialogue it is.
I also like the awkward phone call scenes ala “Swingers”
Using inappropriate music as the soundtrack for an action sequence.
In “Faceoff” a spectacular gunfight takes place as a child watches while listening to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.
In “Good Morning Vietnam” Robin Williams plays “What a Wonderful World” to a montage of everyday scenes in Vietnam, including IIRC a plane dropping napalm.
I like the way Lynch shows strange characters as if they are completely normal. I also like the way he shoots his scenes so that they look a bit skewed.
I like Jarmusch’s travelling shots, and the way he sets up scenes as if you’re watching a play.
I think it was created by Hitchcock, and perfected by Copella, but the “Copella Stretch” is one of my favourite camera techniques. A camera will simultaneously zoom in and pull back on a subject, making the shot appear really stretched and disoriented. Vertigo is the movie that comes to mind for a lot of those shots, but they’ve been done and copied countless times since then. Even Kevin Smith used it (very strangely and unexpectedly) in Dogma.
For the absolute worst in directing, see Driven, 2001, a Renny Harlin film. It is a case study in what not to do. For example, he holds the camera on each character until his or her line is complete. The effect is weird, and I have no idea what it is called, but it is very unsatisfying.
Cutting a series of short lines of dialogue from the same character so that the audio cuts to the new shot just a moment before the video. You see the first clip and hear the next line start, then the picture cuts in. Repeat. The courtroom scene at the beginning of Erin Brockovich is probably the best example. Love it.
Also something other directors have done, but I’ll say I stole it from Soderbergh just because I’ve seen it in several of his movies: the blue filter that gives everything a really cold blue and black look. He did it in Traffic, and it looked kind of cool, but I appreciated it more in Out of Sight. As soon as they go from Miami with all the yellows and oranges to detroit the picture goes really blue and stays that way.
Long elaborate multi-character tracking shots by PT Anderson. What can I say, they’re just look like they take so much coordination. It’s really impressive.
And I completely agree with the OP about “too painful to watch” shots and off-camera action and dialogue. Solondz did this really well in Welcome to the Dollhouse, when Dawn has an entire argument with her mother and we just see the TV in the other room.
On the other hand, I hate the simultaneous zoom/track shot mentioned above. It’s occasionally used effectively (as in Vertigo) but more often than not it just distracts the hell outta me.
I really like long, tracking single shots. Rope by Hitchcock is done as a single shot, tracking around an apartment where two killers have stashed the body. The tension gets really heightened because you know there has been no break in the action and that everything they do and everyone they interact with are right there, next to the dead guy, with the chance that someone could find out at any moment. Another good one (but considerably shorter) was done by De Palma in The Untouchables when a mobster sneaks through the window into Jimmy Malone’s apartment to kill him. The camera takes on the roll of the hitman’s eyes and we see what he sees as he follows Malone’s character around. Again, very tense and exciting.
I liked the way he panned to just the right place before stopping filming each time so that the whole thing appears to have been shot in a single take. The actors all got their starts on the stage, didn’t they? That would have helped out a lot during each ten-minute take.
I used to think the old “pan-and-scan” technique used when widescreen movies were shown on narrow-screen TV was an actual camera pan. I thought it was so cool-looking, like a robot camera or something.
On a related note I also liked it when they would have to “squeeze” the credit sequence so that all the text could fit on the screen and everything would look real skinny.
My own personal choice is for /no/ soundtrack. I don’t know if anyone has pioneered this yet. But it seems to me that a movie without a soundtrack (or a very, very distant one) is more powerful than one with. Compare the bridge fight sequence in Saving Private Ryan (that had no soundtrack) with the melodramtic violins and orchestra hits of a normal action movie. Hearing a soundtrack–to me, at least–seems like a way to give an emotional boost to a scene. If you can’t get across what you’re trying to say with the film, the music only detracts from it.
There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but I’d stick with that. If one of my books was ever made into a movie, I would cringe whenever an accompiment would come on screen.
I suspect part of the power (?) of the no soundtrack bridge fight sequence in Saving Private Ryan was the contrast with before the fight started when the squad was listening to Edith Piaf on the wind up 78.
The beginning of Little Shop of Horrors has all that upbeat music, and then there’s a crash of lightning, as if it’s going to be a horror film. In fact, the whole idea of the movie could have been really scary, which is what makes it so funny.
If so, that’s what I like too. Actually, I’d like to see a whole sci-fi or action movie done without music. Personally I think it’d be really cool watching a scene like the opening of Star Wars without the accompanying music (good as it was).
I really liked how in the Cave troll scene there was no score up until about half way through. I wish the whole fight had been done like that.