4. Choose Wisely
Marshall, who has had his share of hits and misses, also tries different things even if his clear preference is with musicals. Like Verbinski, he’s not necessarily recommending filmmakers be finicky so much as smart when offering this advice in a 2005 Time magazine interview:
As a director, you should choose a project that will educate you and enrich your life, because you’re going to be doing it for two years.
In a 2015 Hollywood Reporter interview, Marshall affirms this advice when discussing the same moment in his career, when he went from Chicago to Memoirs of a Geisha:
The thing I wanted to do following [Chicago], because I was in this very rare position that you get very few times in your life where you can pick and choose what you like to do, was something completely different and challenging. I didn’t want to do Chicago 2.
I’ve sort of felt that way all of my career: I’ve always looked for something that’s very hard and challenging to do, not something that’s easy to do — and something that also gives you some kind of life experience. You want to do something that really is life-enriching and unique.
5. Spend Efficiently
If you’ve seen Ronning and Sandberg’s Kon-Tiki, with all its special effects and aquatic adventure, you should be amazed it only cost $15M to make. Here’s Ronning explaining the secret to the duo’s budget efficiency in a 2013 interview for This is Infamous:
We don’t have a choice! [Laugh] It’s that easy! The budget, the 15 million dollar budget, that’s… to put it in perspective, that’s the biggest ever coming out of Scandinavia. I think that it’s one of our strengths, to put it all up on screen and then some. Going into making Kon-Tiki, we were very inspired by the movies of David Lean and early Spielberg and stuff like that, and making it epic somehow. That’s not necessarily the most expensive shots. The big shots, the helicopter shots. That’s like a half a day of helicopter and you’ve got them. So it’s really… It’s know how to spend the money and I think you have to learn that as a Scandinavian director. As a Norwegian film director you really have to be on top of the budget because you don’t have money, basically.”
Don’t think that just because they’re now working on a huge blockbuster that their ways have changed, either. Ronning mentions working with a Pirates-size budget in a 2015 DGA Quarterly interview primarily about their work on the series Marco Polo:
Scandinavian features are kind of in the same budget range as American cable TV. For the first two hours of Marco Polo, we had the same budget that we had to shoot Kon-Tiki, which is also two hours. Whereas Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which we’re working on now, is $300 million. Even then, you’re always in a squeeze somehow. There’s never enough for what you want to do.
6. Movies Should Be Epic
Athough Ronning and Sandberg have done some TV work, they’re primarily interested in cinema and doing epic work for the big screen. In many interviews, Sandberg acknowledges their interest in large-scale theatrical efforts and especially sees a need for bigger productions in their native land. From a 2013 Hollywood Reporter interview:
I think it’s important for us to tell these bigger stories and that has been happening in Scandinavia lately with films like Denmark’s A Royal Affair which was also nominated at the Oscars. They cost more but the audience wants that. They respond to that. We believe that’s partly because there’s so much great drama on television. So we have to step up when we make movies for the theatres. To make people come we have to tell bigger stories and tell them in a more epic way.
And in this quote from a 2013 ScreenCrush interview, Sandberg basically implores filmmakers to aim big, again with the reason that you’re competing with TV now:
I think we love making epic movies, movies for the big screen. There’s so much great drama on television these days that you really have to.
https://youtu.be/bWU_l36sLMs
What We’ve Learned
None of the Pirates directors appear to have taken on the franchise as a mere paycheck gig (even if surely that paycheck was huge). They were drawn to the challenges of this property, and for their parts they’ve mostly been successful, career-wise. The gist of all of their advice is for filmmakers to always be shooting something and trying different things that will garner them diverse and enriching and educational experience. Also, working with all kinds of genres and budgets can be great lessons in taking chances and being creative with different ways around certain costs and cliches. Finally, if you want to make movies, make them truly cinematic.
Related Topics: Filmmaking Tips, Pirates of the Caribbean
