Well, it makes it different. I think, for me, it doesn’t make it easier, but it does make it different. Sometimes it’s quicker. And sometimes it’s not! But I love on film, particularly — because if you shoot on film, you’ve got shorter periods of which you can shoot. You mount a magazine. It might be 10 minutes long. It isn’t, you know, the half hour or 40 minutes you might get if you’re shooting on digital. So that becomes a ritual. And then if you can create, in that excitement, every other kind of excitement, so that on the set it feels… particularly for movies like this, where you have big visual effects and things, if you can create a sense of event about every kind of scene, where the goal is not people like me saying, ‘So the troll is going to be 20 feet high…’ Instead of having some massive troll really chasing our real actors around the house.
There’s just something about what it does to the atmosphere, with the actors and to the crew and everything where maybe something that I like to retain in these film adventures is just that unexpected happening. Which is there when it is not too technically dominated. It’s not to say I don’t revere and embrace every kind of technological advance. But if some of what you’re doing is after that sort of human frailty, that human imperfection, that human excitement, sometimes mistakes are happy mistakes [that are] made when excitements are there. It comes out of them.
