|
|
|
|
|
|
|
John Irving
National Book Award
At the time, they didn't have the language for it that we have perhaps an over-abundance of today. Dyslexia, learning disabilities, whatever they are. I had something of that nature and never knew I had it until one of my children was diagnosed as being slightly dyslexic, and when they showed me the results of how they determined that he had a learning disability, I realized that they were describing exactly what I had always done. What it amounted to, in essence, was that I would ask my friends, "How long did the history assignment take you? How long did the English assignment take you?" And if they said, "Oh, it's 45 minutes," I would just double the time, or triple the time, and I'd say, "Well, it's an hour and a half for me." I just knew that everything was going to take me longer. Right?
View Interview with John Irving
View Biography of John Irving
View Profile of John Irving
View Photo Gallery of John Irving
|
|
|
John Irving
National Book Award
So much of a sport like wrestling is drilling, is just repeating and repeating and repeating, so that you've done this thing so many times that if somebody just touches your arm on that side, you know where to go. You could do it with your eyes closed. If you're off your feet and you're up in the air, if you've been there enough, you know where the mat is. You know it's here, it's not there. You just know where it is. You don't have to see it, but you've been through that position enough so that you're not looking for the mat. You're not thinking, "Is it up here? Is it down there? Am I going to land on my head? Am I going to land on my tail?" You know? I think sentences are like that. If you're comfortable enough with all kinds of sentences, with verbs and their gerundive, with active verbs, with short sentences, with long sentences, you know how to put them together. You know how to slow the reader down when the reader is at a place where you want the reader to move slowly, and you know how to speed the reader up when you're at a place in the story where you want the reader to go fast. And it's drilling, it's repetition. Most people would find it boring, like sit-ups, you know? Like skipping rope. But I always had -- I could put my mind somewhere else while I skipped rope for 45 minutes. You know, people think you have to be dumb to skip rope for 45 minutes. No, you have to be able to imagine something else. While you're skipping rope, you have to be able to see something else. You have to imagine that your next opponent stopped skipping rope 15 minutes ago. Then you keep going.
View Interview with John Irving
View Biography of John Irving
View Profile of John Irving
View Photo Gallery of John Irving
|
|
|
Peter Jackson
Oscar for Best Director
We went through this process of sending the scripts to everybody in L.A., everybody in Hollywood, some people in London. Only two people replied, which was New Line and Polygram, and Polygram were being sold at that stage. They're an English company, and they said that they'd love to do Lord of the Rings, but they couldn't deal with it until the sales process -- they were going to have a new buyer soon, a new owner -- and until that all settled down, and we said, "Well, we've only got four weeks," and it was three weeks now. "Harvey has only given us three weeks. We've got a ticking clock." So they immediately sort of dropped out, leaving us with only one option. I mean, everybody else passed, passed just on the notion of it.
View Interview with Peter Jackson
View Biography of Peter Jackson
View Profile of Peter Jackson
View Photo Gallery of Peter Jackson
|
|
|
Peter Jackson
Oscar for Best Director
I just wanted to get out of school as fast as I could, not because I hated school, although I didn't like it. I wanted to get out of school because I wanted to buy a 16 millimeter camera. This was all about the equipment. It was all about the frustration of trying to make films, but not having the best gear. My parents had got me a Super 8 sound camera for a Christmas present during my teenage years, which I used, but we're now getting up to a point that they couldn't expect to buy me a 16 millimeter camera for a Christmas present, and I needed a camera, which meant I needed to earn money. I just had to earn money, and so I just wanted to get out of school and into a job, any job, so that I could start saving up for the next piece of film equipment that I wanted. I did leave school at 16. I got a job at a newspaper as a photo lithographer, and during that seven years I was there, I basically spent two of the years saving up for a 16 millimeter camera, which cost several thousand dollars, and I was only getting paid 75 bucks a week. I lived at home with my parents all this time because I couldn't afford not to.
View Interview with Peter Jackson
View Biography of Peter Jackson
View Profile of Peter Jackson
View Photo Gallery of Peter Jackson
|
|
|
Peter Jackson
Oscar for Best Director
I could only film on Sundays 'cause I had a full time job, and I had to work a sixth day overtime at the newspaper I was working at, just so I could earn enough overtime pay, 'cause now to pay the expenses of this film. So the short movie expanded and grew, and I thought it would be ten minutes long and then -- film it over two or three weeks -- and then what would happen is I'd sit all week in this boring job that I didn't particularly like, and my mind would just be thinking about the movie the whole time, and I'd come up with new ideas of things I hadn't thought about for what we were going to shoot next Sunday. So next Sunday would roll around, and I'd have a whole different bit of plot that I'd figured out that I wanted to do on that particular Sunday. And so the short film grew and grew and grew and expanded out over this period of time, and eventually we ended up shooting it for four years -- Sundays for four years -- and I had none of it cut.
View Interview with Peter Jackson
View Biography of Peter Jackson
View Profile of Peter Jackson
View Photo Gallery of Peter Jackson
|
|
|
Peter Jackson
Oscar for Best Director
Peter Jackson: We wanted two unknown girls to play the two teenagers. They were 15 and 16, and so we had Melanie Lynskey, who's a New Zealand girl, to play Pauline, the Kiwi girl. Fran just found her in a class in school. She literally -- Fran got so desperate, because the casting directors weren't showing us people that we liked, and so she got in a car and drove to schools and asked if she could go into classrooms, said that she's casting for a film, and she would just stand in the classroom and ask a girl to stand up, and then just say, "Could you come with me?" and then she'd go and audition her.
View Interview with Peter Jackson
View Biography of Peter Jackson
View Profile of Peter Jackson
View Photo Gallery of Peter Jackson
|
|
|
Peter Jackson
Oscar for Best Director
Fran is very good at revising. I usually just let her sit down with the pages. There's always a time where she sits down by herself with the written pages and starts revising and starts changing, because that's where a lot of the skill of script writing is. It's not in actually getting the script written, it's the revising afterwards. It's the endless, endless revisions, and Fran's strength is that. She's fantastic at picking the weaknesses out of a script and just revising it and revising it and revising it 'til we're happy with it.
View Interview with Peter Jackson
View Biography of Peter Jackson
View Profile of Peter Jackson
View Photo Gallery of Peter Jackson
|
| |
|
