Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…It opened your brain especially because those video festivals, I would win a trip to New York and a director’s chair with a video shorts that I would put in festivals, but I knew the film festival, if I could get into film festivals, I could send that all over the world. So I made that little short film, sent it, and it was winning all the festivals. And I thought, “Wow, I made that with a wind-up film camera, filming just one take each shot, just no slates because I’m the editor and that costs $800 bucks and it was eight minutes. I bet I can make 80 minute movie for $8,000 if I’d use the same method. So that movie I did six months later, I was making Mariachi because it opened up my mind that I could try it in a feature. Can we actually pause on that because I think Bedhead has a really great, really unique story shot in a really unique way. I think what I’m trying to say is it is very important to write the right script, write the right story. So let me tell you the trick to that. And Mariachi is the same way, and this really helped people. Even Kevin Smith from Clerks said, “Wow,” Robert said, when Mariachi was success, I talked about how I did it. I said, “I looked at everything I had. What do I have? We have a pitbull, we have a turtle, we’ve got a bus that Carlos’ cousin owns. His brother-in-law has a bar and he owns a ranch. So the bad guy lives at the ranch. The fight scene’s going to be in the bar. He’s going to hit a bus at one point, the girl’s going to have a dog and a turtle is going to cross the road. It gives you all this production value, so you write backwards. So for Bedhead, I even did that with a camera. So I’ve been shooting video all this time, and one thing I wished I could do on video, I never could. Was slow motion or stop-motion even. So when I got that crappy World War II camera they gave us in film school. I was so pissed. Like, this is the camera. I’ve been trying to get my hands. I could have bought this for 50 bucks at a pawn shop. Old Bell and Howell wind up, you couldn’t even see through the lens you were seeing through an approximation of the lens, but you could shoot slow motion. I could do reverse photography. If I filmed upside down, I could do, because if I do a fast push into her, I’ll never get the focus in. So I started with it in focus, went back, pulled backwards on a chair, and then reversed it, flipped it, and now it looks like it stops on a dime in focus.…

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