Speaker 1: You know I can only speak for myself really. I just, I like being able to, I'm a very conservative director. I have a lot of sort of ambition about my predecessors. All the geniuses that all of us, whether we know it or not, are learning from and upon whose shoulders we stand.

Speaker 2: Advice to young filmmakers to make a movie every week in super 8 or high def, write every night and every weekend shoot for two days and work with actors, work with a little 1000 watt lighting kit, set it up, set up your shots, get a tripod, shoot a little scene, work with the actors, cut those scenes together and then the next weekend have worked on it with sound and looping and put some music to it. It could all be done for nothing nowadays with a computer and get a response and get a response from the audience and see where it's slow and where it doesn't work and where your ideas weren't being communicated properly. Learn from that experience sitting in with the crowd then go out and make another picture the next weekend and just keep doing it. Make films no matter what anybody says and you'll

Speaker 3: be a filmmaker. Work wherever you can, it doesn't matter what. A documentary, a commercial, wherever you can get near a camera, wherever you can, especially if you're a director, you're not going to be a director in case you continue to put your eye behind into that finder and it doesn't matter what, there's no such thing as good work or bad work, there's only work

Speaker 4: at the beginning. If you get the passion, if you get the passion to do it and you do it and it doesn't work out, I worked for three years on a 16 millimeter film that ended up becoming nothing but guitar picks and I was very disappointed when I realized it wasn't any good but it was my film school and I actually got away really cheap. When it was all over, I knew how to make a movie. I didn't want to show anybody that but I had the experience. I had a lot cheaper

Speaker 5: than I would have gone if I'd gone to film school. The first thing you've got to learn is listen. Learn to listen but learn to say no and when you say no, mean it. Mean it. Don't say no and then just back off because then I don't mean as a technical term which is a great word. I mean it in the existential term, you know. So, you know, don't back off because you have the chance. It's like quitting. What can a director on his first movie do? Quit. But if you quit, quit.

Speaker 6: There is a lot more competition than there was when I was, you know, like kicking around with El Mariachi. So, you've got, you know, there's just a lot more to do these days. You got a lot more competition because everybody's got a camera now and everybody can edit and it's just, it's tough. I don't know. The state of independent filmmaking changes. Yeah, but you know, at the same time though,

Speaker 4: yeah, there's a lot more competition but also those crappy movies aren't competition if the thing is like dynamite, you know. All that shit is, you know, yeah, there's a lot of people out there doing stuff but if, you know, it's like waves on the beach, all right. You make a piece of nitro that you throw in an audience's lap, people notice. My whole love for this media

Speaker 1: comes from paying attention to the past and respecting all the movies that have been made over all of these years and that's what I say to film students when they say, how do I get a job? And I say, well, it's easy to get a job if you write because if they buy your script, buy enough of your scripts, you can insist on directing them or you can just take your device and go out and make a little movie. Anybody can do that today but I also say you need to look at the old films. You know, I used to have to pay my kids ten dollars to watch a black and white movie. I actually bribed them, if you watch this movie and they were, and ten dollars is a lot of money when they're 12 years old. If you watch Red River with me, I'll give you ten dollars and I had a couple of my kids start the movie and 20 minutes later give me my ten dollars back and leave the room. It's not easy, it's not easy to get us all to look back but I continue to learn not just from the films I'm seeing today, I continue to learn from the films that were made 70, 80 years ago.