Terence Davies on “Sunset Song”
I was brought up on American music. My first film was “Singin’ in the Rain” at seven. I fell in love with musicals, I love musicals. So, that was always theirs as part of one’s psyche. And they used to say on the contrary, Britain was a land without music, but that wasn’t true. That was not true. And it felt natural when there were certain things, especially when the camera moves, you think, “It needs something.” Or, I’d find the music and write a sequence to it, or write the sequence and think, “This has got to have music.” Because I’ve been listening to classical music and indeed popular music for 45 years, I just think, “Oh well, we’ll see if that will work.” And that’s the joy of it. Because when you find the right piece, that’s the joy.
Brie Larson on “Room”
The movie that we were making wasn’t about knowing but about allowing it to be what it was, to be honest. In my personal opinion, you miss out on the beauty of the moment if you go in planning what the moment is. It’s like having a vacation too jam-packed with activities. You miss all of the sunsets. You have to have some idea. And it became easy to understand textually what we needed because we were shooting in order. You could go, “we’ve gone kind of deep, and now we go in this direction and explore back here.” But, for the most part, every day had some of the unknown, and I think that’s how Lenny and I like to work—not going in “It has to be this way.” In the bedroom scene, I asked to not see the bedroom until we saw it, and then walk in and really feel it. The first reaction is sort of weirdly anticlimactic. It’s sort of taking it in but too big and too overwhelming and too much to process. It wasn’t sort of her on her knees, crying. The brain has such a hard time processing in the moment. You see a real process of reflection.
Tom McCarthy on “Spotlight”
I do think the reporters are the heroes here. And we spent a lot of time with them and have a great amount of respect and affection for them. And we sat with a lot of survivors and heard their stories. It’s an important issue and it needs to be dealt with before more lives are ruined. We felt like, “Wouldn’t it be great if this movie works and actually has an impact and can get people talking?” Talking about abuse. Any kind of abuse. And, also, as you mentioned, what is the state of journalism? What happened here is great. We need more of that. We need reporters breaking down the door on gun control or on government spending or on political contributions. What’s the next great story that’s going to have an impact?