Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.
Werner Herzog talks about that time he saved Joaquin Phoenix from a car crash, and more, with The Daily Beast:
On that day in 2006, Herzog just happened to be at the right place, at the right time. “He was upside down and airbags [had] deployed. He was literally head down, upside down,” he recalled. Phoenix desperately wanted a smoke as he lay trapped and in shock, but Herzog intervened. “I tricked him into a moment of lack of attention and I snatched the cigarette lighter, because there was gasoline dripping and he was locked inside. There was no way to get him out because the car was too crushed. Some other people came and helped and we had to crush the rear window, and that’s how we got him out.”
Watch a video essay on the isolated female figures in the films of Todd Haynes (which he discussed with us):
Aaron Sorkin tells Digital Spy his pitch for a Pixar movie back in the 90’s:
“What I was thinking about was everything we use to write: papers, laptops, those things. The writer, he’d be a secondary character. All these objects you’d find in an office [would come to life]… Yes, don’t limit it to just what you’d use for writing, actually… And it all stems from this old joke about a screenwriter who is experiencing terrible writers’ block, and it’s been going on for a year and he hasn’t been able to write anything.
Watch a video on Alfred Hitchcock‘s voyeurism:
David Bordwell on Wes Anderson’s world of Moonrise Kingdom:
You can argue that this world’s main purpose is to distract us from the simple flight/pursuit/capture/rescue dynamic of the basic story action. But I’d argue that the final film benefits from fleshing the core action out in a way that situates it in a unique milieu. There’s also the point that worldmaking is no small achievement. Your task as a storyteller, George Lucas once noted, will change when you have to figure out what your character’s fork looks like.