But you use silence. It seems, I don’t know why you’re doing it, but it seems like you’re giving the viewer a chance to reflect on themselves as they’re learning from you in your videos. And so there’ll be some dialogue, and then there’ll be 15 seconds of silence with a little beautiful pad, you know, some beautiful, you know, ethereal kind of music playing, and then some beautiful shots. And you give me time, as a viewer, to like, think about what this video means to me. And I so appreciate that generosity in your videos. How are you thinking about silence in your videos? And I guess, why are you using silence so much? Why are you giving us … Is that just, does that come natural to you?
Okay no, it’s two reasons. Or, it might be three, but it’s two primary reasons. And one of them is Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time. Have you read that book? You have to read it. It’s an assignment for you. And he wrote it, I think it’s the last thing he ever wrote. And he was dying when he wrote it. And he talks about all of the, he talks about it in such non-woo-woo terms. Just, the job of filmmaking.
And so, I read that book, and then I immediately of course like watched all of his movies. And his movies, you know, he’s making them behind the Iron curtain, almost all of them. And they’re slow, but … You’re drawn in, your subconscious is drawn in. They’re like Lynch movies in that way. And they’re slow. And slow means there’s less work you have to do. There’s less shooting, there’s like, less moving the camera, there’s less editing.
But, and this is the chief thing that I got from him, he said something like, you just, you’re not experimenting with the camera. You are getting the job done. You have the confidence in that shot. You know what the shot is, and that’s what’s gonna go in there, you know how long it’s gonna be. And the experimentation might be with the performance or so forth, or some little tiny tweaks in there. But, and I think it was the, you know, just, be confident this is what the shot is. Be confident what this movie is, and be confident that you’re hooking the audience so that they care. And they’ll go all the way. All that we’re doing is getting them to watch to the end. That’s what all this trouble is for.
And the second thing, I made a feature film with Tom Sachs. We co-wrote it. I directed it and it was, we shot it live. And then I went back and shot all this little stuff, it’s called A Space Program. And I worked with a composer named Grey Gersten, who did a lot, like the first, all the videos of my first year, and then he got so many offers that I couldn’t afford to work with him anymore. And he’s unbelievable. He’s such a great artist. Like on every level. But he just got composition. And one of the things when we were editing, and I’d take his music and put it into scenes, is he’d say, “You need to put breaths in.” So that people can digest what you’ve just fed them.
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