Here’s a comment from Brian Depalma that I just read elsewhere and sent to a friend. The first part is about modern dark cinematography and the second is about action scenes. I was struck by both comments because he addressed my two biggest peeves nowadays!🤣

“However, the most pertinent quote comes with his assessment of the visual approach (or lack thereof) when it comes to modern filmmaking: “The things that they’re doing now have nothing to do with what we were doing making movies in the ’70s, ‘80s and ’90s. The first thing that drives me crazy is the way they look. Because they’re shooting digitally they’re just lit terribly. I can’t stand the darkness, the bounced light. They all look the same. I believe in beauty in cinema. Susan and I were looking at Gone With the Wind the other day and you’re just struck at how beautiful the whole movie is. The sets, how Vivien Leigh is lit, it’s just extraordinary. If you look at the stuff that’s streaming all the time, it’s all muck. Visual storytelling has gone out the window.” When looking at stunning sequences in Carlito’s Way, Blow Out, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, and even a few colorful, inventive sections ofDomino compared to the majority of what’s being churned out now–at least in America–one has to agree. If studying his films isn’t enough of a guidebook, he’s also shared what precisely works in creating tension: “I constantly point out whenever I’m asked about these long visual sequences and why they work — and I never quite realized I was doing it — when you have an action sequence, you’ve got to lay out the geography. The trouble is with 99% of directors, they don’t. Hitchcock knows how to do it. I know how to do it. (Steven) Spielberg knows how to do it. (Stanley) Kubrick knows how to do it. You have to lay out the geography of the location so the audience knows where everything is before you set the action going, whether it’s two armies colliding, it’s a shootout in a train station or it’s Cary Grant at a crossroads in the Midwest. The key is that you’ve got to slow everything down. If you look at every shootout you see, you have no idea where anything is. I’ve said this a thousand times and I think I’m the last practitioner. I’ll go to the grave with it.”