re: ‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’ Francis Ford Coppola’s battle to film Megalopolis

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A lot of time was, apparently, wasted. A second crew member recalls: “He would often show up in the mornings before these big sequences and because no plan had been put in place, and because he wouldn’t allow his collaborators to put a plan in place, he would often just sit in his trailer for hours on end, wouldn’t talk to anybody, was often smoking marijuana … And hours and hours would go by without anything being filmed. And the crew and the cast would all stand around and wait. And then he’d come out and whip up something that didn’t make sense, and that didn’t follow anything anybody had spoken about or anything that was on the page, and we’d all just go along with it, trying to make the best out of it. But pretty much every day, we’d just walk away shaking our heads wondering what we’d just spent the last 12 hours doing.” As a third crew member puts it: “This sounds crazy to say, but there were times when we were all standing around going: ‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’”

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Minus the Marijuana part, this is how Kubrick used to make films, too. He would show up and take half the day looking for 'the shot' and then everyone would red-light and re-design the set and scramble for 2 hours of shooting. It's why his films took 1-2 yrs to shoot.

But his crew was very small and all knew how he worked. Coppola did similar things except it was with the writing and not the camera. He would write and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite on the day of shooting and almost nothing would get done.

The magic of those guys all came in the editing snd post production. Spielberg did the same thing on Jaws. It was a disaster until it wasn't.

These idiots are just not used to actual artistic directors working at an artistic pace to get the perfect sequence.

They are used to Marvel shite and untalented directors being puppeted by the studio through a paint by numbers storyboard fest.

Heaven fobid they actually learn about filmmaking.