http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11077661/site/newsweek/

These will be the 5 nominated directors.

Like the picture.

If I were Miller, I doubt I'd recover, either

This is exactly the line-up I am predicting for Best Director.

It looks like they are doing a parody of the Beatles.

I was reminded of Queen. Screw the Beatles.

Yeah looks like Bohemian Rhapsody a bit, but i see both resemblances actually.

Newsweek did this with the acting categories last year. Unfortunately, they included Paul Giamatti.

Clooney is so very funny.

Some excerpts

I

PAUL HAGGIS: I wonder how much influence those ads actually have.

SPIELBERG: I never look at the ads, because it's just too much to read. And everybody here has gotten so many kudos. Especially Ang's movie.

CLOONEY: Yeah. I don't read an ad unless it says "Brokeback Mountain" across the top. [Laughter; Lee smiles and hides his face in his hands.]

SPIELBERG: My family was actually planning to take a trip next summer to Brokeback Mountain. It sounded like a nice place to spend a week. [Laughter]

II

CLOONEY: People love to knock sitcoms, but television is a great place to start. After hundreds of episodes of television as an actor, though, you become director-proof, because you're guarding the character. That's not an insult to television directors. Each new director wants to make the episode his "Macbeth." But on "ER" a director would come in and say, "I think this really upsets you and you would be crying here." And you're, like, "I cried the last three episodes." So I trained myself not to listen to directors, because you can't.

MILLER: How many jobs did you just lose for yourself by saying that?

CLOONEY: I know. But I've gotten better. Now I don't listen because I'm just egotistical. [Laughter]

III

SPIELBERG: What about "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"? Did you story-board that?

LEE: No.

CLOONEY: Wow.

HAGGIS: Jesus.

CLOONEY: When I directed "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," I did 850 storyboards because I was afraid, on my first film, that people might not have faith in me.

MILLER: [After making the documentary "The Cruise"] I got an agent for the first time, and they sent me a lot of scripts. I never came close to doing anything, but the one script I just ached for was "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind."

CLOONEY: That was a good script.

MILLER: Not a great movie, but a great script. [Laughter]

IV

When directors get together, do you talk about things like storyboards?
SPIELBERG: When I met Akira Kurosawa for the first time in Tokyo, we went to a restaurant at 8 in the evening and we left at 7 in the morning. It was amazing, but I was waiting for Akira to share with me the magic that had eluded me in my career, to tell me about being a poet and a great artist. And what he was preoccupied with talking about was how many arcs [high-intensity lamps] it took to backlight the rain to make it show up in "The Seven Samurai." So we spent the whole night talking about technical things: how do you get these images?

MILLER: By the way, we're staying here until 7 in the morning. [Laughter] Steven, how did you do the control-room scene in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"? Were those real air-traffic controllers?

V

So many of your movies this year moved audiences to tears. Do you cry easily in movies?
CLOONEY: I cried at the premiere of "Batman and Robin." [Laughter] I cried for a week.

VI

Steven, you got your start in television. One of your early jobs was directing Joan Crawford in the pilot of "Night Gallery."
SPIELBERG: Yeah, that was the first thing I ever directed. I was terrified, but she made me feel like I was King Vidor. The crew was very hostile toward me because I had long hair, and in 1969 if you had long hair you were no better than Dennis Hopper in "Easy Rider." The average age of a crew member was 50 years old, and I was 21. So my defenders were the actors.

CLOONEY: Was Rod Serling around?

SPIELBERG: He was great with me also. I actually lit his cigarette.

CLOONEY: Did you really?

SPIELBERG: Yeah.

CLOONEY: You helped him die. [Laughter]

SPIELBERG: Yeah, I used to hang around sets all the time.

CLOONEY: Didn't you sneak onto the Universal lot?

SPIELBERG: Yeah, that's an old story. NEWSWEEK has printed it nine times already. [Laughter]

CLOONEY: If you did that now you'd get thrown in jail.

SPIELBERG: But back then you could do it. I'm proud to say that Hitchcock threw me off the sets of both "Torn Curtain" and "Family Plot." "Family Plot" was after "Jaws," and he still threw me off. [Laughter]

VII

You all got rave reviews this year. What's the most memorable thing a critic ever said about one of your films?
CLOONEY: It's always the worst thing, right?

SPIELBERG: I'll never forget what Rex Reed said about "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." He said the mother ship looked "like one of Mae West's earrings." [Laughter]

LEE: About "Ride With the Devil," Rex said something like "Those boys don't know how to say their lines." But he said the nicest things about "Brokeback."

SPIELBERG: And he's said great things about other movies of mine. I don't want to pick on Rex.

CLOONEY: Well, Rex trashes me as an actor. Even when he gave me a good review for "Good Night, and Good Luck," he basically said, "Unbelievably, it's a decent film for him." [Laughter] So beat up on Rex all you want. He can take it. He's a big boy.

HAGGIS: People either loved "Crash" or hated it. One of the earliest reviews said, "Paul Haggis thinks nothing has changed about race relations in Los Angeles since Rodney King." And I thought, "Well, they might be a little worse." [Laughter]

VIII

If your movie is a commercial or critical failure, does it change the way you feel about it?
LEE: No.

SPIELBERG: Never.

MILLER: When we locked picture on "Capote," I watched it one last time before we showed it to people. I had my screen all to myself, and I hermetically sealed my opinion of it. I said, "This is what I feel about this experience, and no matter what happens, I'm not going to think it's any better or worse." [Pause] Having said that, I now think it's much better than I realized. [Laughter]

IX

SPIELBERG: I love listening to you guys, because I really envy the three of you [Miller, Clooney and Haggis]. I remember what it felt like to be celebrated for the first time, to lose your virginity to people who love your work all over the world. Everybody is so hopeful now that you are going to continue the output.

CLOONEY: Oh, no. That's over. [Laughter]

SPIELBERG: You will all be recognized multiple times for great work, but I hope you're putting all that liquid love into a bottle. Put that bottle somewhere where your kids can't get at it. And every once in a while, take the cork off and smell how sweet it was.

MILLER: I've always felt kind of on the outside, and to discover that there is some kind of community—at the New York Film Festival or, my God, sitting at this table—it's like all of a sudden I don't feel like I'm fighting for myself, simply. I want to live up to the hopes of film lovers.

CLOONEY: And you will.

MILLER: As the bubble over George's head reads, "Bulls--t."

CLOONEY: I was actually being earnest. [Laughter]

Gentlemen, our time is up. Thank you all for being here.
SPIELBERG: Thank you. Now, I'll be taking all these tape recorders. [Laughter]

Can someone explain to me what a storyboard is, what its used for, and why they were so shocked Lee had used none for crouching tiger?

I believe a storyboard basically plots and plans out the entire film, and how every scene is to be shot. It's like a comic strip of the entire film. Not using a storyboard is just sort of improvising as you go, so perhaps that is why they were shocked, especially considering how gorgeous looking the film ended up being.

PEACE, Mike.

Man, I love Clooney. He's awesome.

PEACE, Mike.

A pictoral representation of the script, usually done by a director so he can get his vision of shots, etc. articulated to the crew members.

It usually saves time on a set, helping to get angles beforehand, etc.

Exactly. It's the majority of the shots in a film drawn out comic book style. Whenever I work on one of my shorts, I always start with storyboards, but abandon them half way through. Improvising works much better for me.

It's like a shot by shot graphic novel type visualization of what they are going to film done before shooting begins. The reason it matters is of course that time is money and they can't waste time with the crew there and the cameras ready to roll wondering how you want to shoot something.

Also movies are frequently filmed out of sequence and if you dont have it all prepared out you might forget some shot that you later need in the editing room to string a scene together.

Storyboards are laid out like comic books are. It's art and storytelling combined so you have a visual of pacing and movement to go along with the story.

Storyboards are essentially your shots laid out in a sometimes basic drawn form. They help to accomplish many things in the preproduction process. CTHD not being storyboarded is near impossible. You may also hear the terms pre-vis and animatics used when talking about action sequences.

I don't quite believe CTHD wasn't storyboarded.

That's incredibly shocking, if true.. specially with a movie like Crouching Tiger...

Completely agree. Ang is having some fun, methinks. There are shots in CTHD that are too complex to just be improvised.

Yeah, considering the complexity of some sequences in Dragon, it's strange to imagine he winged everything AND it came out so beautifully.

I can tell you now, his company wouldn't have been issued a completion bond without those scenes storyboarded in some fashion. Not possible. I'm 99.99% positive.

So yeah, he's a stinking liar.

He always seems to find a way to make fun of Batman and Robin..

Not storyboarding a film ≠ improvision or "winging it".

But, I don't believe CTHD had no storyboard either. :o

He could have had production art but not storyboards.

Not every movie has storyboards.

But obviously there was tons of cheoreography... he and his DP probably went out and mentally framed the shots during that period (if there were no storyboards).

Clooney's pretty much the shit.