Here’s a great little clip from the Los Angeles Times‘ Envelope Directors Roundtable series, in which five directors discuss how they evaluate their work on a daily basis, and also what they think of criticism of their work, as moderated by Oliver Gettell.
The directors are Martin Scorsese (Hugo), Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), Alexander Payne (The Descendants), George Clooney (The Ides of March) and Stephen Daldry (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close).
Daldry seemingly doesn’t even know how to approach the question; Clooney talks about the difference between being an actor, and being a director, and observes that of reviews, if you get fifty positive notices and one negative one, you’re going to forget all about the praise and focus only on the lone dissenter; Alexander Payne says that he lives with perpetual bi-polarism (“Some days I am Orson Welles. Other days I am the worst loser, impostor, know-nothing, wannabe filmmaker in the world. I believe both with equal conviction”); Hazanavicius thinks that you really can’t judge your work objectively on the set, because who knows what it’s going to look like “four months later in an editing room”; and Scorsese views the whole thing with a certain air of Olympian detachment, observing that “If you read the good [reviews], you might believe those, and if you read the bad ones, you certainly believe those. At a certain point, you’ve got to work.”
