"Oh yeah - I watched Knife in the Water, saw the shot, and repeated it. But even if I hadn't seen that film, inevitably the camera would've ended up on top of that mast, I mean if you think of it there are only so many dynamic shots on a boat"
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Noyce is doing that filmmaker thing where confession and shrug land in the same breath. He admits he lifted a shot from Polanski's Knife in the Water, then instantly deflates the scandal: on a boat, in a confined geometry of mast, deck, and horizon, you run out of fresh angles fast. The line is defensive, but also slyly honest about how cinema actually gets made: not in a vacuum of pure originality, but inside a toolbox of inherited solutions.
The intent is to reframe "copying" as craft, even inevitability. He concedes influence (a savvy move, since denial is what turns homage into theft), then pivots to the real argument: the medium's constraints create convergent thinking. Boats are basically moving stages with limited sightlines; the mast-top shot is the obvious way to buy scale, peril, and kinetic energy in one image. It broadcasts exposure and instability, turning a calm frame into a threat.
The subtext is a quiet critique of auteur mythology. Directors are expected to be singular visionaries; Noyce is describing himself more like an engineer solving a spatial problem. There's also a wink at cinephile gatekeeping: yes, references matter, but so do practical realities. The context here is a director navigating the politics of influence - acknowledging cinema's internal memory while insisting that some images belong less to any one artist than to the physics of the set.
The intent is to reframe "copying" as craft, even inevitability. He concedes influence (a savvy move, since denial is what turns homage into theft), then pivots to the real argument: the medium's constraints create convergent thinking. Boats are basically moving stages with limited sightlines; the mast-top shot is the obvious way to buy scale, peril, and kinetic energy in one image. It broadcasts exposure and instability, turning a calm frame into a threat.
The subtext is a quiet critique of auteur mythology. Directors are expected to be singular visionaries; Noyce is describing himself more like an engineer solving a spatial problem. There's also a wink at cinephile gatekeeping: yes, references matter, but so do practical realities. The context here is a director navigating the politics of influence - acknowledging cinema's internal memory while insisting that some images belong less to any one artist than to the physics of the set.
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