Taika Waititi, Noah Baumbach, and Martin Scorsese Talk About Inspiration

Inspiration is a fickle friend. She visits late at night and sometimes when your brain is clear. She's fleeting, disappearing just as suddenly as she came. So what are you supposed to do when inspiration strikes? Do you sit up in bed, run to your notebook? Do you scribble some Post-Its, and hope they make sense in the morning? 

Getting inspired is the name of the game in Hollywood. You need to take those little bits of excitement and energy and transfer them onto the paper, and then into moving images, and then cut them together to entertain an audience. 

So how do some of our favorite directors deal with inspiration? How do they know when it strikes? How do they deal with bouts when it doesn't? 

Check out this video from Filmmaking Advice, and let's talk after the jump. 

I love listening to Taika Waititi because he's so honest and funny. Hearing him speak about stealing from other people's lives and how he uses things he hears in real life to add to characters is such a smart idea. I loved knowing that the funeral speech from Hunt for the Wilderpeople was an actual speech from a funeral he attended. 

You have a real life you live, so continue to gather inspiration around you. 

Noah Baumbach is a little more straightforward task when it comes to getting inspired. He takes information as it comes, just living his life and taking notes as he goes. He doesn't care if characters, story, or place comes first, he focuses on them as they come, and uses notes over time to build something. 

These notes get compiled, and he's able to go back to them as he makes different movies, borrowing from himself and keeping a catalog he can always go back to when needed. Inspiration for him is a database you keep for yourself. 

For Martin Scorsese, he speaks about gaining inspiration from other directors' work. For him, when he's searching for that lightbulb, he's going back through old movies and even branching out and seeing new movies. He's always returning to his favorite art form and using his position to talk and listen to directors about why they did certain things. 

All of this together should create good lessons for you. Did any of this inspire you individually? 

Let us know in the comments.