Five directors speaking directly

It's as inescapable as any law of physics: To be a movie director, you must first direct a movie. But being a movie director and becoming one are two fundamentally dissimilar things. John Horn, of the Los Angeles Times, talks to this year's Oscar directing nominees.

For nearly two hours, five of the year's most celebrated film-makers gathered to discuss the challenges - and rewards - of making distinctive and often highly personal movies, even as the studios grow all the more interested in presold sequels, remakes and adaptations of board games.

When they were not talking about their artistic epiphanies - saying no to Harvey Weinstein at a test screening, challenging a puzzled producer with a gun on the eve of filming - directors James Cameron (Avatar), Jason Reitman (Up in the Air), Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) and Lee Daniels (Precious) also shared stories about how they cast their award-winning movies, a process that sometimes includes two-hour auditions and a preference for working with familiar faces.

Here are edited excerpts from last week's lively, sometimes unguarded conversation among this award season's front-running directors.

Fighting for your movie

Q When you made Precious, how did you pitch it to your producers, Gary and Sarah Magness?

Daniels: I said, 'I want to do a movie about a 400-pound black girl who's learning how to read, who's raped by her father and raped by her mother'.

And they signed a cheque. And I went over budget. They were like angels.

But ... I had to fire a lot of people halfway through the shoot.

I had to shut down.

Q Why?

Daniels: Because they weren't listening to me.

Who was I? I ain't him (pointing to Cameron). I ain't him (pointing to Reitman).

I ain't him (pointing to Tarantino). I ain't her (pointing to Bigelow).

Tarantino: But that took a lot of (nerve) for you to do that and it took a lot of (nerve) for them to double down on you, to triple down on you, actually.

I mean that's a really lovely story.

Cameron: That's a testament to you too, to have the courage to go to them.

Reitman: That's the moment you become a director.

Q What was your moment?

Reitman: To shoot my film in five cities and in four international airports.

There was this kind of clampdown, 'Look, Jason, you make talking movies.

They're about people who just talk to each other, you could really put them anywhere.

I know you want to shoot a lot of airports and that's important to you, but why don't we just shoot this in one city?'.

And I thought about it.

I could make this movie in one city and I could probably get ... one airport to look like a few.

But I finally held my ground ...

I said, 'This is right for the film.

And it's going to be some more money, but ... this is the whole world for this film.

This is what this character loves; he loves travelling and we need to see America'.

And they went for it.

Q Quentin?

Tarantino: I think the moment he's talking about is more like something that happens ... earlier on in your career ... where you're not going to be a hack director.

You're going to be an artist and you can fail and this could not work and this could all fall apart, but you're going to do your thing. ...

It actually wasn't about filming Reservoir Dogs.

Harvey Weinstein has bought Reservoir Dogs now and they have a market research screening ...

I don't even want to go to this darn thing.

And he goes, 'No, come on Quentin.

Just help me help you'.

Q We're going to recut your film, in other words.

Tarantino: Harvey goes, 'OK, so here's the thing, Quentin, I think that you've got a mainstream hit here, but you've got this torture scene and it just cuts everybody's head off ...

It takes it from a popular entertainment that anyone could enjoy and makes it this niche thing that nobody's going to see.

All the women in America will walk out when that scene happens.