As a film student, I try to listen to as many audio commentaries as I possibly can. If I get a Netflix movie, no matter how bad it is, if it has an audio commentary, I will listen to it. Many people don’t listen to them because they find them boring but if you really want to learn a lot about a film or just film in general, why wouldn’t you listen to a director or somebody else from the production talk about it? Any tips or nuggets of advice that a director gives in a commentary, I write them down. It’s true that all advice is autobiographical, but advice is advice. Here are a couple quotes and things I’ve jotted down.
“Action is character. What a person does and how they do it, is what and who they are.” “The bad guy always eats better than the good guy.” – William Friedkin (The French Connection)
In the commentary for Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese explains that he doesn’t like for his actors to see the dailies because he feels that it inhibits their performance. Another thing he would do is let the actors do 4-5 improv takes of a scene, record them, transcribe them, and then combine it with the original script and that would be the scene that the actors would work from.
Arron Sorkin, in the commentary for The Social Network, said that the first scene of a movie should inform the audience as to how much they have to pay attention.
John Carpenter on the commentary for The Ward said that “there are no actors, only actresses.”
Some audio commentaries are more educational than others. Many directors are very against audio commentaries because they believe that the film should speak for itself but I wish that every director would do one for every movie they make because they are great for lovers of film. Many commentaries have just one or two people in them, usually the director and someone else very important to the film but they can come in all sorts of sizes.
There’s a commentary for the Paul Thomas Anderson movie Boogie Nights, where he does separate commentaries with different actors and edits the best parts of each together which ended up being really interesting. In Mark Wahlberg’s commentary, he keeps saying that he has a party that he has to go to and that he hasn’t even showered yet but Anderson keeps dragging him on until the end of the movie as Mark gets more and more frustrated. They also talk about a fight on set between Wahlberg and John C. Reilly that started because Wahlberg was throwing marshmallows at John C. Reilly’s head and Riley was hungry and moody so they had a fight. But because of the way the commentary is set up, you get both sides of the story at different times which ends up being really funny.
The commentary for Bridesmaids is one of my favorites because it’s Paul Feig (the director) and the bridesmaids actresses just chatting and having a good time. They all sounded like old friends talking about the past and it really made me want to become a film director. It wasn’t really all that educational but it was fun to listen to.
The most ridiculous audio commentary that I’ve heard by far is from Anchorman. In the first twenty minutes of it, Adam McKay (the director) and Will Ferrel, just throw out curse words to see what they can get away with saying. About 90% of the things they say get bleeped and this goes on for a literal 20 minutes. Then Andy Richtor and Kyle Gass pop into the studio and Kyle Gass ends up getting into a fight with Will Ferrel so they pause the commentary. When they come back, they’re talking with Lou Rawls about his career as a musician. That goes on for another 20 to 30 minutes then they’re on the phone with Christina Applegate. She complains that they don’t care at all about women so they tell her that she can have as much time as she needs to talk but then the credits roll and she is cut off. The movie is 90 minutes long and they talk about it for maybe two of those minutes.
So if you love film or TV, check to see if your favorite DVD’s have audio commentaries. I promise you will get something out of it.