More than a feeling?

What inspires me? ZZZZZZ. Whoops. I lost you already. I have a quota to keep up for my own well being, so neh.

Of course I watch a ton of movies and am often inspired by them. But I never watch or see something and say "I need to make that" or even "I need to make something like that." If I watch something I like I usually pay more attention to how it makes me feel. I get a feeling from something (be it movies, books, music, the jerk at the grocery store) and want to know how I can replicate the feeling that with my own bag of tricks (so to speak).

So, something that inspires something else may be entirely unrelated come the end product, except that they elicit a similar emotion. That's my thoughts on where inspiration from other things should come from. It definitely should not be (for example) tons of films aping Pulp Fiction in the years after its release. All of those "wanna be" releases after the fact were super terrible. And they deserved to be. Trying to ride coat tails like that always is bad news.

But say you watch Pulp Fiction and try to build something that elicits a similar emotion, without stealing the exact gimmick or structure, that may turn out OK. Christopher Nolan (example time) showed Heat to his crew before they went off to make the Dark Knight. He was showing the vibe/feeling he wanted to capture for the Dark Knight. I would say he succeeded. Tarantino captures the feeling of things and magnifies them and shows them through his own vision. Scorsese, Leone, Shaw Bros, and more are all easily FELT in a Tarantino movie. But he doesn't go out there and try to make a movie LIKE one of the said directors. Sometimes it is a fine line for sure.

Anyways, the end.

I'll post my thoughts on Ponyo and District 9 in a day or two. And another post on remakes one day soon.