Symposium Offers Insights With Dga Award Nominees

Ah the wonders of technology, well sort of.

After some early technical glitches, a packed Directors Guild Theatre was treated to a four-hour symposium with the five nominees for the DGA award for outstanding directorial achievement in a feature film, which included a rare appearance by Roman Polanski, who was beamed in live from Paris via a satellite uplink.

The discussion's moderator, Jeremy Kagan, coaxed and prodded the nominees — Stephen Daldry ("The Hours"), Peter Jackson ("The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers"), Rob Marshall ("Chicago"), Polanski ("The Pianist") and Martin Scorsese ("Gangs of New York") — on a range of subjects that included the notion of survival in their films, the translation from script to screen, casting decisions and policies on rehearsals.

Marshall, who took home the award at Saturday night's awards dinner, said a major difficulty of his was determining which of the song-and-dance numbers from the Broadway production the film was based on would have to be cut out of the script. "I wanted it structured in the script exactly how I was going to shoot it," he said. "And at a certain point musicals don't work when you are just sitting and waiting for the next number. It all needs to be interlocked."

Scorsese repeatedly impressed upon the audience how he had been living with the story of "Gangs" in his head for decades before the production saw the light of day. "I never believed it was going to get made, even while they were building the sets," Scorsese said half-jokingly.

The film's excruciating attention to the historical details and nuances of the period proved taxing as well. "My interests had more to do with the anthropology of the time," he said. "And improvising with the actors in the language of the time was very difficult. I was afraid of doing something that was stale."

Daldry, referring to the triumvirate of Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore, said: "I was blessed with an extraordinary cast. A great advantage to me was a shared methodology." He also revealed to the audience that for one pivotal and intense scene involving Streep, he had to re-call the actress to reshoot part of it after almost a full year had passed.

Polanski said very little rehearsal took place on "The Pianist." "I don't like to decide how actors are going to evolve around a scene," he said. "I try to accommodate actors and then film it." Asked how he came to cast the film's lead, Adrien Brody, Polanski said, "it just felt right."

And as for those leftover auditioning tapes from "Chicago," Marshall joked, "I have some serious blackmail material."