Something that is rarely talked about is the moment you get stuck on set, unhappy with the camera placement you initially picked, knowing there is a best way to film a scene but unable to come up with a solution. Filmmakers often talk about either the amount of preparation they have put during pre-production, or working organically on set. When problems are mentioned on set, it’s actually often related to actors having trouble with a part, lights taking too much time to get set up, rain shaking plans, or location issue.

But what happens when the filmmaker is the problem?

What do you do when time is ticking and everybody waits on you to find a way to make it work, but you can’t? Well, that’s exactly what Steven Soderbergh talks about in yet another segment from his DGA Interview, after Steve Pond asked him if he could remember a scene where he got stuck, and here is what Soderbergh says:

“Yes, and you’d be surprised at how simple the scenes were, ultimately. There’s one scene in the third Ocean’s where there are a bunch of people in a hollowed-out cave, and they’re all looking at schematics of the hotel. You’ve got eight or nine people around a small table in a small space. And I just keep saying, ‘Run it again. Run it again. Run it again.’ I’ve got a viewfinder with a lens on it, and I’m trying to work my way around the space to find the shot that’s going to form the central visual premise of the scene. And I just can’t come up with a shot. It was horrible. I say to Greg, ‘What time is it?’ And he goes, ‘It’s 10:30.’ ‘So it’s too early to call lunch?’ ‘Yeah, it’s too early to call lunch.’ ‘Well, just send everybody away.’ And I’m sitting there and the cast is gone, and I say, ‘Can somebody move this table? I’m sick of looking at this table.’ So they take the table out, and I’m walking around and I sit down where the table was and then I realize, oh, the camera is the table. That’s it. We called everybody back in and put the camera basically where the center of the table was, and I did a series of two-shots. Shoot, turn, shoot again. We literally did the scene in an hour. What I’ve learned in those situations is to slow everything down. You need to put yourself in that sort of pure space in which time doesn’t exist, money doesn’t exist, nobody’s waiting around, and it’s just a pure problem to be solved. It’s like a Jedi mind trick where you just convince yourself, I’ve got all the time and I can stay here as long as it takes until I figure it out. And once you’ve truly convinced yourself of that, you figure it out. And I’ve had that happen a couple of times.”

I can’t remember having read anything about that very specific situation before, and I found it inspiring and quite empowering actually. Any one of you has developed a way to get unstuck on set? Or remember other filmmakers sharing about this situation? Let us know in the comments section below, I’d love to know more about it.