The Big Picture: Filmmaking Lessons from a Life on the Set

Film production veteran Tom Reilly has worked on the sets of critically praised films and commercial blockbusters for more than three decades?including seventeen years alongside director Woody Allen. In The Big Picture, he explores the art and the craft of filmmaking from the vantage point of someone actually running the movie set. Using examples unlike any of those in other books on film, Reilly exposes not only the power and the personalities, but the secrets of the pros. He shares the insights he gleaned while working with more than sixty Oscar-winning professionals?from Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Vanessa Redgrave to Sydney Pollack, Sven Nykvist, and Barbra Streisand.

In these fifty entertaining, illuminating short essays, Reilly invites you to join him on the film set. What is it like to shoot a love scene? How do you do a full body burn? What is it like to film in the Everglades or in a morgue? What is blocking or matching, and how long should a script be? How do you decide when to build a set? Why is the color palette so critical? Is night shooting worth the suffering?

The Big Picture delivers the surprising answers to these and other fascinating questions about what it takes to make a feature film, offering a glimpse into what it’s like when the lights are bright, the camera is rolling, and the moviemakers are calling the shots.