Learning More About Your Tastes
What are your tastes in movies? It’s something every filmmaker or film enthusiast should strive to better understand. If you don’t know what you’re truly passionate about, you’ll end up chasing trends and trying to make whatever is “hot” right now. Understanding your tastes in film will open the door to a whole new way of looking at film. You’ll watch movies more in line with your interests. You’ll have a smaller niche to focus your time and energy on. You’ll become an absolute pro and it will be in the type of film you love the most.
I should clarify that truly understanding your tastes takes time and often a fair amount of discussion. Let me elaborate. Recently, I started watching every Best Picture winning film, selecting them at random from a stack of flashcards I made. A friend of mine has joined me in this exercise as well. After we watch each film, we rank them against the previous films we’ve watched. In doing so, we’ve gained a better understanding of our film interests by comparing each of our rankings. My friend has a clear interest in films that focus on story development, whereas I put more value on character development. For example I have FOREST GUMP and BIRDMAN ranked in my top 3. These are both films which focus greatly on character development and the dramatic needs of characters. On the flipside, my friend has NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MAN ranked highest currently, for its strong story development and interconnected events. I personally didn’t enjoy the film due to the lack of character development. None of the characters hooked me in emotionally, and I ended up losing interest in the slow developing plot. I understand this is a contrarian opinion and people will think I’m crazy (NO COUNTRY is well regarded as one of the all-time greats), but my tastes are my tastes. From this exercise, I’ve learned that I need strong character development to truly “love” a film.
It’s as though I go into a movie saying, “alright, we are here, now show me how we got here and why I should care about what happens moving forward.”
While some of you might already know exactly what you enjoy most about movies, you could be more like me and have trouble pinpointing exactly what it is about a film you enjoy. That is why I urge you to watch movies with your friends and talk about what you did and didn’t like. It will help you better understand your own tastes and the tastes of others.