DVD extras

I love whoever came up with the idea of all those extras you get on DVDs of movies. Recently, I’ve watched the DVD extras on the mini-series Into the West and the movie House of Flying Daggers. You get to hear interviews with the directors, the costumers, the actors who portray the main characters. For someone who can be a bit … uh … obsessive about movies she likes, it’s fabulous!

For House of Flying Daggers, I learned that the scene near the end of the movie where Leo and Jin are fighting in the snow was totally unexpected — the snow, not the scene. But it fits so well with the scene and the feeling of that part of the movie. Director Zhang Yimou said that it was an early October snowfall, but it ended up feeling like it was destined to be in the movie. It was also interesting to hear him talk about the movie’s theme that two people can truly fall in love at first sight. The movie only covers probably three days, but I believed Jin and Mei were deeply in love by the end.

The extra commentary on Into the West was fascinating since I’m a huge lover of the American West and its rich history. Six different directors worked on the episodes with Stephen Spielberg over the whole shebang. The amount of sets totaled more than 100. A tremendous amount of big-name talent (Josh Brolin, David Carradine, Wes Studi, Skeet Ulrich, Kerri Russell, Irene Bedard, etc.) and hundreds of extras made shooting scenes somewhat like being in charge of an army.

I was most impressed with the directors’ and producers’ determination to get everything historically accurate. The mini-series was about the clash of two cultures — the European-descent settlers of the West and the native peoples, mainly the Lakota, and how one (the settlers) eventually overwhelmed the other (the natives). So much horrid cinema had been produced in the past that made the Plains tribes little more than caricatures. This series showed how there were good and bad people on all sides and that history is not black and white. Unfortunately, history reveals that the white settlers produced more of these bad guys than the native peoples. Native American advisors, people like Charlie White Buffalo, a Lakota language professor in South Dakota, and elders who knew the rich history of their peoples, were on set to make sure the depictions were accurate and sensitive issues were handled appropriately.

Some authors have begun to add these types of extras to their work, either in the books themselves or on their author Web sites. I think it’s a great way to bring in more readers and keep them reading about the authors and their books longer. When I get published, I’d like to do something similar.

Writing update: I revised the old Ch. 1 of my young adult book, making it the new Ch. 2.

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