Films about life are incredibly boring. I have no need to watch them.
I watch films to ESCAPE life. Even if my life was filled with all kinds of weird ****, I'd much rather make a film about aliens, or monsters or some badass gunslinger woman or man... Things that make the audience happy, and have fun.
I can't even imagine making a film about something real. I'm sure if I have a great story to tell I would, but still. I like to use my imagination. I like to see things I can not see in real life.
Every film about real life is so hopelessly boring, and depressing. I do not understand it.
I don't think you got what I meant, i'll say it simply....haha....
Everything you do in your art is informed by your real life experinece, it does not matter if you are making sci-fi puppet explosions in space or a docudrama cinemaverite artyfartyfest.
If you go into making sci-fi films , having only spent your time watching movies, well, chances are, your movie will probably be not that much different from all those movies you watched already, or the movies of your contemporaries, who have also just spent their entire life watching movies...it'll be the people who went out and lived in the real world for kicks too, who went out and tried to get involved in real life, in whatever way they chose, who will come back from the front and inform the films with that real life experience that will give them that extra special boost of individuality.
Look at Lucas...he used to be a race car driver when he was a youth, you can see that in American Graffitti and Star Wars, that excitement, that daring...and then he becomes a business man who sits in business meetings all the time, and we get the prequels, which mainly are about a bunch of boring business people talking in rooms about business.
your life informs your art, always, and too many people inform their art only with other art, and that's why we get so much fiction that is similar to something we have seen before.
I guess it is all about how great an artist you want to be, if you only have the ambition to make movies that people have seen before, then there is not much advice I can give you that will benefit your art, because you've already decided to just make the equivalent of booze and drugs for people, giving them something for them to escape so they don't have to think about anything substantial, you're just gonna be a type of drug dealer really, haha.
But, y'know, you could make something like Star Wars, which provides that escape, we all need that escape in our lives, but also gives a lot of people something substantial too, as there is a lot of heart and excitement in there, as it came from Lucas' real life experineces, as well as his research into other forms of art. You need both, or else it is just gonna be a photocopy of a photocopy.