She retained her conviction that the movie worked, was lush and layered and romantic. He was equally sure it was suspenseless and turgid. And they were both right, because when the credits play out and the house lights come back up, every movie leaves a highly personal imprint on every moviegoer. We sit out in the dark, and for that approximate two hours we experience a sort of collective dream, but we all awake with a different feeling, a different recollection, a different interpretation. But out in the audience, we're only half the equation.
Movie makers are the other half.
While we're out here dreaming on the silver screen, they're back there behind the camera thrusting and parrying, inventing these fictions for love or money. In the case of Snow Falling on Cedars , the movie's makers mostly wanted to find the audience that had made a bestseller of David Guterson's novel. The director, Scott Hicks, was coming off Shine, so he had the success cachet to wind up at the helm. But there are other kinds of movies, the ones made for love. These are more personal and often autobiographical.