>>213892016
I understand what you're saying, but in some interview materials he does speak of a certain intuition that he can't fully explain, "like liking a certain girl". For him there was a little mystery as to why he liked a certain shot or presentation. But yes, his method was laborious, painstaking, slow, and autistic. It's why the Napoleon project got shelved: someone else just released a movie around the same period and beat him to the punch because he was too slow in development (it's very common for two movies with virtually the same subject matter to be in development and/or released right around the same time, he was on the winning side of this one with Dr. Strangelove by suing the competition and forcing his film to get released first).
It's why he had card catalogues full of sources, text and pictures relating to whatever project he was working on, he wanted to have lots of material to sift through until he got the one he felt was right. Drove his actors nuts with this, of course, especially poor Scatman in that one god-damn conversation with Danny at the end of Act I where they were made to do 148 takes, the most of any one scene. Spent a lot of time listening to previously-existing, already-performed classical music while doing this stuff (i.e. not original scores or soundtracks) and the juxtaposition in 2001 was successful, to put it mildly. "Yes, that will work well with the spaceplane".
