A lot of people go to the movies wanting the movie to be about feelings, and it's really not about that. Or rather it's about feelings in the abstract.
My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen. So you're constantly calibrating to play to their strengths. And the key is to never ask them to do things that are beyond their abilities or are really far away from who they are at their core.
There's a technical reason why I think that frame rate is weird and it has to with your brain's ability to scan beyond a certain rate. The point is I find it looks weird.
There are people who are originals and the stuff they make really is new. It isn't based on anything else. But I've decided I'm not that-I was never that. My abilities are to synthesize a wide range of references and ideas into something that feels relatively unified and coherent.
Every time you make something that somebody likes, your impulse is to remind them that if you hadn't made some of these other things that they hated, you wouldn't have been able to make the thing that they liked.
I've tried to get better about weighing what I think the accessibility of an idea is against the cost of executing it. I've tried to be smarter about that, because if you're not smart about that, you're going to be unemployed. But I'm still mystified about what works for people. And I'm not talking about my movies, I'm talking in general. I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too.