I was blessed to have four-time Oscar®-nominated art director Robert “Bob” Boyle as my teacher and mentor at the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles.  Bob was 89 years old when I met him and had over 100 films under his belt, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt, North by Northwest, The Birds and Marnie.  Bob deeply inspired me, not only with his insights into the craft of filmmaking, but even more with his thoughtful observations on the philosophy and humanity required to make great movies.

During my first year at AFI, I asked Bob’s permission to make a film about his life and his work. The resulting Academy Award®-nominated documentary short, The Man on Lincoln's Nose (2001), includes footage of Bob rappelling down Mount Rushmore, taking photos that would become the backdrop to the gripping climax of North by Northwest (originally titled “The Man on Lincoln's Nose”). 

While making The Man on Lincoln's Nose, I filmed Bob revisiting former studios and locations with his life long friends and contemporaries: production designers Henry Bumstead, Albert Nozaki and Harold Michelson, and cinematographers Haskell Wexler and Conrad Hall—all Oscar® nominated and winning artisans who helped craft some of some the best known works in American cinema.

A few years later, these men became the subject of my follow up documentary feature, Something’s Gonna Live (2010). Bob and his contemporaries are among the last of a great generation of Hollywood craftsmen, and I felt compelled to pick up a camera and document their “pre-digital” filmmaking techniques, their philosophies, and their personalities before they passed on. 

Something’s Gonna Live addresses fundamental issues artists face in today’s film industry. While filming in Bodega Bay, the site of Hitchcock’s The Birds, the conversations between Robert Boyle and Harold Michelson made clear what’s at stake today is not the imagination of the artist, but the imagination of the audience. Bob tells us: “I think in our version of The Birds you could imagine a lot of things; what wasn’t seen was as important as what was.” 

Something’s Gonna Live is about artistic legacy, impermanence, making great movies and the values these men wish to pass on. The film is an instructive and deeply affecting master class on filmmaking and life; I wanted to share with the audience the truly inspiring experience of spending time with these legends, one-on-one.

Amazingly, most of these men never retired. Harold Michelson was storyboarding well into his mid-80’s. Henry Bumstead had just finished production design on Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) when he passed away at the age of 91. Haskell Wexler is 90 years old and continues to make films. Bob Boyle continued teaching at the AFI until his passing at the age of 100.

The challenge in making the film was to tell the story of their legacy while at the same time avoiding a purely nostalgic look at the “good old days.” Haskell Wexler summed it up best when he reflected, "It never was great, really. What was great was us trying to make it great!"

— Daniel Raim, Director/Writer/Producer