> One of the first things I learned in film school is _nothing_ in a production at that level is coincidence or serendipity.
Perhaps they should have taught you to be less sure of that. So many takes in movies that ended up being the best one are where a punch accidentally did land, something is ad-libbed, a dialogue is mixed up, etc.
To take an example of a very critically acclaimed show: in Breaking Bad the only reason we got Jonathan Banks in the role of Mike is because Bob Odenkirk had a scheduling conflict, and Banks improvised a slap during his audition. Paul Aaron even complained about it indicating that he would not have agreed to it.
It seems like there is a lot of serendipitous in writing and production. That's not what it was about. The point is how much agonizing and second guessing it takes and how many alternatives explored and how many takes, etc before something, anything makes it in the final product.
The lucky break is first a result of a lot of planning and work - and it gets analyzed to death before included - and then probably re-inforced here or there elsewhere. (So that for me, I do notice when I hear movie or TV dialog as completely natural and said exactly right. It's exceptional.)
This is a cartoon though, significantly less adlibbing, everything has already been storyboarded and scripted out etc.
Pixar's approach to making their movies is a fascinating highly iterative process going through many story boards and internal showings using simplistic graphics before proceeding to the final stage to produce a polished product. I wonder how Simpsons do it.
Perhaps they should have taught you to be less sure of that. So many takes in movies that ended up being the best one are where a punch accidentally did land, something is ad-libbed, a dialogue is mixed up, etc.
To take an example of a very critically acclaimed show: in Breaking Bad the only reason we got Jonathan Banks in the role of Mike is because Bob Odenkirk had a scheduling conflict, and Banks improvised a slap during his audition. Paul Aaron even complained about it indicating that he would not have agreed to it.