Film School Follies: Part 10 – The Direct Approach

By ScottDS

After Panic, our directing class was a regular breath of fresh air. Our teacher’s name was Tom and he was probably the first “cool” teacher we had at Full Sail. He was certainly enthusiastic and knowledgeable (by this time, I had gotten over the skepticism with which I greeted every new teacher) and most of my classmates would probably rate him as one of their favorites.

I remember he had an interesting way of taking roll: instead of calling the student’s name and the student answering “here,” he would ask for other information. “Okay, today you’re going to give me your favorite film” and so on and so forth. Obviously, if you answered, that meant you were there. My favorite was “your porn name” which apparently was a combination of the street you grew up on and your first pet. I never had a pet so, at the urging of a classmate, I simply gave him the name of our DC teacher with the word “ravishing” attached to it. (This turned out to be mildly prophetic.)

Directing is, quite frankly, difficult to explain. No two directors operate exactly the same way. There are rules to be followed but just as often, the rules are broken. In short, directors oversee all the creative aspects of a film. (Television is a different animal entirely.) They are responsible for approving actors and key production personnel and selecting camera angles and the “tone” of the film, in collaboration with the director of photography. They go on location scouting trips and approve costumes, sets, props, etc. They work very closely with the editor during post-production to shape the film. They discuss their intentions with the composer and attend scoring sessions (something I’d pay to do). I’m sure most directors get a say in how their film is advertised and promoted but I could be wrong. (I simply can’t imagine the director of the latest direct-to-DVD American Pie schlockfest having a lot of clout in the industry.)

Stanley Kubrick would shoot a hundred takes before he got what he wanted. Steven Spielberg is known to shoot very fast (sometimes to the detriment of the film). Some directors love improvisation (see: Apatow, Judd) while other directors hate it (like Kevin Smith, though I think he’s mellowed in recent years). Many of the most famous directors have an identifiable visual style (Kubrick, Hitchcock, etc.) whereas many directors are simply journeymen who move from one film to another and have no recognizable style. Many directors storyboard every scene (M. Night Shyamalan) while others arrive at the set in the morning with no idea how they’ll shoot the scene (Woody Allen). (Visual effects are always storyboarded; I’m talking strictly about dialogue scenes.)

We were told that our 16mm films would have multiple directors: basically, anyone who was interested in directing would get a chance. I was not a fan of this idea and I’m still not. I’ll talk about the making of our 16mm film in the next blog but I recall some students were literally assigned just one shot to direct! I took this all in, knowing I wanted to direct both a 16mm film (parts of it, anyway) and a 35mm film. A director needs to have a vision of how the film will be: style, tone, mood. Again, it’s sort of hard to explain but after watching many movies, I felt it sort of seeped in through osmosis. We were given copies of the four scripts to be shot in 16mm and I gravitated to one in particular: a World War II story. I immediately started getting images in my head. A few of us even got together one night to talk about the script, thinking we were all going work on it. (In the end, none of us did and the resulting film is a well-intentioned mess.)

We talked about shot composition. You have your wide shots, medium shots, and close-ups. Each type of shot carries with it an implied meaning. A close-up of a crying woman holds more weight and can mean something different than a wide shot of the same. We also discussed angles. A low angle implies menace whereas a high angle implies vulnerability. The 180-degree rule is something that most people don’t notice until it’s violated. Picture two people talking face to face. An imaginary line intersects them. The camera can only remain on one side of the line. There are, however, ways to get around it: the actors can move, thus dictating the movement of the camera (not every director shoots like this); the camera can circle around the actors; or the director can use an “insert shot” like a shot of a clock on the wall. Many times, inserts are used to cover up an edit or simply to covey information. (That shot of the speedometer in your favorite car chase was no doubt filmed by a second unit, possibly days or months after the main unit wrapped with the actors.)

I was mostly nervous about working with actors. While the roles in Panic were filled by classmates, we would be working with professional actors on our 16mm and 35mm films. Tom talked to us at length about rehearsals and how actors respond to scripts. Every actor has their own process and, looking back years later, for all intents and purposes, I think we might’ve gone a little overboard. I remember a pre-production meeting where all we did was talk about the characters’ backstories for two hours. While this is very important, I’m not entirely sure it was all that relevant for our films. Even after our 35mm films were finished, I thought to myself, “Was all that necessary? Who cares what our lead character’s wife does for a living? She’s not even in the movie!”

They stressed the importance of the “throughline” or the spine of the script. Every scene and every line has to have a purpose: either it reveals character or moves the plot along. Of course, I can think of several examples of scenes and lines that don’t do either of these things but the best written scripts are the ones that manage to do both without hitting the audience over the head. (I read once that a character should never utter the phrase: “As you know…” because that’s simply script-talk for “Now I can inform the audience…” I think that’s why many films have a “new guy” or an “observer” so our hero can explain complicated ideas to him/her and it seems natural.)

We were told that actors hate line readings: “Here is how you should say it.” The trick is to get the actor to deliver the line the way you want without having to tell them how to do it. I later found out it’s all about communication. If you and the actor are on the same page and you answer all of their questions and you know the meaning behind the line, you should be fine. Some actors are certainly better than others and the really good ones will bring things to the film that you never imagined. On our 35mm film, some of the actors had good ideas: some we used, others we didn’t. I don’t believe any of our actors (at least on the films I worked on) had any hard questions that couldn’t be answered and remember, we were dealing with local performers, many of whom mostly worked on student films so they knew we were amateurs. (That is to say they treated us like professionals but knew we were inexperienced.)

I’m personally a fan of what’s called “business.” Some actors like to have a prop on hand, for example a pencil they can chew on. It adds character and becomes a bit of “business.” One filmmaker once speculated why actors in old movies always smoked – they would have something to do with their hands! Tom taught us a very good lesson in “giving vague direction.” During one class, he kneeled in front of my desk and we improvised a little scene. He told me to play it happy, then sad, and then he started generalizing. I can’t remember exactly what he said but I know at one point I was muttering and stumbling like Woody Allen. Of course, Tom did the same thing with my friend at the next desk and he was actually pretty good (the bastard)! Again, this all goes back to communication: answering questions, being able to explain why an actor would perform action A and not action B. (During the making of Airplane!, Lloyd Bridges asked why his character would do a certain thing and Robert Stack basically told him, “There’s a watermelon falling from the ceiling and an arrow shooting into the wall! Lloyd, nobody’s paying any attention to us!”)

Since Full Sail was (and still is) more of a technical school, we didn’t talk too much about the various schools of acting like “the Method.” I don’t even think it ever came up during the making of our films. We were such small potatoes and none of our actors seemed to have any weird rituals (that I knew of) though one actor who worked on another class’ film apparently showed up to the set with his pet chickens! (He didn’t work on any of our films, thank God.) One of our guest speakers was a local actor who had appeared in many Full Sail films. His name was Guido (the name definitely didn’t match) and, while I like to think we learned a lot, there were about five students left in the room by the time his presentation was done. Even the teacher had disappeared and we were left with this stranger in our class. He complained a lot, that’s for sure. I only stayed because I didn’t want to be rude. He didn’t work on any of our films either.

As for me, while it’s been a few years, even if I read a script today, I get images in my head and a good sense of rhythm. Of course, only the audience will be able to judge whether or not my instincts are correct. The best directors seem to be the ones with the best instincts. As I said earlier, much of this creeps in via osmosis and it’s easy to see when the director’s instincts are wrong. My friend and I saw I Am Legend and we both felt it was missing something. On the other hand, I just watched Back to the Future again and everything in that film works. Scenes flow naturally from one to another, the script observes the time-honored traditions of set-up and payoff and, to quote the studio exec, the film “was put together like a Swiss watch.” In the next blog, I’ll talk briefly about a 16mm film that was put together like an imitation Rolex…

Recommended Reading:

Katz, Steve. Film Directing Shot by Shot. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 1991.

Mamet, David. On Directing Film. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Rabiger, Michael. Directing: Film Aesthetics and Techniques. New York: Focal Press, 2007.

Van Sijil, Jennifer. Cinematic Storytelling. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 2005.

Weston, Judith. Directing Actors. Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 1999.