How to become a film director pdf

Directing and Style 9

Somebody said if you give a script to five different famous directors, you’d get five

different pictures. And I believe that. —Vincent Minnelli

Photograph from the set of Precious (2009). ©Lions Gate/courtesy Everett Collection

What Is a Director? Chapter 9

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following: • Discuss the features of the director’s job. • Describe the concept of a director’s style and stylistic movements. • Summarize the auteur theory of directing. • Describe the relationship among the director, the actors, and the writer. • Identify some influential but non-traditional filmmaking styles. • Name several pace-setting directors and their major works.

9.1 What Is a Director? Making a movie is a genuinely collaborative effort. Large films employ hundreds of people who work together to create the finished product. Yet as with any endeavor that enlists the labor of so many people, there must be one person with the power and the overall vision to make sure that all the pieces come together as they should. In the case of a construction crew building a skyscraper, that person would be the foreman, who must translate the architect’s plans so that workers can carry them out. Otherwise, what should be a building would be an incomprehen- sible mess. As with buildings, musical compositions, paintings, and other works of art, films are constructed according to certain plans using certain techniques and patterns that their creator believes will be both effective and expressive of something of his or her own personality.

In making a movie, that person is usually the director. His or her role is often simi- lar to that of the foreman, translating the screenwriter’s story so that the actors and crew can carry it out. And like the foreman, it’s up to the director to turn the elements he or she builds with—words, images, and sound—into something not just coherent but entertaining, even moving. It’s no acci- dent that when films are described, they’re often talked about as the possession of the director—Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and the like. Of the many people who create a commer- cial movie, and it would be difficult to make one without all of them, the director is the most crucial. Much like the quarterback of a football team, he or she often receives an

outsize measure of credit—or blame. While the director may not personally operate the camera or set the lighting or run the editing machine (though some do), he or she is still the boss in rehearsals, on the set, in the editing room, and wherever else the movie is made.

This is all the more remarkable when one considers that, beyond yelling “Action!” and “Cut!” at the beginning and end of scenes, there is no clear set of rules or regulations that all directors fol- low. Some are hands on, micromanaging almost every aspect of making the movie. Others are delegators, allowing more freedom among the actors and crewmembers. Some dictate entirely

Courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ As a director, Bob Fosse brings his exuberance and energy to signature musicals such as Cabaret (shown here) and All That Jazz.

The Director as Facilitator Chapter 9

what they want their actors to do, allowing for no improvisation. Others simply offer a loose set of parameters for a scene and let the actors go where they will with it. Some even shoot or edit their films themselves, while others prefer to work primarily with the actors and leave the technical details to specialists they trust. But whether you are talking about Alfred Hitchcock, a practitioner of the first type of directing described, or Mike Leigh, who uses the second method, or someone in between, the fact remains that the director is in charge of the production and is responsible for the final film. In this chapter, we will look at some of the methods directors use in their many roles, how they shape the film, and how central they are to the overall process.

9.2 The Director as Facilitator While the director plays many roles in the production of a film, as we will see, perhaps the most important is that of the facilitator—the person who makes the trains run on time, so to speak. Overseeing every aspect of the production is, of course, a massively complicated job, one that requires a detailed level of planning and execution at every level. This is important because, unless studio executives meddle too much and take over the project, the film we see in the theater is largely the film that the director wanted us to see—the director’s vision, interpretation, and take. In skilled hands, the director makes a film that takes us out of our world for two hours and into another—a world of the director’s imagining.

The Director and Style

We have discussed such cinematic ele- ments as narrative plot structure, mise en scène, cinematography, editing, and sound in previous chapters. Although individual specialists perform the necessary duties in each category, often with their own per- sonal preferences and styles, the director makes sure they work together to create a coherent and appropriate vision of the story on the screen. Each director tends to have favorite ways of arranging actors and props on the set, favorite types of camera angles and lighting schemes, favorite patterns of editing long or short takes into scenes, and favorite habits of using sound and image to reinforce or clash with each other. When we can recognize similar uses of techniques from one film to another, we are recognizing a style. That style may be associated with the screenwriter or head technicians such as the cinematographer or the editor, or even with some actors, but it is up to the director to approve of the major talents working on a particular project and to mold their visions to his or her own.

How the director achieves this varies from person to person and from film to film (and we’ll dis- cuss style in more detail shortly). It’s also sometimes a function of the studio or a powerful pro- ducer, for example a David O. Selznick or a Jerry Bruckheimer. In early films, the director often truly served as a facilitator, and not much else. But visionary directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, Erich von Stroheim, and especially D. W. Griffith brought an artistic sensibility to the job that moved it far beyond that of a technical functionary. They and others helped establish the director

©Paramount Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a prime example of his work, which is steeped in film history. Scorsese has cre- ated a distinctive body of films examining the psychology of men confronting their true selves through waves of excess and criminality.

The Director as Facilitator Chapter 9

as not only an equal partner to the on-screen (and behind-the-executive-desk) talent but also the true author of a film.

D. W. Griffith and The Birth of a Nation

No discussion of directors—indeed, of film itself—is possible without Griffith. Enormously gifted as well as hugely controversial, he in many ways set the stage for what we think of as the mod- ern film director, as well as the modern film itself. Griffith started making movies in 1908 and directed more than 400 short films over the next five years, experimenting with a wide variety of story content and developing different filmmaking techniques that made his work stand out from that of most other filmmakers, especially those in America. Gradually telling longer and more complex stories on the screen, he finally left the fiscally conservative Biograph Company, which preferred the more economical 10-minute to 30-minute shorts, so that he could make feature-length movies on his own. His three-hour epic The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, had a huge impact on film production and styles of cinematic storytelling, as well as on distribution and exhibition. Countless film historians agree that the popular and critical success of this film changed the industry forever. Citizen Kane inspired filmmakers with its exuberant technical style, but during its day The Birth of a Nation did much more. It told a story full of action, romance, suspense, terror, and heroism, as other films had done, but Griffith’s mastery of cinematography and editing was able to captivate audiences of all social statuses for an entire evening’s entertain- ment. Indeed, before The Birth of a Nation, movies typically lasted about an hour or less and appealed primarily to lower-income audiences who could not afford live theater. Griffith’s ability in cinematic storytelling and his attention to historical detail struck a public nerve that made the film a “must-see” event, the first box-office blockbuster. Upon seeing the film, President Woodrow

Wilson is said to have remarked, “It is like writing history with lightning.” Whether or not this statement did in fact come from President Wilson, Griffith was able to manipulate audience emotions, rather than treating audience members as mere passive observers. He showed the immense power a director could wield over a film. In short, he turned it from simple entertainment (film’s typical role in the culture up to this point) into cinematic art, while simultane- ously demonstrating that it could be highly inflammatory propaganda.

Indeed today, while still considered proba- bly the most influential film ever made, The Birth of a Nation is largely reviled because of the provocative way in which Griffith depicts the subject matter, even though he greatly diluted the extreme racism of its original source to make it more palatable for

mainstream audiences of the time. Based on Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman, deal- ing with the Civil War and Reconstruction, the film portrays black Americans in a condescend- ing, negative light, while treating members of the Ku Klux Klan with sympathy and depicting them heroically. Riots broke out in the North when it was shown there, while Klansmen marched

Courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation portrayed the battles of the Civil War with a level of detail never seen before. Hundreds of extras were mobilized and shot to convey the impression of thousands at war.

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in support of the film in the South—an immediate and instructive example of the effectiveness of cinema as a new and powerful form of storytelling. Its combination of elements engaged the senses of sight and sound simultaneously, providing a transportive experience the audiences were not accustomed to. For better or worse, Griffith had shown just what power a director could have, and movies would never be the same.

Sadly, today Griffith is remembered primarily for the hurtful racial controversy created by The Birth of a Nation (due largely to its overwhelming financial success—itself an indication of main- stream racial attitudes when the film was made). Few people seem aware that most of the contro- versial topics Griffith treated in his films were pioneering calls for progressive reforms and social justice, dramatically scathing condemnations of hypocrisy. His next major film was Intolerance, an experimental epic examining religious bigotry throughout the ages in three historical sto- ries, all intercut with a parallel modern story about exploited laborers, self-serving reformers, and the injustice of capital punishment. Later, his Broken Blossoms treated child abuse, religious and racial bigotry, and interracial romance in the London slums. Sexual double standards and women’s rights are at the root of Way Down East, whose heroine was an unwed mother trying to survive in a narrow-minded and hostile community. His epic action-adventure film Orphans of the Storm contrasted economic injustices and political scheming against the background of the French Revolution, with implicit (and some explicit) comparisons to the American Revolution and the then-recent Russian revolution. All of these films drew audiences into the lives of their central characters, using cinematic techniques to influence viewers’ understanding that these potentially controversial issues were affecting individuals they’d grown to care about. Griffith understood that it took effective entertainment to make audiences see and think about deeper subjects they might otherwise ignore.

Other directors would follow Griffith’s course. Orson Welles would write, direct, and act simulta- neously in Citizen Kane, taking the role of facilitator about as far as one could. He was neither the first nor the last to tackle three or more creative roles in a single film (just look at Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, Spike Lee, and Clint Eastwood, to name a few), but there may be no greater exam- ple than Welles, and some believe no greater movie than Citizen Kane. After Griffith, directors from Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock to Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Tim Burton have established their own names as far more important than their films’ stars and titles in the mind of the public. However, it was Griffith who set the standard for imposing his personal style on every movie he directed and many others he merely supervised. As may be gathered from the discussion so far, directing has been traditionally a male profession. However, female directors with strong personal visions have emerged throughout film history (such as Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, and Ida Lupino) and have become more common in recent years (includ- ing Julie Dash, Andrea Arnold, Julie Taymor, Kathryn Bigelow, and others). There would still be, and still are, hack directors, of course, men and women who simply piece bits of the language of cinema together without much thought beyond 90 minutes of running time and a paycheck. But D. W. Griffith showed that the director could make the film his own, an artistic statement as personal as a novel, a poem, a painting, or a symphony. This concept gave rise to a theory of film criticism that focused heavily on the director.

9.3 Auteur Theory Given the importance of the director’s role in the making of a movie and how easily identifiable certain cinematic styles can be throughout the work of some directors, it is often convenient to discuss a film as though the director was the sole creator, like the author of a book. “Auteur” is

Auteur Theory Chapter 9

the French word for author, and therein lies the meaning of auteur theory. When applied to film directing, auteur theory posits that the director is indeed the author of the film, imprinting it with his personal vision. This can be an excellent starting point for analyzing certain films, both thematically and stylistically, and is in fact exactly how the auteur theory got started. Film critic and future director François Truffaut put forth the theory in the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema (Notebooks on Cinema) in 1954. The theory gives enormous, almost total, responsibility for a film’s success or failure (artistically, not at the box office) to the director. The theory was not, and is not, universally accepted. Film critics Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris kept a running feud going in various magazines about the validity of the theory; Sarris championed it (he is, in fact,

credited with popularizing it in the United States), while Kael, always opposed to the over-intellectualization of movies, attacked it, writing in Film Quarterly in 1963, “How was one to guess what art was and was not based on a logic that seemed hidden to all other critics? . . . Interior meaning seems to be what those in the know, know. It’s a mys- tique—and a mistake” (1963). (It is quaint, and somewhat romantic, to think back to a time when film critics were such an important part of the conversation regard- ing movies and their cultural impact.) See Table 9.1 for examples of some directors who can be considered auteurs.

Despite the misgivings of Kael, one of the most influential American critics of the 20th century, the auteur theory is still a generally accepted way of critiquing films.

Its greatest American supporter, Andrew Sarris, defined it in specific ways that we will use here, as well (see Table 9.2), which others may or may not apply to their own understanding of what makes an auteur.

Table 9.1 Notable auteur directors and key films

D. W. Griffith The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Trueheart Susie, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Orphans of the Storm, America, Isn’t Life Wonderful?, The Battle of the Sexes, The Struggle

Frank Capra American Madness, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon, You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, It’s a Wonderful Life

Alfred Hitchcock The Lodger, The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Suspicion, Shadow of a Doubt, Spellbound, Notorious, Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Family Plot

John Ford The Iron Horse, Hangman’s House, Pilgrimage, The Informer, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, They Were Expendable, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Raymond Cauchetier/courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ French New Wave directors such as François Truffaut, whose film Jules and Jim is pictured here, began as critics who cham- pioned the director as the author (auteur) of the film.

(continued)

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Akira Kurosawa No Regrets for Our Youth, Drunken Angel, Stray Dog, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, High and Low, Sanjuro, Red Beard, Dersu Uzala, Kagemusha, Ran, Dreams

Ingmar Bergman Sawdust and Tinsel, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Shame, Cries and Whispers, Scenes From a Marriage, The Magic Flute, Fanny and Alexander

Jean-Luc Godard Breathless, A Woman Is a Woman, Contempt, Les Carabiniers, My Life to Live, Band of Outsiders, A Married Woman, Le Petit Soldat, Pierrot le Fou, Masculine- Feminine, La Chinoise, Weekend, Tout va bien, Film Socialisme

Michelangelo Antonioni Story of a Love Affair, Il Grido, L’Avventura, La Notte, Eclipse, Red Desert, Blowup, Zabriskie Point, The Passenger, Identification of a Woman

David Lynch Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, The Straight Story, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire

Martin Scorsese Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, New York, New York, The Last Waltz, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, After Hours, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, Shutter Island, Hugo, The Wolf of Wall Street

Steven Spielberg Duel, The Sugarland Express, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Hook, Schindler’s List, Munich, A.I., War Horse

Spike Lee She’s Gotta Have It, School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, Crooklyn, Clockers, Girl 6, Bamboozled, Miracle at St. Anna, Oldboy

Table 9.2 Guidelines for considering a director an auteur

Technical Competence Movies must be well made (cult directors can be exceptions to this)

Distinguishable Personality Movies must have recognizable style and attitude

Interior Meaning Body of work should express consistent world outlook

Technical Competence

Sarris (1962) breaks the auteur theory into three concentric circles, the first of which is the outer circle, technical competence. It may seem obvious, but, at least according to Sarris, technical competence is one requirement of the auteur; he famously wrote, “A great director has to be at least a good director” (Levy, 2001). This is somewhat misleading, as the definition of “competent” is something that is difficult to quantify. A director such as Michael Bay, who has directed Bad Boys, Transformers, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and The Rock, is technically proficient, even gifted, in that he blows things up in noisy and entertaining ways. This delights audiences; his films have made nearly $1.5 billion at the box office. Yet most serious critics would not consider him an auteur in the classic sense. If one holds them up to most standards of critical evaluation (for example, the truth test we discussed in Chapter 1), his movies simply aren’t that “good,” at

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least not good at rewarding in-depth analysis searching for deeper layers of meaning. Among films that he has directed or produced, critics have given him a 6 percent positive rating on RottenTomatoes.com, a website that aggregates reviews from major critics around the country.

On the other hand, there’s a director like Quentin Tarantino, a former video-store clerk who immersed himself in movies and uses in his own films “quotes” from the many movies he has seen. His movies are just as technically good—and as distinctive—as Bay’s. But he is also very much an idiosyncratic “author” of his films (he writes the scripts), marrying technical compe- tence with a personal passion, providing a much more satisfying experience. Exceptions to this technical competence criterion are directors like Ed Wood (Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, Plan 9 from Outer Space) and Dwain Esper (Narcotic, Maniac, Sex Madness), whose films have achieved cult status for their sheer incompetence as much as their peculiar twisted bizarreness. Yet many consider Wood and Esper to be auteurs, as they fit squarely into the next of Sarris’s criteria.

Distinguishable Personality

A distinguishable personality is the middle circle in Sarris’s theory. For instance, the films of Alfred Hitchcock—one of the auteurs Truffaut identified in his essay—display an easily identifiable personality, or style, as we discussed earlier. They may be macabre, creepy, and sometimes down-

right scary: Movies such as Psycho, Rear Window, and North by Northwest share a gleefully dark look at humanity, while at the same time managing to be tremendously entertaining. When considering a director’s body of work, then, a distinct personality will often come to the fore. David Lynch is another director whose films, which include Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, offer a dark take on life that might best be described as weird. Yet through his use of humor and identifi- able technique, Lynch’s films are enjoyable and sometimes moving. As with Hitchcock, Tarantino, Spielberg, Capra, and many oth- ers, audiences approach some directors’ films expecting certain things, because of their track history.

A flaw crops up in this “personality” aspect of the theory, however. How can we explain a director like Danny Boyle, whose eclectic body of work includes such diverse titles as Slumdog Millionaire, Trainspotting, and 28 Days Later? He willfully chooses to bounce from one genre to another to keep himself interested, as he explained in an interview:

I think it creates a kind of freedom, really, of expression. The problem with being experi- enced and skilled . . . is that they’re techniques. They’re not always the way to the heart of the person or the people. They’re tricks that you know work, and you can make them work. It’s

Courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ Scene from the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Frank Capra is best known for his sympathetic portraits of ordinary Americans, such as his film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Many of his films made during the Great Depression capture a sense of enduring American values. Among his most popular works, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington portrays an optimism and idealism about the political process, which may seem unfamiliar or naïve to 21st-century audiences.

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always balancing those things, and the way to really balance them is to take on the unknown. (Goodykoontz, 2008b)

Thus, Boyle seemingly strikes down not only the distinguishable personality aspect of the auteur theory, but also that of technical competence. And yet all serious critics would consider Boyle, winner of an Academy Award for Slumdog Millionaire, a brilliant director. But is he an auteur? He certainly has great command over his films, and they have a distinctive feel, though it’s some- what hard to describe; off beat comes as close as any term to doing it justice. The auteur theory is not always a perfect form for analyzing films, as Boyle and his work illustrate.

Interior Meaning

The least specific of Sarris’s terms, interior meaning—his third circle—would seem to involve the distinguishable personality spread over a director’s collected works. What is he trying to accomplish? What is he trying to say? (Think back again to our truth test.) Sarris isn’t really clear, so it’s left to others to try to sort it out. Some find Sarris’s insistence that it can’t actually be described in words to be a bit much, while recognizing that a common interior meaning is some- thing that is felt by the viewer, the way a director’s personality is expressed through his films’ techniques, attitudes, and choices of subject material.

Here again one might turn to Hitchcock or Tarantino. Each of their films is distinct from one another, yet all have a common feel to them. Both directors, through their movies, have some- thing to say (and certain ways they like to say it), not only about film but also about life and human interaction. And they are specific about how they distribute that message through their work, which allows audiences to enjoy the distinctions between their movies while concurrently recognizing them as Hitchcock or Tarantino films.

Auteur as Marketing Strategy

The auteur theory extends beyond analysis and into the way films are promoted. Billboards, radio ads, and television commercials trumpet the latest Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese film. This is understandable in some respects because some directors have earned their outsized reputa- tions. The auteur theory of criticism gives them creative credit for their films and at the same time turns them into stars. This is obviously not true of every director, even great ones. Mike Leigh may well never have made a bad movie, and he exerts almost total control over his films (even as he allows for extensive improvisation, which we will note shortly). But his films are fiercely independent in spirit, not lending themselves to expensive marketing campaigns. His numerous movies, which include Happy-Go-Lucky, Secrets & Lies, and Life Is Sweet, have a combined box office gross that is less than one major Hollywood blockbuster’s opening weekend. Thus, his name has little public recognition, and you’re lucky if you see much promotion for his films at all.

On the other hand, director James Cameron’s name is such an integral part of the relatively few films he has made that someone unfamiliar with their titles might reasonably assume that “James Cameron’s” is a formal part of their title. Then again, his films have made more than $1.9 billion combined, including the two highest-grossing films of all time, Avatar and Titanic. Cameron, too, is an auteur, controlling almost every aspect of his films, even inventing the technology used to make them. He may be highly regarded, but it is clear that turning directors into stars has a clear monetary advantage for some, while others worthy of such attention toil in near anonym- ity. A number of directors over the past century have enjoyed the same or even greater “stardom” than their actors, including D. W. Griffith, Cecil B. DeMille, Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch,

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Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg, but in the eyes of the general public who buy the tickets, this remains the exception rather than the rule.

Controversy and Debate Surrounding Auteur Theory

As discussed previously, the auteur theory is far from foolproof when it comes to both making movies and analyzing them. There are simply too many holes in the theory. As Pauline Kael points out, some great films are made by directors who willfully show a disdain for what is com- monly thought of as technical competence. (Kael, who died in 2001, might well have appreciated the do-it-yourself charms of a film like Paranormal Activity, which is filmed like a glorified home movie yet is still a powerfully frightening experience—in part because of the pseudo-amateur nature of the filmmaking.)

Others decry the auteur theory on the basis of the collaborative nature of making films. Why should the director be placed above the screenwriter or the actors in terms of influencing the outcome of the movie? Therefore, it’s necessary to understand the auteur theory but not become a slave to it. Although an imperfect method of thinking about the director’s role, the auteur theory is still a valid and crucial one, recognizing the personal stamp that the best filmmakers put on their films, elevating them from mere entertainment to something more substantial.

It is important to note that a film’s auteur need not necessarily be the director. Sometimes producers, screenwriters, or even actors have the most obvious and identifiable control over the films they’re involved with. Writer auteurs such as Joss Whedon, Charlie Kaufman, John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Preston Sturges, among others, have gone the next step to become directors or producers of their own scripts, whereas other non-director auteurs with power prefer to hire the writers, producers, directors, cinematographers, or actors who can help achieve their vision. Some actors (e.g., Johnny Depp, Sylvester Stallone, and Mel Gibson) have the power to choose their own scripts, directors, and producers and thus might be considered just as much an auteur as a powerful director, whether or not they actually produce or direct them- selves on screen.

9.4 How Directors Do It Despite their importance in the making of a film, one might spend days on a movie set and never be quite sure just what it is, exactly, that the director does. That’s because each director works in his or her own way. Some work almost as CEOs of a company, delegating and overseeing the work of others. To be sure, the final film’s content, look, and style rest with them, but they allow trusted crewmembers to help achieve their vision. Others do almost everything themselves, particularly

Courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ Scene from the movie Modern Times. Charlie Chaplin made the transition from actor to auteur early in his career and had both the power and the popularity to continue making silent films into the 1930s. He produced, directed, wrote, starred in, and edited Modern Times. He also composed the score.

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on smaller-budget films. There is no right or wrong way to make a movie; what matters is what we see on screen. How the director achieves this is as individual as the films themselves.

The Concept of Style

Most—though not all—films, even if they play with the form, follow the basic tradition of nar- rative storytelling. We meet the characters, there is some form of conflict, and then there is a resolution. However, there is plenty of room inside that basic format for the director to impose a personal style upon the film. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton, and Martin Scorsese have a strong sense of style—in each case, artfully rendered violence and bloodshed are often essential elements of the storytelling—recognizable elements that the audience comes to expect.

The concept of a director’s style dates back to the days of D. W. Griffith, if not before. Within 10 years of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), Russian director Sergei Eisenstein directed the enormously influential film Battleship Potemkin. Eisenstein was a cham- pion of the montage, the cutting between perspectives and shots in a scene to either heighten the dramatic effect or, in some cases, alter it. The most famous, and most copied, example of this is in the Odessa Steps segment of Potemkin, in which Cossacks open fire on civilians, including women and children. The part of the scene in which a baby carriage rolls precipitously down the long line of steps after the mother is brutally murdered is positively iconic; it has been quoted in near-countless films, most explicitly in Brian DePalma’s The Untouchables and Woody Allen’s Love and Death. Eisenstein constantly cuts back and forth between scenes of terrified citizens and the advancing Cossacks. His theory was that juxtaposing dynamic shots one after another was more important to establish meaning than adherence to conventional continuity editing guidelines. Montage is an essential element in Eisenstein’s concept of style, and it helps define his films.

Other examples rely less on technique and more on mise en scène and overall atmosphere. David Lynch, mentioned earlier, uses creepy, sometimes surreal images and sounds to shape the style of his films. Note the bizarre noises in the background throughout much of Eraserhead, Lynch’s surreal film, which add to the unease and overall weird vibe of the movie. (That Lynch shot the film in black and white adds to the effect.) Even in a film that is, at least on the surface, more main- stream, such as Blue Velvet, Lynch manages to create a subversive atmosphere. The opening shot famously captures the idyllic small town, with flowers and picket fences, but the camera delves in more and more closely, finally showing the insects burrowing underground. Thus, Lynch imme- diately establishes that he will explore the ugliness beneath the happy exterior, a recurring theme with Lynch that he accomplishes through a strong sense of style. The style consistent throughout his films includes choices in sound effects, colors, wide-angle lenses, placement of actors within settings, and often-dreamlike logic in character interaction.

Subject Matter

Subject matter over the course of a career is a crucial element of Sarris’s version of the auteur theory of criticism. Are the movies the director makes important to them on a personal level, or are they simply guns for hire? A technical master such as Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese could, in theory, make any movie look good. Yet leading directors rarely take on projects whose subject matter doesn’t appeal to them directly. Scorsese grew up in New York City and saw first- hand the tough kind of characters that would populate many of his films, such as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Goodfellas. The characters, style, and action in the films ring true because of

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Scorsese’s lifelong familiarity with the subject matter. He is a gifted enough director that he could fake it. But in a stunning scene like that in Goodfellas in which Ray Liotta as Henry Hill walks through a side entrance of the Copacabana nightclub with his future wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), through the kitchen and onto the club floor in one long tracking shot, Scorsese combines his filmmaking brilliance with a genuine knowledge of how people like Hill operated to create a remarkably authentic feeling.

Other directors, such as Boyle and Jason Reitman, bring themselves to their subject matter in different ways. Reitman, the director of Up in the Air, Juno, and Thank You for Smoking, is the son of director Ivan Reitman, a director and producer whose films include Ghostbusters. Their films have different sensibilities, and they choose different subject matter, with Ivan typically making comedies, while Jason tackles drama (albeit mixed with humor). In an interview, the younger Reitman reflected on these different styles:

My father is the son of a Holocaust survivor . . . He wants to make movies that make you happy . . . I grew up in Beverly Hills and never had to worry where my next meal is going to come from. That affords you the ability to be more challenging. (Goodykoontz, 2009e)

Each director, in other words, brings his or her own history and life experiences to films. One of the most ironic cases of the combination of director and subject matter is Francis Ford Coppola’s selection as direc- tor of The Godfather. Coppola famously didn’t want to direct, in part because he wanted to concentrate on directing his own scripts and not major studio produc- tions that he feared would prevent him from bringing enough of his own style and sensibility to the picture, and also because he worried about the negative portrayal of Italian Americans. Coppola was right; the studio interfered throughout, from casting (executives were especially resistant to hir- ing Al Pacino as Michael Corleone) to the length of the film. Coppola fought to make the film the way he wanted, however, and

the result was both a box-office sensation and what is generally considered one of the greatest movies ever made. Coppola didn’t want to direct The Godfather Part II either, wanting Scorsese to do it, but he eventually relented and created another masterpiece. In these cases, Coppola’s ambivalence about the subject matter is overcome by his bringing his own sensibility and person- ality to the film, despite studio interference and other problems.

Working With Actors

Of all the director’s many roles, his or her work with actors is the hardest to define; indeed, it’s an almost mysterious ritual that varies among actors, directors, and movies. And yet beyond setting up shots and other technical work, the director’s most important task is to coax a good performance out of his or her actors. It may involve pressure, praise, patience, or, more likely, a combination of all three. “The truth is, if you discourage an actor you may never find him again,”

©Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ Director Oliver Stone is especially well known for his politi- cal biographies, including JFK (shown here), Nixon, W, and Alexander. Stone blurs fact and fiction in a style uniquely his own.

How Directors Do It Chapter 9

the French director Jean Renoir says. “An actor is an animal, extremely fragile. You get a little expression, it is not exactly what you wanted, but it’s alive. It’s something human” (Stevens, 2006).

On its face, coaxing the appropriate performance seems an almost impossible task—the actor is trying to bring something to the role, to the scene, that feels genuine. The director wants the same thing, of course, but the actor’s version must mesh with the director’s vision. These typically are not people with small egos or hesitancy when it comes to opinions on how things should be done. Somehow actor and director must come together on what is needed, scene by scene, throughout the film, maintaining believability and consistency throughout. But how is this all accomplished?

Actors often repeat the same phrase when asked what they most desire in a director: that he or she makes them feel safe. They’re referring to the freedom to take chances with their perfor- mances, the trust that the director will select the best take when putting the movie together. (Remember, many takes of the same scene are usually shot; the director pieces the film together from what he or she considers the best of the lot, much like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle.) It is a precarious dance between carrot and stick, one illustrated by the director George Cukor’s remarks about directing Greta Garbo in Camille. Asked generally about the performance, Cukor said, “With Garbo you must create a climate in which she trusts you” (Stevens, 2006).

Over time, some directors and actors are successful enough together that they work together again and again. Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, for instance, have made nine films together. “We just have a good, terrific relationship,” De Niro said of their work (Goodykoontz, 2009c). This again echoes the theme of trust that an actor requires of a director to do his or her best work. Conversely, if that trust is missing, the work suffers. Said Mira Sorvino, “As an actor if you don’t feel safe, kind of, you tend to protect yourself more and batten down your hatches. It’s much harder to give a truly vulnerable performance when you feel a little bit defensive” (Goodykoontz, 2010b).

An essential part of a director’s makeup should be confidence—not just the confi- dence to choose the right take, to pursue the performance he or she wants, but also to trust the actors to make decisions about their per- formances, perhaps finding the right ingredients for the scene in the process. Director Mike Leigh is known for meeting with his actors for months before a movie is shot, working out the characters with the actors instead of imposing the character upon them.

Not every director shares the sentiment of finding safe harbor for actors to work in. Hitchcock famously allowed no improvisation, knowing exactly what he wanted from his cast in each scene. Among the many quotes variously attributed to him: “I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle” (Hardman, 2010).

Whatever method the director uses to bring the proper performances out of his or her cast, as with every other element of filmmaking, the final results are what is most important. Talk of

Courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ Scene from the movie The Wings of Eagles. From westerns to iconic WWII films, director John Ford and star John Wayne created classic American cinema.

How Directors Do It Chapter 9

rifts between actors and directors fuels gossip magazines and television talk shows, but those are fleeting concerns. What matters to the audience is the film they see, not what it took to make it. As director Mike Leigh says, “. . . what I want the audience to take as theirs, is what’s on the screen, the film itself. Never mind the prep work" (Goodykoontz, 2008a).

Point of View

In some respects, the point of view of all films is that of the director, but sometimes films give the audience the view of one of the characters. In Forrest Gump or the original 1982 theatrical release of Blade Runner, we see the story unfold through the eyes of the central character: Forrest (Tom Hanks) in the former, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) in the latter. In both cases, the films use voice-overs to establish the first-person point of view. While neither Forrest nor Deckard is a completely reliable narrator—that is to say, they do not have an omniscient, or all-knowing, point of view concerning the story—they are nevertheless our entrée into the film, and we watch what unfolds as it happens to them, even as they comment upon it.

In other films, such as Casablanca, the director simply portrays the action, allowing it to unfold in front of the audience without comment, letting the movie speak for itself. The film is no less engrossing because of this; director Michael Curtiz relies on the brilliant performances of his leads, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, along with a stellar supporting cast, to draw us into the film, even if it is only as an observer. We learn what the characters learn, when they learn it. In the case of Blade Runner, the voice-over was imposed by the studio, so Ridley Scott removed it from his 1992 and 2007 director’s cuts of the film, preferring to let his use of the mise en scène, cinematography, and editing convey the film’s point of view.

In films such as The Sixth Sense, director M. Night Shyamalan seemingly sets the story up from the classic third-person point of view; as with Casablanca, we simply watch the story of a boy who believes he can see dead people unfold. But at the climax of the film, we find that we have been fooled, that, while we know basically what psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) knows, we know far less than his patient, young Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) knows. It is that unreliability of what we know, or what we think we know, that makes the film so satisfying (along with top-flight technical direction and acting).

Whether chosen by the director and cinema- tographer or written directly into the script, the most effective point of view for a film var- ies. Documentaries, for instance, are often more effective when they approach a subject with a specific point of view, not necessarily of a char- acter but in the sense of conveying the film- maker’s attitude. Some audiences love Michael Moore; others hate him for the unabashed