Directing for Film and Television

by Christopher Lukas

  Oddly enough, despite the title, the relationship between director and assistant directors is very slim. The A.D.s actually work for the producer (in much the same way that the P.M. does), and, aside from the invaluable work they do in running the set, you won’t have a great deal to do with them. At the end of the day they may go over the strip board with you (after first giving it to the producer, of course) and ask if you mind them shifting around certain shots or scenes. They may say it looks like rain the next day and ask what shots you want to do indoors if the location shoot is canceled, but most likely this will simply be given to you as a fait accompli.

  As I’ve indicated, the prop person is a special friend to, and helpmeet of, directors. Learn from the prop person. Got a problem? Grips and props are there to help.

  Similarly, the continuity person is invaluable. It would be a mistake to turn away when that inestimable member of the crew cries out, “Wrong camera direction” (referring to which side of the camera a person was supposed to look toward), or “She dropped a line in that take.” More likely, of course, the continuity person will not cry out, but will stand up out of his or her chair, carrying a heavy book, laden with twenty different color pencils and rulers (for marking the script), and whisper in your ear the necessary suggestions. The continuity person is often a writer and often a highly intelligent person, someone worth having lunch with during the shoot and worth chatting with about arcane matters.

  I don’t know what to say about the writer in this part of this chapter. I suppose I ought to admit that I’ve been one myself and felt very upset when a director changed my lines. I ought to admit, too, that I’ve been on the set as a producer and been very angry when a writer came on and said we’d changed lines and shouldn’t have. (It’s in their contract; they can come on the set.) On the one hand, you may be a writer and feel that it’s your project, your idea; you’ve got to see it through from start to finish. On the other hand, you may not be the writer, and you’ll be damned if you want someone telling you how to do your film. That scene doesn’t belong there; and that one over there doesn’t belong in the film at all. In part, it comes down to how you’ve gotten involved in the project. If you’ve started the film yourself, your relationship with the writer will be self-evident: a friend, a hired gun, a co-worker. If you’ve been hired to an existing script and cast of characters, you may not even see the writer. If you do, you would do best to be very polite, listen carefully to his or her suggestions, and then do about them what you think best. (Writers are strange people. Sometimes they actually have very good ideas about filmmaking.)

  Your relationship with the film editor may not even exist. If, as I’ve suggested, you’ve been hired on a television series, you may not get to work with the editor at all. If it’s a feature film or a movie-of-the-week, then you may. In that case, let’s reserve comment until chapter 9.

  The rest of the film crew and management team really will not have much contact with you, the director, in any deep sense. The “key” (that is, chief) grip may banter with you from time to time or make very good suggestions, but that’s more in the nature of good humor than an attempt to establish a friendship. The crew knows that a director is concentrating on getting the best pictures and the best acting possible, and that very often means being left alone.

  How much you want to get involved with specific craftspeople (such as the costume designer, art director, and so on) really has to do with your own particular feelings about that craft or about its importance in your film. The people I’ve discussed thus far warrant your special attention. The others, I leave up to you. There is something called the “chain of command” in film as well as in the Army. People work through other people. You will go through the A.D. for certain things (getting the wardrobe person on the set, calling actors, moving props). You will go through the producer for others (hiring an art director or a production manager). If, however, you have a particular desire to work closely with someone, then do it, whatever the chain of command. Just let your compatriots know you’re going to do so. I like talking to costume designers. I like going to the costume fittings. Many people don’t. I just let my producer and the production manager know that any conversation about costumes will be handled by me. Similarly, some people think that art directors should be handled with kid gloves; that a production manager is likely to rub them the wrong way—giving instructions, for instance, not to spend too much, before the art director has even read the script. If you want a stunning set, you’d better intervene early on. Don’t leave sensitive matters to other people if you are comfortable handling them. On the other hand, if you can’t bring yourself to talk about money, then don’t start making deals or discussing contracts until your producer or your production manager has done so. In fact, don’t discuss them at all.

  There’s the team. Not many with whom you will need to have a close relationship, but the point of making films is not to form friendships.9 Of course, these are only guidelines. It’s perfectly possible that a particular associate producer may turn out to be your closest friend, or that the assistant cameraman is an old buddy. It would obviously not do, either for your own sake or for his, to ignore him just because I said a relationship with your A.C. isn’t important. You probably won’t see the P.O.C. much after the initial days in the production office, but if that voice on the phone is important to your sanity during the shoot, obviously you’re going to call and keep in contact.

  JOB FUNCTIONS OF THE DIRECTOR AND THE TEAM

  “We come now to a tricky discussion. The question here is which of the many job functions do you, as director, need to understand, and which jobs, conversely, can you simply assume to be someone else’s work, and leave it at that? If you’ve attended classes in film, or practiced the crafts in the real world, you may have been led to believe that the director’s job encompasses everything in the world of film, and therefore he or she must know all the crafts. That may work well, indeed may be a necessity, in film school where four students go out to make a film and act as D.P., director, producer, gaffer, best boy, and grips all rolled into one. It may also be sound in a setting that takes as a given that the students will decide later what to do with their talents and, therefore, need training in everything simultaneously. Lighting, sound recording, filming with an Arriflex and a CP, writing, carpentry, all may fall under the curriculum for a filmmaker in a film school. In the practical world, however, as you have obviously gathered by now, there are many more crafts and specialties than one person would want (or could manage) to learn and to master. In the highly unionized industry, many of those craft functions cannot be undertaken without a union card. So, as long as we’re talking about the organized film world, we need to make distinctions between those crafts that a director needs to master and those that he or she simply needs to acknowledge exist.

  Which are which? I’ve suggested in chapter 1 that writing is an art in which a director must have some skill. Now, I’d like to add to writing the fields of lighting and cinematography, but with strong caveats on the amount of proficiency one needs to acquire in those areas. In camera work, a director should be familiar with lenses and their effect upon the film image; he or she should know the difference between various film stocks and their effect upon film image; he or she should know whether a particular camera can be equipped with a wild motor, whether “super 16” refers to a style of dress or a particular kind of film format, how fast a camera can rotate on a tripod, and similar points. But directors do not need to have a working acquaintanceship with f-stops or with the actual mechanism of a camera. In fact, a director should retain a healthy respect, but also a healthy distance, from the myriad mechanical facts about cameras and how they handle film. Nothing impresses a crew more than a director who can rattle off a series of facts and figures about depth-of-field and Wratten filters, but simply impressing the crew is not what directing is about. What’s needed is to be able to articulate what kind of a look and what kind of a shot is desired, and to reques
t that look or that shot from the D.P. If it cannot be achieved, he or she will suggest an alternative; if it’s artistically right, he or she will go along with it or suggest a shading. A modicum of knowledge is desired so that the director will be able to have a range of possibilities, but not in order to instruct the camera crew in how to achieve the look or an effect.

  As always, there are exceptions. In the world of commercials, for example, many directors are actually D.P.s who have taken on the dual role of cameraman-director. Obviously, they know, and need to know, everything about camera. And there are directors, some of them famous or extremely capable, who believe in knowing everything. But in the broader world of film and TV, the world that you will inhabit, a director needs to know some basic language, the effects produced by the parameters of light and film, lens and filter, and let it go at that.

  Lighting is a similar craft. It is obviously essential that a director know the difference between “key” light and “fill,” between a “2K” and an “inkie.” A director should know what kind of light will make the shot work, understand that sunlight is bluish and tungsten light is reddish, and that filters or other tricks will be needed to make them compatible. But a director need not know how to balance lights, how many amperes are needed, or how to protect a house circuit from becoming overloaded. The technical names for various cables (“pigtail” being my favorite) are quite irrelevant for a director. The gaffer is a trained technician whose associates should know everything about getting the lights up and focused. Even the D.P. will leave a request hanging in midair without appending the really technical language to it. “Bring that baby over there and flood it” may be as far as he or she goes. For you, the director, study light and study the moods it creates.10 Stay away from the wonderful, but relatively irrelevant, world of lamps and amps.

  For the rest, you don’t need to know how a dolly is put on its track, but you must know whether or not track is needed and that it takes time to get the dolly set—otherwise, you will be constantly baffled why certain shots take so long to get. You don’t need to know how a continuity person makes his or her notes, but you need to know that such notes are kept and how they can be useful to you. You need to know that props can take a long time to acquire and that discussions about special effects must take place long before the shoot is to begin, but you certainly don’t have to know how the prop person makes a dead seagull look like a live duck. In fact, it’s a lot more fun to be ignorant of such processes, so you, too, can take pleasure in the transformations, in the magic of it all.

  In videotape, you certainly must know that a video camera has to be “white balanced” (the magic way in which a video camera is electronically tempered to the actual color of light falling on the subject). You need to know that video requires more even lighting than film does (because of something called “contrast ratio”), but it is certainly not important that you can read a vectorscope, or that you know how to repair a broken image enhancer.

  In fact, there is a certain balance that must be achieved between knowledge that helps you and knowledge that gets in the way, knowledge of other people’s crafts that makes it possible for you to say, “I see your problem; I’ll do it some other way.” This makes you very popular with the crew, but also makes it possible for them to very gently steer you away from the stringent artistic course you have set yourself. Helpful knowledge, on the other hand, is precisely that knowledge that allows you to say, “I think I can see a way you can accomplish my goals, without breaking your spirit or your equipment.” Helpful knowledge is that knowledge that advances your artistic goals. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of a director knowing something well enough so that he or she can devise a shot or a scene ahead of time that is easy to shoot. Sometimes it’s a matter of knowing enough technically so that you can help the craftspeople get around a problem that you created. That, too, can make you very popular, but it more importantly helps you accomplish your aims. How much of any one craft you must acquire in order to be knowledgeable enough, but not too knowledgeable, is essentially a matter of balance— and experience.

  The self-taught approach has severe limitations. Sometimes one cuts out a kind of shot or a kind of scene precisely because one thinks, “I know that it’s too expensive or too difficult.” How much better it would be, with an extremely difficult shot, to go to a D.P. or a prop person and say, “Here’s what I have in mind. Can you do it?” Sometimes the answer might be, “Oh, sure, we just bought a new lens that does that kind of thing,” or, “Have you heard of the Cricket Dolly? It’s built for just that problem.” If you tried to keep up with every technical development, you’d probably fail at both the technical and the artistic sides of your career.

  A FINAL NOTE ON YOUR ROLE AS DIRECTOR

  I have given a picture of film and television crews that may lead one to believe that the director has, in many cases, been reduced to an adjunct. The director doesn’t write the script, doesn’t hire the actors, doesn’t supervise editing. On the set, the director calls the shots, but only in conjunction with a large number of people. This is a different image from the one given by books and newspapers, certainly a far cry from the notion we have of the film director from the early days of the industry. All this is true, but not universally so.

  There are, for instance, those feature films where the director is not only king, he’s Superking: the legendary Orson Welles, of course; Francis Ford Coppola; George Lucas; Robert Altman; Ingmar Bergman; Martin Scorcese. These are (or were) directors fully in charge, hands-on in script, design, everything.

  Sometimes, such directors will feel the need to take on the title of Producer as well, to keep total control. Such was the case for John Sturges (The Great Escape, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral). But other directors prefer to keep the roles separate, as does Woody Allen, for instance, who leaves logistics, money, and other important jobs to his longtime producers.

  Directors who take on the producer role are called “hyphenates,” as in producer-director. (There are also writer-producers, director-cameramen, etc.) Of course, on any feature film, even if the director isn’t the originating force and doesn’t take the producer credit, he or she will have the absolute right to do casting, rewrites, and so on.

  “What I am trying to do in this chapter, however, is prepare you for the majority of directing positions, those in film television series, or in commercials, or similar occupations, where the producers have taken more and more control of certain functions.

  This does not mean that you have had your artistic authority usurped. It does mean that you will have to alter your image of the director’s role somewhat. Relax. Enjoy it. In fact, it’s nice not to have to worry about many of the details. When the knock on your door comes at 6:30 in the morning, and the A.D. says, “We’ll be ready in five minutes for your first shot,” you may indeed find it a pleasure not to have to worry about all the details that you concerned yourself with as a film school senior. On the other hand, if you’re one of those wonderful individuals who find every detail important and like to do it all yourself, you may simply have to work somewhere else than the “real world” I’ve been describing. If you don’t, you may find yourself constantly at odds with a system that has decided, for good or for evil, that the producer, the executive producer, and other team members are going to perform some of the functions you thought were yours.

  9There are many worse reasons for making films than the relationships you establish and keep. But it’s just unlikely that anyone will hire you if you say “I want this job for the friends I make.” Nor is it likely that you actually went into the film business just because of the friendships you knew you’d make.

  10This, of course, is not a simple matter. It can take a lifetime. We’ll discuss the part of it that can be discussed on paper in chapter 4.

  3

  Casting

  Conventional wisdom is that the script and casting are the two most important elements in making a film. I believe conventional wisdom is righ
t. We’ve discussed the role of the script in chapter 1, so now it’s time for the next step.

  Shortly after World War II, when the “neorealist” films from Italy were stunning American audiences with their powerful stories and their powerful looks, inquiries were made by critics into how the directors (men like Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini) were able to achieve such brilliant acting from an infant movie industry emerging from a war-torn society. Imagine the critics’ surprise when they discovered that many of the actors used by these brilliant directors were amateurs, “real” people who had been chosen for their character and look, not for their professional experience. While much of the Italian movie-making world has taken a different track since then— using brilliant actors, schooled in acting techniques, such as the preeminent Italian actor of the last three decades, the late Marcello Mastroianni (who can be seen in many Fellini films)—there are many, both in Italy and in other countries, who still employ nonactors in order to acquire a sense of utter reality in their films. More importantly, the concept of using people for their “look” is a crucial part of the skill of European casting. Fellini, as is well known, would use an actor or actress whose voice was very unpleasant or untrained, but “dub” a voice in later by someone more skilled or whose sound was more mellifluous. The result, as all who have seen a Fellini film can attest, is marvelous faces, marvelous films.