Directing for Film and Television

by Christopher Lukas

  Don’t be surprised if you get tired and restless very easily during casting. It’s not easy listening to people reading the same lines (and many of them doing badly) while you’re looking for your ideal character. Which brings us back to “the dream” you had when you first read the part. If you keep that dream uppermost in your mind and don’t detach yourself from it, you’re probably going to be disappointed. Casting, like shooting, requires an unbelievable amount of compromise. With one part of you, you’re holding on to an ideal; with the other, you’re looking for that spark of imagination or excitement that someone else can bring to the project. With actors, that means listening and looking for something that is new; something that you didn’t expect; some reading of a line or some character in the face or body that tells you that that person can bring a wonderful quality to the role—a quality that you hadn’t thought of or, perhaps, even known was there. That may mean giving up your dream—but getting much, much more. On the other hand, the opposite may happen. You may hear a lot of banal reading, and nothing you can say to the actors helps. After several days of this, your producer gets very upset and says you’re being too picky. He knows that the actress you heard yesterday has done beautiful things and you’re being pigheaded about the whole thing. Indeed, you may be pigheaded, and you should be. Your vision of the film is what counts, and your need to have the right actor or actress is terribly important. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that you will find one, but it should be your decision to compromise, not someone else’s. (Of course, they are paying the bills and you may have to sleep on that decision a little.)

  “What happens in the end is that you, the producer, and the casting consultant will come up with a tentative list of those you want for your film. Some of them will have sounded fantastic, others will be ifs that you think will work. Take time to think about the list before giving your approval. If you have doubts, talk them over with someone (if you’re still talking to anyone). When you’ve decided, the producer will try to make deals with the agents and then, if you’re lucky, you’ll have your cast. If you’re unlucky or someone is too greedy, you may have to go back and cast one or more parts anew.

  All of us want to know if the actors we’ve chosen can truly deliver. If you’ve come up with a cast list of well-known actors whose work you’ve seen, then that won’t be much of a problem. If, on the other hand, you’ve taken someone else’s word for the acting ability of one or more of them, you may have a few tremors in the stomach during the next few days. And if, as sometimes happens, you’ve gone for a completely unknown cast, who made you feel very excited while you were casting, but very nervous when you were away from the reading, you will have to find some way of coming to terms with that uneasiness. Rudolph Serkin, perhaps the world’s greatest interpreter of Brahms piano concertos, was asked on his seventy-fifth birthday whether he ever still got stage fright when he went out to play. His answer was that he always got stage fright and he wouldn’t trust a performer who didn’t! I feel somewhat the same about all stages of film directing.

  Certainty at all times is probably suspicious. At the same time, constant doubt and anxiety aren’t very productive either. Talk over your doubts with people, like the producer and the casting director. Go back over your notes (you did take notes, didn’t you?) and see what it was that made you so excited about this or that actor at the time. If it’s a nonunion production, go talk to your actor on some pretense or other—such as a discussion of character or dialect—to reassure yourself that you’ve done the right thing. (You can also do that if it’s a union production, but money may get involved; “rehearsal” isn’t free.) I can’t give you any suggestions how to handle things if you want to get out of a signed deal, but if you haven’t signed and you have grave second thoughts, tell the actor or actress that you’re rebalancing the cast and want to replace him or her. It’s not nice; it’s not even ethical, but it is necessary if your film is to be the way you want it. On the other hand, if you find yourself doing this sort of thing often, then you ought to examine (a) your judgment, or (b) your behavior.

  Casting is crucial. I said that at the beginning. It’s crucial because your actors and actresses are the vehicles for getting your picture across to the audience. It’s crucial because it is in the casting that we create a sense of reality or unreality. It’s crucial because casting can give the twist that we need. It’s crucial because the right actors will often do three-quarters of the work that needs to be done. They will see things in the lines that you and I will never have seen, or they will make our dreams come true because of their extraordinary ability. Anyone who has even once chosen a less-than-perfect actor for a part will know what I am talking about. Which is not to say that directing is all casting; there is more to it than that, but it’s a huge part of it.

  When you see a film in which casting has been imaginatively done, you come out believing in the mood, the style, the realness of it: a short, ugly man plays a leading character; a woman with blazing red hair plays the ingenue; a Brooklyn accent shows up in the middle of a Midwestern scene; unknown faces and unknown voices show up in a crime movie, making it seem like a documentary; actors move rhythmically, because they’ve been chosen for their ability to move; a man and woman are identical heights, making it easy to believe in their “twinness”; a midget plays a role written for a full-size person, bringing a quality of originality to the film that could never have been achieved with other casting. We have all seen films that worked because of that casting skill.

  And, on the other hand, we’ve seen films ruined by casting: Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, intent on proving its patriotism or its ability to rouse us from our doldrums, plugged into each film its “stable” of “contract players,” giving us one pretty face or one rugged, handsome physique after another, but not the originality that European films of the 1950s and American films of the 1970s began to achieve.

  4

  GETTING READY (I): LOOK, STYLE, AND MOOD

  This could have been called the “look, style, mood, feel, emotion, and content” chapter. In some ways it’s the most important part of this book. It’s about how you’re going to shoot the film—the actual shots you’re going to use, the way you’re going to translate the script into image. It’s difficult to talk about these matters in a general way, so let’s try to be specific: where you will shoot the film to give it the right look; how you will plan shots so they will accomplish your goals of mood and style; what you will do to achieve the effect you’ve decided upon; when you will bring in other members of the team for consultation; what you should do when you’re stumped; and, finally, how and when you should improvise. These are thorny but crucial matters.

  In one sense, this process starts the day you decide to do your film at all, even while you read the script. It continues through the precasting period, and on into every successive day. Bruce Beresford, director of Breaker Morant and Tender Mercies, was once quoted as saying that too many directors simply photograph a film rather than direct it. What he meant by this is that they simply place the actors in front of the camera, rather than planning each shot so that it is superbly right for the film and the moment. He talks about doing a drawing of every shot in the entire movie, and researching carefully. “I have to find my locations first. I can’t go somewhere and start shooting. It doesn’t work. I find the locations, work with the production designers, and get plans of all the rooms so I know where all the windows and doors are. Then I work out every camera angle for the entire film.” What a director says in print when he’s publicizing a film may or may not be an accurate reflection of his true beliefs and his true behavior, but this statement rings true to me and, with one exception, I find it an incisive description of a very important process that all directors need to go through. The exception is that Beresford, for me, places too much emphasis on the groupings, the lenses, and the framing of the shots and not enough on script, actors, and directorial efforts apart from the camera work. A few examples will help
explain what I mean, though they will push me out onto that strange limb called “taste.”

  Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman’s 1983 film, utilizes the director’s great cinematographer, Sven Nyquist, and Bergman’s own impeccable sense of taste to create great framing. In the film there are scenes with absolutely unbelievable opulence (a Christmas dinner and a christening scene) and others with the utmost simplicity and purity. I found it difficult to keep my mind always on the story because the visual side of the film was so perfect. At the same time, the power of the story and the shimmer of the acting brought me back to the film, as it told its kind of grown-up fairy tale. I do not think I would have felt that way if it had been a film that was only well shot.

  A perfect example of the latter, I think, was James and Stacy Keach’s The Long Riders, a film brilliantly photographed, directed by Walter Hill. This retelling of the Jesse James myth had some of the most marvelous cinematography, some of the most brilliant shots I’ve seen. Framing and lighting were magnificent, but the story itself was banal, the acting oppressive, the film, in the end, a boring failure. And yet let’s take another Bergman film, Scenes from a Marriage. This low-budget miniseries, shot for Swedish television, is basically without exceptional framing or lighting. The images are good but by no means great. Yet the story and the acting, brought out by Bergman, make this an unforgettable film. So, too, Steven’s Soderbergh’s first film, Sex, Lies, and Videotapes, was shot with the most minimal use of camerawork, yet his fine sense of story, dialogue, suspense, and acting, created a wonderful film. So—for me—story before picture. Always!

  Yet I can agree with Beresford that how a director sees his film and how he translates that vision to individual frames of celluloid is of great importance. I said “individual” frames of film and I mean that. As you probably know, there are 24 such frames in every second of film, and 1440 frames in every minute. In a very real sense, then, there are 24 still photographs to be framed and shot every second, and 1440 every minute. To consider only how a whole shot or scene looks ignores all the nuances of the frames in between.

  The real-life house has a whole tree, a long path, and mountains in the background. On screen, the “frame” reduces path, tree, and mountains to “partials.” Putting a frame around reality changes that reality for the viewer, forever.

  This is especially important when one considers how a film is edited. You may think a shot should be cut at a certain point and another shot spliced on. Your editor, on the other hand, may think that the timing or rhythm of the scene requires that a cut be made a fraction of a minute earlier or later. What does the frame look like at that point? And, here, it is in fact the frame we are talking about, because the film editor has stopped the film from running at the rate of 24 frames per second, and is looking at it frame by frame. Are they all composed equally well? Not if you haven’t given consideration to each of those thousands of frames when you were shooting. Since every shot involves movement of actors or movement of camera (pans or tilts, truckings forward or sideward), you may have to give consideration to dozens of separately composed frames within each shot in order to come out with shots or with a scene that is properly framed. It’s like considering the composition of a whole series of still photos, not of one continuous, moving shot.

  Now to some this may seem like a great deal of farfetched nonsense, but it has actually proven to be a very exciting and important concept. It means that as an actor moves toward or away from camera, or as the trees pass the camera on a tracking shot, if you think frames you won’t be sandbagged by the misframing of any individual instant. And when you and the editor are struggling over a cut in the post-production period, you will at least have given him or her a whole series of wonderfully composed frames from which to make any single edit. That, to some extent, was what Beresford was talking about.

  THE LOOK

  If you’re a director, the first thing that will happen to you when you start to read a script is to have fantasies about how the film will look when you start making it. If this doesn’t happen to you, prod your subconscious a bit by closing your eyes and formulating a setting. The lines and the stage directions will take on a new meaning; you should begin to actually see the shots and the characters in them. How do they look? A lot of wide shots, showing countryside and large rooms? Or close shots, very dark, with lots of “eyelight”? This “look” will vary from film to film, sometimes subtly, sometimes grossly. (It doesn’t matter whether your “film” is a drama, a comedy, an educational short, or an industrial; everything has a look, and that look should be planned.) If this isn’t something you’ve ever done before, you may very well wonder how to actually see scenes and shots in a frame, as opposed to the way we normally view: through two eyes. Akira Kurosawa, the late great Japanese director, painted every shot of his films ahead of time and had actually exhibited those paintings, but you may not have an artist’s eye or an artist’s hand. If not, try a still camera.

  Beginning students in filmmaking have often been required to study still photography, which makes a lot of sense. To me, the beauty of using a still camera is that it makes you look at a single frame, not simply as one piece of a moving shot, but as an artistic entity to be considered all by itself. Besides, it’s a great deal of fun. To cut down the cost, and to concentrate on the essential elements of framing, minus the bogus influence of color, do black-and-white photography only.

  Take your time; no one is looking over your shoulder. Use a sophisticated camera or a Polaroid, it makes no difference which. You will suddenly notice, as you take stills, that a tree branch coming into the top of the frame (see the drawings on the previous page) can be a contributive force to the frame, or it can be a distracting one. You will notice the interplay between light and dark, between negative space and positive space. And all of it will be frozen on paper to study and to change as you see fit. You can take stills to suit your mental image or create a mental image with stills, then remind yourself of those images later. All the while you will use the stills to help you continue your preparation for your film.

  The tree branch and leaves help make this an interesting frame.

  Some might think this branch interferes with the shot. I think it helps make a very interesting and unusual shot.

  Three people, when spaced like this, help balance the frame.

  The tree and the person overlap and unbalance the frame. With the wrong lens, the tree would actually look like it’s growing out of the person’s body.

  But, of course, your frames aren’t all static like a still photograph. Actors move, and so do movie cameras, which brings us to an important element in this area of discussion. To Move or Not To Move. There are those who say that moving without purpose is a travesty of the whole film process, that it distracts the audience from the story and from the essence of film: the characters’ interaction with each other. But since many filmmakers (especially in the Italian school of filmmaking—Antonioni, Bertolucci, Visconti) made movement an integral part of the look of their films—so much so that one cannot imagine a film by them without movement—a great deal more has to be said about movement. I am assuming that the concepts of montage and mise-en-scène are meaningful to you. In case they are not, a word or two is in order.

  Montage and Mise-En-Scène

  Montage? That’s the basic technique of cutting between shots of various actors and objects. Classically, a director would shoot his scene first in a wide shot, taking in the whole set, or a large piece of it, and most of the characters. This is followed by a medium shot, then a three-shot or two-shot of some of the actors, then singles (close-ups), then (sometimes) extreme close-ups (ECUs). Usually you match close-up for close-up, or vary the shooting with over-the-shoulder shots (part of the back of one actor and the full face of another) that are also usually matched (that is, you shoot two over-the-shoulder shots, not just one.) In current filmmaking, especially television, practices concerning size and variety of shots have changed. Very often the wi
de shot (sometimes called the “master”) is not used and is traded for closer shots early on, or for some kind of moving shot: a pan, a dolly, a tracking shot from one part of the set to another. There will be much more about the technical side of shots in chapter 8, but, basically, the concept of montage implies that you will shoot a variety of nonmoving shots, and the pacing and timing of a scene will be altered, its impact will be changed, by editing from one shot to another.

  Mise-en-scène, on the other hand, is both a conceptual way of looking at film and a way of shooting it. Without knowing it, you will have seen this technique on many television shows and in many movies. Once the steadicam came into use—a device that allows very steady handheld shots—programs like ER and West Wing incorporated long, complex, winding shots into their work, following people who move around and around a room from a variety of seemingly endless angles. So mise-en-scène is the use of the camera so as to constantly place the actors and the setting in a flexible relationship to each other by moving the camera and the actors, not by cutting from one actor or group of actors to another. The effect of this use of the camera is often called “fluid,” precisely because of the small number of cuts and the continuous camera movement.

  For example, a camera tracks from one room to another, “carrying” (that is, staying with) one actor, who leaves the frame as another actor, coming from the opposite direction, passes the first; the camera then reverses direction and follows the second actor into another room where, in a mirror, we confront the second actor and his character’s wife, who have an argument. The camera pushes in on the wife in the mirror, and we now dissolve to a shot of the same actress fully dressed at a dinner table. The camera moves from actor to actor along the dinner table, with each actor talking to the one next to him or her, thus “passing” the camera along from actor to actor. Obviously, this use of the camera requires a vision that goes along with it. It also requires a great deal of rehearsal time, because the pace, the timing, the impact of the scene must be built into the movement. In other words, since mise-en-scène is built along the notion that a scene will be carried in one long, fluid shot, there is no way for the editor to make pacing and timing changes later on.