Let’s take another tack. When you go to a museum and see paintings by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and other members of the Dutch school, are you struck by the extraordinary directionality of light and by its almost magical quality? Some filmmakers, especially from France and Italy, have taken advantage of that quality for their films, but many American directors and D.P.s have not. I wonder why. It seems to me that the way in which light can come at us from a wide variety of directions, how it looks in fog or mist, what happens when it’s bright outside and dim inside, and a multitude of other variations are opportunities to alter the look of your film in a way that can add to the quality of the script, the acting, the entire production. (See a few examples of the way light varies on the next three pages.) I have never forgotten the first time I saw Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (in the 1960s) nor Bertolucci’s marvelous The Conformist (reissued in 2000 in an expanded version). In both cases, it was light that I remembered. One film was shot in black-and-white, the other in color, so it was not the color that impressed itself on me, it was the light. Use it wisely and the benefits can be exceptional.
Make notes to yourself that you can discuss with the D.P. when you get around to it. If you’ve experimented with lighting—by your–self, in film school, or in other films—you already realize how intricate and detailed such work can be. You also know that most modern D.P.s will not use natural sunlight but prefer something called the Halogen Mercury Incandescent (HMI), a wonderful invention that puts out the hot (blue) light of sunlight at a fraction of the heat of earlier “arc” lights. Why don’t D.P.s like sunlight? Because of clouds, and because the sun moves. If you are shooting all day long outdoors, and the scene has to be lit from a certain position, then errant clouds may cover your key light, or the movement of the sun will mean that what was “backlight” is now front light, ruining the lighting continuity of your close-ups, wide shots, and mid-shots. Of course, if you can shoot the entire scene in a half hour, then you won’t need to lug cable and two or three HMIs out with you, but that’s pretty quick shooting.
Light can vary in quality, direction, and intensity. Here are three possible variations. Here, the intensity of the light is low and, because it’s sundown, the quality of the light is very even and diffused.
I go into all of this not to scare you away from your ideas on lighting, but to get you to formulate them carefully enough so that you and your D.P. can plan for them in advance and get the right lighting equipment ordered. For instance, if you are shooting indoors and you want strong, bright sunlight to come pouring through the windows, let your D.P. know. If, on the other hand, everything can be lit from unobtrusive “practicals” (the real lamps in a room), that changes the entire look of your film and the way it has to be lit. Like everything else in directing, the more you decide in advance, the more flexible you can be. That sounds like a contradiction in terms, but in fact, giving warning to your team about what you want to do means that when you do change your mind on the set, you will not be looked at as if you had ruined everyone’s lunch (“He’s changed his mind again!”).
TWO FINAL NOTES ABOUT LOOK
One You will want to establish a “point of view.” To some extent, this has been predetermined by the script. It’s seen from so-and-so’s point of view. But what does this mean filmically? Will you, for instance, go so far as to do what was done in the classic Lady of the Lake, directed by Robert Montgomery, where the camera was the protagonist, or at least took the view of Marlowe, the detective protagonist, taking blows from a criminal’s fist, tilting down to see its own feet, and so on? Or will you take an “objective point of view,” with the camera standing back and viewing everyone the same way? Going beyond that, will your shots take into account objects and settings, or will they stay strictly with humans? Can the camera show the outside of a building if the narrator of the film, or even the central character, is not present? When a couple is wed, from whose point of view will you show the two hands and the ring: from that of the groom? The bride? Or the priest? These things will make a very important difference.
Here, a sharp unidirectional source creates quite a different feeling.
Deep in the woods, on a hot day, a small pond provides cool relief. The sunlight filtering down into the woods clearly states heat, and the shadows and bright spots create a sense of mystery.
Two How large will your shots be? Is a close-up, to you, full face, or face and neck? Is an ECU the two eyes, eyes and nose, or what? Is a medium shot down to the waist, or is it chest height?
The impact of your film or videotape will be determined by all these variables. Taken together, they define the look of your film; how and when you envision them and carry them out will be crucial to the aesthetic effect of the story you are telling.
If you are on a producer’s staff or the other members of your team have already been hired, you will want to start conveying some of your ideas for the look to the D.P. and the art director as soon as possible. You will certainly have formulated an idea about whether you want to shoot this film on location or on the studio set or a combination of both (see chapter 6), because your visions of the look will have dictated what kind of place fits the film. Talk over these ideas with the D.P. Can he or she accomplish what you have in mind inside the studio, or does it demand the location in southern France that you visited last year?
A film student of mine wanted to do a short video project. He picked the basement tunnel underneath the administration building of our college. There, in a dirty, noisy space, with pipes and cable running here and there, he figured his World War II scene would have a sense of realism. The problem was, he wanted to use a dolly for the scene, and the floor of this tunnel was much too bumpy for that. In addition, he hadn’t taken into account the problems he would have with sound. On the other hand, all other locations were too banal, too clean, too square for the war-torn scene he had in mind. In the end, he decided to shoot in the tunnel, compromising by using a smoother portion, farther from the steam valves, with ample headroom for the lights. It was a compromise that didn’t hurt his film; by discussing it in advance with me (the titular producer for the piece), his D.P., and his sound person, he saved himself all sorts of problems during the shoot and the edit.
STYLE AND MOOD
Molière or Odets? Shakespeare or Beckett? Realistic or Impressionistic? This is a matter of style, and it is a decision quickly made, but often erroneously. Comedy is perhaps the most difficult kind of film to direct, because every actor and every set designer has his or her own idea of what it is. Doubly difficult is contemporary comedy, where the settings and the environment give audiences reason to believe that this is a realistic movie. The lines, however, and the plot, may lead us to another conclusion. How should the actors play it? “With a belief in the outcome, but in the grand manner (high comedy)? Or with no belief whatsoever in the result (farce)? You must decide this early on, for it will be important that set and costume designers know which you have in mind, and the actors, of course, must all play in the same style.
As I suggested earlier, the mood of a film is established not by lights or by settings alone, but by the plot and the way you direct the actors. Does a female character step in and say, without any fuss, “Sir, Mr. Marlow is here,” or does she say it with a whisper, slyly? Or does she say it with her face in the shadows? Or does she, finally, say it with a shriek? How do you want your audience to take the film: as a realistic, contemporary story? As a mystery? As an allegory? As a comedy?
All this has to do with the mood of the film (others may give it a different name—no matter), and all this requires a great deal of thought as to what you want and how to achieve it. When the film opens with a panoramic sweep of the countryside, birds twittering, sun shining, and comes to rest on the corpse of a man, his body strangely mutilated, we are establishing one kind of mood. If the same pan found a couple on a bed, making love, with the bed in the middle of a stream, we have obviously established another, less serious, mood. The same
shot, ending with a wide shot of a house, quietly sitting in the middle of a clearing, smoke curling out of its chimney, but not a thing stirring, may well establish yet a third mood, not one of chilling surrealism, not one of comedy, but one of neutral expectation, for a still house, with nothing stirring in the middle of the day, should give us a little sense of suspense.
Your perception of the film’s message, of the script’s dialogue, and of the import of the film, all will play a role in making you think about how the audience is to receive it and, therefore, how the actors are to play it. This is the time to think about that, and to think about all the settings and trappings that will help you convey it. Naturally, your choice of style will be one of the ways you do this, as will your use of lenses, light, color, and so forth. Most important, however, will be the way you instruct your actors to behave, the way they talk, the pace at which they move and speak, the lines of dialogue you keep and those you throw away. Here is an example.
The time is 1905. The setting is a little town in—well, the script doesn’t make it clear—it could be New England, it might be the Midwest. Two men are sitting on a porch, rocking (or at least that’s what it says in the original script). One turns to the other and says,
SAM
They’re coming today.
PHIL
Who says?
SAM
Frank saw them in town.
PHIL
What does he know?
The script is about a couple of women coming back to a small town and giving the men a shock by their big-city ways. Is it a serious commentary on feminism? Is it a light comedy? Is it a quasi-serious tract on how far we haven’t come? Or is it a gentle story of how a woman in the early part of this century can be both a loving helpmeet and a liberated woman? Once you’ve decided that (based on the writer’s intentions), you will have to decide a number of things about those first four lines of dialogue. For instance, will they be spoken with a dialect? What dialect will it be? How strong will it be? A Southern accent will tell us one thing, a Vermont twang another, and a Midwestern drawl yet another. Will they really rock, giving us a comedic twist to the beginning? Will they, as in many television sitcoms, snarl their lines or, as in Pinter, merely say them? Look two or three times at the lines and try reading them in a variety of ways, to convey the different parts of the country or the different moods you want to establish right at the beginning of your film.
Once the acting approach and the pace have been established, you will have to match them with the lighting, lenses, shots, and other visual choices you have made. Is this the house we panned to in my earlier paragraph? Or do we open on voices coming from a part of the set that we can’t see, while our camera lovingly tracks past photographs and other memorabilia of the woman who is about to return from the big city? You can see that there are a million choices, and that any two of them make your audience react differently from any other two. Try thinking of how some of the famous directors you know about might do such an opening. Fellini, Coppola, Mike Figgis, Jim Jarmusch, Ridley Scott, Spike Lee. If you’ve seen films by those directors, you will see right away that there is something in the personal style of those directors that would probably dictate how they would open any film, yet there is something so creative about the same men that that mood would be different from the mood of any other film. Your choices will make the difference, not only at the beginning of the film, but all the way through it.
EMOTION AND CONTENT
Up to now, in preparation for your film, we have been concentrating on translating a particular look and feel about a script onto the screen. This has involved some technical matters and some purely aesthetic ones. What we are now going to discuss involves something a good deal more intricate: the decisions you will make about how to translate a particular line of dialogue or a particular emotion onto the screen. Much of this is a matter of trial and error, but some general hints can be given—or at least some general areas of choice you must make.
One. Is your story to be told in a straightforward manner or do you wish to use symbols? This depends, of course, to a large part on your script, but since the director has an opportunity to change script, you can add or subtract such things. Once again, we can call upon Ingmar Bergman for our discussion. In The Seventh Seal, light is used to symbolize the struggle between Death and the Knight who has just returned from the Crusades. Anyone seeing the film is immediately struck by the dark shadows that surround Death, and the halo of light that surrounds the juggler and his wife, symbols of virtue. In Bergman’s hands the symbolic use of light (and of the chess game between Death and the Knight) is powerful. In another director’s hands, such symbolism might be clumsy.
A less well-known film provides another example of the use of symbolism. Ways of the Night opens with a deer being killed. It is 1944. The German soldiers who have killed it discuss whether killing is a good or a bad thing per se, or whether the way in which one kills is important. Such a discussion could have been carried on without the deer, which I found a little heavy-handed. The director must have felt it was a necessary precursor to the killing that would go on later in the film and that it set the scene for the whole movie: a pastoral setting into which brutality would come. This, then, is more than mood. It is a symbol that plays upon our intellectual and emotional beings.
Two Where should a scene take place? A writer may choose an open field or a barn, a bedroom or a dining room table. Where the scene takes place is very closely tied in with the emotion and content of that scene. Would you be better off taking the discussion on brutality in the aforementioned film out into the fields or into a cold, white room in a requisitioned chateau? Do you wish to “telegraph” your message or let it develop? Is a love scene played out on the tennis court (with lovers batting balls toward each other) a good love scene? Or should it be, more conventionally, played in the bedroom? Do you recall Tom Jones, where the lovers wooed each other across a table laden with food? I have no idea whether that was the writer’s original idea for a place to set the scene, or the director’s, but it was a marvelous choice. Do you want to establish a stressful situation? Place the characters in a factory or a work yard where the noise of the mechanical goings-on is pitched to their feelings about each other. Do you want to make the audience think that everything is peaceful? Place your characters against a herd of lowing sheep (but watch out for the sound problems!). A writer placed a scene about a character who is ruining people’s lives in the boardroom of a corporation. The director placed it, instead, in a hallway, with half a dozen doors opening to either side of the characters. At any moment, the image seemed to say, someone may come out of those doors. The danger of the scene was perfectly matched by the locality of the scene. These are but three possibilities for matching scene and locality among thousands of such choices. The message is: don’t let the locality of your scene be a haphazard or frivolous choice.
Three What is the color and light quality in a scene? Here, think “Ingmar Bergman,” for the color and quality of light in films such as Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander so perfectly match the emotion and content of the scripts that they fairly cry out their message without dialogue. But you don’t have to be a Bergman to use light and color to establish (a) the emotion and (b) the content of your scripts. You can do this as subtly or as openly as you wish. What is happening in a scene? Should this take place at night, with a little light filtering into the room through the open door or window? Should it take place in full daylight, with shadows on the walls from the hot sun, or, perhaps, in a room devoid of shadows? Is there an argument? Does this call for “angry” colors in the decor or lighting? Or is this too obvious? Are the characters depressed? What do you want in the room that calls attention to this? Or, conversely, do you want to play the dialogue outdoors in the fog to match emotions with the weather? Or, as a final possibility, to call attention to the fact that your character is at odds with nature, play it in a wooded glade with the birds singing and gentle lig
ht falling from a sun hidden by trees? Are there plants and flowers in the room in which a scene is played? Is the character in bed really sick or just pretending? The color of the flowers and the light that plays on them can give us a hint. (One doesn’t have to have the plant die as in Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial [1982] to do this effectively; there are subtler means.)
Your art director and your costume designer will play major roles in this kind of determination. What kinds of clothes and what color of clothes are the actors wearing? Is the light coming at them from behind, or in front? Does their dialogue tell us how complex the situation is, or do you need shadows from moving fans overhead to cross their faces, giving the impression that they are somehow caught up in a great big web that entangles their every move? Too obvious? Perhaps not. It’s your choice, of course.
Four What is the sound you choose for a scene? For some directors, this is something they choose not to think about until the scene is “in the can” and they are editing, but others want the scene to be shot with the appropriate sound built in. (In the days of silent films, string players serenaded actors during sentimental scenes so they would feel the right emotion.) Play a scene in a whisper and it’s quite different from one spoken at normal pitch. An argument spoken under hushed circumstances may convey a sense of anger much better than one that is shouted.
Directing for Film and Television Page 10