Directing for Film and Television

by Christopher Lukas

  Talk it over with your continuity person. He or she will have not only made a notation as to how fast a scene ran but will have a very good idea whether your pace is being maintained, because of all people on the set, the continuity person will have been listening very carefully. Second, talk it over with the mixer, who also has been listening and will have an idea how the pace of this close-up matches the pace of yesterday’s medium shot. Third, ask your D.P. Because of watching each scene carefully, he or she may have a notion of the pace. Finally, and only as a last resort, ask your actors. The reason you don’t want to discuss pace with them, is that this brings the scene down to a rather technical matter. You want them to act on many levels. To be conscious of speed alone is to reduce the scene to a level that may harm the way it plays.

  But, above all, keep in mind that pace is one of the ways that a movie progresses from scene to scene. Be prepared.

  The point of this chapter is that all crises should be expected, no matter how bizarre. After all, Murphy’s Law states that “If something can go wrong, it will.” How much better to be prepared and have everything go right, than to be unprepared and have something go wrong. There is no god of film who guarantees you a smooth shoot. Your preparedness is your own responsibility.

  14There’s more about handling extras in chapter 8.

  8

  The Shoot

  You wake up early and know that today is quite different from all the other days you’ve awakened early. Yesterday, you spent four hours reading through the script with the actors. They sounded okay. Today, you start shooting. What’s it going to be like? What will the succeeding days be like? In this chapter, I try to describe the character of that first shooting day, and also some of the things to look out for as the production progresses. If I miss some of them, it’s because each project is different from the last; each script, each team brings its own joys, and its own problems.

  You feel butterflies in your stomach. You’ve arrived on the set early—6:00 A.M.—because you think something may be going on that needs your attention, but when you get there the donuts and coffee are just being set out and the Teamsters (drivers) are clustered around the table. Nothing else seems to be happening. The producer smiles at you and you smile back, but he or she has other things to do and disappears through a side door. The D.P. arrives. You’ve already agreed on the first shot, and the D.P. goes about directing lights and telling the grip where to put the dolly track.

  TIME OUT

  What did you tell the A.D. about your first shot? What did you pick? In general, the first shot on any shoot should be a simple one. Since, almost without exception, it takes twice as long to get a shot at the beginning of the day as it does at the end of the day, you should pick a shot on the first day that is even easier than most first shots. But the shot shouldn’t be an unimportant one. You want, in other words, to convince the cast and crew that you can accomplish something important right off the bat, but you also want to make sure that it’s accomplished easily and speedily. This is a show of bravura on your part, a clever move to illustrate your capability; it also allows the actors and crew a chance to start slowly. You already know that you won’t be shooting anything in sequence, because most scenes are shot in the order that makes sense for the logistics of the production, so don’t pick a scene to begin with that requires a great deal of emotional preparation from the previous scene; your actors won’t have anything to base their performance upon. Choose the first shot in a scene, something with a medium tone to it—not high comedy, not intense drama. You notice that I assume you will be able to pick the scene. Technically, your P.M. or A.D. will have chosen shots for every day of the shoot, but you will get a chance to go over the board with them, making suggestions in those areas that bother you.

  TIME IN

  On this first day of the shoot, be aware that all your actors are experiencing some of the same butterflies as you; even your crew may have some problems. I like to think that every time I start a new production I’m going to remember this, and I’m going to make a nice little speech to my crew before we begin. In practice, this never seems to happen, mainly because each member is off doing what he or she is supposed to be doing. But, oh, the first setup drags on and on. Lights have to be pulled over or off the truck; the dolly has a leak in its hydraulic system; a costume is too bright and has to be changed. (Of course, much of this could have been foreseen and forestalled, but often isn’t.) The result of these delays is not only that you’re behind schedule before you start, but that you and your actors are tense. Finally, the “first team” (the actors, as opposed to stand-ins) is called. Lights are adjusted for the fifth time, and a camera rehearsal is begun. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t look or sound right, which is why the simplest possible shot should be selected for first—the simpler the shot, the fewer the changes necessary to get it right. An actor’s voice has taken on a hard edge from waiting around; you can’t see the clock you placed behind the actors, even though you need it to be visible. Things like that.

  Even though I didn’t make a big deal about losing your TV monitor a few pages back, that doesn’t mean it isn’t crucial to check shots through the camera. Even with video assist on a film shoot, things look differently when you peek through the lens itself. It’s very important not to let your D.P. intimidate you. He or she may be the lighting/camera expert, but the shot has to match your vision—now and later. Check the shot through the eyepiece, lens, or video monitor. How else did you know that that clock wasn’t visible?

  So, you have this little problem before you can get the first shot “in the can,” but because it’s a simple shot, an easy scene, you make the changes, and you shoot. By God, it’s happened. You like it, and you make one or more takes to make sure and then go on to the next scene or shot. If you can let it go at one take, do so. It makes you look like a genius.

  But there is the serious question of how many takes a person needs.

  There is, for instance, the wonderful, though possibly apocryphal, story about John Ford when he was directing one of those great Welsh classics—How Green Was My Valley—with a huge cast on location in Wales. Down the hill from the coal mine comes the cast of thousands, with Walter Pidgeon in the lead, singing with their great Welsh voices. They are on strike, and the scene is a great moment in the story. After Take 1, Ford talks to the camera people (who were using two cameras to catch the whole panorama) and both acknowledge they have caught the scene. On to the next shot, says the director. Pidgeon is dumbfounded. “Aren’t you going to take another?” he asks. “Was anything wrong?” queries the director, feigning horror. When the actor says he thought one always took another shot for “safety’s” sake, Ford simply stalks off. Whether or not this story is true, the point is, making another take should be done for a purpose, whether that purpose is “safety”—whatever that means—or because you have something specific in mind that needs to be changed or improved. Just shooting take after take because you hope something will happen is not only fruitless, it’s a waste of precious time when you could be doing something important.

  After each day’s first shot, there is a tendency to slow down again, especially if it has taken a while to shoot. Since the pressure will be put on you when things are rushed at the end of the day, or when you run out of shooting time because of a rainstorm, it’s in your interest to have made a deal with the A.D. before shooting starts. Say that you are perfectly willing to give the crew breathing time after lunch, but that you want pressure put on them in the early morning shots. You know that that’s when things are slow, and you want to pick up time before lunch. The A.D., who has his or her own pressure from the producer, will be delighted to find a director who understands the financial pressures of the business. What you don’t tell the A.D. is that it’s not financial pressure but aesthetic perfection you’re looking for, and keeping things moving in the first two hours is one way to have breathing space to achieve that kind of perfection later on.

  The day
goes on. As it proceeds, the actors who have been called for that day’s shoot begin to find their voices and their pace. The crew begins to find theirs. And, believe it or not, you begin to find yours. There should, in point of fact, be a great relief, a great surge of pleasure—assuming it’s a good first day—at getting out from under that preproduction period. Things that go right on the first day have a feeling about them of perfection. Your afternoon won’t be interrupted with anyone from the producer’s office having seen the dailies, so you won’t have that anxiety. You will consult with the P.M. at some point about tomorrow’s scenes; a “call sheet” will come around about 4:30, with everything that’s going to happen. And you will begin to feel that it all can be handled. By the end of the first day, you will have had enough shots in enough scenes so that a pace for those scenes has been established. So, too, a “tone.” So, too, your look. You won’t have seen it on film—only through the camera and in your mind’s eye—but it’s there nonetheless.

  If you’re shooting video, you will be able to reinforce your good feelings with something tangible after each take and, with film, as the days go by, you will have a chance to see the material in a screening room, and have an opportunity to match it against your vision. Don’t lose that opportunity. Even if you have video assist on a film shoot (and most of us can’t afford it), you will want to avail yourself of the dailies. Looking at the film on a big screen a day or more after you’ve shot it can be revelatory.

  If you’re on location, they will fly the film from the laboratory to a makeshift screening room so you, the D.P., and others can look at it. It may come a couple of days after you’ve shot it, so meanwhile confer on the phone with the editor or the producer. Ask if a special scene had the kind of light you wanted. Answer the producer’s questions if he or she is unhappy. (Sometimes the producer is on location, sometimes not; it depends on the nature of your relationship, the kind of show, how many days you’re going to be on location, and so forth. Often, the P.M. stands in for the producer. Sometimes an associate producer does.) When the scenes come on the screen, don’t be surprised if the laboratory hasn’t gotten the “timing” or the color right. A moody scene may have been “printed up” so that you could see everything sharply. A bright comedy scene may have been “printed down” because they misunderstood the instructions. Don’t worry. Everything (or nearly everything) can be corrected later. Listen carefully for sound problems. Watch the size of close-ups. All these things can be corrected in future days’ shooting.

  If you don’t get a chance to see dailies, as you may not if you’re on the studio set and they screen during the day, ask if you can have a projectionist stay overtime the first night they’re available. If not, spend some time with the producer; get his or her true feelings. Don’t be defensive. Learn from what they think is wrong, and what they think is right. Of course, the first couple of days’ shoot may be indecisive; crucial scenes may come later. But keep all your senses alert to things; keep pushing toward the vision you have.

  EXTRAS

  “We’ve said nothing about all those people who hover at the edges and in the background of scenes. They’re your responsibility, too, those “extras.” The first A.D. is given the assignment of handling “background business,” which is fine as long as all you’re interested in is “business,” the coming and going of people without any special quality to it. (“Keep busy, extras,” I’ve heard an A.D. say.) What is the quality you want? What kind of character do your extras have? If they’re just background, that is, literally nondescript figures moving to and fro, then let your skilled A.D. handle their movements. (“You two come in from here; you from here; you from there. Wait for him, then you, then you, and finally get that car in here. Don’t hurry. Make it a slow pace.”) But if their actions and reactions are crucial to how the scene plays (imagine a film about Hitler at Nuremberg, for example), you’ve got to be prepared to stand up there and tell them what the film is about and what you want them to do. You see, they won’t have read the script! They may not even know what the film is about on the most general level. They’ve been hired for the day (or for days one, two, and four) and given a costume and some makeup (maybe) and told to stand “there” until called. Give them a break. Clue them in.

  SOUND

  We have dealt very little with audio and sound problems in this book thus far, and that is indicative of the approach of most filmmakers—to worry over picture, script, and cast. On the other hand, if you have done your best to make sure that the actors are cast for character in their voices as well as their faces, if you have rehearsed them and listened to nuances in their reading, then you will want the sound quality to be good, right? Then you have to know more than a little about some of the technical matters that can make for good—or bad—sound.

  Let’s start with the film versus video problem. If your production is double-system film (that is, the image is on film and the sound is on quarter-inch magnetic tape recorded on a Nagra), then you will have a good deal of control over it when you are in postproduction: editing, mixing, dubbing, and so forth. Each piece of tape is cuttable at the same place as the picture—or separately; and several sound tracks can be created to give you control over nuance, level, and variety of sounds. You can have a voice on one track, sound effects on another, music on a third, and so on. You can have your picture cut and then remove a few frames of it, simultaneously cutting out a few frames of sound in all three tracks or on only one track. Similarly, if you choose to leave the picture the way it is, but replace the cough that is in track one with a piece of sound track of a door closing, that is a fairly simple matter—a literal cutting of the tape with a “guillotine” splicer.

  Not so with video. Even though the introduction of digital recording, and editing tools such as AVID and Media 100 have made the job of editing both picture and sound a hundred times more facile (see chapter 9 and chapter 10), and even though audio labs can do miracles with video sound, the expense and time required to solve audio problems on video is far beyond most low-budget operations. So if you’re shooting video, make trebly sure you’re aware of audio problems before they’re recorded.

  What are the effects of these things that a director needs to know about? First of all, there is background noise. If, during a take, a cough occurs between two words, in film it is a fairly simple matter to eliminate the cough and replace the empty space on another track, with “room tone” (the noise that is heard in an empty room or outdoors—crickets, traffic, the buzz of a light bulb, and so on—when “nothing” is happening). When this occurs in videotape, it requires a fairly complicated kind of editing; one cannot ever totally, accurately, fill in the space left by the eliminated cough. This means that a director has to be very responsive if an audio person cries “Halt!” If it turns out there’s a real sound problem, you had better do another take, because postproduction manipulation may be very difficult. This is especially true on low-budget productions, where sound rerecording and elimination of “glitches” is almost impossible. In film, even the most elementary editor can cut out a sound problem and keep the tape in synch with the picture. In video, it takes both expertise and high-tech equipment to do so. So, when recording sound on videotape, you must take some simple preventive measures, such as doing retakes when any problematical sound arises.

  Second, there is the question of postproduction. The individual film sound track can be “equalized” in a “mix.” That is, an excessively bass or treble voice, or one with too much background hum can be individually tuned during the final mix of sound tracks, and new sounds can be added (a door closing, a telephone ringing, and so on). So can music. Add another track, put it in synch, “sweeten” the sound track, and there you have it. On the other hand, videotape-editing consoles are organized around video problems, not around audio ones. Editing rooms have computers and consoles to take care of the picture (changing colors, enhancing video, and so forth) but only rudimentary ones to handle audio. Differences between media aside,
what will you listen for, now that you’ve established yourself as someone concerned with sound?

  Perspective. This is a common problem. You’ve taken a wide shot of a duel in a glen, outdoors. The sound, because the microphone couldn’t get in the picture, is nice and airy, giving the sense of distance. On the other hand, you’re getting a lot of birds and airplanes because the microphone is so far away from the actors. The sound man is perfectly ready and willing to put RF (radio frequency) microphones on the actors to get their voices close up. Do you want to do that? Shouldn’t the actors have a sense of distance from the camera? Sure, but what happens in editing when you cut back and forth between wide and close shots? Do you want the sound to change? Get softer and louder? Get “airier,” with more perspective in it? Probably. But you don’t want it to have more airplanes and birds in it. All this not only requires that you be sensitive to sound perspective, but have some idea how you want to handle the problem in concert with your audio person, of course.

  The solution to the problem above? You’re probably better off getting a “close” perspective with an RF and then planning to “cut over” (that is, use two different tracks) when editing and mixing, with wide shot sound on one track, close shots on another. Then, you can equalize them for distance without adding birds and airplanes at the same time.

  Different Takes. It often happens that you’ve changed the action or the lights between Take 3 and Take 17. Or, with a microphone shadow in Take 3, you decided to have the mike held higher, so by Take 17 there is a different kind of sound from your actors from what there was in the earlier takes. This is a common problem. As long as you’re sensitive to it, it can probably be handled very nicely during the mix. On the other hand, if you have a very soft-spoken actor or actress and you’ve asked him or her to speak louder for the latter take, you may have trouble cutting between one line on Take 3 and another line on Take 17, without it sounding as if a deaf person had just entered the room. Be aware of it.