You, too, can give your director directing lessons.
Director David Lean not only asked screenwriter Robert Bolt to read his script of Lawrence of Arabia but also taped Bolt reading it. When shooting began each day, Lean listened to Bolt’s recording of that day’s scenes before he started shooting.
Directors can’t write.
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Cimino has written his own screenplay whose awfulness has been considerably inflated by the director’s [Mr. Cimino’s] wholly unwarranted respect for it.”
When will they ever learn?
Martin Brest directed the hit movie Beverly Hills Cop, written by Danilo Bach and Daniel Petrie, Jr. He then directed the hit movies Midnight Run, written by George Gallo, and Scent of a Woman, written by Bo Goldman.
And then he directed Gigli, which he also wrote. It was one of the biggest cinematic disasters in years.
Stay away from Michael Cimino.
Michael Cimino directed The Deer Hunter brilliantly. He didn’t write it. He won the Oscar for Best Director; the movie won for Best Picture.
Then he directed Heaven’s Gate. He wrote it. It became the greatest financial and critical disaster in film history.
Michael Cimino has directed many films since then. He has cowritten or written all of them. All of them have failed.
He is rewriting himself now. He is sometimes seen around Hollywood wearing dresses and a wig.
Renny Harlin’s writing advice …
Harlin (Cliffhanger, Exorcist: The Beginning): “I don’t want accidents, I want disasters. I don’t want dirt, I want filth. I don’t want a storm, I want a hurricane. I don’t want fear, I want panic. I don’t want suspense, I want terror. I don’t want humor, I want hysteria.”
Directors confuse psychodrama with drama.
Adrian Lyne, the director of Flashdance, tried to talk me into having Alex, the central character, be raped by her father at the age of eight.
Larry Peerce, the original director of Love Story, wanted Ryan O’Neal to be a returning Vietnam veteran suffering combat flashbacks.
No wonder he screwed up my script of Jade.
Billy Friedkin, to an interviewer in 1967: “The plotted film is on the way out and is no longer of interest to the serious director.”
Your director will hate you because you can write.
On July 18, 2003, Alessandra Stanley wrote this in The New York Times: “Mr. Affleck and Mr. Damon, who were themselves awkward newcomers when they won an Oscar for best screenplay for their first film, Good Will Hunting, sponsored a competition for thousands of unknown, inexperienced writers and directors, summoning the semifinalists to the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. Erica Beeney, 28, whose screenplay about a troubled teenager in Shaker Heights won first place, was teamed with Efram Potelle and Kyle Rankin, both 30, long-time friends and directing partners. … The two directors’ desire to exclude the reticent Ms. Beeney becomes increasingly obvious in each episode. By this Sunday, she had finally moved from wounded perplexity to sarcastic rage. ‘Do phones work?’ she finally barks at Mr. Potelle when she realizes that they have once again made last-minute changes behind her back. She bonds with the slick producers who report to Miramax and try to keep the directors’ inexperience and egotism in check.”
Writing is more difficult than directing.
Writer/director Elia Kazan: “Writing, in case you don’t know it, is much harder than directing films. It may be the reason why I, perverse I, do it.”
A director isn’t a writer or an artist; he’s a general.
Director Orson Welles: “A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army.”
Directors are artists.
Director Herbert Brenon delayed shooting a scene while an assistant searched Hollywood for a fifty-pound note.
When the note was brought to him, Brenon sealed it in an envelope and handed the envelope to the actor, who, the script said, was carrying a brown envelope with a fifty-pound note in it.
It’s the scenery that makes a great movie, not your script.
Director David Lean in a memo to his Lawrence of Arabia producer: “Listen to me. The thing that’s going to make this a very exceptional picture in the world-beater class are the backgrounds, the camels, horses, and uniqueness of the strange atmosphere we are putting around our intimate story. … This is our great spectacle which will pull the crowd from university professor to newsboy.”
What to do when a director calls you to tell you he likes your script.
When Barbet Schroeder called screenwriter/novelist Charles Bukowski to tell him he liked Barfly, Bukowski said, “Fuck off, you French frog!”
Directors certainly haven’t changed much.
Ben Hecht, discussing a first meeting with a director in 1937: “I’ve never met anyone so eager to flaunt his stupidity, low-grade human values and jackass vanities in the world.”
Directors hate what they do.
Director Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Launderette): “There’s nothing more loathsome than actually making a film.”
Directors use people.
They don’t say, “He’s perfect—we’ll cast him.” They say, “He’s perfect—we’ll use him.”
Don’t give any ideas away.
The director Ivan Reitman was the producer of Big Shots, a comic adventure about two little kids.
As Ivan and I talked for days about the script, I suggested putting adult stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito into the kids’ parts.
A couple of years after Big Shots, Ivan made a comic adventure about two adult kids. It was called Twins and starred Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito.
Big Shots failed, but Twins was a huge hit.
Most directors are passive-aggressive snakes.
This will seriously complicate your life.
It means they won’t tell you if they dislike your script or something in your script. They’ll rewrite it themselves behind your back or try to get a screenwriter friend to do it. Or they’ll tell you they love your script but that the studio wants another writer to come in and do some “very minor rewriting … nothing more than some touching up, really.”
They hate confrontations and will agree with you about most things and then do exactly what they want to do when you aren’t on the set. And if you see the finished film and then confront them and say, “What the fuck did you do to my script?” they’ll say, “What do you mean? I didn’t change a comma.”
Or: “I didn’t have a choice. The studio ordered me to make those changes. I didn’t want to tell you because I knew how bloody upset you’d get.”
Or: “I was just trying to prevent you from getting hurt.”
Or: “The star just didn’t want to do the scene. I tried to insist on doing it the way you wrote it, but you know how arrogant he is. Defending your script almost cost me my job.”
Martin Scorsese is paranoid.
Martin Scorsese puts a mirror on top of the monitor while he’s filming, so he can see who’s standing behind him, watching.
When he was shooting Gangs of New York, producer Harvey Weinstein put a giant truck mirror on Scorsese’s monitor. Written on it were these words: “Caution, objects in the mirror are larger than they appear.”
In the middle of the jumbo mirror was Weinstein’s huge face.
The director always thinks he is the star.
According to Hal Ashby’s producing partner, Charles Mulvehill: “Hal felt the picture should be the star, not the actor. But what that meant is that the star was the director, Hal Ashby.”
ALL HAIL
Barbet Schroeder!
He’s a director, I know, but still …
Learning that the studio had just pulled the plug on his film, he bought a Black & Decker circular saw, took it into the office of the studio head, plugged it in, turned it on, and held the blade over the studio head’s hand, threatening to slice his finger off.
At that moment, the studio head changed his mind and
decided to make Barbet’s film.
Directors have always been full of it.
Screenwriter Ben Hecht: “My movie, Underworld, was the first gangster film to bedazzle the movie fans; there were no lies in it—except for a half dozen sentimental touches introduced by its director, Joe von Sternberg. I still shudder remembering one of them. My head villain, after robbing a bank, emerged with a suitcase full of money and paused in the crowded street to notice a blind beggar and give him a coin—before making his getaway.”
You don’t want to get this close.
According to the producer Gerald Ayres, who worked with them, screenwriter Robert Towne and director/star Warren Beatty liked having sex with different women at the same time in the same room.
Hanging out with your director can be deadly.
Screenwriter/film critic James Agee went off to write at the San Ysidro Ranch, near Santa Barbara, with director John Huston. They drank and played tennis, and Agee had a heart attack and almost died.
ALL HAIL
Carole Eastman!
Screenwriter Eastman (Five Easy Pieces) “felt she would become polluted if she had to talk to the director,” said her friend Richard Wechsler.
You don’t want a director as your best friend.
When director Bob Fosse was dying, he asked his best and oldest friend, Paddy Chayefsky, to look over his will.
“Hey,” Paddy said to Fosse, “why am I not in your will?”
“I’m taking care of my wife and my kids,” Fosse replied.
“Fuck you, then,” Paddy said. “Live!”
Don’t be anybody’s “pocket writer.”
This can happen when you get to be pals with a director. In most cases, a director will be pals with you if you do exactly what he tells you to do, if you write what he tells you to write.
If you do that, he will then bring you into his future projects (written by others) and get you a lot of money to rewrite those scripts.
Kurt Luedtke (Absence of Malice) and David Rayfiel (The Firm) made a lot of money being director Sidney Pollack’s “pocket writers.” As a result, though, they were mistrusted by other directors, who feared that if they worked with them, these writers would pass their ideas on to their pal Pollack.
If you’re working with a director, don’t just “come up with the details.”
Screenwriter José Rivera, talking about working with director Walter Salles on The Motorcycle Diaries: “Some of the best collaborative work I have ever done with a director was with Walter because he doesn’t rewrite you. He makes very precise and interesting comments on everything you’ve written, and some of them yield new things … He would have an idea and I would come up with the details.”
Directors like being deified.
Billy Friedkin about Alfred Hitchcock: “I don’t give a flying fuck about him, and I’m not a worshipper of his, nor have I ever set out to emulate him. But I’m glad that people deify directors because I make more money that way.”
But you don’t really have to deify your director.
Screenwriter Brian Helgeland on director Dick Donner: “With his leonine head and booming voice, he seems more like a movie star than the stars he’s directing. When Donner shouts action on a set, it’s the voice of God coming down from on high.”
Oh gag me!
Screenwriter Darryl Ponicsan on director Martha Coolidge: “She values words, but she knows the silences are worth more. A rambling rose rambling down a Texas street says more than words can convey. Come to think of it, so does this photograph of Martha.”
Please pass me that barf bag.
Screenwriter Jeff Davis, asked to adapt a novel for director William Friedkin, whose wife, Sherry Lansing, headed Paramount at the time and who hadn’t had a hit movie in thirty years, said, “To be writing a psychological horror film for William Friedkin, the man who set the standard in the genre by directing what is considered to be the scariest and most viscerally disturbing movie of all time, is more than a writer could hope for.”
You can get up now, sweetie.
Ronald Harwood won Best Adapted Screenplay for The Pianist and said in his acceptance speech, “Roman Polanski [the director] deserves this.”
ALL HAIL
William Goldman!
He wrote an article in Daily Variety saying that Martin Scorsese did not deserve to win an Oscar for Gangs of New York: “Gangs of New York is a mess.”
He also wrote that he would never forgive Miramax for “hyping the Oscar to Robert Benigni, the scummiest award in the Academy’s history.”
Don’t ever trust your director.
Jean Renoir, the king of auteur directors, said, “Is it possible to succeed without any act of betrayal?”
You can’t ever overestimate a director’s ego.
Billy Friedkin told screenwriter William Peter Blatty that he refused to cast Marlon Brando in The Exorcist. Blatty: “His reason was that if he cast Brando, it would be Brando’s picture, not his.”
Where do their brains go? Be prepared for the director of your film to have an affair on the set with the lead actress.
It happened to me twice—with Costa-Gavras and Debra Winger on Betrayed and, more famously, with Paul Verhoeven and Elizabeth Berkley on Showgirls.
Costa’s affair didn’t hurt Betrayed, but Paul’s destroyed Showgirls.
After the film bombed, I said to Paul, “When a man gets a hard-on, his brains slide into his ass.”
Paul laughed; he didn’t argue with me.
But they can’t walk the walk.
Directors know they can’t write, but they try to make up for this by talking about writing.
They are similar to the screenwriting teachers in this regard—the teachers who can’t write scripts but tell you how you should write them.
Directors will talk to you about the “through line” and “the arc,” ask “Where is the redemption?” … and refer to “deep in the subtext” and “the door to the character’s motivation.”
Some directors, interestingly, have taken screenwriting courses from the likes of Robert McKee, but even those who haven’t have learned how to speak this cinema-lit psychobabble.
They can’t write, but while you’re writing, they have to do something creative—they can’t even cast or scout for locations until you’re done writing.
So what they do to kill time while you’re creating the movie is to talk to you about how to write—like the baseball-hitting coach who never got out of the minors telling major leaguers how to hit a curveball.
A good director is worth waiting for.
Costa-Gavras, the director of Z, called me in 1977, after he’d read my script of F.I.S.T. He said, in very broken English, that he loved the script but that he couldn’t speak English very well.
But he was taking Berlitz courses, he said, and when his English got better, he’d call me back and maybe we could do something together.
Eight years after that first phone call, he directed my script Betrayed.
Don’t completely dismiss your director’s ideas.
Director Costa-Gavras saved me from an ending to Music Box that, I think, in retrospect, would have hurt the movie. I will always be grateful for the way he slugged it out with me and convinced me that my ending was wrong.
On the other hand, dismiss most of your director’s ideas.
Costa-Gavras had an idea for the ending of Betrayed that, I was convinced, would destroy the movie.
We slugged it out for two days and, at the end of those days, he reluctantly agreed with me that he was wrong. I will always be grateful for that, too.
LESSON 13
Every Good Director Is a Sadist!
If you argue with your director, go for the jugular.
Sam Spiegel, arguing with Elia Kazan, said to him, “What the hell do you know? You only know about testifying on your friends.”
On An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, I said to Arthur Hiller, “You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, you
doddering old fuck.” (I apologized later.)
Are you masochistic?
Producer David Merrick: “All good directors are sadists. I won’t put up with it from mediocrities, but for genius I’m willing to be a doormat.”
Your disagreement with the director can get ugly.
Working on Lawrence of Arabia, screenwriter Carl Foreman and director David Lean got along so badly that they were even arguing about whether a character would scratch his face or not.
Foreman accused Lean of being “an art house director.” “You have made only small British films,” Foreman said. “You have no experience of the international market.”
Lean attacked Foreman in an eight-page letter to the film’s producer, which began: “This is not meant to be an attack. But when one gets into the scenes in detail, they are awfully rough and ready, and in many cases cheap and derivative.”
In a creative discussion, use any lethal weapon you can.
Director Jack Garfein (The Strange One) had survived concentration camps, and when a screenwriter wasn’t listening to him about the scene he wanted, Garfein asked, “Why are you arguing with me? Don’t you know I am an Auschwitz victim?”
The way to talk to a director …
Producer Robert Evans: “I don’t want a director to talk with me and then leave and say, ‘Gee, what a nice guy.’ I want him to say, ‘That bastard.’ ‘That son of a bitch!’ Because then they always come back and say, ‘You were right. Let’s talk.’ ”
To Do a Terry Malick
To acquire a towering international reputation for very little work.
Break his ribs.
When screenwriter/actor Sylvester Stallone had a creative disagreement with director Ted Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz) on the set of First Blood, Sly smashed a jarring left hook into Ted’s rib cage, breaking three ribs.
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 24