Directors Tell the Story

by Bethany Rooney

  Directors come in all shapes and sizes, all ethnicities, all educational backgrounds, and both genders. There is nothing to physically or mentally link this group of people. In television and features, the theatrical world and the commercial, in reality shows and low-budget indies, there is an infinite variety of people who choose to direct. What links them are two qualities: a passion for storytelling and an ability to be a leader. But what is that? What is involved in “a passion for storytelling?” And what does it take “to be a leader?”

  NEEDING TO TELL A STORY

  Wanting to be a storyteller is something you’re born with—it is not something that can be taught. It is the innate need to make sense of the world and to entertain oneself and an audience by framing real-life experiences and eternal questions (such as “why are we here?”) in a fictional way that illustrates what it is to be human. It’s one of those things that is part of your DNA. Either you like to read or you don’t. You prefer savory to sweet. You’re more right-brained or left-brained. You want to be swept away in a story or you’d rather face the world in a more prosaic fashion. You are a storyteller or you’re not.

  Wanting to be a storyteller is something you’re born with—it is not something that can be taught. It is the innate need to make sense of the world and to entertain oneself and an audience by framing real-life experiences and eternal questions (such as “why are we here?“) in a fictional way that illustrates what it is to be human.

  If you are, then there are things you can learn that will help you do a better job of it. We’ve been talking about those things through this entire book, but the basic recap is this:

  Job Requirements for Being a Storyteller

  Interpret the script

  Shape the actors’ performance

  Choose every element within the frame

  Use the medium (film/tape/digital) well in production and postproduction

  A DIRECTOR’S INNER SENSE

  All of those things are learnable, up to a point. But there must be a preexisting condition that is a psychological factor, an inner sense that again is inherent in your makeup. That innate sense tells you which shot is better, which color is better, and which communication method will work best with each actor. It is basically a sense of good taste that is instinctive rather than logical.

  But that inner sense doesn’t arrive full-blown in your psyche the day you decide to pick up a camera. It needs to be tested and honed, challenged and refined, with every decision you make. Can you enhance that inner sense? We think you can do so by exposing yourself to everything. Directors are lifelong learners. The world is your university. Politics, popular culture, the arts, the sciences, cuisine, psychology, sports. And don’t just stay in your comfort zone: venture out! No knowledge will be wasted. You can start at the public library. Or online. Read every day. Observe life around you.

  There must be a preexisting condition that is a psychological factor, an inner sense. That innate sense tells you which shot is better, which color is better, and which communication method will work best with each actor. It is basically a sense of good taste that is instinctive rather than logical.

  You should also watch TV shows and movies. Contrast and compare. Know what you like and why you like it. In the same way, determine what you don’t like and why. Study each episode or film by turning the sound off and just watching the screen; we are, after all, a visual medium. Discover if you can follow the story without hearing the dialog. In a well-made piece, you should be able to get the gist of it without hearing a word.

  Tell a Story

  Choose any movie you’ve seen recently. Describe it in the following ways:

  • Figure out the one-liner (for example, “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back”).

  • Describe the movie in more detail. What is the setup, the conflict, the climax, and the ending?

  • Describe the main characters, including three physical characteristics.

  • Describe three “moments” or sequences in which the director employed camerawork that helped tell the story well.

  • If you were making a poster for this movie, what would be the iconic image from the film?

  It is highly unlikely that your first film or TV episode will be brilliant. It may have flashes of brilliance, but there’s so much that can be learned only on the job. It stands to reason that with more experience, you will become a better director. With more life experience, you will as well. Mary Lou, who studied to be an actor at Penn State, took one required directing class. She admits frankly that she wasn’t very good. Although she had a lot of leadership skills, she simply didn’t have a lot of life experience. She had a limited point of view. What she did have was an insatiable desire to grow and learn everyday.

  Let’s say you are a born storyteller and you have studied how to be a good one. And you’ve shot some film, tape, or digital media and cut it together. You’ve practiced your craft. That’s what you’ve done on your own—perhaps even with people who claim to be actors. But now you want to really direct. You want to lead a cast and crew toward achieving your creative vision. You want to interact with studio executives and financiers. You want to navigate the politics necessary to ensure that your product—your film, your episode—is seen by many people, hopefully millions of them. How do you do that?

  Try Something New

  This is a long-term exercise. Every week, give yourself the gift of opening your horizons and experiencing something new. This new thing should be experiential, rather than just reading about something. Put yourself in a position to see, hear, taste, smell, or touch something that was previously unknown to you. Do something you haven’t done before. Go somewhere new. Try something outside your comfort zone. Get a different viewpoint, look at other cultures, and expand your previous boundaries. Keep a journal about what you’ve learned.

  BEING A LEADER

  You become a leader. It’s a little different than when you were in first grade, and your teacher picked you to be the leader in the lunch line. It’s a very sophisticated concept that has to do with, well, something that a president of the United States said: “To grasp and hold a vision, that is the very essence of successful leadership—not only on the movie set where I learned it, but everywhere.” That was Ronald Reagan speaking. What we’re saying here is that the “grasping” of the vision is an innate quality you either have or you don’t. The “holding” of the vision is the leadership part. How do you hold on to your vision?

  Leadership Qualities of a Director

  Determination—Often, you win just by not giving up. You will have many people against you, just because they’re not with you. They have other opinions. They think something else might work better. They don’t understand what’s in your head.

  Communication—If you are able to clearly describe your vision, you can get everybody on board. First, you have to clarify your own thoughts, which is why it’s so helpful to block and shot list, as doing those things make you organize everything into individual pieces, or shots. After you’ve done the work and know exactly how you want each scene to look and feel, you can describe it to others.

  Enthusiasm—When you describe your vision, it is your enthusiasm that will carry the day. You are essentially saying, “C’mon, people, come along with me! We’re going to make something wonderful and magical and I know you really want to be a part of it!”

  Gentle command—Once everyone is committed to your vision, keep them following you by projecting an aura of decisiveness and kindness—a sense that you know where you’re going and everyone is going to enjoy the ride. In that way, you will earn your cast and crew’s loyalty and desire to work hard to help you follow your vision.

  When you commit to directing, you commit to taking on a leadership role. But there are other places and ways in your everyday life to use these skills in preparation for stepping into directing. Any small group needs a leader, whether it’s a committee or a classroom. You need not wait until you have a
script in hand to begin employing these four leadership tips. Especially if these extroverted qualities do not come naturally to you, it is extremely helpful to employ them as often as possible so they begin to become an organic way of being—a part of who you are. Mary Lou honed her abilities running her household when her mother reentered the workplace when Mary Lou was twelve. Mary Lou, the fourth of five children, cooked, cleaned, and did the laundry for her family of eight people. She delegated work so that she could have a normal teen life. She first practiced her leadership qualities bossing her siblings around! Once in college, she loved not only being on stage, but stage-managing plays she wasn’t in. She also did administrative work for the dance company she performed with. It’s important to see directing as an outgrowth of your previous life experiences and predilections.

  THE BUSINESS OF THE BUSINESS

  Directors need a team of support personnel for the many demanding aspects of being a director. There will naturally be the personal ones, like family. But there are also professional support staff, two of whom are required if you are directing anything for distribution: an agent, and the Directors Guild of America (DGA).

  Every director who works for the networks—whether broadcast or cable—must have an agent as legal protection on both sides. The networks will not do business with an individual who is unrepresented. There are numerous agencies that represent acting talent and literary (writing and directing) talent in New York and Los Angeles. The agent is the go-between who imparts information and mediates between the hiring party (buyers) and the client and is licensed to do business by the state in which they operate. Your agent will seek out work for you, set up meetings, be your biggest fan and cheerleader, negotiate deals, plan an overall career strategy and execute it to the best of her ability, and be the bearer of bad tidings (that you didn’t get the job, or you didn’t perform well on a job you did get) if necessary. The agent is the buffer in good times and bad.

  Mary Lou and Bethany, being female directors, have occasionally experienced bad times, in part because they are in a distinct minority. The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University reported in 2009 that women held fewer than one in ten directing jobs on prime-time programs on the five major broadcast television networks in the 2008–2009 season. Overall, women made up 25 percent of the workforce in seven job categories (producers, writers, executive producers, series creators, editors, directors, and DPs) at ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and the CW. To show how static the rate of women employed in the industry is, consider that women made up 21 percent of the workforce in the 1997–1998 season, only 4 percent less.1 However, both Mary Lou and Bethany feel that we are working toward the day when the appellation “excellent female director” simply becomes “excellent director.”

  Why are there so few women directors in prime-time television? (There is also a dearth of minority directors.) There is only our experience to go by because there are no studies or statistics to report on the amorphous underlying cause. Because directors are leaders and because the time and budget constraints of television are so pressurized, there seems to be an inherent ingrained attitude from the production companies and the networks that they are best served in this job category by white men. But Bethany’s experience over 25 years of directing is that once on set, neither the cast nor crew care about her gender—just her abilities. Will she shoot the day’s work efficiently and well, allowing all to return home to their families in less than 13 hours? Cast and crew only care about “good.” They don’t care about gender.

  The DGA, which was founded in 1936, works hard to promote women and minorities to the hiring entities, as well as continuing to serve and protect all of their members, in every job category. As Taylor Hackford, the current president of the guild, states, “The Directors Guild of America proudly represents more than 14,000 professionals whose creative vision and skill is indispensable to the creation of the films, television, and emerging media enjoyed by audiences worldwide.”2 The DGA faces negotiations every four years with the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers—the business side of the “business”) and fights for our creative rights, our work conditions, our salaries, and our health and welfare contributions. And it does incredibly well, because each member—if they qualify by the amount of money they earn—is entitled to extremely good benefits.

  One of those benefits is the minimum salary cap. Currently, a director of a one-hour single-camera network show earns $39,258 for a 15-day contract, which excludes postproduction time, and the director of a halfhour single-camera primetime network show makes $23,113 (a nine-day contract). A director of a one-hour basic cable show earns $19,967. The rate for a two-hour basic cable movie is $71,597. And if you direct features, the rate is based on the budget. At the low end is $75,000; in the medium range, the figure is $189,358, but almost every salary in the feature world is negotiable. Pilot directors may negotiate their salary and royalty (payments that are made as long as the series runs, in recognition of the creative input to the long-term interests of the show).

  You may also enlist the support of an attorney, as well as a creative manager and/or a business manager, for such specialized negotiations. All of them work on commission, from 5 to 15 percent. (The DGA requires dues.) Though the director salaries are quite respectable, they can disappear quickly when you have a large support team. Managing a career in the long-term requires not only a support team, but also an ability to see yourself as a player on a world stage in which there are many opposing interests, a lot of competition, and the vicissitudes of fame.

  There is much you can do to prepare by studying, learning, and practicing on a theoretical level. But ultimately, it is a job that you learn by doing, by making innumerable mistakes, and by being grateful for each failure that teaches you how to direct.

  But when you are focusing on just directing (and not the career), it is still an incredibly complex job that utilizes multiple skill sets. If you are a born storyteller, you have to learn to work with script, actors, camera, and editing. And then you need to hone your ability to lead others in service to the story, potentially working with hundreds of people, navigating their personalities, and sculpting their contributions to fit your vision. There is much you can do to prepare by studying, learning, and practicing on a theoretical level. But ultimately, it is a job that you learn by doing, by making innumerable mistakes, and by being grateful for each failure that teaches you how to direct.

  Go into this knowing that it takes a while and that you’ll have to practice these multiple skills over and over again to become proficient. It’s an exciting journey to take, full of discovery, growth, and fun!

  * * *

  1. Margulies, Lee, “Few Women Are TV Directors,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 2009, Sec. D.

  2. Hackford, Taylor, “A Message from the President,” 2010 Directory of Members. Los Angeles: Directors Guild of America, 2010.

  Chapter 17

  The Demands of the Job

  When you are the director of a project, people are going to judge you. The buyers ask the producers, “Is the director staying on time and on budget?” By that, they mean, are you someone who knows the craft and will return their investment? The producers ask the DP, “How’s the director doing?” By that, they mean, do you know how to make the day? The makeup artist asks the actor, “How is he [or she]?” By that, the makeup artist means, do you know about character and performance and how to get it? The dolly grip asks the camera operator, “What’dya think?” By that, the dolly grip means, do you know how to use the camera well? The writer asks the script supervisor, “Is she [or he] sticking to the script?” By that, the writer means, are you a good storyteller? And all of those questions are asked within the first hour of your appearance on set. Everyone is waiting to judge because everyone has a lot riding on your competence, and everyone wants to know if you’re any good. Everyone wants to get home to their families at night (or some other aspect of their personal
lives), but they want to do work they can be proud of, too. So they’re going to judge you: Are you fast? Are you on budget? Are you good?

  You can be all three of these things; you don’t have to “pick two of the above,” as the industry saying goes. When you are prepared, when you know your craft, and when you are passionate about storytelling and have that inner sense of good taste we talked about in the previous chapter, you can be all three. But you have to have done your homework, and you have to be a leader. And you have to understand storytelling. It requires hard work, intuition, and creativity. Because it’s such a complex job, not many people are really, really good at it. So everyone judges. They want to know whether you can be trusted to make this project happen.

  Are you fast? Are you on budget? Are you good? You can be all three of these things; you don’t have to “pick two of the above,” as the industry saying goes. Because it’s such a complex job, not many people are really, really good at it.