Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
What’s a Film Director?
In the beginning of film, there were no directors; there were only cameramen. The first movies had no plot, only the real-life silent spectacles of 1890s street traffic, ballerinas dancing coquettishly, armies on parade, and most famously, in 1895, a locomotive that seemed to be bearing down on the thrilled, frightened audiences of the fairgrounds.
By the turn of the century, two new elements would give lasting shape to what we came to call “the movies”: scripts and actors. They’d been together in the theater practically forever, of course, and now those masks of comedy and tragedy had a technician with a cine camera to record them for distant audiences. Well into the first decades of silent, ten-minute films, their production was loosely supervised, usually by the main actors.
But when movies grew to feature length, or what passed for it 110 years ago, a couple of veteran hams fighting it out wasn’t enough of a management structure anymore. Someone, one person, had to decide if the villain’s makeup looked scary enough, or if the love scene was romantic enough to make the ladies swoon. Someone had to say, “That was no good—do it again,” with the authority to make it stick.
A separate new role for a film director was tacitly accepted by the actors and cameramen by then. At last, somebody was clearly in charge. Sooner than you’d think, this modest coordinating job became exalted to the heavens by delirious publicists, gullible journalists, and not surprisingly by the preening egos of the cocky young class of “megaphone men” with their names on the canvas backs of their folding chairs. From D.W. Griffith to Christopher Nolan today, the idea of the director as the genius creator of the movies has grown. Sometimes, as in the case of those two guys, it’s even justified.
Here’s a contrary view from artist and underground filmmaker Andy Warhol, describing what a director does: “It’s like being the hole in a phonograph record.” Like a lot of Warhol’s drolleries, it’s cannier than it looks: That void in the middle is what the whole record spins around. Writers do their thing, actors act, the cameraman films it, and professional editors cut it all together. What, really, does a director have to do, other than making sure that everyone else on the set does their job?
Unless directors not only originate projects, but pay for them themselves, they are hired supervisors working to someone else’s blueprint. Look at the opening credits of any episode of Bonanza (1959-’73). The illustration behind the writer credit is a man in a book-lined library; the producer rates a prosperous banker, with gold stacked in his vault; the director is illustrated as a grim, watchful foreman on horseback, supervising laborers in the field. The role doesn’t have to be more than that, but it can be more, a lot more, especially if the director is a “hyphenate”: a writer-director, or a producer-director.
Screenwriter William Goldman, reflecting his profession’s love-hate relationship with their eternal frenemies and daily collaborators, the directors, struck a fair note when he said that good directors, and he worked with quite a few, can really help a script come to life and are, at their best, very helpful to actors. He added sarcastically that, on the other hand, he’d never met a director whose “cosmic worldview” would fill a thimble.
While a movie is in production, the director is the one person on the set who is proxy for the audience. The script suggests a mood and a pace, but it takes a director to intuit how the day’s work is going to come across later.
Jaws was based on a best seller, and like The Godfather, many people in the audience knew roughly what to expect based on the book. But take one night scene as an example of what a director does. The great white shark that has terrorized the beaches of Amity is half-beaten, with hooks in its mouth and strong lines tethering it to a rickety wooden pier. A couple of drunk fishermen are celebrating. Suddenly, the shark pulls on the lines so hard that the end of the pier breaks off and starts being pulled out to sea. The fishermen fall off. As soon as the film switches to the view underwater, with the men writhing clumsily in the ocean, we know what could happen now.
And so does the shark, who we never see in this scene. What we do see is that floating wooden wreck of the end of the pier, as it gets dragged out to sea, slows down…and to the alarm and excitement of the audience, begins to reverse direction, heading back to shore. As the men try to drag themselves to dry land, unaware of the danger, the pier accelerates, getting closer and closer. By now the people in that 1975 theater were screaming and shouting at them to get out of the water. Peter Benchley, the writer, didn’t do that. It took Steven Spielberg to do it, in collaboration with composer John Williams and film editor Verna Fields, launching the first real mega-hit of the modern era, and a filmmaking career that’s lasted half a century.
You’d think Stanley Kubrick would have had a rarefied notion of his own job, but he described it as simply being an all-day decision machine, some of the questions being merely practical (is the doorway wide enough for the camera, is Marisa’s gown right, can we get the crowd shots done by 4?) and some are questions of taste and judgment (She tires easily after 20 takes, but he doesn’t even warm up until then. Can I fix it, or will I just have to nurse them through the next two weeks?) Kubrick described the filming process as like trying to compose a masterpiece while sitting in a bump-‘em car ride.
You have to plan everything but be open to anything. One cold night in 1944, Billy Wilder’s location shoot for Paramount’s Double Indemnity, at a local Southern Pacific railroad station, called it a wrap. They’d just filmed a critical scene where murderer Fred MacMurray and his scheming accomplice, husband-killing hussy Barbara Stanwyck, jump in her nearby car, a fancy LaSalle, and make their getaway. Some good shots and they finished early.
But when director Billy Wilder got to his own car for the ride home, it wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. Wilder had a sudden inspiration and, shouting, called the cast and crew back to their posts. On the spot, they re-shot the getaway to include MacMurray’s agonizingly drawn out starting her car, which parked near to the murder scene, was incriminating enough evidence to send them both to the gas chamber even if they left on foot. This improvisation became one of the most suspenseful moments in the movie, helping make it a film noir classic.
The image of film directors as mysterious Svengalis, able to coax Oscar-winning performances out of grateful, hypnotized actors, is a considerable exaggeration. There have been periods of Hollywood history that played that up.
One area where actors need help is keeping track of where they’re supposed to be, dramatically and emotionally at that point in the story. One big reason for this is movies are seldom shot in sequence. You have to work with location requirements, weather, seasons, the scheduling of actors’ other commitments, you name it. Yesterday, you shot script pages 38-40. Monday, we’ll do the ending. Tuesday, we film the opening scene. If you’re young Al Pacino, you might appreciate some directorial guidance. It might not have been much more complicated than, “It’s a couple of scenes too early for that kind of anger.”
Of course, whenever an actor becomes an on-set bottleneck while the clock is ticking, directors have been known to use other methods, too—amateur psychologist, coach, buddy, nursemaid, whatever it takes to move on to the next scene.
“Women’s director” was often a Hollywood classic era euphemism for “homosexual,” but it was true that actresses appreciated someone who didn’t treat them like cattle, and understood how to help them deal with onscreen emotion or difficult dialog. Suppose you were Vivien Leigh on the set of Gone With the Wind, carrying the weight of the entire production on your shoulders. Director George Cukor’s sympathetic, “Darling, you’re doing just fine! Really! But just maybe you’d like to take a little break. I’ve been working you so-o-o hard today” is going to be easier on your nerves than Cukor’s brusque successor, Victor Fleming. “Aw, jeez, Viv, get it right just once, can’t you?”
In the Fifties, acting teachers like Lee Strasberg and his Actor’s Studio made “method acting” famous at a time when live TV drama was on-the-job training for a postwar generation of actors. By the way, what’s a live TV director? It’s a very different kind of job than making feature films: For example, a television director in live sports is a quick-thinking wizard who instantly directs and edits the output of a dozen or more cameras on the air, plus integrating instant replays, pre-recorded, and graphic elements. It is a remarkable skill, akin to simultaneously conducting a musical score while improvising a visual jazz solo in front of millions of people. It’s a gift that few film directors have. But other than a similar job title, the jobs themselves are very different and deserve a different post. @ejhill is the Ricochet expert for live TV.
Sometimes, directors do play mind tricks in pursuit of better performances. Most of these are “honest tricks” at least half out in the open. When Francis Coppola filmed two S.E. Hinton young adult novels in the Eighties (The Outsiders, Rumble Fish), the actors who played the rich kids slept in better hotels on location, which the young actors who played the poorer kids later admitted was a helpful motivator of realistic rage and resentment.
Usually, major stars go out of their way to be just-folks with younger, starstruck, and intimidated actors. Sir Lawrence Olivier was “Larry” with his co-stars. But when David Frankel filmed The Devil Wears Prada, he encouraged Meryl Streep, playing imperious fashion editor Miranda Priestley, to be polite but, though not unfriendly, distant towards Anne Hathaway, playing her soon-to-be-less-naïve young assistant. There was nothing cruel about this; both actresses understood. There were natural on-set effects of unequal fame and experience that he wanted to use.
Christopher Nolan is both a storytelling visionary and a visually-oriented movie master. He combines Stanley Kubrick’s drive towards perfection, with Sidney Lumet’s (Ten Angry Men, The Verdict, Prince of the City) TV-born abilities to get great performances from actors while working carefully but relentlessly fast.
Nolan has quirks, personal rituals, and rules, and by now, actors are lining up for miles to follow them. He requires actors on the set to be in costume, in character, and ready to work on a few moments’ notice. As easily as someone would pull out an iPhone, Nolan will reach for a handheld IMAX camera. By now, he’s acquired the legendary popular image of a Cecil B. de Mille or an Erich von Stroheim.
Eighty-plus years ago, screenwriter Robert Riskin read plenty of publicity gush about his frequent co-worker, director Frank Capra. He sent the three-time Oscar winner a hundred pages of blank paper with a good-natured but barbed challenge: “Go ahead, give this ‘The Capra Touch’!”
Published in General
Thanks for the great information about a subject of which I am utterly ignorant.
Charlie,
This RICO writes so well it’s almost scary.
Should you take out insurance on him?
Heck, strip me (and most of the world) of authoring privileges, creating a stable of a dozen stars, and Ricochet would instantly be the non-Marxian American Everyman’s journal of our times. New Yorker plus Atlantic Monthly, sans insufferable proggies. Claremont Review, sans unexplained Latin, except for stuff we learned at Ohio State like “sans”.
Me and my friends, we’d just pay to comment.
Thank for you this entertaining and informative post!
Very interesting. I never thought before about what directors of movies actually do. I am also curious about what “producers” do other than get their names in the credits.
My favorite story about a director using mind tricks to get an actor’s best performance comes from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. In one scene, Kirk is trying to deceive his nemesis Khan by pretending to comply with his demands (while actually sending a code that will force his ship to drop its shields). William Shatner’s natural tendency toward overacting threatened to ruin the effectiveness of the scene; he was delivering his lines in a way that made it obvious that Kirk was not being sincere.
Director Nicholas Meyer found an effective way to tone down Shatner’s performance: he just kept filming take after take, so many that Shatner became exhausted and pretty much lost interest in the scene. He stopped trying to perform and instead delivered an understated, almost flat line reading, which was exactly what the scene required.
Most fans would probably agree that Wrath of Khan features Shatner’s best performance in all of the Star Trek franchise. This was not an accident.
Great story, Bart.
Speaking of our Rico Stable of Stars: Werr yoobinnat? Did somebody leave the paddock gate open?
I believe they sign the checks.
No idea what “executive producers” do though.
The biggest difference between a film director and a TV director can be summed up in two phrases: “We’ll fix it in post” vs “We’ll get ’em tomorrow.”
That said, the brief time that I spent in local news had many eye-opening revelations, not the least of which is that one could direct a half-hour of live television and never look at the monitor wall. The “directing” was done in the previous hour by marking up one’s script. Truth be told most directors of TV news couldn’t direct their way out of a windowless room.
Much has been written about the French using the word auteur, or “author” to describe a director. In reality their title is Réalisateur de cinéma, the person who is responsible for taking the script and turning it into a reality.
Sometimes they don’t do a damn thing. If you see a film or television show and one or more of the actors are given a producer credit that has more to do with residual payments than actual work.
Me too!
A recent study shows that neural signaling is lower on Zoom calls than for in-person conversations, implying less emotional involvement. Which would have obvious implications for remote work and education.
But people develop very close emotional connections with actors that they see only on a screen, and with the imaginary characters played by those actors.
What might account for the difference? Gary? Anyone?
It’s a big job. They’re usually on the project before a director is hired. Here’s my explanation:
https://ricochet.com/945704/whats-a-movie-producer/
That title varies more than any other.
My guess: films and familiar TV shows seem to slot into the parts of our brains that process dreams. In that respect, “Hollywood, the dream factory” is kind of literal. The real-life lady on Zoom is ephemeral; she’s in and out of your life. Whereas memorable roles linger.
Bob Gale, co-creator of Back to the Future, was on the board of our American Cinema Foundation. When my kids were small, I pointed out Bob’s fake “office” inside the Back to the Future ride at Universal. At the time I think they were five and seven years old. They already knew that the stuff you see on TV and in the movies was made-up entertainment. But for some reason they both strenuously objected to the idea that included BTTF, because “Marty McFly is a real person”.
But it’s not like I don’t know that feeling. Tom Selleck was also on the ACF board, we talked about politics…but there was still part of allegedly sophisticated, professional me that reacted like “Wow, I just met with Thomas Magnum“.
Executive producers make sure the catering truck appears in Palm Springs, Florida instead of Palm Springs, California. Or vice versa.
The rest of the producers molest the talent.
Provide the money behind the checks signed by the producers?
Insurance?? I just hope he doesn’t take out a contract on me! People get bumped off around here!
Thanks for the kind words.
People make fun of “the auteur theory” (actually, “policy of authors”) but in its early days, the mid-to-late Fifties, it was a sensible and needed corrective to movies that were getting to be stodgy and talky. Like a lot of needed correctives, soon it too needed correction; some directors of the Sixties began to think they were the whole show. It’s a collaborative art.
Informative and entertaining as per usual. Thanks Gary.
There have been people who made the jump from the camera to the director’s chair, but not a whole lot. Even some of the ones who we think of as being their own cameramen, like Kubrick and Nolan, still made a choice to work through a director of photography, a respected collaborator who knew the score: the boss does what he wants and I’ll handle the rest.
Are there editor-directors? In documentaries, sure. Docs deserve a different post. In feature films there have been a few directors who worked their way up from the editing room, like Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, Star Trek: The Motion Picture.) It’s surprisingly good training; you get to study what the other guy did right and wrong. You learn one of the directors’ most important skills: breaking down the action into shots. The only thing is, it generally calls for a different temperament than directing, because the editor’s craft is a quiet, methodical one. Stanley Kubrick used to say that he directed actors just so he’d have something to edit.
One of my sisters-in-law is an occupational therapist here in Los Angeles. One of her patients, a shy, polite elderly man, allowed that he was once in the movie business. My SIL asked politely if she would ever have heard of any of his films. He said, hesitantly, “Have you ever seen The Sound of Music? It was Bob Wise.
A great story, BXO, very relevant.
The last shot of The Graduate was semi-improvised. Lovestruck loser Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) has managed to steal the heart of Elaine (Katharine Ross) about a minute before she was about to get married. They escape from the angry wedding crowd the only way they can, by jumping aboard a city bus. They go to the back of the bus and sit down, exhilarated but exhausted, as it pulls into traffic. Director Mike Nichols let the shot run…and run…and run, bewildering the two actors. You read it in their faces. What does he want us to do? He kept it all in; it perfectly reflected a look of “Now what are we going to do?”
As far as the auteur theory is concerned, it’s interesting to me that the auteur — if there is one — isn’t necessarily the director. In movies it usually is, but there are exceptions. When people talk about “Steven Spielberg movies,” especially if they mean the classic ’80s Spielberg subgenre, they often include films like Gremlins or Back to the Future, films on which Spielberg was the producer. (And then of course there’s Poltergeist, which Spielberge nominally produced, but apparently in such a hand-on way that some people claim he effectively directed it.) To this day I still don’t have a good handle on who the auteur was for Gone With The Wind, with its multiple directors; surely there must have been someone in that role, because the movie feels like it has a very consistent and unified vision.
In the TV world, on the other hand, directors are almost never auteurs. They’re much more likely to be hired hands who are not in charge of the overall creative direction. This is probably inevitable for series TV, because to meet the production schedule you have to have multiple directors working on multiple episodes concurrently; there’s no way one director could run things. That’s why film directors are household names, but few people can name any TV directors.
Instead, in TV there’s this informal concept of the “show runner,” which is not a fixed title but rather seems to be effectively the auteur role for a TV show. The show runner might be a producer, a writer, or a script editor, for example. Vince Gilligan was show runner for Breaking Bad, for example, but he only directed a handful of episodes. Of course he did not make the show by himself, and he’d be the first to credit all of the creative people who contributed to it; but he’s the guy who ultimately chose all of those people, and he had final say on everything.
I just love your posts, Gary! I will admit, though, that I’m more intrigued with the posts that tell stories or are about specific movies or roles. I’m not the techie type. But you manage to offer something for everyone. Is that by design?
The trick is to randomly name character actors from sitcoms that went off the air 10 to 40 years earlier.
Jerry from Newhart
Potsie from Happy Days
Herb Tarlek from WKRP
Danny Dallas from Soap
It goes on and on.
I was about to post pretty much the opposite; this is a great topic for Gary. It lets him mosey around, making whatever points he likes, telling whatever stories he chooses along the way.
They sign the big checks.
Betty Thomas from Hill Street Blues
Fred Savage from The Wonder Years.
Penny Marshall from Laverne and Shirley.
Gary, I greatly appreciate your observations to cheer up the usual Monday blahs.
I found your mention of “honest tricks” to be interesting.
And the “Double Indemnity” info was insightful as well:
“But when director Billy Wilder got to his own car for the ride home, it wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. Wilder had a sudden inspiration and, shouting, called the cast and crew back to their posts. On the spot, they re-shot the getaway to include MacMurray’s agonizingly drawn out starting her car, which parked near to the murder scene, was incriminating enough evidence to send them both to the gas chamber even if they left on foot. This improvisation became one of the most suspenseful moments in the movie, helping make it a film noir classic.”
Thanks, Susan! Yes, I’m going for a Whitman’s Sampler effect. I like to demystify Hollywood history and methods of reaching people.