On Directing

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I'm tackling a big subject here, one that I already know is not going to be contained in one piece, or two or three probably. But it's been something I've wanted to talk about for a while, not least because setting it down might help clarify my one thinking.

You can't move online for pieces on how to write. This is partly because there is a set of "rules", laid out by Aristotle and many after him, that can be pored over and disagreed with and reiterated. And it's partly because the people writing those pieces are, to varying extents, writers themselves and so comfortable with the form - writers on writing, it makes sense.

Pieces and books on directing are a lot thinner on the ground probably because, as with fine art, the practitioners don't naturally express themselves best in the written word. But there also isn't a set of rules to directing that can be as easily applied, or mis-applied, as the three act structure or the hero's journey. This makes it hard for anyone, from the casual viewer to the studio executive, to define just what "good" or "bad" directing is.

And maybe the quest for a definition is, in itself, futile. I have been directing on screen for thirty years and I would still find it a difficult skill to teach to a beginner (I'm not even sure it is a skill). To therefore define when it is done badly or well is also tricky. There are so many variables, and articles of taste, involved, that I often can't get much more useful than "I know it when I see it."

If nothing else, though, I can approach the topic from a personal perspective and attempt to shed light on some aspects of it that might prompt further exploration. And I think it's useful to dissect your own profession every now and again, for the chance that you might illuminate something for yourself.

So let's start with the basics, and we'll go where we go...

What is a director?

For these purposes, I'm talking about directing on screen. I haven't directed any theatre since I was in my 20s, and I am in no way qualified to talk about it. And when I say "on screen", I mostly mean feature film. We might do television as a side-quest, because while the fundamentals are the same, the strictures and requirements of television make it its own thing in few distinct ways.

On a movie, the director is the person with the final say as to what goes on screen. Even with that simple claim, we run into trouble because big budget financing and studio politics etc can easily see a director muscled into agreeing to things they don't like. But we can't account for that all the way through (again, a side quest?), so for our purposes, the director is where the buck stops.

In practice, what that means is that every department from design to photography through costume, make-up, casting, editing etc etc works under the guidance of the director's vision and presents the director with options that the director then decides on.

This is not the same as auteur theory, which has it that the director is the sole creative force on a movie. That is nonsense, in the same way that it would be nonsense to claim that the boss of any company remains completely outside the influence of the advice and expertise of the people working for them. It might be true in rare instances, but we wouldn't consider that boss to be a genius, we would call them an idiot for closing themselves off to potentially useful ideas.

In line with this, there are two pieces of advice that were given to me long ago, and which I try to heed whenever I'm working, and I think these are both absolutely fundamental to the job of directing:

1. People are looking to you to make decisions. Make them, and make them fast. The team needs a leader, and that leader needs to seem certain even when they're not. Better to make a decision and then, with appropriate apologies for the inconvenience, change your mind, than to seem like you don't know the answer.
2. Best idea wins. It doesn't matter if that idea came from the head of the studio or the kid making the coffee. You want to create an environment where ideas flow freely and it is then up to you to use the best ones.

Any director who routinely ignores those two guidelines is off to a bad start. Anecdotally, I can tell you that we just wiped out about 85% of the profession right there. You can't tell by viewing the work, necessarily, just as you can't tell by driving your car whether the guy who runs the car company is a dick. But the people who work at the company could tell you that, just as a film crew can tell you when they were working for an idiot. If the movie worked, it's because that crew hauled that idiot's ass out of the flames, and he or she is now going to get a lot of undue credit.

What is a bad director?

We're going to talk about bad directors a lot here (without naming names, I hope) because it's easier to spot when the job is done badly and thereby point the way to what it might look like when it's done well. Bad directors do us some favours on this topic, because they leave certain clues in their work. No one movie necessarily gives the game away, because we can never know what shenanigans happened behind the scenes on one movie. But several movies give us the pattern. So let's look at some basic examples of how the job can be done badly...

You'll sometimes read a review stating that a movie was well-directed but poorly acted. This can NEVER be the case. Performance is the director's first and most important job. If the acting is no good, if the behaviour isn't believable, then it doesn't matter how much you flung the camera around or how beautifully lit the thing was, the director failed. That, to me, is inviolable. Not one bad performance, maybe, but in a movie where poor performances are in the majority, that is down to bad directing. Whatever else might be happening on screen; car chases, dinosaurs, stunning space vistas - if the performances suck, the director sucked.

In other instances, you may notice the direction. This isn't always bad, because we all spot a flourish here and there and it's not as if the director should be 100% invisible, but what they should never be doing is drawing attention to themselves at the expense of the story. As an audience member, you want to be immersed. If the director keeps pulling you out of the thing to show you how clever they are, that's no good.

Examples of this are hard to find without naming and shaming, so let's conjure the opposite for contrast. Take a look at VICTORIA, directed by Sebastian Schipper. To be clear, this film is a staggering achievement - pitch-perfect performances, incredibly well paced, beautifully made etc etc. If you watched it without knowing, you would be forgiven for missing that the entire 138 minutes is executed in ONE SHOT. And the reason you may miss that is because the execution is integral to the story and because, despite what must have been overwhelming technical challenges (there's a bank robbery, a shoot-out and a fucking car chase!), Schipper doesn't make a song and dance about how he's doing it even once. Now contrast that with a few recent examples of one-shot productions that cannot stop pulling you out of the story to say "Did you see how I got the camera from inside the car to outside the car? How clever am I?" Not as clever as you think you are, and certainly not as clever as Sebastian Schipper.

Sometimes, you simply don't buy the movie. This is a slightly elliptical one, but bear with me. The director's job is to create a believable world in which believable people do and say believable things in service of a believable objective, overcoming believable obstacles along the way. That doesn't mean that everything has to be naturalistic, far from it, but a movie has to be true to its own internal logic. Spielberg made me believe there was a shark in the water at Amity Island. Ridley Scott made me believe in Replicants, or that there was an acid-blooded alien aboard the Nostromo (and that the Nostromo was real and those crew members had actual jobs etc.) Richard Donner, famously, made us believe a man could fly.

How, then, is it possible that I can fail to believe that this person here is a real cop? Or that this married couple have even met before? Genres all have their own rules, which we have an instinctive grasp on. And not everyone likes sci-fi or crime movies or rom-coms. But allowing for that, and allowing for the occasional, isolated "That character would never do that" moment in an otherwise convincing film, if the world feels paper thin, the relationships don't work and the whole thing is unpersuasive, then you're in the hands of a bad director.

But what if it's the script's fault? What if the writer is the one who sucked? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that very rarely happens. Of course, a script can suck. But a good director either gets it fixed or doesn't continue on the movie. Yes, there may be bills to pay or other extraneous circumstances, so in the real world an otherwise good director might get saddled with a bad script and external forces might prevail to stop them from making it better. But I don't think it happens all that often. It's far more likely that either the director didn't spot that the script sucked (because they are bad at their job) or they didn't care that the script sucked (because they are bad at their job). Every good director has had movies that didn't work at the box office or were less well-regarded than other pieces of their work, but if you look at Spielberg's flops, or Soderbergh's misfires, or Hitchcock's, you still tend not to be looking at poorly executed movies.

Conversely, I can think of dozens of very successful and in-demand directors who seem to continually suffer from bad scripts, miscast actors and stories that don't hold water. I don't think these people are unlucky (and judging from the size of the their swimming pools, neither do they), I think they are symptomatic of a bigger problem; a lot of people don't really know how to tell good directors from bad.

How do bad directors get sucessful?

There's an Orson Welles quote about directors that I continually return to:

"Directing is the only profession in the world where you can be incompetent and go on being successful for 30 years without anyone ever discovering it."

It's a good soundbite, that is often repeated. But it doesn't really mean much in isolation. Helpfully, Welles continues:

"Because the only job that a director can do in a film of real value is to do something more than what will happen automatically. …If a director is something of a camera man, something of a cutter, something of an actor, something of a writer and preferably completely a cameraman, completely a writer, completely an actor then his contribution is a real one. Otherwise he is simply the man that says Action or Cut, take it a little slower, take it a little faster and nobody will ever discover that he doesn’t know anything."

Now, I think we get it. But I'd like to dig into "more than what will happen automatically". There has long been a joke in certain theatrical circles that the director's job is to get in the way of the actors. This stems from the idea that, with a good script and the right cast, a play should essentially direct itself. I'm not about to step on that landmine as regards theatre, but a similar notion in film certainly holds water.

In film, a good script and the right cast, working in concert, will show you how the scene is supposed to play, just as the well-written script will give you the tone and pace of a movie. That, I think is what Welles is talking about. If the director gets out of the way, it'll be fine. If a director is good, he or she can find ways to help the process, to accent moments with the right lens or lighting choice or a piece of blocking. The director can make a "contribution". But if a director can't spot what is working, or doesn't know how the scene is supposed to play, or doesn't trust the actors or the material, then they will be tempted to, as Clint Eastwood says, "Kill it with improvements."

Absent those "improvements", the audience (and the studio, and agents and producers etc) might not notice the director at work. And to those with a modicum of taste, not noticing the director is a good sign. But for those who don't know what they're looking at, an invisible director is a non-existent director.

And so, because identifying a good director is not actually easy, the industry tends to reward the directors it can "see". And so drawing attention to yourself becomes a smart career move. Thus you start to "improve" on what is happening, in order to stamp your identity on the movie. And you break it. But because you did something they can point at as "directing", they give you more work. Hollywood people will often use the phrase "X directed the shit out of that", which is meant as the highest compliment but really isn't.

I'm not ragging on bad directors for fun here. It's simply that it is often easier to judge quality by looking at its inverse. We might not appreciate what goes into designing a great bicycle, but if the wheel falls off when you squeeze the brakes, you know you have a dud.

If you're watching a movie and you're completely absorbed in the story, you believe the world and the characters, and the only real question in your head is "What happens next?", if you're not having to forgive or overlook certain shortcomings in order to enjoy the experience, then you're in the hands of a good director.

And good directors are really the subject of this series (yes, it's going to be a series). I want to examine the tools and techniques directors use to convey story and emotion. Because the "invisible" directors aren't actually invisible, their work is on show if you know what to look for. And, as with so many things, executing something without any seeming fuss is usually a lot more difficult than doing it with bluster.

And that's next time... If you want some homework in the interim (who doesn't love homework?), watch the first twenty minutes of Jaws and try to tune in to what Spielberg is doing that has absolutely nothing to do with jumping up and down and trying to draw attention to himself.