First Time Director. Gil Bettman

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СКАЧАТЬ and unavailable. Or they may not be willing to compromise and accept the wages of your budgetarily compromised film. Under these circumstances, suggestions are usually welcomed. To this end, I have always saved all my crew sheets from every shoot I ever worked on. And if I had the good fortune to work with any crew person who was a standout at what he did, whether he was a PA or a cinematographer, I have always entered his name and phone number in my Rolodex, under his job title.

      As soon as you come on board as the director, sit down with whoever is hiring the crew and casually suggest that you go over his choices for the department heads: the director of photography, the art director, the editor, the wardrobe department head, the hair and makeup person, the prop master, the special effects man, the stunt coordinator, and the graphic effects designer. Try to feel out how open he is to your suggestions. He may welcome your input or he may be completely opposed to it. Whichever, follow his lead. Yes, crewing up is important, and a first time director can only help his cause if he provides some key input into the process. Yet it is definitely not so important that the first time director should risk getting into an adversarial relationship with the line producer or the UPM or whichever one of the higher-ups is doing the hiring.

      In almost all instances, the director participates in the hiring of the cinematographer. This only makes sense. The harmony and efficiency of the production is almost entirely dependent on whether or not the director and the cinematographer can get along with each other as human beings while collaborating as artists. Truly, it is as if the cinematographer and the director paint a picture together. The director must rely on words to tell the cinematographer what to paint. The producer and the higher-ups would be buying themselves some very cheap insurance guaranteeing that their set will be a happy and productive place if they hire a DP with whom you, the director, have collaborated with successfully in the past. You have got to hope that they understand the special nature of your relationship with the DP, and will respect your wishes when it comes hiring time. If they can't, or don't, politely and persistently try to enlighten them. If they are beyond being enlightened, after a week or ten days, you have to give up, even though your relationship with the DP is arguably more important than your relationship with the producer.

      As a rule, successful cinematographers get ahead by getting along. Their careers are not going to flourish unless they have the people skills to amicably resolve differences of opinion between themselves and the many different directors — all with different work habits and personalities — with whom they are going to have to collaborate on their way up the ladder. Pedro never even introduced me to the DP on Crystal Heart. He just told me his nickname, Vasaleo, which means vaseline in Spanish. The nickname said it all. This guy was as smooth as they come. He was cheerful, completely unflappable, flexible, always full of ideas, but ready to incorporate mine. I had no trouble working with him, and it was to Pedro's credit as a producer that he knew filmmaking and Vasaleo well enough to know in advance that this would be the outcome.

      If the producers are so incompetent they are going to force you to work with an intractable DP, this is going to be the least of your worries. If they blow it at this important juncture, then it is (tragically) more than likely that they are going to make bad decisions in two other areas that happen to be much more crucial to the success of the film: the rewriting of the script and the casting of the actors. Unfortunately, there is very little you can do to remedy this situation.

CHAPTER 1 | SUMMARY POINTS

      • As a first time director, many of the crucial decisions will not be left solely up to you — especially those that impact the budget. But if it's purely a matter of taste and doesn't dramatically affect the budget, it should be your call. If it is your movie, it will be a better movie.

      • The director sets the tone of the workplace. Stay positive, because you are going to need every bit of optimism to make it through the battle ahead. Be your own best cheerleader.

      • The director is responsible for everything, even that which he has no control over.

      • The director should never be heard laying blame or making excuses. It is not his place. He should have anticipated everything and made all the right decisions. Even if disaster befalls him, he should have had a back-up plan that saves the day.

      • Prepare and then prepare some more. There is no such thing as being over- prepared.

      • If you are going to direct a film which relies heavily on some realm of filmmaking that you are new to — whether it's something as old hat as song and dance numbers or stunts, or something as cutting edge as 3-D CGI graphics — then before you ever set foot in the office, study the nuts and bolts of that process so you can walk the walk and talk the talk.

      • As a first time director, you should never risk one iota of whatever trust and goodwill exists between you and your producer. The only way for you to get ahead with your producer is by getting along.

      • Very few first time directors get a second chance if they cannot get into the mindset of being a budget hawk.

      • The director is responsible for everything, but he cannot actually do everything. Crew up well and delegate.

      CHAPTER 2 | CONTENT IS EVERYTHING

Casting and Scripting

      You cannot make a great movie without a great script and a great cast. This truism is well known and well supported. Anyone who aspires to direct has probably heard it bandied about repeatedly. And yet, most aspiring directors neither understand how true this theory is, nor do they grasp the full ramifications of that truth. I certainly did not when I was starting out as a director. In fact, only recently, after 25 years as a working director, have I come to actually embrace and internalize this truth.

      The reason for this is that in the last 30 years or so, pretty much since Spielberg set a new standard for how movies should look, the “look” of the film has become conspicuously more important than the content of the film. All big movies must look big. Ideally, they should unveil some technological breakthrough that the filmmakers have harnessed to give that film a whole new look. Advances in CGI graphics have paved the way. Lucas used them to give us space battles such as we had never seen before in Star Wars. Zemeckis used new graphic technology to integrate live action and two-dimensional animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Spielberg's dinosaurs in Jurassic Park showed us how CGI technology could produce three- dimensional animated dinosaurs and seamlessly place them in the real world. Then Zemeckis had to top that by using the same technology to seamlessly integrate the fictitious main character of Forrest Gump into actual documentary footage of three past presidents. Today when teenage boys, who are the target audience for every big Hollywood film, discuss which films are worth seeing and why, they rate “the effects” on par with and of equal importance to the story or the cast.

      No big film can pull a big audience without a big look, and so only those directors who are most adept at generating the big look are big successes. Lucas, Spielberg, and Zemeckis launched this trend. Today it is carried on by John Woo, Michael Bay, David Fincher, and every director whose career is launched with a big action film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. One never hears these directors discussed in the same breath with those directors who deal with character or plot-driven movies. In a way, the directors who do the smaller budget, independent films — the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Whit Stillman, Neil LaBute, Todd Solondz, Kevin Smith, etc. — will forever be relegated to a kind of second-string status. On a big Hollywood film, probably 90%, if not more, of the director's energy is consumed by the process of making the technology work to generate the desired big look. As a result, the biggest directors — the ones who get the big bucks and their name in big lights — are those who have been most successful at mastering the big look. The significance of this situation is not lost on aspiring young directors. To make it big, you have to be a master of the СКАЧАТЬ