First Time Director. Gil Bettman

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      In this atmosphere, it is all too understandable why most directors today, when lightening strikes and they get their big breakthrough gig, can only think about how they can best use the peanut-sized budget for their film to make it look as much as possible like Spielberg's or Michael Bay's latest multimillion dollar extravaganza. This is clearly a big mistake. It is definitely a case of putting the cart before the horse. On his breakthrough gig, the first time director should be ready to move heaven and earth to assure that the content of his film is of the highest caliber — the content being the script and the cast.

      If you equate making a movie to sculpting a statue, then the quality of the script and the cast are like the quality of the marble or whatever stone is used to make the statue. For the finished product to be of the highest quality, the marble has to be of the highest quality. If the stone is flawed or somehow inherently unattractive, no matter how skillful the sculptor, no matter how refined his technique, the end product will be similarly unattractive.

      The big look costs big money. It should be left to big studio films with unlimited budgets. There are numerous examples of great films which were visually unadorned and low-tech, but which achieved critical and popular success because they had the right fundamental components: (1) a great story that was well told and (2) universally excellent performances. Most first time directors who made it to the top with a breakthrough film relied on great content to make their debut films stand out. They gave their films as good a look as they could muster on a shoestring budget. But, as a rule, these directors skyrocketed to the top because they had the script savvy to write or recognize a great script, and they had the eye and the drive to unearth movie stars at casting calls. Collectively, over the last 30 years, these directors actually initiated and carried out most of the trends of the independent film market.

      The films which fall into this elite category are Easy Rider ; What's Up, Tiger Lily? ; Mean Streets ; Sisters ; and The Return of the Secaucus Seven. This initial wave of low budget successes was continued by She's Gotta Have It, Stranger Than Paradise, and Blood Simple. In the last few years, the most notable examples are probably Clerks, Welcome to the Dollhouse, In the Company of Men, and The Blair Witch Project. These films all had the desired end result of a breakthrough film: They created an ongoing directing career for their writer-directors (with the possible exception of Dennis Hopper, who wrote and directed Easy Rider and was handed a franchise which he immediately trashed by making The Last Movie).

      Much of this book will be devoted to explaining how the first time director can best go about giving his breakthrough film a contemporary, hip look. If you know what you're doing, even on a peanut-sized budget, you can make your camera dance like Tinker Bell in the hyperkinetic style which has been popularized by Spielberg, Bay, Woo, et al. But the hard truth is that style alone — style slavishly adhered to — will never make your film great. Style is a necessary condition for greatness, but it is not sufficient. Good script and good casting are both necessary and sufficient.

      This undeniable fact is rooted in the moviegoing experience. Most people go to the movies to be transported in space and time into the lives of Indiana Jones or Forrest Gump or Michael Corleone. They want to spend two hours in the dark experiencing everything that these mythic beings encounter in their fictional lives on screen — thrilling to all the impending dangers, tasting all the joys, enduring all the hardships. The story and the actors are the vehicle that transports the viewers out of themselves and into the drama of the film. The actors, if they are good, do not seem to be acting. They are real and compelling, if not attractive, so we identify with them. The story, if it is good, is both fascinating and believable. We are sucked into the illusion that something crucial is happening to these characters with whom we are identifying. We sit there for two hours, eagerly anticipating what is going to happen next. The extent to which this transportational effect takes hold of an audience is the extent to which a film succeeds.

      The first time director must understand and take to heart the fundamental truth that, if the audience is transported into the drama of the film, they will sit there happily for the entire two hours with their eyes riveted on the screen, even if the look of the film is decidedly low-tech. The lighting can be hit or miss, the set almost bare, the focus in and out, the camera forever rooted in one place; there might be no effects, no quick cutting, no glitz, no big look, but if the story and the acting are consistently convincing and compelling, most people will enjoy the film. Stranger than Paradise, Clerks, In the Company of Men, She's Gotta Have It, and Blair Witch are five films that succeeded in this manner. They were all made for under $50,000. They have virtually no look, or at least, no big look. But they made money and were critically acclaimed, and most important, they made their writer- director's career — because when it came to the story and the acting, they hit a home run.

      This immutable truth offers the first time director an extraordinary opportunity. He can count on the fact that his film, like all breakthrough films, is inevitably going to be a day late and a dollar short. But, during preproduction he has an opportunity to make his film screw-up proof. If during preproduction he takes to heart the truth that a great movie can be made from a great script and a great cast, and, accordingly, slavishly devotes himself to writing and rewriting the script until he has made it as close to perfect as is humanly possible; if he simultaneously launches himself on a never-ending quest for, not just good actors, but the very best actors which money can buy on the face of the planet for all of the key parts in his film; then, when he goes into production, he can rest assured that, no matter how budgetarily compromised his film is, no matter what disasters strike during filming, he can still make a great film. If he has a great script and a great cast, all he has to do is to get them to say the lines in the script while the camera is rolling. That's it.

A Few Examples from the World According to Bob

      I developed two feature scripts with Zemeckis for studio movies that I was to direct. Neither project ever got made, but going through script development with a master like Zemeckis was enlightening. Bob used to say, “The script is never finished.” He meant that only perfection is good enough, so you have to keep on rewriting and improving the script until it is too late — because you just finished filming the scene. On every film Zemeckis has made, even after the studio had approved the script and it was being prepared for production, Bob continued to work with the writer. This may seem obsessive to some, but Zemeckis looks on it as the most productive use of preproduction.

      He knows that nothing done during the preproduction process will have as great an effect on the quality of the finished product as the script. During the preproduction for a huge scene like the one in Forrest Gump at the anti-war rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where Forrest reunites with Jennie after a separation of many years, Zemeckis understood that everything which takes so much time and money to prepare — securing the location, hiring the hundreds of extras who will make up the crowd, working with the effects artists to prepare the CGI graphics that will add tens of thousands of additional people to the crowd, renting all the period costumes, renting all the additional camera and lighting equipment, transporting all the men and material to the location, catering, and the like — would make the movie a little bit better. But none would contribute one tenth as much to the overall quality of the film as the script and the cast. What makes the scene in front of the Lincoln Memorial moving and great is the way it was written and the way that Tom Hanks and Robin Wright played it.

      You should not begin to shoot a film without the right cast. Ironically, the most concrete proof of this axiom is a Zemeckis film which made that very mistake. The film, Back to the Future, put Zemeckis over the top and made him a director of note. What most people don't know about this film is that Bob first cast Eric Stoltz over Michael J. Fox as the main character, Marty McFly. In retrospect, this seems surprising. In the years that have passed since Back to the Future came out, Eric Stoltz has gone on to deliver many fine performances, almost always playing a mercurial, quirky, slightly oddball type, and Michael J. Fox has built a successful career (cut tragically short by his illness) with the help of some respectable actor chops, but relying mostly СКАЧАТЬ