First Time Director. Gil Bettman

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СКАЧАТЬ gave him: earnest likeability, pluck, puckish charm, and deft comic timing. Twenty-five years later it's obvious — Eric Stoltz is an excellent actor, but Michael J. Fox is the definition of Marty McFly.

      Back in 1984, when Zemeckis went into production on Back to the Future, Stoltz and Fox were young actors, just starting out and largely unknown. Bob shot for three weeks with Stoltz before he realized he had made a crucial mistake. Eric was a good actor, but he could never do justice to the role of Marty McFly. Because Spielberg was the executive producer, and the film was being made at Universal — where Spielberg was, de facto, the most powerful man on the lot — Zemeckis was allowed to shut down the production for several weeks, recast Marty, and finish the picture with Michael J. Fox in the lead. And the rest is history. We now can see clearly that without the perfect actor in the role of Marty — Michael J. Fox — the film would have never achieved greatness. It would have a good film. The script was great. Christopher Lloyd was perfectly cast as Doc Brown. The rest of the cast was solid down to the bit parts. But with Eric Stoltz playing Marty McFly? No one can say for sure, but it seems highly likely Back to the Future would not have been the film that launched a franchise.

Perfecting Your Script - Getting the Audience into the Movie

      A first time director is wasting valuable time and energy during preproduction if he concerns himself with questions such as how many days, if any, he will get to have a steadicam. Instead, he should focus on what will yield the greatest results: perfecting the script and securing a dream cast. How does he go about doing this? It is incredibly difficult. If it were simple or easy, great first films would be a dime a dozen, instead of one in a hundred.

      All first time directors, before they undertake their big breakthrough gig, should have spent a reasonable amount of time trying to understand and incorporate the wisdom of one of the great screenwriting gurus. Zemeckis swears by Lajos Egri. According to Bob, everything you need to know about screenwriting is in Egri's book, The Rules of Dramatic Writing. I personally found the approach of Frank Daniel, who ruled the USC School of Cinema when Zemeckis was a student there, to be the most enlightening. His teachings are memorialized in a book written by two of his disciples, David Howard and Edward Mabley, called The Tools of Screenwriting. Many of my colleagues at the School of Film and Television at Chapman University think the best book on screenwriting is Chris Vogler's The Writer's Journey. You are well advised to read and take to heart the teachings of one of these books (or one of comparable greatness) before you direct your breakthrough film. Your understanding of what a director must do to make his breakthrough film great will be seriously compromised if you do not.

      That said, I personally think the easiest way to get a handle on how to perfect your script is to understand exactly how an imperfect script ruins the experience of watching a film. As mentioned earlier, I am adamantly convinced that people go to the movies because they want to be transported in space and time into the action of the film. They want to identify with the main character and live in his skin for the two hours they are in the theater. Again, the extent to which the film allows them to do this is the extent to which the film succeeds. This explains why different films have different audiences. Generally speaking, those under 30 get off on spending two hours being Batman or Spider-Man, while those over 30 prefer being transported in space and time to somewhere like Jane Austen's England, or present-day America courtesy of the Coen Brothers, where they witness a series of events which provides some insight into our current collective consciousness. In a movie made from a script that is flawed, the transportational effect will be weak, even for its target audience — perhaps so weak as to be nonexistent — or it will be intermittent. In either case, the audience's appreciation of the film will be diminished.

      There are a number of reasons why the transportational effect of the script might be weak. Usually it is because the script fails to give the audience the basic information they need to enter the action of the film. The audience must know who the main character of the film is. They must know what the main character wants, and they must want him to get it. Often this essential component of a good script is referred to as the protagonist and objective. The audience has to know who the protagonist is and what his objective is. Sometimes the main character or the protagonist is embodied in two characters. The protagonist of The Godfather could accurately be said to be the joint character of Vito and Michael Corleone. The godfather of the Corleone family is the main character, and throughout the film this role is passed from the father, Vito, to his heir, Michael. In the case of an ensemble film, like Diner or American Graffiti, there is no single protagonist. It is easiest to think of ensemble films as being a number of shorter films woven into one longer film. Each shorter film has its individual protagonist. This is whom the audience identifies with and enters the action through, each time the film shifts to the story centered on that particular protagonist.

      If somebody is going to put up the money to have a first time director direct a script, hopefully they know enough about filmmaking to have made sure that the script has a clear protagonist and objective. Where most scripts are flawed and could be improved is in the extent to which the audience wants the protagonist to realize his objective. Do they really care? If I have heard Zemeckis ask me once, I have heard him ask me a thousand times, “Who cares, Gil? Who really cares?” This is the acid test. This is the hard question every first time director should ask himself when he starts the preproduction on his breakthrough film. Will your audience have an intense desire to see your hero succeed? The more the audience cares, the more fully they enter the action of the film.

      So when he reads the script that he is to direct, the first time director should put it to this acid test on every page. When the audience is watching action described on the page, will they care if the hero gets what he wants? How much will they care? The answer should be: a lot. If not, the director is advised to immediately go to work on the rewrite.

The Hero

      If the answer to the acid test question is that the audience does not care a great deal, then the problem either lies in the nature of the main character or in his objective. Either the hero is not sufficiently heroic or his quest is not truly a worthy quest — one that the audience sees as valid and is eager to participate in. Or it could be a bit of both. You have to determine this and then attack the problem.

      If the problem is with the hero, it is most often because he does not establish himself early on as being of truly heroic proportions. Entire books have been written on what makes a hero a true hero. The best of these are by the scholar Joseph Campbell. Every first time director would be advised to have read Campbell's definitive The Hero with a Thousand Faces before taking on the task of rewriting the script for his breakthrough film. The defining quality of a true hero is self-sacrifice and selflessness. All the heroes of all the Capra movies did the right thing at the crucial moment, in spite of the fact that by so doing they had everything to lose and nothing to gain. Somebody who does something rash or risky when the bad guy has a gun to his head is being brave, but nowhere nearly as brave or heroic as somebody who puts his life on the line in a situation where he could walk away with his head held high. This is the key to the heroism of the final moment of Saving Private Ryan.

      Neither Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) nor Private James Ryan (Matt Damon) has to defend that bridge. In fact, by defending it, they are both disobeying orders. Likewise, at the end of Casablanca, Rick, the Humphrey Bogart character, could use the letters of transit and fly off with lisa, the Ingrid Bergman character, and we know that they would be happily in love for the rest of their days on this earth. Rick has spent the entire movie obsessed about having lost lisa, and desiring nothing but to get her back. But when he has the chance, he walks away from it, surrendering lisa to Victor Laszlo for the good of mankind. Described in those terms it seems implausible and corny. True cynics would say it is. But 99 % of the human populace who have seen that film are moved to tears (or have to fight them back) when they witness Rick's act of selflessness.

      These examples of heroic action are taken from the conclusion of two classic films. It is best СКАЧАТЬ