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I directed my first film when I was nine years old. Dad was my camera operator. Mom helped some with the costumes. Most of the characters in the film were unicorns, because that was the way I could convince my friends to participate. Before that, I mostly directed theatre pieces I'd written, along with puppet shows. During a brief period when I was five or so, it was mostly radio dramas which I painstakingly recorded using a small microphone and tape player; these tapes have unfortunately and mysteriously disappeared. My career as an amateur actor goes back farther than my memory; I think my first role with lines was when in a church play when I was one.
As a director, I'm fairly mediocre. At some point I magically developed a mysterious quality that makes actors trust me, and so they wind up doing exactly what I want, only much better. Which then makes the actors trust me more, when all I do is stop them if they go on autopilot or start using actor voice. Otherwise, it's just a matter of casting people who are capable of the roles.
While I'm always open to experimentation, after 20 years of directing I have a pretty good idea of what does and doesn't work for me. And something that doesn't work for me is British film drama, which always feels stage. I don't hold this against British television, and it's an asset for British comedy, but it makes film drama...off-putting. I'm uncomfortably aware of the actors' bodies, which wastes the greatness of projected pictures being really big - small movements become huge. In film, you don't need bodies anymore; you have faces.
I am rankled by the way my school teaches directing, especially since it tries to pretend that if the performances are good enough, the shots won't matter. They do matter. The wrong shot will make a great performance look stupid, and the right shot will make a bland performance adequate. Editing shapes the performances further, and not just by selecting for the best takes; cuts create their own rhythm and emphasis, and teach the audience what to look at without the actors needing to artificially telegraph everything.
This is ignored in the directing workshops, in which we work with actors we've never met before, in a blank space, and then record it all in a continuous wide shot. This is beyond frustrating for someone like me who directs for close up, and makes any scene which interacts with the environment seem ludicrous in a green-screen Episode II way. Then the scenes are critiqued mainly by the actors, who, of course, love any scene that demands acting (i.e. yelling). Subtlety goes out the window, partly because you can't see it in the wide shot. It makes me soangry it makes me so. angry.
I don't even want to start on the critiques at the end of term screenings, which I'm thinking about not attending anymore because it's like being in a room full of A.V. Club message board trolls. It's mostly white English men in their 60s who haven't seen much of anything in the last twenty years and who are upset by any story that isn't about affluent male baby boomers. It's bullshit.
I love everyone in the camera department, the editing department, and the sound department. I love the screenwriting teachers and the film historians. I love the entire administrative staff. But I wish the directing wing would stop wasting my fucking time and energy, like with the fifth script conference where a man more than twice my age and from a wildly different cultural background still seemed to find something wrong with the fact that my main character - based on me - doesn't seem to be interested in the same things he is.
(That whole thing is weird to me; it's a common criticism I see these people level at films, the "I don't think someone would do that." When someone does something counter to my expectation, that's when I get hooked into the story. That's when things start to feel real. In one of the films from last term, a man starts yelling "take" at a woman, repeatedly, like a WWI machine gun, while he slaps one of her breasts. It was nothing I could have imagined, and it terrified me.)
Ciro says that when I complain about this I sound bourgeois and conceited, because all artists go through it. But that makes me madder, because why should they have to? You can teach technique and history, but you can't teach the art part; artists find their voices through experimentation and instinct. All this negativity just makes it harder to do that.
I am so terribly frustrated.
It is difficult for me to talk about this - or about school in general - to Ciro, because if I complain it is like spitting on something I have and he wants. Something, furthermore, that he delayed so he could be with me. And to talk about things that are going well seems equally mean. He's my partner, but the situation pits us as competitors, and when I ask him for advice it seems arrogant instead of ignorant. Or else it draws attention to our enforced separation, the unpleasant fact that he can't be here to fix things. I hate it. It's obvious that I'm hurting him badly, and I don't know how not to.
As a director, I'm fairly mediocre. At some point I magically developed a mysterious quality that makes actors trust me, and so they wind up doing exactly what I want, only much better. Which then makes the actors trust me more, when all I do is stop them if they go on autopilot or start using actor voice. Otherwise, it's just a matter of casting people who are capable of the roles.
While I'm always open to experimentation, after 20 years of directing I have a pretty good idea of what does and doesn't work for me. And something that doesn't work for me is British film drama, which always feels stage. I don't hold this against British television, and it's an asset for British comedy, but it makes film drama...off-putting. I'm uncomfortably aware of the actors' bodies, which wastes the greatness of projected pictures being really big - small movements become huge. In film, you don't need bodies anymore; you have faces.
I am rankled by the way my school teaches directing, especially since it tries to pretend that if the performances are good enough, the shots won't matter. They do matter. The wrong shot will make a great performance look stupid, and the right shot will make a bland performance adequate. Editing shapes the performances further, and not just by selecting for the best takes; cuts create their own rhythm and emphasis, and teach the audience what to look at without the actors needing to artificially telegraph everything.
This is ignored in the directing workshops, in which we work with actors we've never met before, in a blank space, and then record it all in a continuous wide shot. This is beyond frustrating for someone like me who directs for close up, and makes any scene which interacts with the environment seem ludicrous in a green-screen Episode II way. Then the scenes are critiqued mainly by the actors, who, of course, love any scene that demands acting (i.e. yelling). Subtlety goes out the window, partly because you can't see it in the wide shot. It makes me soangry it makes me so. angry.
I don't even want to start on the critiques at the end of term screenings, which I'm thinking about not attending anymore because it's like being in a room full of A.V. Club message board trolls. It's mostly white English men in their 60s who haven't seen much of anything in the last twenty years and who are upset by any story that isn't about affluent male baby boomers. It's bullshit.
I love everyone in the camera department, the editing department, and the sound department. I love the screenwriting teachers and the film historians. I love the entire administrative staff. But I wish the directing wing would stop wasting my fucking time and energy, like with the fifth script conference where a man more than twice my age and from a wildly different cultural background still seemed to find something wrong with the fact that my main character - based on me - doesn't seem to be interested in the same things he is.
(That whole thing is weird to me; it's a common criticism I see these people level at films, the "I don't think someone would do that." When someone does something counter to my expectation, that's when I get hooked into the story. That's when things start to feel real. In one of the films from last term, a man starts yelling "take" at a woman, repeatedly, like a WWI machine gun, while he slaps one of her breasts. It was nothing I could have imagined, and it terrified me.)
Ciro says that when I complain about this I sound bourgeois and conceited, because all artists go through it. But that makes me madder, because why should they have to? You can teach technique and history, but you can't teach the art part; artists find their voices through experimentation and instinct. All this negativity just makes it harder to do that.
I am so terribly frustrated.
It is difficult for me to talk about this - or about school in general - to Ciro, because if I complain it is like spitting on something I have and he wants. Something, furthermore, that he delayed so he could be with me. And to talk about things that are going well seems equally mean. He's my partner, but the situation pits us as competitors, and when I ask him for advice it seems arrogant instead of ignorant. Or else it draws attention to our enforced separation, the unpleasant fact that he can't be here to fix things. I hate it. It's obvious that I'm hurting him badly, and I don't know how not to.
