It Sounds Good in Theory

Sometimes the suits and the brass on a production come up with a brilliant idea, but since they have limited experience with actual shooting they can hand a director an impossible task.

Such was the case for me on The Edison Twins.  The show had been going over budget, through no fault of anybody on the production end that I could identify.  The scripts were just very ambitious.  Each episode was given one day of prep and four days of shooting. Now the producers wanted to save some money by doing an episode in three days.  How do you do that?  Well, let’s get the writers to give us an episode that is all in one location so it can be “block shot”.  This should mean that we save all the wrap time and moving time as we go from location to location.  Sounds like a great idea, right.

So they hand me a script and tell me that this will be a three day shoot.  There’s only one problem.  The script calls for a highschool play, with everything taking place in the school auditorium.  So far so good.  Except we can’t jump from one scene to another and shoot efficiently, because the show starts with an empty auditorium and a bare stage then develops gradually until there is a complete set on stage, actors in costumes, and chairs in place for parents and audience to occupy. Every scene still has to be blocked and lit.  Actors still need time to work out their performances and say their lines. Jumping from a scene near the end of the show to a scene near the beginning of the show and back again just can’t be done without at least an hour of set dressing and costume changes. The show has to be shot in sequence, and any efficiency gained by having just one location will be lost by the demands of continuity.

Halfway through day one we were already two days behind schedule on a three day shoot.  This may be a slight exaggeration, but not by much. By day three, which was supposed to wrap the episode, we still had at least two days of shooting left to do. The three day shoot turned into five.

That was my last shoot on “The Edison Twins”.  They had to blame somebody, and the obvious choice was the director.  No hard feelings.  That’s just the way it goes sometimes. It was a great run, and I was sad to see it end.

And Then There Was The Cave of Mirrors

The Edison Twins was not the only episodic show with inexperienced visionaries making disastrous decisions.  I’ll never forget the cave of mirrors on Kung Fu the Legend Continues.  That sounded like such a good idea to the writers and the show runner.  Wouldn’t it be great to have a cave of mirrors where the climactic kung fu battle happens.  I mean, wouldn’t that be confusing if Caine couldn’t tell whether he was seeing the bad guy or a reflection of the bad guy.  So at great expense, such a set was constructed.  The cave of mirrors. Mirrors everywhere.  Triangular mirrors built into pyramids of stalactites and stalagmites.  It was beautiful.

The thing is, the camera only sees in two dimensions.  It doesn’t have binocular vision.  So a mirror doesn’t look like a mirror to the camera.  It looks like a hole, the entrance into another space. And what is worse, when you put a film crew in a cave lined with mirrors at all different angles, it becomes very difficult to hide the crew from the audience. When you are watching the kung fu fight, it’s rather distracting to see a thousand versions of the camera crew reflected in all the mirrors.

That shoot was a nightmare.  We ended up using dulling spray to turn most of the mirrors opaque, so that we could shoot without seeing the crew. I don’t think I ever saw the completed show, but I sure would like to.

Zale Dalen – where the imposter syndrome meets the Dunning Kruger principle.

How can one possibly feel competent to direct a movie?  When I thinks about what a director should be able to control to do an effective job – image, actor performance, editing rhythm, sound effects, music, and most of all audience reaction – the task seems impossible.  One can only approach it with great humility and a certain amount of dread.  When I started directing I usually felt like an imposter, a fraud, a victim of a thousand forces beyond my control. It took some time to get over that feeling.

That’s always been something that I find amusing.  Everybody on set is pretty sure they can do a better job than the director is doing.  Direction is the easiest skill set to belittle, or fail to recognize, or assign to somebody else on the crew.

I remember a production manager talking about a friend of mine, Phil Borsos, and sounding off about how Phil didn’t really direct “One Magic Christmas”.  She claimed it was directed by the cinematographer, Frank Tidy, while Phil was hiding somewhere snorting coke.  I took it upon myself to enlighten her.  “I don’t care what Phil seemed to be doing on set, but if you look at his first film “Spar Tree”, a theatrical short, and his second film, “The Grey Fox”, there’s little room for doubt that he directed “One Magic Christmas”.  His finger prints are all over that movie,” I told her. “Furthermore, I know that movie was dead.  Unsupported by the standard funding sources.  Phil did the work to bring it to life, finding funding, polishing the script. It was years of effort that nobody saw and few recognize.  So please don’t tell me that Phil didn’t really direct that movie.  That movie wouldn’t exist if Phil hadn’t directed it.

Very few people really understand what a director is doing, and only the best directors are actually doing it well.  Because the hand of the director should be almost invisible.  The director is a presence, a control figure.  Peter O’Toole’s character in “The Stunt Man”, nailed it – searching for something he’s not quite able to identify, but ready to accept it when the writer brings it to him.

A professional film crew is like a performance sports car.  You don’t want to go twitching the wheel this way and that, micromanaging to realize some incredibly precise vision of the product you are after.  Subtle and gentle movements are what is required.

The same goes for actors.  In Michael Green’s The Art of Coarse Acting he describes the only four directions a director should be allowed – faster, slower, louder or softer.  I think directing can be more granular than that, but the idea that the director is a puppet master, pulling the strings of the actors and controlling every aspect of the performance, is just absurd.

There’s a film, the name of which I have forgotten, in which Peter Coyote plays a movie director.  I don’t know whether it was intended as a parody, but it really illustrates this point.  His version of a director is a micro-manager in the extreme, telling the actors when to pick up a prop and how to hold it, dictating looks and gestures. I’ve never met an actor who could hold such instructions in their head while delivering a performance. Such a director is only going to give themself a headache and an overwhelming feeling of frustration.  And yet I’ve seen beginner directors trying to behave like this, delivering long lectures to the actors about how to play the scene.  Wrong.  Tell the actor what the scene is about, what is happening in the scene, and then trust that the actor is an artist who will play it.  Only give a direction if something is drastically wrong.  And then only give the simplest direction you can find to solve the problem.

The truth is, a good director controls very little and is at the mercy of innumerable forces totally beyond their control.  A good director is the calm in the eye of the storm, reassuring, supporting, and offering advice only when asked or when obviously needed.  Truffault, in Day for Night described directing as “dancing with the devil”.  (To paraphrase: At the start I wanted to make a great movie.  Now I just want to get the damn thing finished.) And it’s true. The director puts fears and worries aside and assumes they can come out of the process with something of quality. And then they hit the floor with a flexibility and willingness to go with the flow that allows all the other technicians and artists the space to deliver their best as well.

One of my mistakes as a beginning director was to think that I could reveal my doubts and misgivings to the crew, that they were friends of mine and would understand my position.  Wrong.  The crew wants to feel that somebody knows what they are doing and is in control.  They don’t want to think that the director may be totally lost, thrashing around looking for artistic solutions to their problems.  The director is supposed to have a vision of the movie they are making.  And if that vision is cloudy or obscure at times, they better damn well keep that information as a personal secret. Standing in the middle of a set and muttering “I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do with this,” is not what the crew wants to hear.  And yet, that’s often the position the director is in.  Which led to the production still of Paul Lynch standing in the middle of an empty ice rink with a thought bubble over his head provided by the crew.  It read “I know.  I’ll wing it.”

Over the years, I got over my imposter syndrome.  And as I acquired skills, my Dunning Kruger syndrome slowly turned into its corollary – that a competent person assumes what is easy for them is easy for everybody.* It took me years, and many hours on set, to get a handle on what I bring to directing.  Essentially it is this: I have a talent for finding order in chaos.  Give me a dance hall with two main characters and a couple of hundred extras, as I had in Watrous, Saskatchewan at the Rainbow Dance Land while directing the Saskatchewan film for Expo ’86, and in a few minutes I can organize a scene that flows and looks wonderful.

Do you remember the first time you drove a car in heavy city traffic?  If you are like me, you were very tense, trying to be aware of every car in every direction.  It’s only after driving in city traffic for a while that one calms down and only pays attention to the important stuff, like where you are going and is anything in the way.  My first days on a film set were like that.  I was trying to be aware of everything that everybody was doing, from the camera crew to the boom man to the craft services.  It was only after a few hours or days on set that I could focus on the things that needed my attention, and let the completely competent technicians do their jobs without my monitoring. Then directing became…no, not easy.  It will never be easy.  But at least less stressful.  Just as driving in a Chinese city during rush hour no longer gets my heart rate up.

*Totally aside from directing, I noticed the extreme corollary to the Dunning Kruger effect in myself when I tried to show a friend, a very accomplished musician, how to play the harmonica.  I’ve been playing the harmonica since I was about six years old.  Nothing could be easier for me.  I always assumed it would be just as easy for anybody with some skill at music.  So I was very surprised to see my friend struggling with something as simple as getting a single, clean and pure note.  For me, that’s no problem at all.

I have always considered being on time and on budget to be the most important reason I should be hired to direct, second only to putting together a good show.  If the logistics will allow it, and there are times when they won’t which I will get into in another post, I promise delivery on time and on budget. I mean, if there is only so much money, then going over schedule and over budget is irresponsible.

On a film set, especially for episodic television, every second counts.  We are asked to deliver more setups in fewer shooting days as competition for eyeballs intensifies, advertising dollars get spread between more shows, and budgets shrink. Time must not be wasted.

I got into the habit of having a quiet conversation with the continuity person at the start of each shoot.  I would explain that I understand axis.  I’ve done enough editing to know when a shot will cut with another shot.  So if the continuity person thinks I’m crossing the axis, they can quietly tell me about it, and mark it in their notes if they feel they need to do that to cover their butt, but I do not want a discussion. If you allow a discussion of axis, pretty soon you have the camera department weighing in, crew members sketching their idea of the existing shots, and the clock ticks on.  I tell the continuity person that if I have crossed the axis, I will eat it.  It’s on me.  But we don’t discuss it.

That’s just one area where time can be wasted on set.  It’s not even the most important.  A certain amount of time is required for the crew to rest, eat, sleep, and otherwise have a life.  That’s turnaround. You can’t shoot until four in the morning and ask the crew to start again at eight.  Not allowed. When Canal was gearing up to make Wiseguy, the pilot not only blew its budget out of the water with spectacular special effects, it piled on so many overtime hours that the unions wouldn’t allow turnaround.  Alex Beaton, the line producer, brought me in to do the next show.  He told me he wanted the same quality of shots and performance, but on time and on schedule.  Right.  I’m supposed to produce comparable footage to what  the prima donna pilot director delivered, but without the prima donna attitude toward time and money.  Okay.  I’ll take a run at it.

Needless to say, I was wired down tight for that shoot.  Focused.  Intense. I told the crew what was expected, and that I intended to deliver.  So let’s do it.  I had worked with that crew on other shows.  They were with me.  At one point as we worked toward our evening deadline, a gaffer ran past me with a huge coil of heavy cable on his shoulder. I gave him an encouraging slap on the back as he passed me, and got a spray of sweat.  That man was humping.  So I talked to the sound man.  “This is a great crew.  They are really working.  What was the problem with the pilot that they went so far over budget and over schedule.  Was it that the schedule was unrealistic?”  He told me, “No.  The problem was they would put the camera down in three different spots before they would take a shot.”

You can’t do that on an episodic budget.  When I put the camera down, that’s where the shot is going to be taken from.  If it’s a bad choice, I’ll eat it.  But I’m not changing the camera position.  Of course I hope it isn’t a bad choice.  I hope I’ll have  the perfect shot.  But if the shot is less than perfect, I’ll make sure the editor can work with it anyway.  There’s no time for indecision and changes.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to be quick and dirty.  It does mean that I’m going to think ahead, plan my shots, and get the coverage I need to make the scenes work.   I’m just not going to waste any time doing it.

More on time and budget in later posts.