notes from a directing seminar at the Drama Book Shop
On Wednesday I went to a seminar at the Drama Book Shop on 40th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues).
I am on the store's mailing list and had gotten a newsletter advertising Free Workshop with Myrl Schreibman, author of 'The Film Director Prepares.'
When I arrived I was surprised that Myrl was a man. I guess I had read "Myrl" as something relating to "Myrtle." Apparently not. Odd name. Anyway, he wanted to know every one's name and what they did, and how that related to wanting to know about directing. Several people had gone to a previous seminar about a software package called Frame Forge 3d Studio, and included with Myrl's book is a demo copy of the software. A few others were actors on the Drama Book Shop's normal channels. One was a cinematographer. Way in the back was a guy who directed a couple of features and was a former student of Myrl Schreibman. When his name was mentioned I had already finished taking notes and didn't write it down. I thought Myrl said he directed Annapolis, but I looked on IMDB and the guy who directed Annapolis is Asian, and this guy wasn't Asian, so who knows. While I was Googling around I noticed that Mr. Schreibman gave the exact same lecture on Tuesday, elsewhere in Manhattan.
He started out asking who we thought the creative force was behind a feature film. The answer he was looking for was "the producer or the producers." He used a football metaphor, saying the producer is the coach and the director is the quarterback. That would seem to make sense. The producer deals with strategy so the director can get in the trenches and push the project forward. Usually you don't think of the producer as creative, but in practice they are very much involved. In John Ford's early days as a director, you had the producer sitting back at the studio doing finance and the director would take the company off on location to make the picture. Now the producer goes along. Not only that but you have a whole crew of producers and assistant producers and associate producers and a line producer and executive producers doing all kinds of crap to get the picture made. I think I'd rather do it the old way, but the market says otherwise so we do it that way with the whole circus above the line now.
Myrl went on to say that the director has three basic responsibilities. (1) To the financial backers of the project, (2) to the audience, and (3) to their creative self. In my mind, if you satisfy 2 and 3, 1 naturally falls in line. Though, only if you have a good producer and 1st assistant director watching the expenses.
He mentioned "mobisodes," which are programs you can watch on a mobile device like an iPod or a cell phone. The word is short for "mobile episodes" but can also include standalone pieces. There are a lot of things you can do with mobisodes, but the sacrifice, at least for the moment, is resolution. The video quality on a cell phone is far from HDTV, and light years from something like a Cinemascope image. Also, because bandwidth is always a concern for wireless devices, it's best to be able to compress the image as much as possible, so it's really not a format for a lot of action. The ideal format for a webisode/mobisode is vector animation (like a Flash animation) drawn by a local graphics processor; but animating takes a lot longer than shooting something with a video camera so it is in the end more expensive. What you will see available for delivery on mobile devices the most is probably going to be soap operas, because they're relatively cheap to produce, they allow for more-or-less static images (making compression easy), and the tried and true daytime soap is a proven formula for advertising. Get an audience hooked on a story and string them along forever. How long have Guiding Light and General Hospital been running? There is hope though, brought by the Hispanic television world's novella format. Novellas are soap operas with a beginning and an end. More like prime time dramas. Ugly Betty is the heavily touted example of a recent successful novella on American network television. Unlike shows like Dallas, which suffered greatly from an ambling plot line and unfocused writing, novellas have a predetermined story arc, like my favorite television show ever, Babylon 5, and the very popular Lost series. They write the episodes as it goes along, but there are plot points and character changes mapped out over the season. Many series of the past would probably have benefited greatly from this sort of structure.
Back to the seminar, Myrl said "the director begins with the script" and described an objective method of doing read-throughs. First you ask "what is it" and look for themes. Second read you ask who the characters are, where do they come from, how they relate to each other, what are their needs and wants. Third pass you ask yourself "can I hook my gut to the piece." Meaning, is this a story that I can tell from the heart. Do I believe in the material enough to drive this story as a director. He also said, if it's a paying job and you need the money, you probably do it either way. I wish that weren't the case, but for survival in the industry it needs to be. You can always go by Alan Smithee.
Moving on, he mentioned some hints to look for in your quest to "find the character on the page." Obviously, look for a character's actions and dialog. Myrl said that "words and actions are the result of impulses." One can infer that these impulses all have a cause behind them. I've felt for a while that in a good screenplay, nothing in the text is insignificant, and this speaks to that end. If the script says the character turns to the left, then the word "left" should have meaning. It's specificity. When you write a script you are writing out a set of instructions, and meaningless textual chaff is disruptive to the process of turning your words into a meaningful film. So, if a character says or does something, and the writing is good, you should be able to read something between the lines about the character's intent or impulses.
He also said something I found very interesting. I like when complex ideas are distilled down to a few words. He said, "anger is protest. Tell the actor to play the source of the anger." This is an important distinction that translates to using models in photography. I hate when models are obviously posing. I tell my models quite often to "just be." I don't like them to look at the lens a lot. I tell them "only look at the lens if you mean it." Sometimes I have to wear a model out a bit before they start to act naturally. New models mostly, but also models who do a lot of glamour photography are usually stuck on artificial poses. Jim Henson once said, "You're assisting the audience to understand; you're giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don't give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it's almost more pure. It's a cooler thing."
Mr. Schreibman then went on to talk about a few classic films and what they are in essence about. The Godfather is a story about succession to the throne. It is at its roots the same formula as Shakespeare's King Lear (Michael being Cordelia) and any number of classic Greek plays: a king has three heirs and one kingdom. He mentioned The Conversation as well, describing is as having a theme of transparency, and mentioned that Gene Hackman's character wears a translucent raincoat. I did not notice the raincoat when I watched it a few years ago. It is possible that this was planned by the writer or the director, but since it didn't really stand out I wonder if it was not simply the wardrobe supervisor pulling something that fit Gene Hackman. Lastly, he mentioned Traffic, and that it was really three movies with three separate themes.
He then moved more into an actor-director matrix part of the seminar. A book was mentioned, Friendly Enemies: The Director-Actor Relationship by Delia Salvi. The store was out of copies when I went upstairs, so I have not yet had a chance to check it out. I started doing model photography in grad school because I wanted to get better at working with talent. It's largely how I got sidetracked into fashion photography. When I was at the North Carolina School of The Arts, my end of year project was a bit of a disaster, largely because I didn't know how to communicate with the actors. Since then I've put a great deal of effort into figuring out how to talk to performers and get them on the same page about what we're working towards and how I see a particular scene. Mr. Schreibman said "[single camera narrative] is all about the discovery of the moment." This was a central theme in his talk, particularly later when he started talking about the perils of over reliance on previsualization, but also in relation to the task faced by the actors, and the director's responsibilities in helping them to achieve a captivating performance. He said "actors work on three levels simultaneously." First is the conscious level, where the distractions of the actor being chained to their own life while trying to play a character are always going on. Is their wig going to fall off, the coffee on the craft services table is bad, etc. The second level is the unconscious level. On the unconscious level, the actor's life experiences, the things that make them who they are, act as a filter (and unfortunately sometimes a governor) for how they perceive the world. Third is the subconscious level. I really don't understand the difference in practice between the labels of unconscious and subconscious, but just roll with it. The so-called subconscious level is where the actor uses their base emotions to fill in the gaps of the character. Myrl referred to an actress in the audience as having a computer (I think he meant database) from which she could call up preexamined emotional states from her own life and lay them over what a character was experiencing to make the character more real. As I understand it, this is called Method acting. Personally, I can see how it could be useful, but I think there is certainly an art to the deployment of The Method. For every Marlon Brando there are a couple hundred bad method actors out there. You have to do what works for you. But that's internal for the actors, and I try to stay out of it as a director. Myrl siad "the image has to be motivated by the actors, not the actors motivated by the image. In my previously posted list of Rules of Filmmaking I said "never perform an actor's line." This is what I was talking about. There is a certain trust between the director and the actors, and you as the director really don't want them doing your job, so why would you tread on their turf and try to do their job right in front of them? You as the director are a facilitator for the creative input of everyone on the set. You are guardian of the vision, but the vision is not yours, it comes from everyone involved in the project. If one person is not hitting the mark you want them to hit, you don't shove them into place, you find out why they're not hitting the mark. They are professional artists and if they're missing the mark you want them to hit now, then the source of that divergence will probably cause a greater rift as you go on with making the picture. You need to stop and find the cause. Myrl said, "the closer the camera gets to the actor, the more truth it tells," and I add that if the actor doesn't believe in doing it the way you want them to do it, then that breech of verisimilitude will probably be quite visible to the audience. The actor isn't playing it the way you want them to play it? Stop and talk about character and motivation with them. You're working form the same script, so get on the same page and talk it out. The actor may be completely right to play it their original way.
Then came the final segment of the seminar. Myrl Schreibman teaches coverage at UCLA so he knows quite a lot about assembling a film. He was very insightful about the use of storyboards, saying, "storyboards are dangerous for directors. Directing is a thought process." They are also bad for the actors, "find what they're giving you." He showed a few clips from the film The Cooler (William H. Macy plays a guy who is unlucky and brings his bad luck with him wherever he goes, so a casino employs him to walk around and drive away luck) as an example. On the DVD for The Cooler, there is a feature where you can view the storyboard sequence and the final film on the same screen. They were similar but the camera angles seldom matched, the cartoon figures often didn't look like the actors playing the parts, and the gravity of William H. Macy's performance in the scenes and his ability to bring them alive was quite obvious. In other words, the storyboard is only the beginning. As a director, you have to sense the scene on set and react. Don't just shoot the storyboard shot for shot, bring the sketches to life. Storyboard and create shot lists but do not use them as a bible. Myrl didn't mention this, but I think it was Martin Scorcesse who pointed out that the only real thing in Raiders of The Lost Ark was when the fly flew into John Rhys-Davies' mouth, and that the original audiences reacted to that moment quite positively because there was a sense that the rest of the movie was too tightly controlled. This is possibly why writers should not direct their own material or be on set for every shot. The script is clay and the director and actors must breath humanity into it. Myrl said "the audience doesn't care about the visual. The audience cares about the performance."
Finally, he said "[when you are directing] instinct is never wrong." That one's a bit too deep for a blog.
I am on the store's mailing list and had gotten a newsletter advertising Free Workshop with Myrl Schreibman, author of 'The Film Director Prepares.'
When I arrived I was surprised that Myrl was a man. I guess I had read "Myrl" as something relating to "Myrtle." Apparently not. Odd name. Anyway, he wanted to know every one's name and what they did, and how that related to wanting to know about directing. Several people had gone to a previous seminar about a software package called Frame Forge 3d Studio, and included with Myrl's book is a demo copy of the software. A few others were actors on the Drama Book Shop's normal channels. One was a cinematographer. Way in the back was a guy who directed a couple of features and was a former student of Myrl Schreibman. When his name was mentioned I had already finished taking notes and didn't write it down. I thought Myrl said he directed Annapolis, but I looked on IMDB and the guy who directed Annapolis is Asian, and this guy wasn't Asian, so who knows. While I was Googling around I noticed that Mr. Schreibman gave the exact same lecture on Tuesday, elsewhere in Manhattan.
He started out asking who we thought the creative force was behind a feature film. The answer he was looking for was "the producer or the producers." He used a football metaphor, saying the producer is the coach and the director is the quarterback. That would seem to make sense. The producer deals with strategy so the director can get in the trenches and push the project forward. Usually you don't think of the producer as creative, but in practice they are very much involved. In John Ford's early days as a director, you had the producer sitting back at the studio doing finance and the director would take the company off on location to make the picture. Now the producer goes along. Not only that but you have a whole crew of producers and assistant producers and associate producers and a line producer and executive producers doing all kinds of crap to get the picture made. I think I'd rather do it the old way, but the market says otherwise so we do it that way with the whole circus above the line now.
Myrl went on to say that the director has three basic responsibilities. (1) To the financial backers of the project, (2) to the audience, and (3) to their creative self. In my mind, if you satisfy 2 and 3, 1 naturally falls in line. Though, only if you have a good producer and 1st assistant director watching the expenses.
He mentioned "mobisodes," which are programs you can watch on a mobile device like an iPod or a cell phone. The word is short for "mobile episodes" but can also include standalone pieces. There are a lot of things you can do with mobisodes, but the sacrifice, at least for the moment, is resolution. The video quality on a cell phone is far from HDTV, and light years from something like a Cinemascope image. Also, because bandwidth is always a concern for wireless devices, it's best to be able to compress the image as much as possible, so it's really not a format for a lot of action. The ideal format for a webisode/mobisode is vector animation (like a Flash animation) drawn by a local graphics processor; but animating takes a lot longer than shooting something with a video camera so it is in the end more expensive. What you will see available for delivery on mobile devices the most is probably going to be soap operas, because they're relatively cheap to produce, they allow for more-or-less static images (making compression easy), and the tried and true daytime soap is a proven formula for advertising. Get an audience hooked on a story and string them along forever. How long have Guiding Light and General Hospital been running? There is hope though, brought by the Hispanic television world's novella format. Novellas are soap operas with a beginning and an end. More like prime time dramas. Ugly Betty is the heavily touted example of a recent successful novella on American network television. Unlike shows like Dallas, which suffered greatly from an ambling plot line and unfocused writing, novellas have a predetermined story arc, like my favorite television show ever, Babylon 5, and the very popular Lost series. They write the episodes as it goes along, but there are plot points and character changes mapped out over the season. Many series of the past would probably have benefited greatly from this sort of structure.
Back to the seminar, Myrl said "the director begins with the script" and described an objective method of doing read-throughs. First you ask "what is it" and look for themes. Second read you ask who the characters are, where do they come from, how they relate to each other, what are their needs and wants. Third pass you ask yourself "can I hook my gut to the piece." Meaning, is this a story that I can tell from the heart. Do I believe in the material enough to drive this story as a director. He also said, if it's a paying job and you need the money, you probably do it either way. I wish that weren't the case, but for survival in the industry it needs to be. You can always go by Alan Smithee.
Moving on, he mentioned some hints to look for in your quest to "find the character on the page." Obviously, look for a character's actions and dialog. Myrl said that "words and actions are the result of impulses." One can infer that these impulses all have a cause behind them. I've felt for a while that in a good screenplay, nothing in the text is insignificant, and this speaks to that end. If the script says the character turns to the left, then the word "left" should have meaning. It's specificity. When you write a script you are writing out a set of instructions, and meaningless textual chaff is disruptive to the process of turning your words into a meaningful film. So, if a character says or does something, and the writing is good, you should be able to read something between the lines about the character's intent or impulses.
He also said something I found very interesting. I like when complex ideas are distilled down to a few words. He said, "anger is protest. Tell the actor to play the source of the anger." This is an important distinction that translates to using models in photography. I hate when models are obviously posing. I tell my models quite often to "just be." I don't like them to look at the lens a lot. I tell them "only look at the lens if you mean it." Sometimes I have to wear a model out a bit before they start to act naturally. New models mostly, but also models who do a lot of glamour photography are usually stuck on artificial poses. Jim Henson once said, "You're assisting the audience to understand; you're giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don't give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it's almost more pure. It's a cooler thing."
Mr. Schreibman then went on to talk about a few classic films and what they are in essence about. The Godfather is a story about succession to the throne. It is at its roots the same formula as Shakespeare's King Lear (Michael being Cordelia) and any number of classic Greek plays: a king has three heirs and one kingdom. He mentioned The Conversation as well, describing is as having a theme of transparency, and mentioned that Gene Hackman's character wears a translucent raincoat. I did not notice the raincoat when I watched it a few years ago. It is possible that this was planned by the writer or the director, but since it didn't really stand out I wonder if it was not simply the wardrobe supervisor pulling something that fit Gene Hackman. Lastly, he mentioned Traffic, and that it was really three movies with three separate themes.
He then moved more into an actor-director matrix part of the seminar. A book was mentioned, Friendly Enemies: The Director-Actor Relationship by Delia Salvi. The store was out of copies when I went upstairs, so I have not yet had a chance to check it out. I started doing model photography in grad school because I wanted to get better at working with talent. It's largely how I got sidetracked into fashion photography. When I was at the North Carolina School of The Arts, my end of year project was a bit of a disaster, largely because I didn't know how to communicate with the actors. Since then I've put a great deal of effort into figuring out how to talk to performers and get them on the same page about what we're working towards and how I see a particular scene. Mr. Schreibman said "[single camera narrative] is all about the discovery of the moment." This was a central theme in his talk, particularly later when he started talking about the perils of over reliance on previsualization, but also in relation to the task faced by the actors, and the director's responsibilities in helping them to achieve a captivating performance. He said "actors work on three levels simultaneously." First is the conscious level, where the distractions of the actor being chained to their own life while trying to play a character are always going on. Is their wig going to fall off, the coffee on the craft services table is bad, etc. The second level is the unconscious level. On the unconscious level, the actor's life experiences, the things that make them who they are, act as a filter (and unfortunately sometimes a governor) for how they perceive the world. Third is the subconscious level. I really don't understand the difference in practice between the labels of unconscious and subconscious, but just roll with it. The so-called subconscious level is where the actor uses their base emotions to fill in the gaps of the character. Myrl referred to an actress in the audience as having a computer (I think he meant database) from which she could call up preexamined emotional states from her own life and lay them over what a character was experiencing to make the character more real. As I understand it, this is called Method acting. Personally, I can see how it could be useful, but I think there is certainly an art to the deployment of The Method. For every Marlon Brando there are a couple hundred bad method actors out there. You have to do what works for you. But that's internal for the actors, and I try to stay out of it as a director. Myrl siad "the image has to be motivated by the actors, not the actors motivated by the image. In my previously posted list of Rules of Filmmaking I said "never perform an actor's line." This is what I was talking about. There is a certain trust between the director and the actors, and you as the director really don't want them doing your job, so why would you tread on their turf and try to do their job right in front of them? You as the director are a facilitator for the creative input of everyone on the set. You are guardian of the vision, but the vision is not yours, it comes from everyone involved in the project. If one person is not hitting the mark you want them to hit, you don't shove them into place, you find out why they're not hitting the mark. They are professional artists and if they're missing the mark you want them to hit now, then the source of that divergence will probably cause a greater rift as you go on with making the picture. You need to stop and find the cause. Myrl said, "the closer the camera gets to the actor, the more truth it tells," and I add that if the actor doesn't believe in doing it the way you want them to do it, then that breech of verisimilitude will probably be quite visible to the audience. The actor isn't playing it the way you want them to play it? Stop and talk about character and motivation with them. You're working form the same script, so get on the same page and talk it out. The actor may be completely right to play it their original way.
Then came the final segment of the seminar. Myrl Schreibman teaches coverage at UCLA so he knows quite a lot about assembling a film. He was very insightful about the use of storyboards, saying, "storyboards are dangerous for directors. Directing is a thought process." They are also bad for the actors, "find what they're giving you." He showed a few clips from the film The Cooler (William H. Macy plays a guy who is unlucky and brings his bad luck with him wherever he goes, so a casino employs him to walk around and drive away luck) as an example. On the DVD for The Cooler, there is a feature where you can view the storyboard sequence and the final film on the same screen. They were similar but the camera angles seldom matched, the cartoon figures often didn't look like the actors playing the parts, and the gravity of William H. Macy's performance in the scenes and his ability to bring them alive was quite obvious. In other words, the storyboard is only the beginning. As a director, you have to sense the scene on set and react. Don't just shoot the storyboard shot for shot, bring the sketches to life. Storyboard and create shot lists but do not use them as a bible. Myrl didn't mention this, but I think it was Martin Scorcesse who pointed out that the only real thing in Raiders of The Lost Ark was when the fly flew into John Rhys-Davies' mouth, and that the original audiences reacted to that moment quite positively because there was a sense that the rest of the movie was too tightly controlled. This is possibly why writers should not direct their own material or be on set for every shot. The script is clay and the director and actors must breath humanity into it. Myrl said "the audience doesn't care about the visual. The audience cares about the performance."
Finally, he said "[when you are directing] instinct is never wrong." That one's a bit too deep for a blog.
Labels: actors, craft, directing, events, film, ford, links, metaphor, photography, quotation, resources, rules
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