The Directing Process.

Stanley Kubrick

Now we come to the directing process and all that goes with it so I am likely to ramble on a little bit here. This is the one where directors will write to me and tell me I don't know what I am talking about and they may be right. As regular readers will know, and there are regular readers, I don't profess to be an expert on anything.
Some of those regular readers, by the way, read this within minutes of publication – how does that happen?
I have directed a few times; the first time was when I was in a film being produced and directed by a fella from the pop music business with plenty of money. He was also starring in it and I was doing a scene with a well known TV actor – I was playing his bank manager and we were talking across a desk.
We did his medium shot, close up and then they started to set up the shots on me; but instead of setting the camera up in front of the other fella they put it behind his head; in other words they crossed the line.
Great directors like John Ford and George Stevens have crossed the line and got away with it but this guy was making his first film.
Now 'the line' comes easier to an actor than it does to most directors and before I go on I'll explain it better – I hope.
If you cross it with the camera you will give the affect that (in our scene) one actor is looking at the other but the other one is looking away.
If you watched a game of tennis from the side or even a football match the camera has to stay on the same side of the field of play all the time, or the audience wouldn't know which person was hitting the ball in tennis or which team was kicking which way in football.
Also when people are moving in films – like someone running after someone else – they should be going the same way from shot to shot. Let's say from left to right; so when they come to a corner and turn it, the camera is always on the other side of the street keeping the subjects moving from left to right.
The audience watching these films are not aware of these rules, which were instilled into film makers by Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, but they would certainly notice it if they weren't followed.
Anyway – I said I'd ramble – we pointed out to our director that he was crossing the line and he changed the shot.
Later, when he had cut the film together, he showed it to the well known TV actor who said that it – the film - didn't make sense. So the well known TV actor wrote some scenes which he wanted me to direct.
Actors learn a lot about directing from working with directors and the best ones are in the theatre – the live theatre. They do proper directing. The crossing of the line and the other technicalities of actually shooting a film through the camera should be sorted out by the Director of Photography (the DP; DoP in Britain) in consultation with the director. The director should be directing the actors.
In early movies – look at the credits – they had dialogue directors. George Cukor was an uncredited dialogue director or a 'fill in' director on early movies; mostly uncredited.
When they asked me to direct the extra scenes in the movie I looked at the formulaic TV dramas at the time – Kojak etc – and copied those shots more or less: establishing shot, medium shots and close ups.
I also asked for a tracking shot and shot one of the scenes – involving a child – in one continuous shot.
It all worked out well and one shot we did with a mirror turned up on the DP's show reel; the mirror, which I had asked for, changed the dynamic of the whole scene.
All that was great fun – the film disappeared in a mountain of dysentery with all the other crapola films of long ago.
But the hardest part of the whole process is directing actors. As I have said actors work with great directors and terrible directors. They all manage to be there in the mix – in the theatre, in movies and in television and we know the difference.
Most directors in TV don't direct at all; they just set up the shots. It's the same in movies!
I was doing a commercial in Dublin once and, whilst we were having lunch in the Shelbourne Hotel, the DP mentioned he had made a film which was directed by a well known writer Wolf Mankowitz; someone asked him if he was any good and the DP said 'he just said action and cut!'
That film, also, disappeared into a mountain of dysentery!
Some terrible directors sometimes make good films; the DP, the sound crew, the actors and not forgetting the Cinderella men and women in Hollywood, the writers, bring the film in to an acceptable standard.
In the fifties the new wave directors came along and made wonderful French movies which have never been bettered. They advocated the auteur theory where the director is the sole author of the whole shooting match – his vision and his vision alone is what we, the audience, see on the screen – well the DP, the sound crew, the actors and not forgetting the Cinderella men and women in Hollywood, the writers, may have something to say about that.
I mentioned in a post before about famous directors of the past, and Woody Allen in the present, expect actors to direct themselves and come along on the day with their lines learned, their motivation and attitude all there. Their choices already to work with another actor who has also directed them self and come along on the day with their lines learned, their motivation and attitude all there hoping that it doesn't clash with the other guy's.
One of the scenes in Eyes Wide Shut, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Tom Cruise went into about 90 takes; yes ninety takes.
Is that good directing? A good director may only say one word to the actor which can fix everything but 90 takes? It is quite obvious that this very successful director who knew everything about lenses, cameras, lighting and only auditioned actors via video tape, didn't know what word to use to get the scene right from Tom Cruise.