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.

Gullane and the Academy Awards.

Well it's been over a week since I made a contribution to the blog with a post but here I am back and ready.

There are a lot of other things I have to do; I have to write my novel, organise my one man show for the Edinburgh Festival and do my taxes.

What appears to be taking a lot of time is the one man show; I did the classic thing of registering my show on the Edinburgh Fringe web site and then forgetting what user name and password I had chosen.

Ordinarily this would not be a problem as all you do in that case is click on 'reminder of password' and it gets e-mailed to you automatically but there is one snag.

AT&T in the form of SBCGlobal are my servers and they put a block on foreign domain names they do not recognise. So when the reminder came to me from the web site in question it was blocked and sent back. The name of the domain where the e-mails were coming from was edfringe and edfringe might look a bit shifty to a computer.

So I have made many a phone call to Scotland over the past week and it still isn't sorted out. The big problem with calling them is that they finish work at 6:00 pm so all the calls have to be made before 10:00 am Los Angeles time. If the person I want is in a meeting they never get out of it before the end of their day.

So it's a bit of a bind.

There is a place called Gullane which is a small town – or more like a village -on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth in East Lothian on the east coast of Scotland. It's about twenty to thirty miles from Edinburgh and in it there is a village hall which I want to use for a few rehearsals before the show; there it is above.

I know of the hall, and Gullane, because my uncle used to live there. He had half a Dublin accent and half a Scottish one and my dad couldn't understand a word he said.

When I was staying there with my brother, many years ago, we took a job in Gullane at the fair ground collecting the fares on the Dodgem Cars.

The first thing we were taught to do was to give incorrect change to the punters. It's something I never did but our boss, who was a little fella who wore a hat with a feather in it, would show us how to let the customer see the change in our hand and then as we put it into their hand we would somehow keep a coin in the folds of our fingers; I don't think I could have done it even if I'd wanted to.

We collected the fare when the cars started to move and we had to jump between them and kind of flatter and chat up the girls to try to keep them in for another ride; I liked doing that.

The thing you couldn't do was to touch two cars at the same time as the electricity would go through you and give you a nasty shock. I can still feel the pain from trying it once – it wasn't touching cars exactly, but the bar that was on the back which would reach the ceiling of the rink to give power to each car.

There was that, of course, and trying to avoid being hit by the cars.

I remember it took us some time to get paid too as the people running the dodgems tried to get away with it.

My cousin, who still lives in Gullane, always reminds me of the time my brother Pat and me worked at the fair ground.

So I think a nice little drive out to Gullane each time I rehearse would be nice and pleasant when I am there and I can get some fish and chips with my wife and wander along the beach.

When I go there I have another blog which I will be posting so I hope you will be able to follow me there.

It's been over a week since the Academy Awards and I wasn't too disappointed with the outcome. I'm glad Hurt Locker won but I would have liked to have seen Up in the Air win. It was a brilliant script and well performed and was about a man who thought he had everything but he didn't and it was a really good satire on America. Try and see it if you can; it's not a rip roaring comedy or a thriller but well worth a watch.

I asked a friend of mine if he enjoyed the Academy Awards and he said that they were a load of shit; a blatant publicity stunt.

Well you know who am I to argue with that; but people enjoy them. I always do and loved last year with Hugh Jackman; I didn't expect Stave Martin and Alec Baldwin to be like that but they were good in their own way.

I know it's a publicity thing but at least members of the academy get to vote – so it's real as far as that's concerned but it's only their opinion. There is never a degree of difficulty point like in the diving at the Olympic games so it really is very hard to say whose performance is better than anyone else's?

Is it harder to play a country 'n' western singer than a company executive? It depends doesn't it – I mean it would be harder for me to play a country n' western singer than Jeff bridges as he is almost there.

And what about directing? What about it I hear you say.

There was one scene in The Hurt Locker when the chap – the protagonist – was trying to defuse a bomb in a car; that scene was almost perfect and it was made up of good acting, good placement of the camera shots and – most importantly – good editing.

What kind of direction went into that scene? We will never know, of course, but the director's job is to get the performance from the actor; a discussion with the Director of Photography about the camera angles too but the main job is to make it believable and if the actor is not believable – over the top, playing it too small or just plain unbelievable – the whole thing is ruined.

The director has to tell the actor, if he doesn't know, what the character wants, what he has just been through and then has to tell him, using the correct words, how he is doing.

If the director tells the actor he is a load of shit where is that going to get him? If the director tells the actor how good he is that could be counterproductive too – the correct words need to be used I repeat.

That is why I am glad Avatar didn't win; I haven't seen the film but every time someone tells me about it they tell me of the 3D effects and the magic but I have yet to hear anyone tell me about the acting.

With regards to how important and correct the awards are I will say one of the greatest actors never recaived an Academy Award for any of his performances; I'm talking of Charlie Chaplin.