What's a director's vision and how can I get one? (Part 1.a subparagraph ii)

I want to make another point about that stuff I said back on March 12th about how humankind deals with the discovery of extraterrestrial life. Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Neil Blomkamp, and Barry Sonnenfeld were all drawn, for one reason or another, to the same material. Just in time for their movies to come out when the public wanted to see them.

Think about it.

What that means is that these directors all happened to be on board with the story two to three years before the audiences were ready for them. They had to be. It takes years to make a movie, from the time it's written through its development, shooting, post-production, marketing, and release.

The genius of Spielberg, I'm convinced, is that he wants to make what people are going to want to see two or three years before they even have a clue that they want to see it. And it's not just Spielberg, although he's probably the most consistent.

Remember 'First Monday in October'? That came out just after Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Want a freakier one? How about 'The China Syndrome'? Twelve days after that film was released, Three Mile Island melted down. The producers couldn't have asked for better PR for the movie. Suddenly, everybody needed to see it.

By the way, I don't think Spielberg –– or any successful filmmaker –– knows how he knows. He's kind of like Wayne Gretzky, who could only explain why he was so good by saying, "I just skate to where the puck is going to be." Something just gets under his skin. It has to. How else could you work that hard on something for two, three, sometimes four years?

Here's the bottom line on material: You can't know. You can't know what's going to resonate with the fickle public any more than you can project what the Dow Jones Industrial Average is going to be on May 13, 2012. So don't try.

Find the material that speaks to you. If you're lucky, it'll speak to an audience as well. If you're not, at least you won't have spent years of your life pretending to care.

What's a director's vision and how can I get one? (Part 1)

I've been talking to a lot of people lately about vision –– that nebulous quality that defines your work, separates you from your competition, and makes you worth vast sums of money –– and I've come to the conclusion that there are two aspects to a director's vision.

The first part is the material.

The easy way to think about this is to ask, "What's the film about?" 'ET', for instance, is about how humankind deals with the discovery of extraterrestrial life. (So are, by the way, 'Avatar' and 'District 9', but we'll get to them down the road.)

The material you're drawn to is a huge part of defining your vision. Back in 1980, Spielberg could have easily been working on a film about –– oh, I don't know, how humankind deals with the discovery of a hugely powerful religious artifact... oh wait. He was. That's 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'.

As long as we're talking about Spielberg, let's see if we can find a pattern. There's 'Jurrasic Park' (how humankind deals with the discovery of prehistoric life'), 'AI' (how humankind deals with the development of artificial intelligence), 'War of the Worlds' and 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' (how humankind deals with the discovery of extraterrestrial life –– again)... Hmm. When you break it down that way, you start to get a pretty good sense of the stuff that floats Spielberg's boat.

I think it's fair to say that Spielberg is attracted to stories about how humankind deals with events that have the potential to change history.

His vision.

I know, I know, there are a lot of ways to parse what a film is about. Just go with me on this one. And, yes, I'm cherry picking. But you get the point.

Some directors, it's pretty obvious what gets them going.

Mel Gibson is drawn to stories about heroic characters who are utterly destroyed by powerful bad guys ('Braveheart', 'The Passion of the Christ', 'Apocalypto'). Krzysztof Kieslowski rarely veered away from dealing with great cultural themes ('Trois Couleurs', 'The Decalogue'). Ingmar Bergman was hung up on death. Until he, well, died.

Others, well, hey. They have mortgages and ex-wives to support.

Or they have something else that unifies their work. Another aspect of vision I'm going to get to in Part 2.

Production design is simple. At least when it's good.

Look around your place. Be honest. Are there things that don't fit?

You bet there are. Even in my place there are, and my wife and I both have pretty distinctive, pretty consistent taste.

There's a painting, for instance, that I hate. My wife likes it. So it's up. If you're married, you understand this kind of compromise.

It's not distinct enough from the other art we have to draw attention to itself. But it doesn't quite fit. So what does it say about us that it's on the wall?

If we were characters in a film, it would say that we don't have a really clear sense of what we like.

We're not characters in a film, which is why it's not a big deal. But in a film, it would be death. It's not consistent enough with the other art to define our taste, but not inconsistent enough to raise a question.

Communication depends on clarity.

If your character is neat, a little mess is not okay. If your character loves music, there's no reason for him to have a collection of shot glasses. Unless there's a reason for him to have a collection of shot glasses, in which case he needs to have them.

Let me hasten to explain that I'm not saying every environment in a film needs to be neat and orderly with only meaningful objects in it. What I'm saying is that you, Aspiring Director, don't have the luxury of developing subtle nuances of character in the same way that, say, a novelist does. A novelist can tell you about the shot glasses, then explain why they're there. Why they're perhaps ironic. Or a holdover from a time when the character felt a need to collect something. Or maybe a meaningful reminder to help a recovering alcoholic from falling off the wagon.

A novelist can even go on for pages about shot glasses that aren't there, that were there once, maybe, but had been tossed into a dumpster in a fit of rage by an ex-lover years ago and missed ever since. Shot glasses that might have precipitated the very breakup of the character and his lover from which he is only now, years later, beginning to recover.

You can't.

There are only two ways to communicate character in film: what people see and what people hear. And as Steven Spielberg can attest, you can never be too heavy-handed with what people see.

Keep it simple.

Is that clear? I know, I know. Clearer than my own living room.

If you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough. Today I'm failing spectacularly.

What a week. I spent the past four days working with some footage I shot just before I left for New York, testing a new film technique I came up with.

And it's not coming together.

The idea's there, but the process isn't working the way I imagined.

It's enough to make me feel sorry for myself. I spent a lot of time and effort designing the test. And dropped a bunch of cash to rent the equipment and hire a crew. That's money I could have spent to take my wife on vacation. My wife deserves a vacation. She hasn't had one since before the kids were born.

As I shut down the computer to head home, I had an epiphany. I realized that I haven't accomplished nothing after all. I've accomplished something much more important. I've failed.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Brian, you're an idiot. Failure is not a good thing."

You're wrong. Failure is a good thing. It's not the best thing. Success, that's the best thing. But failure is the second-best thing. What's bad is not trying.

If everything works out every single time, it isn't hard. And if it isn't hard, what makes you think you're any good?

Directing, by the way, is hard. Inventing a film technique that nobody's ever done before is harder. And putting the two together into something that's worth watching, that's just stupid hard.

So it's no wonder I didn't nail it.

And no, I'm not making excuses. I wish everything had come together the way I imagined it. I have that fantasy, too, you know. The same one you have where you pick up the phone to hear Steven Spielberg on the other end, begging you to tell him how the hell you did it.

Not going to happen. Yet.

But I'm going to go back and work on it some more. Eventually, it'll work. And if it doesn't, something else will.

When that happens, I'm going to be so fucking good at what I do that it's going to look easy. But you know what? It won't be. Unless you're me.

And I'll know that whatever success comes from it comes from skill, not luck.

Casting trick #4. Look at the resumes.

There's a story kicking around about Steven Spielberg which might be true, but even if it's not, it's pretty informative. The way I heard it, a woman approached him in a restaurant and told him he should audition her kids for his next film. He asked if they'd ever been in movies, and she said no. And he said, "I don't put people in their first movie, but I might put them in their second."

Welcome to Hollywood. You can't get work unless you have experience and you can't get experience unless you get work.

There's so much at stake when it comes to making any kind of production that most people are reluctant to take a chance with an unknown. This is true in every department, but today we're talking about actors.

I guess my standards aren't as high as Mr. Spielberg's because I will actually hire actors for their first job. But only on a couple of conditions. One is that they really do their homework, meaning they need to know how to act. The other is that they don't lie about it.

Which brings me to the point of this blog. Insist on your actors submitting resumes. And read them. Even if your actor doesn't have a ton of experience, a resume can tell you a lot about how to work with him or her.

So how do you read a resume?

First, I give it an overview. Just a glance will tell you not only how experienced your actor is, but what kind of acting he or she tends to do. There's a huge difference between the grammar of the stage and the grammar of a film, and stage actors generally need a little special care to make the adjustment to film. People with improv experience can usually improvise, but those who do it almost exclusively might not be as comfortable following a script verbatim. I don't care –– in fact, I prefer that my actors find the line that makes the most sense to them –– but there are some situations where a script has been through so many revisions, tests, animatics, and levels of approval that you can't change a single syllable.

Then I read. Usually from the bottom up.

The bottom is where actors put special skills. Someone who has a black belt in taekwando is probably pretty dedicated, whereas listing "likes cats" might mean he or she doesn't really commit to much. If I see a special skill that I know something about, it gives me an opportunity feel them out, to see how much their resume might be padded.

Just above special skills, most actors put their training. There are a lot of acting schools, each of which has a slightly different take on both the business and the appropriate approach to acting. I like seeing actors who have attended a variety of schools because it means they're probably looking for what works best for them. Call me a cynic, but I think finding the perfect acting school right off the bat is about as likely has finding true love with your high school sweetheart.

Of course, once an actor has done enough work to fill out a resume, he or she has probably learned the rhythms of an actual set and the shorthand we use to communicate, so that stuff is a little less critical.

Right above training, actors put their experience. They usually break it up into film, television, stage, and commercial, with the more experienced actors (or the ones who want to appear more experienced –– remember what I said about using special skills to see how much they might be padding their resumes?) putting the line "conflicts available upon request," which means, "I've done too many to list here."

It also means, "I'll audition for your Burger King commercial even though I shot a McDonald's commercial last month and if you want me I'm going to hope that nobody notices." This, by the way, is a really bad move.

One of the things I look for in the experience section is anything that might be interesting or relevant. Believe it or not, there are some directors whose work I really admire. If someone's worked for one of them, it means that he or she impressed that director enough to get the job. I give points for that.

I never take off points for working for a director whose work I loathe, by the way. Work is work, and it's certainly not the actor's fault if the director who hires him or her happens to suck.

All this takes me maybe a minute, by the way.

And what if your actor has absolutely no experience and absolutely no training? Well, unless you're dealing with a kid –– and I'm talking a kid under five or six –– that person has been up to something, right? Whatever that something is can tell you a lot about how to work with him or her.

A lawyer can't be a lawyer without learning to think a certain way. Just as a mother can't be a mother without learning how to deal with kids. Those things are relevant because they tell you how to communicate with them. If I find the perfect person for the role, I'm not going to make a silly detail like lack of acting experience keep me from working with them.

Spielberg has every right to hire only people who have worked before. But if we all did that, he would never have been hired for his first job.

Ron Howard could teach us all a thing or two. But he won't.

I'm going to pretend 'The DaVinci Code' never happened. That film is such a mess, I could teach an entire course on really bad directing, using it as the only example.

Ron Howard's done other, less stinky films. But even though most of them range from pretty decent to fairly good, I always leave the theater scratching my head. Something always seems to be missing.

It wasn't until I saw 'Frost/Nixon' that I put my finger on it: A theme.

The theme of a film is its lesson. Love is better than money. Crime doesn't pay. Be careful what you wish for. That sort of thing. It's the ultimate truth that the audience (and usually the protagonist) learns just before the credits roll.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Brian, I don't want to teach a lesson. I just want to entertain."

Well, grow up.

Expressing a theme isn't teaching a lesson. It's preaching to the choir. When a film contains "a heartfelt message about the power of love," do you really think people who don't believe love is powerful walk out of the theater with their minds changed?

As much as I complain about Spielberg, this is his genius. Sure, he's heavy-handed. Sure, his characters are often one-dimensional. But his themes? It's like the guy is illegally wiretapping the American psyche. He knows what people want to hear better than they know themselves.

But enough about Spielberg. Let's talk about Ron Howard. Specifically, 'Frost/Nixon'.

The movie’s got a bunch of potential themes:

Good triumphs over evil.

Greed corrupts.

Youth and audacity can beat seasoned and cynical.

Do your homework.

The future is inevitable.

A good storyteller could have taken any one of them and spun an interesting tale. For my money, I would like to have seen ‘Frost/Nixon’ borrow one of Spielberg’s favorites –– it’s better to be American.

Structurally, 'Frost/Nixon' is a fight film. You've got the president –– the most quintessentially American possible –– in the ring against a foreign guy who talks funny. But there's a twist. Said president did a bunch of shit that’s totally un-American, while Frost, on the other hand, turns out to be the poster boy for freedom of speech, dressing in flashy clothes, talking loudly, having huge ambitions, and boffing beautiful women. The only thing that would have made him more "American" is if he shot moose from a helicopter and called it sport.

A role reversal. And it's Frost's "American-ness" that starts off looking like a weakness, but is ultimately responsible for his success.

What did we get instead? I'm not entirely sure. At the end of the film, Ron has Nixon, defeated, confessing to Frost that he doesn’t like people. Which tells me (and you, even if you don't realize it) that that's the lesson the film is meant to impart. People who like people are better than people who don’t.

Hmm.

Okay. That can be its theme. Except for two problems. One, a theme needs to be established, developed, and resolved. And two, really? That’s the great truth you want your protagonist and your audience to come away with?

Come on, Ron. You can do better than that.

What makes an interesting protagonist (Part 4): A worthy adversary

Let's say you're single-mindedly determined to accomplish something and what you want and what you need are potentially at odds. Are you an interesting protagonist?

Not yet.

You're missing one critical thing that makes your story interesting. Difficulty.

Without difficulty, you're not accomplishing something, you're just doing it. And who wants to watch you do something you're perfectly capable of doing?

Not me.

The tougher the struggle, the more interesting the story. In other words, as determined as the protagonist is to succeed, the antagonist needs to be even moreso to make the protagonist fail.

That's not to say that the antagonist has to spend every minute devising ways to thwart the protagonist. In fact, a super powerful antagonist doesn't even need to try. In 'Finding Nemo', the antagonist is the ocean. It's so vast and powerful that it doesn't even need to be aware of a little clown fish trying to find its son.

In films where a hero faces an actual enemy, the enemy needs to be stronger than the hero. And not just stronger. You want your hero to be up against somebody so powerful, so experienced, with so many more resources and so few scruples about destroying the good guy that you wonder how your hero is ever going to survive, much less triumph.

Think Luke Skywalker versus Darth Vader, for example. Or Harry Potter against Valdemort.

The more unlikely your hero is to emerge victorious, the more satisfying the story is when he does.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Brian, if my antagonist is unassailable, how can my protagonist ever win?"

Good question. There are two answers. One is what's called "deus ex machina," which is a fancy way of saying "Wow! That sure was lucky!" Remember 'War of the Worlds'? Not the original, but Steven Spielberg's 2005 turd?

The other answer is for what appears to be the hero's weakness to become the very strength that vanquishes the antagonist.

That same formula is at work in both 'The Bad News Bears' and 'Life is Beautiful'. And yes, I know how weird that sounds.

How to dress like a director. And why.

It's inevitable.

At some point, you're going to start dressing like a director. Black T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, baseball cap.

Most directors put on the uniform because they want to look like what they hope to be taken seriously as. And it's not until years later that they discover the purpose behind what they wear. If ever.

Here's why you wear what I wear that they wear.

Baseball cap: If you're shooting exteriors, a baseball cap keeps out the sun. Unfortunately, the bill of a baseball cap isn't exactly well-designed for looking through the viewfinder. The reality? We're losing our hair.

Jeans: Jeans are relatively cheap and durable and aren't ruined by stains. As glamorous as directing sounds, I've spent more time shooting in garbage dumps than in the catwalks of Milan. And no, you don't get to ride into the set in a sedan chair, ordering your minions to find a shot. If you're not on your hands and knees with a viewfinder, you're not directing.

Sneakers: There's a famous story that's been attributed to Steven Spielberg, although it may be apocryphal. An aspiring director asked him for advice and he answered, "Wear comfortable shoes." Sounds glib, but it's actually great advice. You're on your feet constantly. Good directors don't bark commands through a megaphone. They generally station themselves next to the DP in order to work with them on the shot, then move into the set to adjust the actors' performances. On a long lens, you're moving hundreds of yards between every take. (I shot a job on location in Namibia, and since the schedule was tight--and I like to keep the energy up--I found myself running 200 yards between the camera and the actors between each take. Over rocky ground. Try that in a pair of Gucci loafers.)

Black T-Shirt: This is the most telling bit of wardrobe, and there are a bunch of explanations put forward for it. 1) Black is a slimming color. There's probably a lot of truth to this, especially if you don't run around like I do on a set. The craft services table is usually brimming with all sorts of candy and cookies. 2) Black doesn't reflect. There's probably a lot of truth to this one, too, especially on car shoots and sets with lots of reflective surfaces. But while black makes you reflect less, it doesn't make you invisible. Even in a black shirt, your reflection is going to be seen. 3) Black goes with everything. Bingo, but probably not for the reasons you think. It's not about fashion, it's about packing. My work requires me to travel--I once had to fly to Zurich for a single meeting--and in order to travel I have to pack. I don't like checking luggage, so I try to condense my clothes as much as possible. A couple of black T-shirts and a couple pair of jeans and I can be presentable (albeit predictable) for a week.

Besides, I look like a director. Which helps when I'm meeting people I need to impress with my authority for the first time.