Becoming a director is perhaps the goal of many film production team members, and it is also a dream of mine; however, this is definitely no easy task. The director indubitably has the most difficult job among all above- and below-the-line crew members in a film production team. While the producer is responsible for most of the administrative works and financial decisions of a production and while the sub-directors are responsible for their each individual job discipline, the director (executive) is the liaison among all of these managing and creative personals and is ultimately the person whose vision will become the final product.
When an idea, perhaps a screenwriter’s work, is selected by a producer who plans to produce, a director will be hired. The producer, or in more cases the director, is then responsible for hiring the sub-categorized directors and designers, such as assistant directors, casting director, director of photography, director of audiography, production designer, lighting designer, costume designer…etc., who in turn hire people they are familiar with to serve in their team. Although these highly creative individuals do their jobs mainly by their own decisions, the director ultimately has the approval power.
The first most important stage of the director’s job is the planning stage during pre-production. This is arguably where most if not all of the creative decisions are made by the director. Although some directors agree to leave room for improvisation and planning on the go, most prefer to have the plan to be quite exact for later execution. The reason that this is so is that the more clear the vision, the more time and money it saves on set (some actors are expensive! It is not a good idea waste their time planning shots on set) during the production stage, let alone making the editors’ job easy by providing all the possibly foreseen footage that may have been necessary. The most extreme case for this is Alfred Hitchcock, who claims that all creativity ends the moment he gets up from his desk (during the planning stage). He is perhaps one of the most powerful visionaries when it comes to planning the production. The better the plan, the easier it is to have total control over the production, and this usually results in a better production overall.
After the planning stage, the team goes on set to begin the shoot. This is perhaps what most audience perceives as the true process of making a movie. In fact, this stage goes quite fast if the aforementioned planning stage is done productively. This is “the show” where the director puts his vision into reality by capturing the action onto the camera. From my experience in directing my own student productions, I find it crucial to be accustomed to shooting footage while imagining the final production because they are often quite different with much modification during the post-production stage. To have the editors’ job in mind while also compromising for realistic challenges the camera crew may run into but still maintaining the large bulk of the vision is the director’s great challenge at this point. A great director tells the story, advance the plot, and enchant the audience not by a narration of “camera following protagonist” but rather by the cuts—the juxtaposition of pictures that logically progress a conceivable story in the audience’s minds, relying on the gestalt theory. This is usually what separates a good director from a bad one and is perhaps what separates an enthralling movie from a boring one.
While I cannot quite envisage a detailed description of how this works or how it should work, another important point to mention during the production stage is the director’s interactions with the actors. A director “directs” the actors and tells them what to do, right? Sure, but what does the director tell them? I find it useful, in my amateurish productions, to limit the actors’ urge to “act,” in the commonly viewed sense. I want to tell the story, advance the plot and demonstrate character attributes with cuts, and how well these are done is inferred by how well my cuts are done—none of these has to do with the actors’ abilities to “act,” or to put through their own emotions, or worse yet their own interpretations of the script and thus the conjured emotions. Although this may have been the way theater actors work, film must operate differently since the director now has the tool of the screen, which impacts the traditional part of acting greatly.
In a nutshell, in theater the story is told by the actors’ acting and stage movement, while in film the story is told by cuts. While not doing “line reading” (monkey see, monkey do kind of acting out for the actors, which is usually seen as an insult), the film director can consolidate with the actors about what the vision for this scene is, and the scene is typically motivated by the character’s goal, which is also the audience’s goal. While welcoming suggestions from experienced actors and possibly bringing about a modification to the vision, the director must make sure that the actor behaves in the most simplistic, or uninteresting way, so as to not distract the audience from the story. After all the good stuff is “in the can,” the post-production stage begins.
Editing can be as creative as the planning and shooting stage—the product may turn out all the more different but all the more polished from the raw footages thanks to post editing. This is also where the cuts, previously planned and executed, are assembled into the final envisioned storytelling. Also, it becomes semi-clear at this point how good of a job the director did in the previous stages—does the director have all the potentially useful shots at his/her disposal for assembly, or are there many places where he/she must exclaim, “ah! I wish I had a shot of XXX at this point for insert!” Good planning really pays off at this point, and the editor will love the good director.
After editing and polishing the film, with any special effect inserted. The considered finished production is viewed by the producer for any further modification. It is then rendered and distributed under the duties of the producer who should at this point have sufficiently marketed the product. The director, then, will have the luxury of welcoming the glories of his/her work—and hope the critics take it easy on him/her!
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