Communication is Key

One of the most important things in filmmaking is communication. Filmmaking is a collaborative art form, one of the few. You have so many different aspects and positions in filmmaking you must be certain that as a director you communicate your vision clearly.

A danger in this thought is not learning to delegate. There is a team of artists behind you that are experts in what they do, so you do not need to tell them every little thing that needs to be done. Communicating your vision clearly is far from telling other department heads exactly what to do. This is an element that takes practice and often times the effectiveness of your communication is not discovered until you reach the edit suite.

I learned this on the current film I am making. There is an amount of freedom that you need to give people who are under you, but that freedom can only be given if you have properly prepared and communicated your ideas to those department heads. Preparation leads me to another point about communication. If you have not done your homework in pre-production you risk the chance of slowing down your production and ultimately not getting what it is you want.

Pre-production is much more than just figuring out how you will be directing the actors but involves creating a shot list, blocking and, what I am finding to be a huge assistance in prep, storyboards. Film is a visual medium and shot lists and overheads of your scenes still leave a lot of interpretation to an individual. If you have an exact mood or emotion that you want to come across in you picture you can't always expect a DP or Art Director, etc. to know exactly what it is you want. This is where storyboards can become a valuable tool. Even a stick drawing can convey an idea if you are not an established artist.

Communication is key and once that line of discussion is cut, your project is doomed. You can't do it alone so don't try, but make sure your team knows what your intentions and ideas are or it is not much different that trying to do things alone.

The Moment it Clicks

While directing the feature film, BOUNTY, I discovered a lot of things that are important when directing actors. Not only do they help in creating memorable performances but they help the over all through line of the story, connecting story elements in a way you may not have thought of before.

While working with the actors in one scene I was noticing that something was just not clicking. Don't get me wrong, the performances were great but there was something that was missing from the scene. Between each take I would talk with the actors to discuss the scene. Often times I try using the technique given by Judith Weston in her book, Directing Actors, about giving action verbs to help make quick adjustments to the scene. I felt that this was not the moment to use that technique. The performances were fine it was something that the actors needed to discover. After further discussion the lead actor came upon something that I could not have done myself, he made a discovery about his character. We did the scene again and the missing element was found.
Often times I see directors wanting to dictate exactly how each moment of the film happens but to truly have full creative control over how you direct a film you need to be willing to let the actors discover things for themselves. If I had told the actor that this was the moment in the film where his arc was complete and that he learned he truly loved the girl the performance could have come out flat and stale, but instead I was able to talk the actor down a path of discover. Our discussion was not one of me telling him what was happening but was me asking him what he felt was happening. I was able to give suggestions that lead him right to where we needed to be. When he told me that this was his moment of discovery I thought for a moment he was talking about himself as an actor, but what he meant was it was the scene that his character made a discovery. I am almost certain that whatever way he meant what he said it applied to both the actor and the character he was playing.

It is important to not only help an actor discover something for himself but also to understand where a character is coming from, what causes certain things to happen and why their responses are the way they are. The moment it clicks for the actor is when you are on the verge of an incredible performance.