Morton - A Quick Guide to Film Directing

Copyright 2014 by Ray Morton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2014 by Limelight Editions
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Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Mark Lerner

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Morton, Ray, 1961
A quick guide to film directing / Ray Morton.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-87910-806-9 (pbk.)
1. Motion pictures--Production and direction. I. Title.
PN1995.9.P7M585 2014
791.4302'33--dc23
2014008765

www.limelighteditions.com

For Erin, Jack, and Sean Morton
and
Caitlin Hoey
and
Aiden James Masterbone

Contents

The director is the pivotal figure in the creation of a motion picture.

It takes an army of talented people to make a movie, but it takes a director to lead that army. The director devises the overall creative concept for the production, hires the cast and key members of the creative team, sets the tone and calls the shots on the set and in the editing room, and has final say in all creative matters affecting the film.

The contributions of everyone working on a moviethe producer, the screenwriter, the cinematographer, the editor, the production and costume designers, the composer, the technical crew, and the actorsare all filtered through the directors concept, judgment, and taste to create the final cinematic work.

Directing a film requires a unique combination of artistic vision, technical expertise, and managerial skill. This book will provide you with a comprehensive look at the essential talents and tasks required to successfully helm a motion picture.

1

The job of film directing was born with the cinema itself.

The first movies were short documentariesbrief clips of real-life situations such as a train pulling into a station, workers leaving a factory, a man sneezing, and so on. These scenes were filmed by the various men around the globe who invented the movie cameramen such as Louis Le Prince and William Friese-Greene in England, Louis and Auguste Lumire in France, and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson in the United States. These inventors figured out how to transform still cameras capable of recording only one static image at a time into machines that could record (on a strip of flexible celluloid) a series of images in rapid succession that, when projected back at the same rate at which they were shot, could create the illusion of a picture that moved. Initially, the Lumires, Dickson, and their fellow innovators created their moving images by simply setting up their cameras and recording whatever happened in front of them. Before long, however, the men began choosing their subjects more deliberately. As they made their decisions about what subjects to photograph, where to place the camera, and when to begin and end the recording, these technicians inadvertently became film directors.

The cameras created by these inventors were soon acquired by othersbusinesspeople, showmen, and artistswho began to make movies for public consumption, and thus, the film industry was born. Audiences soon grew tired of documentary scenes, and so moviemakers began using their cameras to tell fictional storiescomedies, dramas, romances, and action spectacularsin the form of five-, ten-, and twenty-minute shorts. The director was the key figure in this process.

Early movie directors were total filmmakersthey would usually dream up and write the scenarios, organize and run the production, help build the sets and find the locations, cast the actors and tell them what to do, photograph the scenes, create the special and visual effects, and edit the results. In the process, directors such as Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith began to pioneer the various techniquesclose-ups, intercutting, and so onthat would become the foundation of the language of film.

As movies grew longereventually into ninety-plus-minute featuresand more complex, and the production process became more involved, individual specialists (screenwriters, cinematographers, art directors, editors, and so on) began to assume responsibility for the various tasks required to make a movie, leaving directors to function more as a creative overseers than as hands-on functionaries. Directors remained, however, the primary artistic drivers of the filmmaking process.

For American directors, this began to change with the rise of the studio system in the 1920s. During the approximately thirty-year-long studio era, company-designated producers working for a strong production chief became the prime movers of individual film projectsthe producers found the properties, hired the writers, and developed the stories and scripts. They also cast the films, selected the key members of the creative team, and supervised the production process. Directors, most of whom were under long-term contract to the studio, became hired handsimportant ones, to be sure, but still subservient to producers. Directors in this era usually did not participate in the creative development of a project, but instead were simply assigned to a particular film a few days before shooting began and then reassigned to another project as soon as the picture wrapped. The producer would oversee the editing and completion of the final product.

Studio-era directors had little or no say in what pictures they were assigned to, and it was not unusual for several directors to be put to work on a single movie; if a director fell ill, or a producer was unhappy with his work, or the director was unavailable for reshoots because he was working on another project, then another helmer (a nickname for director coined by the show-business trade paper Variety ) would be assigned to take over. While some higher-profile directors such as Frank Capra, John Ford, and Howard Hawks had more control over their work than their brethren, even they had to operate under relatively tight constraints.

As the studio system came to an end in the 1950s and early 1960s, most directors who were formally under contract went freelance, moving from one studio to another as they took on different projects. This samurai status gave helmers who made pictures that were successful at the box office more clout, allowing them to choose the projects they wanted to do and to negotiate greater creative input and freedom from the producers and companies who were eager to hire them.

During this period, American directors also began to gain more critical respect. This was due in large part to the influence of la politique des Auteurs , a.k.a. the auteur theory, a critical perspective devised by a group of French movie critics (led by future directors Franois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard) writing for the respected film journal Cahiers du Cinma and later popularized in the United States by critic Andrew Sarris. The theory saw directors as the primary creative auteurs (authors) of the films they made, and as a consequence of it, movie directors in the U.S. began to be regarded by critics, viewers, studio executives, and themselves not just as competent technicians (the prevailing view for most of the studio era), but also as legitimate visionary artists.

This view was bolstered by the increased distribution and popularity in America of foreign filmsmovies from England, France, Sweden, and other countries where directors had retained their creative clout over the years and were definitely the artistic authors of their moviesas well as by the beginning of an independent film movement in the U.S. that saw young directors who very much considered themselves auteurs making personal films that reflected their own unique creative ideas and artistic points of view.