Long before we get the green light on a film, my colleagues and I discuss the size and the makeup of the crew: who we can afford, who would be a good match for the script and the director, and who we could stand to look at for four months. It’s a bit like assembling a Mission: Impossible team: You’re not only shopping for artistry and competence, but for individuals who can coalesce into a crack unit, and who won’t come apart when the clock is ticking down.
You put out feelers. You read résumés, make calls to other producers, and send out scripts. The cinematographers, editors, and designers you are seeking have agents, too, and at their various companies, the word will spread. You can also put ads in alternative newspapers or independent film magazines, most of which are eagerly perused by techies with time on their hands. Once the principals have been engaged, they in turn can do much of the tributary hiring. Your assistant director can hire the second assistant director who will doubtless have suggestions for the second second assistant director. Your director of photography will know camera operators and grips and best boys, and will probably have a regular posse.
There are few things as frustrating as choosing your people, then having to wait until the project is a definite go before you can send out contracts—knowing, all the while, that some other production team might swoop down and snatch them away like hawks carrying off small children.
ME: Hang on just a little longer. We’ll be starting prep at the end of August for sure.
CANDIDATE: Yeah, but I have an offer from this other movie—I mean, I like yours better—
ME: Our movie is better! It’s such a better movie!
CANDIDATE: But they have a definite start date, and you might have to wait until November and I’ll have missed out on a job…
ME: We are so on the verge.
CANDIDATE: They need an answer by three this afternoon. (Pause)
ME: And to think I was the first person to give you a shot in this business, to take a chance when others…[Guilt-trip monologue continues ad nauseam]
It breaks my heart to see people slip away like that. Actually, it makes me livid. Most producers, even we’re-all-in-this-together independent producers, are fiercely competitive, and at these prices there’s always a limited pool of experienced talent.
Before you start hiring, it’s important to know not only what the key jobs consist of, but the various personality types that make people good—or awful—at them. And then there’s chemistry. The trinity at the center of the set—the director, the cinematographer, and the assistant director—needs to lock into a rhythm if the shoot is going to go smoothly. If not, it becomes your very own Bermuda Triangle, swallowing up whole days and leaving behind only crew invoices for tens of thousands of dollars. I’ve produced movies in which the director got along okay with the cinematographer, the cinematographer got along okay with the assistant director, and the assistant director got along okay with the director, but the three worked together with the ease of junkies in a revolving door. Rhythm and balance can make all the difference between a dream shoot and a campfire-ready tale of terror.
DIRECTOR
On independent movies, the director generally comes with the package, but it doesn’t hurt to consider the aspects of the job that they don’t teach you about in film school.
The single most important quality in a director is the ability to communicate a vision in a clear and succinct manner. If, in addition, he or she can get people excited about that vision, better yet.
That said, I’ve worked on films where everyone loathed the director, and on films where everyone loved the director, and it doesn’t have nearly the impact on the final result that you’d think. Crews clearly prefer directors who “settle,” like the guy who says: “Oh, well, we’ve done three takes and it’s maybe not a hundred percent, but it’s late and everyone wants to go home…I guess we’ve got it.” No Kubrick, he. Directors who create the best on-set atmosphere do not always make the best movies.
The other day I was telling Todd Haynes a story about the sadistic director of a movie that a friend of mine produced—a filmmaker who made an actress do take after take of an emotional scene for what appeared to be the sheer pleasure of breaking her down—and Todd wondered aloud if he wouldn’t be a better director if he had a touch of sadism. He doesn’t—he’s blessedly compassionate. He might be a control freak—which is why every frame of his movies is so resonant—but he doesn’t get a charge out of controlling people. Sometimes those sadistic directors are the ones who’ll push themselves (and others) that extra, punishing mile. On occasion, I’ve had to help directors not settle, even if that meant provoking the wrath of cast and crew.
Plenty of times, however, a ghastly on-set atmosphere will manifest itself on screen—especially if the actors are so miserable and lacking in trust that they can’t (or won’t) reach down inside themselves for whatever they need to let go and give a performance. Despotic directors often end up with closed-down performers.
The worst thing is when the crew comes to perceive that the director doesn’t know his or her job or isn’t prepared for the shoot. It’s a recipe for insurrection and turmoil. It’s also when the producer’s choices become the most agonizing: Do you adopt a laissez-faire approach? Do you step in to keep the shoot on track at the risk of fatally undermining your director’s authority? I’ve found that it’s best to work behind the scenes, to beat up the director if you have to, but never let the crew or the cast witness the fisticuffs. Keep up a united front!
Great directors know exactly what they want and are able to articulate it—but can still surrender to serendipity and find something even better than what they thought they wanted. They don’t get swayed by the peanut gallery, but they do listen, and they trust their collaborators. Even the mulish ones, if they’re smart, will listen. When Joel and Ethan Coen were starting out, their then-cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld told a writer that, contrary to popular belief, he could change their minds about things: “I find it’s best to make my point, drop it, then wait a couple of days,” he explained.
It’s great when directors know enough about what everyone else does—designers, actors, techies—to give them pats on the back. People like to feel that their work is appreciated. Sometimes a director is so stressed-out that the producer has to step in and exclaim, “Wow, that set looks beautiful!” or whatever. Actors in particular will languish without a director’s attention. For example almost every film set these days has a monitor. And even though they’re extremely important—they can save you an incredible amount of time when it comes to setting a background or getting a clear sense of the frame—it’s awful to watch an actor do an intense scene while everyone on the set, including the director, is staring into the monitor. The actor feels as if no one is there. I like Todd Haynes’s approach, which is to watch a rehearsal on the monitor but watch the actor during the shoot.
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
Don’t let the term “assistant” make you think the job of assistant director is subservient. A good AD can salvage a shoot, while a bad one can multiply the misery exponentially.
The AD is the general of the set. The AD runs the set. If you wander unbidden onto a set, you’ll always know the AD because he or she is the one who’ll probably throw you off. That’s the AD yelling, “Places!” “Quiet on the set!” “Lunch—one-half hour!” and “That’s a wrap, people!” It’s all very ritualistic, like reveille and taps on a military base, at once grating and oddly comforting.
Practically speaking, the AD does everything from scene breakdowns—identifying the elements for each scene and listing them by category—to working with the line producer on the schedule, to creating lists of shots for the crew, to keeping tabs on the actors’ whereabouts, to making sure that all union requirements have been met and the necessary releases and clearances are signed. The AD hires, trains, and supervises the production assistants; maintains safety standards; and oversees set security.
The AD answers these questions and a hundred more:
Imagine forty-five people showing up with a vague sense of an agenda but no idea how they’ll accomplish it. Someone needs to pull the strings that make the puppets move. The best way to understand what the AD does is to be on the set when he or she is gone.
ADs come in many different flavors. Some are martinets who scream all the time and rule the set with an iron fist. Some are cheerleaders who rally the crew back from the brink of exhaustion. Some are relatively ineffectual and bark orders that no one pays attention to. One quiet, careful AD I know runs a methodical set with a nice atmosphere, but it’s not a set where everybody knows what’s going on every second—and there’s something to be said for that, even if it means a lot of screaming: “Camera on the dolly for scene one-oh-three!” “This side of the set is hot!” and so on. At least the energy level is kept higher. There has to be something driving the set, and often it’s the assistant director or it’s no one.
A great AD acts as a selective information screen for the director—letting only the vital stuff through—and creates an atmosphere that’s conducive to his or her particular needs. One very famous (and famously aloof) director is notorious for having sets like prison camps and exceedingly cruel ADs. Other directors thrive in a carnival atmosphere. In terms of loyalties, you’ll find there are Director’s ADs and Crew’s ADs. Predictably, directors hate Crew’s ADs and crews hate Director’s ADs.
I like ADs to be part general and part cheerleader. They should also have the capacity to police their own emotions, because their moods will invariably have an impact on the mood of the set. If he or she is in a foul temper, the whole crew will tense up; whereas a well-placed joke at a difficult moment can offer a huge release.
ADs absorb most of the tension on the set: “Will we make the day?” “Will the actor come out of his trailer?” “Will we still have sunlight by the time we move to the next scene?” The best can absorb all that tension without putting it back out. They’re the unsung superheroes of the movie business.
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Your director of photography often controls the tempo of the shoot, contributes his or her own vision (or provides a vision when the director has none), and makes the actors feel cared for, even worshipped. All decisions about lighting are made by the DP, who can make a $200,000 film look as if it cost five million, and a five-million-dollar film look as if it cost two hundred thousand. During production, the DP is privy to virtually every major creative decision, from the number of extras to the color of the costumes to the actors’ movements to whether or not to call it a day. Along with your actors, this is your major hire.
Many low-budget producers look for Directors of Photography (DPs) who own their own 16mm camera package—which, all else being equal, will save you money (that is, if you’re shooting in sixteen).* In any case, you’ll want to see a sample reel. That’s not a hundred percent reliable, however. With a good DP, every movie should look different—unless his or her aesthetic is consistently overwhelming the director’s, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. When inexperienced directors look at reels—for either a DP or a production designer—they’re apt to declare things such as, “Oh, this is too stylized,” when usually the amount of stylization has been dictated by the director.
Getting a great cinematographer won’t make a studio say, “Oh, now we can finance that film!” What a great cinematographer can do, apart from making the movie look good on a low budget, is bring in people who want to work with him or her, who maybe wouldn’t want to otherwise. They have a cachet. But make sure the high-powered DP understands the “size” of the film. If they’re already rich, they might not care about the money they’re making, but when they realize that on a low-budget film they’re only going to have, say, two 6Ks and a 9 light, they may bolt. Also, even if they work cheap, their usual crew probably won’t want to: What’s in it for them?
Many cinematographers have justifiably high opinions of their own abilities, and some go on to direct their own (frequently terrible) features. It’s important that the DP’s ego and the director’s ego complement each other, because a set on which the two are locked in combat is a guaranteed six weeks of hell. On Office Killer, we needed a cinematographer to work with director Cindy Sherman, a brilliant and renowned still photographer with no conception of how to stage a scene on a set or move a camera. We chose Russell Fine because he could do his own thing but also enjoy the challenge of trying to tap into Cindy’s unique sensibility—to use her gifts in the areas of lighting, color, and composition.
Make sure your DP commits to working on a schedule with you—to doing things in the specified amount of time, however insanely limited it might be. Be wary of a DP who refuses to take responsibility for the length of the days or to prioritize. This is what I mean by prioritize: “Uh-oh, we have a big scene to do after this and time is running out, so I’ll light this little scene in half an hour so that we can have the rest of the day for the important one.” A selfish DP will take his or her sweet time without looking at the big picture. One DP I know spent an age lighting every scene, and when the crew complained about the length of the days and threatened to walk, he said he’d go with them. He played both sides.
A cinematographer’s ability to work quickly is a godsend on a low-budget shoot, where everything’s compressed and there’s little flexibility in the schedule. Some of the most elastic low-budget DP’s have documentary experience. Eric Edwards was a superb choice for Kids because he’d done both features and documentaries. He knew you can shoot a scene with the existing light if it’s right, but he could also work resourcefully to light a big effect if one was required.
LINE PRODUCER
The line producer hires all your key technical personnel, which is why he or she will generally be the first or second member of your team. Beyond that, his or her chief function is to monitor the minutiae of the budget.
Some producers can act as their own line producers, but not me. My eyes are fixed, for better or worse, on the big picture. I’ve been told that I’m too much of an optimist, too quick to exclaim, “We can do it! We’ll figure it all out!” It’s probably good for me to have someone more cautious around as a reality check, to say, for instance: “Look, if we keep overshooting film stock, then by week six, we’ll be over by thirty percent, and I don’t know where we’re going to get the money to cover it.” Then I do my big picture thing: “We’ll take ten percent of our contingency for film stock, and get the rest by eliminating a day of Steadicam and shaving twenty extras.” Or, “Perhaps I should have a word with our director about not shooting so many takes.” In general, it’s best if those “words with the director” are initiated by me and not the line producer, who can easily be nudged into the role of the resident Scrooge.
It’s good to have someone around to play devil’s advocate and to anticipate worst case scenarios, but an Angel of Doom who’s always spouting “We can’t do this! We’re not going to pull this off in time!” is bad for the crew’s morale and can cause a high-strung director to throw more tantrums than are necessary. You should keep that kind of line producer far away from the director. My partner Pam, who occasionally serves as line producer on our films, would never say, “This is a disaster!” or “How do you propose to pay for this?” She’d say, “Well, Christine, really, given the fact that it takes us an hour to do each shot, is it realistic to think we can do six shots and shoot that location in two hours?” When it’s put to me like that, I’ll say “Maybe it isn’t realistic” instead of getting defensive.
Good line producers are not simply fixed on the numbers. They know what the numbers mean: which ones are critical—and therefore inelastic—and which aren’t. They know why it’s important to have fifty extras in a particular scene and not thirty, and they won’t spend time trying to convince you to do with thirty; they’ll be busy searching for a scene where you can afford to lose twenty extras. They’ll do everything they can to make the numbers fit without compromising the integrity of the director’s vision.
PRODUCTION DESIGNER
Some directors have a clear image of every item of their characters’ clothing and every tchotchke in their house, but most need inspiration from elsewhere, too. The best designers find ways to enhance what’s in the script, and can make the narrative and the characters a hundred times richer.
Production designers determine the “look” of a film—and often, in the old days, they did the costumes, too. Along with the DP they control the way a movie feels. Therese DePrez, who designed I Shot Andy Warhol and Happiness, gives packages to the DP, the costume designer, and director: a little booklet containing a swatch of wallpaper from one set, the color of the paint from another, the upholstery on the couch in a third.
You don’t always notice production design, especially when it’s good, as in Kids. One of the illusions that Larry Clark loves to maintain about Kids is that we just went in and “did it.” Not true. It was scheduled, it was scripted, it was location managed, and it was production designed. But you don’t have a clue that somebody made a decision to put this bit of debris here and that chair there and paint that wall this color. Somebody did: Kevin Thompson, who also designed Office Killer and Flirting With Disaster. Kevin’s work can be very stylized, but true style rarely calls attention to itself; it looks effortless—“found.”
Designing a movie is one small part creative bliss and one huge part management. Production and costume designers—and, to a certain extent, DPs—need to be able to supervise their departments. On a teeny film those departments can be as small as two or three people, but on a bigger one they can be massive and require a juggler’s dexterity. Production designers keep a lot of balls in the air. On a given day, they’ll be striking yesterday’s set while getting tomorrow’s set ready and making sure that the director has everything he or she needs on today’s set. Christopher Hobbs, the marvelous designer of Velvet Goldmine, is sometimes in his own world—say, out picking flowers—but part of his genius is hiring art directors who are masters of logistics.
The relationship between the production designer and location manager can be sibling-close and just as fraught. When our budget was slashed on Velvet Goldmine, many of the sets we’d planned to build were nixed and we had to move to locations, so the designer, Christopher, and the location manager, David Pinnington, often scouted together, and David worked diligently to meet Christopher’s needs. Before they’ll accept a job, many designers ask who the location manager is. Tom Whelan, a location manager I love to work with, sold himself to me by saying, “Production designers always like me.”
When they don’t get along, it isn’t pretty:
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: I’m going to paint this wall green.
LOCATION MANAGER: No you’re not. I told the people who own this house we wouldn’t paint.
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Well, why didn’t you tell me? Now the whole color scheme is thrown off
LOCATION MANAGER: Hey! Don’t nail that in there! Get your hands off that!
PRODUCTION DESIGNER: Leave him alone. Keep nailing!…and so on.
On Happiness, we needed a scene in a Florida real estate office but couldn’t afford to spend another day in Florida. So we found a bare room in New Jersey and took designer Therese DePrez to see it. “But it’s just a white box!” said Therese. “But after you’re through with it,” we said, helpfully, “it’s going to look Condo Central in Boca Raton.” And lo, Therese moved in with her sunny paints and furniture and tropical plants, worked her magic, and a day later you could practically smell the cocoa butter and hear the distant whack of golf balls. Unfortunately, that magic came at a price: nearly as much as an extra day in Boca.
LOCATION MANAGER
The location manager scouts locations and, once they’re chosen, makes the deals for them, preps them, and then oversees your comings and goings. The job is not just logistical—it can actually be creative. Initially, the location manager sits down with the director and goes through the script and brainstorms:
LOCATION MANAGER: So…Patsy’s office. It’s sleek, modern, brand-new features, a little bit of Deco…
DIRECTOR: No no no. I want something…artsier.
LOCATION MANAGER: Like—a loft?
DIRECTOR: Not a Soho loft. Not cold.
LOCATION MANAGER: Artsy…and warm.
DIRECTOR: Artsy-craftsy.
LOCATION MANAGER: A warm, artsy, craftsy loft. A country loft?
DIRECTOR: Maybe…But Patsy lives in the city.
LOCATION MANAGER: You want a tension between artsy and homey, urban-chill and country-warmth…
DIRECTOR: Yeah. That’s good.
LOCATION MANAGER: I saw this old carriage house in Brooklyn when I was scouting for New York Undercover. It has all the nineteenth-century fixtures and moldings, but it’s also someone’s studio.
DIRECTOR: A carriage house. Cool! I could give Patsy, like, a horse fetish…
You could, of course, transform a conventional loft into that carriage house or build one afresh on a sound stage, but that would cost you a grotesque amount of money. On a low budget, you’re better off finding something that approximates the real thing. For Poison, we needed a French prison of the 1940s. On a shoestring, of course. Our location manager had the idea of scouting army and navy bases around New York City. Many of those facilities were built in the 1800s out of stone. We found our Bastille—Castle Williams on Governors Island—in no time.
This is important: The location manager needs to be extremely presentable and well spoken. He or she is the rep from your movie with whom the community will have the most contact. A good location manager puts location owners at ease by appearing to be completely calm and responsible—but also not lying about the magnitude of what it means to have a film crew stomping around. The best are reassuring presences, even amid pandemonium.
Location managers usually precede you to the location by at least a few hours, if not a day or two, depending on how much work the art department has to do. Then their job is to protect the place from you. If there’s an area that’s going to be heavily trekked, they put down mats or brown paper, and they also safeguard the door jambs.
Inexperienced low-budget film crews tend to have a crash-and-burn mentality: “We’re gonna blast in there and shoot, baby!” First, anyone who’s dumb enough to let you come into their house and make a movie is worth treating with care, because they’re few and far between. Second, you might have to go back, especially if you’re using an inexperienced crew: Maybe you didn’t get all the coverage you needed, or something went wrong with the film. But if you left crap all over the place or broke something special, the owners will often tell you to go to hell. That has happened to me. We’ve learned over the years to be very, very careful.
I’ve messed up locations, and it has had repercussions. For one of Apparatus’ first short films, we convinced a guy to let us shoot at his country house in Woodstock, New York. We didn’t have a location manager—and on a very low-budget movie where almost everything happens in one place you almost don’t need one. But we should have had somebody in charge of the location. We went in and changed everything around, and when we finished and were cleaning up and preparing to return to the city, we realized that we hadn’t documented the way it looked when we went in. We were saying things to each other like: “Er, do you remember whether this painting was here or there?” We put the place back together as best we could, but we weren’t even sure what was his stuff and what was ours. Needless to say, the guy was furious. We barely managed to talk him out of suing. We could never talk him into letting us come back—which really screwed us up.
More on locations themselves in “The Shoot.”
COSTUME DESIGNER
Think of clothes as an extension of personality: This is how a person chooses to present himself or herself to the world. A great costume gives the actor an additional tool for characterization. And a great costume designer puts drama before fashion statement, and works closely with the director, the production designer, and the DP to achieve a unified look and feel.
On a low budget, you have few original designs, if any. Instead, you do lots of shopping and returning, and lots of closet-raiding. The designer has to put his or her ego aside and go with what works. On I Shot Andy Warhol, the costume designer, David Robinson, searched high and low for the right coat for Valerie Solanas (Lili Taylor). Lili found one herself in a thrift store, and David was gracious enough not to let his pride get in the way of the right decision. That sort of behavior is not as common as you’d think.
Beyond the designs themselves, the most important skill a costume designer needs is the ability to put the “talent” at ease. Actors are usually hysterical about how they look in clothes—they’re terrified of appearing fat or old. On one movie, an actress based in LA told our designer that she was a size six. When she arrived in New York only days before production she turned out to be a healthy size ten. A good designer has to handle problems like that with finesse, because you can bet that the actress was touchy about it. And if the film demands certain costume excesses (as in Velvet Goldmine), the actors’ trust in the designer must be unwavering.
The hardest wardrobe day on a film is frequently the one in which a major costume gets established. That’s what you’re going to see the actor wearing for maybe half an hour on screen. Once you establish it, you can’t change your mind. So right before you shoot that outfit for the first time, you inevitably hear: “The director doesn’t like the hat.” Which means that that the costume designer had better be ready with seven alternative hats, or the shoot will stop dead. One job for the AD is making sure that the director goes to wardrobe before the actor arrives on the set—although even that’s not foolproof, since directors often change their minds in the heat of the moment. Todd Haynes has said, “I don’t like what that extra is wearing!” when the extra is one in a crowd of fifty. It might be a pain, but that kind of attentiveness is one of the reasons he’s good at what he does. Your costume designer has to be prepared to dive in and make the necessary (instant) transformation—which means having racks of “stock” nearby with as many options as your budget will allow.
SECOND ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
The second assistant director is largely a people person, provided you think of actors as people. (They sometimes seem to be extraterrestrials.) He or she prepares the call-sheet—which lists call times along with location addresses and phone numbers—for the AD to approve, and then informs the actors when they have to be on set. Daily cars that pick up actors are also the bailiwick of the 2AD. Once they show up, the 2AD has to look after their needs (the temperature of their dressing rooms, their toilet and makeup facilities) and keep tabs on them—which means, for example, making sure the lead isn’t down the block shooting hoops when he’s supposed to be in costume and makeup and ready to go on.
If I have to rework the schedule, it’s the 2AD I’ll call. “Find out if Jane Adams is available on October ninth,” I’ll say. Or: “See if we can we switch Ben Gazzara from Friday to Tuesday.” Discussing such changes with actors and their agents is the 2AD’s headache. Another of their headaches is handling most of the SAG paperwork, along with the actors’ time sheets. The 2AD verifies that the actors have scripts and revisions and that the extras are fed and watered. On top of all that, when the first AD screams into the walkie-talkie, the 2AD has to drop everything and Obey.
Because they’re responsible for getting actors to and from the set, they have to know the van and limo drivers. In fact, they have to liaise with just about everyone. Consequently, 2 ADs are the people to go to if you want to know who’s sleeping with whom, who’s broken up, who’s got a drug problem, and other good (or necessary) items of gossip.
PRODUCTION ACCOUNTANT
On a low-budget shoot, your line producer can follow the money, but it’s good insurance to hire a production accountant, too—and, if you’re using a bond company (which protects your financiers), you have to. He or she will be your lifeline to the budget, issuing a daily “hot-cost” report that tells you what you spent the day before versus what you were budgeted to spend, where you went over, and where you went under. I can phone the production accountant and ask: “If we add an extra day, what will it cost to pay the crew?” and he or she will run a few numbers and present me with the good or bad news.
Ideally, though, the production accountant should be more than a numbers cruncher. Along with the line producer, he or she needs to understand what the numbers mean, which is the only way you can successfully extrapolate and forecast either gentle winds or icebergs ahead.
This is the chain of command: The production accountant goes to the line producer who goes to the producer.
The production accountant is an important hire to the people who finance your movie. They usually have to approve the person, and if you’re working with a bond company, the bond company does, too. (I once had my first choice turned down because the financiers didn’t think the candidate was experienced enough.) On studio films, it’s clear who the production accountant is working for: the studio. On independent movies, they tend to be on Our Side. Our accountant would never put a cost report through to the financiers without checking with us first, although if they called to ask something, he or she would probably tell them.
A good production accountant will work with you to figure out ways not to alarm your financiers. For instance, you can decide not to show an overage until you have a savings that can cover it—which, in the short term, will make your life less harrowing
SCRIPT SUPERVISOR
The script supervisor is in charge of continuity, whether that means the length of actors’ cigarettes from take to take or how much food is on their plate or at what point in the scene they shifted their bodies so that when you cut to the close-up they’re in the same positions. They also pay attention to actors’ eyelines from shot to shot and to that cinematic bugaboo known as “crossing the line,” which means staying on roughly the same side of the action so that you don’t perceptually jar your audience.
Now, the prop department could pay attention to the food on people’s plates, and the costume department could worry about a collar that’s up in one shot and down in the next. And some DPs have an innate sense of continuity and the location of “the line.” But many don’t, and a lot of directors need help with things like large dinner-party scenes. It’s also good to have someone around to settle the inevitable debates.
The script supervisor keeps track of which takes the director selects and lines the script for the editor. He or she should also pay attention to the movie’s pace and running time. If, for instance, the director elects to shoot a scene from a single master—the pacing of which you can’t change in the editing room, unless you want to go back and film close-ups, which no one will—it’s the job of the Script Supervisor to approach the director and say, “This scene is playing five minutes and we really should try to make it play in three-and-a-half or four.” Or, “The actor’s walking really slowly up those stairs. Maybe he could take them at twice that speed?”
Is a good script supervisor anal retentive? Well, he or she should certainly be detail oriented. But some script supervisors get into a mindset where they decide that the only thing preventing the movie from descending into utter, uncuttable chaos is them. A good script supervisor has a sense of priorities. Whether the food on the plate is slightly more canted to the left or the right from take to take doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference most of the time. I recall a shot that took two and a half hours to set up and light, and then, finally, when the AD was about to yell “Action!” the script supervisor stepped in and queried whether the hall light should be on or off. What followed was a twenty-minute discussion during which I wanted to throttle someone. (Guess who.)
When we interview script supervisors, we care mostly about their personalities, because they’re around all the time, and the overbearing ones can make you want to be sloppy just for the sake of driving them crazy.
PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS
My colleague Ted Hope calls production assistants “the circulatory system of the crew,” because they come into contact with everyone, and they can spread their attitude like a virus. They’re also the crew’s eyes and ears, which means that they should police the set for intruders and always be prepared to troubleshoot. No matter what happens, they should be brave, cheerful, thrifty, and reverent, which is really, really hard because most of what they do is sit around waiting to be given orders. For hours they wait to “lock up” the street when it’s time to shoot, or to drive people home, or park the vans. Meanwhile, they tend to absorb much of the crew’s frustration. The difference between a PA and a dog is that people are afraid to kick dogs.
The best PAs are the ones who keep themselves as busy as possible. They can always be tending to the talent. One thing that irritates me is when I see an actor walking off the set in his or her pajamas (the costume) on a freezing night while a bunch of PAs are clustered together nearby not helping out. Actually, I loathe seeing PAs clustered together period. They should be doing something—trying to anticipate what will happen next—instead of sitting around blabbing. When I see PAs complaining to each other, I want to fire them on the spot. They should keep a “production face”: My Movie Right or Wrong. They should not gripe about the food or the hours. For them, this is basic training, and you don’t question orders in basic training. Look, everyone wants those pathetic $300- or $400-a-week PA jobs. We have many, many more applications than we can use. (We still end up hiring some idiots.) If you’re lucky enough to get such a job, you should throw yourself into it body and soul, absorb as much about the process as you can, and impress the people who matter (like me) with your incredible initiative.
When I hire a production assistant (and I don’t much anymore, since it’s the AD and the unit production manager’s job), the first question is: “Can you drive?” Because a lot of what PAs have to do is get in a car and go pick something up or drive someone someplace. When they’re just starting out—before they graduate to being set PAs—they spend most of their time nowhere near the set.
Because I don’t know how to drive, when I was a PA I was on the set all the time, right away. I think I was hired by accident. Nobody thought to ask if I could drive, and then, when they turned around and said, “Christine, we need you to jump into the van and drive over to Camera Service Center because we need a replacement lens,” I just said, “You’ve got the wrong girl.” I bet they were really pissed off because they had to hire someone else, but I was delighted. It meant that I was on the set from the start and could never be sent away.
Sometimes you work on movies where it’s obvious that the director only wants gorgeous girl or buff boy PAs. There’s nothing wrong with a little set decoration, but if they aren’t any good, they should be dumped as quickly as possible, because that’s too high a price to pay for beauty.
One PA’s recent mishap made all the papers and has passed into legend. It was on a mega-budget film that was shooting in New York. Some poor fellow had the job of transporting the negatives from the day’s shoot to the lab. He left them in a taxi. The producers called all the cab companies, but never came up with that precious day’s filming. The PA was merely fired; in a different time and place, he would have been shot. My colleagues and I (all former PAs) talked about what we’d have done if we had been in his shoes. Pam would have gotten on an airplane, flown to another city, and changed her name. Another producer I work with said she’d have pretended she was mugged and would have even filed a police report. One person said if he’d been the producer he wouldn’t have fired the PA, because what are the odds of the guy screwing up again after a disaster like that? Ha! On a movie I produced, a PA wrecked a car. The policy was that if you have an accident, you’re fired, except my partner was a bleeding heart and said, “He’ll never do it again.” The next day: BOOM!, another car accident. He was out of there so fast.
EDITOR
Even though the editor does most of his or her job in postproduction, you should hire one early so that the assembly of footage can begin when you start shooting. Your financiers, if you have them, will want to see scenes. More to the point, you’ll want to see scenes to make sure that you have enough coverage, and to get a better sense of the pacing, the performances—everything.
The position varies in importance from director to director. Some directors prefer to cut their own movies, and some get an editor to implement their desires without being especially interested in what he or she might bring to it. Some directors edit in their heads. When I talk to Todd Haynes about changing a shot, I can see the wheels turning in back of his eyes: “Hmmm…I was going to use the master, then I was going to cut to that, then cut to this, then cut to that, but instead of cutting to that I can cut to this…Okay, we can change that shot.”
A great editor can bring something to the process that wouldn’t otherwise have been there. The late Ralph Rosenblum’s great book, When the Shooting Stops, gives you a sense of how an editor can save a scene and how that scene can save a movie. It also gives you a sense of how little recognition editors get for their work.
It’s important that editors are familiar with the changing technology. Films just aren’t cut on film anymore. On an Avid, using video and computers, you can make fine cuts that were much, much harder to do on celluloid. And as the technology has changed, the language and syntax of the cinema has changed with it. I was on a panel recently with a producer who pointed out that the average length of a shot has dropped by thirty to forty percent. Today, radical jump cuts are nothing. Leaping back and forth between black-and-white and color, or grainy stock and silken stock, is nothing. The editing room is where the revolution in film language really begins.
STILLS PHOTOGRAPHER
When you’re shooting, stills seem like the least important thing in the world, but you’ll kick yourself afterward if you don’t have them.
It’s best to have the stills photographer on set from the beginning; that way the crew will get used to him or her. Some actors prefer that stills be taken before a take, some after; a good stills photographer is flexible and sensitive, and after a week or so will lock into a rhythm with the actors, the DP, and the AD. Actors have peculiar sensitivities in this area: I once overheard two of them commiserating about how awful it was to have two lenses pointed at them at the same time.
If you don’t have the stills you need for publicity, or if you need another kind of image for the poster, you’ll have to get the actors back, get their hair back to the color it was, put them back in their costumes, and hope that they haven’t gained or lost too much weight. But don’t beat yourself up too much: A lot of posters are done after the fact, usually at the discretion of the distributor.