“It surprised me how good the actors were. I deliberately chose younger actors, people under twenty-five, and that innocence goes a long way to the end.”
— Ang Lee, director, Brokeback Mountain
Directors have a vision of a project in their heads. But they must break that vision down into pieces and carry it through. When a director is stuck seeing only the forest and not the trees, the trees never stand out to define the intricacies, depths, and mystery of the forest—all the things that make it a desirable and wonderfully intriguing place to visit.
A storyboard consists of hand-drawn or computer-generated still images of individual shots within specific scenes. One needs only to look to the funny papers or comic books to see storyboards that inspire the imagination of readers. Teachers of film production emphasize to their students the need to construct storyboards in interpreting the visuals of the narrative. Although they don’t require their students to do anatomical drawings and detailed images of each frame of the movie, they encourage them to be as meticulous as possible. This technique often starts at the very beginning of their learning process and establishes that the basics of directing rests in storyboarding the project from start to finish. This approach produces directors who are impulsive about using various cinematic techniques but who understand neither the importance of the actors’ performance to the story nor the directorial process to get to any storyboarded image. It also develops directors who think image first and actors’ performances second. These directors spend more valuable production time creating the image than focusing on the performance, and when that happens they lose the trust of their creative team and their actors.
My cinematographer and colleague of twenty years, Tom Denove, tells the story of a director he worked with who storyboarded every scene of the movie they did together before he got to the set. During preproduction, he was able to show anyone who asked exactly how he was going to shoot the movie—regardless of the inspired, spontaneous performances that actors give during the production. In one shot, he had storyboarded an actor to enter the scene through a door from camera right, and on the day the scene was to be shot, the director walked onto the set, stopped in his tracks, and froze. The door in the set was on camera left. He was stunned, flabbergasted, and couldn’t figure out how to stage the scene according to his storyboards because the door was on the left side of the frame and not the right as he had drawn it. He sat down and for three hours was at a total loss as to what to do. It wasn’t until Tom took the director’s storyboarded image and held it up to the light and reversed the paper that the director realized how to stage the scene. By turning the paper over he was able to see the door on his storyboard in the exact spot that it was on the set and was thus able to block the scene. His creative planning was locked to something he had imagined: his preconceived storyboards. And he was unable to see the trees for the forest.
A storyboard is a single image. In narrative directing, that image should be fluid to the structure of the scene and not an image that a director preconceives, stages, shoots, and then figures out how to stage the actors in the scene to fit the storyboarded image. Storyboards are single images that do not move, and motivated movement is the fuel a director uses in framing the narrative.
Actors must be motivated by the staging and not by an image on a storyboard. On one movie that I produced, the director created copious storyboards predetermining certain images that he wanted to see in the movie—even though he had no concept of what the locations were to be. In one scene he had envisioned and storyboarded a five-shot1 that contained a rack focus.2 The scene was one in which ten characters interacted with one another, and it was pivotal to the movie as it was the scene in which the good guys met the bad guys for the first time. The first shot he did in the scene was the five-shot; he put the actors exactly in the position that was in his storyboard and did the rack focus on the precise line that he had planned. After he completed several takes of the shot, he set out to stage the scene with all ten actors. But since the five-shot was in the middle of the scene, he did not know how to dramatically motivate the actors and the camera into the position that would logically allow the five-shot to be cut into the scene. In fact, after he had completed the scene and was working with the editor, he realized that he did not have the camera coverage for the nuances in this pivotal moment in the story. He had no reverse angles, and the audience never knew who was where at any moment in the scene. And this because of the need for the storyboarded preconceived five-shot.
If the director’s entire foundation is the storyboard and they are unwilling to see their work unfold on the set, they generally see things only one way: how they created it in their imagination. On set their eyes are closed to the story unfolding in front of them: the story that must be told by the actors in what they say and do and how they feel. The actors must always motivate the camera, never the other way around.
Storyboards are necessary, however, because they provide the opportunity to help directors think visually through concepts and ideas that may be germinating in their heads. But they must not be used as the map for the entire project, unless the concept of the project is totally dependent on the visual image, as in comic strips, animations, TV commercials, music videos, or multimedia designs. They will become an impediment to the narrative when a director shoots only the storyboarded images. And why? Because by shooting (directing for) individual preconceived shots without seeing the movement or the motivation that brings about those shots, the editorial fluidity suffers. The thought process for the director is to look at only one image at a time—not the linkage that connects the images (shots) through direction of the actors and motivated staging!3
Since the earliest days of moviemaking, filmmakers have relied on storyboards to aid the understanding of certain scenes and to give the cast and crew a visual interpretation of what the finished result should look like. Movies with key action sequences use storyboards to allow stunt coordinators, special effects supervisors, and other creative units, such as set design, to visualize their creative contributions to the sequence. The images created are discussed ahead of time with the production designer, the director, and a storyboard artist who translates the image into a series of drawings for the sequence. This can easily be seen below in a series of storyboards created by production designer Nathan Amondson for Wim Wenders’s film Land of Plenty.
In the motion picture The Cooler, director Wayne Kramer and a storyboard artist carefully worked through the opening montage sequence, giving us the setup of a very sad lead character, played by William H. Macy. The character is so negative about himself that he generates energy that makes him the saddest and unluckiest guy in the world. Nothing goes right for him, not even having enough cream for his coffee in the morning. He works for a casino as its “cooler” to cool off anyone who is hot and winning at the games. His presence near them automatically causes them to lose. Kramer and his storyboard artist repeat the montage later in the movie, after Macy meets a cocktail waitress. They fall in love, and his attitude about himself changes. And so does his luck: it is reversed, causing people to win. The storyboards for the movie4 provided Kramer and his set designers, costume designers, and cinematographer the ability to discuss and determine how they were going to do the details of those two sequences. When you see the montages in the movie it is clear that the storyboards were used as a guideline in telling those aspects of the story and not as a bible.5
Since narrative projects are actually made during the preproduction process and executed during the production process, storyboarding during previsualization for this purpose is used extensively—and digital technology has introduced us to digitally-created, animated storyboard computer programs. Through CGI they create a series of images that are then animated and given movement to see how they will work together in the sequence. Once the sequence is developed and approved, it is then shown to the creative production team, who determines how best to create and marry the production’s elements to replicate the animated storyboarded sequences. Again, these animatic storyboards are a guideline toward the end result of the sequence, which may be continuous or cut in with other dramatic action in the storytelling. This technique was used in such movies as Secret Window, the Spider-Man and X-Men movies, and Peter Jackson’s King Kong and is being used more frequently, especially when other creative departments must contribute to the sequence. The results may be simple or complex. A sequence may need elements that are designed, built, and shot during production and then include elements created in postproduction by the visual effects supervisor. Storyboards, whether animated or not, get everyone on the same page working towards the same visual image.
There are, however, directors who like to storyboard a movie as a way of helping their own creativity understand even the simplest of sequences. And there are computer-generated programs that help the director not only visualize the shots but also see the camera positions in relation to the staging. One such program is Frame Forge 3D, which includes not only the shot as seen through the camera but also the overhead set layout with camera setups and all the relevant camera information such as height of the camera and lens millimeter. Such storyboard software tools deliver a high degree of previsualization elements and creative exploration that directors can work with personally as they visualize their projects.
But these directors keep their storyboards for themselves and a few other people. They do not show them to anyone as the only images that will be shot. These directors recognize that the staging must motivate the camera and that the storyboard images only help them (and others) to see where the story might be headed! More important, these directors don’t force these storyboards into the staging but rather look for (and refine) them as they stage the actors during rehearsal. They forewarn everyone that the storyboards may change so that it does not become a hindrance to what they may discover when they work with the actors on the set. However, working this way brings up another issue that can strap the fluidity of storytelling by the director: the use of shot lists.
According to legend, Alfred Hitchcock storyboarded every shot in all of his films. This was understandable because it was at a time when technology was limited; the camera of choice was large and heavy, and it was impossible to move the camera quickly during production. In addition, Hitchcock was known for giving his actors very little freedom to experiment with the characters they were portraying. As we have already discussed, today it is very time-consuming and possibly detrimental to storyboard every shot of a movie, so generally, with the exception of helping directors with their own visual ideas, storyboards are used primarily for more challenging scenes such as action sequences, extreme camera moves, and any scenes that may require a complicated setup and/or mechanical or visual effects. So instead of storyboarding, directors may create a list of shots detailing every camera angle, move, and sometimes even the lens of choice. Such a list is intended to help the director in advance of the shooting days. A shot list is a list of all the camera angles for a scene and should (but rarely does) include all the coverage 6 and cutaways.7
| SCENE#1 | EXT- CEMETERY | |
| Shot Number | Type | Description |
| 1 | Wide | Master of mourners at burial |
| 2 | Medium | Rabbi reading the Kaddish |
| 3 | Medium | Close-up Esther as she puts a rose on the casket |
| SCENE #2 | INT- COURTROOM | |
| 1 | Dolly | Counter dolly along the row of judges |
| 2 | Medium | Close-up Lead Judge-low angle “This court will ….” |
| 3 | Medium | Ann (Def. Attorney) “Your honor I wish…” |
| 4 | Medium | Bill (Pros. Attorney) “But your honor….” |
| 5 | Three-shot | All judges |
| 6 | Medium | Ann |
| 7 | Four-shot | Ann approaching the bench |
| 8 | Close-up | Bill |
| SCENE #3 | INT- ANN’S HOUSE | |
| 1 | Steadicam | Ann wanders through the house to kitchen |
| 2 | Close-up | Ann at stove |
| 3 | Wide | Children enter kitchen |
| 4 | Close-up | Ann “Do you have your things for….” |
| 5 | Two-shot | Nancy and Lily (kids) “Yes but…” |
| 6 | Wide three-shot | Kids fight |
| 7 | Close-up | Profile of Ann “Stop that I can’t” |
Direction includes deciding which shots will best tell the story and involve or elicit an emotional reaction from the viewer. Today, shot lists are often the norm and not the exception, as many producers require shot lists from their directors before they start a day’s work. A producer colleague of mine requires her directors to give her shot lists. She went to this practice several years ago when she discovered that most new young directors cannot think on their feet during production and do not know how to focus on the performances. She believes that many of them have little or no knowledge as to what is needed in telling the story without a discussion ahead of time. She believes that many directors do not know how to prepare and is unsure whether they even have a sense of what the story is about and thus are able to cover the scene appropriately. The shot list provides her with information to build her trust in the director, and she hopes that they will, at the very least, deliver what was discussed.
When directors study the script, they are expected to see certain moments in shots: for example, the close-up on a character at the height of their confession. So planning shots to some degree is unavoidable. However, whereas a director’s planned shot list should be only a blueprint, many beginning directors consider it a bible and attempt to do the list of shots they preconceived before seeing the actors, the locations, or the logistics that affect time management during production.
Some film educators do a disservice to their students by teaching them to create shot lists and predetermine the amount of time they will take to do each shot.8 When working this way they discover that they have planned too many shots, and the direction of the actors suffers because they are unable to get the utmost performances and multiple-camera takes of a shot. They also again find out that when shooting only their preconceived shot list they lose the connecting visual tissue needed for an audience to understand the spatial relationships of the sequence. For example, the shot list may call for a close-up shot of a character in a store as he is speaking to someone else and who crosses away from camera, and then another close-up shot of the same character in the second area of the store. If only these two shots are part of the sequence and the shot list does not have a shot that shows the relationship of the character to the second place in the store, the audience will be confused as to where the characters are in physical relation to each other in the store.
(2-1a)
(2-1b)
Shooting only the shots listed (and preconceived) and only when they are preconceptually used in the scene is called “editing in the camera” and causes another major problem. For example: the shot is preconceived for a specific line of dialogue. A director (and especially students of directing) will shoot only the specific line of dialogue for that preconceived shot. This is wrong. This not only limits the editorial choices and prevents the director from spontaneously creating based on the actor’s performance, but it also works against the actor’s instrument in creating the character from a logical emotional or transitional moment in the scene. I see it time and again with beginning directing students. When they work this way, I know they are pre-editing the project (cutting in their head) before they have finished shooting.9
Another problem that arises with a preconceived shot list is that the director may have a tendency to shoot the shots in the sequence of the list. This will cause the production to work inefficiently as directors conceive each shot as the scene develops rather than consider the choreography and efficiency of production needed to achieve each shot.
Many of these and other issues arise when shot lists are used inappropriately. A written shot list is important as an organizational and conceptual tool but should be kept in the director’s back pocket when working on the set. The list can be given to the assistant director and the script supervisor so they have an idea of what is in your mind, but you, the director, should keep it in your back pocket. It is there to remind you of what your plan is if you need to get focused when all the people on a production set are swirling around you doing their jobs. And if the preconceived and pre-visualized shots are embedded in your head while working with the actors, they will unconsciously happen as the scene is being staged for camera. As we will find out in the chapters on coverage, the shot list should be kept as a backup, as it is a guide for you in visually understanding the scene. You must keep yourself open and spontaneous on set for visualizing your project. You must never lock yourself down to the list just in case you come up with something more creative or practical. In this way your actual list of shots will constantly go through revisions on the set. Beginning directors use shot lists as a crutch because the camera doesn’t talk back if it doesn’t understand its motivation. Actors, on the other hand, do. And to a new director that can be intimidating.
Many times directors need to use constructed multidimensional models of locations and sets to help their previsualizations, as Susan Stroman did for the movie version of the musical The Producers. With these models, directors use small figures of people as actors much like they are used in a child’s dollhouse. Like storyboards, they provide you with the ability to collaborate with a group of people to get your vision across. You are also able to try out ideas for camera positions and discuss them ahead of the production period with your cinematographer, producer, or production designer. These models are not to be photographed as a miniature set used in the project but as a tool for the director to collaborate with others and get everyone on the same page. Therefore these models do not have to be very detailed to get the point across.
Production board
In preproduction the director must learn how to read and use a production board which is the production’s roadmap for the creative logistics of production, its relationship to the budget, and the ability to achieving success during the most volatile stage of the filmmaking process—production. If Murphy’s Law is going to happen on a project, it will happen during production. The director’s input in the layout of the production board is key to the success of completing the project on time and on budget. The board consists of individual strips representing each of the scenes in the movie. The strips contain important information that tells everyone who is in the scene, where and when the scene takes place, how long the scene is in the script, any mechanisms that must be considered in order to shoot the scene, and the specific dramatic or emotional action of each scene and how it relates to the story. You have an obligation to your producer to complete the day’s work within twelve hours (including setup and wrap), and the production board helps you focus in on what your production crew needs to do to allow you to plan out your creative directing decisions. Early in the planning stages, your first assistant director will prepare the board with that in mind, either manually or by using one of several types of organizational software for that purpose. As you get closer to the first day of production—and during production—your input to the board will be most important. This will be discussed further in Chapter 8.
In preproduction the director must be able to read a budget and understand what he or she is reading. Many producers do not give the director access to the project’s budget. This is not a good idea, since it is the director who is the quarterback of the production, has a responsibility of completing each day’s work during production, and, along with the producer, keeps the project within the guidelines of the budget while preserving creativity in telling the story.
The director should have input in the budget or at the very least be able to make suggestions to the producer about where money needs to be allocated during production. But a bit of forewarning: you need to be knowledgeable in the many areas of production in order to provide reasons for your suggestions, since a creative producer who is on the same wavelength as you will always want that information before making decisions. It is not enough to say “I think we need more money in wardrobe” without saying why. Or if you need a camera crane or another technological device for the project, you must make sure that you won’t end up using it for just one shot. Having knowledge of budgets and how they work in correlation to creativity makes you a more informed and valuable director. It gives you the ability to collaborate with not only your producer but also the other members of the creative team. Chapter 9 will discuss the director and budgets further.
Locations are a key part of any project and involve many people once the director has determined the locations that are right for the project. Locations are a large part of the previsualization process since the location (or set) is most important for directors so they can do their homework before working with actors.
Location managers are given the task of working creatively with the director (and producer) in getting an idea as to the look of a specific location. Since the right-looking location is a major part of the texture of the story, the director’s ideas are discussed in detail with not only the location manager but also the producer, the production designer, and the art director. The location manager will present several suggestions for locations, taking into account the logistics and fiscal limitations of the project. The locations are then scouted during preproduction with a group of people that will include not only the director, production designer, cinematographer, and location manager but also the assistant director, production manager, gaffer, key grip, and production sound mixer. Even before that a wise director will take into account how and when the location will be used and scout the location accordingly. For example, if the scene calls for a magic hour shot,10 you should scout the location around magic hour. On one movie I produced I asked the director to scout a specific woodsy location both in the daytime and at night since the picture had many scenes that called for both. He and the scout crew scouted it only in the daytime. The first night shoot in the woods location was costly in both setup time and cast and crew creativity. The scenes to be shot had twelve actors in them with an artificial moonlight established with extra lighting, generators, and crew personnel. After everything was set, the first assistant director called for quiet, getting the camera ready to roll on the first shot. In the brief silence that occurred on set before the actors spoke, a sound came from the woods: “croak,” then another “croak,” then another and another “croak,” and then many others—“croak, croak, croak, croak, croak”—and in a short period of time there was a cacophony of frog sounds coming from a stream near the location, making sound recording impossible for the scene. This of course impacted the actors’ performances, as they could not concentrate. We had to rerecord the dialogue in postproduction, and the performances suffered since automatic dialogue replacement (ADR) never sounds as good as actually doing it during production. Had the director scouted the location at night, he would have heard the frogs and would have thought about finding another location. So the collaboration on finding the right location is very important. It must not only work logistically, efficiently and fiscally but also create the environmental truth for the actors so they can deliver the performances for the story. Planning for the right location will only enhance your previsualization for the movie.
Although you are the quarterback for the movie, your ability to collaborate and work with your team will determine the effectiveness of your plays. The collaboration begins in the planning phase of the project and continues through production and into postproduction. The sooner your collaborators understand and get excited by your vision, the easier time you will have as a director. You must always show respect and integrity and you will get that in return. A lot of that comes from your passion, understanding of the material, its themes and its characters, and how and what others have to do for you in their roles. It all must be there when it comes time for you to bring the actors into the game so your focus can be primarily with them. You must become the in-the-trench collaborative driving force and romance many egos to deliver the goods. Once you do, you are on the road to thinking like a director!
Your actor will talk back to you if you don’t know what you’re doing. Your actor will talk back to you if you don’t understand the story or its characters. Your actor will talk back to you if you don’t understand what they are all about in bringing to life the character they are playing. So make sure that you understand the text, the characters, the theme, the content, and most of all: the actor. Acting for the screen requires the actor to work much more quickly in finding the essence of the character and using themselves to portray the role than they do for the stage. As many film project budgets do not allow for rehearsal time you must be able to get performances from your actors quickly during the shooting process. In order not to be intimidated by your actors—because many of them do talk back—you must first generally understand what an actor is all about.
Actors are basically like children. They like to dress up and be other people. They want and crave attention, and they respond to words of praise or disapproval. They look at you after they have done a scene to see whether you want them to do more, and then nag that they are doing too much. They are complex, creative people. They have a life away from the script, the stage, or the studio, and that life sometimes gets in the way of their life as an actor. Knowing how they think, how they approach their craft, and what they are about and understanding the separate levels of what makes up the person we call an actor can be useful to your success in working with them. Although many books are written about acting—and one or two about directing of actors—this section should give you a brief glance at the makeup of actors.
Actors work on three levels at the same time, especially as it relates to acting for the screen; it is just the nature of who they are as actors. Those three levels function with one another in various intensities from the time they audition through the time they complete their work in front of the camera. Actors spend years in classes developing those levels. Meryl Streep once said that acting is so simple that it is difficult. Simple because actors use who they are and difficult because they have to show who they are and their own vulnerabilities to bring life to the roles they play. Three levels make up the basis for an actor’s ability to create a character and are constantly at work as actors act: the conscious level, the subconscious level and the unconscious level. They should be thought of as three levels of one’s layered traits. Simply, they make up the actor’s psyche and affect how they approach the shading of their roles.
The first level is that of the conscious actor. It refers to the facet of a person’s or actor’s behavior that is closest to the surface on an immediate day-today and moment-to-moment basis. It pertains to the little voice inside of the person/actor that asks How does my hair look? or What does she (the director, casting director, etc.) want me to look like when I audition? or Damn, I had a flat tire getting to the set, how am I going to get it fixed before going home? It manifests itself as emotions or feelings that may affect the focus actors need to get into character unless they are trained or directed to work from other levels of their experiences; it certainly is true when actors audition and sometimes is true when they are working in front of the camera. On one project that I directed, a well-known actor had to do a “breakup” scene with his female costar. The scene took place at night on the rooftop of a high-rise apartment building, and it was three pages of dialogue. During the course of the film, this actor was always letter-perfect with his lines each and every take of a shot, so I devised this particular scene to be a continuously moving dolly shot during the interchange of dialogue between the two actors while bringing the night skyline of Los Angeles into the scene. When we went to shoot the scene, he could not remember one line of his dialogue and was continually flubbing through his speaking lines, making the long take impossible. I was baffled and, because of our schedule, needed to change the shooting concept on the spot and revert to shorter takes, breaking the scene up with a fixed camera position for each shot and working more slowly with this actor to get a performance. Not as visually effective as the planned long continuous take, but for some reason the actor could not remember his lines in the relationship of the scene. Even then, the actor never maintained dialogue continuity from take to take. The next day my second A.D. told me what had happened the previous morning. The actor had broken up with his live-in girlfriend of twelve years. I knew then that the breakup scene in the movie was too close to what he had experienced that morning before coming to the set. It was on the surface of his working consciousness and therefore affected his ability in performance.
The conscious facet of the actor often has the strongest impact and can cause the biggest problems with the inexperienced or untrained actor, not only because it can affect the performance but because the emotions that happen only on a conscious level are portrayed mechanically and without meaning. Actors doing this are playing it safe. This is what directors refer to when they tell an actor that they are being mechanical and “playing at the emotion.” Actors bring meaning to emotions when they bring other parts of themselves from other levels. Working just from the conscious level is untruthful. And the camera records only the truth.
The life experiences that frame the foundation of the person/actor are found at the unconscious level. To some degree life experiences affect and determine who we are and how we might behave in certain situations since we learn something from each experience that life offers us. And it is from those life experiences that a trained actor can call upon to help create a character.
When I produced the play On the Waterfront and was auditioning actors, Burt Young11 read the role of Johnny Friendly, the boss of the union who controlled the labor on the docks. In the film written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb played the role as a strong, threatening, loud, and brash union leader. Threat and the powerful unpredictability of the character were for Cobb couched in his brashness. When Burt Young read for the Broadway production, his reading was understated, deliberate, and quiet but with the same (if not more) threat and power that was called for in the role. Burt Young grew up and survived in the tough New York neighborhood called Hell’s Kitchen. Growing up in this neighborhood—and because of his size—he developed tough-guy mannerisms, through understated, direct, and deliberate behavior. His life experiences developed within him unconscious characteristics that he was able to bring to the John Friendly character. The brashness that was very much Cobb was not in his performance, but the power of the character was evident in every line of dialogue that he read. Life experiences that mold us into who we are cannot be changed. When they are used, it is these life experiences that actors draw upon to shade their character. Thus, Brian Dennehy’s performance as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is different than Dustin Hoffman’s Willy. It is the skilled actor who is able to recognize those experiences and can isolate any aspect of them to breathe a soul into the foundation of the character they are portraying.
For the intimacy that acting for the screen requires, the basis for the actor’s performance is at the actor’s subconscious level. An actor must always remember that the closer the camera gets, the more truth it tells. I will mention this many times throughout the book because it is one of the tenets to remember when telling a story through the camera. And the closer the camera gets to the actor, as in the close-up or the extreme close-up, the more truthful the actor must be with his or her performance. The close-up will show an audience one level of truth, and the extreme close-up will take them further into understanding the truth of the character. That truth must come from the subconscious portion of the actor. This involves the actor’s own instincts and emotions that are brought to the role as it relates to the momentary discoveries that are true to the character being portrayed. As we have already stated, when these emotions are intellectually understood but only “played at,” then they are on the surface (conscious) of the performance. The audience will not believe the actor in the close-up. But if the emotion is experienced, the audience will believe it in both the close-up and the extreme close-up. In order to do that, actors must be in touch with and bring their own emotions to the character. Directors must always remember that the closer the camera gets to the actor, the more truth the actor needs to tell. Directors must carefully make sure they are using these emotions at every moment of discovery on every shot, on every take of every scene when the camera is rolling. A daunting task for any director, but made easier when actors are vulnerable with their emotions. It is the most difficult part of acting for the camera since actors must allow themselves to be vulnerable in order for the camera to see their honesty. The subconscious portion of the actor allows the true portrayal of such fleeting moments as embarrassment, passion, flirtation, shyness, disappointment, disgust, fear, surprise, and so on.
Dialogue should be the result of these emotions that the characters feel in a narrative. And as people are complex, the emotional moments can be complex, since one links to another as the characters discover things about themselves, their surroundings, and their relationship to the story. Actors are at the center of this because it is with their acting in the moment and playing the emotional discoveries that the audience is pulled into the story. Can anyone forget the moment at the beginning of The Constant Gardner when Ralph Fiennes is told that it might be his wife and her driver who were killed in an accident driving home? In that one close-up, shot out of continuity to the scene, Fiennes very subtly shows surprise, fear, love, hurt, hope, and despair as he absorbs the possibility of it being true. This often becomes easier for actors when they are working in the theater or in television soap operas or situation comedies. These forms have something in common: they allow the actors to play out the scenes without having to go back to the micro-moments of their performances. Directing the visual portion of the presentation is an entirely different process than single-camera narrative directing of movies; these are discussed in Chapter 10 of this book.
As in the case of The Constant Gardener, actors directed for individual shots may do many takes before the performance is right. In some instances they spend many hours on a tiny moment of a scene. Directors focus on and use the camera for the moments of a character’s emotional discovery that link to other moments that may be shot out of context of the scene. So keeping actors focused on the nuances and gradation of the emotions of their characters is what directing for the camera is about. To be able to do that, actors must be in touch with and use that subconscious level of who they are while recognizing that they have an unconscious level of life experiences from which to draw for the character. When truthful, it will manifest consciously in a truthful performance. Honest moments are developed when the actors are working with their moments of discovery. Keeping it there each and every time it is needed is the difficult part. Actors need to be comfortable and feel safe with their directors, safe in being able to show themselves to the world.
Much is written about actors playing the objective and the super-objective in their performances. An actor’s objective is what he or she may want in a scene, their action, their desire, their goal. The objective of each individual scene is connected to the super-objective, which is the driving obsession of the scene. It is the force that pushes the character through the journey of the film and causes the action to take place.
The super-objective is the road that the writer provides and thus the road that the screenplay takes. Actors who study “the Method” learn about objective and super-objective. They work diligently in classes analyzing scenes they are working on or the entire material to determine the elements that are necessary for their performance. And they are! But not totally as it relates to the process of acting for the movie director. Although actors and directors must understand the journeys the characters take in the story and see what the objectives and super-objectives are, they must be more cognizant of the arc of their character and what takes the character on the journey.
It is more important for actors in single-camera narrative to play the discovery of the moment and not concern themselves inherently with the objective of the scene. Why? Because the nature of single-camera directing, which you will see throughout this book, focuses time and again from shot to shot on the micro-moment. With this process, a scene may be three pages long and may take a twelve-hour day to shoot. The front end of the scene may be shot and covered in the morning and the last section of the scene may be shot and covered in the afternoon, or vice versa for one reason or another. The movie process involves multiple takes from different angles. The focus that an actor must maintain is therefore difficult. An actor who plays only objective and not discovery will always get confused, and there is little likelihood the performance will be honest. An actor who always plays discovery will be successful, and an actor who can play discovery while maintaining the objective is the most successful of all.
Each actor has his or her own method of working. As mentioned earlier, Meryl Streep once said that “acting for film is so simple that it is difficult.” The actor must learn to use who they are when they play a role, not someone they think they are. I once asked Anthony Hopkins how he prepares for any of the characters he plays. His answer was uncomplicated. He said “I learn the text!” He said he had a photographic memory and he learns the dialogue. His instinct tells him what emotions to feel to motivate the words he memorized after listening to the words that his partner in his scene throws to him. He is vulnerable and in the moment, and when put into the scene doesn’t think about it; he just does it. And in so doing uses himself to create the characters. Acting (for movies) is so simple it is difficult!12
Actors should be vulnerable in order to bring out a performance. They must be able to elicit emotional intimacies, often at the drop of a hat. They are people who must gain the trust of their director and learn to take risks. A wise director will encourage those risks, since from risk emerges inspiration. During a park scene in Finding Neverland, actor Johnny Depp was inspired to play a game with his dog that wasn’t part of the scene and to use this activity for his character of J.M. Barrie. It worked so well that director Marc Forster left the business in the story. Actors use their imagination and intuition to bring life to the characters. However, intuition as the character is one thing, and intuition as an actor is another. Since actors have egos, they sometimes do what they think is intuitive to the character but in reality is an action that they do to stand out in the scene, such as an unscripted kiss or a slap. They will tell you that it felt right to do it. Perhaps. But felt right to whom? The actor or the character the actor is portraying? The director must recognize the difference and know what is true for the character—and if it is not, correct it without damaging the actor’s creative ego.
Directors look for talent in their actors, but that word talent is a difficult one to define. The best teacher, coach, and innovator in training directors in how to communicate to actors is Delia Salvi. In her brilliant book on directing the actor, Friendly Enemies: Maximizing the Director-Actor Relationship, she says that “the components of raw talent are unreliable and will be wasted unless the actor develops a conscious awareness of how to selectively arouse them during the creative process. Artists cannot fully utilize their talent without complete mastery of their instruments … and that instrument is their bodies, minds and souls.” Salvi goes on to say that it is therefore incumbent upon the director to understand how to play the actors’ instrument.
Actors learn technique to build their talent and continue to work and study to do exactly that. But talent for acting in film and television is not always the issue since directors, casting directors, and producers cast actors based upon qualities they project as people that are suitable for the character in the script. Having talent enhances the actor’s ability to fully develop the dimensions of the characters; it is not what is necessarily needed for them to get the role.
Actors are like children. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be actors. They like to dress up, pretend and make believe. Like children they need constant assurance that they are doing well. On stage they get an immediate reaction from an audience who reacts to their performance. When working in front of the camera they look to their director for approval. Just like audience applause and laughter enforces the ego of the actor in the theater, a word of praise, a laugh or even applause from the director when the shot ends enforces an actor’s ego.
Norman Jewison, when directing Fiddler on the Roof, stayed very near the lens of the camera on each take. When doing a close-up shot of Molly Picon for the song “Anatevka,” he was so tuned in to the performance that Molly was giving as Yente, the matchmaker, that a tear rolled down his cheek, and when he said “cut,” he walked over to Molly and hugged her. That little hug boosted Molly Picon’s ego and supported her contribution to the scene. Norman was her director and audience, and she performed for her audience. On an episode of a television series, I witnessed a wonderful actress playing the recovering alcoholic mother of the female lead. In the final scene, she walked over to a window on the set and supposedly saw what we later find out to be the man who is her last chance for happiness being arrested for drug dealing. She immediately broke down and sunk to the floor, letting out a Medea type of painful cry. When the camera stopped rolling, the crew and actors in the scene applauded with echoes of “bravo!” The actress beamed from ear to ear and basked in the praise.13
Actors, like children, have a burning desire to please others. If not, they wouldn’t be actors. Actors, like children, have a major desire to prove themselves and succeed at what they do. And actors, like children, need a creative environment and energy to nurture their work. If not, they struggle to deliver honesty in their performance. The creative environment and energy comes in many forms: wardrobe, makeup, direction, ensemble playing, and everything that pertains to telling the story that must be told. That creative environment and energy starts with you, the director, who must keep the needs of your actors in your mind at all times.
Some actors do not like to take risks but use crutches to support their character. A crutch is an impulse or an emotion that an actor plays on a line of dialogue in a specific way that is not the intention of the text. It is an impulse that they are comfortable in showing because it has been preprogrammed as part of their acting psyche by some kind of acknowledgment, usually in the form of applause or someone noting that a line of dialogue they once said left a positive imprint. These positive reactions from observers reinforce the impulse (subconscious) in the actor’s psyche and they use it instead of taking a risk and showing deeper vulnerability. Acting coaches work with actors to get rid of crutches, but they can creep into an actor’s performance during the sometimes exhaustive process of film acting. Directors need to be on the lookout for these crutches and, when they see them, try to find a way to instill in the actor the right way to discover the moment and to intensify their vulnerability. One way is to alter the emotion of the moment. Another is to discover it through the rehearsal process. When actors are rehearsing a scene and there is a moment that does not quite feel right, it is because an actor went for a momentary crutch rather than look deeper inside themselves to find a suitable vulnerable impulse for the moment.
Believe it or not most actors should have an understanding of certain words as it relates to their work. They speak about the inner uniqueness of the character and the physical characteristics of the role. The inner characteristics involve the psychological and emotional makeup of the character, and the physical characteristics refer to how the character moves, dresses, speaks, and relates physically to other characters. The inner being of the character may come from an examination of the text combined with the actors own unconscious and subconscious experiences, whereas the physical characteristics are affected by other people’s contributions to the film. For example, a character’s moves may be suggested by the author through the description of the character or the structure of the dialogue, the clothes by the wardrobe or production designer, and the physical relationships to other characters by the director, who must merge all these collaborative elements toward the vision of the project.
Conflict is another word that actors use with the director. Conflict is the heart of drama. It is what the actor and director discuss on a large scale, such as the story, and on a smaller scale, such as the inner thoughts of a character and his or her relationship to the other characters. Actors look for conflicts in scenes, since without them there is no drama. It can be as simple as the character deciding whether to get dressed before getting the children off to school or to get them off to school and then get dressed.
Actors like to speak in terms of subtext, or the inner struggle that motivates a line of dialogue. Again, dialogue is the result of impulses that happen to the character, and those impulses are part of the subtext of the moment—the thoughts and feelings that the character is having before deciding to express them through dialogue or action. It refers to the story that is going on below the dialogue. The strength of the subtext colors the dialogue with specific impulses that affect the delivery of the words. Those impulses must be honest to the actor if they are to be truthful to the character.
The subtext is very important to an actor, as it “communicates that more is going on in the character than they are sharing, that an inner conflict is present, that the person is thinking or feeling something other than what they are saying or doing.”14 Subtext can affect the moments of discovery for an actor in a scene, but only if the director has put the subtext in the right context for the actor. The thread of subtext must be very clear in the mind of the director in order to communicate it to the actor, especially through the disjointed process of single-camera film directing.
Actors should understand the term beats and what it means to the process. A beat is defined as a change in situation or action. Beats have beginnings and endings, which is why they are called beats. This becomes very important for the director, since the process of single-camera movie directing involves using beats to find the moments for camera coverage. In addition, a beat allows the actor’s psyche to find a safe point in the scene to go from since it is usually the beginning of a new emotional or psychological moment for the actor. This will be explained in detail later in the discussion on coverage.
A director’s eyes and ears work together and independently of each other. Therefore, the director’s ears help to hear the believability of the impulse in each beat (since words must be the results of impulses), while the director’s eyes see images that assist and support the moment of the story.
This now brings us full circle, since if you are focusing only on your preconceived shot list and/or storyboards, your ears will not hear the believability of the impulses, and your eyes will not see all the possible images based on your actors’ performances—which is the foundation for telling the story.
A storyboard consists of hand-drawn or computer-generated still images.
Actors must be motivated by the staging and not by an image on a storyboard.
Storyboards help directors communicate concepts visually.
Shot lists are an organizational and conceptual tool that directors must not lean on.
Directors use models for previsualization, the production board for production visualization, and the budget for planning.
Previsualization involves knowing your locations or sets in preparation of working with actors.
Actors work on three levels simultaneously.
The actor’s language includes subtext, objective, super-objective, conflict, and inner and physical characteristics.
1A five-shot is an image that has five characters in it.
2Rack focus is a cinematic device in which sharp focus within the image moves from one subject to another.
3Students studying directing in film schools are occasionally trained this way. Their films often lack fluidity because they cannot see the tissue connecting the shots, resulting in reshoots, pickup shots, and extended budgets.
4The storyboard sequences can be seen on the DVD for The Cooler under special features.
5Referring to being unfailingly precise and beyond question to each and every storyboard.
6Coverage is a sequence of shots that are needed to allow the editor to make choices in a specific scene.
7A cutaway is a shot that does not relate directly to the characters within a scene but may be a shot that is devised to allow for editorial changes, e.g., if there is a scene with two characters talking and one of them is cooking at the stove, the cutaway would be a shot of what is being cooked on the stove.
8e.g., 10:00 A.M. − 10:20 A.M. the close-up, 10:20 A.M. − 10:40 A.M. the two-shot, etc.
9This results in editing not making sense in relation to the story and the need to shoot pickup shots because the director was cutting in his or her head at the time of production.
10Magic hour is the time of day just before the sun rises or sets.
11Burt Young played the role of Paulie in the Rocky movies.
12When Anthony Hopkins was asked at the 2006 Golden Globes award what advice he had for actors he said “learn the text and be professional.”
13On a side note: The shot was an elaborate moving master that ended with the actress at the window. The crew was so into the performance that the dolly grip missed the final marked position of the dolly requiring the shot to be done a second time. Her performance was not as strong as the first take, and it was the first take that was finally used in the episode. Actors’ performances will always win out over the shot!
14Salvi.