SUCCESS IN DIRECTING: DO THE WORK AND HAVE FAITH

Being a director is a scary thing. A really scary thing.

         You’re committing to “putting yourself out there” – you’re declaring that you are a creative leader with the vision and skills to bring a script to life via a very complicated process. But what if you’re not? What if you screw it up? What if someone hires you and then you blow it and everyone laughs at you and the company loses money and your agent fires you and you have to move back to Ohio to work for your local cable station?

         Yes, if you call yourself a director, some passion for the craft and an ability to think in visual terms is required. And then, with experience, those inherent capabilities are built upon and enhanced. But extremely successful directors do, indeed, have some sort of special sauce, a way of looking at the world of the story  which rises above most mortals’. But if you are not sure you can claim that special sauce, there are a few things you can do to either raise your abilities or your confidence. Or both. It’s quite simple, really. To be successful as a director – or in any creative endeavor – it is necessary to do two things: do the work and have faith. The work always comes first, and then it is sustained by the faith that says, “All will be well.”

         In the directing profession, there is just one overarching goal to accomplish: tell the story. In order to tell it, the director must do the work of understanding it, from the superficial to the deepest subtext.  A visual representation of a method to do this story investigation would be the peace sign: one road diverges into two, and all three lines are encircled by the concept of telling the story. The first “line” is outlining, and the two diverging lines are blocking and shot listing. This is all done during the preparation period.  In the subsequent shooting or production phase of directing, there are two additional skills a director must have to guarantee that the story is told: the ability to work in concert with the actors to achieve a performance that is on target, and the ability to register that performance and its environment by filming it in a manner that also illustrates the story.

         How to begin? You read the script, right? Yes. But there is so much more. Even if you read the script a hundred times, you run the risk of missing something, of not burrowing deeply enough. You don’t want to walk on set and have the actor ask a question, such as, “What was the scene before this, again? Where was I? What was I doing?” and you stumble through a rambling and confused response, looking foolish. Outlining the script provides a cheat sheet of quick and accurate answers, and by writing it down, you lock it more securely into your brain.

         Outlining is also a way of finding things out, by pushing past obscuring dialogue and screen direction to determine “What is this scene really about?” What must be accomplished in this scene to move the story forward? What does each character need to achieve? What are the obstacles to the character(s) reaching their intention? What ties the scenes together, that is, what is the theme? At its core, what is the seed of an idea that sprouted in the writer’s wonderful imagination to become this unwieldy multi-paged-and-pronged script?

         Outlining requires a clear statement of “what must happen” in each scene: a sentence, using a verb, because something in the scene must be done. So Character A does something and Character B has a reaction. Character B does something back which is the antithesis of what Character A wants, and this conflict propels the story. But no story is quite that simple. There are multiple characters. Multiple storylines, multiple elements to weave together to serve the theme and tell the story. An outline allows the director to discover and understand all of these threads and dive below the surface that the simple reading of the script forbids.

         After the outlining, the director – who now understands the story! – will begin blocking and shot listing (or storyboarding, if they prefer a pictorial image,) which is a process of imagining ahead of time how the shooting will go. Where will the actors be and how will they move in a manner that facilitates their intention? Once that is determined, how will the director shoot it? Where will the camera go and how will it be used to help tell the story?

         All of this – outlining, blocking and shot listing – is doing the work. It is time-consuming and mind-stretching. It is a large part of the responsibility of the director, the person who is tasked with bringing this story to life. Sometimes directors want to skip over this part and “wing it” on the set, counting on their experience and intuition to carry them through without spending so much time shackled to their desk, thinking and adjusting and re-doing and discovering. But that’s also a very stimulating and exciting part of the job, living in your imagination and “seeing it” before the first call sheet is ever published.

         The director does the work. And then has faith. That faith is a belief that, having fully prepared, all will happen as it should. Sometimes it’s not exactly what has been planned, sometimes new ideas spring forth on set which the director is wise enough to incorporate. But the preparation work is the thing that allows the creativity to flourish, to adapt and become as alive as possible, to embrace the talents that others (like the actors and the cinematographer) bring to the table. Regardless of whether the scene adheres to the director’s imagination or grows from it, the faith that all is happening as it should, and what’s more, that it’s good, is the bedrock of the director’s confidence. It means that a director can go into a project and leave the fear behind – the fear of not being enough, of not fully understanding the story or not being accomplished enough to do the script justice. This faith may encompass a higher power, or it may just be an acceptance of “letting go” once the preparatory work has been done. Either way, faith is believing that the structure you have created will carry you through shooting and into post. You can take a deep breath on your first day of shooting and then release it, while you release your fears of failure.

         What we do is scary. And no matter how much experience you have, no matter how successful your last project was, when you embark on a new one, that fear will pop up. But if you do the work and have faith, it will all be okay. I can promise you that.