Surprisingly high production value for a trailer for the hollywood equivalent of the hero’s journey.
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Surprisingly high production value for a trailer for the hollywood equivalent of the hero’s journey.
Before I direct a film, like I will in two weeks, part of my ritual is to watch Charles Kiselyak’s A Constant Forge. It’s a documentary on the life and work of John Cassavetes, possibly the most influential filmmaker in my short career as a short filmmaker.
Studying Cassavetes’ films and life, I have realized how his earth shattering performances were based less on technical trickery or whispering the correct action verb to actors, and more about how his entire filmmaking process was radically different than the kind I am learning here.
Cassavetes didn’t light for close-ups, he didn’t care about focus pulling, there was no blocking, everything was handheld. There were no no marks for the actors to hit. His crew often lived with him, rotating through positions with little or no money. As someone once said, his style of filmmaking was just as much a critique of the means of industrial film production as the content.
Watching these films we’re making now, where I see the large crews and equipment packages (very small by professional standards) with complicated lighting and focus marks, I realize how radical Cassavetes’s changes were. If performance is the focus, many of these other things simply have to go. It’s true that professional actors will give professional performances under these circumstances, and will probably even become upset if given direction, but it is rare that these performances transcend storytelling to reach something we see so rarely; total presence, involvement, humanity, unpredictability, divinity.
A critique of the content of Hollywood films must by nature also be a critique of it’s means of production. We are learning here, very rapidly and amazingly, to make larger films with larger crews, to deal with the myriad of conflicting interests and personalities that compose a film cast and crew.
We are learning the professional, Hollywood model of production, unparalleled anywhere else. Film professionals the world over swoon over the productivity, detachment and professionalism of Hollywood crews. I certainly hope to work with some someday. The product is often similar: clean, understandable and marketable, targeted to the largest audience possible. It can be very impersonal.
There are of course many negatives to Cassavetes’ style of filmmaking: prohibitive cost, endless editing, emotional and technical chaos, difficulty in marketing, and audience misunderstanding.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s not just what you put in your movies: what you write, who you cast, what costumes you find for them. It’s also about how you make that movie: the size and faith of your crew, the compromises you make between the big three; writing, performance and visuals.
I’m exhausted from a day of shooting and this post isn’t as coherent as I normally like them to be, but looking at it now it feels appropriate, something tells me Cassavetes would have liked it too.
There have been fight masters on a couple of our shoots thus far. A fight master is basically a director for scenes involving violence.
I talked to one of them for a while on a previous shoot, and he talked about how difficult it could be to constantly direct people to be raped and abused. I had never thought that a fight master would be used for a rape scene.
Non sequiturs aside on the shoot we’re working on right now there is a scene where a mother slaps her daughter. As the director of photography, I sat with the fight master for a while, watching him direct the actress to give a believable slap.
Later in the week we were filming the slap sequence he had prepared me for. I asked the director if she wanted to go through the fight master blocking, but she told me “it’s alright, I’m going to have her really slap her.”
What was interesting was watching how the real slap actually looked less believable on camera than the fake one. I imagine that this applies to all sorts of acts, both violent and nonviolent. The camera sees reality differently than a human being does. This is why it doesn’t matter if an actress is sitting on an apple box so she’s at the right height (as long as it doesn’t affect performance). The camera is not reality, it is a higher reality. It’s interesting to see how it shapes things.
I just finished our fourth shoot, which was a noir. I was gaffer on it, responsible for all of the lighting. It was shot on one of UCLA’s three soundstages, which gave me a lot of freedom to create some interesting lighting. A few things I learned from this shoot is that
An amazing book I have been reading on the subject is Kris Malkiewicz’s Film Lighting. Cinematography is a little more difficult to break into if you don’t have any experience. Sometimes I think that this year of film school is more about cinematography and production than writing and directing. I’m told that will change. It’s an amazing thing to learn about cinematography, I learned on this shoot how much I love lighting. Here are some stills:
Just read a beautiful interview with him in the book Cinematography Screencraft. I am going to be DP’ing next week and was looking for some practical inspiration. Here’s what Ingmar Bergman (as well as occasionally Polanski, Tarkovsky and Allen)’s cinematographer has to say:
I have tried to avoid using direct light, working mainly with bounced light in my quest to stop a film looking lit.
When we came to film persona, we virtually discarded the medium shot. We went from wide shots to close-ups and vice versa.
I like to see reflections in the eyes – which irritates some directors, but is true to life.
I always aim to catch light in the eyes, because I feel they are the mirror of the soul.
I make a point of not annoying actors with light meters or by shining light in their eyes, and I will always tell them what I am doing.
The actors give me inspiration when I light them.
Good actors react to their lighting: the personality connection between the cinematographer and the actor is so important.
I start by asking myself how I can help the audience to look at the right thing: is it the actors, or the dialogue, or the mood, and so on.
Fanny and Alexander was shot with the same zoom lens throughout its six hour running time.
I have been out in the desert Assistant Directing a difficult shoot, and I thought I would share a few extra things you can do to keep a crew happy. This is all based on my mistakes:
I’m sure there are more, but this is a handful of things I learned on this one.
Yulin writes,
Hello! Please allow me to introduce myself first. My name is Cassie Liu, a applicant for UCLA 2010 MFA Directing/Production Program. I read your blog which helps me a lot for the application. A few days ago, I received the “Interview Request” from UCLA. I know this is a great news for me. But I’m a little nervous and do not know how to prepare it. I read that one of your blog articles is “How I Got Into UCLA Film School” and mentioned your interview in last year .So would you please give me some advices for this interview? How long this interview will be taken? It’s difficult? What kind of questions the professors will ask? And also, the letter told me that I need pitch a new short film idea to interview committee.Is it just an idea? Or I need do more preparation?
I hope these too many questions would not bother you. I shall be VERY appreciated for your kind help
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Best wishes,
Yulin
The interview time is upon us again. 64 students will be invited to interview for UCLA’s MFA Directing Program. 18 applicants will be chosen with around 8 people on the wait list. I got in off the wait list, as did two of my classmates that I know of, so it’s not all over if you are waitlisted.
For my interview I flew to New York and met with professors Becky Smith and Rory Kelley, both very nice people. Three things I remember happening in the interview:
They didn’t exactly happen in that order for everyone. I talked with them for an hour, which I felt might have been a bit long judging by what my classmates have said. It was very relaxed, and I left feeling pretty good. I wore a sportcoat with a turtleneck, which I felt might almost have been too formal.
The people here at UCLA are looking to put a class together, so if you make it to the interview and don’t make it into the school, it may be because your classmates are different. Getting rejected from film school is no excuse to not become a filmmaker. In fact there is no excuse for not becoming a filmmaker if that is what you want to be. Film school helps a lot but is by no means essential. I’m going to write more about my feelings on the film school/no film school debate later.
This year, due to lovely California budget cuts, there will be no interviews in New York. I believe some interviews may be held over Skype. Try and get out to your interview if possible, it makes a lasting impression.
Also, write thank you notes to the professors you interview with. It helps to be cordial, and may help them remember you while they’re making those difficult decisions.
Good luck to everyone going into the interviews. Let me know if there are more questions.
I had a casting director for my six-minute film, which saved me a lot of time to focus on preparing my director’s notes/script. I think it is imperative to have the script broken down in detail before you ever see actors. For the actors you cast, the first audition is the first rehearsal, and it’s amazing how long actors can hold on to a misshapen piece of direction or faulty idea about the character. As a director it is your interpretations that the actors end up following. Have them before you see actors. You can’t direct actors to get what you want if you don’t know what that is. Writing a script is not enough to tell you how to succinctly and effectively communicate those ideas to actors. That is the essence of what a director does. A friend of mine sent me an email about this the other day, so I thought I would publish my response:
Dear xxxx,
I am attaching my script with director’s notes on it, as well as my more extensive personal director’s notes with backstory and all the questions I answered. Different directors/books have different philosophies, and I am still bouncing between them. Some books I like on the subject:
Notes on Directing by Frank Hauser is very short and sweet, a little lacking in scene analysis but great on blocking.
A Sense Of Direction is in the library. The whole thing is good but if you need something quick and effective the chapter on objectives is excellent.
Also for real down and dirty stuff look at Kazan on Directing. It has all of his director’s notes for all of his plays and films. He gets really personal about the characters, which I would like to do more over time.
Friendly enemies has one of the most extensive analysis sections of any of the books i’ve read. I think it can be a bit too much, but there is a lof of good stuff in there.
So for me the bare minimum of director’s homework is looking at every scene and determining the actions, using an action verb in the infinitive, like (to destroy). What is the character doing in that exact moment, is he pleading, bargaining, begging? I write these in parentheses in bold next to individual lines and actions. Sometimes I don’t need them, but if an actor is confused I have at least a few ideas to get things going, if not precisely what I want.Second very important thing is objectives in a scene. What is the character trying to do or get? In my first scene Eli is trying to get attention. He uses a number of strategies to do this (action verbs). Sometimes objectives change in a scene, these happen when a character achieves a goal or receives information that renders achieving a goal impossible or uninteresting. Often times scenes end here.
I also think it is essential to have clear backstories worked out for “the scene before the scene,” so if an actor asks you what they were doing 5 minutes before the scene began, let alone 5 years, you know. Interestingly enough this is also a very strong tool for directing. If for example, if in my script in the backstory the two characters didn’t have sex because Zoe refused, or did have sex and Zoe’s feeling self conscious, the actress is going to play it somewhat differently. My auditions today were living proof.
Another big weapon is adjustments, or “as ifs.” Play the scene “as if” someone were listening in the next room. Play the scene “as if he were an adult.,” etc.
A lot of the time you don’t need these, but you must always have them on hand in case an actor misinterprets the character, or trips up. It clarifies what you want in terms that an actor can understand.
I will be reviewing tapes from my auditions today. For an example of a director’s script I recommend Delia Salvi’s Friendly Enemies. It’s a difficult process putting all the notes and interpretations, one that I actually find more difficult than writing, but it’s so important. Actors respect directors who know what they want at any given time. That can change, but waffling is a surefire way to lose a little bit of that essential trust between actor and director.
links for 2010-03-12
Barrett’s preferred evolutionary explanation for dreaming, and the one she’s best known for, is that dreamscapes provided our ancestors (and therefore us) with a sort of creative canvas for solving real-world problems. In support of this, Barrett describes the work of Stanford University psychologist William Dement, who in the early 1970s instructed hundreds of undergraduate students to work on a set of challenging brainteasers before bedtime, so that they’d fall asleep with the problems still on their mind. For example, “The letters O, T, T, F, F … form the beginnings of an infinite sequence. Find a simple rule for determining any or all successive letters.” [The correct sequence is the first letter of each number, so the next one would be “S” for “six.”] One participant who went to bed frustrated by this brainteaser dreamed: