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.
