uncollected thoughts on directing

was on set again directing this past week for 5 straight days for my upcoming web-series Micgroaggressions, about 5 individuals and how they intersect with a City mediation one Saturday morning (more to say about that in the coming weeks) and learned and/or was reminded about multiple things that I am going to put here for my future self:

- just ignore that pulsing imposter alarm that keeps going off in your head throughout the shoot.
- get good sleep where possible
- if you think you got it move on. don't do another one just because or for safety. corollary: ask the actor/s if they want another one and give it if so.
- let the PA or someone other than you handle the particulars of craft and lunch
- your relationship w/ 1st AD is key to days going well.
- every day is a sort of marathon w/ ambitions, difficulties, highs/lows, varying energies, occasional heartbreak - don't get snagged by any of it. move on to next setup.
- while it's good to be flexible and in-the-moment about what to shoot, it's better to have an ordered set of shots in your head that you can speak to and deviate from.
- you will be asked an endless river of questions so don't let yourself feel annoyed when they keep coming.
- don't be afraid to say I don't know or I haven't thought about it.
- if low/no $ you may be tempted to have no hair/makeup person and ask actors to do their own. don't do this.
- though your head may be elsewhere, pondering specific details, missed opportunities, happy accidents, shortcomings, budget etc, remember that you are working with people so come up for air and talk to them. in some ways genuine conversation at lunch can be just as important as the screenplay
- the importance of deeply trusting your cinematographer cannot be overstated.
- something will go wrong.
- something will go very wrong.
- If something going wrong is an actor dropping out 4 days before you're supposed to shoot w/ actor, don't panic, just recast.
- If something going very wrong is replacement actor dropping out at 1:36 AM the night before you're supposed to shoot w/ replacement actor, don't panic, just rewrite scene for 3 people and make it a scene for 2 people even if it means you're late to set. Then when you remember 1 of those people is not an actor per se and not honed at new lines on the fly and how you were counting on 2 other actors in the scene to bolster him don't panic. Adjust shot/s w/ DP, get wild lines where needed. Maybe it's a happy accident b/c you didn't location scout this location in the first place and you'll realize that the space wouldn't work great w/ 3 people in scene anyway.
- always have a scripty.

shooting trailer 10.8.17

me walking, SB pointing (pic by Phil G)

first time directing per se since January 2013, holy moly. plenty of writing and editing and cinema in between but being on set again was a balm for the weary. today's undertaking a trailer for upcoming feature called Sister/Brother (production starts March 2018). shooting on Alexa. 7 static shots, no dialog, plus 1 shot w/ dialog, so I make mistake of thinking things will go at fast clip. always budget extra time. guerilla style but 6 locations. DP Scott Ballard, AC, Asia B. , Sound Phil G, plus 2 actors and myself. 8 am call for all minus 1 actor. Loc 1 is my house. simple shot down hallway but we didn't wrap 1st loc till 9:20. loc 2, easy shot but rain. I ask DP to add tilt down even though I designed the whole thing static. just felt right. I text actor 2 and say push back an hour b/c we're running late already. loc 3 has 3 separate setups. stop back by my house for another camera battery and bathroom breaks. loc 4 easy peasy though i add another tilt down, which also felt right. Actor 2 arrives. go to small street near stop sign and both actors in car. several shots, several considerations. airplanes overhead bad for sound. neighbor comes out, asks what we're shooting. she's nice though. AC leaves as we're finishing this location. All remaining pile into Phil's van. we head downtown for last shot. Traffic horrendous. construction plus portland marathon earlier that day plus apparent protest nearby. we park, head to top of building. get shot. I design another quick shot, no dialog  w/ both actors b/c location is good but it ends up looking like an album cover photo so i don't know what purpose it can serve, possible title card/poster down the road. we wrap but Phil has to take off. He drops us at my house. that leaves me, Scott and 2 actors. We go have some lunch and beers around 3 pm. we all toast the movie. directing again at last is different sensation. i feel strange sense of confidence about the project, in part to being older, in part to project, in part to having made feature before. the day is me planting a flag along w/ cast and crew. ready to continue, ready to begin.

brewing

the next thing is humming on the periphery, eager to announce itself. This is an exciting thing for me because for an extended duration - years and years - there has been nothing but the black sea. I am have always been an all or nothing person, project wise, often to my detriment. I have to put my full focus into one thing. This extends far beyond production, which has a slow decompression period as the details and hustle ebb away. Then comes the long desert of post. (note: this has all been amplified/exacerbated by a family and a day job and no budget all of which multiply durations by a factor of 10.) It's only now, on the edge of putting this movie to bed, that the space for other things starts to show itself. A muffled pulse beat, louder by the hour. Music to my ears. 

Woody Allen on Bergman

the interviewer asks some very basic banal questions here but it's still worth checking out.

screenplay versus direction

There is a world of difference from screenplay to production to finished film. (This is not a new thought and has been expressed/covered in multiple forums most cogently in the maxim: a film is made 3 times - screenplay, production, and in editing).  This is not to discount the primacy of screenplay because I, in part due to my background as a once aspirant screenwriter, think it's vital. But I used to think the script was at the top of hierarchy, the tree the other limbs sprang from instead of how I see it now: the embryo that grows the complex organism. Essential but not ultimate.

The screenplay for the black sea went through multiple iterations and drafts across many years until it finally was nailed down. It's a complicated, slightly dense thing - amusing since i set out to write/direct something straightforward and easily digestible for my feature debut - but after a lot of work I got it to a place where every word of prose and every bit of dialogue was to my liking as we moved across pre-production and into shooting. Overall, it worked. 

On set there were minor adjustments here and there, growing pains, adjustments and reconfigurations particular to production. A line altered here. A line ad libbed there. Bigger: A plate of chocolate (seen in the dinner table shot below), and one character's animated refusal to take any was meant to happen in the background, under the dialogue, to be a foreshadowing for later things. It's tiny and small but important to the world of the film. Further, it worked on the page. But in directing this (to me) complicated scene the plate of chocolate was subsumed by the on-set machinations of multiple eyelines and 2-shots and 3-shots and covering 5 plus pages of dialogue shooting a 4:1 ratio (on Super 16). The plate of chocolate and its import became diminished so the animated refusal was not even shot. A perfect example of how production can overwhelm/alter the screenplay. The writer in me might have fought for the plate of chocolate but the director in me cut it loose to better get through the day. Perhaps this is a case of directorial inexperience.

A bigger example of screenplay v. film came in a another scene that worked on the page. We see character 1 sitting by the window, looking at the ocean and then cut to a flashback where he meets character 2 at a bar. However the scene ended w/ jump cut to later in the night, at same location w/ Character 2 on phone w/ Character 3, Character 1 long gone. Then we cut back to Character 1 sitting by the window. Believe it or not it worked on the page in a sort of lyric poetic way, the words and prose guiding the reader's POV so that it made sense in terms of text. It had a flow and the reader could understand what the screenwriter was attempting to do. So I directed it and we shot it. But once we were in post-production, we could not make it work. All the lyric prose in the world can't shoe-horn two opposing POVs across the cut. Perhaps directorial inexperience again but I also like to think it is a remnant of my dependence on the written form instead of the filmic one.

A screenplay is made of words so it's easy to confuse with literary forms.  But the image and what it says/does-not-say is more enduring and vital than any well-turned phrase in the prose of the screenplay. It's taken me a long time to realize/admit this.

 cross-posted at northern flicker films production blog

on the long game

I spent 7 odd years of my life and youth in Los Angeles, peddling spec scripts w/ minimal return. I moved to Portland over a decade ago with a handful of scripts most of which I've long considered dead and untenable since they found no takers. Recently, considering what to do after the black sea is finished, I went back through some more as a curiosity than anything - some of them are 15 years old -  and was surprised happily to discover that there were actually movies in them, a pulse laying under years of neglect, even if they were obscured by bad writing.

Said bad writing is both a hazard of youthful ambition and of being an aspirant screenwriter, wherein the goal is to get noticed -- find voice to get noticed, write prose to get noticed, write something compelling and memorable to get noticed - not to serve the film. Here is an excerpt of a screenplay I wrote, one I was proud of back in the day, but one which contains some bad prose, particularly parts noted in red.

tough loss

I can feel my own 25 year old desperation in that sentence,  flailing away frantically underneath, screaming to the world "I am different, pick me, pick me". Here's the truth though,  I don't even know what that sentence means in practical terms, much less how an actor would act it or a director would direct an actor through it. Here's another chestnut:

oops! some terror just oozed out.

I found many such bits throughout this screenplay and others, which reminds/bestows a lesson I've heard a million times from a variety of sources: simple is best. This is antithetical to the aspirant screenwriter, or at least it was to me. In Los Angeles, clogged with rising writers and hoping-to-rise writers and mountains of spec scripts, the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race approach feels more like taking a suicide pill than time-worn wisdom. Simple is plain, is anonymous, is replaceable. Instead you have to distinguish yourself, announce yourself, separate yourself.

I don't fault myself for trying so hard, it was an essential and formative component of the person and director I became - and it's a marker of the terrain I've travelled. My focus then lay not on the movie I was writing but the career I was pursuing, and the dark underbelly that was urging it forward: my adolescent need for the world to hear that plaintive 'pick me, pick me' wail and answer it.

Not much to do about it except laugh but I do so wish bad work didn't hang around like ghosts holding mirrors that reflect back the depths of my desperate ambition.