INTRODUCTION

Here is a practical, comprehensive directing manual that speaks directly to those who like to learn by doing. No matter what genre or screen medium you work in, and whether you are learning inside an educational institution or out of one, this new edition will occupy your head, heart, and hands with meaningful work.

Happily, new digital technology is making ever more practical the flexible and personal approaches this book has always championed, and a formidable body of work by modern masters shows the artistic gains available from improvisatory approaches and smaller equipment. As Samira Makhmalbaf, the youngest director ever to present a work at Cannes, has said: “Three modes of external control have historically stifled the creative process for the filmmaker: political, financial, and technological. Today with the digital revolution, the camera will bypass all such controls and be placed squarely at the disposal of the artist.” Now, she says, cinema has become simple again and accessible to all. And she is right.

WHAT CONCERNS THE DIRECTOR

With so many changes in technology, what should most concern a new director? No single book can attempt to cover everything. It seems clear from the plethora of unwatchable indie films that the conceptual and creative processes remain the toughest challenge, so these are this book's priority.

WHAT'S NEW IN THIS EDITION

This third edition is extensively revised and expanded in content. Naturally the creative implications of the new digital technology are much in evidence, but there are also new sections on the much-misunderstood subject of dramatic beats, dramatic units, and the three-act structure. There is an expanded screen grammar specifically for directors and more explicit information on the difference between neutrally recording a fictional story and telling it instead as a spirited screen storyteller. There are also new sections on the significance of the entrepreneurial producer; the fruitful triangular relationship possible between screenwriter, director, and producer; the significance of lines of tension in a scene and the potent but invisible axes a director must respect; the positive value of any documentary training to fiction makers; the increasingly valuable art of pitching, or orally proposing a story; the Dogme Group manifesto and the importance of setting creative limitations; the dangers of embedded values in filmmaking and the ethics of screen representation; sound design in screenwriting and beyond; and the prospectus and sample reel as tools of communication in fundraising. Also new is a section on right and wrong ways to subtitle.

There are entire new chapters on production design, breaking down the script, procedures and etiquette on the set, shooting location sound, script continuity, preproduction meetings, and working with a composer.

A NEW AGE

Today's films are more likely to thrust us into characters' subjective, inner lives using elliptical and impressionistic storytelling techniques. They are more inherently akin to music, employ a less linear narrative development, have more subjective points of view, and are more often driven by their characters' streams of consciousness. More fluid editing, sound design, and intelligently used music draw the audience into the visceral lives of the characters, as do the advances in picture and sound reproduction in people's homes. High-definition television and high-fidelity sound promise a cinema-quality experience from the couch.

The long-dominant mode of Hollywood objective realism is in decline, like the Hollywood studio system itself. But realism still dominates public taste and presents a huge challenge to a new director, so it remains more central to this book's educational purposes than I would prefer.

LEARNING METHODS AND OUTCOMES ASSESSMENT

Learning to make films is like learning a musical instrument. You can't do it with either hands or intellect alone. You need an informed heart, a feel for the other arts, and plenty of practice to internalize what you discover. For this reason the book urges voluminous practical work. Because the why of filmmaking is as important as the how, practice and self-development are integrated by a common sense film grammar based on everyday perceptual experience.

The projects and exercises, so important to actualizing and reinforcing learning, have brief conceptual instructions, technical and artistic goals, and outcomes assessment criteria to alert young directors and their teachers to their strengths and weaknesses. Modern education looks not just at what the teacher puts into the student but focuses now on defining and assessing the student's expected output. Students like the outcomes assessment method because it supplies an explicit inventory of what to aim for. Circling scores for each criterion produces a bar graph that reveals at a glance where the general areas of strength and weakness lie. Teachers and students can use these levels of success as the basis for a critical and constructive dialogue.

The assessment forms, formerly attached somewhat invisibly to the relevant projects, are now gathered together in Appendix 1 (and can also be found at this book's companion web site, www.focalpress.com/companions/0240805178). This makes the way outcomes assessment methods work more evident and shows by example how they can be written to cover any kind of project or exercise. Also, Appendix 2 contains the Form and Aesthetics Questionnaire, which will yield a useful overview of any project—past, present, or future.

PREPARATION VERSUS EXECUTION

You may wonder why a production manual devotes 16 chapters to the thought and activities prior to preproduction. The answer comes from decades of teaching and will be reiterated by anyone of similar immersion: most of the time, when fiction screen works fail they do so not because they are badly filmed but because the conceptual infrastructure to every aspect of the work is weak or nonexistent:

• The story's world and its characters are not credible or compelling (which requires lots of work to understand the processes of human perception, story structure, dramaturgy, actors, and acting).
• There is no unity, individuality, or force of story concept (which means developing energy and originality in the writing, something worthwhile and deeply felt to say, and a strong awareness of whatever in form, dramaturgy, or sound and visual design can effectively launch a given idea in a fresh and fitting cinematic form).

New students dive into learning screen techniques and technology in the belief that only the mastery of hardware separates them from directing. But this is to confuse learning a language with storytelling. Language facilitates telling stories, but learning Russian, for example, won't qualify you to captivate an audience. Narrative skill in the dense and deceptive medium of film is a rare and littleunderstood accomplishment. If it comes, it's the result of completing a quantity and variety of creative and analytic work (all represented in this book) and from learning to think as a committed screen artist. Aspiring directors will advance only if they come to grips with the notion that their artistic identity as a filmmaker is part of a lifelong endeavor that reaches into every aspect of their lives. To the fun of practicing production crafts, then, you must add the pain and effort it takes to assimilate the purposes and limitations of screenwriting; aesthetics and their association with authorship; textual structure and interpretation; acting and actors; and wise leadership of an ensemble, beginning with thorough, purposeful, and demanding rehearsals.

Many beginners view all this reluctantly or impatiently, finding it unfamiliar, fuzzy, and threatening to the ego. This, however, is the hidden four-fifths of the iceberg and requires more explanation than do shooting and editing, which today's young people accomplish so easily and well. Hence, those 16 chapters.

FILM'S ARTISTIC PROCESS ENHANCED

The organization of this book suggests a rather idealized, linear process for film production, but this is to help you find information in a hurry. In practice, the process is organic, messy, and circular. Everything is connected to everything else and nothing done early ever seems finished or foreclosed. The director must be ready to improvise, solve problems collaboratively with cast and crew, and see crises not as mortal blows to the master plan but as opportunities in heavy disguise. This guerilla approach to telling stories on the screen—normal in documentary but antithetical to the assembly line traditions of the features business—allows the low-budget independent to prosper and can lead directly to cutting-edge creativity in film art. This is strikingly apparent in the digitally enabled work of Mike Figgis, Steven Soderbergh, the Danish Dogme Group (principally Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg), Wim Wenders, Spike Lee, Michael Winterbottom, Gary Winock, Rick Linklater, and many others. For speed and convenience in compositing, George Lucas shot his Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones using high-definition (HD) digital camcorders, and he came out a convert to HD, having shot the equivalent of 2 million feet of film in a third less shooting time and with $2.5 million saved in film costs.

LOCATING THE HELP YOU NEED

When any aspect of production reveals specific difficulties, try solving your problem by going to:

• The checklist for the part that concentrates on that stage of production
• The chapters handling that area of activity, via the Table of Contents for the part
• The Index
• The Glossary
• The Bibliography
• The Internet. Though a Web site guide is included, Web sites die and resurrect with bewildering speed, so be prepared to use a good search engine, such as Google, to flush out sources of information. As always, cross check any important information with other sources.

THANKS

Anybody who writes a book like this does so on behalf of the communities to which they belong. These, in my case, number at least four—my college, international colleagues in the film teaching profession, my publishers, and my friends and family.

Many ideas in this book grew from teaching relationships at Columbia College Chicago and New York University with past and present students who are now so numerous their names would halfway fill this book. I also benefited inestimably from interaction, advice, and criticism from many dear colleagues, most recently at Columbia's Film/Video Department. Particular help for this and previous editions came from Doreen Bartoni, Robert Buchar, Judd Chesler, Gina Chorak, Dan Dinello, Chap Freeman, T.W. Li, Emily Reible, Joe Steiff, and Diego Trejo, Jr.

That I mostly kept my sanity during four years of upheaval and changes as chair of the Film/Video Department at Columbia College Chicago was particularly owing to Ric and Eileen Coken, Charles Celander, Joan McGrath, Margie Barrett, Sandy Cuprisin, and Micheal Bright. Thanks also to Wenhwa Ts'ao, Chris Peppey, T.W. Li, Joan McGrath, and Sandy Cuprisin for help finding pictorial matter. Successive administrations have given our department an extraordinary level of faith and material support, in particular Executive VP Bert Gall, Dean Caroline Latta, Dean Doreen Bartoni, Provost Steve Kapelke, and three successive presidents—the late Mike Alexandroff, who founded the college in its modern form, and his successors Dr. John B. Duff and Dr. Warrick L. Carter.

I also want to thank my successor Bruce Sheridan, whose experience, energy, wit, and wisdom in the chairmanship are taking the 2,100-strong Film/Video Department community to new levels of achievement.

I learned greatly from the many impassioned teaching colleagues I encountered in the 14 countries where I have taught and from all the good work done by those who organize and attend the conferences at CILECT (the International Film Schools Association) and UFVA (University Film & Video Association of North America). All of us, I think, feel we are slowly coming to grips with the octopus of issues involved in teaching young people how to act on audiences via the screen. Particularly must I thank Nenad Puhovsky, Henry Breitrose, Joost Hunningher, and Aleksandar Todorovic for the invaluable help I got from their 200-page report on behalf of CILECT's Standing Committee on New Technologies. Their report, and much else of value, can be found on CILECT's Web site (www.cilect.org).

Enduring thanks to my publishers, Focal Press. Thanks to Ken Jacobson for advice on the book's original substance, and Karen Speerstra, Marie Lee, and most recently Elinor Actipis for unfailing support, encouragement, and great publishing work.

Among friends and family in Chicago, thanks go to Tod Lending for teaching me more about dramatic form and Milos Stehlik of Facets Multimedia for pictorial assistance. Thanks also go out abroad to my son Paul Rabiger of Cologne, Germany for our regular phone discussions and advice on composing for film, and to my daughters Joanna Rabiger of Austin, Texas and Penelope Rabiger of Jerusalem for far-ranging conversations on film, education, and much else. Over four decades their mother, Sigrid Rabiger, has also influenced my beliefs through her writings and practice in art therapy and education.

Lastly, undying appreciation to Nancy Mattei, my wife and closest friend, who puts up with the solitary and obsessive behavior by which books of any sort take shape and whose support and valuations keep me going and keep me right.

To anyone unjustly overlooked, my apologies. After all this help, any mistakes are mine alone.

Michael Rabiger, Chicago, 2003