Appendix: Finding the Director’s Idea

This appendix is intended to offer you practical guidelines for finding the director’s idea for your project. We begin with a deep reading of the script.

Strategy for Reading the Script

Three crucial questions should emerge from the first reading:

1. What is the genre or story form? Each story form has a different dramatic shape and presentation of character and deployment of plot.
2. Who is the main character and his or her goal? There should be a distinct main character with a clear goal.
3. What is the character arc, or, to put it another way, how will the experience of the story change the main character? You should be able to identify the state of the character at the beginning of the story and how the character changes as the story unfolds.

Upon a second reading, another set of questions should be answered:

1. What is the premise of the story? The premise—sometimes called the spine, central conflict, or engine—of the story is best understood as the two opposing choices facing the main character. Often these two choices concern important relationships presented in the narrative.
2. Is the premise consistent with the main character and his goal? It should be. If, for example, the main character in the “The Verdict” is a successful lawyer, then the premise of restoring dignity to a dissipated life would not resonate. There must be a link between the premise and the main character.
3. Does the main character transform in such a way that his or her transformation is credible, meaningful, and emotionally satisfying?
4. What is the plot in the film, and how is the plot used? Ideally, plot works most effectively when it puts into place forces pitted against the main character’s goal. In “A Very Long Engagement,” a young woman cannot believe her fiancé has been killed in World War I. The lethality of the war as well as the plot to find him and restore the relationship seem closer to fantasy than a realistic likelyhood. Unless plot puts some kind of obstacle in the way of the main character achieving his or her goal, the plot is not working. Think also of the voyage of the Titanic in “Titanic” as an example where the plot works effectively. The ship sinks, and Rose’s hope for love becomes a memory rather than a reality. Deploying plot in a story can be a major weakness for directors, so this aspect of the director’s idea requires considerable attention.
5. How do the secondary characters representing the two choices of the premise fit in with the premise? Are they two distinct groups—helpers and harmers? Is one of the harmers more essential than the others? How? This character, the antagonist, can be the most critical character of all, determining the vigor of the main character’s response, the shape of the character arc, and how we feel about the main character at the end. The more powerful the antagonist, the more heroic the sense of our main character at the end. In their nature and actions, secondary characters serve specific purposes in a script. The more they resonate as people rather than story elements, the richer the script will be. Although we experience the story through a main character, secondary characters can help the script seem more credible and compelling.

Let’s return to the genre issue at this point. Genre implies the dramatic arc of the film. A thriller is a chase; a police story is about solving a crime and putting the criminal away; a gangster film is the rise and fall of the main character; a science fiction film is a story about the threat of technology to humanity. Some genres are internal. The melodrama is about an interior journey around loss, ambition, or spiritual rebirth. The situation comedy is about values in life and the behavior of the main character (e.g., a man pretends to be a woman to further his ambitions for his career in “Tootsie”). Westerns also tend to be about values, with the pastoral, free past representing the positive and civilization and progress representing the negative. Each genre has a different shape. What is the dramatic arc, and how does it serve the goal of the main character? If the script does not follow genre expectations, do the changes make the script better, fresher, and stronger . . . or the opposite?

Now that you have read the script a second time and taken copious notes, a third reading is necessary to explore dimensions of the script that could yield a director’s idea.

Moving Toward Interpretation

Think of this round as the application of text interpretation. A useful approach here is to speculate about the story’s potential in the following dimensions:

• Existential
• Psychological
• Sociological
• Political

Each dimension spins the story differently. Let’s look at a film such as “Lost in Translation.” On a political level we could say the film has a Japanese–American dimension. Films such as Billy Wilder’s “One Two Three” put politics and political differences right up front, but in “Lost in Translation” Sofia Coppola does not seem that interested in the political dimensions of a story. What about the sociological dimension of “Lost in Translation”? Is there a class or gender issue at play here? Is there a hierarchy of groups, one over another? Not really. A sociological reading was not important to Sofia Coppola in this film. What about the psychological dimension of “Lost in Translation”? Is this essentially a story of unhappiness or some other character issue? Can the unhappiness of the two main characters be defined in terms of a cause and a cure? Not really. Let’s look at the existential dimension, then. Both main characters, the actor and the young photographer’s wife, seem to have full lives but are essentially alone. Conversations with their spouses alert us to how alone they feel in their significant relationships. Being in a strange foreign culture with distinctive social mores does not resolve the aloneness of these two characters. Only the friendship each offers the other moves each of these characters away from being absolutely alone. Sofia Coppola has chosen to focus on the existential dimension in her interpretation of the text. She could have chosen any of the other dimensions—psychological, sociological, or political. A different reading, however, would have changed the film considerably.

A second prism available to the director when developing a director’s idea is a possible relationship between the narrative and issues of the day. Every time period has recognizable issues of the day. Looking at 2005, for example, large issues of the day would include the role of religion in life, globalization, challenges to the environment, the right to privacy, equality for all (e.g., women’s rights in a man’s world), and, of course, modernism versus tradition. There are many other specific, local issues, but these larger issues are begging for attention on an urgent personal, national, and international level.

If the director is passionate about society, the issues of the day become relevant as a prism for interpreting the script. These issues also give the director a platform for expressing his or her personal beliefs as well as a vehicle for gaining an audience. Issues of the day can focus the director’s idea in a particular way. Steven Soderbergh has often used an issue of the day to make his narratives more compelling. “Erin Brockovich” used the prism of women’s rights in a man’s world to make the main character’s journey more compelling to the audience. Power and its partner, corruption, drive the drug story “Traffic.” Parenting is at the heart of Soderbergh’s revenge story, “The Limey.” Considering issues of the day during the text interpretation can help in developing a director’s idea.

Voice, which expresses the director’s opinions, is another device that can move a director from text interpretation to a director’s idea. Voice can in good measure be a reflection of the character of the director. Stanley Kubrick was ambitious, ironic, and passionate in his views of human progress. He differed with technological or scientific views that the human race has progressed. The Coen brothers share Kubrick’s skepticism but are far more playful in articulating their voice on the issue. Steven Spielberg also has views on the issue, but being more optimistic in his voice, his narratives seem positively hopeful in comparison to those of Kubrick. “Artificial Intelligence: AI,” a Kubrick project directed by Spielberg after Kubrick’s death, offers a good example of the clash of two distinct voices. The script developed by Kubrick reflects the critical voice of Kubrick, but the visual style and performances reflect the more optimistic voice of Spielberg.

Directors who are very conscious of the issue of voice and for whom their views supersede any dramatic considerations often opt for voice-oriented story forms—specifically, satire, docudrama, fable, and nonlinear stories. Each of these genres uses distancing strategies such as irony to detach our identification and emotional involvement with the main character. Structure also is used to distance us from the main character. The viewer watches without emotionally identifying with the character. The relationship between the director and the viewer is more direct, as it is not mediated by the viewer’s emotional relationship with the main character. Voice is the most direct vehicle for the development of the director’s idea.

To say that marketing does not play a role in the development of a director’s idea would be disingenuous. Aside from voice, marketing is a most conscious deliberation during development of a director’s idea. For the director, it can be the single most influential factor. Sensation sells tickets. Sensation may be generated by plot, by a sexual subtext, by a violent subtext, or by an over-the-top tone or style. Excess and commercialism seem partnered in the work of Quentin Tarantino (“Kill Bill”), Bernardo Bertolucci (“The Dreamers”), John Woo (“Mission Impossible II”), and Adrian Lyne (“Fatal Attraction”). Marketing can be a powerful shaping force in the development of the director’s idea.

Choosing the Director’s Idea

Now that you have completed a full script analysis and decided which aspect of the story has pulled you into the story, you have five options for choosing the director’s idea. Each provides a different pathway; focus on one of the following:

1. The character arc—The main character and his or her transformation are the vehicle.
2. The dramatic arc—The plot is the driving force. The struggle of the main character and the antagonist determine the direction and shape of the dramatic arc
3. A subtextual idea—A narrative can be straightforward (e.g., the romantic nobility of “King Arthur”) or complex (e.g., “Silence of the Lambs”). By making the subtext prominent, the character arc and dramatic arc are subsumed by the subtext.
4. Voice—The director’s ideas about, for example, war (e.g., Malick in “The Thin Red Line”), family values (e.g., Coen brothers in “Raising Arizona”), or racial profiling (e.g., Holland in “Europa Europa”) dominate all narrative structures.
5. Your deepest values in life—There are filmmakers whose personal ethos is revealed in how they approach the narrative, such as Jean Renoir’s humanism in his films; Elia Kazan’s contentious framing of class, ethnicity, and intragenerational differences; Roman Polanski’s vision of existential aloneness; and Sergei Eisenstein’s aesthetic Marxism.

Once your director’s idea is defined, you need to conceptualize an approach to directing the actors and a strategy for the camera shots that are in harmony with your director’s idea. Remember, the more layered your approach, the more creative and commercial risk-taking is at play.