The Director’s Idea
- The director’s idea is a deep subtextual interpretation that unifies the production. Using an aspect of the main character and his goal, the director finds an existential, relational, or physical dimension that relates to the main character in the deepest fashion. Using the subtextual idea, the director articulates a complementary approach to the performances and to the camera. It is the quality of the director’s idea that differentiates the competent from the good and great director. The director’s idea drives all the many decisions a director makes in the course of the production.
In this book, I am going to say many things about technique, about directors, and about directing. To persuade the reader that what follows is not simply esoteric, abstract, and academic, I would like to use this chapter to demonstrate that the views presented in this book are conceptual in their framing but practical in their goal. The goal is to help readers become better directors by utilizing the concept of the director’s idea. What needs to be said at the outset is that there are all kinds of directors: intuitive directors, self-conscious directors, dictatorial directors, laissez-faire directors, directors whose agendas are political, and directors who are utterly commercial and exploitative in their intentions.
In order to develop our understanding of directing, we must consider three broad areas of decision making that are critical to defining the type of director: (1) text interpretation, (2) attitude toward directing actors, and (3) how the camera is used (e.g., shot selection, camera angle, shape of the shot, point of view of the shot). Beyond those areas is the issue of whether the director’s decisions add value to the project. What I am proposing in this book is that there are three categories of such decision making: competent, good, and great. To understand directing, each level of decision making must also be clearly understood; accordingly, the next three chapters address the concepts of competent, good, and great directing.
In each case, the consciousness of the director’s idea is where progress begins. The competent director conveys a singular attitude about the script, be it romantic, violent, or victorious. The good director conveys a more complex, layered vision of the narrative. The great director transforms the narrative into something surprising and revelatory. Each of these options exists. Only the ambition of the director can elevate the audience’s experience.
The goal of this book is to illuminate the pathway from basic to great. We can assume that the director consciously chooses a director’s idea, which implies an awareness about the directorial choices that must be made and a sense of what constitutes better directing. This is not a matter of intellect or personality. It is far more about conscious goal setting and moving along a pathway to achieve that goal. The opposite view, which has its proponents, is that art (including directing) is mysterious, subconscious, intuitive, and therefore impossible to articulate. My approach in the book is to embrace what I believe to be the source of art making: consciousness. The greater the consciousness of the director with regard to what the director’s idea is and how to apply it, the better, the clearer, and the more powerful the outcome.
The tools that the director uses are text interpretation, directing the actors, and directing the camera shot selection. The director can value one of these tools over the other or use them equally. Whichever he chooses, these three tools are the prism through which he filters the thousands of choices he will have to make in the course of a production. What I am suggesting is that a clear, articulated director’s idea will help sharpen the focus and purpose of those thousands of decisions.
Here we come to the hierarchy that this book creates as its pathway to great directing. The presumption here, as elsewhere in life, is that some people are better at their jobs than others. In addition to our three categories of competent, good, and great, we could add another for those who misunderstand directing or are unable to function as directors. Let us call them ill-suited and unsuccessful in their goal of directing. Of course, our categories of competent, good, and great are subjective, so I put forward the following criteria.
The competent director tells a clear story, even an effective story, but the audience’s experience of the film is single-layered and flat. A film directed by the competent director can be commercially successful and the director’s career can be a rewarding one, but even from the directorial perspective the experience is flat. A competent director is technically competent and produces shots that are useful to a clear edit and performances that are credible within the parameters the director has set for the film. The competent director provides a kind of technical baseline for the purposes of this book.
The good director gives the audience a more complex experience, a layered experience. The layering may be generated from a more complex text interpretation, such as a modern main character in a classic Western, for example. The layering may arise from modulation of the actors’ performances; Elia Kazan, the great director of performers, utilized this kind of strategy. Or the director might use a broader variety of shots, wide-angle foreground–background shots rather than mid two shots or extreme long shots rather than the anticipated close-ups. Whatever the choice, the good director seeks out a director’s idea that will deepen meaning, add subtext, and complicate the narrative.
The great director not only adds value to the experience of the film but also provides a transformative experience. By transformative I refer to what all great art does: It gives us another way of seeing the ordinary. A man uses his bike for work. The bike is stolen. The economic future of his family is in jeopardy. The man steals a bike, and his son watches as he is caught. The boy shares his humiliation. Vittoria De Sica transforms an everyday story of survival into a story about poverty and fathers and sons. The shared humiliation of father and son will no doubt have an effect on the child. How will this boy grow up—a thief or a doctor? Will he be a caring or callous person? Such questions emanate from the directing of “The Bicycle Thief,” in which De Sica transformed a simple story into something quite special about all of us. This is what the great director does. And the instrument is the director’s idea. Because individual chapters are devoted to each of these categories, we will move on to a discussion of how a director’s idea unifies a production.
The Unity of the Production
It is critical for the viewer that the film be experienced whole. By that I mean that the text interpretation, the performances of the actors, and the shot selection act together to build the viewer’s experience. Imagine a jokey, superficial performance in a film such as Ordinary People, where the realism and emotional credibility of the characters are key to the experience of the film. Unity means the tools of directing are working together, and this is the purpose of a clear and strong director’s idea, which promotes a unity of experience for the audience. A few examples will illustrate how. I have intentionally chosen two relatively simple narratives so it will be clear how the director’s idea is operating.
The first example is Volker Schlondorff’s “The Ninth Day” (2005). The story takes place over the course of nine days in 1942. A Catholic priest is held in Dachau, where he and his fellow priests are poorly treated but not as poorly as the rest of Dachau’s inmates. He is given a leave of nine days to convince his bishop in Luxembourg to accept the primacy of Nazi rule. We learn that the priest is respected, scholarly, and pious and comes from an important family in Luxembourg. For eight days he visits with his family and the bishop’s secretary. He sees his mother’s grave. Everyone pressures him to make his life easier and not return to Dachau, but in the end he does return, unwilling to yield to the demands of the Nazis.
The story is simple, but Schlondorff’s director’s idea turns the film into an overwhelming experience. The director’s idea is that the world in 1942 became a black and white world. For most people it was black—their lives, their dignity, everything could be instantly taken away. On the other hand, there was the white world, filled with privilege, power, and seeming immortality. In the black world, violence and cruelty knew no bounds; in the white world, indulgence and selfishness knew no bounds.
To work with this idea, we begin with the text interpretation. In Dachau, the focus is on death, cruelty, torture, humiliation. In Luxembourg, the settings are Father Henri’s family apartment, Gestapo headquarters, the church, the bishop’s office, and the cemetery. These latter environments seem untouched by what Dachau represents in the narrative.
Two people are specifically seen as spiritual: Father Henri and a priest from Norway, who commits suicide as a result of his personal suffering in Dachau. Father Henri too suffers but he maintains his humanity in spite of the suffering. Father Henri’s brother is an industrialist who offers to save Henry by taking him to Paris. Father Henri’s pregnant sister offers to use all her connections to get Henri to Switzerland. In spite of the implications for each of them, the siblings need him to survive, as if he is the spiritual center of the family.
Three other characters are important: the bishop, the power of the Church in Luxembourg; the bishop’s secretary, keen to accommodate the Nazis; and a Gestapo official who almost became a priest but at the last moment saw more of a future with the SS. All are believers. All of these characters care, but self-interest in whatever form motivates them. All live in the white world of power and have no understanding of true powerlessness and the black that represents life and death in Dachau. The director’s idea of black and white frames the events of the narrative such that we see each event and each character as residing in one world or the other. When Father Henri chooses to return to Dachau, he is remaining spiritually intact and embracing the blackness of the world he and his fellow priests occupy at Dachau. For him to accept the blackness means to never replace his spiritual wholeness with the material benefits of a world that is power oriented, the white world. As such, Father Henri represents the best values of the Church in the world, the spiritual values of piety and valuing others in life.
The performances are in keeping with the director’s idea. The tormented Father Henri fluctuates between spiritual strength and human weakness. With the exception of the Norwegian priest, the other performers dwell in the material world where power is everything.
Schlondorff is very interesting in how he uses the camera to present the two worlds of the director’s idea. The black world of Dachau is shot in telephoto lens, and the background is compressed, pushing the people in the images together such that they are less individualistic and more herd. We learn they are priests. The camera looks down upon the mass, and the camera angles rob the characters of individualism and dignity. They are victims and we watch as they are victimized. Intense close-ups bring Father Henri and the SS into emotional and cruel conflict. The intensity makes this black world threatening and devoid of humanity.
When Father Henri is in Luxembourg, long shots replace close-ups and wide-angle shots provide a clear context for the white world. The solid church, the powerful Gestapo headquarters, even the graveyard where Father Henri’s mother is buried seem to belong to a different world than Dachau. Here, Schlondorff is deepening visually our sense that black and white live side by side, yet one is hell and the other is heaven, the powerless versus the powerful. His execution of the director’s idea helps transform this simple story into an emotionally alive and vivid experience.
A second example is Cedric Kahn’s “Red Lights” (2004). Again, the story is simplicity itself. A rather ordinary man has a successful wife—an attractive corporate lawyer. They have two children. The entire film is occupied with their setting out from Paris to pick up their children from a camp holiday in Bordeaux. The journey itself is the focus. The husband drinks, waiting for his wife and their journey to begin. Whether or not he is jealous and why he might be is unexplained, but he is troubled and alcohol empowers him. Driving like a wild man he becomes increasingly provocative. At his second drink stop, she abandons him for the train. He tries to catch the train but cannot. Again stopping for a drink, he picks up a young onearmed stranger who has asked him for a lift. The main character keeps stopping for alcohol and becomes quite drunk. Road blocks set up to catch an escaped convict do not encourage caution, just more bravado. When a tire bursts, the stranger pulls the car over and takes over. He changes the tire but then drives into the woods. When the stranger becomes more threatening, the main character smashes him with a liquor bottle, batters him, and runs him over with the car. Lost and again sober, the main character has the car towed to the local town for repair. There he learns that his wife never made it to Bordeaux. He finds out that she was raped and shot on the train by the previously mentioned escaped convict. Eventually, we learn that the stranger he killed was the convict. The film ends with husband and wife reconciled and continuing on to pick up their children.
Kahn’s director’s idea is that violence resides everywhere in the world and arises from expected sources (the escaped convict) and from the most unexpected (the normally rather timid main character). Violence complicates everything—relationships, vacations, and more. The director’s idea regarding violence begins to take shape with the text interpretation. The main character is Antoine. His frequent calls to his wife are punctuated by glasses of beer. The alcohol illustrates his frustration; alcohol and coping will be further linked as we move through the film. His wife, Helene, is clearly a strong person. Her lack of tolerance for the drinking, together with its implications for his driving, illustrates her unwillingness to be victimized by her husband’s behavior (his drinking as well as the way he is driving). Antoine’s driving becomes increasingly violent as his risk-taking on the road becomes increasingly dangerous. The upshot of his driving will be two consecutive incidents of flat tires (separate scenes)— consider them as foreshadows of the consequences of the violence of his behavior on the road. Finally, we have the stranger, who is in fact a violent escaped convict. His silence and his actions imply bottled up, explosive violence. Physically, he is the opposite of Antoine, which also makes him a threat.
All of the actions—telephone calls, drinking, driving, talking to doctors and nurses—seem to be filled with the potential to be unpredictable and terrifying. Kahn regards all the actions and behaviors in the narrative as actions and behaviors that have violent potential, no matter how benign they might inherently be. Kahn’s goal in the interpretation of the text is to convey violence and its revelation in all things.
The performances are also keyed away from the romantic aspects of relationships and encounters. Warmth consequently is totally absent from the performances until the last five minutes of the film. The emphasis is on anger, overt and suppressed, as well as on the inability or unwillingness of the characters to help one another. Even those who are helpful (the waitress in a small café, the nurse in the hospital) seem hesitant, as if they are deciding to help or harm a character in spite of the fact that their jobs are essentially to help the other.
Kahn’s camera use is interesting. The road is photographed subjectively, but most of the time the characters are observed through more objective camera placements. The subjective road represents danger and the opportunity for violence, rather than the excitement or thrill of driving. Kahn also uses the jump cut to disrupt our sense of continuity. The disruptive jump cut introduces violence into our experience of the events and characters in the film. Kahn uses the jump cut extensively throughout the film to instill the director’s idea into the emotional flow of the film (the edit).
Both of these simple stories, “The Ninth Day” and “Red Lights,” illustrate how the director’s idea works to focus and lead our experience of the film. This is how a director’s idea adds value to the narrative but most importantly how the director unifies the production.
Directors use different strategies to find their director’s ideas. Of course, personality, interest, and training are contextual elements that dispose a director to a particular set of choices, but specific aspects of a particular film can be considered that will help the director move toward a clear director’s idea.
In order to articulate the director’s idea it is first necessary for the director to understand his attraction to a particular script. Generally, directors are attracted to a script because of a particular character, usually the main character, as well as that character’s life situation and how the character has chosen to deal with it. To move toward a director’s idea, it is important to fully understand whether we want our main character to be a victim or a hero. Are we interested in their psychology, their surroundings, and the sociology involved, or are we more interested in the political dimension of their story? Every story has elements of all of these dimensions. What attracts us?
A second aspect is the importance of plot in the narrative. For some directors, such as Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott, plot is very important. For others, such as Anthony Minghella or Steven Soderbergh, plot is far less important. If plot is critical, character flattens. If character is critical, psychology is central, and the plot becomes secondary.
The director also needs to clearly bring into the foreground his own values. What are his obsessions in life? The director’s idea allows the director to highlight and articulate the values in the story that are important to him. All of us in a fashion are curious about the corners of ourselves. A director who wants to gain the audience’s love will be charming and maybe funny as they tell the story. Another director might want the audience to be impressed and will seek the most complicated, challenging approach to telling the story. Yet another director will be attracted by the challenge of the project itself. The more challenging the project is, the more the director becomes vested in it. Directors of comedies want to earn the love of their audiences (think of a film such as “Meet the Fokkers”). Directors such as Steven Spielberg (“Schindler’s List”) want to earn both the audience’s love and respect. In “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Stanley Kubrick took up the challenge of dealing with human history and such philosophical issues as being and of man versus technology. For Kubrick, the challenge was his goal of creating a visual meditation on man and technology. These goals are important filters as directors create their director’s ideas.
What I am suggesting is that the director must have a conscious personal and creative set of goals when choosing to commit to a story. I am also saying that such a commitment will require articulating how the director feels and wants us to feel about the main character.
The director begins developing a director’s idea by interpreting the text. What is the basic concept or premise of the story? It is best to think of the premise in light of two opposing choices facing a main character. Love or money is the choice facing the main character in “Titanic.” To be like the father, an immigrant, or to be different from the father is the premise in “Four Friends.” To be an ambulance chaser for the rest of his life or to restore his dignity are the two choices for the main character in “The Verdict.”
The premise is the key to both the film and to our relationship with the main character. Understanding the premise and being excited about exploring that premise lead to articulation of the director’s idea. How passionately does the director feel about the premise? How should he approach the premise? In “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Frank Capra wanted to overvalue the idealistic option of the premise for his main character, and he wanted to demonize the other option (“realpolitique”) and its consequences for personal behavior. This means that his director’s idea was to overdo both options of the premise. Such an over-the-top approach has its dangers (e.g., caricature and farce), but it also enables Capra to be impassioned about his populist views.
An important tool for articulating a director’s idea is creating backstories for characters and events in the film. The fact that Maximus and Commodus, the main character and antagonist, respectively, in “Gladiator,” were raised virtually as brothers makes their current struggle more personal and more anguished. In Robert Aldrich’s “Attack,” a Battle of the Bulge World War II story, the main character and antagonist have a similar linkage. Back home in the south in the United States, the antagonist’s father was the political boss. The main character was a capable, ambitious young man, recognized by the local political boss. The political boss asked the main character to look out for his wayward, less capable son. Again, the tension of two sons in conflict gives this war story deeper meaning. In both of these film examples, the Cain–Abel factor became the director’s idea.
Another avenue toward developing a director’s idea is to work with a specific subtext to the narrative. “The Bourne Identity” is a film with a big thriller plot about a CIA contract killer who has lost his memory and is being pursued by his employer, who intends to kill him. The subtext of the film is about loneliness, the deepest kind of loneliness a human being can experience—the belief that they have been abandoned. Director Doug Limans’s director’s idea was to work with the loneliness not only of the main character but also of other characters in the film. Remember the death scene of the other contract killers? Each scene bespeaks the effects of loneliness on the characters.
The subtext of “All about Eve,” the great film about the theater and stardom, is ambition, which takes each of the film’s characters to different places. Joseph Mankiewicz used ambition as his director’s idea and explored the vanity, depth, even desperation of ambition and subsequent loss of dignity experienced by each of the characters. The greater the ambition, the greater the loss of dignity.
The subtext of the “Road to Perdition,” directed by Sam Mendes, is paternal love. The subtext of “Zorba the Greek,” directed by Michael Cacoyannis, is eros, or life force. In each of these films, the directors used the subtext as their director’s ideas to deepen the classic gangster film and classic melodrama. For the director, the subtext can be the most overt path to his director’s idea.
A coherent character arc can also be a useful vehicle for the director’s idea, but for the arc to be genuinely animated by the director’s idea it must be surprising. All screen stories, at least those that are character driven, are essentially stories of character transformation. Stories of adjustment, coming of age, or loss of innocence are not in and of themselves surprising. What make them surprising is the use of deeper themes as both the director’s idea and the instrument of transformation. Two examples will illustrate how this works. William Wyler’s “The Heiress” is an adaptation of the Henry James novel Washington Square. In a nutshell, the character arc introduces a main character who is plain but wealthy. Two relationships are key: a father who is judgmental and treats his daughter harshly and a suitor who is handsome and a fortune seeker. In the beginning, the main character is hungry for acceptance but at the end she rejects her suitor because her father was right. She is initially hopeful and young but ends up more mature, realistic, and embittered. The character arc can be viewed as a loss of innocence. The director’s idea here is to show how disappointment plays a major role in the lives of all the characters and how those disappointments drive the outcome of the character arc. The father is disappointed that when his wife dies in childbirth he is left with his daughter; the daughter is disappointed by the absence of her father’s love and is disappointed that her father was right about her suitor.
A second example is George Miller’s “Lorenzo’s Oil.” A married couple has a child late in life. For the husband, it is his second family, as he has two grown children from the first marriage. The inciting incident of the film is the onset of an incurable disease in the child, who is five years old. The main character is the wife, who had the child when she was forty years old. The character arc is discovering motherhood relatively late in life and marveling at the state of motherhood. The onset of the child’s disease threatens to rob this mother of her newly discovered state of motherhood. The character arc ends with the boy alive but essentially crippled by the disease.
The mother is humbled but not destroyed. She has grown in her understanding of what it means to be a mother. Love was always there, but now patience, empathy, and something almost intangible or spiritual complements the sense of love she experienced at the outset of the story. The character arc is a coming-of-age arc, as the woman has matured over the course of the story. We can view the plot as the progression of the disease and the efforts of the mother and father to work with doctors to find a cure for the disease. The director’s idea in “Lorenzo’s Oil” is the power of the will as a force of nature. The doctors say the child will die, but the son the mother waited so long for simply cannot die. She will not allow it. The presence of will in her behavior, in her husband’s efforts, in the African people among whom the son grew up is a surprising and palpable force in the outcome of the film. And will is the surprise that in the end changes the plot and allows the discovery that saves Lorenzo, the child, thus altering the character arc. The character arc and the role of surprise can be vehicles for realizing the director’s idea in a film. By exploring the character arc and what will provoke change, the director can discover the device that will become the director’s idea.
When the director has found an idea in the text interpretations, this director’s idea can then be used to shape the performances and organize shots to serve the idea. The design of the edit will use these shots to integrate the text interpretations and performances with the director’s idea. Deciding on a director’s idea can only be arrived at through conscious examination of script and an awareness of the director’s own priorities as a storyteller. Using text interpretation as the vehicle for defining the director’s idea will further articulate what the director needs from the actors and from the camera to realize the director’s idea. (See the appendix at the end of the book.) Now that the director’s idea has been conceptualized, it is time to consider how directors deploy these ideas, but first we must define what constitutes competent directing, good directing, and great directing.