Conclusion
The central idea of this book has been that the director of a film must have a concept, an interpretive idea that I have called the director’s idea, to determine an effective approach to the text, the performances, and the camera. With a clear director’s idea, the film will be deeper, more layered, and more powerful. Without the director’s idea, the film can still be made, but the audience’s experience of the film will be flatter. In this sense, the director’s idea is the path to better directing, possibly even great directing.
I suggested in Part I that directors fall into particular categories: competent, good, or great. Competent directing is the baseline for directing. This category is characterized by a particular view. The examples that I used, “King Arthur” by Antoine Fuqua and “The Lighthorsemen” by Simon Wincer, have taken a singular approach of featuring heroes in war and their adversaries (i.e., the enemy). These films deploy the romantic idea that men who go to war, whether they embrace the mission or not, are inevitably romantic heroes. This romantic idea of heroism was realized by the director’s camera choices, the performances he drew out of his actors, and his interpretation of the narrative. These choices applied to all the characters in the films—those helping the main character as well as those opposing the main character. The experience of these films is singularly romantic, and the films are entertaining. Competent directors, such as Antoine Fuqua and Simon Wincer, are effective in what they set out to do.
When discussing the good director, I used the examples of Adrian Lyne and Claude Chabrol. Lyne remade Chabrol’s “Une Femme Infidele” into “Unfaithful.” Lyne’s film focuses on the woman as the main character and views the murder of the lover as an accident, the results of which must be addressed by husband and wife. The film proceeds as a story of desire and its tragic consequences. In Chabrol’s film, the main character is the husband and his motivation is jealousy. He has a beautiful wife and assumes she is bored with him, but he remains overwhelmingly in love with her. That love takes him from suspicion to painful discovery to murderous rage and back to the stasis of love and acknowledgment of guilt. The character in the Chabrol film has a powerful inner life, and Chabrol used feeling and irony to make his motivation seem both understandable and poignant. There is no such understanding about the husband in Lyne’s version. He is simply overcome and surprised by the arrival of his rage at the moment of murder. For the purposes of our discussion, Lyne represents a competent director and Chabrol a good director.
The good director adds value to a project through his text interpretation, direction of the actors’ performances, and camera deployment, creating surprise and a subtext that deepens our experience of the film. In Chapter 4, I focused on the work of Anthony Mann, a director known principally for his Westerns. In Mann’s “Winchester ’73,” the surprise is the dynamic deployment of the environment to reveal how morally ambiguous the main character has become. The classic Western positions the main character as a moral hero and the antagonist as morally reprehensible, but this dynamic does not operate in “Winchester ’73,” as both the main character and his antagonist are humanized. The humanity of each is compelling, and the genre expectation shifts. The subtext in Mann’s work is rather modern compared to the classical pastoral sense of the West; consequently, the film proceeds toward resolution without the optimistic sensibility of the classic Western. To compensate for this shift, Mann provides a visual aesthetic that is dynamic and powerful. The real hero of his films is the artist, Mann himself, who takes us on a visual rollercoaster ride that is quite unforgettable. He does so in his war films as well as his film noir films. Visual power and disappointed characters are a potent mix in the experience of a Mann film.
If the good director uses a counterpoint approach to layer our experience of the film, the great director deploys his own voice to transform our experience of the film. The vehicle for that voice is the director’s idea. As I mentioned in Chapter 5, particular characteristics mark the work of the great director. The level of passion in the work of the great director is unusual. The great director stakes out a distinct position on a subject or character in the film, and there is a simplicity in his approach as well as economy in the narrative. Much is achieved in a single shot. Finally, there is a distinctive style in the work of the great director.
A useful comparison of good directors and great directors is provided by the two versions of “The Manchurian Candidate.” I suggested in Chapter 4 that the more recent example of “The Manchurian Candidate” directed by Jonathan Demme is an example of good directing. By deploying an aggressive, intense camera, Demme was able to portray the madness of creating two assassins for political gain. The antagonist in Demme’s version is the corporate/industrial complex seeking dominance. Although this version is layered, the performances are realistic, which relegates this “The Manchurian Candidate” to an entertaining cautionary tale.
On the other hand, the original “The Manchurian Candidate” directed by John Frankenheimer exemplifies great directing. In this version, Cold War politics provides the core struggle. Communists create an assassin to help them take over the United States, their capitalist rival state. The Cold War plot is transformed into an emotionally compelling nightmare by positioning the struggle inside one family. Raymond Shaw, the main character who is brainwashed to be an assassin, is forever the powerless son. The antagonist is his mother, who presents herself as a patriot but is in fact the communist mole who controls Raymond and moves him toward his assignment of killing the presidential candidate. Her power over her son destroys his life, and this personal tragedy becomes a national tragedy. Made in 1962, this film illustrates how politics and personal life can clash to the detriment of the family and the nation. Frankenheimer’s visual style and ironic deployment of visual observations about race relations, interpersonal relations, and national rivalries even between Allies make “The Manchurian Candidate” a powerful example of what great directing can be.
The director deploys three tools to create the director’s idea: text interpretation, direction of the actors’ performances, and camera choices that create editing opportunities to realize the director’s idea. Let’s look at each of these individually.
In Chapter 4, I described how Michael Mann in “Collateral” interpreted Los Angeles as a city where individuals are alone. They cannot count on people or organizations within the environment to help them. This is a more neutral presentation of Los Angeles than Robert Altman’s in “Short Cuts,” and it is more neutral but in the opposite direction than the view set forth by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly about the city of dreams in “Singin’ in the Rain.” My point here is that in his interpretation of the text in “Collateral,” Mann used his depiction of the city to make his main character, a taxi driver, even more defenseless against the hit man who is a passenger in his cab. Mann’s depiction of the city is an interpretive strategy that deepens our experience of the narrative.
In terms of the performance of the actors, in Chapter 4 I described Elia Kazan’s strategy in “Splendor in the Grass.” The text is all about sexual desire and the powerful inhibition parents can have on their children. Deanie and Bud are in love. Her parents are poor. His father is a self-made man. Deanie’s mother says sex before marriage is wrong, and sex is not pleasurable for women anyway. Bud’s father says sex is necessary but marriage is about consolidating wealth and power, not love. He is implying that Bud should marry with an eye on climbing the social ladder, not for love. Kazan stages consecutive scenes between the children and their parents. The text says “don’t,” but in each scene Kazan’s staging communicates the opposite. Deanie physically clings to her mother as she offers her daughter advice. Bud’s father physically pummels Bud, albeit both aggressively and affectionately, while he advises him. In both cases, the physical (desire) outweighs what is being said (delay desire; go for power). The directorial choice is empathetic to the desire both Bud and Deanie feel; here, performance tells us about the director’s idea.
In Chapter 3, which discusses camera placement and how the elements of the shot are organized to convey the director’s idea, I mentioned the bombing shots from “Pearl Harbor” and “Dr. Strangelove.” In “Pearl Harbor,” the bomb from a Japanese airplane is dropped on a ship below. As the bomb drops toward the ship, the camera takes the view of the bomb. The image is conceptual but in the end it simply elicits a sensation rather than deeper feelings. I compared this shot to the nuclear bomb being dropped from the B52 in “Dr. Strangelove.” Slim Pickens’ character has opted to ride the bomb to its destination. Wearing a cowboy hat, he rides the bomb as though it is a wild bull. He is all excitement trying to tame the bomb/bull. Whether we view the shot ironically, whether we consider the character to be demented or a macho cowboy to the end, the image stays with us long after the film has ended. Kubrick transformed a narrative action—bombing the target—into another level of meaning. Whether we view it as an anti-war or anti-cowboy mythology and mentality, the shot is transformative. It has become more than the sum of its narrative parts. Good directing and great directing use the camera, the performances, and the interpretation of the text in just such ways.
It has not been my intention in this book to create a hierarchy of directors, but it has been my intention to suggest that great directing can move in numerous directions. The tools—text interpretation, direction of the actors’ performances, and direction of the camera shots—are applied through the lens of the director’s idea. I would like to close this book by reconsidering how these tools are used and to what purpose. Specifically, I would like to suggest that great directors often use the tools preferentially to achieve a level of feeling that underpins the director’s idea. A director such as Sergei Eisenstein, for example, uses interpretation and camera more than he relies on performance, while a director such as Elia Kazan relies on performance and interpretation more than on the camera shots and editing style. Both are great directors.
In this book we have looked at 14 directors. Let’s review those directors who focus on text interpretation and performance in their films. I would like to suggest that there is an underlying purpose for such an approach. In the case of Margarethe Von Trotta and Catherine Breillat, that purpose is political. Both Von Trotta and Breillat have staked out a specific position in the war between men and women for equal rights in society. In the case of Von Trotta, the text interpretation focuses on political action in the community. A woman commits robbery to save a child daycare center in “The Second Awakening of Crista Klages.” One sister becomes a terrorist while the other acts for the environment and women’s rights within the law in “Marianne and Juliane.” The bedroom is the battleground for Catherine Breillat; whether we look at “Fat Girl” or “Anatomy of Hell,” the struggle between men and women can be boiled down to a matter of getting what you want sexually.
Because the stakes are so high in the work of Von Trotta and Breillat, much pressure is put on the conviction of the actors. They have to make the audience believe that their very existence is at stake. The political dimension of the narratives of these filmmakers must be communicated by the performers, so charisma as well as conviction are at the core of the actors’ performances in these films. In both cases, despite the provocative dimensions of the narrative, the visuals must follow or take a subordinate position to text interpretation and performance.
If politics is the goal in the work of Von Trotta and Breillat, the goal is energy in the work of Elia Kazan and Mary Harron. Kazan and Harron both favor performance and text interpretation but for a different purpose. I have already mentioned Kazan’s performance work in “Splendor in the Grass.” His work with Jack Palance and Zero Mostel in “Panic in the Streets,” Raymond Massey and James Dean in “East of Eden,” and Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger in “On the Waterfront” produced legendary performances by mythologized performers. All of the performances are driven by the conflict between the character trying to achieve a goal and the vigor of the forces opposing him. The interpretation keys the performances. The clash of drama and psychology, so forcefully utilized by Kazan, highly energizes these films.
The same holds true for the work of Mary Harron in “I Shot Andy Warhol” and “American Psycho,” where the energy is generated by the performances of Lili Taylor and Christian Bale. The characters’ inner and outer lives are at war, and the battlegrounds—haves versus have-nots, celebrities versus non-celebrities, men versus women— energize these films. From an interpretive point of view, Harron’s choice of genres—docudrama and fable—adds her own contrarian views that conflict with those of the characters. In both films, the characters want celebrity, but Harron illustrates the emptiness of their goal by displaying the banality of Warhol and his acolytes, as well as that of the corporate vice presidents. Her voice conflicts with the characters’ goals, and the intentions of the characters are presented as ironic rather than as something we can identify with or care about. In these films, neither Solanas nor Bateman gains happiness or understanding as a result of their actions, but Harron has put their actions to good purpose to energize her dark narratives.
If politics is the key transformative device in the films of Breillat and Von Trotta and energy is the key transformative device in the works of Kazan and Harron, it is the romantic subtext that is transformative in the work of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. Again, performance and text interpretation propel the subtext deeper into the films. Because Lubitsch specialized in romantic comedy, on first glance my claim may seem confusing. Let me explain. Although the films follow the course of a relationship between a man and a woman, the course of that relationship is always underpinned by the subtext. In “Trouble in Paradise,” the lovers in the end have more in common with one another than the challenger Madame Colet could ever hope for, and the fact that both of the lovers are thieves saves the romantic relationship. In “To Be or Not To Be,” the shared narcissism saves the relationship of Joseph and Maria Tura. In “The Shop Around the Corner,” idealism and the need for idealism fuels the relationship of Klara and Alfred. Finally, in “Ninotchka” the joy of romance fuels the relationship of Leon and Ninotchka and helps each overcome their political differences.
To highlight the subtext, the performances are keyed toward opposites attracting. Leon is portrayed as a hedonist, so light he might just float away, and Ninotchka is portrayed as serious and somber, weighed down by her heaviness. It is the joy of finding each other that transforms Leon into a man who can make and honor commitments and Ninotchka into a woman who can laugh and take pleasure in the small things, such as a hat or a Moscow dinner party with her friends, all of whom have been banished from where their hearts are—Paris. The performers had to be able to capture the pleasure and the pain, the seriousness and the lightness. And this is precisely where Lubitsch brought the performances. In each case, they are the focus of his text interpretations.
Billy Wilder also focused on the romantic subtext in his films. Lost hope is the subtext of “Double Indemnity.” Lost dreams are the subtext of “The Lost Weekend.” Lost ambition is the subtext of “Sunset Boulevard.” Lost moral values are the subtext of “The Apartment.” Using text interpretation, Wilder amplified hope and its destruction in “Double Indemnity,” in which a single character—the woman of Walter Neff’s dreams, Phyllis Dietrichson—was responsible for both. In a sense, two women represent Joe Gillis’ relationship with ambition in “Sunset Boulevard.” Norma Desmond represents the collapse of Joe’s ambition for himself; with her, he is a kept man. With Betty, the story analyst, Joe regains the sense that he may be a good writer. His relationship with her represents the hope that he might regain that ambition.
Critical to the performances of the actors is that we need to see their self-contempt for losing their ambition and we need to see the desire, the hope, that the ambition can live again. This requires a labile performance swinging from cynicism to anticipation to love. William Holden’s performance as Joe Gillis does not disappoint, nor do the other actors in Wilder’s films. Both Ray Milland in “The Lost Weekend” and Jack Lemmon in “The Apartment” were recognized with Oscars for their acting. Portraying the swings between moral confusion and clarity in no small part contributed to Jack Lemmon’s performance in “The Apartment.” Performance together with text interpretation created romantic subtexts that lifted Wilder’s director’s ideas to remarkable heights.
Not all directors use the same mix of tools to elevate their work. The directors we have discussed thus far used a mix of text interpretation and performance to power their work. The next group of directors uses a different mix, that of performance and the camera. In the case of George Stevens and Steven Spielberg, they have deployed camera and performance to highlight the humanity in the characters portrayed in their films. Both Stevens and Spielberg have had as their goal that the audience will recognize themselves in their characters. This attentiveness to character can seem manipulative but in their work the focus is on first a recognition of the humanity of the character and eventually an invitation to see ourselves in that character. There is no other way to understand the power and poignancy of the character of George Eastman in “A Place in the Sun” or of John Miller in “Saving Private Ryan.” For Stevens, humanity required an emotional complexity. When Angela Vickers meets George Eastman in “A Place in the Sun,” he is playing pool alone. We understand why he is alone. He has tried to mingle with the guests at the Eastman party but even his cousin has failed to acknowledge his presence. When Angela sees him she is impressed by his acumen at pool. She asks him why he is alone. Is he feeling blue, or is he simply antisocial? In a sense, he is both. He has been rejected by his peers, so, alone, he is both blue and antisocial. This acknowledgment by Angela immediately penetrates his mask, and his wanting to be alone turns into anxiety, and this feeling, too, is acknowledged. In this brief exchange of the soon-to-be lovers, George Eastman has been acknowledged and portrayed as emotionally complex and very human. Later, when his desire clouds his judgment and he considers killing his working-class lover, Alice, it is his humanity, and hers, that prevents him from carrying out the murder. At this point we can see ourselves in George Eastman—basically decent but conflicted about desire and our feeling guilty for having that desire.
To characterize the humanity of George Eastman, Stevens relied principally on performance and his direction of the camera. The performances of Montgomery Clift as George Eastman, of Elizabeth Taylor as Angela, and Shelly Winters as Alice can be categorized as either masked or emotionally open. Both Angela and Alice are emotionally open and expressive, which requires above all an honesty in the presentation of these characters. The actresses portraying these characters are admirable in their projection of the transparency of their characters. Montgomery Clift, on the other hand, is more masked; he feigns directness but all the while masks his feeling. When Angela unmasks him in their first meeting, we get a glimpse of his vulnerability. For Clift, this required a more internal performance and he, too, performed admirably.
In terms of camera choices, Stevens relied on two styles of shots to depict the humanity of his characters. The close-ups of George and Angela in the scene where they meet captures the openness of Angela and the mask of George. Later close-ups of George in the boat with Alice are not able to illustrate his murderous intent. The lighting produced shadows on his face, particularly his eyes, which masked his intent from Alice but suggested his intent to the audience. The other shot Stevens relied on was a slow tracking shot. As Angela and George begin to dance in the scene that follows their meeting in the pool room, the camera discovers them and moves in on their growing intimacy. The slow tracking shot creates an anticipation of their growing desire and the culmination of their desire to be together.
In the case of John Miller, Spielberg introduced him in “Saving Private Ryan” as a capable officer who is serious about his job. Like the police chief in “Jaws,” Miller is decent and effective in his work. In both “Saving Private Ryan” and “Jaws,” the plot challenges the character. For Miller, the plot is to find Private Ryan behind enemy lines. This means putting his men in harm’s way. Is it worth it? This will be Miller’s struggle. In the case of “Jaws,” the police chief unequivocally stands for shutting the beaches and eliminating the human food supply for the shark. In both cases, the humanity of the main character is highlighted and challenged by the plot.
In terms of performance, the key was to convey an idea of the characters being caring and effective. Both Tom Hanks and Roy Scheider worked within these parameters. Spielberg also gave each main character a private moment—the police chief with his wife, Miller with platoon members who are trying to find out about his private life—where the vulnerability of each character is clearly on display. As in the case of Stevens, Spielberg allows secondary characters to be expressive while the private side of them remains more hidden, masked. Spielberg does this to provide a transparency to their professional effectiveness. The personal is private, masked, so it will not get in the way of the characters’ conduct of their work. As in the case of Stevens, Spielberg relies on the close-up and camera movement to articulate the feelings, professional and personal, of his main characters.
Both Stevens and Spielberg have defined humanity in terms of the other—a couple, a platoon, a community. Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick, on the other hand, have focused on the individual, the solitary self being pummeled and punished by another. Their focus is on the existence of the self and its quality, based on challenges by the actions of others. Both Polanski and Kubrick have used a mix of performance and camera to evoke this punishing dynamic. Whether the two directors were or are pessimists or realists is a matter of interpretation. What we experience in their work, however, is a transformation of the narrative into its most basis struggle, the self struggling to survive under the most ferocious attack from social, political, even spiritual antagonists.
Polanski uses the camera to highlight or focus upon the individual—Tess, in Hardy’s adaptation of “Tess,” and Rosemary, in “Rosemary’s Baby.” These women’s perspectives on the world are represented by a subjective camera that is so intimate that it crowds them, revealing the anxiety they feel about their state of aloneness. Their performances are attenuated to their communities. They want connectivity but all they are offered is the traditional female position of powerlessness, of being used for other agendas and then abandoned. In this sense, the performances focus on their vulnerability. Casting and the shape of the performances emphasize their openness and their vulnerability. The consequence is that they are disposable, having served the agendas of powerful men in society. Their existence is in the service of others.
In the case of Kubrick, the camera roams, focusing on the narcissism of a New York doctor and his wife or on the callowness of a young Irish nobleman. In “Eyes Wide Shut” and “Barry Lyndon,” the characters are held up for examination. The camera is the witness to their feelings. In terms of performance, Kubrick’s characters are enacting a habitual state. They are dissatisfied and trapped in that state. Ryan O’Neal, Tom Cruise, and Nicole Kidman seem self-conscious about their unheroic characters. Their discomfort lies in their flawed characters. The performances are keyed to that discomfort and to its unheroic nature. They are restless rather than objects of satire, disillusioned rather than unhappy. The performances focus on the restlessness of the characters, characters who do not understand, characters struggling for meaning. Finally, both Kubrick and Polanski use the moving camera to a greater extent than most directors. It is a searching camera, a probing camera, and its restless movement raises questions about existence and meaning.
If Polanski and Kubrick used the camera and performance to explore the issue of existence, François Truffaut and Lukas Moodysson have used the camera and performance to subvert and challenge norms, the baseline of social and psychological existence. That subversion can also be used to turn those norms over to reveal new and stimulating alternatives. Truffaut in his embrace of children, viewed rebellion as the expression of individuality, eccentricity as a creative norm, relationships as the litmus test of aspiration and happiness. To do all this, Truffaut peppered his narratives with mischievous performances. Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel is Truffaut’s alter ego. As the unreliable narrator of “Love on the Run,” Léaud’s performance subverts the authenticity of the memoir of Doinel in his sundry relationships past and present. The camera movement between Doinel and his son and Colette in the train station, their sighting of each other, and their eventual coming together on the train after Colette has been reading about herself in Antoine’s roman à clef links the characters together in a random rather than urgent manner. The consequence is that the camera lowers expectations for an eventual encounter. In a sense, Truffaut used the camera to alter the traditional result of parallel editing, the coming together of the two parties, in a more dramatically satisfying and expected manner.
In the case of Lukas Moodysson, subversion is also achieved through a mix of camera and performance. The characters in “Together” could be characterized as straight or conservative (e.g., Elisabeth and her children) or unconventional (e.g., her brothers and fellow hippies). Key to the performances is that Elisabeth and her children provide a baseline for behavior. Their presence unmasks the conventionality of the others. By the time she leaves the commune, the hippies have been transformed, their ideals subverted into a more practical approach to life. Also key to the performances is developing this capacity for subversion without making the change farcical. In fact, Moodysson handles the change believably. The camera is direct and close to the characters in order to capture the changes. Because the characters’ arcs are similar, there is no confusion in the editing. The shot selection is similar in “Lilja 4-Ever,” although the character arc is more intense, as in the end Volodya and Lilja choose to end their lives. The subversion here is that in nature Lilja and Volodya are decent, moral friends. It is the people around them who undermine the life force and move these characters toward their deaths.
We end this chapter by looking at the two remaining directors, Sergei Eisenstein and John Ford. Both preferred to use the camera and text interpretation to create the distinct styles central to their work. Their distinctive styles transformed their films from a tale well told to an altogether different level of experience. Many filmmakers have opted for including political or historical material in their films but none has matched Eisenstein in the formal power of his imagery. Composition and the juxtaposition of light within a frame and between consecutive shots go to the heart of depicting the conflict and transformation typically found in Eisenstein’s work. The vigor of Eisenstein’s style elevates “Ivan the Terrible” from a portrait of an important monarch to an operatic tragedy of a man abandoned and betrayed by all those around him. The transformation of a man into someone who has earned the surname “Terrible” is tragic because of Eisenstein’s operatic interpretation. Francis Ford Coppola used the same operatic interpretation to transform “The Godfather” into an iconic American tragedy.
As much can be said for John Ford. His politics may seem old fashioned and his narrative rambling, but his style turns nostalgia, romance, loss, love, and revenge into poetry. Few filmmakers have been able to summon the power of style in such a manner as Ford did in “The Grapes of Wrath” and “The Searchers.” The poetry he created suggested a larger-than-life quality or deeper soul within his characters. Ford exemplified the capacity for greatness in us all. Westerns and poetry—these are the legacies of John Ford.
The path to great direction is a varied one. By choosing a particular mix of tools, a director can formulate a director’s idea that will realize his vision.