The Good Director
- The good director uses text interpretation to find a layered interpretation of the story.
- The interpretation makes the narrative more complex.
- The interpretation may generate from the director’s approach to characterization—for example, the goal of the character may differ from expectations or the director can use the surprise of plot to promote the transformation of the character in the character arc.
- The director can also use a specific subtext to alter the meaning of the narrative.
- The point of view of the director is more pronounced in the case of the good director.
- Directing the actor and the camera supports the director’s idea regarding the subtext or creates a deeper sense of the main character.
The competent director presents a straightforward narrative, clearly and cleanly focusing on a style of performance, text reading, and camera execution that delivers the narrative without subtext. The intent of the director is in this case explicit, and he may be very successful as a result. The good director is more ambitious and employs strategies to add value to the project. Our task in this chapter is to explore and exemplify how that value is added. The three major areas of activity for the director are text reading, performance, and visual interpretation. And, of course, the impetus for making useful, effective choices is the director’s idea. What exactly is the director’s idea and how does it work?
How the Director’s Idea Works
Two versions of “The Manchurian Candidate” offer us the opportunity to look at two directors applying two different director’s ideas to essentially the same story. Both versions are based on George Axelrod’s screenplay of the Richard Condon novel, and both focus on the plot of creating an assassin via brainwashing—an assassin who is trained to kill a presidential candidate at a political convention. The killing would allow the antagonists and their backers (the Communists in the 1962 version, a transnational corporation in the 2004 version) to control the presidency and consequently to exploit the most powerful country in the world for its own purposes. In this sense, both versions are “paranoid” political thrillers.
The 1962 version, directed by John Frankenheimer, focuses on Raymond Shaw, who is the assassin brainwashed in Manchuria. His mother, a conservative political powerhouse, is the American agent who controls him on behalf of the Communists. Her husband is a U.S. senator who, as the vice presidential candidate, would become the presidential candidate when the assassination takes place. Bennett Marco, Raymond’s commanding officer in Korea, is a man with bad dreams. He keeps dreaming that Raymond killed members of their patrol in Korea rather than saving the platoon, as Raymond’s Medal of Honor commendation reads. These dreams drive Marco to discover the truth about Raymond Shaw and to try to stop him.
In this version of “The Manchurian Candidate,” Raymond is the main character, and the Cold War context gives this 1962 film a frighteningly believable quality. The Axelrod script bristles with irony about Cold War politics as well as the domestic divide on race—a black soldier dreams of the Communists as black church ladies and Marco, a white man, dreams of the Communists as white church ladies (pillars of their community). The Frankenheimer version also has humor—the newspaper columnist who sleeps in his dead wife’s nightgown; the costume party where Senator Jordan’s daughter, the lost love of Raymond Shaw, appears wearing a Queen of Hearts costume. The Queen of Hearts is the visual cue to put Raymond into a hypnotic state. This time instant obedience is to a good purpose—to advance his relationship with the woman he loves.
The Frankenheimer version also has daring scenes, such as the seductive train conversation between Marco, in the midst of a panic attack, and Rosie, the woman who becomes his love interest. Another such scene is the Raymond Shaw confessional scene (“I know I’m not loveable”), where Raymond recounts his relationship with Jocelyn Jordan at a time when he was loveable. The scene ends with his mother stepping in to destroy the relationship.
The irony, the humor, and the audacious scenes are characteristic of the first version of the film but are absent in the later version. Frankenheimer’s director’s idea was to focus on power and powerlessness: political power and powerlessness, personal power and powerlessness. This idea arises from a less conscious substrata of the plot, the creation of an assassin for political purposes. To articulate how the director’s idea works, we must look first at the characterizations. Raymond is powerless with regard to his relationship with his mother and his Communist handlers. Bennett Marco is also powerless and is a victim of his dreams. He is powerless as a military man subjected to political authority, and he is even more powerless as a troubled military man within the structure of the military. Power, on the other hand, is embedded in the Communists’ scientific ruthlessness (evaluating the brainwashing apparatus by carrying out a murder at each stage of testing), in Raymond Shaw’s mother’s political power, and in Communist influence via Raymond’s mother over her Senator husband and through his nomination as vice president and candidate for his party.
Visually, the theme of power and powerlessness is created by Frankenheimer’s camera choices. He often used a moving camera and wide-angle or deep-focus images to create a sense of power. When we see Raymond in his mother’s home, the depth of focus of the images of her home conveys her power. Her dominance in the foreground of those images tells us who is at the top of this pyramid of power. Rarely has a matriarch been as evocatively captured visually.
Powerlessness, on the other hand, is presented in the middle or background of the frame, where Raymond Shaw and Bennett Marco are so often found, as are Raymond’s victims, his newspaper employer, Senator Jordan, and Jocelyn Jordan. And, by using a moving camera to approach the victims, the ultimate outcome of powerlessness, death, is all the more vividly presented.
If the original “The Manchurian Candidate” is about externalized power and powerlessness, Jonathan Demme’s 2004 version is about something far more internal. Whether he is portraying a descent into madness or madness run amok in the political–industrial complex, Demme’s concerns are all the more personalized. In this version, Bennett Marco is the main character, and Raymond Shaw occupies the plot position the Marco character occupied in the first version. In this version, both Shaw and Marco have been implanted with devices to make them compliant to the wishes of the corporation—to assassinate the President. In this version, Vice President Raymond Shaw will become the corporation’s President rather than the President of all the people. The Jordans, who played such personal roles in the first version, are now relegated to being political adversaries. Rosie, the love interest for the Marco character in the first version, is now an FBI agent investigating Marco’s allegations. She pretends to be interested in Marco romantically and, although she echoes Janet Leigh’s dialogue from the first version, plays a far more central role in this version.
Demme’s director’s idea was that paranoia when it is real is not madness, but he works with an inner sense of madness and paranoia, particularly for Marco. Although Shaw and Al Melvin (Jeffrey Wright) are both played off center (troubled, disturbed), in fact the majority of the inner madness is left to Marco to portray. To deepen this idea, Demme used many more close-up and medium-range shots than is typical. Long shots and wide-angle shots tend to contextualize, and Demme was trying to take away rather than create context. He also used a camera placement that crowds the Marco character, again creating a sense of disturbance and that all is not right. The pace of shots and scenes, particularly early in the film, also suggests disruption, that the circuits are not all working.
What works less well here are the actors’ performances feeding this sense of madness and paranoia. The performances tend to be too realistic. Perhaps an example from a director’s idea keyed to performance will illustrate my point here. Elia Kazan, in his direction of performances in “Splendor in the Grass,” perfectly captured his director’s idea. “Splendor in the Grass,” set in 1928 Kansas, tells the story of two teenagers in love. Deenie is beautiful and poor. Bud is handsome and rich. Both are overflowing with sexual desire and both are mindful of their parents’ admonitions. Her mother tells her that boys don’t respect girls who go all the way. His father tells him that he has plans for him (to go to Yale and take over the business), and if he gets Deenie pregnant he will have to marry her (and ruin his life).
Kazan begins the film in mid shot. The two main characters, Deenie and Bud, are kissing passionately in his convertible, parked adjacent to a waterfall. The sensuality at the core of the scene is powerful, but the scene ends with Bud frustrated at Deenie’s resistance to go any further than petting. The next scene is between Deenie and her mother after Bud has dropped her at home. The scene that follows is Bud’s return home and his encounter with his father. Both Deenie and Bud try to articulate their feelings but neither parent allows those feelings to be acknowledged. Deenie and Bud are clearly overwhelmed by their desire, and the parents warn their children about the consequences of that desire. Here is the point where Kazan’s brilliance with actors deepens the director’s idea. Kazan’s director’s idea is that sexuality is tactile and good but to censor it is destructive.
In the scene between Deenie and her mother, the mother states her position. Deenie asks about whether she, the mother, ever felt (as Deenie does about Bud) desire for Deenie’s father, her husband. Deenie at this point embraces and holds on to the mother, as the mother tells her that women do not like sex and they give in to their husbands’ sexual desires only after they are married. When the mother is not being held by her daughter she is munching away at a sandwich. The tactile quality, the physical need of each character is pronounced and central here; it overrides what is being said. For Kazan the need to touch is more important than the words spoken.
We find a parallel in the scene between Bud and his father. What Bud is trying to say is that he loves Deenie, but the father pummels Bud verbally with his ambitions for his son. All the while the father also physically pummels Bud, punching him with a mix of pride and aggression. As he punches Bud’s shoulders, again we are aware of how much each of these characters needs a physical connection. Again, Kazan used his direction of the performances to illustrate the primacy of the physical. Indeed, for Kazan, desire and physicality are life itself, while control and censorship imply a life half lived and worse, as the tragedy that befalls these two lovers suggests.
Returning to Jonathan Demme’s treatment of the performances in “The Manchurian Candidate,” I have suggested that overall they were too realistic. Although Raymond Shaw and his mother are presented as narcissistic and political, we do not sense any madness here nor is there madness to be found in the Marco character. Because Rosie is there not as a bystander drawn to Marco in the midst of a panic attack (as in the first version) but rather as an FBI plant, she gives credibility to Marco’s eccentric behavior. Consequently, only Wright’s portrayal of Al Melvin’s character suggests the madness that is necessary to make the director’s idea work as effectively as does his early camera placements. The realism of the performances suggests that the political–industrial complex has an agenda that is credible and feasible. And, in good thriller fashion, the audience is saved when Marco kills Shaw and his mother, preventing them from highjacking the presidency. Were the performances keyed to the director’s idea as they were in Kazan’s “Splendor in the Grass,” this remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” would have been as unnerving as the original.
Having looked at how a director’s idea shapes choices for the director and how those choices either deepen the outcome or, in the case of “The Manchurian Candidate,” differentiate two treatments of the same story, we should now return to our central topic of the good director.
I hope that I have not suggested that there is a single approach to being a good director. On the contrary, how good a director will be depends upon how far the director goes in his realization of the director’s idea. Before providing a case study of the good director, I would like to address the diversity among good directors.
First not all directors are exceptional in every area. Essentially, the areas of opportunity are performance, visualization, and text interpretation. As I mentioned earlier, Elia Kazan’s strength lies in his direction of the performances of his actors. I would add that he is also a powerful interpreter of text. His film “America America” (1962) offers a good example. The director’s idea in “America America,” an epic journey of a young man from Turkey to America, is that in life everyone is either master or slave; consequently, in every scene—whether involving a father and son, husband and wife, employer and employee, or simply fellow travelers—the director’s idea determines the shape and outcome and the level of the performance within the scene. The visualization in “America America” is strong but secondary to the director’s text interpretation.
Visualization on the other hand, goes to the core of Ridley Scott’s work. His director’s idea in “Gladiator” is “What is a man?” Scott is interested in all aspects of manhood—son, father, friend, lover, leader. His visualization of the main character, Maximus, is Scott’s idealization of what it is to be a man—assertive, aggressive, yet tender and moral. The antagonist, Commodus, on the other hand, is less than a man. He becomes Caesar by killing his father. He is cowardly, a man in need of constant attention and jealous of rivals, a man who needs his sister’s comfort to have a night’s sleep. Scott’s visualization of manhood is always powerful. Maximus is foregrounded and photographed in movement. Low angles suggest his heroism. Commodus, on the other hand, appears mid-frame or toward the back. Mid shots instead of close-ups make him appear less of a man. Ridley Scott relied on visualization to articulate his director’s idea.
The Coen brothers had a very different director’s idea in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Their idea is that the American odyssey is less noble than the original. It is all about self-interest and religion, sin and repentance. This fable-like idea requires exaggerated performances, exaggerated text readings, and a visual style that connotes the opposite of realism—let’s call it the fabulous.
What I am suggesting is that to be a good director, the director must have a director’s idea that he executes using the tools of directing—text interpretation, performance, visualization in balance with the director’s interests and skills. Now, let’s turn to a case study of good directing.
A Case Study in Good Directing: Michael Mann’s “Collateral”
Michael Mann films cross numerous genres and seem to test the core values of their main characters, whose very existence depends on their behavior in a crisis. The lone thief, Frank, in “Thief” (1981); Hawkeye in “The Last of the Mohicans” (1994); Neil, the criminal, and Vincent, the detective, in “Heat” (1996); and Jeffrey, the informer and Lowell, the producer, in “The Insider” (1998) are all tested, and each gives up a great deal in order to survive, if indeed the character does survive. Director Mann’s efforts to lay bare the primal or true character of his main characters and their antagonists reflect his director’s idea of viewing life as a test. Whether a character is honest or dishonest, professional or amateur, capitalist or environmentalist, the narrative is set up to test his beliefs and the depth of those beliefs. Only in the test can we measure the man. This is Mann’s director’s idea. In this, Mann is closest to Howard Hawks, as each used genre to explore the man.
What this means in a film such as “Collateral” (2004) is that Mann sets up the main character as someone who has reached stasis in his life and has both dreams and fears; all is in balance. Mann uses an antagonist and plot to challenge the main character. The environment in Mann’s films is never neutral and is not enabling for the main character; if anything, it makes the challenge all the greater.
In “Collateral” the narrative is simple. The main character, Max, is a black man who has been cabbing in Los Angeles for 12 years and dreams of owning his own luxury limousine company. The evening begins simply with a young attorney as his fare. She is concerned about how long it will take to reach her office. Max remains low key and confident, and by the end of the ride the two have formed a bond. The next fare is far more direct when he asks Max if he wants to make $600. All he has to do is drive him to five meetings. Max agrees and the night from hell begins. His fare, Vincent, is a hit man, and as Max will learn target number five is the young attorney who will be prosecuting a case against a drug kingpin the next day. The others are the witnesses, and the hit man must kill them all.
The plots and the murders, particularly the threat to the prosecuting attorney, rouse Max to stand up and be tested. His relationships with the prosecuting attorney and the hit man are key. If Max is a mild human being, a dreamer, the hit man is intense and aggressive—a man on a clock. If Max seems kind to others, the hit man is indifferent and cold to feelings or needs. The only thing these two men have in common is the cab, Max’s livelihood and the killer’s transportation of choice to get through a hard night. The subtext of this film is what will rouse a mild man, perhaps even a meek man, to action? The answer is clear— survival—as well as Max’s need to save the life of the prosecuting attorney.
Plot and character, then, are important dimensions of testing what kind of man Max is, but Los Angeles at night also plays a role. As presented, Los Angeles is all highways and sleek skyscrapers. The few times Max seeks help from Angelinos he is either mugged or ignored. Mann’s presentation of the environment is that it is cold and hostile. So many people, and yet they pass each other in the night and leave Max to his own devices. If he does not stand up for himself, no one else will. This is the Los Angeles Mann presents in “Collateral,” and it makes the test that much harder.
Finally, we need to address the camera style Mann adopts in “Collateral.” Max and the hit man are often shown in close-up with the camera placed close to them, as if they were the only two men in the world. The environment, on the other hand, is objectified, the camera distant. Mann used helicopter shots to look down on the city. He also used long shots to track the cab. The point of view only shifts when Vincent is doing his job or during an impending crash of the cab. At those points, Mann shifted into subjective motion and camera placement.
Even in the climactic scene when the hit man tries to kill the attorney but Max rescues her and they attempt to escape via the new subway system, Mann alternates close-ups and extreme long shots to objectify the confrontation. It is as if the environment (long shots) does nothing to help or harm those (close-ups) who pass through it. By doing so, Mann is suggesting that, if you can make it through a night in Los Angeles, you can and will survive anywhere. And Max does.
The good director moves beyond the choices made by the competent director with regard to:
- Complexity of the narrative
- Approach to characterization
- Approach to the narrative
- Issue of surprise
- Point of view of the director
- Camera placement
Whereas the competent director takes a singular approach to camera placement (e.g., romantic, as in the case of Simon Wincer, cited in the previous chapter), the good director utilizes more varied camera placement. Anthony Mann directed film noirs, Westerns, and epics and is well known for his powerful visualization. Mann would enhance the dramatic tension and power by alternating between close-ups and extreme long shots. He also tended to place the camera close to the action to establish tension between a foreground character (the main character) and a character in the background (the antagonist). In other words, he used the image itself to create tension rather than relying on editing and pacing to create the tension (as Wincer does). This use of visual context for dramatic intensity is also typical of other good directors, such as John Frankenheimer, whom we discussed earlier in this chapter, as well as Roman Polanski and George Stevens, both of whom will be discussed in later chapters.
In terms of complexity of the narrative, I suggested in the previous chapter that the narrative is simplified in both Wincer’s “The Lighthorsemen” and Michael Bay’s “Pearl Harbor.” Everything is sacrificed to serve the plot, and the plot provides the same romantic view of the main character as the camera placement does. Again turning to Anthony Mann as an example of going further with the narrative, we look at his first Western, “Winchester ’73” (1950). The plot follows the fate of a rifle, a Winchester ’73. The rifle is a much sought after weapon, and it is the prize for the marksmanship competition that begins the film. The best marksman, the main character, wins the competition, but the gun is stolen by his rival, the antagonist, who in turn loses the gun to a gambler. Indians seeking to buy guns from the gambler instead kill him and steal the rifle. When the Indians’ chief is killed in battle, the gun passes to a ne’erdo-well. His pathological partner kills him for the gun, and he in turn is killed by the main character, who retrieves the rifle and uses it to kill the antagonist in a climactic shootout at the end of the film.
“Winchester ’73” is anything but a romantic story. In fact, it is about constant betrayal. The power the rifle represents is elusive and temporary; those who come into possession of the powerful weapon end up losing it because the way in which they acquired it was immoral or unethical. In short order, they are destroyed for their greed and their immorality. The narrative is made even more murky when we learn that the antagonist, whom the main character is pursuing with the intent to kill, is his own brother. He seeks to kill his brother because the brother killed their father. What at first seems to be a story about a gun has instead become a Cain-and-Abel story, a revenge story with a tragic core. The narrative is very complex, with a subtext of unleashed sibling rivalry working its way toward a horrible climax, where one brother kills the other brother, his only living blood relative.
With regard to characterization, note how the characterizations of “Winchester ’73” differ from those in “The Lighthorsemen.” Again, the characterizations in “The Lighthorsemen” are romantic and simple—men are either brave or cowardly. The Australians are straightforward, and the British are eccentric or rigid. In “Winchester ’73,” only the main character, Lyn McAdam, is straightforward. He is a great marksman filled with a rage that drives him to avenge the death of his father.
All of the other characters are interesting. The antagonist, Dutch Henry, is aggressive but he is also impulsive and immature. His two companions have to keep him on track. Wyatt Earp, who oversees the competition at the outset, is a lawman, but he is also a civic enthusiast and something of a caregiver. Lyn’s companion and friend, he is a father figure and something of a philosopher. He has to keep the main character from imploding due to his rage. The dance hall girl is honest, expressive, and funny, given the dangerous situations in which she constantly finds herself. Steve, her fiancé, is a coward trying to become a person who deserves respect, but he dies without achieving it. Waco, who kills him, is a romantic psychopath—a man who enjoys betraying others. All of these characters are complex and make the experience of “Winchester ’73” one of witnessing absolute behavior in a world of considerable moral ambiguity. They make the story more complex, and their development as characters does not seem to slow down the busy plot.
Regarding the movie’s plot deployment (pursuit of the Winchester ’73) and its relationship to the character layer of the story, the plot was designed to mask the deeper character layer, particularly the protagonist–antagonist relationship. Initially, the plot highlights the intense rivalry between Lyn McAdam and Dutch Henry Brown. Initially, we believe the rivalry has something to do with a past grievance, but eventually it is revealed that Dutch Henry killed Lyn’s father. Only late in the story do we learn they are brothers. Each revelation changes the story. In Act I, the story seems to be one of two rivals fighting to prove who is the top shot. In Act II, it becomes a revenge story. And, in Act III, the revelation that they are brothers changes the story yet again to one of fratricide. In a sense, the pursuit of the rifle (the plot) masks what the story is really about, but what the story is about keeps changing as the story unfolds. To put it another way, Mann’s treatment of the story in “Winchester ’73” yields considerable subtext and surprise. Thus, another mark of the good director is layered storytelling.
This brings us to Mann’s point of view in the story. Here we reach an interesting point. Andrew Sarris viewed Mann as the ultimate craftsman or technician. Putting it another way, Mann did not have a personal voice, and he himself claimed to be a director for hire. Other directors have been damned with the same faint praise: Fred Zinnemann (“High Noon,” “Day of the Jackal”), William Wyler (“Best Years of Our Lives,” “Roman Holiday”), and Carol Reed (“The Third Man,” “Odd Man Out”). I would include all of these directors in the category of good directors. I would like to suggest that these filmmakers excelled in the visualizations of their films, and each showed great strength in deploying an intricate mix of plot and character in a manner that raised the bar for the story in general. In the case of both Wyler and Reed, their use of the deep focus frame is as powerful as the work of Orson Welles in “Citizen Kane.” Both Wyler’s “Little Foxes” and Reed’s “The Third Man” are classics with regard to the use of deep-focus foreground–background relationships to illustrate the core conflicts in their films.
Fred Zinnemann was able to make complex stories emotionally available (“A Man for All Seasons”) or layered simple stories with complex subtext (“From Here to Eternity,” “High Noon”). This intelligent director kept on story in one of the most complex narratives of the 1970s, “The Day of the Jackal.” And, of course, Anthony Mann’s capacity to tell a story powerfully, economically, and in a visually powerful fashion marks his work from “T-Men” to “El Cid” and “The Heroes of Telemark.” All of these directors loved the visual power of the medium. They were not aesthetes, but their voices, in part, reflected the pleasure they found in playing with the medium. Today, directors such as Quentin Tarantino are celebrated for playing with the medium, but in an earlier time Anthony Mann, William Wyler, Fred Zinnemann, and Carol Reed were good directors who displayed an equivalent pleasure in visualizing their stories. This pleasure was an important component of their voices as directors.
The Director’s Idea
I have discussed the many ways in which a good director’s work differs from that of a competent director. What I have not yet added to the mix is the focal point of the director’s skills—the director’s idea, the magnifying lens that helps the director choose characterization, narrative, and visualization strategies that will elevate the work to another level.
In the case of Anthony Mann, his director’s ideas arose first and foremost out of the genre in which he was working. Generally, the Western tends to be a genre where the main character and the antagonist represent certain values. The main character represents pastoral values, romantic individualistic values that are associated with the past, the West. These values do not differ from the romantic values of the knights of the court of King Arthur. The antagonist, on the other hand, represents civilization and material values. He wants all the cattle, all the land, or all the money. The main character and the antagonist do battle in the Western, ritualized battle, and the main character prevails. This romantic, even poetic notion infuses Wyler’s “The Westerner,” Ford’s “My Darling Clementine,” and Hawks’ “Rio Bravo,” all classic Westerns.
Mann, however, viewed the West differently. His is a more modern, far more ambiguous view of the West and of the characters that populate his films. Lyn McAdam is neurotically obsessed with killing his own brother, the antagonist. To call him morally ambiguous is to flatter the McAdam character. In a sense, he shares more values with his brother than he admits. The setting, the West, is beautiful, but given the narrative and its corruption of the traditional Western values it is ironic, unpredictable, and dangerous rather than poetic.
And now we come to Mann’s director’s idea. In Mann’s take on the Western, the main character is not a hero, not a romantic character. He is all too human, and he is a man not unlike his antagonist. In the beautiful setting of the West, his behavior is ambiguous rather than idealized. In “Winchester ’73,” we view the main character’s struggle as a modern one. He is obsessed and he has to survive to achieve his goal—in this case, revenge against his brother. When we look at the visualization, we can see that the Lyn McAdam character is crowded by the very close camera placement. He is foregrounded. In the background is his adversary, Dutch Henry Brown, his brother. This conflict, internal and deep, ties him to his brother. The two men are visually linked together but are adversaries. The intense close-ups alternate with extreme long shots. The intensity of the close-ups contrasts with the breathtaking beauty revealed in the extreme long shots. The beast is in the close-up, and the beauty is in the extreme long shot. The irony in this juxtaposition again and again reminds us of the madness of the main character. If he is heroic, he is at best a tortured hero. This pattern is repeated in the relationships of the main characters in “The Naked Spur,” “The Man from Laramie,” and “Men in War.” In each case, the visual landscape plays the same role: to make ironic and modern the choices the main character must make. We see the same pattern in Mann’s noir classics “He Walks by Night” and “Raw Deal.” Mann’s director’s idea is to examine the moral compromises of his main characters, and the beauty of his long shots, whether of the West or Korea or a modern-day main street, deepens that moral ambiguity.