A Quick Guide to Film Directing

By Ray Morton

A Quick Guide to Film Directing provides the reader with a concise and comprehensive overview of this creative and exciting occupation. Written in a fast-paced, easy-to-understand fashion, the book addresses such topics as what film direction is; the history of the profession; how to become a director; the creative and practical duties and challenges of a film director in the three stages of making a movie (preproduction, production, and postproduction); working with actors; working with the members of the technical crew (cinematographers, editors, production designers, etc.); the director's support team (assistant director, production manager, and so on); and the business of being a film director. It also offers a brief look at some of the greatest and most influential film directors in the history of the cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780879109011

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Copyright © 2014 by Ray Morton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2014 by Limelight Editions

An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation

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Trade Book Division Editorial Offices

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Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Mark Lerner

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Morton, Ray, 1961-

A quick guide to film directing / Ray Morton.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-87910-806-9 (pbk.)

1. Motion pictures--Production and direction. I. Title.

PN1995.9.P7M585 2014

791.4302'33--dc23

2014008765

www.limelighteditions.com

For Erin, Jack, and Sean Morton

and

Caitlin Hoey

and

Aiden James Masterbone

Contents

Introduction

1. A Brief History of Film Directing

2. How to Become a Film Director

3. A Few Things a Film Director Should Know

4. A Few Skills a Film Director Should Have

5. Getting the Job

6. The Film Director in Preproduction

7. The Film Director in Principal Photography

8. The Film Director in Postproduction

9. The Director and the Film’s Release

10. Directing in Other Modes

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The director is the pivotal figure in the creation of a motion picture.

It takes an army of talented people to make a movie, but it takes a director to lead that army. The director devises the overall creative concept for the production, hires the cast and key members of the creative team, sets the tone and calls the shots on the set and in the editing room, and has final say in all creative matters affecting the film.

The contributions of everyone working on a movie—the producer, the screenwriter, the cinematographer, the editor, the production and costume designers, the composer, the technical crew, and the actors—are all filtered through the director’s concept, judgment, and taste to create the final cinematic work.

Directing a film requires a unique combination of artistic vision, technical expertise, and managerial skill. This book will provide you with a comprehensive look at the essential talents and tasks required to successfully helm a motion picture.

1

A Brief History of Film Directing

The job of film directing was born with the cinema itself.

The first movies were short documentaries—brief clips of real-life situations such as a train pulling into a station, workers leaving a factory, a man sneezing, and so on. These scenes were filmed by the various men around the globe who invented the movie camera—men such as Louis Le Prince and William Friese-Greene in England, Louis and Auguste Lumière in France, and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson in the United States. These inventors figured out how to transform still cameras capable of recording only one static image at a time into machines that could record (on a strip of flexible celluloid) a series of images in rapid succession that, when projected back at the same rate at which they were shot, could create the illusion of a picture that moved. Initially, the Lumières, Dickson, and their fellow innovators created their moving images by simply setting up their cameras and recording whatever happened in front of them. Before long, however, the men began choosing their subjects more deliberately. As they made their decisions about what subjects to photograph, where to place the camera, and when to begin and end the recording, these technicians inadvertently became film directors.

The cameras created by these inventors were soon acquired by others—businesspeople, showmen, and artists—who began to make movies for public consumption, and thus, the film industry was born. Audiences soon grew tired of documentary scenes, and so moviemakers began using their cameras to tell fictional stories—comedies, dramas, romances, and action spectaculars—in the form of five-, ten-, and twenty-minute shorts. The director was the key figure in this process.

Early movie directors were total filmmakers—they would usually dream up and write the scenarios, organize and run the production, help build the sets and find the locations, cast the actors and tell them what to do, photograph the scenes, create the special and visual effects, and edit the results. In the process, directors such as Edwin S. Porter and D. W. Griffith began to pioneer the various techniques—close-ups, intercutting, and so on—that would become the foundation of the language of film.

As movies grew longer—eventually into ninety-plus-minute features—and more complex, and the production process became more involved, individual specialists (screenwriters, cinematographers, art directors, editors, and so on) began to assume responsibility for the various tasks required to make a movie, leaving directors to function more as a creative overseers than as hands-on functionaries. Directors remained, however, the primary artistic drivers of the filmmaking process.

For American directors, this began to change with the rise of the studio system in the 1920s. During the approximately thirty-year-long studio era, company-designated producers working for a strong production chief became the prime movers of individual film projects—the producers found the properties, hired the writers, and developed the stories and scripts. They also cast the films, selected the key members of the creative team, and supervised the production process. Directors, most