I’ve been writing another script, with a friend of mine, and that’s almost finished.

We started casting on The Maid’s Room, and that will start getting busy around the beginning of March, probably.  So from now on, the new posts will be over at the Maid’s Room blog.  The link is on the sidebar.

My script isn’t about a ballet dancer, it takes place at a women’s magazine, but it’s about a young, ambitious, over-talented woman who is thrust into a big job and goes crazy with all the crazy things that are happening around her. So, in that sense, it’s similar. It’s more than similar – there’s even a scene that seems lifted out of my script, not that they stole it from me – mine scene is better.

In fact, my script is better. But that doesn’t matter.

Darren Aronovsky got his film made. Whatever I think of his talents or the flaws or strengths of his script, his film was made and mine languishes on the proverbial shelf.

My point is that part of the skills and talents of a director is getting your film made, because if you don’t have that particular skill set, you’re never going to be able to show any of your other talents. I have friends who are far more talented than me, but they have yet to get a film made.

How to get your film made varies, and the stories of films getting made are as different as the styles and stories that are in the films themselves.  But the fact remains that there are directors who get their films made, and those that don’t.  There are directors who are awful, but we have seen their films because they somehow know how to get their films made.  Nobody has seen the films of the directors who are geniuses, but haven’t gotten their films made – because they don’t have any films.

Artistically, making a film like that, which I’m about to do, is definitely full of compromises.  There’s never enough money or enough time to make a film, which is part of what makes it exciting.  But more money comes with a different kind of compromise.  For example, it’s one thing to not be able to shoot film, as opposed to digital, because you can’t afford it, and another thing to not be able to shoot film because some idiot executive has decided that film is dead.  The lack of money becomes a sort of cold, unfeeling wall, but at least it’s not irrational or opinionated.  That wall never has a dumb idea: it’s just a wall.  You can complain about it all you want, it won’t take it personally.

We’ll see how making this film goes, and what we are doing is fairly ambitious considering how much money we have; ie. there’s a lot of locations, we have some stars, our overtime is non-existant.  On the other side, we have an incredibly talented cast and crew – and no one is in this for the paycheck.  I wish we could pay everyone more, or what they deserve, which would be even more than that, but we can’t.  The wall says no.

The wall isn’t a cheap bastard.  It’s not going to rob you, or lie to you.  It’s not going to take away your final cut.  It’s not going to try to fuck your star.  It’s not going to scream at your agent, or sue you.  It sets the parameters, and you have to work within them.  It tells you what you have and gives you virtually nothing more.  I have to say, while it’s heartbreaking to lose an idea to the wall, it’s not as soul destroying as losing an idea to a bad decision, or someone with more power who has a different idea that clashes with yours.  It’s just a wall.  It’s a fact of life.  We’re lucky to have the space we’ve been given.  It’s not such a bad space inside the wall, and, when you used every inch of it, there’s actually more room for ideas than you thought.

As I director, those are probably the two most important things you need to do: have a vision of what you want and then be able to communicate it to the people helping you make that vision.

But the part about the haircut that always gets me is when it starts to look promising as it’s going along, and then I say something to the barber, who gives me a sort of noncommittal response, and does what I say.  And it screws the whole thing up.

At first, I give him some general idea of where we are going: short, maybe a little longer on the top.  We reach an agreement on how short: above the ears, a number 3 razor.

A haircut, like a film, may change as it happens because it might not be looking quite like you thought it did.  So, my barber starts with the edges, shearing it off with the number 3, and very suddenly I look very different than I thought I was going to.  But it’s not finished yet.  Should I change course, make an adjustment, or should I continue along my original path and hope for the best?

I have to remember that the barber is an artist too.  Like a DP or a Production Designer, we had a discussion and we agreed on a vision.  If I start to alter that, I not only have to worry about what our next plan of attack is going to be, I also will be suggesting that this artist, this barber, is not doing a very good job.  He may take this personally.  Remember, he only wants me to be happy.  He’s going to do what I say.  It’s not his fault that he’s confused now.  Where is this ship headed now?  The hair is cut.  He can’t put it back.

Experience has taught me that when getting my haircut, I have to keep my mouth shut.  Once the plan is agreed on, I have to stick to it.  Every time I’ve tried to fix something that may or may not have been going wrong with my haircut, I get the worst haircut.  Anytime I say something like, “shouldn’t it be a little shorter there”? the barber does what I say and then spends the rest of the haircut working around the disaster that just happened because I couldn’t keep my stupid mouth shut.

I have to trust in the artistry of the barber.  He knows what he’s doing.  He’s cut more hair, he’s been to barber schoool.  If I wasn’t going to trust him, I shouldn’t have sat in his chair.

Your job as a customer in a barber shop is to give the barber some direction.  You give him a good idea of what you want, and he may suggest his own ideas, and together you come up with a plan.  And then you have to step aside and let the professional do his job.  What makes this tricky is that you are looking at the results as they happen, so you are always open to second guessing yourself.

Isn’t this what a director should do?  It’s not his job to light the actors.  It’s not his job to dress the set.  I’ve seen it happen with actors when they didn’t give a director exactly what he was expecting and he tried to fix something and it just got worse and worse.  I’ve seen far too many films ruined in the editing room by directors  losing faith in their visions and trying to make a different film out the same material.  That never works.

A director’s job is to give direction to a group of talented people who know how to do their jobs really well.  You have to trust in the people who you hire, get out of their way, and let them do their jobs.  And when you think it might not be turning out like you thought it would, remember all the bad haircuts you got and keep your mouth shut.  The tough decisions have already been made.

Action movies are great, but directors lately are so intent on moving forward, on getting to the next explosion or climax, that they forget to mix some suspense into the mix.

This was glaringly apparent in UNSTOPPABLE because the trains were not the demons of speed that Tony Scott obviously hoped they would be.  So rather than embrace the momentum inherent in the premise of his film, he uses every cheap trick in the book to get those trains moving.  (Some of them are embarrassingly cheap – like the shot of the train full of kids headed straight for the runaway train, then cut to safely off to the side, which is odd because there wasn’t an exit ramp in the shot before, but whatever, right?)

Suspense needs a little room to breathe and the train’s massive slowness would seem to me to provide a great opportunity.  It’s still going at 55, but on film, it’s never going to look like a roller coaster.  What’s the premise of this film?  It’s a missile the size of the Chrystler Building, right?  What difference does it make if it’s not moving at the speed of sound?  They can’t stop it!  That’s the point.

So a scene when the horse trailer is stuck on the tracks, it shouldn’t just happen and then be over.  A scene like that can last 15 minutes, if it’s done right.   Give us some time to know where everything is in the scene.  Give us some time to see how the characters react to their increasingly tense situation.  Get stuff in the way, and then get it stuck there, and then show what’s needed to get it out of there, and then show the train coming, and then they get more stuck, and the train gets closer, etc.  You get the idea.  Why were they in such a hurry to get done with this scene, anyway?  It’s not like they had another cool scene waiting around the corner.

But then I started thinking of all the other films I’ve seen in the last, I don’t know, five years.  I couldn’t think of one that was particularly suspenseful, or had any memorable suspense scene.  I’m sure I’m forgetting one, but my point is that action movies need to rediscover that central lifeblood of their make up.

Think of the scene of Bruce Willis in DIE HARD, when he’s in the air duct and the blond guy is shooting along the length.  It’s suspense.  Or in JURASSIC PARK, when they’re waiting for the T-Rex to show up.  The rest of the movie was crap, but that was the scene you remember – and it was a suspense scene.

Suspense is the soul of these films because without it, we know the end: the hero lives, saves the day, whatever.  There’s never any risk.  You never wonder if they’ll make it or not.  You need that because with out it, it’s just all the same speed.  It’s just one thing after another.  Suspense means that we’re invested in the film.  I just worry that, in an effort to keep the audience broad, and not upset anyone, they’ve actually decided that suspense in a film is a bad thing.

The impossible fast moves of the “camera” in an animated film cannot be matched by a dolly pusher on a live action film (or can it?).  The precision of the shots, at the speed they are moving, can’t be recreated.

The perspective of the camera is often somewhere impossible, through a wall, sailing over the sky, down some winding stairway again zooming at incredible speeds.  It can’t be done traditionally, without computers.

The world that animated characters live in is completely created from scratch.  This kind of attention to detail would be pretty tough to achieve in a live action film, especially one that has to exist in the real world – ie. you can’t build every chair, you have to buy them.  An animated film literally designs every chair, everything, even if it takes its cues from the real world.

So how does this affect us in the world of live action films?

Well, by looking at the newest styles, the trend is to go against all that.  Mumblecore is the mode of the day.  Abandon style.  Let the shots linger.  Imperfection and sloppiness are the goals.  If you need speed, shoot handheld and move the camera around really fast.  All this in the quest of something called a “happy accident”, which is supposed to be some captured moment of truth.

I can’t imagine that this style is what is going to save cinema.  The next generation is growing up on animated films that have huge budgets and are generally models of perfection, even if the films aren’t that good.  Perfection, meaning that all the characters hit their mark and deliver their lines as someone wrote them.

It would be a much more exciting challenge to try to capture some of the innovations of animation and use them in a live action film that wasn’t a special effects driven megabudget film.  How can we get those camera speeds up?  Do we want to grab a shot from an angle where the camera couldn’t be?  Do we want to spend the time and money designing the details of a set, instead of cobbling together what we could find at Ikea?  I’m sure there’s a host of other innovations used by these animators.

Animators, or at least good ones, know that film is visual.  They storyboard a hundred times, adding shots, building sequences, creating visuals and action over the course of a few years.  Imagine a live action film taking that much time preparing those visuals.

Most importantly, this is how people are learning to watch films.  Filmmakers ignore it and they will mumble themselves into oblivion.

The fact that the movie isn’t good is a little besides the point. Oliver Stone might have gotten away with such a mediocre film a few years ago. Studios always put out disappointments. Now it just seems old fashioned, which, in a way, is worse.

In my mind, audiences have finally started wising up to the fact that Hollywood movies stink. Because Hollywood enjoys a defacto monopoly on the theater screens, the only result of this is audience decline.

Hollywood loves to blame all movies, but they don’t consider anything besides what they do to be a real movie anyway. Until the theater owners step up to the Hollywood machine, there’s not going to be a lot of change.  Still, it’s incredible to watch some movies make it through to the theaters – a mindnumbingly tough road to travel – and see how out of touch they are.  It is not unlike GM putting out their boring, ugly gas-guzzlers that keep breaking down and then wondering where all their customers went.  But that is what happens in corporations: the people at the top came up in the decade or two before they came to the top, so that’s what they know; it’s hard to steer these huge corporations in new directions.  It’s the same in film.

Now more films are being made outside of Hollywood and then brought in for distribution.  Some better films will surely come of this, but also some bigger misfires.  The real trouble remains getting the films from the minds of filmmakers who want to make them, to the audience that wants to see them.  Hollywood can claim over and over again that the audience isn’t showing up, but it’s just a form of denial.  Hollywood has spent three decades disenfranchising audiences only to turn around and blame any current film that isn’t pre-branded for the decline of American theater goers.  Reminds me of the Republicans blaming everyone but themselves for the deficit that happened over the last ten years.

Hollywood needs some new ideas, and they’re just not up to the task of trying them out.

Some people, particularly in Hollywood, like to say that there are no new stories, but that we tell the old stories over and over again. Now, of course, Hollywood does tell the same stories over and over again. It’s part of their business plan, part of their DNA, but that doesn’t mean that that’s all there is. If you think about it, there’s a million stories all around us that Hollywood wouldn’t touch, but that, if told in an interesting way, would certainly hold up to the latest bland rom-com.

Let’s take an easy example: Considering how many of Hollywood’s biggest stars are now over 50 years old, how many films are there about 50 year olds? There are plenty of films with 50 year olds in them, but that’s not what I’m talking about. How many films are there that deal with problems and issues that 50 year old men and women have to deal with, like stale marriages or divorce or the fact that your health starts falling apart. I’m sure the list is longer, but I’m not 50, so I’d have to do some research. Who would want to watch one of these films? If it were interesting, I would.

Before I start sounding like someone with a geriatric fetish, there are a million areas that are just out of bounds: and what’s funny is that they are kept out of bounds by the same people who say that there are no new ideas.

I wrote a script that takes place in an office. It always gets compared to OFFICE SPACE or THE OFFICE. Were there really on two office stories that needed to be told? It makes you think how groundbreaking OFFICE SPACE was. I can imagine that Mike Judge had to convince a bunch of skeptical executives that people might actually be interested in what happens in an office – because it have never been done before.

It’s easy to shake the plot line of any film until you’ve got it down to its basic premise, and then declare that it’s just like some other movie. OFFICE SPACE is about a guy trying to rip off his company. You see? Just like a ton of other movies.

Except it’s not.

On HULU… http://www.hulu.com/watch/182076/chasing-sleep

On YOUTUBE… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y2xtBTmJgg

And soon to be streaming on NETFLIX.

What’s alarming to me is that the things I fight for in the first fight – ideas that I can’t imagine being compromised without ruining the script, scenes that are necessary, etc – are often things that I’m quick to give up when facing production.

Sure, if I had more money or more time, I could do it all. But no one has enough time or money to make a movie (except David Fincher.)

As I’ve discussed before, “tight” screenplays aren’t always good screenplays. But when you’re are faced with a shrinking schedule, that stuff that added nuance and character to your screenplay, the stuff that wasn’t directly connected with the plot, that’s the first stuff to go. I’m not sure that’s the best way to make a film, but I know that every director has faced that loaded-up schedule and lost a little bit of their soul.

Personally, I love films that stray a bit, or have scenes that have nothing to do with the plot but everything to do with the film. Practically, as I’m not a producer, I haven’t figured out how to get there. Compromise is boiled into the process of filmmaking, but it is also the mother of invention and a lot of times it really does improve the film. It forces you to be creative in ways that can be very cinematic. Directors who know how to solve these problems are the ones who really know how to tell a story cinematically because they are the ones that have access to the cinematic language. In other words, if something can be said, if a story can be told, they have the vocabulary to say it differently, to tell their story in another way.

As I’m facing this problem myself, I am trying to look at it from another perspective.  There comes a point in preproduction when you are given what you are given, and you have to make a film out of it.    I’m finding that this is a much more positive way of looking at a schedule and at production in general.  It opens you up to everything that’s there, instead of the stuff that is stuck in your head that isn’t there, that you wished was there.  Take what you can and use it.