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.
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
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The Director’s Idea
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.