AUGUST 13, 2006
"REVELATIONS" DIRECTOR BLOG, PART III
I'll never forget it. I was excited. I got up at six o'clock in the morning. I was ready. I think crew call was 7:30 am. I get to set about 7:00 am and, as I was driving in, one of the transportation captains goes, "Hey, boss, you ready to get started? You ready to shoot this thing?" And I'm like "Yeah, let's go. Let's do it!" We were talking and he'd cut his fingers pretty badly over the weekend working on his house. I was like: "Are you okay, man? What happened?" And we had some small talk and, when we were done, I was like, "Well, feel better." And he went to drive off, but then stopped and said: "Oh oh oh! Wait a minute. One more thing. The first shot that we're doing up with that truck? Yeah, well, that guy isn't letting us use his truck anymore. So, we have to find another one."
That was my first shot up of the day! Immediately, James Head's words came back -- ringing loudly in my ear! I looked at the transportation captain and I go: "Dude! I haven't even had breakfast yet! I haven't even eaten yet. Let me get some food before you give me this news!" That was my introduction to my first day directing.
Then it was a lot of highs and lows. It was a lot of feelings of complete and utter success ... and then feelings of just complete dejection, having nothing to measure directing against. So, when I hear that we're an hour and a half behind, I'm thinking: "No director has ever been an hour and a half behind schedule. I'm the worst director ever. I will never work again. This is the worst. I suck! What's wrong with me?" And then, in the very next scene, I would set something up in which we could get it in a one-er and everybody would go: "Man, that's really good." And I'd go, "I am Spike Spielberg! I am the greatest director ever! I am to directing what Marlon Brando is to acting." I had no idea or concept what to measure success or failure with.
Ultimately, what I learned was, as far as a director is concerned, success and failure is measured by having a vision, being able to articulate that vision, and then having faith in your producers and in your crew and in your actors to execute what the collective vision is, recognizing that you have people who have experience around you. On our show, when I was doing my episode, you're talking about maybe 200 or 300 years of experience in doing what it is that they do – between the DP and the camera guys and the grips and everyone – if you add up all that experience. People are competent in what their jobs are.
I learned that you have a vision, you know why you want something the way you want it, and then you articulate it and then you trust the people that are around you to do their jobs ... then you focus on what it is you focus on. Directing, for me, was a lot like what I heard the first year of Law School is like where you don't know exactly what to study, so you try to study and memorize everything and you drive yourself nuts.
A lot of directors come from their own individual areas of filmmaking, unless they went to school primarily to direct. If you're directing and you used to be a DP, you're going to be more focused on the overall picture, on how it looks, how the camera moves. If you came out of acting, you're going to be more focused on the performances of the actors. It's really important to know what you do, what you bring to the table, and then trust everybody else to do what they do. That's what I took from it.
As I said before, I thought it was going to be really easy ... but it was definitely trial by fire.
I later found out from directors – who had been directing for fifteen or twenty years and who have worked on The Dead Zone – that our show is one of the most difficult to direct, because it's not just straight ahead wide, medium, over-the-shoulder, over-the-shoulder, insert, insert, and next scene.
We have nine, sometimes eleven pages of dialogue that we need to shoot, and then you have a couple of visions thrown in with the A side and B side to it and you're trying to get things to match. You may have worked five hours on six pages of dialogue and, now, you have this little quarter of a page of a vision and it might take four hours to shoot it! Okay, it should never take that long, but it might take at least 30% of the time it took you to shoot six pages of dialogue to shoot this one vision. It's very time consuming.
Then, acting in what I was doing was compounded by the fact that, on the first day, we had two company moves and then we had another small move. So, we moved three times which loses you a lot of time in your day. The next day we had two moves and, the day after that, we had another move. So, I was under the gun. It was definitely a trial by fire for me.
I remember being told by Robert Petrovicz that I was not allowed to cry. When he told me that during prep, I said: "C'mon, man. Dude, I played high school basketball, I'm not going to cry. What's wrong with you?"
