Film making Tips from Directors

2 Tips from Peter Jackson

1. You’ll Always Wants to Change a Movie When You Look Back On It

But you’ll also want it to stay exactly the same:

2. If You Can’t Finish Your Movie, Go Ahead and Finish Your Movie

“You’ve got to realize, that when I started doing Bad Taste, it was only a short film. In my mind the enormity of the project was restricted to ten or fifteen minutes, so we started shooting and it just sort of. . . spread. I never, ever dreamt that it would be a feature and I never thought it would until about a year into it. Until then, I hadn’t edited any of the footage – I was just sticking it in tins under my bed – so I took a week off work for editing and put together a 60 minute rough cut only to find it didn’t have an ending.

I thought, ‘Christ, there’s nothing I can do, other than just patch on and make a feature.’ It was actually scary at first, making a feature. I thought, ‘It’s impossible, you can’t just make a feature film,’ but then I thought, ‘Why not?’ So I wrote out this ending and we just started shooting again. Not to make this sound so quick though, the film took four years to finish.”

4 Tips from Tony Scott

1. Your Plan A Can Become Your Plan B Which Can Become Your Plan A

It’s the oldest advise in the book, but sometimes it needs to be echoed or said in new ways. So you want to be a screenwriter? A director? A producer? A gaffer? The road to those titles can go through some strange places, but with the kind of technology available (and if you make work your drug of choice), you can utilize a job near the job you want in order to make the best possible jump.

“I was finishing eight years at art school and Ridley had opened Ridley Scott Associates and said, ‘Come and make commercials and make some money’ — because I owed money left and right and center,” Scott recently told The Hollywood Reporter. “My goal was to make films; but I got sidetracked into commercials and then I took off — I had 15 years [making them] and it was a blast. We were very prolific, and that was our training ground: You’d shoot 100 days in a year, then we gravitated from that to film.”

The win-win is that if you get sidetracked into something you love, you’ve found something you love. If you don’t particularly love it, you can keep your sights set on the transition – the moment where you’re main gig leads you to the job you wanted all along.

Just remember to dress for the job you want.

2. The School Bell Doesn’t Mean the Day is Over

When asked about his process on Deja Vu and one character’s resemblance to Timothy McVeigh:

“I always do a lot of homework, as I say, for my movies and I do a lot of research, and I looked mostly at the transcripts from McVeigh when he’s kidnapped, when he’s taken. BTK and a couple other guys and I really focused around McVeigh and I gave the highlights from those transcripts to Jim [Caviezel]. So I give this to my actors. This is the way I’m thinking: no matter how much you talk, unless you get specific, you know, it’s sort of an abstract area, trying to define characters other than if you’re a real guy. Like for Denzel [Washington], we finally got Jerry Ruden who became Denzel’s role model. But for Jim, a lot of it well, the tone of the character came from McVeigh.”

That’s a specific example, and Scott goes on to talk about finding touchstones for his actors to work off of. However, it’s clear from his work that he does this for more than just the performers. With Deja Vu, he spoke a lot about designing a movie that was “science fact” instead of science-fiction, and the difficulty that comes with that is finding an authenticity that only comes with putting in the research.

3. Put Your Stamp on the Script…Unless It’s From Tarantino

“There’s one great script that hit my desk that I didn’t change at all, and that was True Romance.”

Scott insisted on altering scripts to put his own signature on the story. As a director who was plugged into every part of the filmmaking process (he notably “got off” on being on set because of the danger but he also loved post), and as a director who showed a great deal of skill, he earned a bit of leeway there.

But it’s a double-edged sword. Changing a script simply to show you’ve added your own touch to it is what studio executives often do to prove they’re worth keeping around. It’s also what torpedoes scripts before they can even go into production. Sadly, not everything needs a giant mechanical spider. Tweaks and twists are fine if they serve a purpose, but consider the writer’s work sacrosanct if there’s nothing else in it but ego for you. Or if it happens to be Quentin Tarantino handing you the screenplay.

On a side note, a million words could be written about how ingeniously Scott directed Tarantino’s words and the actors in True Romance. If that’s out there somewhere, I’d love to see it.

Alright. Back to the tips.

4. Man on Fire Comes To Those Who Wait

“I started working on Man on Fire in 1980, and then I completed a film called The Hunger, and people weren’t too sure that I could handle this one. . . so I did Top Gun [Laughs]. And then Arnon [Milchan] called me up like two years ago and said he was channel surfing at 3am and said, ‘I saw the old one, I want to make a new one.’ I said, ‘Yes,’ because something’s always stayed with me. . . For me, it’s such a huge emotional roller coaster and it touched so many human emotions in terms of love, fear, danger, violence, and it’s very rare that you get one product or one script that all this stuff.”

Matt Dentler recently called the revenge film starring Denzel Washington (surprise, surprise) Scott’s Oscar moment (that sadly never happened) and his most emotionally relevant work. Joshua Brunsting at Criterion Cast lobbied for it to join the Collection. It’s easy to see why. In a career of solid films, this very well might be his stand out. His most trenchant work.

And he had to wait 24 years for it.

Food for thought.

6 Tips from Joss Whedon

1. Never Give Up On an Idea

“You know what? I never give up on anything, because you come back around, and suddenly the thing you thought you’d never do is relevant. I talked with my wife about Much Ado About Nothing for years, and it was always like, ‘I don’t feel like my take on the material is solid enough to merit that.’ And then one day I woke up and said, ‘Wait a minute, I know exactly what I think that movie’s about.’ I definitely have had a lot of projects that stalled, but I never know which one’s going to suddenly pick itself up. I don’t tend to look back that much. Except for Firefly. But I’m always open to something that I thought was moribund suddenly coming to life and trying to eat my brain.”
We are all susceptible to The Shower Principle.
From that same interview, a quick lesson for the Michael Bay’s of the world: “Spectacle and character are not inherent enemies.”

2. Sometimes a Drought Comes Right Before the Downpour

By most measures, Whedon has had a steady, successful career even if a lot of it was spent frustratingly close-but-not-quite to that highest plane of fame. Plenty of screenwriters would switch places.
So it’s a bit odd to think about the recent history that led to The Year of Whedo-mination. With the shelving of Cabin in the Woods, he hadn’t seen a feature theatrical release in 7 years and only had Dollhouse to call his own on television from 2004 on. That’s a nice, little dormant period. One that Whedon himself has noted a period of questioning – wondering whether he was already seeing his career in the rear-view.
Then, based mostly on Lionsgate’s ironic timing (which was undoubtedly fueled by having a movie from the director of The Avengers that starred Thor on their hands), Whedon saw two movies hit in a month’s time. As a writer, Cabin in the Woods represented a movie that made genre fans salivate and non-genre fans clap just as loudly. As a writer/director, The Avengers was the summer itself.
It turns out this narrative of failure and success fits in nicely on a creative and personal level.
“That moment where you stand up and say, ‘I have the right to exist.’ I’ve written it a lot of times, and I never get tired of writing it. And if I could just believe it about myself, I think I could stop writing it.”

3. Never Lose Sight of the Emotional Stakes

So you’re main character is a mythic beast killer? An astronaut forced to battle dragons? An accountant? No matter what genre rules you’re adhering to, what concept dressing is on the side or what toys you get to play with, don’t forget what’s centrally at stake for your characters.

4. Build the Structure, Then Hit the Playground

“The plot [for Cabin] is something I presented to Drew [Goddard] as ‘I think I found the movie that we could actually sit down and write in a weekend,’ because it has a third act. It starts one way then takes you another way and just when you think you know where it’s going, it goes a third way. And this is how it wraps up. And not only did I present it to him all in a bundle, but it came to me that way. The structure came first. Not, ‘We should make a movie about a guy named Marty.’ Or, ‘We should make a movie about two guys in an office. What could they do?’ The structure is what appeared before me, shining like a unicorn.
And I went, ‘Oh.’ And we just filled it in from there. And structure is the hardest part of storytelling. With The Avengers, the structure nearly killed me. It was very difficult to make it flow and cohere in terms of all the changing perspectives and characters, all these movie stars, all these beats to hit. It’s a ridiculously complex puzzle. But once you’ve got the puzzle, and you’re just filling in the voices and coming up with the moments, that’s what’s fun.”
Could eating your vegetables make dessert taste even better? If you build your sandbox first, you can actually have some fun in it. And other analogies.

5. Hire Yourself

“When people ask me ‘How do I get my start?’, I’m not a great example. I grew up knowing a little about the business, and my dad had an agent so I understood a lot about how you write these things and I had someone to look at it. So it’s hard for me to give advice. But in the last few years, the advice became: If you like something, make it. Don’t write it and try to find a studio. Make it. Because it is very possible, for anybody.
When I did Buffy as a show, it was partly because I couldn’t get a gig as a director. So I said, well, I’ll write a show. I’ll hire me. Buffy was, unabashedly, seven years of film school for me, with me teaching myself how to direct. The best way to learn is to do it. Get it wrong a couple of times.

6. If You See a Tired Trend, Do the Exact Opposite

6 Tips from Rian Johnson

1. Read Great Stuff That Has Nothing to Do With Anything You’re Writing

I’m in that phase right now where I’m fishing for the next idea, so this is the first tip I thought of. But it’s applicable at all points in the process I think. When I’m looking for inspiration, in addition to looking at sources that line up with my idea I try to cast my net wide and into weird waters. If you’re working on a western, read a biography of Einstein, or if you’re working on a horror movie dig into some Jung, or a history of the French revolution, or some Tolstoy short stories. Anything that sparks your interest, and as far afield from your own idea as possible. Because when you’re reading a book that has nothing to do with your movie and you hit that one paragraph that somehow miraculously has everything to do with your movie, it’s like striking gold.

That’s the kind of unique inspiration that can really start things up.

2. Listen

One of the things I’ve tried to get better at in the whole process is listening. I grew up making short films with friends, and coming into features I was used to controlling every aspect of the process, story boarding everything and dictating the movie I had in my head. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, I think you need a movie in your head and having a clear idea of how that movie will work and what to do to get it there is obviously essential. But I’m also learning that my most important job on set is to be present, to be in the moment, and if something new presents itself to be open to that. That sounds really obvious I guess, but I’m a slow learner. So I do my storyboards, I have my plan. But I also show up ready to listen, watch and observe, and to react.

3. Make As Many Movies As Possible

When I graduated high school I had made about 80 short movies, and 78 of them were unwatchably horrible. Dumb skits with friends, action scenes with GI Joe figurines, fart jokes and tv parodies and half assed videos on “Hamlet” and “Brave New World” to get out of writing book reports. Nothing that will ever see the light of day. But in making those 80 dumb videos I learned more than I did in 4 years of film school.
I was getting used to having a camera in my hands, and with finding shots and forming a (crude) visual language. I was goofing around with editing, with sound, putting things up against each other and testing how malleable everything was. Doing a bunch of it, even if it was bad, was the key to it becoming something I could start refining. The camera in my iPhone is a million times better than the Hi8 camera I lugged around back then, and I would have killed for iMovie. If you’re in high school right now and want to make movies, you should be doing it.

Right now. Stop reading. Go.

4. Try Film

This tip is is specific to October 2012, so if you’re reading this in the future, you can probably skip it.
Film is going away. Quickly. We’ve shot all three of our movies on 35mm film, and in film school we made our student shorts on super 8mm and 16mm. I know that it’s expensive, I know it’s a pain in the ass. But it’s something that will be totally gone in 10 years. So I’m saying try it. Shoot it while you can. If you’ve only shot digital, get ahold of a super 8 camera and make at least one short on it. If you’re making a short film with a budget, stretch a little and shoot 16mm.

First off, it looks so much cooler than digital. Second, this is sort of last-days-of-the-dodo time, nobody can say how much longer we’ve got with film, and you owe it to yourself to experience the sewing machine whirr of a camera turning over, the smell of the stock when you load it, and that weird magical thrill when you get it back from the lab and realize you’ve got an image.

5. Watch The Criterion Collection

Blindly choosing a movie I know nothing about that’s been vouched for by somebody (or by a great DVD label, like Criterion here in the states or Masters of Cinema in the UK) is one of my favorite things to do. Sometimes it leads to muted appreciation, sometimes to flat out boredom, but when something grabs you and engages you it opens up not just a new movie you love but a new director and maybe genre or period you’ve never explored. It’s important to keep discovering.

6. Don’t Chase the Market

When I was trying to “break into the business” (I’m not sure why I put quotes around that) every once in awhile I’d get frustrated and say “Well, hell, X is really getting lots of attention this year, I should do one of those.” Then I’d make an X, whether it was a parody short or an action screenplay or whatever, and of course it would be derivative and not very good, and I would realize I’d wasted a chunk of time making something that didn’t get me anywhere.
At the end of the day, the movie that got me noticed was something that nobody was asking for – a bizarre high school detective movie – but it was 100% mine. It was my individual voice, and it was something I cared deeply about. I think the biggest “breaking in” (man I did it again) lesson I learned is to not concentrate on breaking in, but to focus inward and just work on your thing. Cultivate what you care about and what’s unique to you. That’s what has the best chance of breaking through the clutter, and even if it doesn’t (because who the hell knows in this business), that’s what you care about and what matters.

Making a short film that you’re proud of and you feel is true and honest that 200 people see on youtube is more fulfilling (and in the long run more productive) than chasing someone else’s dream, on any scale.

5 Tips from Akira Kurosawa

1. Get Greedy

“Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied. That’s why they keep on working. I’ve been able to work for so long because I think, ‘Next time, I’ll make something good.’”

Who says perfectionism is a bad thing? Perhaps there more to this than simple greed, but the Emperor is pointing out a mindset for excellence that stands as the first step in making sure your creative output is the best it can be. Just as no screenwriter I’ve spoken to has ever said they didn’t care for another shot at re-writing a script, there’s a natural sense of imperfection and incompleteness to any project because the cameras have to roll, the editors have to get their hands on the film, and the audience has to see the end result at some point.

Aspiring filmmakers have the ugly luxury of not having a deadline, so they can afford to take another pass on that screenplay. Of course money becomes a factor in getting one more shot or one more cut, but the grand principle here is that you can’t punch the clock at 5 and call it an early day. Work to make the film as good as it can be and know that you can also do better on the next one.

In other words: the bad sleep well.

2. Story Comes First

“The most important part of my film is the scenario for without a good script, actors are not much use.”

Again, do you have some time to polish that script just one more time? This fundamental truth about movies is often (maybe because it’s so obvious) pushed aside, especially when special effects and famous faces seem to engage audiences. Even the big studios are beginning to relearn this powerful lesson (Battleship anyone?) because there’s nothing like a stellar story to send audiences out of the theater in a rush to tell their friends.

3. Aim For a Masterpiece Everytime

4. Don’t Let Success Go To Your Head

“What I promise you is that from now on I will work as hard as I can at making movies, and maybe by following this path I will receive an understanding of the true essence of cinema and earn this award.”

That’s what Kurosawa said when earning the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy. It puts a few things in perspective, doesn’t it?

5. Keep It Simple

“A truly good movie is enjoyable too. There’s nothing complicated about it.”

Of course, it’s easier to say that when you’re a technically gifted director with a great ear for dialogue, but there’s a kernel of easy truth in it. Kurosawa’s movies usually have a simple core to them that a bit of chaos tends to flow out of. Even when working with Shakespearean texts, his characters’ motivations are usually singular in focus. It also might be a better task to try to deconstruct the human condition in thirty movies instead of just one.

4 Tips from The Wachowskis

1.Bad filmmakers don’t know the rules. Good filmmakers only know the rules. Great filmmakers know the rules and how to break them

2.Here’s Lana on the way Francis Ford Coppola crafted the scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone takes a moment in a restaurant bathroom after finding a gun meant for him to use on his companion:
“Michael stops, runs his hands through his hair, stares at the door and prepares his mind. Coppola does that moment as a high-angle shot from behind. Any other director would have moved around for a close-up. It’s so much better the way he does it. We’re forced to think about what’s ahead of him that he’s walking into, not just look at a shot of his face.”
The DP and director have God-like power to show us exactly what they want us to see, and the best use that power with exciting wisdom. It’s the stuff that keeps us talking long after the credits roll.

3. Build an Elevator Shaft Even If You Don’t Know How

Going into Cloud Atlas, The Wachowskis took close to a dozen big gambles. Their last directorial effort had failed financially amid mixed reviews, and the film they’d last produced, Ninja Assassin, wasn’t exactly a runaway hit either. They had lost the golden touch (which, it should be said, is a near-impossibility which they captured in their first mainstream try), so it wasn’t like they were free to experiment on top of the world.
Falling deeply in love with the novel by David Mitchell, they engrossed themselves in learning the book with astounding intimacy so that they could print the un-filmable onto screenplay pages. The pair did all this without knowing whether Mitchell would sign off on the project, but instead of railroading him, they insisted that he give permission before going ahead with the filming. At that point, there were still about 10 gambles left.
All of this finds its core in a small paragraph inside the indispensable “New Yorker” piece on the filmmakers:
“After Andy dropped out of Emerson College in his sophomore year, the [siblings] reunited in Chicago, where they started a construction business, learning most of the skills on the job. They once built an elevator shaft without any plans or previous experience, having projected unquestionable confidence to the people who’d hired them—not an unuseful talent in the film business.”
Seriously? They bid for a construction job they didn’t know how to do, won it and then built an elevator shaft? Does anyone know if it was safe to use?
You can see the enormity of the undertaking, and the brass buttons it takes to say that, yes, of course you can do something that you have no idea how to do. Sometimes filmmaking requires that kind of absurd confidence (but don’t do anything that might make people fall down several stories or anything).

4. Be Passionate Beyond the Bounds of Reason

Confidence is one thing. Deep, abiding love is another.

6 Tips from Sylvester Stallone

1. Let Regret Be Your Gasoline

“Regrets? There’s tons. That is the fuel that keeps me going. It’s not success, it’s not money. It’s regret. I was on cruise control from ’85 to ’95, and it was my fault. There were a lot of self-inflicted wounds, when I was not doing any original material. I wasn’t directing. I wasn’t writing. That’s not who I am. I wish it was, it’d sure be a lot simpler, but it seems my fate is to be self-generating, produce my own films. I try to direct. That’s why I admire Eastwood. Started as an amateur and became an auteur. I’m sorry I didn’t adhere to opportunities presented, because I could’ve done so many things.”

If you’re really inclined, just the imagined regret you might feel if you turn an opportunity down might be enough to charge your batteries. Of course, on the other side of regrets are goals:

“There are always goals. If you don’t have a mountain, build one and then climb it. And after you climb it, build another one; otherwise you start to flatline in your life. People think retiring is fun. Well, maybe, but if you have a certain kind of fire inside, there is no end in sight.

2. Accept That the Money Game Exists But Understand What It Can and Should Mean

“If people were to say that the money at a certain point is not important, I think they would be reveling in a serious case of mendacity. When you get to a certain level and you see that one performer is getting a number, right away you feel as though, okay, to be respected it becomes a numbers game. I think more importantly it is to the agent than quite often it is to the actor. For example, in the film I just completer, I was paid nothing. Zero. Absolutely nothing. You gamble. . . I’ve never been ‘a mercenary.’ At one time I thought I was, but it’s not about money. Otherwise I wouldn’t waive this and I would take the safe route. . . I have all the material comforts one needs. Now it’s all about the library of memories you leave behind.”

The commerce element of art is a difficult one to navigate, which is partially why agents exist in the first place, but no matter where you are on the financial spectrum, the sentiment of choosing projects based on the body of work your leaving behind (as opposed to the paycheck you might get) is a powerful one.

3. Hope Your Mother Proclaims That You’ll Fail For Seven Years

The bit about his mother reading his horoscope and telling him he’d fail comes at the 10:22 mark, but the entire episode of Inside the Actors Studio is fascinating, especially if you want to hear about Stallone reviewing his own theatrical performance for a school newspaper (it was glowing), to see images of him playing the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and catch his words about writing every day without fail.

4. Underdogs Can Become Champions

From a New York Times profile of the Best Picture nominees in 1976:

“You know, if nothing else comes out of [Rocky] in the way of awards and accolades, it will still show that an unknown quantity, a totally unmarketable person, can produce a diamond in the rough, a gem. And there are a lot more people like me out there, too, people whose chosen profession denies them opportunity. When that happens, their creative energies begin to swirl around inside, and erode them, and they become envious, vindictive persons who turn to drink. I, myself, turned to fighting; I averaged a fight in New York City once every four or five weeks. Now when I reflect back on it, I know it was just a release for creative energy.”

This is perhaps the first of thousands of references to underdogs fighting their way up that Stallone makes, but the message is clear: never give up. Keep fighting, and you may be able to punch through to the top. There’s perhaps no better example than Stallone of that principle; he once cleaned out lion cages at the Central Park Zoo, and he also worked as an usher in a movie theater. He’s now made billions for Hollywood studios.

5. Don’t Foolishly Dismiss Action Movies

“There has always been an elitist attitude toward action films. Good action films — not crap, but good action films — are really morality plays. They deal in modern, mythic culture. The industry has dismissed that, which I think is a big flaw. Action films have been the cornerstone of this business. Without those escapist films, they wouldn’t be making the so-called important dramas.

As we’ve learned over the past forty years or so, this same principle can be applied to almost every genre. Jaws is the elevation of the creature feature. The Exorcist proves how stirring horror can truly be. At their core, the best genre stories have a human element that lives right at the pit of the heart where it meets the gut. With compelling characters and difficult choices, any genre – even action – can become the framework for a timeless story.

6. Start with Mimicking Then Mold it Into a Style