I was seeing some great old movies and wondered how you actually learn how to be a director. I know that film schools exist, but are those necessary? How long is the training? I know that Spielberg didn’t go until he was already made.
It seems complicated because unlike directing stageplays, there are major technical concerns with cameras, editing, etc. Does film school teach the technical aspects of camera work, or is it mostly artistic?
And if you do graduate from film school, I would imagine many people are graduating from the same school with you. What are they all doing for jobs? Not many classified ads say “director” needed.
So while I would love to be a director, the last thing I want is to spend time and money getting a degree that has no real market value, aka a culinary school. Can this stuff be learned on the job? Books?
Yes, film school teaches you technical AND artistic stuff, but it’s just school–you need to do a lot more of both parts to be qualified.
For example, if you get a job as a cinematographer’s assistant (by liking, and doing well in, and getting recommendations for it in film school, for example), you may work as that for a while, and eventually get to operate a camera yourself, and by showing that you understand other functions (scriptwriting, editing, acting, etc.) you may eventually be able to persuade someone to let you direct yourself (probably after a stint as second-unit director). Each of the other career paths I’ve mentioned could as well lead to directing, but it’s very rare for someone to just apply for a director’s “job” fresh out of film school and land one, sort of like hitting the lottery. A director’s job is basically to put together all the artistic functions of a film, which costs enough money that very few people are willing to entrust it to someone who hasn’t demonstrated clearly that he can do it well.
If you have the wherewithall to organise, control, and create a movie, you just have to get everyone and some equipment together and do it. You start small and simple and work your way up to bigger budget ones.
Hopefully.
There’s a lot of luck and money required to be very successful, but just to make a low budget film, all you need is a little bit of money, a lot of motivation, a convenient bunch of talented people, and a big chunk of spare time.
I don’t see why anyone would want to put 10 grand or so (the minimum you’d have to raise just to rent equipment for a short and simple film) into a project he hadn’t done before competently when a year in film school will give you MANY chances to deal with unanticipated problems, work on technical skills, and generally to make mistakes you’ll learn from. I think if you’ll check the resumes of any random 100 successful directors, you’ll see that the vast majority take the path of gradually greater job experience rather than directing their own productions from the get-go.
Some of my friends make short films, and though the total budget can reach 5 figures, (Australian dollars) it’s usually less than that because the crew has their own gear, or knows people who know people who get them good deals.
But $10,000 is not a huge amount of money, if you’ve got it available. It only seems a lot if you don’t have it.
Part of movie business success is the ability to convince other folks to invest in your project. If you can’t describe your project in such glowing terms that people believe folks are going to rush out to see your movie, then you are going to need a fat bank account yourself.
You start making little itty bitty movies, and then you make itty bitty movies, and then you make bitty movies, and finally you can get somebody to invest in your movies. Himself has a video production company, and does his own creative work on the side. He has cameras and lighting and such that he owns himself or borrows from friends, and people work for free or for not-much, and they buy their props at Wal-Mart and then return them. Technically he made Buddy Cop Show Season 1 for like $500.
This question about how to become film director or writer or anything else always winds up having the same answer: if you have to ask it’ll never happen.
People become directors by one of two routes. Either they start out from a very early age making movies in their backyard and learning about the craft through actual doing (film school does count as actual doing, but you can’t get into film school by wanting; you have to already have some skills to be accepted) or else they start out by becoming famous enough in another field that they have a name that people will put money toward.
Either way, doing it means being totally obsessive about some aspect of creativity and immersing yourself in it. If you’re asking instead of already doing your chances of success are exactly zero.
Sorry to be so blunt, but I’m a professional writer and I encounter this all the time.
Not really. Technically, he (as you say) already bought cameras, sound equipment, and much else, all of which will need to be replaced someday. It may have been that his only immediate out-of-pocket expenses were for film stock and the like, but the other equipment didn’t exactly cost him nothing. Even the favors of friends will have a cost, even if that’s not immediate.
My daughter acted in a bunch of NYU student films (at the Masters level) and there was a lot of technical discussion going on in the set (someone’s apartment.) Students crewed each others films, and every shot seemed to require a lot of debate.
BTW, the kids universally said that it is better to major in something besides film as an undergrad - something like writing.
It’s also expensive even to make a student film. It was great for her, because when she acted in professional shoots the crew just did it without a lot of discussion. I suspect people in a set who are interested bug the crew for pointers.
My daughter went to the Cal Arts summer film program, and made some films, but luckily for my pocketbook decided she wanted to do something else.
No one has mentioned that directing takes quite a lot of talent and the ability to compose shots, etc. Not everyone can do it, I sure can’t.
No kidding. He’ll never live it down that I hadn’t wanted to be in it, but I finally agreed, and then the day they shot my scene my grandfather died, but I wanted to go ahead and film anyway because there was nothing I could do until my plane left the next morning and I wanted to keep busy. (I also made two pots of chili and some cheddar dill beer bread for the cast and crew, and manned a microphone, and ran to Wal-Mart six times, etc.) And now he cut my part!
That’s how it’s done for “$500”, though - you use your own equipment and borrow what you don’t have, you impose on your friends and film in their houses, etc. You want to make a movie bad enough, you can make one. If you can’t, you probably don’t want it bad enough.
You could also join a film co-operative, take courses, put in volunteer time, pay membership fees, hang around with people, and work your way up from the bottom.
Um hi, Director of stageplays here. Can’t help you with the film thing (dislike working in film, I find it extreamly unsatisfying), but don’t underestimate the value of being able to work with actors. Learning to direct for the stage is HARD. You would be amazed at how many people who get paid to do it have no clue about what they are doing. Learning how to direct for film is different, but equally hard in it’s own way I suppose.
As Yoda said “Do, or do not. There is no try.” Directors like Spielberg and Peter Jackson were making films before they were teens. No, you can’t afford a 35mm camera and stock. But you can afford a video camera and tape. You can’t afford professional lighting, but you can scrounge up some white cardboard and learn how to bounce light to fill. Every modern computer OS has a simple video editing system that you can use to learn how to do transitions. And most important, you can watch TV and movies carefully and critically. Everything film school can teach you is already there.
Heh. My first film class (which was revolutionary for that school in the early-80s): Here are 20-minute versions of popular Hollywood films. (Watch films in class.) Now go make a film. If you don’t have a super-8 (or regular 8) camera, you can do a slide show. If you don’t have a 35mm still camera, you can write a report.
OK, I’ll be fair. We did learn about persistence of vision, the relationship between shutter speed, aperture, and depth of field, colour temperature, and I think the basic three-light lighting set-up was mentioned. How To Read A Film and Lenny Lipton’s The Super-8 Book were good.
But basically it was ‘Watch these, then make a film.’
My directorial debut was The Walk. A war breaks out. A guy heads north to join his military unit. A woman heads south to join the partisans. (She finds a gun on a corpse.) Montage of Naval wargames from footage dad shot when he was in the Navy, atomic bomb, etc. interspersed to denote the passage of time and to indicate what else was happening in the world. Woman sees the guy, assumes he’s a Russian and shoots him in the face. (Nifty slo-mo repeated three times.) She discovers he was a Good Guy. The End. Shot with dialog, but I got rid of it and replaced it with music by Goblin off of the Dawn Of The Dead soundtrack.
I thought it was crap. But I had no money, and I was on crutches after destroying my knees. The audience loved it and thought I was a genius for depicting the violence in a lovely field of poppies. (It happened to be springtime. Happy accident, which I filed away for future reference.)
A friend’s brother -in-law was sick of being a lawyer so he decided to quit and make a movie. And by god if he didn’t do it, He quit his job, wrote the script and shopped it around locally and raised some money, then started hiring actors and crew. After a chunk of the movie was filmed he was able to use it to raise more money and finish it.
It wasn’t easy and it took a long time and hard work aside from the actually process of making to movie to raise money and coordinate everything. More than anything you need persistence and stubbornness.
