The difference between a good director and a bad director?

Cafe Society
21

One more point:

A good director can get good performances out of the actors, sometimes by coaching, sometimes by flattery, sometimes by threats.

Look at Brando. Whatever he was doing in Apocalypse Now wasn’t what the script or the director wanted, and FFC lost control of his movie. it more or less works, but not because of either FFC or Brands, but because…it’s not a normal movie. people were more forgiving.

Then look at Brando in The Score, where Brando refused to act, or even be on set with the director Frank Oz, who he called “Miss Piggy”, and “appointed” co-star deNiro as an intermediate director.

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Shatner took a lot of heat for his direction of Star Trek V the Final Frontier. I think Leonard Nimoy put it best when he said Shatner chose lots of interesting shots, had a good cast, and did just about everything else right a director should do, but the problem was he chose at the outset to work with a bad script, and no amount of doing other things right could make up for this fact.

23

Plenty to say, not sure how to say it.

For me, the visual style is 90% of what makes a notable director. All the ones that @Machine_Elf listed above (with the possible exception of Nora Ephron) have made films where as an audience member, five minutes of watching it would tell you who the director was if you’d gone in blind. I always thought the original four Alien films were fascinating in that it was the only franchise I could think of in which each instalment was helmed by a director with a distinct, recognizable visual style: Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

Then again, the cinematographer brings more than a little to bear on the final product as well. Oliver Stone is a director who I’d say had a specific look to his films, but how much of that was due to Robert Richardson’s lensing? He shot all of Stone’s films from Salvador through U-Turn, and the similarity in their visuals jumps off the screens. You can always spot a Richardson film, no matter the director: he’s shot things as diverse as most of Tarantino’s films, a lot of Scorsese’s since Casino, and even John Sayles’ City of Hope. Stone’s films have been less recognizable as such since they parted ways.

Editing was brought up as well. There’s a common saying in Hollywood: a film is written three times, once when it’s scripted, once when it’s directed, and once when it’s edited. Look at the editing in JFK, Natural Born Killers and Nixon and once again, Stone’s work has a trademark visual unity. He used the same kind of cross-cutting in U-Turn, in which is was wholly inappropriate, and that’s one reason the movie is one of his worst.

Spike Lee is a director I’ve long admired because he’s always remembered that film is a visual medium above all else. For a crash course in effective storytelling, watch He Got Game. I’ve been long convinced that one could watch that movie with the sound turned off (and maybe playing the Public Enemy soundtrack on loop in the background) and you’d still understand every single plot point, because the story is told so effectively through the cutting.

Back to cinematorgaphers, and speaking of Lee, his earlier films were all shot by Ernest Dickerson, and there’s a distinct similarity between everything from She’s Gotta Have It through at least Malcolm X. And yet…some of Lee’s specific stylistic quirks, like the dolly shots in which a character moves along the street while not seeming to walk, continued into later, non-Dickerson, films.So that’s on Lee and not his DP.

We haven’t even gotten into the more intangible things about a director’s work, like how they elicit performances. Some directors have a reuptation as “actor’s directors.” Some stars would cut their salaries to work with Robert Altman, because they knew it would be a great ensemble experience. Davids Lynch and Cronenberg are also able to get big stars for relatively cheap because those stars care about their craft and want to have interesting, challenging and talked-about projects in their filmogaphies. At TIFF one year, I saw Catherine Keener in a Q&A telling the audience that she’d accepted the role in Genova for no other reason than she wanted to work with Michael Winterbottom. I like a director who fosters loyalty among actors either through a good working environment, or by constantly offering them interesting work: Willem Dafoe will act in zillion-dollar superhero epics, but he’ll also star in Abel Ferrara’s latest, shot for pocket change in his own Manhattan loft. A mark of a successful director is when actors want to work with them.

It’s sometimes easy to see bad directing. Look at the original The Producers. Mel Brooks, comedy genius that he is, has no idea where to put the camera, the lighting is flat, and shots begin and end practically at random (the “Springtime for Hitler” scene is an exception). Then there are the journeyman directors, the ones I personally call “mechanics.” You see mechanics at work in the horror genre a lot: they and their team know how to construct a scene, editing it in a way that suspense is generated as if by flicking switches. They’re good technicians, but if you can tell the stylistic difference between Steve Miner and Rick Rosenthal, you’ve got a better eye than I.

Anyway…tl;dr, but to me (film school grad, but also that was in screenwriting and not directing), the signs of a good director are myriad and largely intangible.

24

I think a lot of it for me is not really being a film person or involved in performing in any way, so I don’t really know exactly what a director does and doesn’t do on a film/TV/stage set.

What I would like to see might be for there to be a script for a short film of some kind, and then have multiple directors film it with the same actors, editors, post-production people, etc., so that you could actually tell what’s direction, what’s acting, and what are other factors. Sort of a controlled experiment

25

Yeah, probably? Just checking through past examples of “Golden Raspberry Award” (“Razzie”) nominees for Worst Screenplay, for instance, I see some films that scored Oscar nominations for the actors speaking the dialogue in that screenplay. (E.g., the 1981 Willow.)

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That does seem to lead down a bit of a rabbit hole, though.

Like, if I’m watching a really terrific Oscar-caliber performance from an actor, and I don’t know whether the director coached it out of them with flattery or threats or whatever, I just shrug as the actor wins the Oscar and think to myself, well, yeah, sure.

But if I watch two really terrific movies — and one of them involved a director who had cooperative actors who showed up pretty much ready to go, and the other was a behind-the-scenes nightmare slog of playing psychologist to Brando-level divas — all I’m looking at, both times, is the finished product, right?

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Or one might compare Peter Jackson, Director of Fellowship of the Rings vs Peter Jackson, Director of The Hobbit films.

I just watched FotR with our kids (age 7 and 9). Not being familiar with the works, they had a lot of funny questions (like why is Gandalf so TALL?). But they were really engaged with the story from the beginning, even though there wasn’t a whole lot of action for the first half (they fell asleep roughly around Rivendale). In spite of the length, it’s a lot of concise scenes introducing the world of Middle Earth and the backstory of Sauron, and the various characters and their backstories and relationships without feeling overly expository or bloated.

The Hobbit films OTOH felt extremely bloated as if Jackson was trying to cram as much Middle Earth lore and bloated CGI battles into the story, regardless of whether or not it actually advanced the plot.

In fact, that is a big complaint about the “Marvelization” of films these days. Creating a comprehensive group of 20+ films with disparate but interconnected stories culminating in Avengers Endgame was a pretty big achievement. But most of the films since then have felt like a bloated mishmash of ideas and storylines, most of which didn’t go anywhere.

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While it’s possible for an actor since awards for acting are more likely to be given for sentimental reasons what you say is generally true because awards aren’t a very useful measure of actors or directors. That doesn’t mean that directors deserve all the credit for a good movie, or even most of it all the time, nor should they receive all the blame for a bad movie. Some directors are great at drawing quality performances from actors. Some shape the story of a movie in their own way. Some are just good managers and organizers behind a problem free production. And sometimes they do all that but don’t end up with a good movie because the story is just not appealing or it’s ruined in post-production. Bad movies often reflect more on the director than anyone else whether it’s their fault or not, and if you’re a movie producer, meaning it’s your money on the line, then a bad movie is the result of a bad director. It’s just not as simple as saying good movie=good director and bad movie=bad director. Considering that the vast majority of movies reside somewhere closed to the middle of the scale than the extreme ends it would be a terrible way to decide the matter.

As a measure of how good a director can be take a look at the episode of The Movies That Made Us about Pretty Woman. That was a movie based on a tired plot that was ruined by producers multiple times over before shooting came close to starting. The entire crew was concerned that the movie was going to flop, they couldn’t even see that the movie was there under Garry Marshall’s direction. He was a brilliant director though, I think undoubtedly the result of his extensive TV and B-movie work, and he created the story we are all familiar with out of his own imagination and ability. That’s what makes a great director, taking a mediocre basis for a movie and turning it into a classic gem. Didn’t get him a Best Director Oscar though.

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I’ve seen films with shitty dialogue get nominated for Best Screenplay. Straight Outta Compton is littered with utter clunkers but got a nod. A director, as captain of the ship, as it were, should be able to tighten up the stuff that doesn’t work.

30

I think most directors of note are pretty involved in editing in at least a review capacity because of how much bad or indifferent editing can ruin an otherwise well-produced film with good script and performance, and how much executive interference can utterly destroy the directorial vision of the film (see the “Love Conquers All” cut of Brazil as ‘edited’ at the direction Universal head Sid Sheinberg). Today with digital ‘film’, most directors will spend quite a bit of time in the ‘editing booth’, at least selecting shots and deciding what to trim even if not doing the by-frame editing and coordinating with post-production effects.

It is certainly true that the physical job of editing in the days of printed film was regarded as largely a technician job rather than a creative one, which led to a disproportionate number of female film editors at a time where there were virtually no women directors. Realistically, the editor spends more time looking at the actual film as a whole than anyone else, and a good editor is at least as responsible for the success of the film than anything the director does. Scorsese has consistently (and almost exclusively) worked with Thelma Schoonmaker since Raging Bull, and acknowledges her contributions as a virtual co-director for her eye at editing. Marcia Lucas is recognized as essentially having ‘saved’ the original Star Wars film by excising a lot of unnecessary eye candy and extraneous subplots, turning the effected-bloated film into a streamlined and easy to follow narrative that left just enough effects on screen to look amazing but didn’t require a lot of attention or give the viewer time to observe the technical shortcomings of what was by today’s standards a pretty low budget film. Often when you compared a ‘director’s cut of a film to a well-edited original cinematic release you can see what the editor really does; even if the ‘auteur’s vision’ comes through in the revised film, the original cut often flows better. The reason that viewers don’t really recognize good editing is because a really good editing job is transparent, allowing the story and performances to shine through without distractions; it takes someone who has studied or perform editing to recognize a good job from a mediocre one.

As for what the director brings, it varies depending on the director but they can best be thought of as the conductor of an orchestra; they don’t write or play the music, but they drive the tempo, mentor or critique the individual players, and take the bulk of the criticism if the film does not appeal even though most of the actual work is done by others both in front of and behind the camera. They do so by having a (hopefully) cohesive vision of the dialogue and description in the screenplay, an understanding of the characters and a grasp of how to bring out the appropriate performance in the actors, a technical comprehension of how their vision translates into the view of the camera as well as the good sense to hire and trust a good cinematographer, and most of all an ability to work with artists and technicians in all of the crew departments to get them to fulfill his or her vision through their own narrow view of their particular assignment. If a film comes together with uniformly great performances, sharp set and costume design, enveloping cinematography, and a cohesive narrative, the director has a primacy of responsibility even though they didn’t do the work that appears on screen. If a film is ruined by one or two bad elements, the director clearly didn’t do their job (or was impaired by ‘studio interference’ or other external factors).

Aside from editing, other unheralded roles in the production of film that manifestly contribute to the success but are not apparent to most viewers are the casting director(s), who find only only actors for the lead and primary supporting roles but all of the minor and background roles which contribute to the innate sense that the movie occurs in a real-ish world populated by well developed characters even if you only see them for a single scene; the art, set, and costume design that gives the film a consistent ‘feel’ to the film; and the sound department which produces nearly all of the actual audio track so that the film doesn’t sound like it was filmed in a windy tunnel. And of course all of the production support including scouting, coordinating, permitting, budgeting, coping with sudden changes, and all of the building and tearing down of sets, lighting, rigging, et cetera, which when done well allows the director to focus on story, shooting, and acting instead of niggling details that suck away time and creative energy.

Stranger

31

I’ve seen something like this a few times in the theater world (not sure of its origins): one play with act or scene directed by a different director with a different cast.

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Saturday Night Live had a series of sketches based on this premise: a director with a background in wacky comedy steps in to direct a somber drama, with predictable results:

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You can imagine films made by different directors; for instance, Casino as directed by Quentin Tarantino would have Sharon Stone’s Ginger walking around barefoot a lot, and the director casting himself as the incompetent pit boss who DeNiro fires, while Scorsese making Pulp Fiction with The Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter” in every possible scene. Otherwise, the films would be exactly the same. :wink:

With seriousness, some directors have made shot-by-shot remakes of other director’s films, such as Gus Van Sant’s Psycho (different cast and crew, of course, but the same screenplay and shot list) and it just never works. Nearly every project involves the director (and often lead actors) changing the screenplay or improvising to fit both the director and/or actors interpretation of characters as well as the focus of the story. Trying to perform some kind of “controlled experiment” where absolutely nothing changes except for the director doesn’t really make sense because part of director’s scope is to select a cast and crucial crew positions to support their vision of the film.

Stranger

34

How about Star Wars as directed by Wes Anderson?

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That was an exercise during my first week at film school. I wasn’t involved because I was in screenwriting and it was a project for the production side of things. Each group had a scene from a movie (I remember one of them was the interrogation between Harvey Keitel and Brad Pitt from Thelma & Louise) and had to direct a version of it. One of them was all done in one shot…I was curious what the editor in that team did for the afternoon.

36

That sort of plays into what I’m getting at. LotR was 3 books, 3 movies, which makes sense from a pacing standpoint. But the Hobbit was 3 movies, and one book, which IIRC wasn’t even as long as any individual LotR book.

So the decision was made at some point and by someone that they were going to stretch out one book into three, and fill it in with stuff like a lot of extra time centered around Legolas and the other Elves.

Was that Peter Jackson? Was that the producers? That’s what I’m curious about- where are these lines drawn, and who draws those lines? Was Lee Pace’s portrayal of Thranduil as rather forbidding his own choice, or was that Peter Jackson? Whose choice was it to try and portray a lot of the pre-Fellowship goings-on in Mirkwood, Dol Guldur, and elsewhere as part of the Hobbit?

That’s the sort of stuff I’m pretty unclear about, and why I was proposing that experiment upthread.

37

As I understand it, Guillermo del Toro was originally going to direct The Hobbit as 2 films, but then it became 3 when Jackson replaced him. Although I still don’t know if that was the producer’s decision or Jackson.

From a technical production value standpoint, they are still really well-made films. But whether it was the director or the producers, they sort of missed the point of The Hobbit artistically. The Hobbit isn’t really meant to be an epic story on the scale of Lord of the Rings. It’s supposed to be a smaller story about a small little hobbit and his adventures out in the big world leaving the Shire for the first time. Like there shouldn’t be all these extended scenes of battles and wizards talking Silmarillion shit that Bilbo would not be witness to from his POV. That made more sense with LOTR where Jackson is presenting the epic scale of the War of the Ring from multiple POVs after the Fellowship broke up (ie Mordor, Gondor, and Rohan).

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I feel like they could edit the three movies down into a really good version of The Hobbit that’s pretty true to the book, if they so felt like it. It’s all there for the most part, but they’d need to pare everything down pretty hard and lean into the whole Bilbo-in-the-wider-world side of things, and less into the fighting/combat and Dwarf-centric side of things.

Can’t say I’ve ever seen a director’s cut go that way though.

39

My understanding, also, is that del Toro left, and Jackson came on board, fairly late in the pre-production process, leaving Jackson to inherit a project that he couldn’t do much to change (due to the timeline that’d been ordained by the studio).