Typical on set conversation:
Actor “Now, what am I supposed to be doing here again?”
Director “This is after you found the body of the girl, and are about to go look for the murderer.”
or some such. The Director is the guy who keeps it all straight, and is reminding actors of their motivations, the basic storyline as it relates to the particular scene, etc.
I still remember an interview I read with the director (I’m pretty sure it was the director) of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension. That’s a movie that I have grown to love, starting with the second time I saw it. The first time I saw it, it was damn near incomprehensible. It’s like watching the seventeenth episode in a serial when you haven’t seen the first sixteen. (“That guy playing the piano and singing, I thought he was like a race-car driver, or something. What do you mean he was also the brain surgeon?”)
That sort of thing doesn’t happen by accident. What the he said in the interview was that the real achievement of making that movie was that all the actors understood what he wanted. Once I thought about it, that made a lot of sense. I think it would be easy to show people a movie and say “let’s make one like that.” But of course, they can’t look at the movie until they’re done making it. I can see why doing that well is such a rare talent.
Another good example is Airplane! When Robert Stack first got the script for that, he thought it was the worst thing he had ever read. And you know, he was probably right. Reading those jokes on a printed page must have been just awful. The humor is all in the delivery. It’s great that someone knew, in advance, that it would work.
That said, Wild, Wild West still blows.
Agree, but that steam-driven spider was ultracool!