I think truly that’s what a Director should be about. I have always maintained that the Director is not a primary artiste in the sense of the word. There is an Actor, a Story, a Music Director, a Cinematographer etc who are all primary artistes. The Director amalgamates all these arts into one wholesome experience which is intended to create an emotional impact on the audience. Watching a film should be an emotional experience. It should either make you laugh, or make you cry, or make you scared or make you feel like falling in love etc. The story’s function only can be to aid in creating such moments by the usage of the various aspects of cinematic language. Obviously if the story is not right it would fail in the build up to make those moments work.If you try to recall the films which affected you, you rarely remember the story in detail. You just remember scenes and moments from the film. A director’s craftsmanship is about his ability to create those moments.
In the opening scene of my first film SHIVA the content is about a gang of goons coming and waiting to beat up a few students outside a college gate. If you give this content to 10 different directors they will shoot in 10 different ways. But in which way which director would capture it in the most effective way is the actual true test for a director. I narrated the scene to my producer as in “The camera on a crane showing the campus slowly comes down and pans to the left and tilts down to show a car’s wheel stopping in the foreground”. As I went forward in this detail by the end of the first scene my producer already made up his mind to give me the film and that’s because I gave him so many highs in the process of detailing that one single scene itself without even coming to the conclusion of the scene.
This basically made him feel a tremendous sense of confidence in my ability to create moments through my craftsmanship.
Crafting a scene is what for me is what purely the technical merit of a director should be judged by. If he is also good at story etc they are his additional assets. Most people would not be able to separate the various elements of what goes in to creating the final effect of a scene. My earliest memories of understanding this was in Spielberg’s JAWS where there is a scene where Roy Scheider after having a quarrel with Robert Shaw, sulkingly is putting some fish into the sea as bait and the shark snaps out to catch it. A stunned Roy Scheider slowly walks backward into Robert Shaw’s cabin looks at him and says, “We need a bigger boat”. The scene cuts to extreme top angle shot of the boat and we see the shark underneath the boat, thereby for the first time giving the audience an idea of how big the shark really is in comparison to the boat size. Now the scene cuts to the close-up of Richard Dreyfuss who guesses the shark’s size and says ’15 feet’ and the camera sharply tilts down to Roy Scheider’s close-up who says “20 feet” and then it swish pans to Robert Shaw’s close-up to show that he is no longer that confident of dealing with that shark anymore.
Here I do not believe that the effect will be nowhere near if it is done with 3 separate close-ups. The sharp tilt down and the swish pan have as much story to tell as the content and the actor’s expressions.
Also the reaction of Roy Scheider which is considered as one of the cult expressions in Hollywood lore is not anywhere real. Sure enough the stunned look is expected but in a context like that anyone in real life after getting over the shock would scream for someone to come or start blabbering or run inside to inform the concerned. No one would walk backwards slowly and dramatically say a smart line in a composed manner “We need a bigger boat”. But the line has been designed to facilitate the extreme top angle shot of boat to show the sharks size in contrast. So who cares whether it is real or not. We all felt the visual impact and that came from Spielberg’s crafting genius.
A similar example in Martin Scorsese’s “CAPE FEAR”. The content is that Jessica Lange unable to sleep is moving around in the bedroom when through the window she notices Robert De Niro sitting on the compound wall.
The way Scorsese sculpted it is that on unable to sleep Jessica gets up from the bed and he dissolved to her getting up to her still getting up which is very unconventional considering that we as audience are psychologically tuned to see a dissolve only for a considerable time lapse. As she gets to a dressing mirror he again dissolves and sharply cuts to the tight close-ups of one eye as she studies the dark circles around it. She reaches to the venetian blinds, opens them to look outside and reacts to something she sees and the camera rushes forward to catch her reaction without any change in background music which kind of startles you as again we are kind of accustomed for that to happen. Now the camera rushes to a sleeping Nick Nolte on the bed which makes us presume that it is Jessica’s p.o.v but by the time camera reaches his sleeping face Jessica’s face comes into the frame from the other end thereby surprising you again. Then it cuts to both of them looking out through the blinds and now for the first time we are shown what they are looking at, which is De Niro sitting on the compound wall. In this entire sequence De Niro did the least but the overall effect was on him which is obviously the intention of Scorsese.
He literally broke every rule in the so-called film grammar to achieve his desired effect on De Niro’s character.
Spielberg and Scorsese are cult legendary filmmakers but that does not mean only they and a few other great recognized filmmakers are the only ones who can sculpt emotions. On the contrary so many times I chance upon some highly obscure films in dvd stores and I find unimaginably brilliant craftsmanship in them. The over all film might not work for so many reasons which influenced the makers at that time. I know that from my experience. But what you can’t take away is the brilliance of their craftsmanship.
As an example of one of my all-time favourite craftsmanships I am posting here a scene from a 25 year old film “CUJO” directed by Lewis Teague.
The scene’s content is just a little boy waking up in the middle of a night to take a leak.
Teague through his craftsmanship literally sculpted every emotion of fear we as kids would have gone through in our childhood.
Link on YouTube for the clip from CUJO : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7Bvbiepmpo
In the opening scene of my first film SHIVA the content is about a gang of goons coming and waiting to beat up a few students outside a college gate. If you give this content to 10 different directors they will shoot in 10 different ways. But in which way which director would capture it in the most effective way is the actual true test for a director. I narrated the scene to my producer as in “The camera on a crane showing the campus slowly comes down and pans to the left and tilts down to show a car’s wheel stopping in the foreground”. As I went forward in this detail by the end of the first scene my producer already made up his mind to give me the film and that’s because I gave him so many highs in the process of detailing that one single scene itself without even coming to the conclusion of the scene.
This basically made him feel a tremendous sense of confidence in my ability to create moments through my craftsmanship.
Crafting a scene is what for me is what purely the technical merit of a director should be judged by. If he is also good at story etc they are his additional assets. Most people would not be able to separate the various elements of what goes in to creating the final effect of a scene. My earliest memories of understanding this was in Spielberg’s JAWS where there is a scene where Roy Scheider after having a quarrel with Robert Shaw, sulkingly is putting some fish into the sea as bait and the shark snaps out to catch it. A stunned Roy Scheider slowly walks backward into Robert Shaw’s cabin looks at him and says, “We need a bigger boat”. The scene cuts to extreme top angle shot of the boat and we see the shark underneath the boat, thereby for the first time giving the audience an idea of how big the shark really is in comparison to the boat size. Now the scene cuts to the close-up of Richard Dreyfuss who guesses the shark’s size and says ’15 feet’ and the camera sharply tilts down to Roy Scheider’s close-up who says “20 feet” and then it swish pans to Robert Shaw’s close-up to show that he is no longer that confident of dealing with that shark anymore.
Here I do not believe that the effect will be nowhere near if it is done with 3 separate close-ups. The sharp tilt down and the swish pan have as much story to tell as the content and the actor’s expressions.
Also the reaction of Roy Scheider which is considered as one of the cult expressions in Hollywood lore is not anywhere real. Sure enough the stunned look is expected but in a context like that anyone in real life after getting over the shock would scream for someone to come or start blabbering or run inside to inform the concerned. No one would walk backwards slowly and dramatically say a smart line in a composed manner “We need a bigger boat”. But the line has been designed to facilitate the extreme top angle shot of boat to show the sharks size in contrast. So who cares whether it is real or not. We all felt the visual impact and that came from Spielberg’s crafting genius.
A similar example in Martin Scorsese’s “CAPE FEAR”. The content is that Jessica Lange unable to sleep is moving around in the bedroom when through the window she notices Robert De Niro sitting on the compound wall.
The way Scorsese sculpted it is that on unable to sleep Jessica gets up from the bed and he dissolved to her getting up to her still getting up which is very unconventional considering that we as audience are psychologically tuned to see a dissolve only for a considerable time lapse. As she gets to a dressing mirror he again dissolves and sharply cuts to the tight close-ups of one eye as she studies the dark circles around it. She reaches to the venetian blinds, opens them to look outside and reacts to something she sees and the camera rushes forward to catch her reaction without any change in background music which kind of startles you as again we are kind of accustomed for that to happen. Now the camera rushes to a sleeping Nick Nolte on the bed which makes us presume that it is Jessica’s p.o.v but by the time camera reaches his sleeping face Jessica’s face comes into the frame from the other end thereby surprising you again. Then it cuts to both of them looking out through the blinds and now for the first time we are shown what they are looking at, which is De Niro sitting on the compound wall. In this entire sequence De Niro did the least but the overall effect was on him which is obviously the intention of Scorsese.
He literally broke every rule in the so-called film grammar to achieve his desired effect on De Niro’s character.
Spielberg and Scorsese are cult legendary filmmakers but that does not mean only they and a few other great recognized filmmakers are the only ones who can sculpt emotions. On the contrary so many times I chance upon some highly obscure films in dvd stores and I find unimaginably brilliant craftsmanship in them. The over all film might not work for so many reasons which influenced the makers at that time. I know that from my experience. But what you can’t take away is the brilliance of their craftsmanship.
As an example of one of my all-time favourite craftsmanships I am posting here a scene from a 25 year old film “CUJO” directed by Lewis Teague.
The scene’s content is just a little boy waking up in the middle of a night to take a leak.
Teague through his craftsmanship literally sculpted every emotion of fear we as kids would have gone through in our childhood.
Link on YouTube for the clip from CUJO : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7Bvbiepmpo