Just F%¢#!*@ Shoot It!

Today is Pet Peeve day. Not like any kind of official holiday or anything, but today I'll be covering one of my pet peeves: timid, pontificating, micromanaging, pretentious, and/or incapable directors. I've worked with a few directors in my time and most are decent folks who trust their people to do their job without a lot of interference or micromanagement. Then there are the "art" directors. You know the ones: they talk endlessly about the look and feel of their films (they say "film" and not "video"); they make art not commercial garbage; they tell stories with deep meaning; they make shit.

Whoa! They make shit? Hell yes, they make shit. These are the guys and gals who have some vague dream of being a "Broadway" filmmaker smoking cigarettes on long holders a la Hunter S. Thompson, wearing 1920's styled hats, talking endlessly about their life's drama, saying snarky little things about famous people (as if they were qualified to speak about them), and being generally jealous of everyone who has actually made a name for themselves while they remain obscure. Nobody knows them (though they expect people to know their name) and nobody really cares, but working with them is a nightmare.

Imagine a set. Indoor or outdoor is immaterial. You have actors ready to go, crew ready to work, and a director holding everything up. The director is screaming at everyone to get everything straight. The actors have done the lines 50 different ways (some good, some average, but passable) and the director is saying the same things over and over: "I want more feeling...more depth...make me feel what you are saying..." Yeah, this guy is a douche bag.

I was on set for a film about 3 or 4 months ago and we had the lighting guy like this. He was not a native English speaker (he was from a Spanish-speaking South American country I forgot the name of) so I initially cut him some slack, but when his inability to set up a simple 3-light configuration halted the set for 2 hours, I cut him no slack whatsoever. We were in a house with some odd lighting requirements and we had a director who was completely inexperienced. On the other hand, this guy was claiming to have some kind of degree in lighting. He would explain his actions endlessly, forcing people to sit and wait while he explained it again and again. How strange the lights never got set up. He would move it an inch, wander off, come back, move it another inch...rinse, repeat, you get the idea.

So what's my point? Other than that I hate time wasters, I would say: learn to make mistakes. What? That just goes in the face of all that is holy and American! Whoa there, dude. Breathe. Relax. Have a Valium, Zanex or some heroin. How do you learn? If you are like most Americans, we learn in school by rote memorization and regurgitation until you hit the real world and discover nobody gives a shit what your grades were in high school (unless you want to work with a university or college) and nobody cares what you CAN do unless you've DONE it. So what happened? We got out of school, hit the real world and found out there is a dual standard - one we've been told to expect from our schools and the real one we hit after school is out.

I suppose if you hit some big professional studio right out of film school, you would be great - that's pretty much how they set you up. Me? I didn't go to film school. I read about filmmaking in books from people like Lenny Lipton and Stu Maschwitz and then tried it out on my own with a cheap Super-8 camera and, later, video. I have failed far more times than I have succeeded. I am proud of that fact. Each time I failed, I learned something. Each time I did it right, I only learned one way to do it right whereas my failures yielded piles of educational material and a number of ways of doing things "the right way."

So, to our wanna-be director, I say, "Just fucking shoot it!" This is video! It's not like were wasting a buck a minute here, tapes run less than $5 - just get it wrong and edit out the parts you don't like. You'd be surprised how many films I've worked on where nothing went right on set, but the final version looked amazing. Conversely, I've worked on a lot of sets where everything went just the way it was supposed to, but the final version is flat, drab, and boring. Your lack of vision disturbs me!