1000 FILM SCHOOL WORKSHOPS

THE OBJECTIVE (PART ONE)

The four pillars of storytelling are character, plot, setting, and theme. Understanding every character’s choices and interpreting how they weave and connect and lead an audience through a satisfying story is the director’s job. I call it ‘the director’s contract.’

For directors, understanding characters and shaping a performance is critical, and it’s one of the toughest things to teach effectively in film school.

If student directors are working with prepared, dedicated actors and being authentically challenged in directing workshops, there are genuine lessons to be learned, as opposed to working with filmmaking classmates playing the role of the actor. Play-acting can only take you so far in building the necessary skills for sustaining a professional directing career.

Characters in conflict and the actions they choose to take in order to overcome the obstacles in a scene are the starting points for the actor/director relationship. Someone wants something. They have a goal, a purpose, an agenda, and this is covered in the catch-all term: objective.

It’s important to keep in mind that an actor can never play the whole film but only individual scenes. A character’s objective is the character’s want for each individual scene. Objectives provide actors with a through-line for the actions they choose in any given scene.

Every strong objective should fulfill the following criteria: it has to be active, it has to be specific, it has to be achievable within the scene, it has to be able to drive a character’s actions from beginning to end, it has to affect another person and require a response from them.

After decades of directing, as well as leading over 1,000 directing workshops, I can tell you that coming up with objectives is not easy, because objectives are not necessarily on the page.

A strong objective dwells in the subtext, and this needs to be explored by going deep into the script. An in-depth script analysis precedes a directing workshop and strengthens the dynamic relationship between actor and director. Preparation for productive workshops and rehearsals is imperative for actors, directors, and teachers.

More to come…

The Lost Tapes: Frank Daniel Q&A (pt 4)

This is my final section [for now] on Frank Daniel, the Stanislavski of Screenwriting. In this last part of his farewell talk with students at Columbia, circa 1986, he touches on dreams, genre, character, Amadeus, and common sense.

He inspired many filmmakers: Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader, Jon Avnet, Martin Brest,    David Lynch, Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel — and many more.

He was the first foreigner admitted to the Russian State Film School, and he became a sought-after educator: Dean of FAMU in Prague, instructor at Carleton College, Head of the American Film Institute, Screenwriting at Columbia, Artistic Director at the Sundance Institute, and Dean of USC School of Cinema-Television.

He manifested waves of creative film energy everywhere he went.

Speaking of the late Daniel in a 1996 interview, David Lynch said, “I am sorry to say he died not long ago, and I have to tell you that he was my only teacher. He gave much to other people, he helped many people. He was a noble-minded and non-egoistic man, and no one understood the art of film-making as he did. He understood it and truly loved it – his criticism was always constructive and never purposely offended anybody. He was open about saying what he didn’t like, but he did it in a way that would help you. And that cannot be said about most of the critics in USA. I am very sorry he is not here.”

{Kinorevue, July–August 1996}

Dreams and Nightmares

Q: What is the best way to deal with dreams and visions?

FD: Well it’s the same thing as dealing with emotions and thinking. You externalize it. For instance, dreams and visions can be used directly, as you have seen in many movies. You can demonstrate, you can perform the dreams, and if the intention and the main thrust of the story is based upon those dreams, and directly connected with them then there is no problem if they come true.

If you have a dreamer as the main character then obviously we must get into his dreams. How his dreams and his reality conflict with each other complete the story. It can be played on two levels; one is the dream, the internal stuff, and one is the reality around the character.

In 8 1/2, you have nightmares. It starts with one. Then you have a total daydream about Claudia Cardinale. The main character’s daydream is his belief that she will help him find a solution to all his problems. Then you have remembrances, of his childhood, Sarabina, school, etc. And then you have the realities, so there are four layers of story material. The state in which those different levels of dreaming are dealt with is distinct, and they are all distinguished from the reality. I don’t think Fellini was looking for some formula, he just relied upon himself and the characters and their own experience.

Real dreams and nightmares look different from our daydreams. So you just dig out the things that you know from your own experience. If they are your dreams, and if they are your demons, then they’ll look true, and everybody will understand them. How your mind operates is one of the areas that film should explore. Unfortunately there are so many clichés in the use of flashbacks and memories that it’s usually not an exploration but simple theft.

Thinking in Terms of Genre

Q: Do you classify thinking in terms of genre as part of critical thinking? That it’s not helpful, creative enough? That it’s not part of the analytical process?

FD: I don’t believe that ignorance is useful. Knowing about genres helps, one should know as much as possible, and to understand genre cannot hurt your writing. But if you start with a desire to write the genre story, you have eliminated part of your creativity, because you are actually giving up. You are putting yourself under a certain pressure.

Q: So at what point do you bring that into the process?

FD: If you get an idea for a western, because you know something that has not been told, then write it. Then, when you have written the story of yours, you can ask yourself all those questions like, did I steal it from somebody? You have to understand the basic techniques of humor if you want to write a comedy. But that doesn’t mean that you start repeating old stories, old patterns, old gags. I would like to write a screwball comedy. You ask: What do I need? A screwball character. Do I know any? When you get a screwball character, the story begins to emerge, and then the genre flows from that naturally.

Amadeus and Common Sense

Q: I’m confused about who the main character in Amadeus is. The story is about Mozart, but it’s more about Salieri.

FD: Amadeus is the main character. Salieri, the narrator in this case, helps to see the main character’s story with an additional irony, or additional insight, but you don’t identify with Salieri.

Q: To some extent you do.

FD: You identify with every character in the movie if you have scenes in which the main character is not present. At that moment it is somebody else’s scene, so you are getting into the shoes of a subsidiary character. If you have an omniscient point of view you can change your allegiance accordingly. You can be in the shoes of different characters, and if you use a subsidiary character as a narrator, or “a raisonneur,” a type of narrator, who is part of the action, and at the same time tries to figure out what the meaning of the main story is, sometimes you get into his shoes. You pity the character. You can feel compassion for him. But the main story, the main identification, is with the main character. Otherwise there is no unity.

Q: There is no what?

FD: Unity. Unity of effect, which is the major objective that we are after. All these things are common sense. This is not something that people invented, or created to come up with a theory, or a prescription, or whatever. It’s just common sense. What do you want the audience to feel? What should they know at this moment? What should be hidden from them? When should you reveal? Those are very simple questions. It’s a part of the craft. That’s why it’s not really mysterious. You can always find out, if you look at a script carefully, why it doesn’t work, and what’s wrong. A film is just a presentation, in action, of a story to create an emotional impact on the audience. So the characters must be in action. You cannot have characters just talking, because then you change the audience into listeners instead of viewers, and motion pictures were created because of the motion. That’s how movies differ from still photography, why Lumiere and Edison invented it. Action is the only tool that you have for painting characters. And action doesn’t mean only physical action. Action is a purposeful drive of the character towards an objective. It includes thinking. It includes feeling. It includes planning, remembering, doubting, hesitating, talking, asking, lying, dancing, singing, crying, laughing, whatever. Okay?

Good Luck!

 Thank you, Frank Daniel, for sharing your knowledge, wisdom and experience. I wish I could have been your student, but you will forever be my teacher-in-absentia and an inspiration.

A quote from Frank Daniel’s obituary in the New York Times, 1996:

The Lost Tapes: Frank Daniel Q&A (pt 2)

I’m surprised by how many students take so few notes in class or screenings. It’s almost like pens, pencils and paper notebooks have been deemed too antiquated for the high-tech age. But trust me, they are essential tools for creativity and collaboration.

I was invited to a recent screening of a feature in the editing stage and I took copious notes — as usual. (One of the great tricks I learned in film school was how to write in a darkened theatre. Movie critics had to do it all the time.) Sitting down later to discuss the cut with the filmmakers, I took the opportunity to exercise my brain. First, I spoke about my reactions to the cut as thoroughly as I could until I had exhausted my memory. Then I pulled out my notepad and, to no surprise, had many more comments on the work that would have gone into thin air without the prompt of a hastily scribbled note.

The flip side is something that I’m sharing here: a transcribed recording of a question and answer meeting with the esteemed film and screenwriting instructor, Frank Daniel (circa 1986.) It’s unpublished – as far as I know – so this too would have disappeared. I’m so glad it didn’t.

If it’s helpful – in any way – please think about sending me a note. Thanks.

Audience Expectation

Q. Once in a while, I’ll see a movie, and I’ll like it very much in the beginning and even in the middle, and then when it gets to the end I sort of feel let down, like it didn’t really live up to what it set out to do.

Frank Daniel: There can be different reasons for that. For example, we had a problem with Desert Bloom. In the first edition, the end wasn’t there at all, and the problems of developing each scene in full length, and slow pacing were making it almost impossible to wrap up the story properly. So it was necessary to shoot some pick up shots, and then, by condensing the final sequence, the film got an ending. It still is not completely satisfying as it could have been, but the end of the picture is there, because the story always has an ending.

So the reason for the unsatisfying feeling might be the execution, as it was in this case, or it might be the three endings that we talked about that make you feel quite impatient, if not angry. Sometimes it is a problem with the final effect of the story itself. The reason why the story has been told is not clear. Every writer is obliged to ask himself: what will the audience leave the movie theatre with? What do I want them to feel? Not: what do I want them to think? They’ll think what they want, but feeling is something that is in your hands. If you don’t know how they should feel, the end cannot be there. You just end the story, but you don’t end the film.

Did you ever see a Fellini film? When you are leaving the theatre after Nights of Cabiria, or after 8 1/2, or La Strada, you know why he made the film, what he wanted your to feel. For real masters, stories are vehicles. They don’t tell stories to tell stories. They tell stories to create emotions, and in our medium there is no other way to communicate emotion except by evoking it, i.e. by using the story material, human conflicts and human relationships, and situations that created sympathy, empathy, hope and fear. If you start dealing just with the story, you are only doing half of your job.

Desire and Obstacles

Q. Is there a time when what you want to leave the audience with starts emerging? Is it as you’re developing the character?

FD: It’s actually just very simple mathematics. You have a main character that brings with him or with her a desire. That desire creates the obstacles. We identify with the character. Now, when the story ends, what happens to that desire is the key to the emotional impact. Are we glad that he reached what he was after, or do we hate him at the end because he reached it? Are we sad he didn’t make it, or are we glad that he couldn’t.

There are millions  of possibilities, but you must look at each conflict. Scientifically. That’s when you determine what the tension is – what we hope for and what we are afraid of. Because the basic theme is carried by the passionate action of the main character, the result comes in the resolution and our response depends on what happens to that passionate desire at the end. It’s simple… and it’s very difficult each time.

Adaptation

Q. What do you have to say about the script for Dr. Zhivago? Is it a different process to adapt a novel?

FD: As you know we don’t recommend adaptations in this program for several reasons. It’s not that any of us has anything against it. It’s a totally legitimate form, and film is entitled to use any material that lends itself to be made into a good film. But adaptations are really more difficult for a beginning writer than original stories, and paradoxically, you don’t learn as much from an adaptation as you do from an original story.

Then there is the danger, when a beginning writer starts adapting a narrative piece, that he starts indiscriminately transplanting things that are proper in one form, in the other form without the due transformation. Look at any of Hemingway’s novels. Look at the dialogue, and imagine actors saying the dialogue as it is in the novel. It would almost inevitably sound stupid. But it’s so brilliant on the page! To understand what each form requires takes some experience, trade skills.

Usually when you adapt, it is best to read the novel as many times as you can without any effort to start writing. Then you put the book aside and begin to imagine the film until you see it so clearly that you can start an outline – but a film outline. When you are able to tell the story in a film outline form, you still don’t go back to the novel. You work on the treatment – just scene, scene, scene, scene. Only then do you open the novel and start seeing how its material can be plugged in, and what can be used for the film.

The reading you do in the beginning is, let’s say, to analyze the novel for yourself. Why does he start where he starts? Why does he give some of the sequences in the form of a report and other sequences in scenes? Why does he use a certain point of view; first person narration, third person narration, omniscient narrator? That helps you understand what the stylistic decisions are based on – how the novelist came up with this accomplished narrative. Then you have to find equivalents for these elements.

For example, to transcribe a novel in the “I” form into a film is not that simple. Even worse is when you have a subsidiary character telling the story about the protagonist and antagonist, because the subsidiary character is there to tell the story, but as a rule he doesn’t have anything, or very little, to do in the story itself. You saw Sophie’s Choice, so you know what happens when the narrator, subsidiary character, stays in the story and the problem of the point of view has not been satisfactorily resolved.

Character vs. Plot

Q. You talked about characters being more important than plot in the beginning, that you have to think about your characters and know your characters before you tell them what to do. Then at the end you said that you need to write parts, not characters. I’m confused.

FD: There’s no controversy in it, I mean you first have to know the characters, but what you write are parts. In a novel you can write characters, because you have time to go into their thinking, and into their memories, their dreams, and their self evaluation and examination, in other persons’ views of them, even in the narrators analysis and commentary, and therefore, you really write characters. In our medium they must do it all. We portray people in actions. And the actor must have ways of showing who the character is, externalizing emotions and thoughts, and this is what leads to the parts. When you have a scene in which two people can sit down and talk as long as they wish, you haven’t got a scene.

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