Journal+4+-+Director

For background research on the role of a director of a film I read parts of the book Moviemakers' Master Class - Private Lessons from the World's Foremost Directors, by Laurent Tirard. In this book it talk about many well known and renounced directors in the film-making industry and their philosophies. There were many things I have taken away from this reading and will attempt to into my film and how I will personally approach this task of being the director. Throughout this reading one of the things that really popped out to me was something said by Sydney Pollack in page 19. Essentially he said that there are only two types of directors in the world, people who want to communicate the story and people who are not quite sure and try to find out on the way. Personally I feel that is it really important to know what type of director you want to be, and I want to be the one who wants to communicate a story. I reason I want to be this kind of director is because the other type of director seems like they are not sure of what they want and just figure it out as they go alone, however I want to know what I am doing and an idea of how to do it. This means that I will need to put more time into the preproduction of the film, but this does not bother me as I feel it was lead to much better results. Another idea of director that really stuck to me is something I read on page 45 by Woody Allen, in this part of the book Woody Allen talks about the importance of the script. I believe that making sure you have a good script before you begin to film is one of your most important jobs as a director, and I will try my best to make my script as perfect as it could be before we even take a single shot for the film. This means that there will be several revision of the script, however I believe this is necessary if I plan on making a quality film. Finally an idea that has been repeated in many philosophies of famous directors throughout the book is to give your actors space. Because our film requires us to have actors not part of the our group, it will require me to work with actors I am not very familiar with. Though the director has the final say in what goes in the film and what doesn’t I learnt that it is still important to allow your actors to voice their personal opinions. This could also be applied to anybody anybody working in the creation of the film as my film will also need to help work on the film such as a second camera man and other people helping with other chores. Overall this reading was very beneficial and I will try my best to apply what I have learnt to my personal style of directing for this film.