Director to Director

I had dinner last night with a director who is in town to direct another one of the movies in the set of four of which I am doing the first--all adaptations of books in the same genre. He has directed thirty movies to my three, he's good at it, and I look up to him a lot. He wanted to ask me about the local crews, who was good, who wasn't, and where the good places to eat were. I wanted to ask him why he was doing one of these movies, given, as I had heard, that he didn't like the novel or the script and was furiously rewriting it himself. He told me it was a good question and the answer, basically, was that there isn't a lot out there. Then it hit me: I am unbelievably lucky to be working. This guy who is an A+ TV director is getting the same level of job that I'm getting. The TV movie business, cable and broadcast, has shrunk to a shadow. CBS no longer makes movies regularly, NBC almost not at all, ABC a couple a year, etc. The director told me that as he called various other directors to get references on potential crew he could hear in their voices the unasked question: How the hell did you get a movie?

Then the director knocked me over with this statement: At this point I'm just hoping to make something I'm not ashamed of. Which is really several steps below what the great French director Francois Truffaut said: Making a movie is like riding a stagecoach. You start out hoping to have a great ride. You end up just hoping you get to your destination.

And what am I hoping for? A well-made entertaining romance that delivers the goods to its intended audience. Am I pulling that off? I watched all my dailies today and it was a pin in the bicycle tire of my end-of-the-first-week high. So much slow pace, so many camera moves that don't deliver as I'd hoped they would, so much acting that is overwrought, so much that is prosaic and just there. Sometimes when we're on the set the actors and the crew and I talk about our favorite movies, particular scenes and moments that we love, and I think: nobody here, me included, thinks that what we are making will ever be a movie that people talk about that way.

All of that said, the big truth is that only a quarter of the movie is in the can. I have three more weeks to pick up the pace, move the camera in more dynamic and effective ways, tone down the overwrought performances, coax the poetry out of the moments.

Onward!