Movie Directors.

kneemos · 18-02-2015 1:04am #1

A lot of actors seem capable of turning their hands to it,not being critical but is it difficult?
Is there a training course or qualifications needed or is it simply a case of a big bank roll equals a decent movie?

Honey Monster · 18-02-2015 1:06am

Big bank roll = good movie?
God no.
Have a look at Mr. Michael Bay's efforts over the last few years. It's got everything to do with talent, talent and the right connections.

Desolation Of Smug · 18-02-2015 1:08am

kneemos wrote: »

A lot of actors seem capable of turning their hands to it,not being critical but is it difficult?
Is there a training course or qualifications needed or is it simply a case of a big bank roll equals a decent movie?

Kinda like football players make good football managers? Because fully immersed/capable at what they're at? I'd say if you bunged the average Bookies assistant into the role of "Director", it might not end too well..

wretcheddomain · 18-02-2015 1:13am

kneemos wrote: »

Is there a training course or qualifications needed

You need at least a 2.1 from Trinity College in their Movie Directors honours degree.

You're taught by the likes of Scorsese, Tarantino and Spielberg.

Final year project is to produce a successful movie that makes it into the top 10 movies of that year and, as you can expect, there have been no graduates as of yet from the course.

FloatingVoter · 18-02-2015 1:16am

The name actors that turn their hands to it and are successful are the ones who stay behind after school. To figure out how cameras, lighting, sound actually work. Bit like learning how to conduct an orchestra....not just waving your arms about - you have to know how the instruments interact.
Clint Eastwood spent the 1950s doing Rawhide. As well as paying the rent, he was asking questions. Same in the '60s with Sergio Leone so when the time came he was ready to roll.
Ben Affleck obviously was doing the same - even though he was a plank in a lot of his movies, he must have been doing something right behind the scenes.

Links234 · 18-02-2015 1:21am

Yup, Ben Affleck makes a way better director than he does an actor

kneemos · 18-02-2015 1:25am

FloatingVoter wrote: »

The name actors that turn their hands to it and are successful are the ones who stay behind after school. To figure out how cameras, lighting, sound actually work. Bit like learning how to conduct an orchestra....not just waving your arms about - you have to know how the instruments interact.
Clint Eastwood spent the 1950s doing Rawhide. As well as paying the rent, he was asking questions. Same in the '60s with Sergio Leone so when the time came he was ready to roll.
Ben Affleck obviously was doing the same - even though he was a plank in a lot of his movies, he must have been doing something right behind the scenes.

So not necessarily difficult.
Given half a brain and an interest anybody could churn out a decent old tale?

FloatingVoter · 18-02-2015 1:46am

kneemos wrote: »

So not necessarily difficult.
Given half a brain and an interest anybody could churn out a decent old tale?

Given half a brain and an interest, anybody can make a movie nowadays. Unfortunately the internet is polluted with them.
The tools are all online. There were huge barriers in place when Clint was starting out, Fewer when Affleck was - he had to write a script with his friend to get in the door.
For you, just download some editing software, rent / steal / buy a camera, get some mates on board to do acting and crew duties. Then interest someone.
The last part is the hardest.

Honey Monster · 18-02-2015 2:14am

Links234 wrote: »

Yup, Ben Affleck makes a way better director than he does an actor

As long as he makes a good batman, that's all I care about.

kneemos · 18-02-2015 2:21am

Honey Monster wrote: »

As long as he makes a good batman, that's all I care about.

Watching him at the moment in Argo.
Did he direct that?Not a bad movie.

FloatingVoter · 18-02-2015 2:28am

kneemos wrote: »

Watching him at the moment in Argo.
Did he direct that?Not a bad movie.

Directed and won a Golden Globe for it. It got best pic at the Oscars.

Links234 · 18-02-2015 3:55am

Honey Monster wrote: »

As long as he makes a good batman, that's all I care about.

I'm not holding out hope for the movie, because it's being directed by Zack Snyder and I can't stand him

Turtwig · 18-02-2015 4:06am

It's incredibly nuanced and as the genre says an art form. Different directors have different styles and preferences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPAloq5MCUA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2THVvshvq0Q

osarusan · 18-02-2015 8:43am

Anybody can become a director, if they have enough money.

Becoming a good and respected director is a different story.

DarkyHughes · 18-02-2015 9:08am

kneemos wrote: »

A lot of actors seem capable of turning their hands to it,not being critical but is it difficult?
Is there a training course or qualifications needed or is it simply a case of a big bank roll equals a decent movie?

Not if you have a good story to tell.

Means Streets, Taxi Driver, A Dog Day Afternoon. Hoop Dreams etc... Little budget great moves. Nowadays people have ran out of really good stories to tell so a big budget is needed for alot of **** no cares about but it looks cooooooooooool.

eet fuk · 18-02-2015 9:14am

DarkyHughes wrote: »

Nowadays people have ran out of really good stories to tell so a big budget is needed for alot of **** no cares about but it looks cooooooooooool.

Ah I dunno, Spiderman was a really good story imo...wait, what? Oh...well I thought that The Hobbit was real origin....what's that? Oh....nevermind then.

e_e · 18-02-2015 10:13am

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGc-K7giqKM

Like others have said anybody can direct people in rooms talking to each other but it takes something else to make that really stand apart. Compare the brilliance of Kurosawa's direction here to the blandness of the clips of The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything (and top think these are getting Oscar nominations).

seamus · 18-02-2015 10:39am

Proper courses that deal with the art behind acting and performance also cover the theories behind all this stuff, how to shoot scenes properly, layouts. There's a mountain of theory in there and most people wouldn't realise the effort and meticulous planning that can go into shooting a 20-second scene.

This is the kind of stuff that you don't get in a 6 week acting course.

As FloatingVoter points out though, there's a lot more to it than just knowing. Practice and experience is the bulk of it, so most of the actors-turned-directors spent inordinate amounts of time watching and assisting on shoots. Some actors do their scene and then head off for the day. But these guys turn up at 6am to watch the start of filming, do their 2 hours of filming and stay back to watch and assist the director until 10pm that night.

Those directors who never went through the acting route were often involved in making amateur movies in their childhood and at the first opportunity went into 100-hour-week unpaid internship positions where they could learn the ropes.

Vex Willems · 18-02-2015 12:26pm

Anybody can be a director, it's never been easier to be a filmmaker. Nowadays you could shoot and edit a movie on your phone! I think the next episode of Modern Family was shot on iPhones and iPads.

However what that really means is there is a lot more rubbish out there. Just because you can shoot a movie doesn't necessary mean you should. Unless you have a good script. The key to a good film is a good script, you won't make a great film out of a bad script.

Also what will make a good Director is having a good team around you, while we'd all like to think we are Robert Rodriguez and could do it all ourselves, the fact is you're not Robert Rodriguez. Delegate, have a good AD, Cinematographer, Sound Op, Script Supervisor, etc.

It's not your job to be checking sound or picture. So when you ask them is the Sound good, picture good and your guys say Yeah, great you move on, if they say we could do with another take, you go again.

If you got people that are good at their jobs, that lets you concentrate on your job which is directing, which is working with actors.

No body needs a piece of paper to be a movie director. Just make a movie, it will be ****e. Learn from the experience and bring that to your next production. And so on.

In saying that I did do filmmaking in college, I had finished the leaving and wanted to do filmmaking so thats what I did. While I never directed in college I learned so much from being on the sets of the film shoots, even if they were only student films. You can't beat the experience of being on set, no book can give you that. It certainly helped me when I got to making my own shorts.

Oh yeah, money also helps.

DarkyHughes · 19-02-2015 9:39am

Original television programming is were it's at now. Stephen Grahams Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire was so much better than De Niros in the Untouchables. Then there's The Wire, Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, Mad Men etc...Even the news has got better with the Daily Show W/Jon Stewart & The Colbert Report

Turtwig · 19-02-2015 2:55pm

Was breaking the vertical boundaries of the thread really necessary?

osarusan · 19-02-2015 3:06pm

Turtwig wrote: »

Was breaking the vertical boundaries of the thread really necessary?

It's art, innit. New perspectives, left to right movement, suspense.

Genius really.

DarkyHughes · 19-02-2015 6:06pm

eet fuk wrote: »

Ah I dunno, Spiderman was a really good story imo...wait, what? Oh...well I thought that The Hobbit was real origin....what's that? Oh....nevermind then.

But Spiderman is based of the comic books so it's not really a original story.

DarkyHughes · 19-02-2015 6:09pm

Turtwig wrote: »

Was breaking the vertical boundaries of the thread really necessary?

My elbow slipped on the the t key by the looks of it. Oppsie

Movie Directors.

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