A director's diary

Act Without Words 1 - Day 1

2006-07-11T08:39:56Z

So, here I am without a second actor, but I will get one. Let's leave it at that.

So, James and I started the day with a warm-up, which was dull and we chatted most of the way through it.
We then went through the piece once and, even though I promised that I would not interrupt, I interrupted after 30 seconds. So we took it apart without ever having seen it. However, I was not that worried about it and I really needed the time to reaquaint myself with the text. As we broke the text down into little "chapters", we chatted about who this man is, what he is doing there and his relationship with the "malevolent demon" is. I am very clear on the point that this man has no history and no experience, as he has only come into existence at the moment that he is flung onto the stage.
Chapters go like this:
1) The flinging
2) The sitting under the tree and the scissors
3) The Water and the boxes
4) The suicide section
5) The flinging and end

Each of these has a distinct pace and energy that tends to change between, and sometimes within, chapters. Our job is to find the pace so that it is not rushed and it is not too slow (making it unbelievably boring). Right now, James is adding pauses in completely random places, which suggests to me that he hasn't figured out what he is doing and why. Which is why I asked him to do it with whatever words come to him. This worked much better and we ended up with a much sharper view of what is going on. Now what needs to be done is to retranslate the words into physical movement and retain the expressiveness that was in the language.
I sent him home to find the meaning in the pauses, as Beckett write about "he reflects" and "he does not move", which are two completely differently motivated actions, and the audience needs to be able to see that. When Beckett says "he reflects", he means it, so we need to find a way of getting across the thoughts to the audience.
So that's for working on next.

Thoughts about dance

2006-04-07T07:01:37Z

A major reason I have never explored opera fully in a directorial way is that I am afraid, almost pathologically, of dance. I do not dance personally and it is a medium that I do not understand at all and am therefore loathe to use it in a production. Of course, there are choreographers that help in many ways, and I have done a very successful production in which I have said to the choreographer "Here. Music. Go." but I may not always be so lucky. Furthermore, the choreographer cannot be expected to block the entire show and there are many moments, especially in musicals, where something dance-like is required, but not a full on choreography job.
Mostly, I worry that I am unable to see movement opportunities and necessities when they arise. I would be quite happy blocking a scene with walk-abouts without ever realising the full potential. It feels like there is simply a tool missing in my bag of tricks.
So, what to do? The easy way out is finding a brilliant choreographer and hanging onto them for dear life. But this, of course, is both difficult to acheive, and risky. I am therefore going to think about this some more and see how my scene works in the final project. Maybe I will need Sheila to choreograph, maybe not. Most of all, I have seen actors take initiative over movement, so maybe that will be alright. If I get truly unstuck, it will be a sign that the time has come to change. Although, arguably, I sing and act, so I have two out of three, and what more do they want?

Music theatre - Adaptation of Opera

2006-04-06T12:46:31Z

I have been giving a lot of thought to the concept of adapting and modernising Opera. Obviously, the purists want everything to remain as it was, but the role of opera has changed and therefore, so must the artistic expression of it.
In Bel Canto, it was absolutely fine to just stand at the front and deliver your song, but now we see Opera as a dramatic form, so it can't be acceptable for the director's role to be simply one of tweaking and changing little things to make the songs more fun to look at. It therefore follows that the stories can be updated to make them "relevant", not in the sense of dumbing things down, but in the sense that, as the audiences of the 17th century found it easiest to understand the basic message through Gods and heroes, so we have different methods today of telling the same story. Therefore, a story of love and loss and a commentary about how women can't win out (like in Carmen) can be told either by making her a factory worker or a stripper, or whatever. Her occupation is not the major plot point, but rather it is her character that makes her and breaks her.
The major problem is the libretto. Music is the language of emotions, emphases and thought. Words are the language of detail. The music can tell the same story and communicate the same message regardless of what time or place the opera is set in. It is the libretto that pins it down to a time or place. It is very easy to, initially, condemn the libretto to the flames and rewrite it based on the minutaie that are of interest to the director and designer. However, it is not that simple. Librettists in the past were chosen because they made music from the words they wrote, namely that the music and libretto complimented each other. This is why operas are still mainly performed with the original, untranslated libretto. By changing the words you run the risk of changing the essetial nature of the piece. Nevertheless, the ENO runs year on year very successfully, and I would argue that, if you are translating into English, you have already bastardised the form, so you may as well change the details to suit what you are trying to achieve. This is still a daunting task for any librettist, as you still need to go back to the original, to try to salvage the phonological tone and, as importantly, the subtext and the message.
So, to continue with the theme of Carmen, I see no reason why one could not update the story so that Carmen is, in fact, a pole dancer (who will not let men touch her outside of her job) and Estimillio can be an A-list porn star, whose porn name is "Toreador" or "bullfighter". After all, we are talking about a story in which this minor celebrity is boasting about his "bullfighting" skills and about a woman who is flirtatious and likes attention but nevertheless has high self-respect. Obviously, the analogy only works so far and some bits would require a lot of attention to adapt, but, overall, I think it's possible.
More controversially, I also don't believe that the libretto is sacred or that someone who has been dead for 200 years should have any say in directorial decisions. People who believe they know what the "original intentions" would have been are presumptious and ignorant. I even would go so far as to say that the music can be ammended, but only with extreme respect and care, as that is where the art truly lies.

pre-shoot stress

2006-01-30T06:52:03Z

Cinema is clearly not my medium. I can't seem to get myself excited about cameras. One of my biggest problems, I think, is that we have not been given enough time to play with our work and have fun with it, because it is all stres stress stress. Camera plans are like jigsaw puzzles. You don't create them the way you do because they look pretty, but rather because that way camera 1 will not be in the eyeline of camera 2. The thought of using professional actors scares the bejesus out of me because I am convinced that I will get into that studio and find that none of my angles work and I have no idea what I am doing. I wrote out my initial camera plan and said I would go back and change it, but then didn't because I truly didn't know how to improve on what I had.
Another worry is that there does not seem to be any rehearsal process, to speak of, and, if there is, I have not discovered it yet. We have one hour to rehearse and I really don't want to be pushing my actors around during that time, trying to get them to stand in the right place. I am afraid this will insult them, which may be weakness on my part, but, in any case, in not a way I like to work.
More later when I have done some work.

Filming a one person variation on a theme

2006-01-23T07:48:17Z

We spent the last two days planning out a one-person sequence which had to have the basic elements written down but we could play with the story and, of course, the camera shots. After sitting down and thinking of lots of dull things (which some people did) and some postmodern things (like a film director who can't think of a sequence), I settled on a piss-take of product placement. Basically, a man comes in and goes through all the motions of the scene, but without any inner life, because he is not a real character, but only a pawn used for the purpose of product placement. Every time he does something, a small sign saying "EAT AT JOES" is revealed, although you can't see any of the signs from the wide shots of the room. Many close ups were involved to get all the signs in without them being seen in the wide shots, and I think I panned up and down too many times. Sue said that if I want to bore the audience for the effect, panning endlessly is a legitimate choice to make. The problem became that I was not sure about the exact choices I did want to make, on that score.
I have found that my camera plans, now that I have written two (but only received feedback for one) tend to arrive in my head fully formed. The justification is not particularly clear as to why I have put the camera where I have and decided on how close the shot will be other than that it FEELS right. I am not certain, however, that this is legitimate, as far as justification goes, and I might have to work on that. Nevertheless, I think I am better off with that than struggling to come up with an angle that expresses a definite thought, such as "this establishes his sense of isolation", or whatever. I am coming to an eventual conclusion that, despite camera work being very technical, it is still an art, and I doubt that Speilberg sits around thinking about how he can acheive certain effects. It must be more of a process of, "I want to swoop in from above and then push in until the camera is almost touching the car door" and the effect that it creates is a result of inspired camera planning.
Otherwise, I found out two things about being an actor on camera. Firstly, you have no idea what part of you is being shot unless the director tells you, so you may be safe in picking your nose if the camera is pointed at your feet, but if you are getting an extreme close-up of your eyebrows, you had better not raise them. This has the added effect of never knowing how big you need to make your actions. For example, if I know that there is a close-up on my face, I do not need to produce a huge sigh to show that I am listless. The effect can be attained just by having the thought there. However, if it is a shot of the whole room, I would need to act much like I would on a stage.
On a related note, I worry about how little "acting" the actors actually get to do. This is especially true of single-cam, when the stop/start is so frequent that you may not be filmed for more than 3 seconds at a time. Obviously, the preparation process is very different from on stage, and I wonder about how Stanislavsky Method, etc, coped with the advent of cinema. Most of the actors from the Actor's Studio (very Method) ended up as film actors, so I suppose the way to go would be to ask one. If you wanted to really incorporate Method Preparation with Film, it would probably be best to have something very like NLP anchors. Instant and effective, one would hope. The only problem is that NLP has not permeated the acting world, so I am coming back to this, yet again. I might write the paper that I wanted to, after all.

The First two days of Directing for Camera

2006-01-19T05:42:18Z

Cameras confuse me. I always said I would probably never direct film because of the technicalities involved. After two days of this course, I am beginning to work out some of the very large tangle, but it feels like it would take years to learn all the terms and types of shots there are well enough to go "Oh yes, I need an R-42 Lens here for the soft focus effect, because that would REALLY make Jane look small and insignificant in the background". Furthermore, I don't even know right now that there is an option to make Jane look small and insignificant, because, I suspect, I will just film it, thinking the effect will magically appear, and then be surprised when it doesn't come out looking the way I want.
Technicalities aside, I am very happy to sit down and analyse every shot on camera in a film made by someone else. I have even started to be able to figure out what makes an interesting/artistic film different from a bland/crap film. This is good. And, of course, it means that there is plenty of room for discussion.
What is interesting is that there is plenty of room for "visual discussion", in the same way that you would literarily discuss a book. "This shot is there because he wanted to remind us that the character is connected to her family and yet very much apart. What comment do you think he is making regarding the nature of the family in general? Can we say that 'Every man is an Island'? Do we agree with him on that?'" However, it's a far cry between being able to see the genius and being even able to emulate it. The learning curve is steep, and I am not sure I know the difference between a close up and a medium close up, but at least there is progress.