Good vs. Bad directing

The director still has to approve everything.

SPATULA, Supporters of Page Altering To Urgently Lead to Amelioration (supports not going through TRS for tweaks and minor improvements.)

The thing about directing that people have failed to mention is that even if the director makes all the right decisions, bad ones by studio suits can still ruin the movie.

Always, somewhere, someone is fighting for you. As long as you remember them, you are not alone.

There are MANY,MANY examples of a lousy screenplay being turned into a great film by a director who knows what they're doing. Seijun Suzuki was handed two completely boring, cookie cutter screenplays, and he turned them into "Tokyo Drifter" and "Branded to Kill", 2 of the most influential Japanese gangster pictures ever made. Nikkatsu studios fired him, but that's just a case of him not giving them what THEY wanted.

You wouldn't hit a girl, would you?

An absolutely horrible script is unlikely to be salvaged, but a merely mediocre one can be highly watchable if the director makes the effort. Paul WS Anderson is known for making halfway decent films from those kind of circumstances.

Cookie cutter isn't the same as bad though.

As for the director approving everything, so do executives. Presumably the director would be more hands on and would have chosen who he wanted and given general guidelines to everyone. Still can't see the director as the sole author of a film.

I have a question about directors and acting. Some directors prefer to let actors approach the character in their own way, while others give very detailed direction as to what performance they want. I've heard actors strongly favour one approach while dispariging the other. Are any directors known to use either approach depending on the individual needs o the actors?

Am I a good man or a bad man?

Well first it's highly unlikely that a director will just give all these people their jobs and tell them to call him in nine months when the movie is ready to premier. For a director to have that kind of faith in people he has likely worked with them before and he understands and likes their style and they his. So the director would have assembled his dream team and being the smart guy he is he lets them work their magic. However, a director will also be intimately involved with all of them as they are working, signing off on what they are doing, offering suggestions or even telling them to do something different if it won't work well with everything else going on.

In the end the director is more like the conductor rather than a one man band and a great movie is a collaborative effort.

So yes, even if the director leaves most of the work to his underlings he's still a director unless he is so hands off it's not even funny.

"Tyyr's a necessary evil. " Spirit

Ok, i agree with virtually everything, but... it probably comes from my literary background (i was studying literature way before getting interested in cinema) that i have this love for screenplay. even though i know cinema is a visual art and an image should be worth more than a thousand lines of dialogue, I just can't get past the plot.

[warning: I'm about to give examples with my personal opinion which I know most people won't agree]

Sunshine was a film I was really enjoying. Everything was working for me - the acting, the pacing, and the cinematography was a work of art. I remembered thinking 'finally a good science fiction movie from Hollywood'. and then the plot became so utterly ridiculous that it totally ruined the movie for me. they changed direction on the last act and... it just ruined everything tat had been done before. The good work done before got lost in the awfulness of the screenplay.

The same thing with Avatar (James Cameron's movie) - there is nothing really wrong with the director work in this movie, i quite liked the editing and don't know anyone who didn't like the cinematography, but the plot is so absolutely bland and predictable that I just can’t enjoy it. And yeah, i know it's my personal opinion in what is a good or a bad screenplay, but i'm just pointing out how important the screenplay is for me when judging a movie.

edited 21st Dec '11 8:27:37 AM by audrey

if i had something clever to say here, i'd sell it

I think that what makes a director (in film at least) is that he's the Visionary, the man who knows where he wants the movie to go. He's also "quality control", making sure that everyone is working at their absolute best in order to accomplish his vision, and as a result his films develop a unique voice/flavor. When a director doesn't fulfill these two roles particularly well, you get a film that isn't that good.

"Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn't get it."

Are there any good examples of a good screenplay that was ruined by bad directing? I don't think I've ever seen one; most of the movies I didn't like were because of bad screenplays.

edited 21st Dec '11 2:56:01 PM by shiro_okami

Joss Whedon wants to know if he can answer that question

"Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn't get it."

From the "Unusused Scripts" thread, here's the cautionary tale of how the Nottingham script got watered down into the utterly forgettable 2010 version of Robin Hood.

I didn't read the entire article, as it is pretty long and a lot of it was just about the Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup nature of Hollywood.

But what made me almost sick to my stomach was the story of a "Developer" where all they did was develop ideas but never took strides to actually make it real, thus they never get a flop and can continue "developing" without actually producing anything.

I'm honestly under the opinion that had the Buffy script been filmed as is, then the final product would have been worse. The horror movie climate of the early 1990's was very frigid and the only horror films making money were either high-budgeted horror comedies (Death Becomes Her) or serious, high-budgeted adult-aimed fare (Bram Stokers Dracula). But other than that? You had dud after dud with films such as Dr Giggles, Pet Sematary II, Hellraiser III and that was just from 1992. Horror never fully recovered until Scream (which the Buffy series seemed to take a few nods from).

In short, doing Buffy as a parody was a blessing in disguise.

edited 21st Dec '11 4:57:18 PM by Buscemi

More Buscemi at http://forum.reelsociety.com/

As one of the ways that university turned my mind into a contrarian nightmare, I can only really take the academic approach to Auteur Theory now, that is that applying it to individual films is tricky and really unearths very little at the end of the day. It's not too relevant to the discussion at hand because as a result we'd be looking at certain themes a director implements and examines again and again across a body of his or her work... but to confirm the presence of "good direction" would be assessing "how well" those themes are applied, which is a dreaded value judgment!

See what I mean? And I dropped out part way through. Think how nonsensical that would've been had I lasted the whole three years.

More seriously, I did note that inconsistent pacing was brought up earlier by one or two folks as a point of bad direction. Years ago I think I could've bitten that off and swallowed it whole, but the inevitable appeal of art cinema*

to me over the years has changed my mind quite significantly. Take a film like L'Avventura, which is very slow paced anyway, never mind in comparison to the most common contemporary standards. In the case of that film, it might even be infuriating to learn that the missing person plot that's spurned you on for most of the viewing experience is simply abandoned (seemingly) suddenly by the end. A film like that almost relies on you digesting it and thinking, "okay, what was that about then?" The potential greatness of the direction then really has an opportunity to show itself to you (or not?). Which is probably why they initially hated that film in particular at Cannes and why it now appears in most "great films" books.

edited 27th Dec '11 8:14:55 AM by TheSollerodFascist

Here is a question to ponder: how can a film win the Oscar for Best Picture but not for Best Director?

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you are probably right.

If the director from another film is a bigger name. That's why Oliver Stone beat Bruce Beresford (who wasn't even nominated) in 1989 and Steven Spielberg beat John Madden (not the football guy) in 1998.

More Buscemi at http://forum.reelsociety.com/

That sounds a lot like being popular or creating a lot of successful works in the past is favored over actual directing quality in the movies actually judged.

We've definitely seen that in best actor/actress awards, with them going to people who deserve it (having narrowly missed a few times already) even if theirs wasn't the best performance of the year. There is no reason why it shouldn't happen with directors as well. It's not how it should work, but in reality it seems to do so.

I can understand giving it to someone who maybe should have won before but didn't, but giving it to someone who is more popular and successful for the lulz, especially if they already have one or more, is going too far.

I'm reminded of Dave Barry's comment that every year's Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences is not concerned with honoring the year's best films and actors per se, but with fixing the mistakes made by the previous year's Academy Awards.

Sometimes a film can have a great production with producers who know what they are doing,actors at the top of the game, and great screenwriting, but the director can't match. That's me best guess

It can sometimes be hard to tell if the reason a movie turns out good is because of the director or because everyone around him was on their A-game. Cause the reality is that the editor is responsible for making the final product look good and that is sometimes all the difference.

It's my understanding that the producer(s) accept the award for Best Picture. They, of course, hired the director.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you are probably right.