CHAPTER 2 | CONTENT IS EVERYTHING

Casting and Scripting

      You cannot make a great movie without a great script and a great cast. This truism is well known and well supported. Anyone who aspires to direct has probably heard it bandied about repeatedly. And yet, most aspiring directors neither understand how true this theory is, nor do they grasp the full ramifications of that truth. I certainly did not when I was starting out as a director. In fact, only recently, after 25 years as a working director, have I come to actually embrace and internalize this truth.

      The reason for this is that in the last 30 years or so, pretty much since Spielberg set a new standard for how movies should look, the “look” of the film has become conspicuously more important than the content of the film. All big movies must look big. Ideally, they should unveil some technological breakthrough that the filmmakers have harnessed to give that film a whole new look. Advances in CGI graphics have paved the way. Lucas used them to give us space battles such as we had never seen before in Star Wars. Zemeckis used new graphic technology to integrate live action and two-dimensional animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Spielberg's dinosaurs in Jurassic Park showed us how CGI technology could produce three- dimensional animated dinosaurs and seamlessly place them in the real world. Then Zemeckis had to top that by using the same technology to seamlessly integrate the fictitious main character of Forrest Gump into actual documentary footage of three past presidents. Today when teenage boys, who are the target audience for every big Hollywood film, discuss which films are worth seeing and why, they rate “the effects” on par with and of equal importance to the story or the cast.

      No big film can pull a big audience without a big look, and so only those directors who are most adept at generating the big look are big successes. Lucas, Spielberg, and Zemeckis launched this trend. Today it is carried on by John Woo, Michael Bay, David Fincher, and every director whose career is launched with a big action film produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. One never hears these directors discussed in the same breath with those directors who deal with character or plot-driven movies. In a way, the directors who do the smaller budget, independent films — the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Whit Stillman, Neil LaBute, Todd Solondz, Kevin Smith, etc. — will forever be relegated to a kind of second-string status. On a big Hollywood film, probably 90%, if not more, of the director's energy is consumed by the process of making the technology work to generate the desired big look. As a result, the biggest directors — the ones who get the big bucks and their name in big lights — are those who have been most successful at mastering the big look. The significance of this situation is not lost on aspiring young directors. To make it big, you have to be a master of the technology.

      In this atmosphere, it is all too understandable why most directors today, when lightening strikes and they get their big breakthrough gig, can only think about how they can best use the peanut-sized budget for their film to make it look as much as possible like Spielberg's or Michael Bay's latest multimillion dollar extravaganza. This is clearly a big mistake. It is definitely a case of putting the cart before the horse. On his breakthrough gig, the first time director should be ready to move heaven and earth to assure that the content of his film is of the highest caliber — the content being the script and the cast.

      If you equate making a movie to sculpting a statue, then the quality of the script and the cast are like the quality of the marble or whatever stone is used to make the statue. For the finished product to be of the highest quality, the marble has to be of the highest quality. If the stone is flawed or somehow inherently unattractive, no matter how skillful the sculptor, no matter how refined his technique, the end product will be similarly unattractive.

      The big look costs big money. It should be left to big studio films with unlimited budgets. There are numerous examples of great films which were visually unadorned and low-tech, but which achieved critical and popular success because they had the right fundamental components: (1) a great story that was well told and (2) universally excellent performances. Most first time directors who made it to the top with a breakthrough film relied on great content to make their debut films stand out. They gave their films as good a look as they could muster on a shoestring budget. But, as a rule, these directors skyrocketed to the top because they had the script savvy to write or recognize a great script, and they had the eye and the drive to unearth movie stars at casting calls. Collectively, over the last 30 years, these directors actually initiated and carried out most of the trends of the independent film market.

      The films which fall into this elite category are Easy Rider ; What's Up, Tiger Lily? ; Mean Streets ; Sisters ; and The Return of the Secaucus Seven. This initial wave of low budget successes was continued by She's Gotta Have It, Stranger Than Paradise, and Blood Simple. In the last few years, the most notable examples are probably Clerks, Welcome to the Dollhouse, In the Company of Men, and The Blair Witch Project. These films all had the desired end result of a breakthrough film: They created an ongoing directing career for their writer-directors (with the possible exception of Dennis Hopper, who wrote and directed Easy Rider and was handed a franchise which he immediately trashed by making The Last Movie).

      Much of this book will be devoted to explaining how the first time director can best go about giving his breakthrough film a contemporary, hip look. If you know what you're doing, even on a peanut-sized budget, you can make your camera dance like Tinker Bell in the hyperkinetic style which has been popularized by Spielberg, Bay, Woo, et al. But the hard truth is that style alone — style slavishly adhered to — will never make your film great. Style is a necessary condition for greatness, but it is not sufficient. Good script and good casting are both necessary and sufficient.

      This undeniable fact is rooted in the moviegoing experience. Most people go to the movies to be transported in space and time into the lives of Indiana Jones or Forrest Gump or Michael Corleone. They want to spend two hours in the dark experiencing everything that these mythic beings encounter in their fictional lives on screen — thrilling to all the impending dangers, tasting all the joys, enduring all the hardships. The story and the actors are the vehicle that transports the viewers out of themselves and into the drama of the film. The actors, if they are good, do not seem to be acting. They are real and compelling, if not attractive, so we identify with them. The story, if it is good, is both fascinating and believable. We are sucked into the illusion that something crucial is happening to these characters with whom we are identifying. We sit there for two hours, eagerly anticipating what is going to happen next. The extent to which this transportational effect takes hold of an audience is the extent to which a film succeeds.

      The first time director must understand and take to heart the fundamental truth that, if the audience is transported into the drama of the film, they will sit there happily for the entire two hours with their eyes riveted on the screen, even if the look of the film is decidedly low-tech. The lighting can be hit or miss, the set almost bare, the focus in and out, the camera forever rooted in one place; there might be no effects, no quick cutting, no glitz, no big look, but if the story and the acting are consistently convincing and compelling, most people will enjoy the film. Stranger than Paradise, Clerks, In the Company of Men, She's Gotta Have It, and Blair Witch are five films that succeeded in this manner. They were all made for under $50,000. They have virtually no look, or at least, no big look. But they made money and were critically acclaimed, and most important, they made their writer- director's career — because when it came to the story and the acting, they hit a home run.

      This immutable truth offers the first time director an extraordinary opportunity. He can count on the fact that his film, like all breakthrough films, is inevitably going to be a day late and a dollar short. But, during preproduction he has an opportunity to make his film screw-up proof. If during preproduction he takes to heart the truth that a great movie can be made from a great script and a great cast, and, accordingly, slavishly devotes himself to writing and rewriting the script until he has made it as close to perfect as is humanly possible; if he simultaneously launches himself on a never-ending quest for, not just good actors, but the very best