How do other filmmakers develop so much confidence in themselves?

JimS2 said:
Oh okay well I've made short films where I bit off more than I could chew but I thought from learning from that now, that what to do instead, was to hire people to help with bigger projects. I just don't feel I could do every task in every department. I thought hiring a DP for example would be an enormous benefit to learning the whole cinematography craft, compared to someone who is specialized in it. Plus a lot of directors hire separate DPs, so I thought it was reasonable practice of course. And I thought co-directing might help as well for a first one, but some others say don't do it.
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I think there is great value in doing every task in every department so you learn about that department.. im talking on micro micro films that you might not even show to the public 'making a cofee' - when working on even a short with crew and talent you need to move towards managing the crew so your vision is delivered but having a feel for all elements may help until you cn afford a director or AD.
 
ahalpert said:
Well it's a spectrum, and probably 2-dimensional not 1-dimensional. Some book suggesting he was on the spectrum:

"He is described as having poor social skills, obsessive interests, literal thinking, and a lot of inflexibility, all of which are telltale signs of autism."

And his indifference to fashion and usually wearing the same thing every day:

"Kubrick dressed simply, wearing the same style clothes every day: beat chinos, a basic blue work shirt, a ripstop cotton fatigue jacket with many pockets, and a pair of well-worn running shoes. "Many producers and actors thought he dressed like a beatnik", notes Herr,[13]:14–15 and his wife thought his baggy trousers made him look like a "balloon vendor." His meals were also simple, "he has no time to waste," writes Ciment.[7]:41"

I think he was autistic like I think Zuckerberg is autistic, if that makes sense
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Zuckerberg feels autistic when you see / hear him speak. It's pretty evident in the way he communicates. There is a very long interview Kubrick did for 2001 and he seems pretty relaxed and open, making jokes, there is nothing stilted about him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQOMNF27kLg
 
Nelson nutmeg.

Its one of the 20% (+-19%) of homemade films that is on amazon I guess. Its got a commercial premise in that kids need entertaining on every a rainy day for 15 odd years, its even got the old girl off Porry Hatter.

As a parent youd plonk your kids in front of it to shut them up even if it is a bad film.

It, therefore, should make a bit of cash sometime.

I was the DP only on shots which had characters in. Mainly an old BM camera, my nikkor 35-70 and a polyboard.

The producers IMO seriously hampered the trailer by shooting pickups for the trailer themselves .. so it looks crap from the get go.

I cant say too much about it but I made a few quid and learned a lot.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Killed-Nel...prefix=who+killed+ne,instant-video,155&sr=1-1
 
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Yes, it is a spectrum, indeed. Lots of people have some, but we only tend to notice the extremes. Btw. I don't have anything against, or certainly don't look down on folks who have it - world progress, technology, art and civilization would not be possible without the contribution of ALL the diverse talents humanity has. Having a little can lead to great achievements but also sometimes lead to misunderstaing "oh, the guy is an @hole", in reality the guy is simply slightly on the spectrum and so on (even in this forum - "oh, he's trolling!"). But again spectrum - you can function well, indeed brilliantly up to a certain range, but go beyond some point, and it can become debilitating. IMHO (again, just my opinion!), the OP is pretty far along - too far for success as a director (again my opinion! I could be wrong!). He's not getting the very, very basics - unlike Kubrick or some of the other names thrown around... but were they really on the spectrum? Armchair diagnosis is always iffy, but particulary dodgy when the degree of being on the spectrum is rather small - so you might not notice or agree that say, Kubrick is on the spectrum. However, when it's very noticeable, then it's a different matter - same as you can't always tell if someone is tipsy, but when they're falling down drunk, well, that doesn't need genius level armchair diagnosis.

In general, I'm in favor of trying anything - if you want to make a film, go make it. That doesn't mean that if asked, I won't tell you my honest opinion - odds might be super low. Can you make a successful microbudget movie - sure, but odds are low. Can YOU (random "you"), make it? Depends on who "you" are - I might say "small", or "zero", or whatever - but hey, I'm just one person, if you feel compelled to make a film, by all means ignore the critics and the doubters and go for it (hopefully without losing your house!). Derrick Borte, the director of a movie I like very much - American Dreamer (2018) - did exactly that, he mortgaged his house to make it. It was not a huge critical success (I think more of it than a lot of critics), but he made his money back and just directed the upcoming Russell Crowe vehicle "Unhinged". So it worked for him... but this wasn't his first time at the rodeo - he had a filmography before he did Amercian Dreamer, just that his career petered out and he took a huge chance on reviving it, gambling his house... worked for him!

If you believe in your project, ignore the critics and naysayers (including me!) - but if you don't even have confidence in your own project and have to ask how to get it, well, it's a steeper hill to climb, like that molehill Mt. Everest with no oxygen - possible for a first timer, but unlikely. YMMV.
 
Batutta said:
Zuckerberg feels autistic when you see / hear him speak. It's pretty evident in the way he communicates. There is a very long interview Kubrick did for 2001 and he seems pretty relaxed and open, making jokes, there is nothing stilted about him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQOMNF27kLg
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I have a friend who self-diagnosed autism in adulthood based on an internet quiz. Basically she came out borderline. But it was things like not always knowing what people were feeling, what their expressions meant, not being able to tell when people are lying, feeling uncomfortable with eye contact. She has a sense of humor and natural way of talking and you wouldn't think she was autistic. Shes very smart. But very literal.

Kubrick did things like he had had assistant gather every dimension of notecard in every thickness he could find. He laid them all out - hundreds of them. He compared them all to find the perfect size for note-taking. Pretty obsessive. Then there was the steak and ice cream:

"at a dinner during pre-production on A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell asked Kubrick why he was simultaneously eating ice cream and steak. Kubrick replied "What's the difference? It's all food. This is how Napoleon used to eat.”
 
People love or loathe mumblecore films ( very unfair to lump all together) but for some it makes the point that expensive resources aren’t necessary for artistic or in some cases financial success. Most filmmakers can master the sometimes lax production standards. Fassbinder if alive today might wholeheartedly endorse the style. I’d rather see an engaging film with tech issues than technically flawless dead fish production.
 
Don’t chase Hollywood, if you follow your own path that feels right you have a chance to be successful but at the end of the day success or not you probably will be happy with that path.
 
ahalpert said:
I have a friend who self-diagnosed autism in adulthood based on an internet quiz. Basically she came out borderline. But it was things like not always knowing what people were feeling, what their expressions meant, not being able to tell when people are lying, feeling uncomfortable with eye contact. She has a sense of humor and natural way of talking and you wouldn't think she was autistic. Shes very smart. But very literal.

Kubrick did things like he had had assistant gather every dimension of notecard in every thickness he could find. He laid them all out - hundreds of them. He compared them all to find the perfect size for note-taking. Pretty obsessive. Then there was the steak and ice cream:

"at a dinner during pre-production on A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell asked Kubrick why he was simultaneously eating ice cream and steak. Kubrick replied "What's the difference? It's all food. This is how Napoleon used to eat.”
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But that could also just be garden variety obsessive compulsive disorder. I have a friend with OCD who is definitely not autistic, but has similar particular, obsessive traits.
 
Batutta said:
But that could also just be garden variety obsessive compulsive disorder. I have a friend with OCD who is definitely not autistic, but has similar particular, obsessive traits.
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Good point. Neurodivergent nonetheless. But if OCD then not an example of an autistic director
 
Oh okay, well I cannot comment about how being on the spectrum or having OCD would affect my directing performance, I just want to do the best I can and make something more worthwhile as a career investment.
 
JimS2 said:
Oh okay, well I cannot comment about how being on the spectrum or having OCD would affect my directing performance, I just want to do the best I can and make something more worthwhile as a career investment.
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My opinion is that different people make different types of movies. A person can't make the same movie someone else does, nor should they. A person finds what they like, what they does best. If they enjoy it, someone else will too
 
JimS2 said:
Oh okay, well I cannot comment about how being on the spectrum or having OCD would affect my directing performance, I just want to do the best I can and make something more worthwhile as a career investment.
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Then please listen to this: you're twisting yourself in circles getting a million different opinions from a million different people. But you are not like them. Your brain doesn't work the way theirs does. You are different. You can't do what they do, and they can't do what you can.

What works for other people, won't work for you. So getting their opinions is pointless, trying to chase after some idea of what someone else thinks is "the right way" is pointless. Your "right way" is going to be different.

My opinion is that different people make different types of movies. A person can't make the same movie someone else does, nor should they. A person finds what they like, what they does best. If they enjoy it, someone else will too
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This is absolutely correct, and doubly so for someone who's on the spectrum, and orders of magnitude moreso the further along the spectrum they are.

If you want to pursue filmmaking, then make something that interests you. You have a unique perspective that may prove to be fascinating to others. But trying to make films like everyone else's films, is going to be a long painful frustrating exercise that's going to end in failure.

Build on the skills and talents that you have, and figure out what talents you don't have and stop trying to force those. The sooner you embrace what you are, and stop trying to be what you're not, the happier and more successful you'll be.
 
Reading back a few zillion pages in this topic wears you out, but one thing I notice in keen amateurs is the need to have named job roles - not just video, but the theatre folk too. Producer, Director, DoP, and the others - when the job role isn't remotely like the same title in a big budget pro production. The amateur 'director' is just the boss - the lead, the person who makes the decisions. The DoPis likely to be the cameraman, chosen or volunteered because they have a nice camera. Sound will be the helpful guy with a portable recorder, and a radio mic or two. There is no hired in kit - because amateur use what they have and rarely 'waste' their money on hire charges because they see hire as a waste of funding. We pick camera angles because the only lens we have access to isn't very wide, and we find a reason to NOT use radio mics, because we don't have any, but we do have a shotgun without any wind protection. So we're picking locations where wind isn't a problem, but have big windows because we can't afford lights - or even worse, we have an unlightable space, with odd colour walls that we then think we can colour correct afterwards as the colour is inappropriate. We want a big tracking shot like a famous movie, but we can't afford track - so we convince ourselves we can stick the camera on a gimbal mount and immediately get the same fluid movement the dolly and track gives us. These are all real things that happen in amateur groups trying to make movies. We even see totally inappropriate scripts that need very specific locations to shoot in, being tweaked to fit what we do have. The script says "The Camera show a large court room, with the judge on a raised platform. In the dock is a uniformed police officer who is reading his notes to a spellbound court" We have a problem with the number of cast, the location, and the costume budget, so re-write the script. "The camera reveals a small meeting room, converted into a court room because of the Corona Virus outbreak. The Judge is in the centre of a small table. At the other end is a plain clothed police officer"

Afterwards, fruitless hours are spent in the edit suite, looking for LUTs or effects to remove the yellow happy coloured paint from the walls without making the blond actors hair go blue, and none of the shots are wide enough and mean huge amounts of flip-flop editing and repetitive cut-aways. The room sounds small and unpleasant, and nobody noticed the boom shadows as the single boom kept flapping from one end of the table to the other.

This is a typical and real scenario when trying to make movies with big ideas and little sensible planning to check a script works on a low budget.
 
JimS2 said:
how do other filmmakers develop so much confidence that all the money they have saved up and are spending on it, that in the end, it will likely turn out good?
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Confidence is just another word for belief. In general, try to line up your beliefs with the truth. You should not try to "develop confidence" that spending all your savings on a feature will "turn out good", any more than you should try to develop confidence that Salamanca is the capital of Spain. The capital of Spain is Madrid. Develop confidence in that. You develop confidence by focusing on the facts. You should not try to develop confidence in something that the evidence does not support.

I was told that the acting and cinemography were not good
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This is too close to a joke. "How was the movie?" "Oh it was fine except for the story, acting, cinematography, and editing."

It's too close to someone trying to be polite. "Oh, I don't think you should give up, but maybe you should hire others to help you with the acting and cinematography" (and everything else?).

Has anyone complimented you on any aspect of your past work (writing, editing, etc.)?

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I agree with lambert, Barry Green, and others:

Start over from scratch. Forget all of the rules. Forget about how many lines a script's paragraph should have or whether it's more dramatic for the protagonist to do this or that. These are the new rules:

1. Do not borrow money.
2. Do not violate your conscience.
3. Do what you like.

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Should a paragraph be 3 lines or 5? What would Ryan Wray like it to be?
Should the character do this or that? What would Ryan Wray like him to do?
Should the camera be here or there? Where would Ryan Wray like it to be?

---

Those are the only rules. You are forbidden to do anything you don't like. That's basically the only rule (except putting yourself or others in danger, that's what rules 1 and 2 are for).
 
Barry_Green said:
Then please listen to this: you're twisting yourself in circles getting a million different opinions from a million different people. But you are not like them. Your brain doesn't work the way theirs does. You are different. You can't do what they do, and they can't do what you can.

What works for other people, won't work for you. So getting their opinions is pointless, trying to chase after some idea of what someone else thinks is "the right way" is pointless. Your "right way" is going to be different.


This is absolutely correct, and doubly so for someone who's on the spectrum, and orders of magnitude moreso the further along the spectrum they are.

If you want to pursue filmmaking, then make something that interests you. You have a unique perspective that may prove to be fascinating to others. But trying to make films like everyone else's films, is going to be a long painful frustrating exercise that's going to end in failure.

Build on the skills and talents that you have, and figure out what talents you don't have and stop trying to force those. The sooner you embrace what you are, and stop trying to be what you're not, the happier and more successful you'll be.
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Oh okay. It's just that I still want people to go along with my right away, so doesn't my right way still have to be agree-able with people in order to attract enough cast and crew to make it?

As for talents I have, I would say that I am better at directing the crew than I am at directing the actors performances, which is why I was thinking of getting a co-director. I direct the crew, and the co-director directs the actors. I was advised this was a bad idea, but I thought it might work for me.
 
If you are a great leader, people will respect your decisions - even if a bit odd, because they will trust you and the ideas will work. If you are poor at managing, they will hate working for you. If you are indecisive, they will take control.

We have done the co-director thing before when you complained your co-director was basically directing and you were his assistant. Remember? Co-directing is terribly difficult for the cast and crew to deal with. A strong co-director will simply steam roller their ideas through, and if they don't do this, what is their function?

It is also completely unworkable to spilt cast and crew and have two engine drivers. Totally impossible. Whoever said it was a bad idea was completely correct - it's an appalling idea. It doesn't matter if it works for you, because it will be horrible for everyone else. Can you really imagine how it would work. Director 1 - can you move a little to the left? Director 2 - can you pan right a bit? Would you ever have two Head Chefs, two Prime Ministers, two Director Generals, two Chief executives?

Ryan - if you are the best Director available, do it. If somebody else who is better than you is available, and you can afford them, hire them. I think last time we said why not be the Producer? You can have a 2nd Unit Director, that's totally different, but you cannot have two people in charge = there will be so much chaos.
 
Really, as I've been repeating for years on these boards, there is only one true rule - make your film (music, novel etc.) engaging. Draw people in. Have them watch and want to watch. Throw out everything that doesn't engage. It sounds simple, and maybe people even agree (hard not to - what, you'd rather make a film that's *not* engaging? LOL). And yet, folks regularly ignore it - or are unable to tell when something is not engaging/boring. Both happen. Countless films - and I watch at least one movie per day - have tons and tons and tons of time spent on stuff that is *utterly* unengaging. Yet if you'd challenge them on it, they'd have all sorts of excuses and justifications - the most frequent being "exposition", the need to convey information so that the plot can keep developing. "This here sequence is boring - we've seen it a million billion trillion times - it's mindnumbing" "Sure, but I need to convey this information otherwise the plot can't develop, the character needs to know x, the audience needs to blah, blah, blah". What's wrong with this picture? You F**K - you were just told not to include sequences that are not engaging, cut that sh|t out - period! If you need to convey information, think of ways of making the exposition *engaging*.

Simple. Only engaging sequences. ONLY. It's hard - and the difficulty is when you don't know how to make it so. For some, with time and experience they learn all sorts of ways to make stuff not boring. That's your skills and artistic abilities developing. Keep at it.

Now comes the second case - folks who can't tell what is engaging or whether something is engaging. This separates the wheat from the chaff, the boys from the men, the real thing from the subpar, the artist from the hack. The hard truth - if you don't have this ability, it can't really be taught. If you don't have it, look for a different career - to be an artist, you have to have an artistic sensibility and artistic judgment. It may not be perfect. The better it is, the better your artistic potential. It too is a RANGE. You have taste - good taste, or great taste, or *unerring* sense. That will determine your limits as an artist - from minor to master. Of course this is just a prerequisite - you need to add work, experience and other personality characteristics to make a career of it (plus luck - don't forget luck!). But if you have none - stop immediately, there is no way to acquire it, and no hope for you in this field.

So if you have "taste" - the ability to tell what's good, what's interesting, what's likely to be engaging to an audience, that's the first step. Now you need to generate material. Otherwise you're just a critic - and as we all know so well, a critic and a creator are not always the same. Can you create? You'll create and be able to know if it's "good" and engaging. Otherwise you'll generate material that you have no idea whether that's engaging - an artistic death. It's a combination of the ability to create and the ability to then judge this creation.

Most directors are intuitive - they rely on instinct and reflect their personality in their work. It's very rare for an artist to be able to do everything by calculation rather than by what they feel. Take Spielberg - he definitely has some technical skills. But his success is down to his sensibilities - he has the kind of personality that connects with millions and millions in the audience. What he finds engaging - the audience finds engaging. He doesn't have to guess or fake it, or "figure out what they like". He finds it interesting - and guess what, so does everyone else (or vast numbers). Now, if you have a less usual personality and taste, you'll connect with fewer people. And if you're even more rare, you'll be cult. But then, you might be someone who connects with not enough to make a living. Cinema is hard that way. A painting needs to appeal to only one person at worst and if lucky, you can make a living. But cinema is mass entertainment, to make the economics work, you need masses (perhaps less these days as the market fragments). Which is why I said that an iron pony is not going to reflect the interests of enough people to make a living as a film director. But the only way to know for sure - rather than listening to someone like me - is to go for it. Make your film. Just don't gamble your house on it - or simply don't gamble more than you can afford. Best of luck!
 
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Okay thanks I will keep this in mind. However, if I do not have a co-director, is there anyone the director can ask for second opinions on something? Whether the performances work in the way you are going for, or if the lighting looks good, etc? Is there anyone the director can ask for a second opinion on something at all while directing?
 
Directors have described their jobs as making a ton of decisions a day. If you usually second-guess yourself and have to take a poll every time that you're called to make a decision, then you will drive yourself and everyone else on the set crazy.

It's incredibly important that the actors can trust your judgment of their performance. They have to completely let go, and at the end of the take, they will immediately look at you to see what you think.
 
Speaking of Spielberg and speaking of asking for second opinions -

I remember seeing an interview with Tom Hanks talking about working with Spielberg on The Post. Apparently Spielberg likes to figure things out as they go along and is always asking his cast, "Do you guys have any ideas how to shoot this scene?"

That part of the interview is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4E4_pD4ObE&t=292

You can ask whoever you want for advice. Just make sure you maintain command of the set.

I AC'd on a film some years back. The director had come from DPing, it was his first directing job. One of the cast was a powerful producer on the show and had gotten most of the cast and producers together. At some point, the director retreated to working with the camera and allowed the actor/producer to direct the actors. it muddied the hierarchy and diminished respect for his authority. People would also ask him, "Is that what you want? You should go talk to the actors." And he would say, "I think there should only be one voice talking to them," but I think the reality was that he wasn't truly interested in directing. It was a mess.
 
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