Should a director be interested more in screenwriting or cinematography?

Many, many great filmmakers and film scholars whose opinions I have heard/read fundamentally agree on this value-hierarchy:

#1 Story/script
#2 Actors/acting performances
#3 Major technical concerns (production design, cinematography, editing, music, etc.)
#4 Everything else
 
Ted Spencer said:
Many, many great filmmakers and film scholars whose opinions I have heard/read fundamentally agree on this value-hierarchy:

#1 Story/script
#2 Actors/acting performances
#3 Major technical concerns (production design, cinematography, editing, music, etc.)
#4 Everything else
Click to expand...

I think it completely depends on the film and the filmmaker.

For instance, let's look at the film Drive. That film had an average script, average dialogue. The acting was good, but nothing to get too excited about. And yet, it was probably the freshest and most exciting film to come out all year. And why? Because the style of the film was near perfection. The production design, the cinematography, the editing, the music (especially the music), everything came together to create an energy that was incredible.

Another example I would throw out there is Children of Men. Again, the script was average, though the concept was fantastic. The acting was good, but nothing special. And yet, many people (myself included) think it's one of the best films of the past decade. The reason being, the style of the film was incredible and exciting and drew you into the world.

I would not go so far as to say there are two types of films, story films and style films. Almost all films have story, and all films have a style. However, I think film must be at it's core a visual medium, and that goes way beyond a good script.
 
Examples to prove any point on this question exist in inexhaustible supplies, so it's pointless to argue, or even cite, individual cases...

History has shown time and time again that the medium is fundamentally a story-telling one however, not merely a 'visual' one.

Modern era directors' conceits have not and will not ever change this fundamental truth, which dates back to the prehistory of the dramatic arts...
 
I don't think Drive disproves your points Ted. It's not like Drive had a bad script. If it had a bad script it would have been apparent, I don't care how well it was directed. Drive had a very simple, sparse and direct story. Not a lousy one. The director elevated it with his style, but something had to be there for him to elevate. It reminds me of a story I heard where Frank Capra did an interview and went on and on about how he give all his films 'The Capra' touch, which is the secret to his success. One of his writers sent him 120 blank pages with a note saying "Put the Capra touch on this".
 
sure got some weird ideas around here. very different from mine.


What happened to any feeling? passion? Do you wanna be a journeyman director? or do you have something to say?

All of this is academic if you just wanna make youtube vids.
 
Ted Spencer said:
History has shown time and time again that the medium is fundamentally a story-telling one however, not merely a 'visual' one.
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Hmmm ... What about story telling IN visuals... :-)

If all would be visuals only, there would be no differenc to a photo exhibition in a way. If I remember Walter Benjamin correct he stated that cinema includes and transcends almost all other arts into a fusion called "the movie". Still it's basic function is telling a story - how realistic or surreal, doc-style or an animation film it may be: It will be a story in the end.

Having said this, I sometimes try to remind my writer friends and myself that a script is a simulation of a movie, a skeleton, a draft and a propositon in writing. As much as I understand that in our roles as writers we may believe or hope - because we were first in the process of creation - to be the most decisive factor in the outcome, we should be abit careful here.

We may believe that directing (and acting) is more or less "only" the execution of the writer's imagination. But that would be underestimating both the sheer power and the richness of possibilities of how and how decisively differently and differentiating (expression allowed?) the process of direction is and how this shapes the material that will sourround this skeleton and give it is final form and its power and it's aesthetics.

In the end it's dangerous anyhow to try to discuss this in terms of hierarchy. Tissue without a skeleton is a blob, skeleton without flesh is not exactly a living being.

So story telling is vastly more complex in the moving picture than writers sometimes are willing to admit and I do say this as someone who has written more films than directed. A tad more self deprication both on the writer's as on the director's side seems advisable here (actors included) and we all have to remeber that we are sitting in one boat - the movie - together. And yes: This boat needs a captain.
 
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Ted Spencer said:
Many, many great filmmakers and film scholars whose opinions I have heard/read fundamentally agree on this value-hierarchy:

#1 Story/script
#2 Actors/acting performances
#3 Major technical concerns (production design, cinematography, editing, music, etc.)
#4 Everything else
Click to expand...

Yes. And in the middle of all of this I see a colourful, energetic, creative, multilegged creature that sorts this elements, brings them into an order, makes them fitting, working together, change them, transcends them into something that is alive..... the mighty directopus.... :-)

postscriptum: analysing movie making by looking at it with the reductionist's glasses and gathering from that a hierarchy can be dangerously close to reducing a human's life to what is written in his or her genomic code. The genetic code is one thing, the real life another - as much as they may be intwined.....
 
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No disagreement with you, Tipota, as usual. The 'hierarchy' is really just a guideline, or perhaps a warning...one shouldn't let the higher listed items get subsumed by the lower ones. And in practice, 'story/script' can be and often is very presciently generated or altered everywhere; on the set by clever actors and/or the director (and others!), in the editing room...not just by the writers of record. It's also all too often destroyed by those same non-writer hands. Hence the 'warning' aspect.

It's been asserted by many a legendary filmmaker that a great story/script can survive a weak production, but not vice-versa...
 
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I saw "Drive" a while back, but can't remember exactly what it was about (which tells you something right there). Give me a sec to web-refresh my memory...

...ok got it. Yeah a decent movie. Not what I'd call great, but I watch a hell of a lot of movies, so I'm pretty jaded. Very few make it onto my personal 'great' list each year (if any).

Regarding Capra, funny you should mention him - I just finished reading his 1971 autobiography "The Name Above The Title". A deeply engrossing, in fact altogether life-changing book for me. And, at least by his own account, he was heavily involved in the scripts for almost all of his films even if he wasn't credited as writer or co-writer. And in almost all cases he was the one who found and/or championed the original story from which the script was written. So in many ways, the 'Capra Touch' was a real thing, especially where matters of thematic content are concerned, which really goes to the heart of what made Capra Capra - stories about ordinary people rising to great challenges, thereby proving their essential humanity and goodness. That is really almost 100% Capra's personal imprint. He discusses it in great detail throughout the book.

He was also the first in Hollywood to achieve great success as what we now think of as a director, in the era of studio-produced films (when directors were far less prominent); being fully in charge of the production from script to casting, to almost everything else. It's one of the reasons why he was also the first to get his 'name above the title', as the book's own title indicates. As such, he pioneered what we call today 'a director's medium'.

Batutta said:
I don't think Drive disproves your points Ted. It's not like Drive had a bad script. If it had a bad script it would have been apparent, I don't care how well it was directed. Drive had a very simple, sparse and direct story. Not a lousy one. The director elevated it with his style, but something had to be there for him to elevate. It reminds me of a story I heard where Frank Capra did an interview and went on and on about how he give all his films 'The Capra' touch, which is the secret to his success. One of his writers sent him 120 blank pages with a note saying "Put the Capra touch on this".
Click to expand...
 
I should also add that Capra goes to great lengths in his book to credit others for contributing to his/their mutual success, including major props to those who repeatedly, relentlessly criticized and even thwarted him throughout his career. The story of the 'blank script' aside (which was very amusing), Capra, at least in his own words, had tremendously profound respect and appreciation for his collaborators as well as his detractors.

There is nary a bitter word in the entire 500 pages...
 
First of all Ted, all of us watch a lot of movies. I, just like you, am usually only genuinely impressed by a handful of films each year. Last year, Drive was one of those films.

And tipota, you are right, Drive did not have a "bad" script. It was, however, a fairly average one in my mind. The concept of the film is, the characters, everything was very "been there, done that" to me. In a lesser directors hands, a story like that could have easily turned into a knockoff of Fast and Furious. But the style of the film instantly elevated it above every other film of it's kind in recent memory. There was such an intense energy to the film, which is why one reviewer (Rolling Stone i believe) said "you can get buzzed just from the fumes coming off this wild thing"

As for the comment that history has shown time and time again that filmmaking is a story telling medium, not completely a visual medium. Well, I agree and disagree. Sure, it's a story-telling medium. I believe all art should have something to say. However I think film, at it's essence, is a primarily visual medium, meaning that film is at it's most powerful when it uses images to tell the story. I do not believe film should be a mere continuation of the dramatic arts. It should not simply be a recorded version of a play. Thinking of it that way completely neglects the power of the ability to record time passing in a camera. Honestly I think film has more in common with music than it does literature or theater.

I am in no way saying a screenplay is unimportant, or acting is unimportant. They absolutely are. But to say those are the definite most important things all films should focus on, is i believe not taking into account the many aspects of the filmmaking process.

I look at a film like 2001: A Space Odyssey. The acting was merely ok, the script practically non-existant (in the sense that there is so little dialogue, and a very vague narrative push). Yet the images of that film will stay with you, and I think probably say more than even the most eloquent sentence Kubrick could have written.

The opposite end of that spectrum for me, are biopics. I find the majority of biopics to be dull and tedious, because all the focus is on telling an accurate story and the actor nailing an impersonation. There are few great images in biopics (Lawrence of Arabia is one of the exceptions to this), and there is never any real style to speak of, because it's all about showing it how it was. I should also mention, I adore history, but generally think it's better left to books.

In the end, I think it's a matter of taste. Not every film needs to be like 2001 (nor should be, that would get tedious), but I also wish more stylistic, visually poetic films got made. Instead we are mostly given well lit, well acted adaptations of popular books. And that's fine, those can be fun and great movies (in the hands of a good director), but I don't believe they are what film can fully be.
 
While I agree that as writing has prose and poetry that there is narrative and visual style in film, I have to disagree about your assessment of 2001 entirely. A script collaboration with celebrated (although not my personal favourite) Arthur C. Clarke, the sparseness and procedural nature of the dialogue a narrative choice. A deep and powerful story that is still being debated over 40 years later. A pre-Apollo film that has been matched but not topped for the accuracy of space portrayal (part effects, mostly screenplay). If you've read the screenplay you'd know the whole dawn of man sequence (a powerful piece of cinema) is in there, without a word. It is a fantastic script.

As for the acting and dialogue, it may not be a weepy death scene "oscar" acting. But it is powerful acting, not as easy as it looks and that a lot of work was put into by all involved. Kubrick elicited the perfect performances for this vehicle. Memorable characters whose dialogue has entered the modern parlance. Who hasn't made comments to their friend Dave in a HAL voice..."pass the salt, Dave" (btw Dave's around the world hate this movie). What you are obviously seeing as flat performances from the two astronauts was a deliberate and considered choice, Keir Dullea and other's discuss the process at length in the special features of the anniversary edition. Just because there is little dialogue, none at all in the first or last sequences doesn't mean it is poor dialogue. Each and every word serves a purpose, no word is wasted.
 
Perhaps you are right on a lot of things. I did not mean to insinuate that Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke were bad writers in any way. Nor do I think the acting is bad in any way. I do personally think that Kubrick tends to get very emotionally distant performances from his actors, which makes his characters difficult to connect to. All of his films take on a very cold persona, the only one that actually manages to elicit an emotional connection for me is Paths of Glory. However I just chalk that up to Kubrick's stylistic choices, and it does not mean I don't love some of his films.

My broader point, is that Kubrick's supreme talent, the reason he is lauded as one of the best there ever was, is his ability to create images that burn themselves into your brains. 2001 for instance, aside from quoting HAL (probably the best character Kubrick ever had outside of Dr. Strangelove), the things people remember from that film are all images. The monolith, the bone to space station cut, the light tunnel, the spinning room, Dave reaching out to touch the monolith from his bed, the star baby, etc. In Barry Lyndon, many people seem to remember little of the actual plot, but they do remember the beauty of the cinematography and the mood of the film.

Now you can of course argue that these images are first derived from the screenplay, and in many ways that is true. But without the proper cinematography, production design, music, and editing, the image would die on the screen, rendering the screenplay worthless. A screenplay is a structure of ideas, the blueprint for the film. But to say that the blueprint itself is more important than the materials used to create the image seems weird to me. They are all equally fairly equally important.

I suppose what i'm really trying to say, is that I think trying to place some hierarchy of importance on these things is dangerous. No one thing can make a film great, but one thing can prevent a film from being great.
 
There's no question that the visual elements are hugely important in filmmaking, and little dispute that they're more important now than they've ever been. I'm by no means immune to a generous helping of eye-candy, in all the wonderful flavors it comes in in our digitally turbocharged film-art era. I was an art major in college, and descend from a line of artists, including professionals.

But a big mistake too many filmmakers make in the current era, as opposed to earlier ones, especially pre-Spielberg/Lucas, is over-focus on that aspect at the expense of solid storytelling. As I said, i watch a lot of movies (and yes I suppose most of us do here, as jhenderson pointed out), and for my $.02 the number of films with overbalanced candy/story ratios has steadily increased over the last decade or two. The fact that a few have made substantial successes of it (like Michael Bay, who himself admitted that Transformers 2 was crap), doesn't change anything IMO.

Yes, bring us the eye candy. We'll eat it up like the kids it joyfully (re)makes us. But dessert does not a dinner make, and those who attempt to live by it, in literal or figurative terms, will suffer. Mature, skillful, respectable filmmakers know they *must* have a solid story, no matter how much candy it's got stuck to it. I'll refrain from offering specific examples because each and every one will have haters, and I don't like going there. Make your own list of established filmmakers who consistently have both financial and critical success, and the truth of the matter will be plain to see...

You do want to be on that list, right?
 
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jghenderson said:
My broader point, is that Kubrick's supreme talent, the reason he is lauded as one of the best there ever was, is his ability to create images that burn themselves into your brains. 2001 for instance, aside from quoting HAL (probably the best character Kubrick ever had outside of Dr. Strangelove), the things people remember from that film are all images. The monolith, the bone to space station cut, the light tunnel, the spinning room, Dave reaching out to touch the monolith from his bed, the star baby, etc.
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It's not just the images, it's the ideas in the imagery, and those ideas start in the script. Michael Bay makes great images, but they are in the service of crass, juvenile ideas. I don't see the script being put first in a heirarchy of importance, but it's certainly first in the process. Kubrick didn't have images, and then look for a story to put them in. His images came from ideas he gets in hashing out the screenplay with his writers...and I disagree about Barry Lyndon. I find the story just as compelling as the imagery. It's one of the things that surprised me about it, how on a very basic what's going to happen next level, it was engrossing.
 
Ted Spencer said:
I should also add that Capra goes to great lengths in his book to credit others for contributing to his/their mutual success, including major props to those who repeatedly, relentlessly criticized and even thwarted him throughout his career. The story of the 'blank script' aside (which was very amusing), Capra, at least in his own words, had tremendously profound respect and appreciation for his collaborators as well as his detractors.

There is nary a bitter word in the entire 500 pages...
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The writer was supposedly Robert Riskin, who wrote alot of his films, but this is one of those stories that's floated around a long time and I'm not sure it's ever been fact checked.
 
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the value of the *physical script* as in a "bunch of typing" as Dov Simens jokingly calls it, isn't the point I was trying to make hierarchy-wise. It's first and foremost the *story* that's key, then the embodiment of that into the script, or more precisely the script *as shot and edited into a finished movie*, which may or may not have a great deal to do with the stack of 3-hole paper the writer handed in as a 'final draft', even if said writer is also the director.

George Lucas in the original "Star Wars" movie ("Episode IV"), one of the very most financially and critically successful films of all time, is widely acknowledged for two things script-wise: a great story, and 'wooden dialog' (something he is consistently, and rightly, IMO, criticized for in all his films). So is "Star Wars" a good script? A bad one? Depends on how you look at it, as they say. But it is, by most reliable measures, a great story, and that is why, for the most part it carried the day so uber-historically well.

Did outstanding visual effects matter a lot? You betcha. Would SW have been the historic success, or even remotely close to it, if everything had been *exactly the same* except that the story sucked? Almost certainly not, I submit. Film history's dust-bin is chock-full of gorgeous films that had crap story/scripts. Great visuals are the sizzle, but story (and thus script) are the steak.

Not to give short shrift to all the other key fundamentals of course, especially actors/performances...
 
But there's nothing special at all about the story in Star Wars...it's very boilerplate and is essentially Seven Samurai. All Lucas did was set it in space amongst some amazing special effects. That makes Star Wars a very poor example for this. It was a blockbuster because it had amazing effects, not because the story was anything special.
 
Gary Huff said:
But there's nothing special at all about the story in Star Wars...it's very boilerplate and is essentially Seven Samurai. All Lucas did was set it in space amongst some amazing special effects. That makes Star Wars a very poor example for this. It was a blockbuster because it had amazing effects, not because the story was anything special.
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It's not Seven Samurai at all...If you think so you need to re-watch both. Maybe a bit of Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress in the set-up, which Lucas has acknowledged. I think it's a great story and so do a lot of people. It's merits have been written about for decades now. Certainly at the time it was released it felt very fresh and original. Some clunky dialogue, to be sure, but also a lot of good humor and captivating characters. Star Wars was the full package for the audience, a fun, engaging story told in a way they'd never seen before. It wasn't just a bunch of flashy stuff thrown up on the screen. The original film didn't even have a ton of special effects by modern standards. Probably less than 20 minutes total. Something had to hold the audiences attention for the other 100 minutes. I think it's a great example of all the elements working in concert and elevating each other...Now if you're talking about the prequels...well, that's another matter.
 
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