Danny Boyle’s 15 Golden Rules of Filmmaking

This week I am reblogging this incredibly generous and informative article written by director Danny Boyle for Moviemaker.com. For those unfamiliar, Mr. Boyle is the director of such films as Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours. People are sharing this article via Twitter and Facebook (how I learned of it). I’m sharing it here so we can talk amongst ourselves. Please note, everything from hereon comes from Danny Boyle, not me. Enjoy!!

1. A DIRECTOR MUST BE A PEOPLE PERSON • Ninety-five percent of your job is handling personnel. People who’ve never done it imagine that it’s some act, like painting a Picasso from a blank canvas, but it’s not like that. Directing is mostly about handling people’s egos, vulnerabilities and moods. It’s all about trying to bring everybody to a boil at the right moment. You’ve got to make sure everyone is in the same film. It sounds stupidly simple, like ‘Of course they’re in the same film!’ But you see films all the time where people are clearly not in the same film together.

2. HIRE TALENTED PEOPLE • Your main job as a director is to hire talented people and get the space right for them to work in. I have a lot of respect for actors when they’re performing, and I expect people to behave. I don’t want to see people reading newspapers behind the camera or whispering or anything like that.

3. LEARN TO TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS • Ideally, you make a film up as you go along. I don’t mean that you’re irresponsible and you’ve literally got no idea, but the ideal is that you’ve covered everything—every angle—so that you’re free to do it any of those ways. Even on low-budget films, you have financial responsibilities. Should you fuck it up, you can still fall back on one of those ways of doing it. You’ve got Plan A to go back to, even though you should always make it with Plan B if you can. That way keeps it fresh for the actors, and for you.

4. FILM HAPPENS IN THE MOMENT • What’s extraordinary about film is that you make it on the day, and then it’s like that forever more. On that day, the actor may have broken up with his wife the night before, so he’s inevitably going to read a scene differently. He’s going to be a different person. I come from theater, which is live and changes every night. I thought film was going to be the opposite of that, but it’s not. It changes every time you watch it: Different audiences, different places, different moods that you’re in. The thing is logically fixed, but it still changes all the time. You have to get your head around that.

5. IF YOUR LAST FILM WAS A SMASH HIT, DON’T PANIC • I had an obsession with the story of 127 Hours, which pre-dated Slumdog Millionaire. But I know—because I’m not an idiot—that the only reason [the studio] allowed us to make it was because Slumdog made buckets of money for them and they felt an obligation of sorts. Not an obligation to let me do whatever I want, but you kind of get a free go on the merry-go-round.

6. DON’T BE AFRAID TO TELL STORIES ABOUT OTHER CULTURES • You can’t just hijack a culture for your story, but you can benefit from it. If you go into it with the right attitude, you can learn a lot about yourself, as well as about the potential of film in other cultures, which is something we tried to do with Slumdog Millionaire… Most films are still made in America, about Americans, and that’s fine. But things are changing and I think Slumdog was evidence of that. There will be more evidence as we go on.

7. USE YOUR POWER FOR GOOD • You have so much power as director that if you’re any good at all, you should be able to use that to the benefit of everyone. You have so much power to shape the movie the way you want it that, if you’re on form and you’ve done your prep right and you’re ready, you should be able to make a decent job of it with the other people.

8. DON’T HAVE AN EGO • Your working process—the way you treat people, your belief in people—will ultimately be reflected in the product itself. The means of production are just as important as what you produce. Not everyone believes that, but I do. I won’t stand for anyone being treated badly by anyone. I don’t like anyone shouting or abusing people or anything like that. You see people sometimes who are waiting for you to be like that, because they’ve had an experience like that in the past, but I’m not a believer in that. The texture of a film is affected very much by the honor with which you make it.

9. MAKE THE TEST SCREENING PROCESS WORK FOR YOU • Test screenings are tough. It makes you nervous, exposing the film, but they’re very important and I’ve learned a great deal from using them. Not so much from the whole process of cards and the discussions afterwards, but the live experience of sitting in an auditorium with an audience that doesn’t know much about the story you’re going to tell them—I find that so valuable. I’ve learned not so much to like it, but to value how important it is. I think you have to, really.

10. COME TO THE SET WITH A LOOK BOOK • I always have a bible of photographs, images by which I illustrate a film. I don’t mean strict storyboards, I just mean for inspiration for scenes, for images, for ideas, for characters, for costumes, even for props. These images can come from anywhere. They can come from obvious places like great photographers, or they can come from magazine advertisements—anywhere, really. I compile them into a book and I always have it with me and I show it to the actors, the crew, everybody!

11. EVEN PERFECT FORMULAS DON’T ALWAYS WORK • As a director your job is to find the pulse of the film through the actors, which is partly linked to their talent and partly to their charisma. Charisma is a bit indefinable, thank God, or else it would be prescribed in the way that you chemically make a new painkiller. In the movies—and this leads to a lot of tragedy and heartache—you can sometimes have the most perfect formula and it still doesn’t work. That’s a reality that we are all victims of sometimes and benefit from at other times. But if you follow your own instincts and make a leap of faith, then you can at least be proud of the way you did it.

12. TAKE INSPIRATION WHERE YOU FIND IT • When we were promoting Slumdog Millionaire, we were kind of side-by-side with Darren Aronofsky, who was also with Fox Searchlight and was promoting The Wrestler. I watched it and it was really interesting; Darren just decided that he was going to follow this actor around, and it was wonderful. I thought, ‘I want to make a film like that. I want to see if I can make a film like that.’ It’s a film about one actor. It’s about the monolithic nature of film sometimes, you know? It’s about a dominant performance.

13. PUSH THE PRAM • I think you should always try to push things as far as you can, really. I call it “pushing the pram.” You know, like a stroller that you push a baby around in? I think you should always push the pram to the edge of the cliff—that’s what people go to the cinema for. This could apply to a romantic comedy; you push anything as far as it will stretch. I think that’s one of your duties as a director… You’ll only ever regret not doing that, not having pushed it. If you do your job well, you’ll be amazed at how far the audience will go with you. They’ll go a long, long way—they’ve already come a long way just to see your movie!

14. ALWAYS GIVE 100 PERCENT • You should be working at your absolute maximum, all the time. Whether you’re credited with stuff in the end doesn’t really matter. Focus on pushing yourself as much as you can. I tend not to write, but I love bouncing off of writing; I love having the writers write and then me bouncing off of it. I bounce off writers the same way I bounce off actors.

15. FIND YOUR OWN “ESQUE” • A lesson I learned from A Life Less Ordinary was about changing a tone—I’m not sure you can do that. We changed the tone to a kind of Capra-esque tone, and whenever you do anything more “esque,” you’re in trouble. That would be one of my rules: No “esques.” Don’t try to Coen-esque anything or Capra-esque anything or Tarkovsky-esque anything, because you’ll just get yourself in a lot of trouble. You have to find your own “esque” and then stick to it.

Full article (with pictures) here:
http://www.moviemaker.com/articles-directing/danny-boyle-15-golden-rules-filmmaking/

Happy creating!

Lessons From ‘THE GODFATHER’

In this day and age, I think it’s safe to say that most people have either seen or at least heard of the film THE GODFATHER, starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, John Cazale and Diane Keaton, along with a host of other stellar actors. It was released in 1972, directed and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola, based on the book THE GODFATHER by Mario Puzo, and produced by Paramount Pictures, which was being run by Robert Evans at the time.

Everything about this movie is legendary. It was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won three: Best Picture, Best Actor (Brando), and Best Screenplay Adaptation (Puzo and Coppola). It was the first “crime family drama” of its kind. Its characters, shooting style, music and dialogue all became part of our national consciousness and filmmaking history. Brando’s performance is still considered one of the best film performances ever, revered, mimicked and parodied the world over.

For those of us in the movie business, or who are film buffs, the making of the film is also legendary. In the biographical documentary THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, Robert Evans talks about some of the epic fights he had with Coppola before, during and after the shoot, and the enormous pressure he was under to make sure the film was a success for the financially ailing studio.

Last weekend, as I was dissecting my book and stitching it back together, I watched the film with the director’s commentary on so I could hear the other side of the story.

Now it’s difficult to imagine, but at the time Coppola wasn’t a famous director. He was an up-and-coming director and only 32 years old. He had a young wife and children. He didn’t get paid much and neither did anyone else on the film, which was made for 6.5 Million. Considering how much it grossed (approximately 133.6 Million domestic, 243.8 Million worldwide (www.boxofficemojo.com), the budget was miniscule.

To save money, Coppola had to get creative. Certain wide shots and long shots were filmed without the real actors, but with extras dressed to look like them, and the actors’ voices dubbed in later. Coppola used his own newborn baby, Sofia Coppola, for the infamous Baptism scene/sequence. He hired other family members to do the music and be extras. When he edited the movie, he lived in the “maid’s room” in James Caan’s 2-bedroom apartment.

The best part of the commentary is when he talks about his fears of getting fired, which were very real and lasted almost the entire time. It’s a strange Hollywood thing, but just because a studio hires you doesn’t mean they support or trust you. Coppola was faced with opposition to practically every decision he made: the actors, the music, the locations, the lighting, the editing… EVERYTHING.

At one point, he was so convinced he was getting the axe, he called Robert Evans’ secretary to ask if he should even go to set. She told him to go because they wouldn’t fire him mid-week (it was Wednesday), but on the weekend. He used the time to re-shoot a scene the studio had complained about, and fire the people on his team whom he considered “the traitors.” A pre-emptive strike, if you will. And it worked. Paramount was flustered and Coppola made it to another week.

There were times when he was so stressed, he didn’t know if he could keep going. There were times when he felt insecure. He remarks that when THE FRENCH CONNECTION, a high octane action-thriller, came out in 1971 (while he was editing) and was a huge hit, he was sure that no one would want to see his dark, slow movie with a whole lot of talking. Of course, now we know that he did keep going. But he overcame all those obstacles without knowing whether the film would do well. He overcame them by believing in himself.

According to Coppola, the moral of the story is that a director should trust his vision and stick to it. If he had caved to the demands of the studio, or his own doubts and fears, the film would have been totally different and most likely not a success. The choices he made were unpopular. He had to defend them tooth and nail. But in the end, those choices are what we remember about the film and why people like me, and many others, still watch and study it thirty years later.

And by the way, the horse head was real. They got it from a dog food company.

Happy creating!

Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Duvall, Marlon Brando