I hope, dear reader, you won’t object to me taking a moment to recount an interesting development in one of my own projects, a feature film called Nitrate? We’ll return to the third part of my interview with leading film editors very soon, I promise. What’s that? You’ll give me a few minutes. Appreciated.

It all began with a conversation over beers in Belgo and ended up with a body found floating in the Thames. Except the conversation happened in 2002 and the body turned up in 1960. Confused? Maybe I should hand the reins of this story to Kevin Morris, intrepid reporter for The Daily Dot – click on the Polish movie poster below to read how I got caught in a rather big lie.

In case you’re wondering, it says “Waiting…” Yuri Gadyukin’s 1957 unauthorised take on “Waiting for Godot”

So, if you enjoyed this little deception and want to hear more, watch this space or subscribe to the Facebook group for “Nitrate“. Meanwhile, take a look at a trailer for the project:

xx

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2013

To be sent my articles as they come out, hit ‘follow’ under the photo of my happy smiling face at the top of this page.

Last time I asked my panel of expert film editors how they prepared to approach their material. Now we’re on to the main event – cutting the scene. I wanted to talk about the most basic but central element of the craft: the cut. When do you cut? Indeed, when don’t you cut? What gets in the way of making a good cut?

A quick reminder of the panel:

Mick Audsley

Chris Dickens

Clare Douglas

Ewa J. Lind

Oscars and other awards (which they have aplenty) aside, click on the links to check out their CVs. I think their work will tell you why I rate these guys highly and respect their opinions.

So, I ask my panel to talk about the moment of the cut: what makes an editor decide that this shot has played itself out, that it’s time to give us something new to look at? Ewa Lind offers advice that had been passed on to her from her mentor Barry Vince – ‘always go out on a high’. She explains that he was talking about never going out when the energy is low, after something’s happened; always go out when something’s about to happen. If someone’s throwing a ball, cut just as it is about to leave the hand. Or if a character is walking, place your cut when they’re at their tallest, just before their front foot hits the ground. She also advises against letting characters leave frame, on the same basis. Besides, what do we get from seeing a defocussed empty frame?

“Always go out on a high” – Ewa J. Lind

Clare brings up the issue of pace. She observes that a badly paced edit will make the audience feel that something’s not right, without being able to say why. Even films where editing is deliberately made to stand out, shots are jump cut etc., have to be paced properly to work and will be seen as an exhilarating ride or a confusing jumble of shots depending on whether the pace is good or bad. Of course, pace is related to rhythm, and a sense of rhythm is something an editor either has, or they haven’t – but clearly pace is an important factor in the placement of edits.

Ewa has more to add on the precise placement of cuts. She personally favours not cutting in the middle of words. “Words are almost visceral,” she says “There’s a ‘point’ to what’s said, and you’ve got to see that ‘point’ hit”. She mimes fencing for me. In fact, the only occasion when she’ll cut in the middle of words is if she deliberately wants to de-emphasise what the speaker is saying, if, for example, someone is talking and she doesn’t want the audience to focus on their words. She disagrees with Edward Dmytryk’s exhortation always to cut in the middle, which she believes takes all of the energy out of an edit.

Anne Hathaway – one take wonder.

Chris meanwhile has more interesting things to say about the value of not cutting. “People unconsciously know when you cut,” he tells me, “they know that you’re cheating.” If you see a car driving and then it rolls and the actor gets out, even if it’s done with effects, it feels real. If someone’s singing and you can hold the shot for the whole of that song, you know that they’ve really done it. Famously Chris did just this recently with Anne Hathaway singing ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ in Les Miserables, a decision some would say contributed to her Best Supporting Actress Oscar (although Chris himself is too modest even to make reference to that film). I’ve written about sustained takes before, but Chris’s point gave me something new to think about – that sense of a held take having the energy of a live performance, the tension. Chris tries to avoid cutting unless he has to, although he’s keen to point out that he avoids making hard and fast rules about anything. The group generally agrees that there are no fixed rules of editing.

“People unconsciously know when you cut, they know that you’re cheating” – Chris Dickens

The discussion so far, is based on the assumption that you can cut where and when you like, but it doesn’t always feel that way. The decision of when to cut is oft complicated by the editor’s perpetual enemy: bad continuity. The head that’s turned before the line from one angle, and after the line from another. The coat that’s first over the left shoulder, then over the right. The panel hold similar views on the importance of physical continuity, but with a variety of emphases. Good continuity can be very important or almost irrelevant, according to Clare, it depends on the style that the director and cameraman have adopted. A very clinical, precise style will cause continuity errors to stand out, a looser more documentary style will tend to be more forgiving.

Ewa recalls that this was something she felt to be vitally important when she started her career, but she’s learnt over time that it’s of no importance whatsoever, especially when compared to emotional continuity. She sometimes feels a little smug, she reports, when she cheats physical continuity and nobody notices. It’s amazing what you can get away with. She does comment, however, that she sometimes finds that inexperienced directors get really stuck on physical continuity. Chris comments that he ignores physical continuity completely because he knows that he can always go back and find a solution later.

“Lack of continuity is the poetry of cinema” – Mick Audsley

“That Obscure Object of Desire”… well, one of them anyway.

Mick Audsley is the most forthright in his views on continuity. “Lack of continuity,” he claims, “is the poetry of cinema”. He points out that only cinema can do discontinuity – he cites Buñuel’s film That Obscure Object of Desire where the female lead was played by two actresses who are swapped from one shot to the next. Mick believes that discontinuity creates a sort of tension, indeed material shot with multiple cameras can sometimes cut together too smoothly and be dull as a result. Discontinuity can be expressive; if you watch someone getting out of a car, not seeing all of the door opening can help convey the sense that they’re in a hurry. Of course, some discontinuity is not poetic: it’s a mistake that expresses nothing, he concedes, but if, like Chris, he sees two moments that he wants to be close to each other he’ll prioritise that desire, and fix the continuity issue later. “It’s a card trick” he tells me, you do something to distract, perhaps using sound or music to pull the audience’s attention from the sleight of hand.

So, these are some of the things the panel thinks about when deciding to cut or not, but how do they decide where they should cut to? In the third part of this expert discussion I’ll be asking about cutting between shot sizes, camera angles and characters. Coming soon…

xx

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2013

Edited by Dr Sara Lodge

To be sent my articles as they come out, hit ‘follow’ under the photo of my happy smiling face at the top of this page.

Compared with other elements of filmmaking, editing is a solitary art. We might have an assistant to help with cutting room admin, and will certainly be sitting with a director at some point, but most of the actual work is done alone. Given that an increasing number of us are working from home or in temporary edit suites, the camaraderie born of working in close proximity with other editors along a corridor of cutting rooms is beginning to disappear; we are losing out on the exchange of ideas such an environment can foster.  In London, Mick Audsley is trying to revive a sense of an editing community with his Sprocket Rocket events. For myself, I thought I’d create my own virtual cutting room corridor by bending the ears of a few well-respected colleagues, to find out how they approach their craft. I’m fascinated to see how editors from very different backgrounds think. Will they agree or do they have dramatically different approaches?

In this first piece I’ll be looking at how an editor prepares to work with their material.  What do we look for when looking through rushes (dailies)? Which take should we use? Most importantly, how do we approach a scene? I want to get to the nitty gritty.

First, a few introductions:

Mick Audsley

Mick Audsley – Regular editor for Stephen Frears and Terry Gilliam, Mick is currently cutting The Zero Theorem for Mr Gilliam. He was BAFTA nominated for Dangerous Liaisons; you can read more about him here.

Ewa J. Lind

Ewa J. Lind – Ewa graduated from the NFTS and hit the ground rolling by cutting Leon the Pig Farmer. She edited the BAFTA-winning The Warrior for Asif Kapadia, Under the Skin for Carine Adler and has cut films in more languages than any other editor I know.

Chris Dickens

Chris Dickens – Working his way up through the cutting rooms of TV comedies like Spaced, Chris is now as comfortable cutting drama as he is comedy, indeed he won an Oscar for his work on Slumdog Millionaire.  More recently he edited Les Miserables, and is currently working with king of British geek comedy Richard Ayoade.

Clare Douglas – Clare learnt her trade during the glory days of the BBC, where she cut classic series like Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy and the later works of Dennis Potter. In the years since she developed rich creative partnerships with both Paul Greengrass and Stephen Poliakoff, including such films as Bloody Sunday and The Lost Prince.

The editor’s job can start before the cameras have even shot a frame. Mick is always keen to give feedback to the director from the first instant he reads the screenplay. His eye is particularly drawn to any dialogue scene longer than two pages; he worries when talking is the only thing moving the story forward, and is eager to reduce the dialogue to its essential minimum.

All my interviewees agree that the script is of primary importance. Expressing the writers’ intention is the editor’s first order of business, at least at assembly stage. Ewa, however, avoids re-reading the script directly before cutting the scene, preferring to keep her knowledge of the intended shape of the scene in the back of her mind so that she’s as responsive to what was actually shot, as she is to the original intention.

From broad agreement on the script, the panel vary widely in the way they approach watching rushes. Ewa takes a more hands-off approach, only making notes of selects and when she sees something unexpected. By contrast, Clare keeps a book in which she records very detailed notes of good line readings, gestures and looks in every take. Mick used to make notes on the takes while watching them but has found that, with the introduction of digital cameras, the volume of rushes he’s getting these days is overwhelming “I’d be there all night”, he comments. Chris meanwhile has devised a very particular way of looking through rushes. Like all the other interviewees, he makes a point of watching all the takes; he assembles them into sequences with the boards cut off in order to do this. With multi-camera action rushes he watches each camera separately. Viewing this sequence, he takes notes of which takes he likes. “You get to see the progression of why a performance ended up the way it did,” he observes. It also allows him to be very familiar with the content of all the takes, because there’ll be good things in each one. He then copies that sequence and cuts it down, removing the material he’s rejected and watches it again. He repeats this process until he has a cut scene. “All that time I’m storing up knowledge of the takes, that will be useful during the director’s cut” he says. He recognises that this may be a very time-consuming process, frustrating too sometimes, but he maintains that it makes cutting the scene much faster in the end.

“You’re looking for something you can tell the story with” – Chris Dickens

So, what are we looking for when watching the rushes? Chris gives a good summary: “you’re looking for something you can tell the story with”. Ewa comments “I don’t think about editing much when I first watch the rushes. Keeping the script in the back of my mind, I look for the strongest, most true performance, staying open to what grips me”. Chris says that he’s always looking for the performance that feels the most real. ‘Performance’ is the key word when talking about the editor’s principle of selection.

Significantly though, line delivery is only one part of a performance.  Clare notes that she’s also looking for interesting reactions from non-speakers. She recalls with pleasure her days at the BBC, where the system dictated that editors always had to watch rushes mute in the first instance. This seems to link with a comment Ewa made about editing films in a language other than her own: she feels that if a performance is true, real, right it will shine through, through the expressions and behaviour of the actor, irrespective of the words. It’s all about the visuals for Mick too: the looks that pass between people, how they behave. “The spoken word is the secondary language” he claims.

“The spoken word is the secondary language” – Mick Audsley

Directors often don’t select takes on set these days, so the editor often decides which take to try first; so how do we make that call? Chris tends to like take one: he feels that it often has a good energy, although there are often technical reasons why you can’t use it. Both he and Clare comment that, when first assembling a scene, they’ll choose the take that contains the greatest volume of good material and stick with that, unless there’s something within it that really doesn’t work. With the pressure on to keep up with the material coming in from the shoot, this allows them to get the scene cut together fast. They then go back at a later time and look to see if there’s better material in other takes; Chris refers to this as “mining”. Ewa warns that sometimes actors change performance so significantly from one take to another that different takes will constitute different versions. Cutting between these can create an emotional discontinuity.

Selecting material is one thing, but you also have to determine in what order it should go. As part of his strategy for dealing with the overwhelming weight of rushes, Mick is always looking for ways to help him make decisions. He’s very focused on the trajectory of the story, so he works out where the scene is going and works backwards from that point. If the scene isn’t actually going anywhere, if nothing changes within it, he knows that sooner or later it’s likely to hit the cutting room floor. Chris thinks that digital editing might sometimes encourage us to work so fast that we don’t stop to think about what we’re doing. He admits that “sometimes putting something together can give you an idea, but then you still have to think about the whole scene or the whole film in order to make decisions.” He encourages editors to slow down and think about the whole, in order to get better results.

Editing is about more than simply being led by the material: the editor needs to bring their own creativity to the process. As Mick puts it “Go in with an opinion from the page of what you think you want to see. Without an opinion, it feels like you’re going to drown in the volume of material. The minute you make one decision it calls for the next thing, and it’s moving you forward.” There’s a reasonable chance that your initial plan won’t work, so if you think you’re wrong, you’ve got to be ready to change direction. This is all a necessary part of the process of learning how to cut a scene.

Next time… “Making the cut.”

x

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2013

To be sent my articles as they come out, hit ‘follow’ under the photo of my happy smiling face at the top of this page.

1960: a film called Breathless was released that revolutionised cinema. It was shot on 16mm film, a technology previously only used for newsreels.  The French New Wave that followed inspired the counter-culture movies of the next decade, and left a mark still visible in the films we make now.

Five decades later: I, and many others, predicted that DSLR cameras (also designed for journalists) could stimulate a digital New Wave that would continue Godard’s revolution. Finally the prohibitive price of filmmaking had been swept aside – the basic technology to make a film could be bought for the cost of a second-hand car – and a new generation of filmmakers could go wild. I anticipated trends I’d love and trends I’d hate. I expected Peter Biskind to be gleefully gathering dirt on a new generation of Easy Riders and Raging Bulls. I waited for movies to be turned upside down.

I’m still waiting.

Cinema technology is moving at missile speed, but the creative innovations you’d expect to accompany the new cameras, sound recorders, editing, grading, mixing and projecting devices are yet to explode. Why?

Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend”: the spirit of the Canon 5D

It’s not that DSLR cameras haven’t been used for feature films – they have. They have even been used in a number of good films such as Like Crazy and Weekend. But such films are few and far between; most DSLR movies are utterly unremarkable. Ironically, a greater number of edgy, experimental films were made during the DV era of the ‘90s. That, far inferior, technology was embraced by directors such as David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Danny Boyle, Michael Winterbottom, Mike Figgis, Lars Trier and Wim Wenders. I’ve not heard of any of the above so much as touched a Canon 7D.

“28 Days Later” the first wave of the digital revolution

One reason up-and-coming filmmakers are failing to embrace the experimental potential of the cameras may be because we’ve got cannier financially. Go to any Q&A or seminar where a fresh-faced filmmaker is talking about their newly released debut, and they’ll tell you one thing: completing the film is only the first hill they had to climb. Getting the film to the public, in any form that would make money, was at least as hard.

In fact, you can make the job of getting your film to market considerably harder if you don’t first find out what the market wants. If you’ve chose to make a drama (i.e. non-genre story) with no stars and low production values you’re doomed unless you take the festivals by storm. And sometimes not even those elegant little laurel wreaths will guarantee paying off your credit card bills.

Quite reasonably, a lot of filmmakers have got real and now mean business. They’ve found stars… well, starlets… well, faces you’d half-recognise on a poster. They’ve picked a genre that has a following. They’ve spent as long on their business plan as they have on their script.

This careful preparation means that their films make it through the system: they have a brief domestic cinema release followed by run on DVD. The film makes a reasonable slice of bread and butter for their distributors, a modest return (perhaps) for the investors and nothing for the filmmaker. But that’s okay: the filmmaker has got to boss everyone around and see their vision come to life. Not exactly their vision: a compromise between their vision and market forces. But basically everyone’s happy. Except the crew, who were on deferrals and never see a penny. Or the critics – who are tired of watching the same film over and over again. Or the audience, which is wondering where its evening went.

I have nothing against cheap genre films. An inventive use of genres – combining them, relocating them geographically or chronologically, changing the gender or the race – can be fun, and can lead to unexpected creative ideas. However the business model I’ve just described doesn’t rely on a movie being inventive… or being ‘good’ in any way, it just has to be made. And made so that it will fit into a ready-made box.

In the business plans of these films lies a clue to their mediocrity. All such documents include a section where the success of the project is predicted by the past performance of similar movies. There’s a list of usual suspects that appear in this section: The Blair Witch Project, The Full Monty, Primer, Paranormal Activity, Once, Monsters… any film that turned a shoestring budget into ruby slippers.

Most producers know that they’re pulling the wool over investors eyes a little here: success stories like these are few and far between, and cannot be guaranteed.  But still they diligently reverse engineer these success stories, looking to find out what made them hits.  Few producers, however, spot (or they don’t acknowledge) the most significant common factor that was at the root of most of those successes.

The secret of these runaway hits reveals a flaw in the basic business model, which is founded on an incomplete understanding of market economics. The real runaway successes in any field are not those products that follow the market: they are those that lead it. This is doubly true when what you’re selling is a story. Few films on that list of usual suspects would have been able to find comparators to settle investors’ nerves; they just weren’t that similar to anything that had gone before.

In some ways movies are still a circus sideshow. The vaudevillian cry “Roll up! We’ll show you something you’ve never seen before” still works. Novelty alone is enough to get your audience excited. And afterwards they want to have that experience again. But if a film is made that’s similar to your story, that very similarity dictates that it won’t be as fresh. Too many films that trade off the success of an original, even if the follow-up is made by the same filmmakers, soon meet with the law of diminishing returns.

Statistics back this up. The 10 films offering the highest returns on investment since world war II were all original stories, in the sense of not being adaptations, many of them were genuinely unlike anything we’d seen previously.  Despite being a genre film, Paranormal Activity’s approach was new, and it was rewarded with a staggering 1.3 million per cent return. That figure should surely be enough to get any investor excited.

“Paranormal Activity” terrifyingly successful.

Surprisingly, however, this is not what investors want to hear. They want success to be more predictable; they want to see steadily rising bar charts, rather than wild spikes and inexplicable troughs.

And this is where the DSLR revolution fits in… or could fit in, were it to exist. The greatest disincentive to experimentation is fear of failure.  Ours has always been an expensive art, the most expensive aside from architecture. Mistakes are costly. The ability to make movies with little more than available resources means that cautious investors can be removed from the equation, and with them a lot of the nerves about risk-taking projects. There’s little to stop micro-budget filmmakers from embracing novelty and make the boldest, most original movie of which they can conceive.

Needless to say, a lot of these films will be dreadful: amateurish and incredibly misguided, but such films will not get picked up. They will only bother film festival programmers (sorry guys) and the friends and family of those who made them. Besides, a lot of low-budget films are already awful. Awful and derivative. At least the awful films of the digital revolution will be dire in new and unexpected ways.

The upside, however, is that those films that aren’t dreadful will be fresh and unexpected. Like the French New Wave before them, they will rejuvenate cinema. And, boy, does cinema need it! Genre has been interbred for so long that its DNA has grown weak. Even mainstream cinema won’t last long without new blood in the gene pool. We need fresh ideas, or the very future of the species is bleak.

But the window for a DSLR revolution will not last forever. Right now the quality difference between the cameras used on Hollywood features and those available to new filmmakers is the smallest it’s ever likely to be. Hollywood is pushing new technologies – 3D, 4k and HFR, and the cameras to make such films are well beyond the purse of emerging filmmakers.

So what have I been waiting for?

What have you been waiting for?

If you’re a filmmaker and you, like me, were bewildered by the poor crop of films in 2012, the answer lies in your hands. We’re the only people who are going to make films of 2013 worth watching. Let’s take up our cameras and set out to make the movie we want to make. Forget compromise with what we’re told that the market wants. Study that list of usual suspects and commit to making a film that’s unlike any of them. Let’s use the resources we have to hand to capture our own unique vision. We need to get Breathless again; we need to start our own New Wave.

xxx

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2012

To be sent my articles as they come out, hit ‘follow’ under the photo of my happy smiling face at the top of this page.

Like virtually everyone else in the film blogosphere, I’ve been to see The Hobbit recently in its High Frame Rate (HFR) presentation and, like everyone else, I feel drawn to offer my assessment of the new technology, especially since it raises some important questions about the nature of movies. Before I explain, let me give you a bit of background on the matter of frame rates. Unlike Peter Jackson, I’ll do my best to make it brief.

Low frame rate in action

In their early life, movies were run between 16 and 18 frames per second (fps); that is, each flickering second would be made up of 16 to 18 still images run together to give the impression of movement. With the introduction of sound, the frame rate was set at 24, the figure at which it stands to this day. Televisions later adopted slightly different frame rates  – 25fps in Europe, 29.97fps in the US – and developed different ways of presenting material shot on video rather than film, but for a long time frame rates didn’t change.

The first significant voice to question this status quo was not Peter Jackson, but Douglas Trumbull, Stanley Kubrick’s VFX wizard from 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the 1970s he did experiments at Pomona College, California with various frame rates, which lead him to conclude that 60fps was actually the ideal for cinema. Removing the flicker apparent in conventional cinema and adding smoothness to movement, he argued, would allow the audience to former a closer emotional association with what they were seeing. He developed a projection system on this principle called Showscan. It failed to attract the level of industry support necessary for a technology to flourish that ate up about 10 times more celluloid per second than standard cinema (not only was the film travelling faster, it was also wider).  Proving far too expensive, it withered on the vine.

This brings us pretty much up to date. Peter Jackson realised that digital technology has removed the cost obstacle of film stock that stood in Trumbull’s way. Jackson’s Hobbit runs at 48fps, which he asserts provides a more immersive experience than 24fps. James Cameron looks set to push the format further on Avatar 2 by returning to Trumbull’s 60fps. With these giants of cinematic spectacle behind HFR, its future must be assured.

But there’s a fly in the ointment. I mentioned earlier that TV had worked out its own way of presenting video material – it’s called interlaced frames. Each video frame is made up of two images (fields) shot a split second apart, leading to smoother motion than material shot on film. Unfortunately the effect is very similar to that of HFR. Even more unfortunately, the material most commonly shot with interlaced frames is news footage, quiz shows and daytime soaps. Rather than making The Hobbit more cinematic, Jackson has made it look more like Teletubbies. While the technical reason for the similarity might be lost on the general audience, the fact that The Hobbit in HFR feels somehow cheaper is inescapable.

Bilbo’s house… I think.

Describing this coincidence as unfortunate, this may be too charitable. It doesn’t take a trained eye to see the similarity between HFR and interlaced video, and Peter Jackson’s eye is certainly well-trained. Whether he decided to see past the similarity and decided that the audience must do so too, or had just gone too far down that road to turn back, is unclear. The fact that expensive TV drama, which could easily be shot with the smooth movement of interlaced video, chooses to adopt a more classically ‘cinematic’ 24fps should have been a clue that this might not be a good idea.

Adopting an optimistic mind-set, you might imagine that, given long enough, audiences will do as Jackson wishes and see past the format’s similarity to cheap TV, but motion is not the only problem with HFR.  The Hobbit clearly shows that the technology provides just too much picture information. HFR reveals texture and detail much more than the standard 24fps, and as a result props and sets made for the film are exposed to a much greater level of scrutiny. The same goes for make-up, especially when projected on to a really big screen – any artificiality is instantly revealed. Any flaws in the compositing of digital shots is also exposed by the forensic eye of HFR. All these are problems for films set in a fantasy world populated by quasi-human characters, where by necessity three-quarters of everything in any given frame is in some way artificial.

But these technical problems have been discussed eloquently and at length, and with sufficient money could be overcome; for me, the real hubris of HFR comes in its misunderstanding of the nature of cinema. The belief driving Jackson and Cameron’s HFR arms race is the same belief that saw the Hollywood studios rush into 3D and push on into 4k projection (also known as ultra High Definition). Here’s the thinking: if we can make the cinema screen a window on to a world which the human eye cannot distinguish from reality, audiences will inevitably succumb. This just ain’t so. If removing flicker were the key to stirring the audience to wonder and delight, stage plays would be lot more popular: no flicker or juddery motion there.

What Jackson and Cameron have failed to realise is that since the dawn of cinema with its shaky, silent, black and white images shown at 16-18fps audiences have not just tolerated the stylised reality movies present, they’ve embraced it. Suspending our disbelief is a joy, not a chore. The gauss created by film grain and flicker lends movies a dreamlike texture, which helps us see past their other imperfections and focus on the essential truths that the stories are telling us. Give us too much reality and we become more literal-minded, pedantic even. I’m not suggesting a return to hand-cranked cameras, but there is a happy medium: it’s called 24fps.

By making a film not only in HFR but also in 4k and 3D, Jackson is giving us 16 times more picture information than you’d see in a standard movie and all that extra data costs a small fortune to manage. What’s more, due to its short exposure times, HFR filmmaking requires more light, and therefore a bigger lighting budget. Add to that the additional costs of making props and sets to the highest standard and hiring the most skilled VFX and make-up technicians, and you’ve got to ask: is it worth it? It looks like this technology isn’t set to make movies better, it’s just going to make them more expensive to produce. And it’s not the audiences who benefit, it’s the companies selling the technology.

James Cameron: bigger, stronger, faster

I’m going to finish with a suggestion. Rather than ploughing their fortunes into bigger and more testosterone-based technologies, Peter Jackson and James Cameron could make movies more immediate, immersive experiences in a way that is almost guaranteed to succeed: they could set up an academy for screenwriters. A school, like the Juilliard for classical musicians, that was dedicated solely to refining the craft of screenwriting, and which trained writers to within an inch of their lives, would add significantly to the audience’s enjoyment of the stories that would result. It could raise the bar for studios and indy’s alike, just as HBO raised the bar for all other TV drama. Let’s see an investment in the ‘it’ of cinema rather than in the kit of cinema. You can obsessively clean the window of the screen to a high shine but if the story that’s happening the other side is dull, then really what’s the point?

Edited by Dr Sara Lodge

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2012

To be sent my articles as they come out, hit ‘follow’ under the photo of my happy smiling face at the top of this page.

A month or two back I wrote a piece about the nature of screen dialogue, focusing on naturalism and style; back then I suggested that there was more to say about the business of making your character talk. There is.

Part of the challenge of writing really good dialogue lies in the many different layers there can and should be in a spoken exchange. This is one reason why most writers over-write on their first pass – they want to get their dialogue doing all that work, but they’ve not yet got it integrated. On a practical level, it makes sense to build dialogue up a layer at a time. Don’t imagine that Joss Wheedon just sits at his laptop and writes that stuff in a continuous, inspired flow. It’s like working with oil paints, you’ve got to build up the layers to get those luminous colours and fine lustre. So what layers am I talking about?

1. Information

The most basic task that dialogue has, and the one that hack screenwriters rarely get past, is delivering story information. Why does the character need to get to Grand Central Station by 12 noon? How does he know about the bomb? This is the donkeywork that dialogue is almost always given to do. It shouldn’t be doing this work: dialogue is worth more than that, and factual information is usually presented more tellingly through visuals. Sadly, despite being massively over-qualified, dialogue is very good at presenting certain sorts of information quickly, so usually gets stuck with much of that job.

Getting this plot information out of your system and down on the page can help you get through a comprehensible first pass of your story, but very much at the expense of good dialogue. No matter; you can go back and make it better by doing another pass that concentrates on…

2. Motivation & Strategy

The most important work that dialogue can do is to show us who the characters are through what they want. If your basic story structure is any good, all of your characters will have objectives and each scene will show those characters pursuing those objectives as best they can. We learn about the character by seeing how they go about achieving those goals, the strategies they use. Do they greet every problem with in-your-face aggression, like Tommy (Joe Pesci) in Goodfellas, hoping to scare people into submission? Do they believe that they’ll get what they need if they persuade everyone to like them, like David Brent in The Office?  Are they wary, and sit there silently soaking up information, like George Smiley in Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy; or do they love the sound of their own voice like Harry Lime in The Third Man? If you’ve done your homework and figured out what the character wants and how they usually go about getting it, writing the dialogue becomes a lot easier.

Tommy in “Goodfellas”, making friends

But dialogue is rarely about one person doing all the talking, so what the other players bring to the scene is also important. Ideally, secondary characters should not always be susceptible to the protagonist’s favourite strategy. Pit a character who relies on their sparkling wit against a security guard with no sense of humour and the scene comes alive. Our hero has to switch to plan B and we get to know them better when we see their choice of second-string strategy.  For example, we learn a lot about a character who starts off by trying to charm, but then becomes threatening at the first sign of resistance. Suddenly we don’t like them so much.

We can even learn something about a character from how easy they find it to switch strategy. We tend to admire characters who are socially adept – they can read people quickly and change tack easily to get what they want; they turn on a dime. However, a character who finds it difficult to adopt more than one strategy, or changes strategy awkwardly, can often be the source of good comedy. I can give you a real world example. A  few years back, British talk-show host Jonathan Ross had Nicole Kidman on his show. For those who don’t know his style: Ross’s shtick sometimes relies on outrageous flirtation with attractive female guests. Whether Nicole Kidman missed that this was an act, or if it was an act for which she just didn’t care, wasn’t quite clear. Either way, the interview got off to a bad start. Where it turned from awkward into funny was when Jonathan Ross responded, not by dropping the flirtation, but by turning the volume up to 11. He clearly hoped that if he made it more obviously jokey, she’d get it and play along. The opposite happened and her discomfort turned quickly into affront. It was a classic of car-crash television.

Build in the characters’ strategies and you’ll find that what previously just felt like two people chatting for a bit, quickly and easily turns into a scene with a shape to it, where something’s really happening between the characters. This is enough for most writers, but some choose to go deeper.

3. Subtext

This can belong either to the character or the writer. The first is where a character deliberately drops hints that are meant to serve their agenda, without being direct or obvious. “I was supposed to be going to the ball tonight, but Frederick can’t take me” – clearly this is said by someone who wants the person they’re addressing to accompany them to the ball.

When writers use subtext outside of the persona of the character, it is often to tell us things about the character not directly related to their prime objective. Sometimes we learn about the character’s attitudes from the language they use: maybe they casually use inappropriate racial slurs in conversation, suggesting that they’re not as enlightened as they might have seemed. Sometimes they’ll inadvertently say thing that reveal their backstory.

Miles in “Sideways”: a different sort of Noir.

Subtext can even give us an insight into the character’s deeper motivation, why they feel the need to pursue their objective. Sometimes this will be in a scene that’s been written specifically to contain this subtext. Remember the scene in Sideways where Miles (Paul Giamatti) talks about why he’s so in love with Pinot Noir?

Click here to watch “Sideways” Pinot Noir scene

As he talks, we realise that he has unconsciously identified with the characteristics of the grape variety. While he may not be aware how much he’s revealing about himself, Maya (Virginia Madsen) seems to get it. She learns, as we do, why Miles struggles with relationships.

Where subtext is at its best, however, is with what’s left unsaid; the questions characters refuse to answer, or from which they deflect by a change of subject. These silences, draw us into the characters and challenge us to play detective and work out what’s going on inside their heads. Cinema, above all other forms of drama, excels at this form of subtext for one reason alone: we have the close-up. Watching someone refusing to answer a question is uniquely fascinating on the big screen because we can work hard to study their face for the answer.

Once all this is layered-in, the dialogue should be reading pretty well, but there is one last surface layer you can chose to add:

1. Tone of voice

This can be used to add credibility to the character, most usually in the context of their social background. Speech patterns and word choice can reinforce characters’ class, education and geographical origin. Some writers also use it to add more specific individual characterization. An exercise writers are often encouraged to undertake is “cover up the character names and we should be able to tell which character is speaking from the dialogue alone”. This is bad advice, or at least advice ill-suited to screenwriting. You might well be able to identify the characters because the objective contained within the line: “Tell me the name of your source!” Okay, that’s clearly the interrogator; but the exercise is encouraging us to give the characters distinctive voices – maybe one is blunt and earthy, another fay and highfalutin’. Good cinematic dialogue tends to be too pared-down to support much of this sort of characterization and it often sounds fake and mannered when it’s written that way.

To illustrate the point, this video was posted on YouTube not long back. It is a cut-together of the common tropes / recycled dialogue of one of America’s best-respected screenwriters: Aaron Sorkin.

While it’s mildly embarrassing for Aaron, it inadvertently demonstrates that much of his dialogue is equally credible, no matter which of the characters is speaking the line. Little attempt has been made to individualize the characters by giving them quirks of speech. Instead Sorkin knows that a good line is a good line, and that a smart actor will be only to happy to make it their own.

The last stage of the process isn’t a layer, so much as a weeding out of redundant dialogue. Does this line of dialogue work to push the story forward or deepen our understanding of it? If not: show it the door. Most screenwriters over-write dialogue, at least at first. Nothing to be ashamed of. Develop an admiration for the scene without an ounce of fat on it, learn to love the white spaces on the page, and your dialogue will offer the actor and the audience more space for interpretation, more room to move.

This order of business may not be to everybody’s taste. Some might prefer to see the character intentions as the base coat and find room for any necessary exposition later. I think the most important thing is not to even attempt to get the dialogue right first pass: it’s not going to happen. Write the layers and you’ll see your scenes develop in richness and your characters start to shine.

xxx

Edited by Dr Sara Lodge

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2012

To be sent my articles as they come out, hit ‘follow’ under the photo of my happy smiling face at the top of this page.

Last month Fujifilm, one of the last two manufacturers of 35mm negative for motion pictures, announced that it would cease production of its film stocks. The move was widely heralded as one of the final nails in the coffin for movies being shot on film.

Bane, saddened by the demise of film.

Purists greeted the news fearfully: for some filmmakers 35mm is a standard, not just in the respect of being a default format, but also in the respect of being a flag around which the faithful rally. Earlier in the year Christopher Nolan arranged a preview screening of The Dark Knight Rises for his fellow directors. He used the event to exhort them to stand by celluloid, and to demand the right to shoot on that format (indeed the end roller includes a line telling the audience that the movie was shot on film). You might imagine this to be a hopeless rear-guard action but, when you consider that the majority of Hollywood movies and a great many US TV shows are still shot on 35mm, Nolan’s campaign doesn’t look so desperate. With such loyalty to the format, have rumours of the death of film been exaggerated? No.  The past year has seen not just the end of Fujifilm, but Aaton, Arri and Panavision have all ceased production of 35mm cameras. Kodak is having a tough time economically and the bowing out of its last remaining rival is hardly likely to encourage it to keep prices down.  Nolan is right that the format is under serious threat.

How did we get here? Who or what is responsible? Allow me to play Poirot, and list the possible suspects.

Most people think that digital cameras are muscling out film cameras because they are so much cheaper.  It’s certainly true that shooting digitally is much less expensive than shooting on film. While high-end digital cameras themselves are only slightly cheaper to hire, when shooting on 35mm the cost of film stock and processing are hefty. By contrast, digital cameras shoot onto data cards, which come with the kit and are reusable. To give you a sense of how much cheaper, let me offer this comparison. Studio rom-com Crazy, Stupid Love was shot on Fuji’s 35mm in the same year as indy romance Like Crazy was shot on a Canon 7D. Two 1000 foot rolls of 35mm film, plus processing and transfer, costs about the same as a 7D camera. So, you could buy a camera capable of producing big screen images for the cost of shooting 23 mins of unedited film, about a third of what a unit might be expect to shoot in a single day (and that’s not counting the 35mm camera hire). To put it another way, you could buy about eighty 7Ds for the cost of shooting on film. Of course, the 35mm will look a whole lot better, but it really ought to for that money.

Shooting Like Crazy

However, for Hollywood movies with budgets over about $50m, filmstock and processing charges are a small percentage of the total spend, so why stint? Aesthetic concerns aside, 35mm is still recognised as being technically the best format on which to shoot: it captures more details in shadows and highlights than any digital camera and offers richer colours. What’s more, the saving in processing costs is replaced with other charges. Shooting on high-end digital cameras means you need another crew member: a DIT, who manages the camera data, and that person must be paid. Some cameras also require the rushes to be converted overnight, if they are to be edited the next day. While the charges for this don’t counterbalance the cost of stock and processing, they certainly take the shine off the savings. While a few established directors have been seduced by the digital revolution – notably Steven Soderbergh and Michael Mann – most have stayed true to a standard that has been in use for over 120 years. No, mes amis, digital cameras could not have been responsible for the death of film.

Many industry-watchers have named 3D as the prime suspect. It’s pretty much impossible to shoot the new 3D with 35mm cameras, nor can it be projected off celluloid. In the last two years most of the Hollywood studios’ blockbusters have been produced in 3D, due to the higher ticket prices that can be charged for 3D screenings, resulting in a reduced demand for 35mm.

But, even though you can’t shoot 3D with 35mm, many of those movies were in fact shot on film and in 2D; they were converted to 3D in post-production. It is not even certain that 3D is here to stay: audience’s enthusiasm for the technology is waning. Even if the studios are still keen on 3D, the writing is a long way from being on the wall for 2D movies. Yes, 3D was certainly present when film received its fatal blow, but it did not have the strength to deliver that blow unaided.

A necessary evil?

While everyone has been looking on movie sets for film’s murderer, the guilty party was safe and warm the other side of town. Arguments still rage about the advantage of film and digital cameras, but another digital debate was resolved a year or two back. Most audiences and filmmakers would agree that the advantages of digital projection outweigh those of 35mm projection.  Film projectors have never been the most lovable of machines. They drag the film through their guts using sharp metal teeth: these scratch and tear at any film print that wanders off the straight and narrow. Only one of my short films has a 35mm print, and that was a thing of beauty. It lasted for three screenings before a poorly aligned projector left a line of shark-like bite marks across its delicate surface. Few people mourn the passing of these beasts.

Digital projection provides a steadier image, without dirt or scratches. Even a film print that has escaped the ravages of a projector fails to match up to its digital counterpart.  I use to attend grading sessions at the film labs: a first generation print would be run off the cut negative and screened for the cameraman and director. This print would present a beautifully crisp image. The next time I’d see the film would be at a cast and crew screening, near the time of the film’s general release. Sometimes the release print would be as many as five generations away from the original negative, and the resulting image was, by comparison, soft and a little muddy. The first time I saw the current generation of 2k digital projectors in action, I was reminded of those grading sessions in Technicolor and Deluxe: the digital image is just one step away from the film that went through the camera.

Exhibit 2: a DCP drive

However this step forward in cinema technology has come at a heavy price. The take up of digital projectors has been extensive, boosted by the growth of 3D. While 35mm prints are still doing the rounds, the DCP drives (Digital Cinema Package) are well on the way to taking over. These drives are reusable and writing a movie to one cost a fraction of the price of striking a 35mm print. The distributors win, the audience wins, but the companies who produced the release prints lose. Who are they? Technicolor, Deluxe, Kodak and Fuji. A feature film shoots on average 200,000′ of camera negative but, if it gets a good cinema release, it could take another million feet of film to get it in front of the audiences. The loss of this business is what’s really killing the companies that make and process film. Christopher Nolan can campaign as hard as he likes, but if Kodak can’t afford to produce film at a price the studios are willing to pay, celluloid’s fate will be sealed.

While 35mm film has been deeply wounded by digital projection, aided and abetted by 3D, it is not yet dead; in fact its final demise may yet be a way off. Once a dedicated audience has taken a technology to their hearts, it proves very difficult to kill completely: just look at vinyl records. Back in the 1980s who would have predicted that 12” albums would still be going at a time when CDs were on the way out? Have the audience taken film to their heart? The very existence of apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram prove that the film aesthetic (albeit photographic rather than cinematic in these cases) has an enduring appeal. Find me an editing system that does not have film grain or projector scratches as visual effect options. It’s likely that the balance will swing, and swing fast. I believe most movies will be shot digitally within the next couple of years. However I believe that 35mm will come to be seen as the Rolls Royce of shooting formats, not just in the respect of being the best but also in conveying an old-world luxury. Who knows, one day very soon Christopher Nolan’s ‘Shot on film’ might even become a hallmark-brand like Fairtrade or Organic, assuring you that what follows is, in the purest sense of the term, a film.

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2012

To be sent my articles as they come out, hit ‘follow’ under the photo of my happy smiling face at the top of this page.

Casting can make or kill your film. Get the wrong actors for the roles and your audience will be watching the lighting. Even if you get the right actors for each part, but they don’t gel with each other: the audience will start planning their weekend shop.  It’s vital to get it right.

Earlier in the summer I conducted mock-auditions for the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts. I’ve run many casting sessions before, but I’d never seen 30 or more actors in a day. Still, that was the nature of the exercise, and the experience taught me as much as it taught them. Here are some ideas for both actors and directors drawn from that experience and my past forays into the field of casting.

Naomi Watts gives everyone a surprise at her audition in “Mulholland Drive”

The Actor

There are some basic rules that should go without saying, but occasionally need repeating.

1. Aim to be early. Turn up ahead of time and you might be seen early, perhaps because someone else has dropped out. If this happens, you might either get seen for longer, or at least get brownie points for helping the director and casting director, if they’re behind schedule. Turn up late and, unless your performance really knocks the ball out of the stadium, you’ve lost the part. Simple as that. Film and TV shoots run to tight schedules, TV in particular. For smaller roles they’re keener to know that the actor will show up on time, than they are to know that they’ll shine.
2. Know the script. While it’s rarely required that you be word perfect, it’s important that you’ve had a chance to familiarise yourself with the scenes. A couple of students at Mountview tried to audition without even having read it through once. Pointless – I could tell nothing about their ability to play the part. It is however possible that you won’t get the script until you turn up; in this case allowances will of course be made.
3. Be polite. Again: obvious. Remember that the director may well need to spend a lot of time with you on set:  give off a bad vibe you might just lose the part to another actor of equal talent but greater charm.
4. Want the part. Usually not a problem, you’d think, but you’d be surprised. One of the most striking things I learnt from the Mountview students was how powerfully enthusiasm for the job (or lack of it) can communicate. There was one student who strode into the room armed with a warm handshake and unforced eye-contact. Everything about him conveyed an earnest enthusiasm for the project, keenness to work with me, and a deep belief that he was right for the part. The effect was overwhelming: he had me wanting to like his performance, and believing that he’d be a great guy to have on set. I’m going to remember what he did for the next time I go up for a job.

As for the performance itself, usually you’ll be given no direction when you first play the text. The trick here, I believe, is: go for it. If you have an extreme idea, try it out. Don’t force it, but be bold. The director may well have seen a dozen or more actors playing the  scene, and many of those performances may be quite samey. An actor giving the reading that’s markedly different will be a refreshing change. It’s even possible that your interpretation might spark new ideas in the director. They might start looking at the character in a different light: your light.

That being said, some directors, particularly writer / directors, have a fairly fixed idea of how they want the scene to be played; this is where the redirect is vital. The director will be looking for two things on the redirect: range and responsiveness. Too often the performance second time round is only fractionally different from the first take. Either the actor hasn’t listened, or they only have one performance to offer. Neither is good – the director wants to be able to work with you. Making your performance on the redirect significantly different from your performance first time round, shows that you can take direction and gives you an opening to impress with your range.

Above all, if you don’t get the part don’t see the session as having been a waste of time. There can be a hundred reasons why you weren’t cast that are outside your control. Impress the director or the casting director and, even if you don’t get this part, you’ll get on their radar. They might even start trying to think of other roles in which you might fit.

The Director

As chefs know, great cooking can’t happen without good quality ingredients. Similarly with casting actors – it’s the secret shortcut to impressive performances. Besides it takes even the most talented director a lot of time, effort and energy to squeeze a decent performance out of a weak actor. It’s so much easier to cast an actor who has natural talent and screen-craft, so that you can focus your attention on the subtle nuances.

Here are some simple suggestions that might help in the audition room:

1. Give the actors time to prepare. Auditions should be about seeing an actor at their best, so give them as much time with the script beforehand as you can.
2. Keep open space between the actor and yourself. A desk might be a power prop for business interviews but, while an audition has a similar objective to an interview, it is a very different beast. You’ll be doing work with the actor on the scenes, to see how you operate as a creative partnership. Desks suggest a far more disengaged dynamic.
3. Make sure there’s more than one of you. If you have a casting director, have them in the room, failing that the producer or even just the person operating the camera. For a start, you’re going to need someone to read in the other part: it can be difficult to judge the performance if you’re reading yourself. It also adds to the sense that yours is a serious production. A lot of actors treat one-man-bands with a caution: physical evidence that at least one other person believes in the project can reassure them.
4. Record it. Most people do these days; it‘s indispensible. I never cease to be amazed at how often the actor who appeared to be the best candidate when you were in the room, ends up not to be the right choice when you watch the tape back. A quick camera tip: many rooms used for auditions have harsh top-light and, combined with the use of low-end camcorders, it’s easy to end up with a recording on which you can’t see the actors’ eyes. Before you start, take a minute to work out where in the room is most favourably lit and keep the camera low, so that you’ll be seeing up into the actors’ eyes.

Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford trying out for “Star Wars”

Most auditions start with a brief chit-chat, traditionally where the director asks what work the actor has been doing recently. This information should be evident on their resume, so the content of the conversation is usually redundant. Other directors ask the actor about their impression of the script or of their character. This can be more useful, but often ends in gushing flattery from the actor. The brief chat can still be useful for the director, so that they can get a sense of the actor’s natural presence, when not in character. I have a trick for this borrowed partly from a technique taught by Simon Phillips, but it ceases to work if the actor knows what’s coming, so I’ll have to leave it to you to think of a good way to use the chat time… or you could take one of Simon’s courses and see what he suggests.

One of the most important factors in getting good auditions, in my opinion, happens before the actor enters the room: the selection of the scene, or scenes, that the actor is to play.  Too often, directors choose expositional scenes just because they’re dialogue-heavy. Actors are only as good as their material; give them a scene with no dramatic meat and most will struggle. The ideal scene would be a two-hander, possibly a three-hander, in which the the auditionee’s character goes through at least one dramatic turn – they should learn something new that changes their attitude to things. At the very least you want a scene that gives the actor a chance to show you a number of different strategies their character could take to achieve their objective.  This doesn’t even have to be a scene that they’ll play in the finished film, or even from that project at all, as long as the emotional energy and character-type are pretty close to the character for which you’re seeing them. It’s more important that the scene gives them material that will allow them to show their best work. As theatre director Blanche McIntire has observed “you want people coming out feeling like they’ve done a good job”.

There are a number of other processes that can be used in the audition – many directors set up improvisations, for example. These can be a useful way to discover out how adaptable is the actor. Of course if you’re going to be using improv as part of your creative process in the piece itself, it’s vital to discover that the actor has those skills. This goes for any specific ability you need the actor to have that can be demonstrated in the room – accents, singing, conjuring tricks – you want to see it in action.

Finally, remember that you can recall actors if you’re not sure. The most important time to think about a recall is where you’re casting characters in a relationship. It doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship; it could be brothers, mother and daughter, villain and henchman, but if that relationship is central to your story, you’re going to need to know that those two actors click in a way that works.

The audition process is where you establish your relationship with your actors. It they feel that they’ve been cast on looks alone or in a random fashion, they’ll respect you less. Embrace the audition process to the full and the actors will feel confident that they’re right for their part and have earned it. They will feel that you are serious about getting the best from them. Given that relaxed, confident actors usually perform better, you can see that well-conducted auditions can not only get you the best cast, they can encourage the cast to be at its best.

mmm

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2012

To be sent my articles as they come out, hit ‘follow’ under the photo of my happy smiling face at the top of this page.

Mick Audsley has edited everything from My Beautiful Laundrette and Dangerous Liaisons to 12 Monkeys and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but he’s concerned about the direction in which post-production is going. With the help of Hyperactive and Pivotal Post, he’s started an event called Sprocket Rocket, hosted by Soho’s De Lane Lea facility house, to get the industry talking. Having worked with Mick very briefly some years ago, I decided to see if I could lure him to the comfort of a West End club to find out more about his take on editing and where he thinks things are going wrong.

Mick is friendly but reserved. His authority, which is plain to see, comes from a sense that nothing is said without being thought through. Like many senior editors, he comes across sometimes as diplomat, sometimes as advocate, and sometimes as trusted adviser. There is an air of confidentiality about him as he leans forward in his chair to address me in a quiet voice, which makes repeating his words openly here almost feel like speaking out of turn.

He attended the Royal College of Art with the intention of studying animation. He soon realized however that animation was a very lonely world “I wanted to be involved in more collaborative filmmaking.” Even when he switched to live action, he did everything but picture editing. His first experience of cutting came when he edited a pitch to the BFI for a production of King Lear. The experience was revelatory: “I saw that this was where the power was in filmmaking.” The project was commissioned.

“This was where the power was in filmmaking”

Keen not to get sidetracked from his goal of working in features, Mick stuck with the BFI. His mentor Mike Ellis advised him to “get on the rungs of the ladder that you want to climb, because it was very hard in Britain to jump, so if you wanted to do commercials or you wanted to do telly, then you should work at a lower level there.” The strategy paid off and Mick worked on progressively bigger and better films.

I asked Mick what the atmosphere was like in the BFI cutting rooms when he was there in the 1970s. “Cutting rooms would all be working next to each other” he said. “We’d show each other work, we’d get excited about things, we’d ask advice, we’d ask friends to screenings ‘We’re going to run a reel today, will you come and have a look and give your notes?’ I too would be asked to come and see a film that Kevin Brownlow was making, and it was very exciting to see something like that and be asked your opinion. It was new to me to be given a voice.” Mick mourns the loss of this culture: “everyone’s so worried about not just things being stolen, or that someone might say something bad about your film. We’re much more jumpy about the process.” He feels he learnt from the collaborative atmosphere: “they taught me how to talk about things, how to share the filmmaking construction issues that editorial has to deal with. I hadn’t had that through film school. I’d learnt practical skills, but not thinking skills.” This question of how you think about editing and approach your material is a theme to which Mick returns again and again. He believes that, while you can’t teach editors a rhythmic or visual sense, “you can teach modes of thinking or ways of approaching problems that will arm them.”

Alexander Mackendrick, in medium shot

Finding himself at the National Film School at the same time as the young Terence Davies, Mick cut one of his first films. During this edit he was mentored by the veteran director Alexander Mackendrick, who was teaching at the Film School and seemed to have a surprising amount of time on his hands: “It was an absolutely life changing experience. He spoke about film in a way that blew my mind. I kept in touch with him over the years until he died. He was a guru to me – I certainly recommend his book, it’s a must for any filmmaker, whichever discipline you’re interested in.” Mick, now involved with film education himself, credits his approach to those few days with Mackendrick: “When I was making films early on I thought to myself in some arrogant way, ‘they’re beautifully cut… but they don’t work.’” Analysis of this question lead him back to the script: “I devoured everything I could find on screenplay writing. I think the thing of deciding which shot, and deciding which way the story goes in the cutting room is merely the next stage on from screenplay writing”

Mick’s first feature, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, was produced by Goldcrest. The break into independent features presented a new challenge: working with a crew “I’d cut a feature for the BFI called Brothers and Sisters and I’d basically done that all on my own, so I walked into a bigger film not quite knowing what the jobs were. I must have been a source of great embarrassment to my assistants, because I was all ready to sync up the rushes and number everything, but suddenly I realized that there was a demarcation, so I had to learn the ropes. There was a fair amount of weeping in the toilet.”

Mick braves the moviola in the cutting room of “The Hit”

But Mick had picked up a few tricks of his own, including the use of the Moviola, less favoured by British editors at the time, “I mastering the Moviola at the BFI, because essentially people were so frightened of it (I didn’t tell them that I was as well) that they kept away. Besides there’s only room for two heads to look down the barrel of a Moviola – just you and the director – so people left you alone. So I used one right up until the end of 12 Monkeys. I was a Moviola guy all those years and have the sore neck to prove it.”

You need to know what sort of animal you’re making and know when that animal’s got four legs and is running

He switched to cutting digitally when cutting The Van for his long-term collaborator Stephen Frears, working first on Lightworks, then eventually switching to Avid. But Mick is not a naturally techy editor:  “To me it’s just a tool. It’s like discussing a Hoover or a Dyson: they do the same job.” While he enthusiastically welcomed the advantages of digital editing, he’s become mindful of the down-sides. He’s seen it lead to sloppy thinking and deferred decision-making. “The ability to have access to raw material outside the cutting room creates a desire to mine the rushes endlessly. You need to know what sort of animal you’re making and know when that animal’s got four legs and is running.” But for Mick the technology does hold one way of combating this danger of losing focus, “the ability to keep versions of the movie in your back pocket and remind yourself that the thinking of three months ago is not necessarily deficient. When you refer back to it you can say ‘why on earth did we spend three months twiddling around here? What was wrong with that?’”

Mick in the “Dangerous Liasons” cutting room, 1988

Digital editing also caused Mick to worry for his crews “Leaving editing on film has threatened to take jobs away, and I don’t think that’s right. I’m very reliant on my assistants who are also very, very close friends who are filmmakers in their own right and we all understand what our responsibilities are and the fun of it is that teamwork.” He argues that more recent developments in digital shooting have added pressure in the other direction to keep the cutting room well-manned “there’s a huge increase in the sheer volume of the material that’s coming in. If it was neg and print then people had an incentive to keep that costing down, but now if you’ve got an Alexa camera squirting away, or three or four of them all at once… When I started, I used to consider a heavy day to be half an hour. Now six hours is a standard quantity of non-selected material. It’s staggering amounts and, if you’re just yourself and an assistant, it’s a huge job keeping that in a database and under control.” This increased workload is one of the issues he believes has lead to increased isolation in the cutting room: “You’re having keyboard lunches, you never get away from the machine”.

Data cameras aren’t the only new challenge “the demands of distributing material, of dealing with the possible piratisation. The fact that material is flying around and being offered up in a thousand different ways. I still think the numbers should be the same, I think it takes two assistants and an editor to be confidently and quietly appraising what’s coming in and be putting stuff together sufficiently well to feed a shoot and be informative, which is what you want to do.”

I’m having to raise my voice more to protect the film I’m making

Mick is positive about how much more accessible editing has become as result of affordable software, but he does wonder if this might have diminished the status of editors. He complains that younger filmmakers sometimes fail to see editors as “someone who can see a film in their head and offer it to you as a director or a producer.” Finding that the voices around him are becoming louder and more numerous, he reports “I’m having to raise my voice more in order to protect, or further, what I believe to be the film that I’m making.”

Generations of filmmakers meet at Sprocket Rocket

Sprocket Rocket came out of Mick’s desire, and that of his friends, to bring post-production back together again. He’s keen to give young editors and assistants access to older and more experienced talent and believes that these are meetings from which both could gain.  “It’s just a way of getting people together, which was very open, and if it was very open people’s natural agendas and concerns would come to the surface. When they met and they would share, you know, the diminishing wages and the increasing hours, increasing isolation, the increasing demands.”

He’s keen to emphasize that this is not a union “It’s also for producers to come, this is not in any way exclusive; it’s open to people just wanting to hang out with other filmmakers really. My original brief was ‘A chance to influence other filmmakers who have no influence on your chances’. If there are some keen film students who’d like to spend an hour or two with a visual effects supervisor on a big gig, then they can have a drink together and make contact that way.” While he initially sees it as being for post-production, he’s happy for it to be open to shooting crew as well, observing that there is a gap between those two fields to be bridged. “I don’t want anything to be exclusive. It’s a good chance for a jolly. That sounds frivolous but if it is relaxed the serious side of it will happen naturally.”

Mick Audsley is currently cutting Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, the story of Ali’s fight against the Vietnam draft, directed by Stephen Frears for HBO.

The next Sprocket Rocket is on 27th September. Sign up on the website.

You can read a longer transcript of this interview here

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2012

To be sent my articles as they come out, hit ‘follow’ under the photo of my happy smiling face at the top of this page.

For many years I’ve been puzzling over the nature of movie dialogue and how it works. Anyone who’s ever tried to write a screenplay will tell you that dialogue is deceptively difficult to get right. If they think it’s easy, they probably haven’t yet heard actors struggling through their leaden lines. With dialogue, less is almost always more, and any other picture editor will back me up on that. I’ve rarely worked on a feature, either as editor or assistant, where less than 10% of the dialogue has not hit the cutting room floor. Usually much more. But why do screenwriters overwrite? Why have audiences grown to love tight-lipped heroes? How does dialogue work?

To be fair what sounds in the rushes like overwritten dialogue is very often evidence not of the writer’s failings, so much as evidence of the actor’s success. A really good actor can say with a look what a lesser actor would need dialogue to convey. These redundant lines are impossible to predict, even if the screenwriter were to know in advance that their words would be spoken by the likes of Anthony Hopkins. While you can write ‘looks’ into a script, a written look can’t express all the complex emotions of which an actor is capable, unless you get into “behind his steely gaze, his eyes register pity, mixed perhaps with a moment of guilt, then resolve”. Writing action like that will guarantee that your script will never reach the inbox of an actor capable of performing that direction. Besides, Sir Anthony needed to understand the emotions of his character; for him the line is a springboard: it needs to be in the script, even if it doesn’t need to end up in the final cut.

“The Artist”: silence in the Golden Age

But why this preference for unspoken moments over dialogue-driven exchanges? Part of it is to do with film’s competitiveness with other forms. Theatre, television and radio drama are all very dialogue dependent; even the most high-end TV drama will average more lines per minute than most feature films. In a cinema you have an audience of willing captives who aren’t eating their dinner, nipping off to make a cup of tea or otherwise easily drawn away from looking at the screen (okay, it depends which cinema you go to), and because of this the filmmaker can rely on greater concentration on the visuals. Besides, movies were born dumb. The talkies only came about after directors had already learned the neat trick of communicating through images, looks and body language. As we saw with the popular and critical success of The Artist, film still secretly aspires to the purity of its voiceless childhood. Crucially, however, a well-performed look is always more powerful than a well-delivered line because we believe a look: how often do people give themselves away with their eyes? Dialogue can so easily be a lie (I’ve written more about this in my article on Behaviour).

It may sound like movies don’t really need dialogue at all, but that’s not entirely true. We live in an age where audiences are used to a level of naturalism which dictates that characters should communicate in a way we recognize from real life. The less dialogue there is, the more heightened and operatic the film feels – not necessarily a bad thing, just look at the movies of Sergio Leone. Conversely, over-lapping or muttered dialogue with broken sentences brings the movie closer to our experience of the world.

However, the belief held, consciously or unconsciously, by many less experienced writers that dialogue is there primarily for naturalism (combined with the need to communicate plot information) leads to bad dialogue. Anyone who’s ever script edited will have heard a writer defend a line by saying “but that’s what the character would say”. Whether a character would say that line in a real situation is beside the point. The reply so often is: “Yes, but do we need them to say it?” Movie dialogue is never truly naturalistic; it is there to provide the illusion of naturalism.

In fact movie dialogue should avoid true naturalism at all costs. Ever heard a recording of a real-life conversation? In reality people talk around a subject; they repeat themselves needlessly; they get distracted and start talking about something else; they get interrupted and lose their thread; they can be wandering, verbose and incoherent. We tolerate, often enjoy, this relaxed form of dialogue in our everyday lives. Many business meetings last at least an hour, despite being little more than a ‘hello’. Meet a friend for drinks or dinner and you may be chatting for three hours or more, often without saying more than a sentence or two that has any dramatic or emotional weight.  Let’s face it, we like to chat. But most films last less than two hours. In order for screenwriters to cover any dramatic ground at all, a style of dialogue developed that  distills natural speech right down. Any line in a film script is usually the most efficient way of communicating that meaning, within the idiom of the character. It might well be a phrase people would speak in reality, but in reality they’d take five minutes to build up to thinking of that phrase, and then maybe repeat the process. Movie dialogue is much more efficient. Very often you can take the first draft of a script, or an inexperienced writer’s work and just cut out every other pair of lines. It doesn’t always work, but often creates a tighter and more interesting scene, where things are either left unsaid or are implicitly understood between the characters.

What’s interesting is that we accept this stylization so unquestioningly that most of us forget that it’s anything other than natural. This is because it allows the narrative to flow freely, and we’re always happy to embrace any stylization that allows us to skip the bits where nothing interesting is happening. Incidentally, the same principal makes jump cuts work – you cut between the moments of significant action, and lose the boring stuff in the middle.

Humphrey Bogart, caught the moment before delivering a wry riposte

While movie dialogue needs to be condensed, it doesn’t always need to be naturalistic. From the early talkies, where dialogue often reflected the style of its source material – be it a high-society stage play or a hard-boiled novel – audiences were happy to accept characters not speaking the way people do in the real world. As long as the dialogue was somehow better than reality, that was alright – it could be wittier, grander, more poetic, smarter. The movie characters played by Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn and Groucho Marx were given lines we wish we could be fast enough and wry enough to come up with in reality. This was literally superhuman dialogue.

Over time movie dialogue has developed a greater pretense of naturalism. Some writers and directors have gone out of their way to try to perfect this illusion: Robert Altman favoured having characters talk over each other to mimic the messiness of everyday speech; David Mamet experimented with having characters interrupt each other mid-word and with artful use of repetition; and the Mumblecore movement is dedicated to producing dialogue with the lack of clarity of natural speech. Some of these experiments succeed in making the story feel more true to life; others frustrate the audience, which sometimes has to strain to make out what is being said. Others still only result in creating a different form of stylization that’s instantly recognizable as the writer/director’s voice and therefore ruining the attempt at realism.

Bitchiness elevated to a fine art in “The Draughtsman’s Contract”

An alternative approach, however, is to eschew naturalism and embrace the unreal. This can be seen in scripts that are simply homages to earlier styles, whether it be the Coens’ use of 40s whip-crack dialogue in Millers Crossing and The Hudsucker Proxy or Peter Greenaway’s hyper-arch Restoration sniping in The Draughtsman’s Contract. The dialogue is either locating us in a genre, or is creating the feel of the period and its values, every bit as much as the costume and art direction. Aaron Sorkin naturally seems to write his own form of whip-crack dialogue, not out of a desire to harken back to an earlier era, but to express high-IQ characters in high-pressure worlds. By contrast, David Lynch films often feature dialogue that’s deliberately stilted, artfully artless, either to mimic bad daytime soaps or to take us into a dream-like world, sometimes both. You can even develop completely original modes of speech, dialogue that, while completely unlike everyday chat, takes the audience in to a different headspace. A special nod has to go to Hal Hartley here, whose house-style allowed his characters openly to discuss the themes of the story, and do it with a sideways wit that ensured that it never came across as preachy.

There is much more to say about the internal working of dialogue, the different strategies that writers can use to bring out character and serve the story — but that feels like another article in its own right. Meanwhile I urge all writers, directors and editors always to ask “do we really need this line?”

Edited by Dr. Sara Lodge.

Copyright © Guy Ducker 2012