Storytelling for Directors E-Book

Bren Simson

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 306

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Storytelling for Directors will develop the communicative power of your storytelling, whether for the big or small screen, in long or short form. Without being prescriptive, the chapters explore the creative potential in every aspect of the filmmaking process, giving directors the skills to put their ideas into practice. Coverage includes: analysing the script to find the character action; building the story world; deciding each element within the frame; shaping the actors' performances; telling the story with the camera; casting; working the schedule, budget and rehearsals, and finally, shaping the film in the edit.

Leseprobe

STORYTELLINGFOR DIRECTORS

FROM SCRIPT TO SCREEN

STORYTELLINGFOR DIRECTORS

FROM SCRIPT TO SCREEN

BREN SIMSON

First published in 2020 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR

[email protected]

This e-book first published in 2020

www.crowood.com

© Bren Simson 2020

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 730 9

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 WHAT IS THE STORY?

2 FINDING THE THEME

3 CHARACTER AND PERFORMANCE AS THE ENGINE OF STORY

4 THE PRODUCER, THE DIRECTOR AND THE BUDGET

5 DESIGNING THE STORY WORLD

6 THE MOVING IMAGE

7 WORKING WITH ACTORS

8 FROM SCRIPT TO SCREEN

9 THE EDIT

ENDNOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Very special thanks go to Maximilian Mena, who designed the storyboards and illustrations for Storytelling for Directors: From Script to Screen. He is a recent graduate in film-making from the Arts University, Bournemouth, and I am hugely in his debt.

My thanks also go to a very special group of people who, over the years I have been teaching, gave me support and encouragement. Neil Peplow and Joe Hepworth were my colleagues at the MetFilm School, who started me on the journey that led to writing this book. Others to whom I owe a special debt of thanks are Faye, Tim Mercier, Jonathan Fryer, Ronan Sweeney and Darren Paul Fisher.

At the Film School in the Arts University, Bournemouth, among my many sympathetic and supportive colleagues, I would like to thank Jonathan Carr, Mark Sheldon, Tom Strudwick and David O’Shea.

A special mention goes to my dear friend, Martin Hawkins, who was my Director of Photography on Island, ITV (I995–96), who kindly supplied photographs for this book.

I am profoundly grateful to Nigel Walsh, who gave generously of his time to read through the manuscript. His advice on all matters of style was invaluable.

Finally, my most heartfelt thanks go to my son, Jack Simson Caird, without whose love and support, I could never have contemplated starting, let alone finishing, this book. To my granddaughters, Rosa and Charlotte, who bring me constant joy.

INTRODUCTION

In writing Storytelling for Directors: From Script to Screen, my aim is to provide a guide for anyone wanting to direct, whether in short films, feature films or small-screen drama.

Rather than being prescriptive about how to direct, the idea is to take the reader through the process of translating a written story into a visual medium. Starting with interpreting the screenplay, to figuring out how the drama will work visually, each chapter helps you to build the communicative power of your storytelling.

Exploring how to tell the story through performance, as well as through the camera, the book takes you through the complex decision-making needed to build the visual world of the story. Storytelling is essentially a collaborative art, so having a creative vision that empowers every department of film-making to do their best for the story is every director’s aim.

I have drawn on my twenty-five plus years as a television director, together with my experience teaching film-making, to give an in-depth understanding of the demands and complexities of being a director.

Leaving film school, beginning my first directing job, it felt as though I was stepping into uncharted territory. Despite being taught by some inspirational teachers, I learnt my craft by making films. Learning by doing was the mantra of The National Film and Television School under its founder Colin Young. Although I was lucky enough to keep learning by working in series television at a time when audiences rarely dipped below 10 million viewers, I was aware that sometimes my understanding of the job fell short of the expectations that were increasingly being put upon it.

My aim for this book is to try to remedy those deficiencies, which were entirely of my own making, by sharing my insights into a job I loved doing. Drawing on the work and experiences of other directors and teachers, as well as my own, I try to find the answers to some of the leading questions about visual storytelling.

As directors, everything we do requires action: interpreting, choosing, shaping performance, designing shots. However, finding the right action requires thought. Without a creative vision, you are just ‘a traffic lights’ director – green for action, red for cut.

The challenges of mastering linear narrative forms, as well as inventing new story structures, which work for new technologies and distribution systems, can be confusing. I hope Storytelling for Directors goes some way to helping to generate new ideas, memorable characters and, above all, stories that help to make the world a more interesting and meaningful place.

In the dark times.

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht,

‘Motto to the “Svendborg Poems”’

[Motto der ‘Svendborger Gedichte’] (1939), trans.

John Willett in Poems, 1913–1956, p. 320.

1

WHAT IS THE STORY?

ANALYSING THE SCREENPLAY

A screenplay is a visual story in written form. The job of a director is to transform the words on the page into a series of moving images. The first steps in this process of transformation take place as the director starts to interpret and re-imagine the screenplay as a visual narrative.

Storytelling in a visual medium relies, above all, on action and movement, rather than dialogue; which is not to say words are not important, but it is the emotion that lies behind them that counts. A screenplay uses minimal dialogue, relying instead on the dramatic event, the physical movement of the characters, together with their unspoken emotions, to convey the story’s meaning.

THE FIRST READ

The first task is to read the screenplay. The emotional impression the story makes on this first reading is an important guide to the film you will make and the responses you want to inspire in the audience. Even if you are the screenwriter, it is important, when starting a production, to try to read the script afresh, re-imagining it as a visual story.

The first reading is when you allow yourself to experience the story unfiltered by anything other than curiosity. Letting it wash over you, leaving an overall impression of the story. Remembering your initial response to the story will come in useful in the coming weeks, as you start to break down the screenplay into its component parts.

After the first reading comes the second, the third and so on, until you feel comfortable with the task ahead. This process of engaging intensively with the material is all about deciding how the story will work dramatically. For the writer director, it is about finding the most compelling way of turning your original idea into drama.

STORY AS DRAMATIC ACTION

This is not so much about asking, ‘What is the story about?’ this comes later, instead, it’s ‘What happens in the story?’.

For the visual storyteller, story is action, a series of events, which are time-related. How one event follows another is key to how the story or the plot moves forward, seizing the imagination of the audience so that it wants to know what happens next.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the writers of South Park (1997–), in a talk they gave to students at Columbia University, New York, came up with a basic rule to express this relationship between events.1 They explained that between each event you must be able to say the word ‘therefore’. This happens therefore this happens and so on. If, on the other hand, you find yourself saying this happens and then this happens, you will have a very boring story. To add more interest, you will need a complication, which is expressed as ‘but’. So, this happens therefore this happens but then this happens, a complication. The Trey Parker and Matt Stone rule is a wonderfully simple way of explaining how a story is made up of dramatic events or actions, which are all related to one another.

STORY EVENTS

In a film, each scene is a unit of action, an event or a happening, which moves the story forward within a certain timespan.

What is meant by an event? It could be a birthday party, a wedding or a funeral. The screenwriter will have chosen a particular happening because it has a special significance, often life-changing for the characters in the story. Other scenes might be lower-key – a domestic event, an encounter, an appointment with a psychiatrist. Whatever the event, something happens, an action, which will determine what happens next in the story.

As the Hollywood director Raoul Walsh opined, the only way to direct a scene is so that the audience understands what happens next. This happens therefore this happens. It is important to know the therefore not just so you understand why one scene follows another, but to understand the emotional significance of what is happening within the scene itself and whether it works for the storytelling.

The wedding in Francis Ford Copoola’s The Godfather (1972) unfolds as a predicable Italian Mafia wedding on an extravagant, no-expensespared scale, appropriate to the status of its leading character, played by Marlon Brando. However, its dramatic purpose is to bring all the main characters, all members of the same family, including three brothers and a sister, whose wedding it is, together in one place, at the beginning of the film.

During the wedding, the struggle as to who might inherit the family business, one of the central themes of the movie, is brought into sharp focus in a series of incidents in which each member of the family reveals their essential character, destined to have a profound effect on how the story plays out. The fact that each incident follows logically and purposefully, one after another, is not what the audience will remember about the wedding, but the sequence of events is essential to engaging the audience’s interest in what happens.

Analysing the dramatic purpose of each scene in a screenplay, or in the script of a small-screen episode, is essential to understanding its importance for the storytelling structure of the film. How it fits into the plot.

THE DRAMATIC STRUCTURE

Theorists of dramatic structure point out that drama is the art of preparing crises. A series of interesting incidents or events may indeed be as entertaining as a complete narrative. But real drama is created by the continuous and very real involvement of the audience as its emotions are engaged both in advance of the crisis and then in the repercussions of what they have just witnessed.

Alexander Mackendrick, On Film-Making3

SCENE STRUCTURE

Every scene or event has a beginning, a middle and an end. The main story might employ a more sophisticated three-act structure. The five-act structure is not unusual, although more recently there has been a trend towards a one-act structure, most often found in short films.

The structure of a scene can be broken down still further into beats. A beat is when there is a significant change in the intentions of the main character as they react to the other character or characters in the scene. The change can come on a line of dialogue or in a gap or pause between the lines. These changes to the main character’s emotions and intentions come out of the conflict or tension generated by the obstacles placed in the way of their wants by the other character – the antagonist. These changes to the character’s thinking will move the story on to the next action or event.

There can be no drama without tension or conflict between characters. As Alexander Mackendrick points out, action without tension is merely activity.2 Writing a letter is an activity but receiving a letter, which remains unread and unopened, can be a moment of dramatic tension.

Conflict creates drama by building the tension and the audience’s feelings of anticipation about what will happen next.

CONFLICT

Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) was a ground-breaking film in its day. Dustin Hoffman plays a father, Ted Kramer, left to bring up his young son when his wife leaves him. The wife, Joanna, played by Meryl Streep, feels stifled by the marriage and wants to find herself by leaving and starting a new life.

Joanna ‘It’s me, it’s my fault’. Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), directed by Richard Benton. Columbia. TCD/PROD.DB/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

At the time, the Women’s Liberation Movement in America and the UK was raising issues around women’s exploitation inside and outside marriage. One of the key demands of the movement was wages for housework. Women began to form conscious-raising groups to explore their problems and find a voice.

At the start of the film, in a sequence designed to build the audience’s anticipation of an impending crisis, we see Ted, an advertising executive, being given a promotion. He celebrates with his boss, which makes him late home. We see Joanna, his wife, saying goodnight to her son, followed by packing a suitcase. She is waiting for Ted, with her packed suitcase by the door, when he finally knocks on the door of their New York apartment. He has forgotten his keys. This is the start of the crisis scene, an inciting incident, so called because it sets off the chain of events that make up the story.

In the scene, the conflict develops as Joanna tells Ted she is leaving him and proceeds to hand over her credit cards and her keys. Ted tries to stop her. His pleading reveals how inadequate his understanding of her feelings is, while Joanna’s responses show her desperation to leave. She explains that she feels inadequate as a mother and a woman, making it clear that, in her mind, she has no alternative but to go.

Floor plan of ‘Joanna leaving Ted without taking Billy’. Kramer vs Krammer. MAXIMILLIAN MENA

Joanna makes her escape. Kramer vs. Krammer. MAXIMILLIAN MENA

Meryl Streep’s highly charged performance as Joanna reveals her internal difficulties over whether she is doing the right thing. This vulnerability helps the audience empathize with Joanna’s situation, softening any criticism of her wanting to leave her son. At the same time, Ted, played by Dustin Hoffman, reveals his selfishness, which will make Ted’s character journey more interesting as he tackles the task of being a single father, which forms the plot of the film. The conflict must be more than a confrontation between two people; it must engage the audience’s curiosity in the characters and the events that follow.

On the floor plan (page 11 top), Joanna has placed her suitcase by the door. As she talks Ted through the arrangements she has made, she remains close to the door, ready for her final flight. Ted, on the other hand, as soon as he is let into the apartment, having forgotten his keys, goes straight to the phone by the kitchen. They are then both perfectly placed for the confrontation that unfolds. As she makes a dash for the door, leaving her suitcase, Ted tries to stop her and the argument then spills out into the hallway and the lift.

THE TURNING POINT

Dramatic action is never straightforward. There is always a high point in the crisis, generally near the middle of the scene, where one character gains an advantage. The turning point, in the Kramer vs. Kramer scene, included at the end of the chapter, comes when Joanna says to Ted, ‘You didn’t even ask about Billy’. When Ted asks, ‘What about Billy?’, Joanna reveals she is not taking their son with her. This is when Ted realizes that Joanna really does intend to leave. In that moment she changes from being a supplicant to an instigator. He pauses with surprise, giving her the opportunity to get out into the hall and then into the lift and away.

The dramatic action is driven by the conflict between Ted and Joanna as they fight over the meaning of their marriage. Each person is trying to win points towards achieving their goal. As the action unfolds step by step or beat by beat, we approach the turning point when one character gains an advantage. The drama builds again towards the end. Sometimes called the denouement, the final beats of the scene lead to the resolution of the conflict when Joanna finally makes her escape. The dramatic structure can now be understood as the setup, the turning point and the resolution, rather than the beginning, middle and the end.

CHARACTER AS THE ENGINE OF THE STORY

Characters drive stories because it is their wants and needs that create the conflict, which moves the plot forward. However, the sequence of events or the plot is never straightforward, there are always complications, the but, as the main character, the hero or heroine, struggles to achieve their goal or objective. These struggles or conflicts give the story its tension, the source of its power to engage the audience’s empathy.

Often, the struggle of the main character is represented as a journey. Someone arrives in a strange place with an objective or a problem to be solved. As they struggle to overcome the obstacles placed in their path, they begin to learn new facts or insights about themselves. These insights reveal either how they need to change or what they must do if they are to solve their problem. By the end of the journey, they are a changed character in very different circumstances from how they started out.

A journey provides the story structure in Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich (2000) starring Julia Roberts. Based on a real story, it tells of a single mother of three, desperate for a job. Her search for work leads through a chain of chance events to her being hired by a lawyer, Ed Masry, played by Albert Finney. Working in his office, she begins to get interested in a case of water pollution. This is where what started as a simple desire for a job to support her children transforms into a personal search for self-respect, her main problem to be solved.

Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich (2000), directed by Steven Soderbergh. Universal Pictures. MOVIESTORE COLLECTION LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

As Erin starts to investigate, the obstacles, the buts, to her solving the case begin to reveal themselves. Having to look after her children, the fact she has no legal qualifications, her appearance as a woman who flaunts her femininity, all stand in her way to being taken seriously; added to which her boss is reluctant to pursue the case. Then there are her emotional difficulties, above all her inner lack of confidence. The audience engages with Erin’s journey by encountering these difficulties along with her in a series of story events.

WHOSE STORY IS IT?

Every director has to be able to answer the question ‘Whose story is it?’ This is because the main character carries within them their own personal goal, as well as the theme of the film. As we have seen in Erin Brockovich, it is very clearly Erin’s story. It is sometimes surprising how even writer directors find the answer to the question difficult.

In Terrence Malik’s Badlands (1973), another true story, this time of a serial killer and his girlfriend on the run, the two central characters, Holly played by Sissy Spacek and Kit played by Martin Sheen, are on the screen almost continuously. Nonetheless, it is clearly Holly’s story. She provides the voice-over commentary and the story is essentially seen from her point of view, even though it is Kit’s actions that drive the story forward. Finally, her unwillingness to continue their flight precipitates Kit’s capture and, therefore, the end of the film.

Having identified the importance of the main character to the plot, we need to take a closer look at the way a character-in-action makes the drama believable, as well as compelling viewing, for the audience.

THE CHARACTER-IN-ACTION

As John Yorke points out, ‘without credible, vibrant, exciting, living, breathing, empathetic characters, drama simply doesn’t work’.4

There is a saying that you should only judge a person by their actions. A character’s actions and their relationships with others are critical to seeing them as functioning human beings. However, to fully engage with them, we need to understand what drives them emotionally. Human emotion is generated by the gap between the internal needs of a character – who they really are and what they want – and their external objectives. This internal struggle or paradox is what makes them seem human. Trying to find ways to overcome these internal doubts is what drives their emotional reactions during the film.

The screenwriter decides on what a character is doing in the scene but it is the actor’s performance that will make a character’s inner thoughts and feelings visible to the audience, so that they can begin to empathize with the character’s situation. In the Kramer vs. Kramer scene, the edited performance plays out very differently from the written scene, although the physical action and emotional intention is faithful to the original screenplay. The process an actor uses to bring a character alive on screen is explored in Chapter 7.

WHAT A CHARACTER IS DOING

Deciding on how the physical action of the characters should play out is a major part of the director’s role as a dramatist. In the Kramer vs. Kramer scene, Ted comes through the door and goes straight to the telephone next to the fridge in the kitchen to make a call. The positioning of the telephone relative to the door, where Joanna is with her packed suitcase, helps the flow of the actors’ movements. Also, the siting of the door, in the shots, is critical to the visual drama, as it represents Joanna’s objective, to escape from the flat and her marriage. Sometimes the screenwriter will have imagined, in detail, how the action should play out, but not always. There is also no guarantee that the drama can be made to work in the place it is set exactly as the screenwriter imagined.

Actioning the film, as this process of dramatization is sometimes called, is vital to building the tension in a scene and, therefore, the audience’s engagement in what is taking place.

Peter Weir’s Witness (1985)

A good example is the barn scene in Peter Weir’s first major film Witness (1985). Harrison Ford plays Detective John Book, who, while investigating the murder of an undercover officer, is wounded in a car chase. He is taken in and cared for by a widow from an Amish community. The widow, Rachel Lapp, played by Kelly McGillis, is the mother of Samuel, the young boy who witnessed the murder in a toilet on a station in Philadelphia. Book, having spent some time hiding in the community, is now recovered from his injury and wants to get back to his investigation.

His car has been hidden in a barn. When the scene starts, he is attempting to repair the car with Rachel’s help. Crammed into the car at the back, she is holding a lamp, so he can see what he is doing. As Book reconnects the battery, the headlights come on, as does the radio. The song playing on the radio moves him to get out of the car, to drum the rhythm on the top of the car. As she follows, getting out on the other side, he invites her to dance and in the light of the headlights, they begin to dance together.

The car is Book’s means of escape back to his own world; it will also take him away from his growing love affair with the widow. The car and the music reveal the gap between his way of life and the Amish, a religious sect, who refuse all contact with twentieth-century technology – so horse-drawn carriages instead of cars and no recorded music. Dancing to the music from the car radio heightens the sexual tension between them. As the couple become more and more intimate, the widow’s father bursts through the barn door, abruptly ending their dance.

The positioning of the car facing the door allows the scene’s action to be condensed into a small space, intensifying the intimacy while at the same time adding to the build-up of tension as the door hints at the danger that they might be discovered. Weir draws our attention to the size of the barn by cutting twice to a high, wide shot. Showing the scale of the barn serves to emphasize the small space the couple occupy, squeezed in between the car and the door, while reminding us of the scene’s context, the closed world of the Amish.

The careful choreography of Rachel and John’s dance, with its subtle build-up of sexual tension, anticipates the entrance of the father, with his distinctly Amish appearance, who punches his way into the intimacy of the dance to deliver a startling full stop to the love scene.

Once, again, the dramatization of the scene is designed to create as much emotional tension as possible in the mind of the audience, while at the same time building their anticipation about what happens next.

It is important to look for ways to make the dramatic construction of a scene fully connect with the character. Mackendrick describes how working with the playwright, Clifford Odet, to adapt his stage play, Sweet Smell of Success, for the screen, he suggested that the main character, Sidney, a theatre agent, should have a bedroom attached to his office. This led to the addition of a character, Sydney’s secretary, Sally, who he treats with scant respect and who sleeps with him occasionally. As well as adding further depth to Sydney’s manipulative character, the office with a bedroom helps to remind the audience of the squalid way in which Sydney exploits his secretary.5

John and Rachel’s moment of happiness is interrupted in Witness. MAXIMILLIAN MENA

Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980)

A bedroom attached to an office also plays an important role in a scene from Scorsese’s Raging Bull. It is, in fact, a hotel suite where Jake LaMotta, the boxer, played by Robert De Niro, is holed up with his entourage before his comeback fight. In the sitting room, two people are practising sewing up a flesh wound. His manager and brother, Joey, played by Joe Pesci, is supervising, while LaMotta’s wife, Vickie, played by Cathy Moriarty, sits on a sofa, watching. LaMotta paces the room, clearly on edge.

LaMotta is a man who seems constantly to be fighting low self-esteem, fear and sexual inadequacy, feelings that drive his violence inside and outside the boxing ring. A meal is ordered over the phone, with LaMotta fighting with his wife and manager over her food choices, heightening the tension in the room still further.

LaMotta retreats to the bedroom and lies on the bed, a moment of calm away from the activity in the sitting room. Some important visitors arrive and Vickie gets up from the sofa to greet them in the small hallway between the two rooms. La-Motta gets off the bed to say hello. The meeting is brief. As they leave, the older man kisses Vickie goodbye on her mouth. This is the trigger for the boxer’s tension to surface. In a jealous rage, he slaps her face hard. It was not rehearsed and took Cathy Moriarty by surprise. The violent outburst reveals the fatal flaw in the boxer’s character, which will eventually cause his downfall.

The pacing backwards and forwards dramatizes the tension building inside LaMotta the pause as he sits on the bed only heightens the anticipation of what might happen next. Although at that point the audience is only thinking about the coming fight, it also has the effect of increasing the shock of the violence that follows. De Niro’s performance conveys the inner truth of the character but it’s the physical movement of the character-in-action that draws the audience into the drama.

The build-up to the big fight Raging Bull. MAXIMILLIAN MENA

THE TIME FRAME

It is important, when breaking down the screenplay, to consider the time frame. The time frame needs to make sense to the audience but it can also be used to add further layers of dramatic tension to the visual drama.

The audience is often not that interested in exactly when something happens. They will be absorbed in the actions of the main character, wondering what will happen next. If they specifically notice the time, it is often because they are confused as to when an event is taking place. You need to make sure any changes in time are integrated into the development of the story, while finding ways to exploit their potential for the drama.

The Feature Film

The sophistication of audiences has encouraged the use of increasingly complex time frames, as in Christopher Nolan’s Momento (2000). An example of a more conventional approach is Winter’s Bone (2010) directed by Debra Granik. The main character, a teenage girl, Ree Dolly, played by Jennifer Lawrence, is told by the local sheriff, at the beginning of the film, that she has just one week to find her father and save her family from being evicted from their home. This time pressure drives her search for her father, raising the stakes and adding greater urgency to her questioning of all those who might know where he might be.

LaMotta, ‘Don’t you ever have any disrespect for me’ in Raging Bull. MAXIMILLIAN MENA

Every event in the film has to fit into a week, which means that some scenes follow on from one another to create story blocks or sections taking place over one day. Another section of the story takes place over one night. The passing of time becomes an integral part of the storytelling.

Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) uses time in keeping with its thriller format. A sense of mystery and tension is created by allowing the audience to see the story only from the main character’s point of view. A private eye, J. J. Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, has been asked by a Mrs Mulwray to investigate her husband’s infidelities. She turns out not to be who she says she is. The real Mrs Mulwray, played by Faye Dunaway, whose father is Noah Cross, played by John Houston, a billionaire and the man behind the crime that forms the basis of the film, then becomes the focus of Gittes’s investigation. The camera follows Nicholson’s character as he tries to get to the bottom of murder, deception and lies. The viewer only knows what he uncovers of the story and as Gittes only ever finds out part of the story, the audience is kept in suspense until the end. Time passing is viewed entirely subjectively from Gittes’s point of view.

Dale Dickey, Jennifer Lawrence and Beth Domann in Winter’s Bone (2010), directed by Debra Granik. Roadside Attractions. AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Time of day is also used in the film, as part of the storytelling. In a wonderful sequence, where Gittes follows Mulwray, an engineer, to a dried-out riverbed. As he watches, the sun sets and as night falls, water starts to pour out of a pipe into the reservoir. Gittes eventually leaves Mulray by the reservoir but before he goes, he puts a pocket watch under his car tyre. When he picks it up in the morning, the watch, crushed by the tyre as the car moved off, tells him when Mulray left.

Time under tyre pressure. Chinatown. MAXIMILLIAN MENA

Another example of the passing of time, in the film is when Gittes has his nose cut by a villain played by Polanski himself. Gradually, as the wound heals, we see the bandage becoming smaller until finally it comes off, revealing a scar. The device of the shrinking bandage is an inventive way of showing time passing in a very personal, as well as visual, way. Polanski had some difficulty in persuading the producers to let him cover the star’s nose, disfiguring what they saw as one of their main assets.

Keep your nose out of my business. Chinatown. MAXIMILLIAN MENA

The Short Film

In a short film, the time frame has to be very simple. The real events take place over one or two days or even a day. Similarly, the character arc or changes to the main character consist often of one revelation or insight about a relationship or a situation. Simple does not mean less important, so as in every drama the passing of time needs to be incorporated effectively into the dramatic action.

Small-Screen Drama Series

Television drama is often divided up into acts or sections with a cliff-hanger before a commercial break. The Wire (2002–08) did away with this convention as it went out on a subscription network, HBO, which doesn’t have commercial breaks. David Simon, the writer, described the series as being sixty-six episodes of a feature film giving each one-hour episode an epic time frame spread over an indefinite time in the life of a city.

Television drama has been ground-breaking in how it uses time. Murder One, written by Steven Bochco, aired in 1997, followed a Los Angeles’ attorney working on one case, which spread over the entire twenty-four episodes of one series. Having already made his name in genre-changing drama with Hill Street Blues (1981–87), Steve Bochco could afford to push the conventions still further.

There have been other challenges to the idea that an episode of television drama had to be compressed into an hour, whatever the story timeframe. In 24 (Fox, 2001–14), each episode was one hour of real time, which meant that the twenty-four episodes, following a counter-terrorist agent, Jack Bauer, played by Keifer Sutherland, took place over twenty-four hours. A television series is now more often viewed on DVD or television-on-demand, so writers can afford to ignore the earlier dramatic conventions imposed by having to set an episode into a pre-determined time slot.

VISUALIZING THE STORY

At this early stage, how you make a note of your ideas is a matter of personal preference. You might have started making notes in the margin of the screenplay of images, sounds, thoughts on casting, ideas for locations or questions you might want to ask the writer or changes you want to make. You might have started sketching out some ideas for sequences or drawn up some rough floor plans.

Floor Plans

One of the most useful visualization tools for interiors is a floor plan. There are various software programmes designed to help do this digitally. However, to explore how the character action of each scene might play out, there is no substitute for a pen and paper.

A floor plan shows how the action will work in the space: where the characters are at the beginning of the scene, where they need to move to and, most importantly, what their physical relationship will be to one another. You will be thinking of the drama of the scene as you explore how to use the space and, with practice, you will be visualizing the shots you need.

Helping you to map out the action are the fixed points and objects written into the screenplay that need to be incorporated. In the scene from Kramer vs. Kramer, there is the front door of the flat Ted comes through, Joanna’s packed suitcase, the telephone and perhaps a table for her to lay out the cards and keys that she is leaving behind. These objects will begin to help work out what sort of space is needed for the action of the scene to work.

A floor plan is not so useful for the outside spaces of yet-to-be-decided locations, but they still can help you focus on what needs to be there in the scene and what the action of the characters in relationship to each other needs to be.

The floor plan also gives you a good indication of where to put the camera. This might feel too soon to decide, but for television directors it is never too early to start working on the floor plans and the shot lists. If the series uses permanent sets, then you can plan the action of the scene together with the camera positions early on in the preparation process.

Story Boarding

Directors who trained as artists can use storyboarding as part of their preparation process. Even roughly drawn storyboards can be a useful way of making sure that you haven’t missed any essential shots in your coverage. It can also help you to plan camera shots and angles to build the mood and atmosphere of the scene. Martin Scorsese draws out every frame of every scene to make sure he has thought of all the shots he needs.