It’s a little late in the game to be writing a wrap blog but I felt I needed a little time to distance myself from the intensity of production before ruminating or waxing poetic about the experience. I disappeared to the woods for a few days immediately following the wrap party and found a little zen. When I got back I had an email from a Mr. Keith Sanders who edits the Television Academy’s newsletter “Off Camera,” and he happened to be writing an article about SHPC. Below (and probably over the course of the next few days) I’ll post his questions and my full responses, as they wound up giving quite a bit of insight into the process.
KEITH: Tell me about a typical day for you during shooting
JI: A typical day for me was about 17 to 18 hours long. I’d arrive on set shortly after the initial crew call, shoot for 13 hours with an hour break in the middle, then Jake and I would return to the production office to spend usually up to five hours planning the next day and storyboarding the shots. Every shot of the film was storyboarded with the exception of pickup shots added during the day, and 9 times out of 10 we shot exactly what I’d drawn the night before. It was this level of preparedness that allowed us to average just under 15 shots per day, and to get a total of 415 shots for the entire movie.
On set my responsibilities range from shaping performance with the actors to setting up the camera choreoghraphy and talent blocking, to choreographyat Jake calls “triage,” which entails combining shots or losing them altogether in the interest of time. I couldn’t possibly do this as effectively if Jake and I hadn’t planned and drawn every shot of the day the night before. (More on this in my blog entry “the shot process and letting go” – JI)
After ruminating on the experience, I realize that everyone’s job is to support and enhance the story. From actor to grip, we all do this in different ways. For me as director, the most technical description of my job is to effectively give the editor Kim Duong (and myself) the absolute most possible usable footage so she and I can build the best version of the story.
To the surprise of some, I don’t spend that much time coaching my actors on set. I spoke with most of my talent one on one during preproduction then shaped them a little in rehearsals, but a big part of my process is to allow the actor or actress to breathe their own life into the character. This, sometimes to my surprise, makes them more real than I might have expected. Randy Blair, for instance, who plays the lead role of hero Eugene Stimpson, brings an intensity and a realism to the role that I’m not sure I intended in the script. However, almost right after seeing his treatment of the character, I readjusted my thinking to support it and incorporate it and now Eugene goes through a surprising range of REAL emotions for a movie as ridiculously titled as Super Hero Party Clown.
Randy made Eugene a real person with real problems and insecurities, real resentment and weaknesses, and real strengths. It’s arguably all in the script but Randy pulled it out of the subtext and onto the screen with such believability that audiences will have a real human being to cheer for, and not just a construct of the mechanisms of film – someone you have to care about because he’s the main character.
What people sometimes don’t realize is that, equally as important as the actor is the movement of the camera in relation to the actor. Otherwise we might as well be working in theatre. What film allows us is to selectively decide the absolute best view for the emotion. When asked by his lead actress for coaching on the delivery of a line, Hitchcock once remarked that he didn’t care how she said the line as long as she said it where he told her to.
I’m not so intense as that; as a matter of fact I’ll often get really specific about the pronunciation of a word or the rhythm of a sentence because so much of that is important to conveying the right emotion. Cadence and timing – saying the exact right line during the perfect camera movement – it all goes back to the two things that I believe separate film as a medium; the existence of the camera as an element of the story, and the process of editing. If you’re directing and you don’t think in terms of providing your editor with usable material – if that process completely escapes you – then it’s possible that you’re not doing your job.
Hitchcock never even looked through the lens – he’d done all of his work before hand and so shooting it was boring to him; it was all edited in his head.
I’m not quite there yet: I shoot to give myself and my editor options because if you’re shooting footage that can’t cut together then you’re wasting everyone’s time on a shot that you can’t use.
More of the interview to come – JI
