I recently saw this post on social media from an aspiring young filmmaker: “Is there any point in studying film history?” Only if you prefer to escape cultural amnesia, I thought, irritated by the very idea of not studying the work of filmmakers over the decades. But then, annoyed by my own annoyance, I reflected that this person had every right to ask such a question. Not only that but the fundamental nature of the enquiry is to their credit. They weren’t saying there was no point, just asking whether there was one and if so what it might be. While I have always taken it for granted that there is indeed a point, it would never have occurred to me to think it through had that prospective cineaste not asked his question. The term “film history” could mean many things of course: the history of film production and manufacture, of filmmaking technology, of distribution, of movie stars and celebrities, of the culture and community of filmmakers and film lovers. While I wouldn't for a moment denigrate the historians of any of those topics, nor seek to limit the boundaries of film history, or any history, I would have to admit it’s the language of the moving image and the storytelling it facilitates, and how generation after generation find ways of making this work, that for me is always the most exciting arena.

A Canterbury Tale, written by Emeric Pressburger, directed by Michael Powell—the duo calling themselves The Archers, who were responsible for several of the greatest British movies ever made—was released in 1944. The film begins with a group of medieval pilgrims journeying across the English countryside to Canterbury Cathedral, inspired in the Powell-Pressburger mind by the pilgrims of Chaucer’s 14th century Canterbury Tales. One of the pilgrims releases a falcon into the sky. As the pilgrim peers up, the bird soars away into the heavens. Then, as it sails through the air, we see something unexpected happen. There's a transition in image, in time, sudden, magical, inspired. With no cut, no camera move, without reframing or adjustment, the falcon transforms into a Spitfire, the single-engined fighter plane adept at combating the Nazi Luftwaffe as it attacked Britain (and once, in the process, taking out my family’s home—empty at the time, as luck would have it). The sky of the 1400s becomes the sky of World War II. Pressburger and Powell have defied the constraints of time and culture. The poetry of the image, of the juxtaposition of images has been rendered a narrative device. Creature has morphed into machine, nature-made into man-made. The past has become the present, or what was for the filmmakers the present. Chaucer’s literature has become cinema and the story of the film moves on. Simple, clear, innovative, masterly. One example of the combined genius of Powell-Pressburger.

It was Martin Scorsese who pointed out to me that Stanley Kubrick's similarly deft transition in 2001—a fibula tossed into the air by a triumphant hominin transformed mid-spin into a tumbling spacecraft—was inspired by that very gem of cinematic language in A Canterbury Tale. The past, through Kubrick's agency, becomes the future. With a single cut, Powell-Pressburger travel through 500 years while with his edit, Kubrick spans not just countless millennia but human evolution over millions of years. Primitive weaponry is rendered state of the art technology, brow ridges frontal lobes, savagery grace, sky cosmos. And that's only the film’s beginning… what’s to follow in every way meets the lofty expectations set up by its prelude. The mystery only deepens, the journey taken only expands, the film only becomes more magnificent…

What would 2001 have been, had Stanley Kubrick not seen that earlier movie? Would he have found some other manner of visual time travel? A different juxtaposition of imagery? But what might that have been? And what, come to think of it, had been the source of inspiration for Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell to begin with? Had they seen an earlier film that made use of some similar transmutation, its combination of affinity and contrast affording a comparable thrill of dissonance? Or had they simply looked up one morning as a bird flew overhead before yielding the empyrean to some subsequent Supermarine Spitfire? Was it movie or was it life that provided them with the solution to the challenge of girding the centuries?

Jean-Luc Godard opined that there are two kinds of director: those of “free cinema” who walk in the street with their head up, and those of rigorous cinema who walk with their head down… fixing their attention on the precise point that interests them. Powell-Pressburger, it strikes me, were of the latter category, as was Kubrick. Those of this rigorous tribe, perhaps, are the ones who derive most benefit from the riches of past cinema, from its reservoir of storytelling language. For them, that language, the nature of the image, its selection, its framing are indivisible from the thing itself. There is none of the assumed duality between content and style—the baggage of pre-20th century preconceptions of a fixed objective reality. The world and story of the film, the screen on which it plays out, and the emotion, thought, and gut sensation of the audience work together as one symbiosis, the process that is the movie. In truth though, there never was a tabula rasa upon which the “free” cinema filmmakers might conjure their images, drawn from life to be merely transplanted onto the blank screen. What is witnessed in the world must inevitably be filtered through the acculturation of the screenwriter, the director, and the cinematographer before being transferred to their movie. Has there ever been a director who has never seen a film? A single film? Could there ever be? How could anyone make a film without knowing what a film is? (Louis Le Prince was perhaps an exception, when he shot the modest seconds of the Roundhay Garden Scene in 1888, or maybe Thomas Edison was a virgin filmmaker when he began to make shorts five years later, but even they, and the contemporary Lumiere brothers, and other pioneers, had to be aware of still photography, as photographers had previously been informed by the work painters.) And would that film or those films seen before not have remained to some extent or other in the filmmaker’s mind as they visualized their own? Wherever it is that art begins, it does not begin in a vacuum. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we copy, we steal, we develop, we subvert, we reinvent, we plunder and reuse whether consciously or unconsciously, what has come before us. No way around it, not without going back to those Kubrickian hominids and their oblivious frolics.

A directing fellow at AFI, outstandingly talented and subsequently enormously successful, once remarked to me after we’d spent hours in class going scene by scene, shot by shot, cut by cut through a Hitchcock movie, that “we don't make films like that anymore”. Why, he asked, should we have spent all this time analyzing the visual storytelling of a movie made so many decades ago? He was, I suppose, asking the self same question as the aspiring filmmaker in that post. My reply was that the class was not only about the solutions Hitchcock found to the challenges he faced, but also—and perhaps primarily—about those challenges and questions themselves, universal to movie storytelling throughout the decades. I wasn't telling him to make movies exactly like Hitchcock’s, I said—although that would perhaps be no bad thing—but to be able himself to find the key questions, ones that otherwise he might not spot, so that he might come up with his own solutions, his own modes of visual storytelling. I might have added that language—any language, on the page, on the screen, of the spoken word—is constantly shifting and changing as it’s pushed and pulled by the pressures of culture, the search for meaning, for function, for the need for renewal, so that it can be ever fresh and vibrant. The study of even a contemporary movie might, given his preconceptions of ephemerality, be rendered past its sell by date. Good movies—and how we define the term “good” is of course a matter of debate—do not have a sell by date, nor, even, do many “bad” movies, from which we can also learn so much.

We know better than our predecessors, the common assumption goes. We are more sophisticated, more hip, less constrained by tradition, more badass than the old-fashioned dead. We have digital cinematography. We have Avid. We have smart phones. We edit on laptops. Sure. So what happens next? Future generations will top us, as each in turn, one by one, tops the other, a progression of the exceptionalism of the present defiant in the face of the wisdom not only of the ancients but of those still warm in the grave. Technologies change, yes, sensibilities shift, cultures evolve, and we find different ways of telling stories. But many of those ways will be echoes and variations of past approaches whether we are aware of it or not. Our need for story, to hear, to read, to watch, to experience will not however alter—it’s through story and storytelling, the catalyst for our emotional and cognitive engagement with existence, that we come to understand who we might be and grasp some sense of the mysterious universe in which we find ourselves.

Such a mysterious firmament presides over 2001, itself now an “old movie”. Is there any point in studying it? Is there any point in studying If, Rosemary’s Baby, Once Upon a Time in the West—films made in the same year? What’s to learn from Lindsay Anderson, Polansky, Leone? Only the dramaturgy of cinema, the language of the screen, the intractable and paradoxical truths of myth and life. Only the troubling but sublime glory of the image. Only the art of what will happen next? Only the emotions and sensations inside us all. Only the world in which we find ourselves. Only us.

And it’s that that is the point, the point of studying film history.

Peter Markham November 2020

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Gazing toward the Pacific during a chemo session.

There’s something I say to filmmakers in my classes, for many years at AFI Conservatory but now online worldwide, to the effect that as we follow the course of a story we long for a victory of some kind while fearing a defeat, yet in a good story what we discover at its end is a sense of meaning, often paradoxical, often hard to articulate, but with a resonance that renders either outcome almost irrelevant. The tragedy we dreaded, we find, offers a reward. The painful ending reverberates, stays with us while the happy dénouement we longed for withers in our memory from the moment we leave the movie theater (in the days when we could attend such venues) — unless it’s come with a cost so that along with the victory comes the pang of defeat. This sense of meaning — and it generally comprises of questions, contradictions and mystery rather than easy answers or moral reassurances (Spotlight went dark for me the moment the lights came up, if not some time before) — is what story and storytelling offer us. Through paths of emotion denied the philosophical treatise, story speaks to us in all aspects of our humanity. Yes, I love philosophy: Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Kant, Aristotle, Locke, Lao Tzu — but it’s Hitchcock, Kubrick, Lynne Ramsay, Lucretia Martel, Andrea Arnold, Barry Jenkins, Martin Scorsese and Ari Aster who get to me deep down in my heart and guts. It’s through their work that I find connection, a sense of meaning, of truth. A story, Nobel laureate Alice Munro says, has a sturdy sense of itself, of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. Those filmmakers don’t seek to shelter or beguile us, don’t attempt to make everything “alright”, but to show us what they’ve let be built out of its own necessity: a story, like it or not, to take us to the core of something we cannot deny, ignore, still less escape, but to the contrary must come to accept.

This weekend marks exactly eight years since the procedure I underwent that saved my life. That transhiatal esophagectomy left me deprived of a couple GI tract components — let’s not dwell on the details — but otherwise left me in one grateful piece. Thanks to the craftsmanship of the surgeon, my guidance from the oncologist and the care given me by the health workers who made my treatment so much less unpleasant that might otherwise have been the case, here I am today, sitting down trying to do justice to what I want to say. I may be several superfluous pounds lighter, may not be able to scarf down a burger and bun with bacon, cheese, pickles, tomato, lettuce and all the rest of it, not able to scarf down anything for that matter, perhaps a little askew physiologically, and a touch more fragile to be honest, but I remain above ground, on the planet, and struggling still to work out what’s going on with the world, with my life, with the lives of everyone around me — a bewilderment now all the more puzzling given the events of the last few months.

Where’s this going? you’re wondering, as you ponder any unlikely connection between the golf ball-sized obstacle lodged in my craw eight years ago, the treatment that rid me of it, and my pontification on the nature of story and why it proves so essential to the lives of so many of us. To explain, I need to recall those days of chemo and radiation, the surgery and recovery period after, and the course of brutal “insurance” chemo following. Chemo does you in — no profound revelation in my saying that. The nausea, the shriek of pain as your hands and your feet morph into shrunken talons one moment, and a polystyrene numbness as they succumb to neuropathy the next, tend to wear one down. The radiation doesn’t help either, although the radiation folk accuse the chemo folk of the side effects as the chemo folk accuse the radiation folk — such Hitchcockian transfers of guilt offering only passing amusement. Then comes the surgery, the cut in the neck, the slit down the front. The snatching out of what lies in between. Post surgery the feeding tube arrives, conduit for nutritional substances distinctly less than appetizing. Not a bundle of fun.

And still… it wasn’t all bad. The biweekly chemo sessions, the major hits, had me gazing, over my feet, out of the window before me to Santa Monica Boulevard, hurrying away to the Pacific and a distant glimmer that struck me as the sparkle of hope, the infinity it intimated seeming the harbinger of some manner of timeless permanence. There were the aforementioned health workers too, people who seemed to enjoy a selfless devotion to those of us fortunate enough to be in their charge. Diversity, along with kindness, reigned supreme among their ranks, so that for once, despite my English predilection for outsiderness and miserablist alienation in general, I began, somewhat unusually, to feel a part of humanity.

Yet there was something even more profound, if that’s possible. There were moments when, lying back plugged into dangling sac-fulls of chemo agent — the heavy artillery as I used to describe it, irony the means of consolation — I thought of the opening title sequence of the first Star Trek episodes, a show my family would watch together after “tea” when I was in my early teens and living deep in leafy southern England. (Each ep was as good an introduction to philosophy as any book). Cosseted under my blanket and in my reclining chair at the UCLA Medical Center, I one morning discovered myself hurtling at warp speed into that all encompassing cosmos, clusters of stars, of galaxies rendered speeding pinpricks of light to rush past me as I tore forth into the darkness ahead. Stars, stars, and more stars, as if the big bang was never going to stop — not much a bang as one perpetual roar of joyful existence. This was me, nano-sized, accelerating forward; this was the universe, fathomless in its unimaginable dimension, coming at me at the speed of light, inviting me into its heart… Somehow, in that moment, I became a part of it, at one with it, and no matter how minuscule I might have been — a Lilliputian dot so tiny I barely existed at all — without me it could not have been the same universe: different only imperceptibly, admittedly, but different nevertheless. I could not escape belonging to it, nor, sentient or insentient, could it escape my belonging.

People talk about “battling” cancer, about “beating” it. I never battled or beat anything. What was I supposed to be fighting against? Myself? The replicating cells were a part of me, not of anyone else. What what was I supposed to be battling with? And how? I found myself not so much battling as traveling, and with those brief seconds of interstellar overdrive came to see I might accept my place in the universe, accept it as I’d previously found it difficult to accept very much of anything, so that although I have not the slightest wish to return to the predicament of that fall, winter, and spring, I came to accept what it was I was going through. There was a truth in it, a mystery, one I neither had to “battle”, nor resign myself to passively, but one I found I could accept actively. This was my decision, my agency, and yet with the rescuing humility it presented. Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it, Henry Miller wrote. No certainties, no homilies, no easy answers, but a truth like that derived from a good story built of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you, but to have you live with it, in it, through and by it.

I wore my chemo pump in my sleep. I wore in the shower. I wore it to class. I wore it as I worked with the students on the stories they wanted to tell. It made my hands and my feet shriek as they morphed into talons, then tingle with the numbness of neuropathy, then twist tight again like the dead contorted feet of a bird clinging, as if still for dear life, onto thin air. But with this pump came the memory of that warp speed Star Trek epiphany and the acceptance it afforded, just as with the stories and films those students were striving to put up on the screen might come the acceptance of paradoxes known and accepted only through the journeys along their narrative paths.

We know when we see a good movie, when we follow a good story. We know, and it pleases us, when we can do nothing but accept it. We know when the sense of meaning it offers connects us to ourselves, to each other, and to the universe of which we form our human part. And with movies there’s no need for sickness, for chemo, no pump, no talons, no polystyrene feet, just the screen, the drama, the emotions, and the sense of meaning that only story can deliver, taking us deep into its core as its stars rush past, so that we may live with it, in it, through and by it.

Peter Markham October 2020

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Never have so many young minds aspired to a life in filmmaking. Over the last couple of decades the number of film schools has burgeoned, applicants have multiplied, the technology for shooting and cutting a movie has become exponentially more available, and the number of shorts sent on a wing and a prayer to festivals has increased beyond what previously might have been imagined. Suddenly, however, a force arrived out of left field to render filmmaking—a challenge even in the most favorable of circumstances—barely practicable across much of the country. Movies on Zoom or shot strictly within the home flourish maybe—ingenuity tends to find a way—but the complexity of communication on set, its nuances, intimacies, detail, and flow that for practitioners become second nature, or should, are rendered fiendishly challenging even with a Covid-19 compliance officer present. How does the director talk to the actor while socially distanced and wearing a mask? How does the director block a scene, or discuss camera placement and framing with the DP? How, above all else, does everyone stay safe? Covid-19 compliance officers see to that but of course add to costs few can afford. Plus, it has to go wrong just once before the shoot is called off. Under the circumstances, even the weekend iPhone production gets to be tricky, while nothing more than a two minute short becomes a mountain to climb.(Brevity, admittedly, is ever mountainous.)

What then is the aspiring filmmaker to do?

Denied the shoot, maybe this is the time for the budding cineaste to learn? And when learning by doing stops being practical perhaps it's time to commit to learning by learning. After all, it wasn't so long ago that there was no such thing as a smartphone. Before, the world lacked digital cameras, and before that camcorders. Those in the know, might have worked on 8 mm but this was so much more laborious than the ease afforded by contemporary technology. How then did a filmmaker learn? Orson Welles said he worked out how to make movies by watching John Ford’s Stage Coach. Martin Scorsese watched Welles, Fellini, Hitchcock, and the canon of just about any director he could set his eyes on. Isn't it time, now, for those at the start of their careers—and maybe those well into them too—to follow in those footsteps and learn (or relearn) by watching? By “watching” I mean watching not as a consumer, not as a critic, an academic, a sociologist, philosopher or any other category of viewer out there, each adhering to their own particular criteria of assessment, but as a filmmaker, hungry to understand. Observing and listening to both the working minds of those who have come before them, and those currently excelling, the rookie director gains insight into the practice, the challenges those storytellers have encountered and the questions they asked. The student, the filmmaker can figure the means, language, connective tissue by which they made (or make) their movies work, firstly in the world, story, and characters of the narrative, then on the planarity of the screen, and then through the address this makes to the hearts, minds, and guts of their audience—without whom a film can never amount to much more than a forgotten artifact.

These masters would think, ponder, reflect, and closely analyze the elements of dramatic narrative, of visual and auditory language that constitute a movie. In the recent imperative to go out there and make yet another short, in the drive to get up and running on the set or on location, in its excitement and immediacy, that lonely process of the mind can so easily be forgotten. Why bother to learn, why wait, when you can simply go ahead and do? 

Even before Covid-19 however, there existed a corresponding factor to dilute the singular journey of the filmmaker—the conflation in all manner of educational programs of disparate topics under the one-size-fits-all banner of “film production”, under which both movie manufacture and creative filmmaking are conceived of as being a single domain. This framing, seen for example in books on so-called film technique and aesthetics, serve only to confuse the student. What if the teachers of creative writing for the novel, for the short story were to give classes on the keyboard, on the computer screen, on the process of book production, the printing, the publication, the distribution? How would that work out for the aspiring author? The category of “film production” is not only misconceived but seduces the student away from the “candy” that is their story and voice, tempting them toward the factory and conveyor belt of its production. The amalgam of the processes of pre-production, physical production, and post production, its skillsets, codes, and subcultures with the creative acts of story-making and storytelling through the language of the moving image can be, and indeed often results in, a debilitating compromise of the emerging—and by its very nature lonely—voice.

Don't get me wrong, those who devote their lives and careers to the manufacture of movies and TV are right be proud of their camaraderie and skills. They should be respected and valued for their dedication to the industry. Without them, no story could be told, no audience sit before that glorious screen, no truth or emotion or mystery conveyed by a movie disseminated. And yet, without the story and the storyteller, there would be no need for the craftspeople. The relationship is a symbiosis, yes, but it consists of two entirely different arenas. When the sovereignty of story and the loneliness of the storyteller are pushed to one side, overshadowed not only by the structures and practice of production but by the worlds of business, marketing, and distribution, the student of filmmaking—as this relates to story, character, and visual language—is subsumed into the universe that serves it.

Fortifying the path through this misconception both at film schools and among a thriving no-film school community, there follows the invitation the fledgling filmmaker yearns for—the beckoning from the club of “working professionals”, the ones who, claiming the knowledge that needs to be known, are seen to have put education behind them and “made it” into a select echelon graced by common assumptions, by awards, by celebrity. “Be one of us!” the industry educator cries. “Come join our coterie!” “Embrace the certainty of professional status!” And so the lonely odyssey of filmmaker as outlier, as dissident, as misfit becomes hamstrung even before it has begun. Herd mentality wins out, group think prevails, the precious resources afforded by the loneliness of individual progress lost to the winds of the craving for belonging. The only interesting ideas are heresies, Susan Sontag said. Well, heresies don’t get you into the coterie—that ticket demands commonplaces.

I worked as a 1st AD, a location scout, and production manager in BBC Drama and Films in the UK for over a decade. I could suss out and nail down a great location, I could schedule a movie, I could run a set, anticipating problems and solving them before they arose, solving them when they arose, I could anticipate the coverage of a scene, know how it might be “hosed down” (in journeyman terminology), I could direct the background action, and I could judge the framing of an image on the basis of the chosen lens without looking through the camera, but I learned very little about story and storytelling, about the rich language of the moving image, its flow of energy, its power as a source of emotion, cognition, visceral sensation,  I didn't understand how a key image could encapsulate theme, I didn't understand narrative point of view and how the director and the editor might articulate and shift this, connecting the audience to one particular character or another in particular scenes or at crucial moments or—should this be the desired approach—throughout a movie. I didn't understand the challenges of tone and its modulation, I didn't understand how genre could have so fundamental an impact on how an event might be the depicted, even—in the context of a particular dramatic narrative—on the validity of that event to begin with. In short, I understood what surrounded the creative process while having failed to explore that central endeavor itself. I thought of myself as part of a club, together with the rest of the crew, in a hallowed community of professionals and yet… and yet, although I would try to deny it to myself, I always ended up feeling lonely. I had interacted with others but said nothing. Then, when I began to direct, I wanted even more desperately to belong, now to the community of directors, to be a member of that esteemed group, safe and sound in that home, that noble family.

It wasn't until I found myself teaching—and when I realized my daunting responsibility toward the development of the young directors under my tutelage—that I came to see what constitutes the progress of the filmmaker through an entirely different (metaphorical) lens. Many of the teachers who were my peers, excellent as they were, would be eager to shepherd their students into the club while I found myself in thrall to an altogether more exciting task: the facilitating of diverse, distinctive sensibilities and voices through the exploration of story and craft. This was not only an act of kindness—nothing wrong in that, whatever the current zeitgeist—but a collaboration to lead the student toward notable, compelling, and above all distinctive filmmaking. When the emotion of a story and the emotion rooted in the one telling it finds agency up on the screen, personal vision speaks. Second-guess perspectives, afforded by those content to conform, to play by teacher’s rules, to be members of the club by contrast resonate less. Films of such complexion offer at best immediate gratification but along with the empty cartons and cans of concessions left strewn across a movie theater’s auditorium, are quickly forgotten and having fallen short in conveying the questions of life common to us all leave us with a sense of emptiness. We have seen it all before and now we've seen it again. Paradoxically, it is the singular vision that is recognized by, and resonates with us. The personal becomes universal and stays with us after the movie has come to its end. It is the individual creative soul that speaks to our common humanity, its loneliness which speaks to our togetherness, not as members of any club, or clique or self congratulatory subculture, but as people of all backgrounds and kinds going about our lives day by day.

We are living through tough circumstances certainly, and for some their predicaments are formidably severe, yet for filmmakers, the opportunity not to be distracted by the imperatives of manufacture and membership but to focus on the heart of story and emotion, is there. Together  with their peers, the new cineaste can be lonely, and lonely be together, so that when moviemaking becomes a touch more doable—and this can’t come too soon—the films they make connect at an enduring level to the audiences they draw.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers, James Baldwin wrote. You learn the answers in order to gain admittance to the club. Outside, you search for the questions to connect you with the biggest club all—humanity.

Peter Markham  October 2020     

Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)  

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

Sabrina Doyle on set. (Photo by Henry Drayton)

Taking the first steps into filmmaking on a professional basis and subsequently developing that career in its early stages are paths that have ever presented challenges and uncertainties above and beyond those encountered in other fields. Finding one’s voice, honing one’s craft, getting oneself noticed in the saturation of competition, aspiration, and general noise, each presenting a hurdle to be overcome, have never by themselves been sufficient guarantee of success without the added contingencies of luck and circumstance. Will the screenplay of the talented filmmaker be noticed by the appropriate enablers? Will the sensibility of the material and its cultural focus mesh with the zeitgeist? Will the filmmaker prove their mettle when it comes to the actual making of the movie? Whatever might be the state of the nation and the world once the movie is ready for release, there remain battles to be fought over festival screenings and distribution. With the arrival of Covid-19, these steep mountains to climb were transformed into the sheerness of a cliff-face. Moving from screenplay to production became tougher than ever. Shoots, in so many parts of the US, became supremely tricky: how does one block a scene given the imperative of social distancing, how are notes to be given to the cast on set, what about the communication between departments, a dialogue of both clarity and nuance, and how does consultation with Covid-19 advisors impact these aspects of physical production? Once a film has been completed, filmmakers find festival screenings, festivals themselves severely disrupted, while the distribution one hopes will follow has been left in the throes of continuing uncertainty. Should the filmmakers wait for a release on the big screen, not knowing how long that wait will be? Or should they go for streaming in order to get the film out into the world? Hard for anyone, even the most experienced practitioner, to know.

As former head of the directing program at AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles, which I left in the summer of 2018, I decided to glean the experiences and consequent insights of my alumni who have been dealing with this situation. Writer-director Sabrina Doyle, for example, wrapped her first feature Lorelei at the end of 2018. She would have finished post-production early this year were it not for the onset of the virus. The indie’s premiere was scheduled for Tribeca in April but with only weeks to go the screening was canceled. “It was a real sucker punch,” Doyle says, “because you hope for that kind of splashy premiere to launch your film and career, and that just went away in an instant, and the industry didn’t step in and collectively come up with a plan for all the indies, like mine, that lost their big SXSW or Tribeca moments.” She explained that Tribeca is inviting this year’s films back next year, a gesture she very much appreciates, although by then domestic distribution deals are likely to have been worked out. The moment, in other words, will have been lost. This process happens now via online screeners—just not the same as the buzz of a festival and its audiences. Fortunately, Lorelei was invited into competition at the Deauville American Film Festival where it won the Jury Award, and one hopes it will  now achieve the distribution it deserves.

Zoé Wittock was somewhat luckier with her astonishing debut Jumbo, the movie premiering at Sundance in January of this year before screening at Berlin at the end of February, thus slipping in before the pandemic stole the headlines along with the regularity of life for so many of us. So far so good but then Covid-19 stepped in and the film's initial theatrical release in Belgium had to be scrapped, switched instead to VOD in March. The movie’s been screening theatrically in France and has been released in Canada, while Dark Star has acquired distribution rights in the US. Its inclusion in the “New Voices” section of AFI Fest had just been announced. Jumbo is a distinctive film from a film maker with a distinctive voice. In steadier times it would surely be winning more notice, but its take is so fresh it's likely to pick up more of its enthusiastic following over the coming months. 

Another feature debut from AFI alumni screening at this year’s Sundance was the mischievous Palm Springs. Directed by Max Barbakow, written by Andy Siara, the movie broke the Sundance sales record, being picked up by Hulu for streaming and by Neon for a limited theatrical release. Without Covid however, but with audiences in movie theaters across the nation in thrall to its agile plotting and generous heart, it would surely have garnered a wider devoted following. 

AFI alum Dubois Ashong was a week away from the start of shooting in the Dominican Republic for his debut feature Geechee, starring Andrea Riseborough, when Coronavirus made itself known to the world and the producers were forced to bring the entire unit home. After weeks of uncertainty, Ashong was able to return to his locations in late July, the production withstanding both a passing hurricane and a crew member catching the virus. The screenplay to his movie, which tells the story of a haunting by the souls of enslaved Africans, is both terrifying and deeply moving. Very much a film for our times, Geechee promises to be more than deserving of a theatrical release—maybe when the time comes that might be possible. It is of great concern then, and sad news indeed, that the shoot has been currently shut down after a crew member was injured in a mistaken ambush by local police. Thankfully they are apparently not seriously hurt. Covid-19, it would seem, is far from the sole problem to assail the new generation of filmmakers.

Dubois Ashong on the Set of Geechee (Photo by Carlos Rodriguez)

Fortune on the other hand, with the assistance of their considerable talent of course, has thus far favored other AFI alumni who have a not immediately been in production, at least as directors. Deft comedienne Oran Zegman has been slated by Tri-Star to direct the remake of Troop Beverly Hills as her directorial debut. Mattson Tomlin meanwhile, who when we met earlier this year, informed me that he works on eight or nine screenplays every day as a screenwriter—a boast I believe, given his astonishing capacity for productive endeavor—and having written the screenplays to both The Batman and Netflix’s current hit Project Power, is now directing the sci-fi thriller Mother/Android for Miramax. Even a global pandemic, it seems, hasn't blocked the progress of these alumni.

Indeed, the most daunting challenges in these troubled times are perhaps those facing aspiring filmmakers either still at film school or just beginning their adventure. The expense in terms of finance and time of attendance is no laughing matter, nor does a film student have the certainty of a career, as many of their contemporaries in other less unpredictable professions might have. They need to be strong-willed and yet I rarely found any fellow at AFI Conservatory to be arrogant or entitled. What struck me most was their courage—impressive in the face of their embarkation on such a high-risk path—which has been supported by programs tried and tested over decades to meet their needs. Film schools in the current climate, certainly those on the West Coast, and certainly those for whom production and learning by doing is at the core of their pedagogy, have needed to adjust curricula years in their evolution in order to adapt to current circumstances. How much of an impact such changes will prove to have on the development of students is difficult to assess, while the inevitable uncertainty of such adaptive approaches alone can hardly have been reassuring for those who succeed in achieving admission to the top schools only in the face of intense competition.

Alum Hao Zheng by contrast, was fortunate to come out of AFI Conservatory in 2019 with a student Academy award for his thesis The Chef. Already a couple of projects previously scheduled for current production have been pushed, thanks to Covid-19. Invited also to Disney’s new Launchpad program for directors, he has to be finding it particularly frustrating not to be embarking on this new adventure but having to wait. Hao tells me he's been busy though. “I never call myself a writer-director as I love collaborating with other writers,” he says. “But this ‘down time’ allowed me to spend more time on reading and practicing my own writing.” He says he’s been using the time to catch up with his fellow filmmakers. “I think because we have more free time now and are desperate for social connection we actually talk a lot more with each other than before, sharing our ideas and perspectives.” The silver lining to a dearth of production perhaps? A time for reflection, for learning, for consolidating one’s understanding of one’s craft, for developing new material. and for communicating with peers—maybe then, just maybe, all is not yet lost…

Peter Markham   October 2020

What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay:

An Essential Guide for Directors and Writer-Directors

Focal Press/Routledge

You have conversations with yourself in coffee shops and hotels and put those conversations onto the page. Before long you find yourself with the book you wanted to write and realize this inner interlocution is to be made to all. Today this is happening. With huge thanks to the 450 or so directors in my classes over my years at AFI Conservatory, and to the filmmakers of other disciplines I was lucky to get to know, I'm proud to say today is publication day in the US and UK for my book What's the story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. These pages are a tribute to all of you. Something I could never of done without our work together, work that continues with the filmmakers attending my current classes and consultations. Onto the next book now but meanwhile I hope this snippet from today’s offering whets your appetite…

https://www.routledge.com/Whats-the-Story-The-Director-Meets-Their-Screenplay-An-Essential-Guide/Markham/p/book/9780367415877

https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Story-Director-Meets-Screenplay/dp/0367415879/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GS4U6NXF1R2K&dchild=1&keywords=peter+markham&qid=1599592714&sprefix=Peter+Markham,aps,202&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Whats-Story-Director-Meets-Screenplay/dp/0367415879/ref=sr_1_2?crid=1UYZSJNIJ8D66&dchild=1&keywords=peter+markham&qid=1599592973&s=books&sprefix=Peter+Markham%2Caps%2C279&sr=1-2

What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. Focal Press/Routledge

Available at Amazon, Book Depository, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, blackwells.co.uk, routledge.com

When I came out of AFI Conservatory in the summer of 2018, I pretty soon realized it was time for me to write a book on filmmaking. It didn't take long to see that the topics we explored at the school might be developed and expanded, and that I could explore them at deeper levels in such a volume. 

I’d always loved class with the directing fellows, always been energized by interacting with such singular talents, such youthful wisdom, but without the constriction of time limits and class schedules, I had the opportunity to do something newly exciting and to take the required months and focus to do this properly. I came up with a list of topics in about twenty minutes, but then the real work started… 

My seventy page proposal was received favorably by publishers, of whom I felt Focal Press the most appropriate avenue for what I planned to achieve. Then came the writing of the book itself, and the months of engagement with the chapters and what I wanted to think about and question and say in them. 

After submitting a draft to Focal Press and receiving invaluable insights, comments, and correctives from peer reviewers, I went on to complete the book. Only the copy editing remained, and here I discovered yet another delight in the process of writing and publishing, copy editor Steven Holt proving not only formidably literate, but a cinephile also. Then, with one or two late adjustments, the work was done. 

Now you can read the result. I hope you will enjoy this book, I hope it will prompt you to think deeply about your own exploration, your own take, and I hope very much that you will be able to draw from it valuable nourishment for your filmmaking and appreciation of the art of visual storytelling. Entitled What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay: An Essential Guide for Directors and Writer-Directors, I believe that creative filmmakers of all crafts also, as well as lovers of film and story will find both challenges and the rewards that come of them in its pages. After all, the seed is one thing but the fruit is another—something the teacher is always anticipating with eagerness…

Scheduled for publication in 2020 with Focal Press/Routledge, my book, provisionally entitled WHAT’S THE STORY? — THE DIRECTOR MEETS THE SCREENPLAY has been described in peer reviews as a game-changer like nothing else on the market. This is a book for both the director and writer-director, and indeed for members of all filmmaking crafts and for informed cinephiles too. Its focus lies in the nexus of dramatic construction and filmic discourse — by which I mean the storytelling, visual language, and flow of emotion and thought among characters and audience essential to both movie (whether short or feature) and TV show. Rooted in sixteen years of teaching around 450 directors in the Thesis Presentation Class at AFI Conservatory, in which the director’s preparation for production — specifically the understanding of dramatic construction that informs all elements of directing craft — would be explored and articulated each week, the book expands the topics the class dealt with to cover some twenty-two aspects the director needs to know in depth in order to tell their story effectively and make a successful film. 

Here are some extracts. May you find them useful. May you find them thought-provoking!

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When filmmaking students (and some teachers too) are asked to tell the story of a film, they will often begin by saying It’s a story about… or even simply It’s about…  Say Wong Kar Wei’s IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE is the film considered, they might offer It’s a story about a two lonely people, or It’s a story about a two lonely people in a relationship, or simply It’s about loneliness and love. None of these sentences describe a story. Two lonely people refers to the film’s main characters. Two lonely people in a relationship describes characters in a particular circumstance. It’s about loneliness and love is more of a thematic than a narrative notion, a concept, an abstraction. Of course it’s important for the director to know their characters, to grasp their condition, their circumstances or state of being, and of course it’s helpful to have a sense of the thematic aspects of their movie or TV episode and what these may be about, but unless the director understands what a story is, they won’t be able to tell one, and if they can’t tell one they won’t be able to incorporate those other aspects — characters, circumstances, theme — into the elements of their craft.

A story is a progression of incident. Two lonely people fall unexpectedly in love but faced by their mutual sense of guilt, find themselves unable to maintain their romance so go their separate ways. That’s a story.

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How should the film announce itself and what might the audience see? A person, people, an object, a setting — whether a room, a place, a vista, or what? Should the director start their film with a wide shot or a big close up? Should the frame be empty or full? Should the image be shown immediately or should it be discovered? And what of the choice of framing? Might something be shown in its entirety or only in part? How will the aspect ratio, the proportions of the frame, affect these decisions? 

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When talking about tone one is thinking of the attitude of the filmmaker, whether screenwriter or director, to their material. A tone may echo the world of the film and its atmosphere, its moods, the emotions of its characters, the pitch and stakes of the drama or it may be at odds with those elements. Tone is not so much rooted in the characters and their predicament as in the screenwriter’s and directors’s attitude towards them, which may or may not be sympathetic. At any moment there may be a single tone or there may be two dissonant tones. A tone may be heightened or muted. A tone suggests an emotional dimension, although it may equally undercut or suppress emotion. In some ways it can be similar to the voice of a filmmaker and it certainly informs it, but it is not the same thing — voice suggests more a perspective on material, a vision of life and humanity particular to the filmmaker. 

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The nature of a physical world may embody a thematic dimension, a deep connection to what the story is about — and when this occurs, the visual and the dramaturgical come together in cinematic unity. During the pre-production of THE ENGLISH PATIENT, writer-director Anthony Minghella posited the story’s desert landscape as a visual metaphor. The true map of the world that the film reveals, he said, is the map not of nations but of humanity, so he thought there should be moments in the film when the desert resembles the human body, when it might even be mistaken as such. The opening of the movie presents that very concept, the camera high above a desert vista as it tracks over its rolling dunes. With nothing to give context, either to the nature of the image or its scale, there is visual ambiguity until the shadow of a plane appears (even this at first resembles the human form), followed by the plane itself, glinting in the sun as it flies below the camera. The audience might see the terrain as desert or as human flesh, as vast or intimate. Thus the theme of the film is encapsulated in a single shot while at the same time one of its two worlds — the other is rural Tuscany — is deftly established. 

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Having understood the intentions of the screenwriter as regards Narrative Point of View and what might be its shifts and flow, the director can employ resources and visual language in order to articulate it that will include casting, mise-en-scène, camera (lensing, placement, movement), sound, music, and editing. When taking into account NPOV, the director does not merely “cover” a scene, shooting whatever angles and footage are required as raw material for its editing, (“hosing it down”, as journeymen put it), but selects what is needed in order to capture and convey the perception and experience of a particular character or characters. 

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A protagonist may be neither a hero nor an anti-hero but simply a character in the throes of adverse circumstances over which they have limited or no control. The conflict and/or tension of such a story may be more interesting than a duel between the good and the bad. In Asaph Polonsky’s ONE WEEK AND A DAY, the protagonist Eyal Spivak has to cope with, and ultimately overcome his grief over his son’s death, a challenge as formidable as any presented by a vindictive opponent, and one that has universal resonance. There is no willful antagonist, no struggle for power, no contest between any one side and another, only the painful situation with which Spivak has to cope, in which the configuration of the characters is less one of offense and defense, to be reversed from act to act, than of a shared and faltering defense against the emotional agonies inflicted by a devastating loss. 

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In a story, life must go wrong. A J Byatt wrote in her novel Ragnarok: It was a good story, a story with meaning, fear and danger were in it, and things out of control. When these elements are not merely brushed aside by a triumphant hero but have consequences, or when the actions the hero takes in order to overcome those forces themselves come at a cost and when that cost becomes evident at the story’s ending, a film stays with its audience. In short, when the irreconcilable opposites that inform dramatic construction and thematic paradox are incorporated into a film’s ending by both screenwriter and director, the film finds its voice.   

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Looking forward to seeing you in class!

Peter Markham

Hao Zheng is the Director, Leqi Kong the Co-Writer of THE CHEF, a sci-fi AFI Thesis Film that is a winner at the 2019 National Student Academy Awards. It has also won Best Futuristic Film at the AT&T Film Awards, has played at a the New Era Film Festival where it won Best Director, and at Jia Zhangke’s 86358 Short Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. A full list of its awards is posted at the end of this article. Both filmmakers are graduates of AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles.

I was Hao Zheng’s Head of Directing and one of his teachers on the graduate directing program at AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles, where I also got to know and admire the work of Screenwriter Leqi Kong. I met them both in September in a coffee shop on the Sunset Strip, in the heart of West Hollywood, to ask about how they had come to learn filmmaking in the US and how this had advanced their understanding of film and storytelling. The coffee shop was buzzing throughout the afternoon but it was their conversation that sparked the most. Leqi was eloquent and entertaining as ever, while Hao, even after sixteen flights to and from different festivals in one month, was his customary engaging, incisive self.

PM: Why did you to come to America study to filmmaking?

LQ: I kind of changed my life and my career. In China I was a film translator. I translated multiple films and TV shows from all over the world, most of them from America, where it all started, where film is most received and has the most influence, and I realized I wanted to be a part of it, and I can speak both languages and could come there to see how they do things. I became a Screenwriter by doing this.

HZ: I went to high school in New York but before that I already knew I wanted to do film. So I thought I would have to go to Hollywood, even though I didn’t know exactly what Hollywood is. Mum loved Hollywood movies so I grew up grew up watching American films and I thought the only way to learn making films would be the US. Then the first year at undergrad [Emerson in Boston], I would be on set every weekend trying a different production position. I then realized what I needed — I was a very visual filmmaker but I had no idea how to tell a story. And I didn’t know how to convey emotion. But I was lucky as I was in Julian Higgins’ class (an AFI Directing alumnus and Winner of the Gold Award at the National Student Academy Awards), and in a class taught by AFI Producing alumna Marie Colabelli. Both of them told me to consider AFI. Then, at AFI, I became certain that this is what I want to do.

PM: What is it about THE CHEF that your education at AFI helped you to be able to do?

LQ: The education at AFI is for the most part about being inclusive, being collaborative. AFI has its own way of making films. There a million ways of making films but this is a right way, like the studio way. You have this much money. You have to report the budget to the school every couple of weeks, and you have to let everyone in every department know when you are changing the script. Every draft is so connected to everybody else. So AFI really prepared me for working with others in all aspects while we were writing the script. It adds to the difficulty of writing a draft but it also makes you more mindful.

HZ: I learned my weakness is writing, but I don’t have to do it alone. I can go to different people for help. I don’t have to do everything by myself.

LQ: Writing is a lonely process, but we had a team. You could ask people, like, what do you think should happen? You don’t necessarily need to take someone’s advice, but it prods your imagination.

HZ: With THE CHEF, and this is a good example, I’ve always tried to find opportunities to do something I hadn’t done before, like try different genres. I want to find my own belief system in their worlds. As long as you are truthful and your character-driven story is the core, which is emotional, then the film will move people. THE CHEF has proved this to me.

LQ: Part of our collaboration is in the same thing. Like, genre is like a coat you put on the story, which you still make truthful. I also try different kinds of stories. I have my comedy sample, I have the Sci-Fi of THE CHEF, I have my magical realism story. You don’t have to do only one thing.

PM: How do you see the differences in approach to storytelling in the US and China?

LQ: I never learned storytelling in China but I watched Chinese films of course.

HZ: I’m still trying to figure that out. Put it this way — I love to observe audiences when CHEF is playing here versus when it’s playing in China. It’s totally different everywhere. Here, people find it more comedic, and the sci-fi is not the main focus. They’re also focusing on the immigrants’ aspect of the story. In China, nobody cares about the immigrant story. Most people are interested in the sc-fi aspect. They don’t really respond to the comedic elements. Comedy is a genre that doesn’t really translate. When I first came to the US I watched some comedy and didn’t get it. After a few years I started to get comedies here and not get comedy in China!

PM: But you’re talking about audience sensibilities rather than storytelling.

HZ: Ah! For me, I don’t want to rush the storytelling. I want a slow-burn. The storytelling is much more patient.

LQ: That’s also my observation.

HZ: Everything here is very to the point. Fast editing and so on.

LQ: Asian storytelling is more like a mood, a vibe. Like vignettes of life.

HZ: It’s like conveying emotion through the tone rather than the story.

LQ: The reason is that there is so much going on in America. America is the melting pot. Like the front-line. You can see it as how people collide with each other. In China we don’t focus on conflict. We focus on, like, an echo almost, like a vibe, like a mood.

PM: In the west we had Aristotle [the Greek Philosopher] with his theory of drama and tragedy. That had a big effect.

HZ: In China we had our ancient poetry, always describing situations in nature rather than straightforward storytelling.

PM: That’s so interesting! How did you work together? As Director and Co-Writer?

LQ: It was a good collaboration. And we worked on two [AFI thesis] films. We once spent seven hours on a story meeting and basically acted it out. What’s happening in this scene? What if he does this? It’s a different process from me sitting by myself and thinking what’s going to happen. Hao is more of a visual guy.

HZ: I’ve never co-written with anyone else. I was very stressed with the first thesis [NEW YEAR’S EVE] because I changed the story. There were so many conflicts. I was worrying how I was going to do it so I approached Vanessa and she was willing to come onboard. Then we talked. I felt I was trying to learn both writing and how to collaborate with another writer.

LQ: Hao is a strong advocate of how every scene in itself has to convey the goal, the conflict, the drama. Even now I’m writing my own stuff and with each scene I’m thinking how important is this to the whole script?

[Here I talked about how a scene might work in other ways — to set something up, create suspense, or mesmerize the audience as Lee Chang-dong does in BURNING for example, when Hae-mi dances. But more of this another time].

LQ: I’m heavy on structure. I need to know where I’m going. I need to know where the end is, in order to start. Some writers enjoy not knowing where they are going. They let the characters take them to the end. I have to have a structure! But a Director like Hao can help cut me loose. Then I realize I can get out of my own way.

HZ: For me it was very important to have Leqi there the whole time. Her job didn’t end until after post-production.

LQ: I felt so appreciated!

HZ: Our DP Carlos Mendoza was very involved with the story too, and sometimes he would talk with Leqi and myself about it.

LQ: And our editor Guangwie Du also. It was great that everyone could express themselves.

PM: And there was producer and Co-Writer Ithaca Deng too!

PM: What advice do you have for young Chinese Filmmakers?

LQ: I’m still young myself!

HZ: I feel like there’s so much advice I want to give. If I were sitting with myself ten years ago I would give so much. One thing would be Don’t be afraid to try! In any competitive program some people will just want to show they are good, so they will play safe. But it is good to try new things. But also, and this sounds like the opposite, Be open to advice! You need to listen to suggestions but you also need to be sure what you really want.

LQ: I would say, have an opinion but don’t hold too fast to it. Maybe you didn’t see the whole picture so don’t be afraid to change your opinion. But you have to know what you want. You are making a film because you have something to say.

HZ: Oh! One other thing. Be patient! Everyone seems to be getting so much every day and you feel you’re so behind. But this is advice to myself in Hollywood. You need to take your time. Be really patient. Really work on your projects.

LQ: Yeah! THE CHEF is a really good example. We spent so much effort on it and we didn’t expect all of this success at all. It’s a long process!

THE CHEF AFI Conservatory Thesis Film. 2018.

Producer/Co-Writer: Ithaca Deng

Editor: Guangwie Du

Co-Writer: Leqi Kong

Cinematographer: Carlo Mendoza

Director: Hao Zheng

AWARDS

Student Academy Awards - Winner, Los Angeles, CA

AT&T Film Awards - Best Futuristic Film, Los Angeles, CA

86358 Short Film Festival - Grand Jury Prize, Shanxi, China

NEW ERA Film Festival - Best Director, Beijing, China

South Dakota Film Festival - Best Student Short, Best Actor, Life Achievement Award (for our

actor), Aberdeen, SD

SELECTIONS

Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia 2019, Japan

Show Me Shorts, New Zealand

Heart of Gold International Film Festival, Australia

National Film Festival for Talented Youth, Seattle, WA

CAA Moebius Screening, Los Angeles, CA

Dances with Films - Spotlight China, Los Angeles, CA

Victory International Film Festival, Evansville, IN

Golden Door International Film Festival, Jersey City, NJ

Emerge Film Festival, Lewiston, ME

Orlando Film Festival, Orlando, FL

LUSCA Fantastic Film Fest 2019, Puerto Rico