A Film’s Universe Beyond Character and Action

Photo by Phil on Unsplash

Some filmmakers have itchy fingers. An event finishes/An event begins. ‘Cut to the chase!’ ‘The story must move on!’ We’ve heard it all. The ‘industry professional’ speaks. Something must always be happening. It’s a one-size-fits-all screen in the cult of one individual slogging it out against another individual. ‘Don’t let up!’ ‘Don’t bore!’ the regurgitators stipulate. Right, and ‘Don’t think! Don’t feel!’ ‘Don’t imagine.’ The audience must be rendered passive ‘Don’t stop’, the sure-of-themselves-educator insists, or like the cartoon character who runs of the cliff and keeps running, only to plummet a suspended second later (if anyone remembers them), your movie will nose-dive, your audience’s attention span dropping precipitously with it…

‘The audience is fickle. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go,’ said Billie Wilder. Let’s be honest—there was one great filmmaker! Someone we would all do well to listen to. Makes me think of the Safdies and Uncut Gems… Their story on steroids. The violence of the visual. Energy extreme. We’re grabbed—and not only by the throat. We’re taken on what we call ‘a ride’. And there’s no getting out of the speeding, skidding, dizzying vehicle we’re in until it hits its devastating denouement and the movie finishes not with a whimper but a bang.

And yet… is that all there can be?

What happens before the characters arrive and the action starts—or after the action has finished and the characters have left? ‘Nothing’, you may say. But what does that nothing look like? What if we were to see it? The space and setting alone. The colors and tones, the shapes, lines, depth. The light, the dark. The left, the right. The up, the down. Does time pass in this realm devoid of human time? If so, what is the sign of it? Or is it frozen? Static. Stopped like the beat of our hearts as we perceive it?

Show an empty space to someone and they are immediately perceptive. They want to know who or what is about to fill it. (Abbas Kiarostami)

Who is about to appear? Where in the frame will they make their entrance? What is about to happen? And when? We have to look but are made to wait—and so the act of looking is intensified… More than witnessing the screen we experience it.

Or, if the action is over, and if the characters have left the frame, what remains? The echo of it. Of them. The resonance. The ghost of the event. The objects, the room, the hallway, the place, the vista holds a charge, a memory. And just as it lives on in the emptiness before us, so its emotion reverberates within us… and the mystery of it too…

Not the passing gratification of the immediate but the quiet trace of the moment.

Ozu was the master of this compelling absence. His ‘pillow shots’, as Roger Ebert called them, possess the screen as for other filmmakers, and for Ozu himself elsewhere, an actor might, through their performance. The master’s sense of composition and mise-en-scène, of tone and later of color, his elegance of shot design, his aesthetic of grace, of both harmony and contrast (a bright red kettle against the affinity of a room’s muted tones), serves to hypnotize and delight us even as the pain of a story’s drama lingers. We are afforded the privilege of bearing witness as no character in the film can. They’re not there. There’s nobody around, just us. No one to see us. Or it. The emptiness is ours alone. We are free of time, of movement, of being—almost. A little universe we have all to ourselves. And its invisible hint, just maybe, of the numinous…

There’s no there there. But with Ozu, who cares? Each split second of that frame is precious.

The universal principle?—Breath is as much a facet of cinematic narrative as breathless drive. Emptiness offers function also. It punctuates. Its frames build the stanchions of structure, the markers between ‘narrative units’: scenes, sequences, movements, acts. The measure of the dramatic narrative, the perspectives on the world, the ellipses in the passage of time, a weave in the fabric of a film’s visual language. The respite enriches—not a faltering but a replenishment.  

The empty frame gives what the page never can—our world without us. What we inhabit discovered uninhabited, like the haunting rendezvous of Antonioni’s L’Eclisse, its lovers failing to turn up as arranged in a place that has no need of them, and had none to begin with. Pure space. Pure time. The pure presence of absence. Plenitude in vacancy. A sense of what might be us from a universe without us.

But the unpopulated image can, in and of itself, yield a dynamic. The tensions of composition with its ikones of visual rhetoric—Bruce Block’s abstract elements of visual language, their arrangement and proportions, and the frames within the frame—and of mise-en-scène—the placement of specific components, characters, and objects within the frame, these serve to animate the inanimate. Energy expressed through a geometry of form and significance that infuses drama into a stillness that exists only without humanity. A combination that takes the eye on a journey over the screen, our ‘eye trace or path’ as we watch a movie, a narrative of the frame that, for its duration, lacks nothing.

The voice of place, of dark and light, of thingness, color, dimension, speaking—as it compels us to listen…  

Peter Markham November 2022

Image of Harold Pinter from TheatreGold.

Once, at the BBC Rehearsal Rooms in North Acton, London, I traveled several precious floors in an elevator with the great playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter—master of the pregnant  pause. Nothing was said, although I wanted to say so much. Nothing could be said. Speech would have been banal. The pause, technically, was not a pause at all since there was no dialogue to either side of it. It was simply a silence. A silence within a silence.

Years later, in a Beverly Hills parking structure, I found myself elevator-bound with formidable actor Martin Landau. I wanted to say how excited I was merely to find myself in his presence. Here was a man who had worked with Alfred Hitchcock on one of my perennially favorite films: North by Northwest. Again, I was struck dumb, even if Mr. Landau was not to the pause as Mr. Pinter was—more to the oblique but piercing glance perhaps, of which there were one or two, oblique though not piercing, and not from him…

A couple of years before, I happened to be in Manhattan, in a store on Lexington on the Upper East Side trapped in a packed ‘lift’ (as we English call them) alongside Robin Williams. My fellow elevator travelers could barely contain their excitement at such shoulder-to-shoulder proximity to a celebrity and during our collective anabasis, one of them, in investigative frame of mind, asked the star ‘How is you get recognized so easily?’ To which the ensnared Williams replied, “Must be my face, I guess.” Excruciatingly embarrassed by the awkwardness of it all, I couldn’t wait for the doors to open so I could make my escape…

But why the elevator anecdotes?

In my childhood in working class South London, and later in the verdant Hampshire of my teens, no one knew anyone famous. Actors, writers, directors, musicians, artists—whether famous or not—might have existed on another planet, a heavenly body to which none of us were ever likely to travel. The dictum prevailed that what mattered was not what you might know but whom you already knew.

It’s true, at least in my experience as an educator, that those from family backgrounds of writing, teaching, the arts, the legal world, the stratosphere of sophistication arrive in class with advantages—having grown up with ‘the conversation’, or one not so far removed from it. (On the other hand, there can be considerable pressure for these so privileged to repeat their parents’ level of achievement—which can’t be easy either.)

But not only are other communities, even when marginalized, awash with cultural richness to draw upon, you the individual student—whatever your grounding—are free to learn by engaging with the work over and above with the artist.

My point is that you don’t need to know anyone ‘of note’ or be within the same milieu as anyone. You don’t need to be in the vicinity of anyone in particular. That, alone, is not going to get you anywhere.

What you need is to engage with the material of the filmmakers who excite you. Yes, the path to a career, even to making a movie is long and challenging but there’s little point in embarking on that odyssey if you don’t engage in an understanding of the art you wish to practice…

Listen to and read interviews and Q&As, sure, which can give the impression of proximity to a filmmaker. Feast on the insights and pearls of wisdom they can offer. Know though, that some of the most profound lessons you learn from those you admire are the ones that come through close, forensic exploration of their work, and which you discover for yourself.

Realization is more enlightening than instruction.

Proximity to the working mind of the artist is more revealing than social or physical proximity to their person.

You create that meaningful closeness for yourself. You make their work your fellow elevator traveler, leaving the artist to their privacy. You may then, in some respects perhaps, come to know them better than they know themselves. After all, what artist of note is not, ultimately, a mystery to their own conscious awareness? What they express most potently is not what they know but what they strive to know… 

Along with the work of the artist comes your ongoing engagement with the nature of the human soul. This nebulous but all-pervasive entity, present in all (or most, perhaps) of us, is there in all its contradictory aspects for us to endeavor to comprehend—as best we can.

If you want an elevator companion, there’s none more dizzying than this soul. Our needs, behavior, motivations, paradoxes, mischief, mystery, paradoxes, our transgressions, aspirations, flaws and failings, our understanding, our lack of understanding, our strength and our vulnerability, our vision, our myths and stories, our truth—you’ll need the tallest skyscraper for your elevator ascent (hopefully not descent) with this protean character…

Do not remain silent though. Talk, Listen. Probe. Tease. Engage. For they are your interlocutor as, floor by rising floor, you come to wonder at the subject and power of your art…

Peter Markham  October 2022

(Alex Wolff as Peter in Hereditary, Dir. Ari Aster, Cin. Pawel Pogorzelski.)

Not part of a filmmaking institution these days, I teach mainly the aspects of filmmaking I most care about: story, storytelling, the language and practical aesthetics of the screen, while I emphasize also the imperatives of ‘The Three M’s’—mischief, magic, and mystery. I don’t venture forth on the business, on production and its structures, or give careers advice—all of which I leave to others. Nor do I conflate these topics with the art of the filmmaker under the too convenient but unhelpful one-size-fits-all banner of ‘film production.’ (My career as 1st AD and Production Manager, successful as it was and my careers as director and filmmaking educator have involved entirely different modes of thinking, universes apart.)

Nor do I presume to teach the vital skill of working with actors—there are plenty of people who do that, some of them very good indeed. And there are plenty who teach this as though it’s all a director needs to think about (while, sadly, there don’t seem to be too many who want to teach anything else).

Yet it isn’t as though I don’t have experience of working with actors…

Time ‘on the book’ as an AD in BBC Drama and Films, in rehearsal in the North Acton rehearsal rooms in West London with John Schlesinger and Alan Bates (Google if you don’t know who they were), with Anthony Hopkins, with Anthony Minghella and Alan Rickman provided a privileged education in the approaches of so many different directors and actors.

Then directing Ralph Fiennes, then others in TV drama in the UK. Then, as 2nd Unit Director, watching Martin Scorsese direct Leonardo di Caprio and Daniel Day Lewis…

Even so, I offer no courses on the director and the actor. And yet, the more I focus on what so fascinates me — the filmmaker’s conjuring of the fiction, their manifestation of it on the screen, and that screen (and the speakers) as the filmmaker’s address to the audience through visual and auditory language — the greater my astonishment at what the actor brings. How paradoxical: the more I think about form and the more enjoyment this gives me, the more I’m in awe at how the actor — in many of the most telling of moments — comes to possess the frame.

This doesn’t happen only when they are speaking. It comes with silence too—more often perhaps. The character doesn’t even need to be doing anything, at least in terms of physical action. The actor just has to articulate the instant or the series of instants that take place within…

The great John Huston once said (and don’t ask me when or where—although I always remember his words), Action is in the mind.

What did he mean?

Perhaps he was referring to the narrative of consciousness, the succession of the increments of an inner, silent monologue—or dialogue perhaps, if we think of self as interlocutor to self. The micro-story hard for the screenwriter to write, the territory of actor and lens, the facial language and nuances of expression externalizing the interior passage of perception and realization, of cognition and—most importantly—of CHANGING EMOTION, of acceptance and of the decision-making that follows. The fundamental nature, no less, of the interaction of self with world.

Often here, the camera is still, or moves with respectful stealth, the frame determined by performance, by the eyes, the slightest shift of sinew, of mouth, lips, jaw, blink and breath. The actor brings to life a suggestion of soul and its emotions—muted but all the more eloquent for such restraint—that comes to possess the shot.

Frances McDormand gives a consummate example of this in Chloe Zhao’s flaneurial Nomadland when, towards the movie’s end, having visited her former home for the last time, she steps out of its back door, pauses, settles, scans the vista before her, absorbs what she sees, reflects upon it, pauses again for the barest instant, then, as she sets her jaw, takes her decision to commit to a life on the road… A journey of heart and mind to which the camera is subservient, the audience in thrall, actor and character alive, emotion refulgent. The face as the very canvas of being throughout these brief seconds. A passing of time to arrest time. In short—Cinema.

Elsewhere, in Ari Aster’s matriarchal conspiracy horror Hereditary, Alex Wolff as Peter gives us an instant of the realization of the incomprehensible—the most terrifying of epiphanies we could experience—after the thud of Charlie’s abrupt, brutal decapitation. Limpid, frozen, aghast at and absorbing of the horror at one and the same time, Wolff inhabits the trauma of his character as his performance dictates the frame’s tense dimensions. His eyes, almost imperceptibly, tearing up, the reflection of his car’s tail lights blood red against the night, a fleck of cold green-blue teasingly icy, Peter/Wolff’s gaunt demeanor, rigid in shock, generates a rush of terror that freezes the soul. We feel a churning together with an intensity of arrested time that puts us at the mercy of the actor…

Wolff controls the space, the passage of time, and the pitch of emotion within the frame.

Disclaimer: I, Peter, was privileged to teach, or rather work with Ari Aster in my class. The thrill of seeing his mastery up on the screen, and the mastery of Alex Wolff as Peter he unleashes, beats everything. (My childhood favorite tune, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf perhaps presaged the coincidental [?] concurrence—who knows?)

Look for these instances when you watch a movie! Now bring them to life in your own work…

Peter Markham September 2022

(Photo by Jed Villejo on Unsplash.)

· Know your story.

· Tell your story.

· Do what works.

· Be mischievous.

· Discover!

· Don’t think like everyone else.

· Don’t talk like everyone else.

· Join no club.

· Learn from the wisdom of the generations.

· Learn from those unlike yourself.

· Listen to the masters.

· Hear the questions of the neophytes. They are the best.

· Seize your own questions. Ask them!

· The student aspires to be the master. The master learns to be the student.

· Don’t rebel against the past, rebel against the present.

· Put what hurts up on the screen.

· Conjure your fiction, address your audience.

· Embrace uncertainty.

· Beware common thinking.

· Beware the ‘industry professional’.

· Deplore celebrity. Respect people.

· Read! — literary fiction, essays, philosophy.

· Feel! Acknowledge your emotions.

· Look! Outside. Inside.

· BELIEVE IN CINEMA!

· Analyze, intuit, dare, explore, challenge, realize.

· If you’re dreaming, you’re asleep! Martin Scorsese.

· Style comes from the soul.

· Don’t be vague — be precise. Render your ambiguities exact.

· Don’t ‘cut to the chase’, cut to the suspense…

· Tension over conflict.

· Drama as journey. Drama as ambush. Drama as stealth.

· Dissonance divides your viewer — for which they will thank you.

· Don’t please everyone. Welcome detractors.

· Subvert.

· Defy your audience’s moral righteousness.

· Defy.

· The integrity of vulgarity. The sublimity of elegance.

· Open the heart.

· Reveal the soul.

· ‘Film production’ is an industrial, not a creative process.

· Filmmaking is a creative process.

· ‘Camera’ as concept and practice, not brand or model.

· Camera as servant. Camera as master.

· Seek simplicity, not reduction.

· Emotion. Cognition. Visceral/Neural/Enteric/Tactile Sensation. Vision.

· Mischief. Magic. Mystery.

· The unknowable in the familiar.

· The aesthetics of the screen are practical.

· Cinema can never be explained.

· Know composition. Know mise-en-scène.

· ‘Coverage’ of a scene is not storytelling.

· Film ‘grammar’ is not film language.

· A size, a framing, an angle relates to other sizes, framings, angles.

· Vista to vignette.

· The flow of energy.

· The power of ‘negative’ space.

· Screenplay. Casting. Editing. (Kieślowski.)

· ‘Prep’ is a misnomer — it’s already happening!

· No, it doesn’t all happen on the set.

· Know your intentions.

· Let your film take you where it will.

· Your film works when it outgrows you.

· Subscribe to no agenda.

· Don’t be ‘well-meaning’.

· Never preach.

· Draw from your community, time, and place.

· Step outside them.

· All fictional worlds are imagined.

· All fictional worlds derive from experience.

· The specific is universal.

· The general is nebulous.

· Realize the moment.

· The actor brings the moment to life.

· You bring the moment to life.

· Support, challenge the actor.

· Every actor is different.

· Spontaneity in performance

· Artifice in performance.

· Mastery of the actor.

· Naiveté of the actor.

· Immediacy. Distance.

· Cassavetes. Bresson.

· Language of the actor. Language of the screen.

· Listen to the actor, especially when you are certain.

· The actor tells the micro-story.

· You tell the micro-story.

· Territory and its boundaries — the primal currency of staging.

· Be a diplomat, a collaborator, a politician, be cunning, be compassionate.

· Be parental. Be a child.

· Be strong. Be vulnerable.

· Don’t play the simpleton.

· You are responsible. Own it.

· Persistence, resilience, application, stamina, motivation, humility.

· Process not product.

· Underthinking is the problem, not overthinking.

· Overthinking is not knowing how to think effectively.

· Never abandon enquiry.

· The partnership of mind, heart, and gut.

· The symbiosis of psyche and universe.

· Trust yourself, not your ego.

· You might be wrong.

· The gift of doubt.

· Bring your mentors inside, then challenge them!

· Look for what lies in front of your nose.

· Seek the truth.

· Make mistakes and learn.

· Stay young. Grow old.

· Diligence!

· From big to small, to big, to small, to big, to small, to big, and so on, and so on…

· Filmmaking the fabric of your hours.

· Keep those in your life close.

· Love!

· Watch cinema!

· Do it!

· Now!

Peter Markham September 2022

(Screenshot: North by Northwest. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Cinematography: Robert Burks. Rock face: Robert Boyle. Shoe, sock, glove: Harry Kress. Hands: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint.)

‘Drama’, commented Alexander Mackendrick, ‘is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.’ How often, here in the US, have we been told that drama in the movies is about conflict. Conflict, conflict, conflict was all I heard over the years of my film school teaching. Not from the students but from the faculty. If a short wasn’t pumped up with conflict, with wall to wall conflict, woe betide the filmmakers! Then came a fellow European. (Despite the iniquitous, malicious Brexit, I regard my English and Brit self as European—as my ancestry, from Spain to the Ukraine, attests). Equipped with the intellect my colleagues so vehemently opposed, this new teacher maintained that the drama of a film is a question not of simply of conflict but of friction. At last! I thought, I have the word, the language, the concept, and so—freed from the tyranny of conflict—I breathed a sigh of relief…

If conflict necessitates two opposing forces, friction suggests instead some manner of mismatch. Of goal or aim perhaps, of emotion, of desire, cognition, approach, need, character. Not the simple punch-up, literal or figurative that seems the imperative of conflict but a universe of possibilities. Got it! I thought, Home and dry…

Yet the journey was far from over—as, indeed, it never will be—for a couple of years later, a student at the school, Chinese, brilliant, further explained to me what the captivating, irresistible, addictive quality of drama in cinema is about. Tension! they said, as I eagerly seized on this fresh draft of enlightenment. Tension! Now I have it. I’d known of the Mackendrick comment since I’d read Paul Cronin’s compilation of his teachings at CalArts: On Film-making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director but this one word encapsulated his insight.

Anticipation + Uncertainty = Tension. The math of drama. (Wait… I’m no reductionist. There’s more to come…)

What I had suspected all along was at last becoming clear. The conflict that so many American filmmaking educators see as requisite, is the consequence of our nation’s cultural foundations. Where adversarial individualism is the creed on which all else is constructed, the mantra without which there can be no ‘freedom’, you will, sooner or later, end up with conflict. No escaping it. Fistfights, firefights more so—the gun as quintessential American fetish and instrument of individualist agency, catalyst and culmination of ‘action’, of story, of denouement. This Cinema of Conflict can be understood as a front for cultural nativism. The Cinema of Tension, on the other hand, is universal…

How is tension manifested? Firstly, in the realm ‘beyond the screen.’ The fictional story, world, characters, situations, events we come to believe in as we watch a movie. In the suspense of the dramatic narrative, in wondering what will happen next. Looking at the frame here from North by Northwest—will Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill grab Eva Marie Saint’s Eve Kendall’s gloved hand and prevent her falling to her death? Or not? This cliffhanger—is it about conflict? Sure, it happens in the context of conflict—Martin Landau’s Leonard and the goons serving James Mason’s villainous Philip Vandamm are pursuing our fleeing couple. But this moment, so consummately captured within the frame, is tense indeed, is Mackendrick’s anticipation mingled with uncertainty. (The artist creates. The critic defines. Mackendrick—an American who grew up in Scotland who saw far beyond ‘conflict’—was, it seems, both.)

That last point, ‘within the frame’, reveals another manifestation of tension—the nature of the frame and how what I call its practical aesthetics convey information, emotion, and physical sensation of one form or another. This prompts another word and concept vital to our consideration, one I heard stressed by Iranian master filmmaker and teacher Asghar Farhadi, that again takes us past the simplistic conflict—and that is: Contrast.

Look at the frame in question closely. There’s up, there’s down. There’s fear, there’s hope. A gloved hand, an ungloved hand, one female, one male. The foot, the hands. There’s light, there’s dark. Human presence, mineral indifference. A close rock face, a sliver of distant sky. The augury of contact, the omen of severance. The potential for salvation, the threat of mortality. Continuity or finality… The defiance of, or the succumbing to… gravity. Will there be a rising, an anabasis, or a falling, a katabasis?

Let’s add another word, related of course to contrast: Dissonance. The glove and the loafer, hardly suitable for rock-climbing! Human-made items against a natural background. Comfortable social life juxtaposed with primal struggle. Sophistication with autochthony. The ephemeral with the permanent…

In the shot’s construction meanwhile, in its composition, the diagonal formed by the reaching fingers renders the vectors of visual tension both lateral and vertical, tautening the rectangular frame as it holds us—incapable of looking away—helpless in its timeless instant...

With the shot’s tactile, primordial promise of touch comes also the sensual and the sexual, and the anticipation, the tension this brings. Thus, Hitchcock heats up his suspense. Visionary of cinema Michael Haneke has commented that all storytelling, whatever its genre, its emotional terrain, its stakes, must incorporate suspense. Cut to the chase! Say the filmmaking educators. No! Cut to the suspense. Hold it! Prolong it! ­Render it unbearable! (Tarantino has this down, and excruciatingly so…)

So, what do we have?…conflict, friction, tension, contrast, dissonance, their visual articulation, suspense… Anything else fundamental to the workings of a movie?

A couple of my alumni, again Chinese, observed that, as they see it, cinema is not so much about conflict as it is about a vibe. Imagine any American filmmaking educator saying such a thing! A vibe? They’d be out on their ear! Asian cinema might work in such a nebulous manner, the cultural nativist might suggest, but its American counterpart?  Well…yes. It might indeed. Think of Aristotle’s eudaimonia, his word for which there appears to be no direct translation but seems to approximate to the ineffable engagement (pleasure?) we take in following a story, a journey incorporating emotions often far removed from delight: anxiety, fear, terror even, sadness, pity, grief, anger, as well as joy—in short the spectrum of human feeling. Then there comes the distinct gratification afforded by the visual language of the screen—composition and its elements of space, shape, proportion, line, tone (light to dark), and color palette (what I call ikones), and mise-en-scène, the placing of specific elements, characters, objects, segments of an environment within the frame. Even while watching harrowing events, one’s visual sensibility revels in the filmmaker’s articulation of their canvas and how it relates to the narrative…

Let’s add awe, wonder, spectacle to our criteria. The flow of energy within the shot, across the cut and the transition. The mesmerism we experience before vista, vignette, the play of light, the meshing of sound, music, and image. The frissons prompted by misdirection across the vectors of the frame, over the axes of the drama, changing from moment to moment.

So…the eudaimonia offered by the narrative and its visual representation—might we not see this as the vibe my alumni described?

Finally (almost), let’s not forget The 3 Ms. Mischief. Magic. Mystery. So much more compelling than the simple, ongoing fracas demanded by the dogmatic conflict-ist. The properties of myth, the imagination, the subconscious. The quintessentials of the soul—without which there can be no cinema…

Let’s end though, with the words of Yazujiro Ozu, taking us from the metaphysical to the vibe of the grounded everyday:

A lot of people now equate drama with sensational incident, such as someone getting killed. But that’s not drama; it’s a freak occurrence… Instead, I think drama is something without sensational incident, something you can’t easily put into words, with the characters saying everyday things like ‘Is that right?’ ‘Yes, it is,’ ‘So that’s what happened.’ ”

That simplicity, the modest register of daily interaction, is maybe the most difficult drama of all to achieve. The cliffhanger of our quotidian exchanges perhaps? And the uncertain anticipation that informs our experience of being alive—one instant to the next…

Peter Markham August 2022

…with the most demanding interlocutors…

Photo by Geoffrey Moffet on Unsplash

As you make your film, who is it that you talk to? Okay, so there are the conversations with the writer (if they’re not you), plus those in prep, during production, in post—in other words the constant, ongoing, to-and-fro conversations with your team and their departments, with the actors, VFX, SFX, stunt arrangers, fight arrangers, producers, colorists, sound designers, and so on and so forth—and I mean no respect to those I haven’t specified and those I am, unforgivably, forgetting. Then there are the conversations with those to whom you approach for counsel—your friends, your fellow practitioners, your significant other. Yet, although the first category of exchanges are essential, while the second frequently prove invaluable and you would be nowhere without them, they are not the focus of this article...

I'm talking here about the conversations with your two most challenging interlocutors. Or That is what they should be. One is on the inside, the other, the outside. You need to be engaged with both, need to allow them to challenge you, question you, bother you, counter you, excite you, inspire you, embolden you, and even then, when you think you know all you need to know and there's nothing more to be considered, you need to allow them to stop you from shutting yourself down. Because it’s this pair of implacably awkward customers who will serve to wake you up and render your process fit for purpose.

Let's take the first one. The interlocutor you fear the most. The one you constantly beg to shut up. The one who torments you with your doubts, your fears, your uncertainties, insecurities, bewilderments, and indecisiveness. That troublesome inner voice and the recalcitrant self behind it...

 You.

 Talk about a shape shifter! One moment this You of yours is wrong, the next, right. How do you tell which is which? A location works, or it doesn't. You’ve found the actor for the part, or you haven't. A scene is necessary, or it isn't. You have the time in the schedule to shoot a sequence, or you don't. It never stops... Should this be an over the shoulder or a single? How close to, or far from the actor’s eye-line to place the camera? You take a decision and that maddening Youdemands the counter option. Is it instinct you’re hearing, or is it sabotage? There's your knowledge of craft and there’s your intuition. There’s your intelligence, and your gut. What you've learned and what you feel. Your frontal lobes, your amygdala. Your analysis, your hunch. Which to go with? 

Perhaps, on occasions, you get lucky. You and your You agree. Even so, you may feel you need to double check but your You assures you that the decision you’re about to take is the correct one. But perhaps the element of doubt continues to hiss its subliminal whisper—as if within your You, there is yet another voice, an interlocutor lurking within your interlocutor, more Yous within Yous, Russian doll style. No. That way madness lies, not to mention the inner cacophony that leads to it...

Ignore you're inner Yous at your peril, but surrender to them and, equally, it could land you in trouble. You yourself are taking into account circumstances, context, practicalities, considerations of which your militant inner chatterbox seems blithely ignorant or doesn't give a monkey’s about. Perhaps what you’re hearing are old dogmas, obsolete assumptions you haven't quite managed to shake off. You tell yourself it's time to move on. The decisions you take now, and the reasons for taking them, you insist, once they are proved right, will then become the mindset of your future inner voice—until they, in turn, are replaced by fresh insights. On the other hand, your You, unencumbered by daily pressures, is maybe offering sound guidance after all, seeing more clearly what is truthful and what is not than you can—knowing in its gut, the gut within your gut, what is going to work despite your reservations to the contrary.

 Not easy, any of it, but without this first conversation, where would you be? 

Second conversation. The one you have with your audience. Not the actual folk you hope are going to watch your movie but the faceless individuals you imagine, the phantasms responding to every cut, every element of direction—even those of which any regular audience will be only subliminally aware (if aware at all). In a classroom in Beijing I once saw a poster pinned to the wall: Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. underneath him, the words: When I make a film I'm the audience. Martin Scorsese.

In other words—imagine yourself as your audience watching the scene you are shooting or cutting. Not only do you formulate the components of the screen as an address to the viewer but as you do this—and if you're not doing it you're not doing your job—you are putting yourself in their imaginary place as they respond to that address. Are they/I engaged or bored? Do they/I understand what is going on? If they/I—let’s say we—don't understand, are we confused or have we registered the question the scene poses? Are we bewildered or do we get the ambiguity? What do we feel? What do we know? What do we think is going to happen next? What do we want to happen? What do we fear will happen? What do we want a character to do? Or not want them to do? What do we dread them doing but need to see them do? What will happen to them or perhaps to others if they do it? Or they don’t? What was it that happened in the past that we don't know but the characters do? Does this moment seem too good to be true? Could it be the calm before the storm? Why aren't the characters as concerned or worried as we are? Why are they more concerned? What do they know that we don't? Do they know what we thought they didn't? Do they know more than we thought? Who knows best, us or them, this character or that?

Most important of all: do we care, or have we switched off? Or have we forgotten about the rest of the world and is this all we want in life from this moment—to be watching this film, following this story, these characters, alive to their emotions and to ours? Whether we like it or not! Whether it's comfortable or not! Do we just have to keep watching? For the next moment, the next, the one after that, and all that follow... 

This is your second, simultaneous conversation. Sometimes, of course, you won't know what your audience is going to feel. There are times when you don't know yourself. All you know is that there is something intriguing about what’s going on in your film, a sense of significance, of promise or foreboding. You just want to tell the story. You don't know what emotions, what reactions it will prompt. You just have to tell it. And let it speak for itself, which you know it will... 

But if you don't imagine yourself as your audience, your actual audience may experience your film in a very different way from the one you intended. It may misunderstand your story, telling itself another, one very different from yours. It may laugh when it's supposed to cry, or cry when it's supposed to laugh. It may miss what makes you want to make your film, whether you can explain it or not. You may even find that your audience is watching another film, conjured by itself. Better by far that you make sure it’s watching your movie. 

Your two indispensable conversations. Into your film and out from it... 

Peter Markham February 2022

How you relate, authentically or not, to your material.

View from the writer’s backyard. South London. Early 60s. Photo: Peter Markham

There’s a faculty member at the film school in which I used to teach, a rare educator of perennial popularity from whom I learned much. He talks about what material you can relate to authentically. When you carry a connection to that story rooted in your own history and experience, he says, then that world, that story, its milieu, its characters, the emotions it brings to the screen will ring true. When you have nothing in common by contrast, but only affect a bond — in short, when you don’t know what you are talking about — those emotions, no matter how heightened, how intense, how strident, are likely to prove false.

The term he uses, to describe the universe of the self from which this authentic conduit to material springs, is your backyard. It conjures a vision of a specific, familiar place from your past. This vignette in your head, resonates as synecdoche, metaphor, and symbol too. Synecdoche because as a part of your childhood home, it stands for the entire place, your first neighborhood, first town, first city etc., etc. Metaphor because its image conjures images of other things, of particular objects and items, and of people — parents, parental figures, siblings, neighbors, friends at school, the bullies you endured, or the unfortunates you bullied — should you have been so inclined. Symbol because it conveys abstract entities — your formative history, your psyche, your place in the world and your perspective on it.

Michael Haneke — for me one of the best living filmmakers on the planet — once said: My students… pitch only the gravest of topics. For them it’s always got to be the Holocaust. I usually tell them, ‘Back off’. You have no idea what you are talking about. You can only reproduce what you read or heard elsewhere. Others who actually lived through it can tell it so much better than you ever could. Try to create something that springs organically from your own experience.

Then came László Nemes with Son of Saul…

Write what you know, we are told. Don’t meddle with stuff that lies outside your experience. Maybe, but then… how do we define ‘what we know.’ Is it a place, a backyard? Is it a community, a milieu, a culture? My own childhood was spent in South London in a flat with no bathroom, no inside loo, no fridge, no washing machine, no phone, and with a minimal backyard bordered by broken fencing with a rotting shed cobwebbed to the back. 49 pupils to one teacher in my class at the forbidding primary school down the end of the street. Then there were my grandparents, aunts and uncles north of the Thames with their glottal-stopped London patois. The smell of boiled bacon, milk stout, mustiness, of old, cloacal London itself. The family’s criminality, masked by jollity was kept from me at the time — just as well too — but it was there alright, lurking like a shadow denied its casting over the street.

Was the combination of all that that my ‘backyard’ then? Could a filmmaker coming from there relate only to tales of socially disadvantaged Londoners in grim settings south and north of the Thames? Or do you get a choice of venues? Can you pick and choose somewhere else, somewhere you might have lived later on?

My family moved to the country when I was twelve, to a village not far from the sea and set amidst heathland and forest. Now we had a bathroom, an indoor loo, a back garden rather than a yard. After a few years, we even had a phone. Eventually my Dad had a car, even if it had seen better days by the time, with varying degrees of success, it ferried us around. I was regarded as a ‘townie’ by the local boys, though they were kinder than the toughs back in London. They spoke with a Hampshire burr, so my London speech stood out. They would say cahnrrr. I would say kawnah. The word as written is corner. I attended the local grammar school where again the air of gentleness contrasted to the murderous machismo of my London grammar. And there were girls there, and I was hitting my teens… So might this not equally have constituted my ‘backyard’?

Or is what we know not a place at all, not living conditions, not a social class, not the people around us, not our position in society when we were growing up, not even our acculturation — although I’m not denying the impact of ethnicity and history on us and our sense of identity — but something more? Because — doesn’t what we ‘know’ lie within us?

It’s this that we have a sense of. It makes us what we are, even controls us if we’re not careful — and too often even when we are. And it’s that sense which suggests to us whether we can relate to a story, to its characters, to the questions it raises, or even to something we can’t pin down but know the film has to be made in order to find it. The instinct — the hunch, isn’t that our guide to authenticity?

Homer was never at Troy, Borges said. The towers of Ilium were not Homer’s backyard, yet didn’t he, or they — if a composite of writers (or she, if that was the case) — rattle off a couple of more than epic poems to weather the millennia? Wouldn’t Homer have had to relate authentically to his material to bring off this feat? We can never know, of course, how he/she/they connected to those stories, but surely it wasn’t because they’d spent their childhood holed up in the belly of a wooden horse.

So what prompted me to list details of my early years then? Isn’t it because I feel so strongly about those experiences? That backyard squashed between the thin strips of yard to either side — didn’t I post a photo of it at the top of this article. Why? It’s an element of myself, that’s why. It brings out emotions in me. Pain, joy, fear, claustrophobia, calm, loss, yearning, wonder…

Write what you feel! says filmmaker Rosita Lama Muvdi. Yes. Your backyard is what you feel. The same goes for filmmaking in general, not only writing, because if you don’t feel your connection, how can your audience feel the film? And when you work with what you feel you can work with what you don’t know but can imagine. We can’t know the past, more so the future, but if we can feel them we might bring them — or at least their approximations — to life on the screen.

It’s not always comfortable though, what you feel. Maybe it should never be — at least when you’re looking for a productive relationship with your material. W.B. Yeats, in his poem The Circus Animals’ Desertionwrote of the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Isn’t that the place that constitutes the backyard my former colleague was promoting? Our soul? The soul that, no matter how messed up, how disordered, how despoiled, that cries out for stories, characters, images, for form — whether skewed, elegant, or both — and for voice, in order that it might speak out, both to our fellow human beings, and to itself.

Because a soul that speaks to itself, speaks to us all.

Peter Markham January 2022

The Sentence and the Image

Photo by Juraj Gabriel on Unsplash

Who hasn’t been reduced to pursuing reading solely in the search for material to adapt for a movie? Novels, novellas, short stories — riches to be mined for narratives, for characters, for worlds. Sometimes you dip in, know this isn’t the one, dip out, move on. Other times you’re not sure, so read on before throwing in the towel, then move on. In rare cases you’re left wondering. Could this work? But you don’t quite get that throb of motivation and before long the book gets forgotten. Or maybe you just know in your bones — this is the one! Is the option available? Can you afford it? What kind of budget are we talking? What locations are needed? Etc, etc…

But what if you find yourself enjoying the novel, or novella, or short story for its own sake? What if you can’t stop turning the pages? What if you cease to care whether it’s material to be mined for a movie or it isn’t? What if you get to the end and wish it hadn’t ended, and all you can think about is finding more work by the same author? Might this be the point at which you arrive at a realization?

This is what happened to me when I read The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. I’d never come across anything like it before and just wanted more of the same. This book could never become a feature (maybe a metafictional hybrid) but it freed me from habitual sorties into literature (and sub-literature) in search of plunder. I went on to read novel after novel — and not just those by ‘Max’ Sebald. Before long I was notching up 60 or 70 literary novels per year (including a smattering of ‘genre’ — the Master and Commander novels of Patrick O’Brian in particular).

But as I was lapping up the pleasure of each chapter, each page, each paragraph, each sentence something unexpected started to happen. I found myself looking at Cinema, and TV in ways I hadn’t looked at them before. It was helping me watch them in richer ways. I started to think about the language of the page and the language of the screen. What are the differences? What the similarities? What can one do that the other can’t? And that’s before considering issues of the respective natures of the narratives that the different languages serve — exterior vs interior life, discursive discourse vs Billy Wilder’s clean line of action, variations in structure, in the way character reveals itself: through inner thoughts vs through action, in what is told and what shown, in what works as a story over 300 pages maybe and what works in 90 minutes or a couple of hours.

Every one of those topics invites a lifetime of thought. Accept simple rules and someone, some writer or filmmaker, some novel and film — or work of non-fiction transformed into a feature, such as book and movie of Nomadland — will come along to prove you wrong. Or you’ll watch Tree of Life again, or Killer of Sheep, or 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould, or Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and think: if those can be movies, what can’t be a movie?

Then there’s the consideration of one language as it relates to the other. Words on the page, images on the screen…

Too much to discuss in one brief stab, so let’s consider just the nature of sentences on the page. It goes without saying that sentences are linear. Whatever the syntax, the order of words and clauses, and whatever the punctuation, you begin at the beginning and end at the end, even if the beginning is the end and the end the beginning. It’s different on the screen. The image is just up there…

Say you have a family gathered around a table… On the page you read through the sentence, the paragraph, to see, one by one, who’s there. On the screen you can see, in an instant, the entire gathering. Or say you have a street or a vista — landscape, cityscape — described on the page. Your sense of it is cumulative as you follow the sentence and its increments of information. On the screen by contrast, there’s a cut from one frame to the next and in a split second it’s all there: whole neighborhoods, streets seen from above, stores, houses, cars, pedestrians, cats, dogs or you discover are rolling fields, a river, mountains on the horizon. You just blink and the screen gives you everything…

Or does it?

Where do your eyes settle on that image? Which store, car, pedestrian, cat, dog, neighborhood, street? Do they settle on one field, one bend of the river, one mountain peak in particular? And if they do find a point that attracts immediate attention, where do they go next? Then after that? Is it a flash of light? Is it movement amidst stasis, a stasis amidst movement? Is it color? Is it sound — a dog barking, a car revving its engine, a river in full, flooding flow? Is it an absence amidst presence, a presence amidst absence? A clearing in a forest, a tree in a meadow, then to the figure walking and to the edge of frame that they hurry towards? Or does the energy in the frame propel your focus…?

No sooner have we registered an image, than our eyes journey across it, from one point to another — what’s known as eye-trace or eye-path. That way we get a visual ‘sentence’ up on the screen, even with just a static image. Or the camera can dolly, pan, tilt, boom, show one character, object, space, then another, then another — as it edits within a single shot.

Still, it’s not quite the same as reading a sentence. When we do this, images appear on what I call, ‘the screen of the mind.’ Yet when we see images on a physical screen, that also happens. We see in our mind what the images on the screen suggest, what the story we witness leads us to anticipate. So, here we have two screens, whereas prose can give us only one — that which exists solely in our heads. With two screens we can imagine what lies outside of the frame. With two screens, one can be for what is seen, one for what is heard. With two screens we can experience a absence: when we see that a character missing from a group around a table, we see them appear instead on the screen of the mind. With two screens we can experience a dissonance: when we see a character partying whom we know is soon to get bad news, in our heads we see them reacting to it. We could of course read such scenarios on the page, but we would have to see the described absence, see the described blissfully unaware partygoer on the only screen available to us — the one in our mind, the one on which we would also see the opposite images, the character present or in the latter instance, the character in shock.

It’s that duality of experience, the external and the internal, the screen out there and the one inside, and the differences and contrasts between them, that makes for some of the most powerful cinema.

But I would never have reflected on that if I hadn’t spent years loving reading sentences on the page and following the stories they tell. When filmmakers read as well as watch — and do both avidly — they become better filmmakers. Who is the best-read filmmaker I’ve ever known, ever taught? Ari Aster. Who is the most film-literate? Ari. Who gets imprimaturs from the likes of Bong Joon-ho and Martin Scorsese? AA. Who made Hereditary, Midsommar? The same.

There! Case closed.

Peter Markham October 2021

Not a beat but...

(Photo by Daniel Gregoire from Unsplash.)

On the page, it’s easy to read a simple action in a scene without giving it a second thought. A character sees something, registers it, and reacts. Another hears the doorbell, goes to their front door and opens it to see who’s there. Another hears a comment, glowers, and stands up from their seat in protest. Someone sad hears good news and smiles. Someone happy is told something bad and grimaces. Someone searches for something in a drawer—when do they find it? Someone else l rummages for a coat in their full wardrobe. I could go on…

I like to call such minutiae not beats but micro-stories. I don’t mean the term in the sense of a very short story under 1,000 words or so in length, how the expression is used in fiction. Even that would be a macro-story by comparison with what I’m talking about. I don’t even mean one of Félix Fénéon’s estimable three-line stories (translated by Luc Sante and published by New York Review Books—a present to me from my much-missed mentor in teaching Gill Dennis). Nor am I referring to Hemingway’s deft For sale: baby shoes, never worn (told to me by another mentor of mentoring I’m so much the less without—Frank Pierson). What could be more micro than that despite its dark chasm of a backstory? (Was it Hemingway who wrote it though?) 

No. I’m talking about how the brief steps of a moment in a scene happen in a sequence that forms a vignette of behavior, of reaction, and action, although not necessarily in that order—our interaction with the world at the most fundamental level. (Perceive/assess/react/think/decide/do.) 

I’m also talking about storytelling, even in this granular form, as a teasing of the viewer or reader—another kind of micro-story. We anticipate something happening, but just how will it happen?

New filmmakers often fail to tell these little stories. Even experienced directors and editors can screw up, missing out a step, an instant, a shift, a look, even several. Because these mini-episodes often take place between lines of dialogue—an exchange of silent looks, for example—they can be easy to miss. 

Say someone sad sees a group of children laughing loudly as they play. What’s the micro-story? 1. The sad person. 2. The laughter of the children. 3. The sad person looks to see who’s laughing. 4. We see the person’s POV of the children. 5. Back to the sad old person although NOT TO THEIR SMILE but to THEIR SAD FACE AS THEY THEN SMILE. 

In other words, we need to register not their completed reaction but the change in it as it happens. Think of how many accomplished directors and editors make the mistake of rejoining the sad old person only after they have already reacted. They miss that beat within the micro-story and as a result sever the connection of audience to character. By the time we’ve come back to the sad old person, they’ve moved on and we’ve missed THEIR MOMENT OF CHANGE—the granule that stories are made of. 

Say that after hearing the doorbell ring, A. opens the door to see who’s there. Okay. Say we are ‘with’ this character, in their narrative point of view, and we don’t know who is on the other side of the door. What’s the micro-story? 1. A, seen in profile—so there’s no chance of us seeing the caller—opens the door. 2. NOT THE CALLER, but with the camera outside the door, we see A again as they look to see who’s there. 3. Then, the camera inside, WE AT LAST SEE THE CALLER. 4. A’s reaction—happy, startled, relieved, horrified, whatever—and we see it as it happens. 

The act of perception, of what is perceived, and of the reaction to that is the story of our most basic engagement with the world. It’s very simple but laced with suspense—especially if for a moment we are not sure exactly what is perceived and if, for another, we are uncertain of our character’s reaction. By articulating that, by showing it, beat by beat, you are telling its micro-story. You are also teasing your audience—making them wait. You don’t ‘cut to the chase’ (in other words the character’s realization), you cut to the suspense, even if it’s only micro-suspense. 

Here’s another example of how a filmmaker teases their audience with a micro-story. One scene into Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, we find boy protagonist Little running from a group of bullies. He dashes up the stairway to camera right to a row of apartments and tries the first door he comes to. Does it open? Of course not. He tries a second. Same result. He tries a third, this one opens—and he enters. That’s a micro-story that observes the rule of three. Third time lucky, and he’s in, after we’ve been kept in suspense along the way. But as he enters, he leaves open the door’s outer iron gate—and that begins the next micro-story: 

1. A bully appears from camera left, not having run up the staircase to camera right like Little but one camera and entering frame left so that our anticipation of a bully appearing is met but not in the way we expected.  2. He runs to Little’s door, its gate swung open so that we expect to see him follow Little into the apartment. 3 He tries the door but finds it shut, unlike the outer gate, so that he can’t go in and can do nothing but bash his stick against it. 

There… no dialogue but two micro-stories within a scene.

Say a character opens a drawer to look for something. Don’t have them find it immediately. Put something in the way. Put two somethings in the way. Only by sweeping aside one, then the next, do they get to find what they’re looking for. An action is rendered a story, a beat a narrative. Show this and you make the audience wait for the reveal too. Make them wait and you make them believe!  

Micro-stories, the molecules that constitute the fabric of the scene…

Peter Markham September 2021

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

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass

… Or why are you already making them?

Photo by Avel Chulakov on Unsplash.

1.     To make the world a better place.

This has been said to me more times than I could count. If this is your reason, become a front-line health worker, a community activist, or join an NGO and support people in need, just don’t cloak your ambition in phony altruism. Art that aims to make the world a better place is invariably bad what’s more. James Baldwin said that the purpose of art is to uncover the questions the answers have hidden. Anton Chekhov said that the writer should not solve the problem but present it. Movies are not about teaching us how to behave, they’re about showing how we do behave—and the questions those behaviors open up. On the other hand, much of cinema, though not all by far, surely helps develop our sense of empathy, which has to improve our engagement with our fellow humans. Much though, is also primordially savage. Whether that purges our primordial instincts or serves to desensitize us, we can argue about, but people who think watching movies can make the world a better place are not watching movies, not thinking about them with sufficient care. Cinema is dangerous, even when it’s Ozu’s.  

2.     To win approval, love, and fame.

If you want to win awards, critical acclaim, fame, popularity, celebrity you’ll be trying to copy everyone who’s been successful in such ways in the past. You probably won’t win approval, awards or anything else. If you set out on your own path but only so as to hit the big time and have thousands of fans, you will be an iconoclast under false pretenses. Unless you risk failure, humiliation, and court comprehensive rejection then the films you make will never be true to you or to themselves. But be warned! Even if you take that risk, that may not work…

3.     To become a member of a select club.

That way lies conformity of thought and approach, and an end to critical thinking. Be a misfit. Clubs are rooted in common assumptions and common thinking. Avoid them and their self-congratulatory coteries.

4.      To make money.

Try real estate, finance, banking, cryto-currencies, state-of-the-art batteries. 

5.      To be cool.

Please… No! Be awkward. Be gauche. Be unfashionable. If inelegance is in, be elegant. If elegance is in, be inelegant. Don’t get tattooed—one day you’ll look past it although I won’t be around to see it.  Maybe looking past it is inevitable anyway, should we be lucky enough to grow old, tattooed or not.

6.     To achieve your dream.

If you’re dreaming, you’re asleep! Martin Scorsese. 

7.     To avoid doing a proper job.

But John Ford said ‘Directing is a job of work’. So it’s still a job?

8.    To save yourself.

Now we’re talking! You won’t succeed but if you don’t need to save yourself, and desperately, your films will be boring. Art is best practiced by the damned, the doomed, the denigrated, the dispossessed, the desperate, the disdained, the doubtful, the delirious—or some among them. Saving someone, anyone else, by some other means, is a more noble act.

9.     To free yourself from your fears.

Again, this probably won’t work, but why not give it a try? Hitchcock said that you should put your fears up on the screen. His sole means of coping with them. Do that as well as he did, and whether you succeed in mastering them or not, you won’t be doing too badly. 

10.  To give voice to your people and community when that voice has been silenced.         

Yes! Do it!

11.  To tell stories.

There can surely be no greater motivation. The compulsion to tell a story, the drive, the need will serve you better than any other inducement. And when you let a story go where it has to go, whether you like it or not, whether you think audiences will like it or not, when you are serving the story rather than insisting the story serve you, your preconceptions, some message or moral you want to dish out, then you’ll find yourself on the right track. A good story poses questions, challenges common assumptions and thinking, makes mischief, conjures deep emotions, and reveals what we creatures are—perhaps in some tiny, daily, but profound way, perhaps with deep existential vision yet one that somehow proves all too grounded and familiar. A good story invites good storytelling. When you make a film you make use of the interfunctionality of dramatic narrative, visual language, sound, and performance to serve that act of storytelling. 

Master these crafts and you’ll discover why you wanted to make movies…  

Peter Markham  August 2021

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

https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass