What questions do I need to ask? Do I need to understand all the parts?
Here are some of the things you need to become a good director.
You need to:
Have the ability to take charge
Be able to think things through out of your box
Understand the role of every department, including those that you don’t direct but you will be providing advice to
Be able to have fun
Have a good sense of humor
Understand the difference between good and bad directing
Have a sense of perspective
This is not the end. By this point, you have probably learned a great deal about directing. There is more and more information about it every day.
And yet, this knowledge about directing in general, and what you need to know about it, you don’t always know. The only way to learn is by doing. And by doing, you begin to understand the nature of it.
I want to give you some examples from my own directing to show you how you can come to the conclusion that you want to direct and how you can get there.
Weird stuff!
1) If you are a fan of a TV show, the director’s job is to make the show funny.
For me, the reason to do the show was not to be funny per se, it was to do a high-brow film. I got by without acting. I would tell the actor what I wanted. The actor told me exactly how to do it, and I would do it. No one else even tried.
My friends didn’t have the same background, and I have to credit them a lot for doing this. It’s what got me to believe that you could do it.
2) A director is not supposed to be a storyteller – as a matter of fact they are not supposed to be able to tell a story. A movie or TV show is, after all, not supposed to be a story.
There are a few movies that are about stories that aren’t about stories. And I would recommend the following movies: Gone (1979), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), The Color Purple (1997), Bad Boys (1988), The Godfather: Part III (1990), The King’s Speech (2005), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2001) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2002) – none of these movies