The answer to that question is simple: no. Both directors and films need to do something and that something is often not as simple as just starting a film like any other film. In each case the filmmaker needs to develop their skill, knowledge, skill set and technique and then go out onto the shooting line and do some of the shooting in the hope that everything will click when they put all of the pieces on the film. The director can take a film that is at a point in its development, develop it a bit, do some reshoots for an improved shot, and that is all it takes to get a finished project done. The director need not spend much time writing the first script, even better for the director, they can be there while the script is being written and they have an input into the writing process of the film.
You may have also noticed that I did not mention budget or cost of the movie. That’s a pretty obvious decision, budget is critical to a movie. When I first started out as a screenwriter, I didn’t really like budgeting because it feels like you are trying to cram everything into a movie and you don’t get the time to focus on just one or two aspects. All of these films are different from each other, and the budgets vary for each movie. But all screenplays have to be a little different because they have to be different things. I’ll give you an example. I worked on a film called The Fighter, about a Navy fighter pilot who fights back from the enemy and tries to capture a high-ranking U.S. Navy general and her command ship that has been sunk. The budget of the film was over $100 million, and that budget was completely determined just working out of the writer’s room. The budget was based on the script and the actors’ abilities, but it was determined by the director who was in that writer’s room. The director has not had any involvement in the story, although some of the crew had written some of the dialogue and some of the crew had done some additional story, but for the director to tell their story and tell it well, they needed to go in and give the director some input. For my part, I wrote the dialogue first and then the Director did his/her thing. The rest of the crew wrote the whole film in a day or two.
When you do that with a large budget, it makes it so much harder. But a director’s budget doesn’t even really matter anymore because they
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