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I was recently hired to do the cinematography work for this small independent film written and directed by Caroline F. (name has been deleted to protect the -- well, not innocent but something else), who is most famous for playing the doomed chick in "Days Gone Bye." that zombie film FarSky and I did last year.
It's a bit of an avant-garde piece, and the script (or rather, the directions on paper) has no dialogue. Caroline wants it to be about reactions, the breaths, every little sound.
So after a month of pre-production, we started shooting on Monday. And it got off to a bit of a rocky start. The problem? Caroline didn't storyboard the film, so we're having to decide on what shots to use right before the camera rolls. I was under the impression we would have a storyboard -- Caroline even said she was going to, after I told her how hard it was to set up shots when we shot "Days Gone Bye, "which also wasn't storyboarded.
However, whenever I suggest trying to do something, Caroline seems to be waving her "I'm the director!" card and shoots down most of my ideas. Her biggest complaint is "We don't have the time," but in my experience, it's better to get the shot and spend a few more minutes in a day getting it, rather than not get the shot and spend the rest of your life complaining about the finished product.
Now, I'm not the most experienced person when it comes to actually shooting a film (my experience lies in writing mostly), but even when I directed "Days Gone Bye," I was more than willing to let my cast and crew suggest ways to improve the quality of the film. Not her. She's like Orson Welles, only without the storyboard or (that I can see) the artistic talent.
Oh well.
I'm not trying to say she's a terrible person -- she isn't -- but she has, to my knowledge, never directed a film before. She's also the main character (along with her beau Chris), so in addition to writing and directing, she's also acting in it. This creates a problem because normally, a director will watch the monitor while the shot is going. In this case, we have to replay the same scene two or three times before we can move on. This eats up a lot of time and patience.
She's a drama student, so she's taken theatre directing courses . . . but directing stage actors is NOT the same as directing films. Plus when I suggest something, she immediately says, "No, it's gotta be this way," which aggravates the hell out of me because the shot she wants is lifeless and, at times, cliched.
We started at 9:00 a.m., and worked right on through to 2:00 p.m. before we broke for lunch. Our total amount of footage in those six hours? Nine minutes.
Then the story gets really interesting.
So we took a lunch break, and I came back thirty minutes early with my lunch. I knock on the door and come in, and Caroline (the director) is standing there. She looks at me, shocked.
"Didn't you get my message?" she asks.
"Uh . . . no." I check my phone, no message there.
"Um, okay," she says, waltzing me into the living room. "Well, we aren't going to be doing any more shooting today."
"What? We were supposed to go till eleven tonight --"
"I know, I know." Caroline's now seeming a little, er, anxious. "It's just . . . I think we're not meshing artistically."
" . . ."
"Which is why I'm thinking we're gonna go another direction."
"What?"
"See, I'm the director, and when I hired you as cinematographer, I thought you'd be taking care of more of the technical rather than the artistic."
"Do you know what a cinematographer is?"
"Yes. It just seemed that you were too busy trying to implement your own artistic vision into the project."
"What artistic vision?" I'm starting to get a little peeved. "You hired me on as director of photography. As in, I direct the photography. Yes, you are the director and you have the final say . . . but when you don't have a storyboard, I'm trying to work with what I have."
She starts to get a little miffed. "I hired you to operate the camera, not give directions."
I look at her. "You hired me to be the cinematographer."
"Yes."
"The word you kept throwing around."
"Yes-s-s…"
"You know a cameraman and a cinematographer aren't entirely the same thing?"
She blinks at me. "Uh . . . wha . . .?"
"The cinematographer is in charge of the camera and lighting crew. They are also responsible for the technical AND artistic decisions of a film."
She starts to blush a little. "But you were acting like you were directing the actors. That's my job."
"You're one of the actors. You can't see what's on the monitor."
"But see, that's the job of the assistant director to tell me what to do."
"You mean the one who didn't show up."
"Right."
So, long story short, she pretty much tells me that she doesn't want me to have any creative input in the filming process. I tell her that she had the final call as the director, but directing is 100% collaboration. She agrees, yet still thinks I overstepped the bounds of what she wanted.
So bottom line, she fired me as DP and is going another way.
Yeah, great start to the week indeed.
_________________
"There's a family with kids. Do the kids and make the mother watch. Tell her you'll stop if she can hold back her tears. I *owe* her that."
--Grace Margaret Mulligan
"WELL GO GET IT!"
--Malcolm McDowell to me, in what was the most terrifying experience of my life
Last edited by Psifonian2 on Wed Jul 14, 2010 6:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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