Zen Directing

When you direct a movie be prepared to die 45,000 times. Be prepared to see your children murdered in front of your eyes. Be prepared to lose faith in God and humanity as a whole. Be prepared to question your very existence and feel the unrelenting wrath of all the gods of all the pantheons pitted against you. To direct a feature film is a terrifying ordeal. Terrifying in that you are about to spend tremendous amounts of money to save your story. That’s right, save your story. Not tell a story. You set out to tell your story but soon realize that making a movie, is saving your story because it will be raped, slaughtered, ground-up, regurgitated, massacred, questioned, over-analyzed, disintegrated before your very eyes and it is up to you as the director, to preserve some semblance of the original idea, before the day is done.
I walked onto the set of my low-budget thriller with suddenly seventy people asking me seventy different questions about seventy different ways of doing seventy different things. I didn’t have the answer. I could barely talk I was so scared. My fear was paralyzing. I pretended to be confident and strong, but I could barely say my name.
If you let everyone think you are fearful, green and clueless, which you may be, everyone will walk all over you, all the time. No one will respect you. You will need to earn the respect of the crew. If you let one person put you down or slam the project, it will poison everybody and everything. The key is to be prepared, be an authority without being an ass and gain people’s respect by not getting walked on. When you are prepared, there is a lot less fear because your brain robot is dialed in to “move forward” mode and you are constantly focused on what you know you have to finish.
It is not that people are mean, malicious, self-centered and enjoy seeing other people suffer but all creatures strive against one another and if you let them, people will want to assert their own will over yours.
I am a mouse by nature. I am quiet, somewhat timid. I like to be humble and sometimes people try to take advantage of this.
The first day of shooting I didn’t know anything. Someone had to tell me to say “action” and “cut”. If someone walked up to me and asked me what planet I lived on, it would have taken ten minutes for me to come up with the answer. I was shaken to the core. Way in over my head.
The second day of shooting I realized that I was facing an all-out revolt. Now no one believed in me or the script or what they were doing. People were ready to quit. The producers wanted to replace me. The crew laughed at me behind my back or avoided me and deferred all the questions to the producers.
On day two I went around to all the departments to say hello and thank them and see how everything was coming. I could sense the general malaise. I was like the retarded cousin whom you are nice to but really don’t want around. I visited the art department, wardrobe, checked how the lighting was coming, visited the camera crew and made sure we had all the bases covered, conferred with the prop crew and the catering. Then as the actors began arriving, I personally said hello to each actor. This feeling of distrust and angst spread to everyone working on the film like a fever.
It came to a boiling point when I found one of the female leads sitting in the back yard of the house we rented as the main set, making notes in her script. But she was not just making notes, she was crossing paragraphs of description and rewriting line after line of new dialogue in the margins. Along with directing the script, I had also been the sole writer. When anyone takes it upon themselves to re-write my precious words, I generally like to know what motivated such a transgression.
It had been this female lead that had created a lot of the original dissent among the cast and crew by putting me down in front of everyone and voicing out loud I didn’t know what I was doing. She was also one of the most experienced persons on the set with the most credits under her belt and everyone just figured she knew what she was talking about, forgetting the old adage by William Goldman about the movie industry: “Nobody knows nothin’.” That double negative again.
“Hey Paula, how are you today? You look great.” I said to the actress, offering a hug and kiss. “What are you up to?”
“I’m re-writing your script,” she replied, the words that every writer/director cherishes to hear from his leading lady.
“Oh. Uh, okay.”
“Yeah, some of the dialogue is weak and you had a few false moments and I kind of spiced it up. Here take a look.”
Now think how this might come off on any other set on any other production. Even a star doesn’t re-write the script on the set. It just doesn’t happen but I had fallen victim to such a vast breach in my authority and loss of respect
from my peers, it became an “anything goes” mentality.
“Terrific. Very cool.”
“Yeah, it’s like pages thirty-six through fifty-four. That’s about all I’ve gotten to so far.”
There was more?
“Yeah. Okay. I’ll give it a look. Great,” I said strolling away, flipping through the pages of the script that had red ink scribbles on almost every page. I took about ten steps, arrived at a trash can, and promptly chucked the script in.
Some might translate this as a real “asshole” moment but from that point on, it signaled evolution. The cast and the crew suddenly respected me. They automatically assumed I had come around and was not going to take shit from anyone. No one questioned my decisions. Even the lead actress herself whom I heard was very “heartbroken” by my cruel gesture was suddenly quiet and agreeable. I never heard another word of dissent from the leading actress and most of the performances went off smashingly and the film went on the play in some festivals and did well on the overseas market.
In this life it is good to please a few people but it’s also good to stay strong, speak our peace, and stick to your guns, follow your dreams, make it happen.
In Paul Tillich’s book, “The Courage to Be”, very early on he talks about the existentialist anxiety and fear we all face which stems directly from the soul’s feeling separated from God and oneness while it resides in the material realm of the senses where we can’t help feeling divided or disconnected from our source. But right here you can feel at one because you are at one with the Creator whether you want to be or not. When you look deeply inside yourself and find the face of God there, you will come to the deeper understanding that all there is is joy, no matter who you are, what you are doing or where. If you continually meditate, going deeper and deeper, you will arrive at limitless bliss and the ultimate, fearless, all-knowing, all-satisfying, sorrowless, ever-renewed and renewing, imperishable cosmic consciousness.