Top Directors Share Their War Stories at Guild Events

The big question at the Directors Guild of America awards dinner was not who would win--Steven Spielberg’s victory was almost a foregone conclusion--but whether the reclusive Terrence Malick would make an appearance.

The answer was yes--but in his own distinct fashion.

In a day dedicated to the top directorial achievements of 1998, the reclusive filmmaker both broke with precedent by making a rare public appearance while still managing to live up to his reputation as a shy iconoclast uncomfortable in the limelight.

“Terrence Malick is in the building,” host Garry Marshall boomed over the microphone during the DGA dinner Saturday night. A moment later, the director’s polished dome bobbed through the crowd on its way to the podium atop a neck and back that seemed impossibly stiff.

“Who was that?” British actress Brenda Blethyn (of “Little Voice”) asked as the director of “The Thin Red Line” left the stage after accepting a plaque given to all of the top movie director nominees. “He’s such a gentle man,” she said in apparent astonishment. “Particularly for someone who made a war movie.”

The DGA top prize went to Spielberg for his own war movie, “Saving Private Ryan,” and neither Malick nor the irrepressible Roberto Benigni--who did everything but ride in on a green horse like his character in “Life Is Beautiful”--could steal the spotlight from him. But the presence on stage of a director who pulled a disappearing act for 20 years after making “Days of Heaven” was still an occasion worth remarking on.

Spielberg, who along with DGA president Jack Shea had been among those urging Malick to come to the awards ceremony and to a seminar of top directors held earlier in the day, paid tribute to him from the stage. But for an occasion that engendered so much suspense, Malick’s appearance was almost anticlimactic. With soft voice, soulful eyes and Zen-like calm, Malick looked directly at friends sitting at his table while making his brief comments, which consisted entirely of thank-yous to the people close to him.

Though conspicuous by his absence from the earlier three-hour seminar, Malick was hardly missed. Spielberg, Benigni, John Madden (“Shakespeare in Love”) and Peter Weir (“The Truman Show”) told fascinating and sometimes hilarious stories about the making of their movies.

And because they were speaking to an audience largely composed of other filmmakers, these were not the prefabricated tales designed for easy public consumption that directors and actors often tell.

Spielberg told of the “method directing” techniques he employed in making his movie, which he made without storyboards or the precise planning that usually accompany his works. During the opening battle scenes, when up to 1,000 people--actors and members of the Irish Army--were storming the beach, a small squad of cameramen was told to film instinctually. As a result, while following, say, Tom Hanks’ character, as he advances toward the beach past whizzing bullets, a camera operator might catch a glimpse out of the side of his eye of a wounded soldier crying in agony on the ground; in such a case, the camera operator was free to aim the camera at the wounded soldier before returning to Hanks.

“Each of them directed their own shots,” Spielberg said.

He also told of how he experimented with camera effects by holding an electric drill against the camera to make it vibrate during filming.

Benigni, who directed “Life Is Beautiful,” a touching if improbable comedy about the Holocaust, stole the show.

Thin and bird-like, he looked like he was about to take flight whenever he was called on to speak with his heavy Italian accent. He perched on the edge of his chair and gestured wildly while talking about improvising: “I like to prepare an improvisation. It can take a week to prepare a good improvisation.”

“An Italian Furby,” Spielberg called him later. “I want to take him home to live with me.”

Weir told how the “Truman Show” script by Andrew Niccol was in good shape when he got it. Still, he said, he told Niccol that he had to take it apart and rebuild it so that it reflected his own sensibility. “I have to eat the script,” he said. “It has to become organic. It has to become part of me. It has to become almost as if I did write it.”

He also spoke of his unusual method of developing and understanding his characters. He likes to audio-record the script, he said, and listen to the recording while driving in his car. “You learn a lot about characters by speaking the lines,” he said.

Of casting Weir said, “It’s a most mysterious business,” he said “I rather think it’s like a missing person’s search. You’re trying to find this man who exists on paper, and you’re meeting people who claim to be the person.”

Madden said Joseph Fiennes was one of the first actors he tested for the title role in “Shakespeare in Love” but he passed him over. “One of the things I wondered about Joe was whether or not he would have the comic deftness,” he said. Madden was close to giving up when he went back and looked again at Fiennes’ tape and realized that he might be perfect for the part. His auditions with actors, he says, can take a full day as he works with them on various scenes.

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The directors touched on a wide array of subjects in the discussion, which was led by writer-director Jeremy Kagan.

On why they became movie directors:

Spielberg: “I had no choice. It was just something that happened. I was always looking for ways to act out, and I got a camera and it acted out for me.”

Madden: “I was a director in my social life. I had an almost fascistic tendency to want to make people see the world the way I saw it.”

For Weir, the ‘60s era of tumult and unfettered youthful exuberance and freedom was integral to his becoming a filmmaker. His native Australia had no film industry to speak of, but Weir was drawn to the life of the theater and show business. And, he added, “there was a feeling that you could do anything. You could break from the life your family had for you--the university and so on. . . . There was nobody to ask advice of. You went to the movies and the screen was your teacher.”

Benigni became a director, he said, because “nothing is more beautiful. Everyone wants to tell stories. The director is dreaming for us.”

Spielberg told the story of traveling in Europe to promote one of his early movies and meeting the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini.

“I was waiting for sage advice from him,” Spielberg said. “I said, ‘Help me be a director. What do I do?’ He said, ‘When you talk to the press, lie.’ ”

Otherwise, Spielberg would become bored repeating truthful stories countless times, Fellini had told him.

A few moments later, Benigni said he, too, had gone to the master for advice. He said Fellini told him: “Robertino, remember--tell only the truth.”

Madden told of the long road “Shakespeare in Love” took to reach the screen and his role in the project. Originally conceived and written by Marc Norman in 1992, the script was transformed early on by playwright Tom Stoppard. The project was shelved, however, when no one could be found to play the part of the young Will Shakespeare. Julia Roberts was slated to play the female lead, Madden said.

For five years the script lay dormant until Universal, which had purchased the script, put it in turnaround and Miramax acquired it. “I had just done a movie for Harvey [Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax], and I was the lap that was in the way when the script was dropped,” Madden said.

Many directors already had passed on the project, Madden said. “Tom had imagined the script as a sort of Zucker brothers movie,” with the emphasis on humor, Madden said. The director and writer worked on the story for six months to boost the emotional core.

He said the ending was the most difficult part. The original project had died before Stoppard had completely worked out the resolution to his satisfaction. And the rewritten ending was again rewritten and reshot during filming.

All five directors also are nominated for Academy Awards. In addition, all of the movies are nominated for best picture with the exception of “The Truman Show”; the other nomination for best picture went to “Elizabeth.”