Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

“What I really want to do is direct.” The late Snoopy’s t-shirt is not inexplicable. His ubiquitous mantra certifies that movie directing is still the occupation du jour. Along with sea captains and symphony orchestra conductors, movie directors are the last civilian dictators and by the middle of the last century their status had been upped by the “auteurists” until the practitioners themselves subscribed to their own mythos.

If movies were the 20th century art form, then movie directors are the premier artists of that form, writers, cinematographers and editors notwithstanding. “Movies are magic and the directors who make them are magical,” avers Robert J. Emery, editor of two collections of interviews with directors, “The Directors: Take One” and “The Directors: Take Two,” just part of the recent flood of books on directors and directing.

What do we learn from these books? At the very least, we hunger for dish surrounding the making of a favorite film or the life of a larger-than-life filmmaker; at the most, we long for the secrets of creativity. The books that seek to answer both categories of questions are bound to be uneven, with nuggets of gold interspersed among pages of deadwood. Directors, like most artists, are usually best doing what they do, rather than commenting on it. It is difficult to answer questions with the eloquence that Dame Margot Fonteyn displayed when an enthusiastic backstage visitor gushed, “Oh, Dame Margot, I so enjoyed your dancing; tell me what were you doing up there.” “I’m sorry,” she replied, “I explained what I was doing while I was doing it; if you didn’t understand me, then I failed.”

Undeterred by such cautionary insights, we long, like Jeff Young in his interviews with Elia Kazan, to learn the secrets, the “rules” for directing. Kazan’s answer, if understandably frustrating, is choice: “. . . [T]here are no rigid laws. Rules, before they were rules, were the experience of one artist who found that in a particular set of circumstances, certain techniques were of value in helping him achieve what he wanted. Then some academic came along and turned these observations into doctrine. . . . That’s nonsense. You have to always leave yourself free to experiment. There simply aren’t any absolutes. Not even that is an absolute.”

You can teach technique, but you can’t teach talent. It is true, to be sure, that as filmmaking grows increasingly sophisticated, there’s a lot of technique to master: film stocks, special effects equipment and methodology, blue screen, green screen, digital possibilities, to say nothing of the older stuff, how to work with actors, how to parse a screenplay. . . . Comparisons with orchestra conductors are apt: A conductor must not only be able to read and understand the dynamics of a musical score, he must also have a working knowledge of each instrument in his ensemble and how their sounds interact.

But you can know every instrument and every lens and still not succeed as well as the inspired amateur, who blunders forward on intuition and guts and makes something memorable with no access to or knowledge of the high-tech stuff. Such recipes are not to be found in books or, if they are, they usually prove inimitable. There is a difference between a technician and an artist. A technician is someone who has mastered his craft; an artist is someone with a world vision. The former may know all the “rules”; the latter cheerfully flings them down and dances on them. It may be argued that within the rigid economic strictures of the film business, it is fatuous to speak of a world vision, but art has always been uneasily yoked to commerce--Michelangelo was an artist, notwithstanding he was painting a ceiling for the pope. How can you teach world vision? There are no rules for falling asleep; each sleeper finds his own way to unconsciousness. To paraphrase Tolstoy: Each great director is great in his own way.

In addition, directors, like other artists, may not be particularly revealing, hard as they try, about their creative processes. They tend to fall back on anecdotal detail, which may or may not be either true or relevant. They can tell you what the weather was like or the temperaments of their stars (rightly or wrongly recalled), what lens they chose, et cetera, but they cannot say for certain why something “worked” or didn’t. In the final analysis, the Artist may no more be able to evaluate his work than the Critic--and Time is usually more accurate than either at understanding and appreciating what was achieved. (It is beguiling to learn that W.S. Gilbert was inspired to write “The Mikado” after a visit to the Japanese exhibition in Knightsbridge, following which a sword fell off the wall in his study and crystallized the idea for him--but it doesn’t really explain how Gilbert wrote “The Mikado.” It is anecdotal but fails to immerse us--can anything?--in the actual creative process.)

Nor are directors helped by a public whose eagerness for answers is matched only by a fundamental naivete about what the creative process is. Treating the artist as though he were a series of answers to math problems at the back of an algebra textbook, questioners assume that what he or she says will in some way be “definitive,” as though the artist had the inside track on the “meaning” of his or her creation. Plato knew better than that: He described poets as essentially a species of idiots who, when they created, went into a sort of trance, during which they took dictation from God, which they called “inspiration.” Afterward, they reverted to their unremarkable mental states, at a loss to explain their achievements or provide any clues as to their significance. (Charlotte Bronte, speaking with considerable insight about her sister Emily, author of the deeply unsettling “Wuthering Heights,” observed that “such was her [Emily’s] nature . . . that she did not know what she had done.”)

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I once heard Billy Wilder asked if “One, Two, Three” was a political film. Not, “Did you intend ‘One, Two, Three’ to be a political film?”--whatever a political film is--but “Is it one?” The question implies that if Wilder had said, “Yes, it is a political film” and if you never thought about politics while watching it, somehow you had it wrong. Conversely, if he had said, “No, ‘One, Two, Three’ is not a political film,” whatever that is, and you had had many “political” thoughts while viewing it, you were also somehow wrong. But this is not so. Whether “One, Two, Three” is or isn’t a “political” film is surely up to the viewer, not the author, as is the case with all art. “Did you intend . . . ?” is a fair question; “Is it . . . ?” a dumb one.

In their eagerness to supply answers, directors--like other artists flattered by attention--may earnestly and honestly endeavor to get to the root of creative questions. But mostly they are stymied, much as the centipede, which, when asked how it manages to walk, suddenly considers the question and finds itself unable to take a step. Or else they display a mystifying (to us, anyway) obdurate obtuseness, confusing their experience of making the film with the results. Just as Flaubert was said to despise his most popular novel, “Madame Bovary,” for taking attention away from what he considered his more important works, so I have a vivid memory of a fan trying to talk to John Frankenheimer about “The Manchurian Candidate” (when it had been long out of circulation) and his dismissing the film with a contemptuous wave of his hand. “Twenty-eight days,” he sniffed, as though the shooting time was all that seemed of consequence to him. (To be fair, he appears to have changed his mind about the film over the years). Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the subject of his hero, Sherlock Holmes, was similarly bemused; he just didn’t understand Holmes’ appeal. He could write Holmes; he just didn’t get Holmes. (Or he said he didn’t, but that’s yet another aspect of the mystery surrounding creativity, which space does not permit us to explore.)

Having said all that, I believe that conversations with directors are not uninteresting, and it is hard to resist our curiosity about the circumstances surrounding the creation of a favorite scene or film. No two directors work in the same way (or fall asleep in the same way, one would hazard), and it is absorbing to compare and contrast modi operandi. Who rehearses, and who does not? Who improvises? Who uses storyboards? When do you cut? How do you feel about over-the-shoulders? Why bother with masters? Is it better to be feared or loved? (Is “The Prince” the greatest textbook for directors? Just a thought). Should the writer be allowed on the set? (Just kidding).

Reading books by and about directors is like eating popcorn; once you get going, it’s hard to to stop. Who doesn’t want the reminiscences of those who made “The Bridge on the River Kwai” or “Casablanca”? “Citizen Kane” or “On the Waterfront”? I love reading such ephemera and do it compulsively; it’s almost a way of enjoying the films again. (One should be careful, however, that such information does not intrude upon one’s enjoyment). And the irony is that though the technical information you glean may be accurate and useful, it is the anecdotes we crave and relish. (That and the critiques, which, as we have noted, occasionally display flashes of true insight). It turns out that what is valuable is not always interesting and that what is interesting may not be especially valuable.

Robert Emery’s books are solidly put together, complete with brief biographical sketches of each director, filmographies and a short film-by-film “commentary.” Originally part of a television documentary series, “Take One” spotlights Robert Wise, Ron Howard, Sydney Pollack, James Cameron, Spike Lee, Richard Donner, Norman Jewison, John Carpenter, Frankenheimer, Lawrence Kasdan, Mark Rydell, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, and Sidney Lumet. “Take Two” features the comments of Rob Reiner, Joel Schumacher, Robert Zemeckis, the late Alan Pakula, John Avildsen, Garry Marshall, John McTiernan, Martha Coolidge, Herb Ross, William Friedkin, Arthur Hiller, Terry Gilliam and John Badham. What they have to say varies from a maddening perfunctoriness to a lot of autobiographical detail, usually as it relates to events and tribulations (what William Goldman called “adventures in the screen trade”) surrounding a film’s inception and reception.

Mike Figgis, editor of “Projections 10,” (latest in a series) on Hollywood filmmakers on filmmaking, casts a slightly wider net. In addition to interviews with such directors as Paul Mazursky, Paul Thomas Anderson, Jean-Jacques Beneix, Tony Scott, Tony Kaye and Bob Rafelson, we also get conversations with such actors-turned-directors as Jodie Foster and Mel Gibson, as well as conversations with studio brass John Calley, Mike DeLuca and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Also Salma Hayek, Julie Delpy and Nastassja Kinski. Figgis, himself an accomplished director, is less interested in directors’ anecdotes attached to the making of their films than he is curious about their lives, the cultural aspects of filmmaking (Hollywood versus Europe) and how one is expected to function successfully within the strictures placed upon one by the “business.” The interviews tend to be longer and more penetrating than the Emery conversations. Quirkier, too.

The truth is that all the people in these four books have interesting and occasionally provocative things to say. To be sure, some say more interesting and more provocative things than others, but they’re all contained in the same set of packages, so you pay your money and take your choice. Read conversations with Pollack or Hayek (or, better still, Calley); skip whomever doesn’t strike your fancy. And be patient: you may have to wade through some chaff before something tastes like wheat.

Susan Gray’s slim volume, “Writers On Directors,” is difficult to evaluate. Though short on “hard” information, it has a (theoretically) interesting point of departure: writers creating short “appreciations” of directors whom they admire and with whom they may have worked. The feel of this book is markedly different from the Emery and Figgis volumes. In the first place, these “appreciations” are written, not transcribed from tape recordings of conversations. (The transcriptions create the occasional inadvertent error--Eric Pleskow’s name rendered as Eric Klosgow in the Jodie Foster interview). In the second place, they are written by writers, that is to say, people who use words professionally and are capable of considerable eloquence and, on occasion, even poetry when describing the work or persona of their chosen subjects.

To say that the essays themselves are of uneven quality--ranging from the sycophantic (writers who hope to be employed by the director again) to the penetrating--is not to state anything surprising. But, no matter how I slice it, I find the result thin--literally as well as figuratively superficial. It is hard to escape the impression that these essays--even the well-written ones--constitute nothing so much as puff pieces; certainly that is their cumulative effect. Here is Walter Mosley on Howard: “Everyone on the set . . . grips, best boys, caterers and special consultants all equally feel that they have the director’s ear.” Here is Brian Helgeland on Donner: “Each person he talks to tries a little harder because Dick has made them feel that their job is the most important job on the set.” It is difficult to imagine for whom this book was written: serious students of filmmaking will not be interested and those looking for gossip won’t find much. Perhaps it would have been better to have writers writing about directors with whom they have had no contact whatsoever. Disraeli’s maxim that a biography should be written by an enemy comes to mind.

There are exceptions. Joan Juliet Buck’s essay on Bernardo Bertolucci, for example: “Bertolucci’s constituency had been taught history by Marxist professors, and around that mental architecture hung the gentle collective haze of marijuana. We of that generation all desperately wanted to both understand and belong and Bertolucci was the first person to join together Marx and Freud, political idealism and sex. And he did it with a romantic sensuality that surfaces again and again in his films, even as he moved away from Marx and made his more recent subjects power and Buddha, and virginity.” Who cares what the subject is; this is wonderful and evocative writing.

Overall, for my money, the most rewarding of these volumes is Figgis’--the conversations are longer and more idiosyncratic than the cursory film-by-film comments in Emery’s books (though the latter may have more “facts”), and they are not limited to directors but include other significant achievers in the filmmaking process.

Still, if you hunger to learn about these magicians, I find the full-length treatments infinitely more gratifying, whether we’re talking about Cameron Crowe’s “Conversations with Wilder,” Young’s talks with Elia Kazan or the David Lean and William Wyler biographies of 1996. I suppose if you’re going to try to learn what makes these folks tick and how they operate, you might as well do the job right and settle in for the long haul. Film scholarship is in its infancy, and it has a long way to go; the chasm between the slipshod scholarship of fan magazines and their gullible sensibility and serious study is a wide one, and so far only a few practitioners have made the leap successfully, from gushing hero worship to subtle, knowledgeable and useful appreciation.

It was one of the greatest directors, Orson Welles (not included in any of these tomes), who delivered the most succinctly insightful comment when he so memorably characterized directing as being allowed to play with the biggest set of electric trains any kid ever had.