I went to film school back in the mid-1970s when the Auteur Theory was being taught, and every article about movies pushed The Director as The Guiding Vision. I admit I soaked it up at the time and believed it, even justifying the behavior of directors like Erich von Stroheim who memorably told his actors during the shooting of GREED, "Hate! I want to see you both hate each other like you hate me!"; or Alfred Hitchcock who commented that actors were cattle, later telling Truffaut(?) he simply meant that they should be TREATED as cattle, and commenting how lucky Walt Disney was because if he didn't like a performance he could just crumple it up and toss it in the wastebin!
It wasn't until I was a bit older and acting and directing that I found out if you carried on that way you might impress SOME people with your genius, but you'd also quickly run out of people who wanted to work with you, as well as that those directors always seem to take longer to get anything done. I also quickly found out that if you let your actors show you what they could do, along with Directors of Photography, Production Designers, even down to Grips and Gaffers (who were usually also DPs and Production Designers, because we were shooting on the cheap!), you'd often get results beyond what you yourself had thought of.
Directing is a balancing act where as the director you have the final say and it's your job to keep things moving, but letting your people do their thing often results in the results coming out better. I also found out that a lot of the more authoritarian directors that I was told to admire in film school like Von Stroheim, Hitchcock, and Kubrick tended to be horribly abusive human beings who believed their "genius" excused truly awful, assaultive, sexually predatory behavior....
Delightful perspective. This was always a favorite film when I was young. I’ve never seen it with captions, I think I’d enjoy seeing it in English for a change.
I went to film school back in the mid-1970s when the Auteur Theory was being taught, and every article about movies pushed The Director as The Guiding Vision. I admit I soaked it up at the time and believed it, even justifying the behavior of directors like Erich von Stroheim who memorably told his actors during the shooting of GREED, "Hate! I want to see you both hate each other like you hate me!"; or Alfred Hitchcock who commented that actors were cattle, later telling Truffaut(?) he simply meant that they should be TREATED as cattle, and commenting how lucky Walt Disney was because if he didn't like a performance he could just crumple it up and toss it in the wastebin!
It wasn't until I was a bit older and acting and directing that I found out if you carried on that way you might impress SOME people with your genius, but you'd also quickly run out of people who wanted to work with you, as well as that those directors always seem to take longer to get anything done. I also quickly found out that if you let your actors show you what they could do, along with Directors of Photography, Production Designers, even down to Grips and Gaffers (who were usually also DPs and Production Designers, because we were shooting on the cheap!), you'd often get results beyond what you yourself had thought of.
Directing is a balancing act where as the director you have the final say and it's your job to keep things moving, but letting your people do their thing often results in the results coming out better. I also found out that a lot of the more authoritarian directors that I was told to admire in film school like Von Stroheim, Hitchcock, and Kubrick tended to be horribly abusive human beings who believed their "genius" excused truly awful, assaultive, sexually predatory behavior....
Delightful perspective. This was always a favorite film when I was young. I’ve never seen it with captions, I think I’d enjoy seeing it in English for a change.