FilmSkool — a free film school
Directing — the primer
Not a craft of its own — a set of judgements about everybody else's crafts, made faster than is comfortable.
DIR · Production · 370 lessons · 160h 33m
What it actually is
Every other department on this site is a skill you can practise alone. Directing is not. It is the job of deciding, and almost everything it decides is something a specialist knows more about than you do. The cinematographer knows lenses better, the editor knows rhythm better, the actor knows the character better. The director's contribution is knowing what the film is, and whether the thing just proposed is it.
The consequence is that most of the job happens before anybody shoots anything. By the time the crew arrives, a director who has done the work has already made several thousand decisions and is mostly there to protect them, to answer questions quickly enough that nobody stalls, and to notice the small number of moments where the plan turns out to be wrong.
The thing beginners most consistently underestimate is how much of it is staging. Where people are, where they move, and where the camera is relative to that decides what the scene means far more than any choice about coverage or lens. A well-staged scene can be shot badly and still work. A badly staged one cannot be rescued by anything downstream.
What is still being argued about
Live disagreements between people who know what they are doing. You will find confident advice on both sides of each.
- Plan everything, or stay open on the day — Hitchcock famously shot-listed to the frame and found the shoot itself boring; other directors block on the floor with the actors and let the coverage follow what they find. The genuine trade-off is not artistic temperament, it is risk: a full plan protects you from a bad day, and an open approach can find things a plan would have excluded. Almost everyone who says they work loosely is in fact working from a very well-prepared position and choosing when to leave it.
- How to talk to an actor — One school says never give a result — "be sadder" tells an actor the outcome you want and nothing about how to get there, and it is the single most common way directors make performances worse. The counter-argument is that experienced screen actors are perfectly capable of taking a result note and doing something interesting with it, and that over-engineered playable actions can be a director performing their own process. What is not in dispute is that a note naming a feeling and nothing else is not a note.
- Whether the director is the author — Auteur theory made the director the author of the film, which was a useful corrective in 1954 and has hardened into an assumption that is quietly unfair to about two hundred other people. The counter-position — that a film is made by a collective and the director is a chairperson with a casting vote — is closer to how a set actually feels and worse at explaining why the same director's films resemble each other. See Film Theory, where this argument properly lives.
On the day
Your real job on the day is to be the person who is not confused. You will be asked a question roughly every ninety seconds, most of them by people who could answer it themselves and are checking; the cost of a slow answer is not the answer, it is the twenty people who stopped moving while you thought about it.
Where to start
- Blocking & Staging — The most under-taught and most load-bearing skill in the department. Start here even though it is not where the exciting videos are.
- Shot Design — Once staging makes sense, this is how the camera gets an opinion about it.
- Directing Actors — The half of the job that no amount of technical preparation covers.
- On Set — What a shooting day is actually like, which is the thing most first-time directors are blindsided by.
Read next
This is the plain index, shown because JavaScript is off. Every lesson here is a free video published by the channel credited on it and plays through that channel's own embed — FilmSkool hosts nothing.