Essay: One Eye Always on the Story

2May/060

Essay: One Eye Always on the Story

One eye! On this blog I tackle filmmaking from a lot of angles. Commercial potential, camerawork, sound design, acting, directing. I might even fool myself from time to time into believing that a movie can be worth seeing for cinematography alone. That's not the way most critics approach a movie; that's not the way the average Joe or Jane takes in a movie; that's not the way the greatest filmmakers of all time have made movies. All the technique in the world won't make a movie relevant to the human race.

This is good news for us budding filmmakers, who don't have access to the latest tech, but have plenty of ideas. It's a cliche in Indiewood that a film is as good as its founding idea. Like most cliches, it's not entirely true. To tell a good story, you need good execution in its telling. That's why I say: split your interest. Keep an eye on the boom man at one moment, or the performances of the actors, or how the shots will cut together in the editing room -- but ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS keep one eye on the story.

We all like to tell stories, but some storytelling strategies are better than others. Your Aunt Margie will drone on and on and never get to the point. Your Uncle Al will exaggerate everything to the point of ridiculousness. If Aunt Margie made a movie, you can bet it wouldn't be a taught thriller. If Uncle Al got his celluloid on, he wouldn't be classified as an Italian Neo-realist. 'Nuff said. They have strategies of storytelling that are proven to drive people away. Hence you avoid them at family gatherings.

Some storytelling strategies are better than others. It's fun to see exercises where different directors and writers tackle the same story, as in the end of William Goldman's Which Lie Did I Tell? There might even be several versions that come out pretty all right. This type of exercise obscures the fact that certain similar choices are being made over and over again.

These choices are what's dramatic. Firsts and lasts are dramatic. The cop getting shot on his first day of the job, or right before retirement -- it's a go-to plot. Why? Conflict between family members... car chases... noble sacrifice. Why will we watch these things over and over again?

Continue reading about film storytelling...
Empathy for the Storyteller

Empathy for the protagonist (often confused with 'sympathy for hero') seems to be a key ingredient in stories. When the protagonist does something irrational, the audience gets upset. This is not saying the protagonist has to do exactly what the average audience member would in a given situation. This is just saying: a character should be consistent enough in their actions to be recognizable as thinking, feeling being. Even if Suzy Protagonist is ten times smarter than me, I'm secure in the knowledge that she is acting according to her own internal logic.

Great actors often earn a reputation for being difficult because they refuse to perform a scene unless they know their character's 'motivation.' This is no accident. Motivation is the fuel of stories. Hitchcock was said to have shut down the production of North by Northwest for an entire week while he pondered why exactly Cary Grant's character was making a phone call. Finally, satisfied that writer Ernest Lehman's script made logical sense, he continued the shoot without changing a single planned element. Crazy? Like a hitchfox!

Documentary or fiction, story is king. It is, with the timecode, the one continuous element of a film -- the throughline. When the lights go down in that theater, we all want one thing: to be told a good story. From beginning to end, the audience has one eye always on the story. What does the conversation mean for the relationship of character A to character B? Will character C see the skateboard at the top of the stairs? How will character D deal with the kidnapping of his daughter?

On the shoot, with everything broken down into tiny shots, changing conditions wreaking havoc with continuity, one actor out sick and the crew ready to go on strike because of PB&J craft services for eight straight days -- the last thing you want to think about is what Cary Grant is really doing in a phone booth at this exact moment. But you must -- the film depends on it!

If you don't know where the story is, forget the whole film. The camera's eye should only be pointed at one thing in any given shot: the story. Camera placement, set design -- all of these need to be in support of the story. The millions of choices that need to be made to make a film suddenly become few once you know the story it is that you are telling.

A Parable

One year in college I had a summer job teaching English to incoming high-school students in lower Manhattan. We finished the assigned lesson early one day, so to fill the time, I started to tell them a story. "There's a young prince, and his father has just died. Not too long after, his mother gets remarried -- to his uncle. The prince doesn't like the situation, but his uncle is now the king and there's not much he can do. Then, one night, he's visited by the ghost of his father. The ghost tells the prince he was murdered -- by the uncle. He makes it clear what he wants the price to do. 'Revenge!' he says."

The class' know-it-all spoke up at this point. "I know this story. It's Hamlet, by Shakespeare."

The class' influential loudmouth imediately chimed in, "Shakespeare? We don't like Shakespeare."

"Have you read much Shakespeare?" I asked.

"Sure," said the loudmouth. "Romeo and Juliet."

"Really, in 6th grade?"

"We read parts of it."

"Well, since don't like Shakespeare, I won't bother with the rest of the story."

Almost as I finished speaking, the bell rang to signal the end of the school day. Unlike any other day, no one stirred in their seats. And didn't, until I'd finished my crib notes version of Hamlet.

Draw your own lessons. Let me just say that the power of the story surprised me as much as them.

Concentrate on the Pocketwatch

Storytelling is a form of hypnotism. Against our will we are held with full concentration, made to feel grand and painful emotions; our patterns of thought are re-ordered; in group settings we may even slip out of individual consciousness entirely, laughing and screaming as one entity. Even as our eyes focus on the images on a movie screen, the inner eye is on the story -- moving us physically, emotionally, intellectually -- surveying the road behind, anticipating the road ahead. The cleverest lines and most beautiful shots fade in our memories, but we can describe exactly what Cool Hand Luke felt in his gut after eating fifty hardboiled eggs, or why Scarlett gave a damn that Rhett Butler didn't.

The story. Always the story. A good story never leaves the screen. It just internalizes, becoming another organ of our bodies. A lembic with which to distill the human experience. And always, like a boxer on the feet of his opponent, one eye. One eye always on the story.