Action!

This weekend, I am going to be on-set, behind the camera for the first time in who-knows-how-long. Actually, in many ways it will be for the first time ever. Sure, of course, I have been making movies since I was nine but something about this shoot feels totally new.

On the films I made as a kid, it was always me and a friend or two running around, acting, shooting and directing -- if you can call it that -- with the used Super 8 camera that I bought for ten dollars. As an older person, in my 20’s, 30’s and 40’s on The True Meaning of Cool (1995), Jumpcuts: An Art Film (1996) and Love,Park (2010), it was much the same thing -- me running the show, calling the shots, working the camera, writing, producing and editing --- sometimes roping friends in to shoot with me or getting a better editor to do a final cut. In 2007, I was brought in to direct a short film at the last minute after the original director had to be removed from the project. I had no say in the script or the cast but I hastily hired my own skeleton crew -- a DP,  an editor and a sound guy -- and we banged it out.

Pre-production on the sitcom pilot that I am directing has been going on for over a month, we’ve had  casting calls, rehearsals and meetings with the camera, prop, make-up and wardrobe departments. To be honest, I sometimes lose track of how many producers I am working with and how many assistant directors or camera people there are. When the full crew assembled last week, I didn’t know who half of them were. The point is not that I am clueless. The point is that this shoot is bigger than anything I have ever done before and I am loving it.

There are few, if any nerves, just anxious anticipation. The script is good. As a writer, I can be pretty cranky and picky about scripts written by other people but that is not the case here. Sure, I have tweaked the script, changed a line here and there, cut a chunk out of a scene and so on but the core of the project is solid.

As for directing, it’s been said that the key to good directing is good casting. I have been blessed with a wonderful cast, the vast bulk of whom are camera ready. Okay, I will give myself some credit for analyzing the script and knowing in my guts that someone was right or wrong for a particular part when I cast them but my line producer gets a lot of credit for seeing eye-to-eye with me and backing me up on my choices.

Of course, directing is not just casting the right actors, it is conducting them like an orchestra, coaxing them to deliver the lines as I feel they should sound. Actors can be fragile, feisty, sure of themselves or totally lost so I have to make my cast feel good about what they are doing. There is a degree of cheerleading and ego-massaging taking place on and off the set and I love that part of the job as well.  Of course, the job is not just dealing with people, it is dealing with machines, too. I have to make sure that the cameras ---- all four or five of them on this shoot --- are getting what I want them to get. 

The bottom-line is that, no, technically, this is not the first time that I have done this kind of thing. It is the first time that I have done it at this level.  For the first time in my my life I really feel like I am doing what the thing that I have always wanted to do, that I feel that I am meant to be doing and I happen to think that I am doing it really well and, what do you know, it feels good.