directing

The Director's Role: You are the obstetrician. You are not the parent of this child we call the play. You are present at its birth for clinical reasons, like a doctor or midwife. Your job most of the time is simply to do no harm.When something does go wrong, however, your awareness that something is awry--and your clinical intervention to correct it--can determine whether the child will thrive or suffer, live or die.

Regardless of the subject of my films _ I am looking for a way of evoking in audiences feelings similar to my own: the physically painful impotence and sorrow that assail me when I see a man weeping at the bus stop, when I observe people struggling vainly to get close to others, when I see someone eating up the left-overs in a cheap restaurant, when I see the first blotches on a woman's hand and know that she too is bitterly aware of them, when I see the kind of appalling and irreparable injustice that so visibly scars the human face. I want this pain to come across to my audience, to see this physical agony, which I think I am beginning to fathom, to seep into my work.

I grew up in an era that was a golden age of the blockbuster, when something we might call a family film could have universal appeal. That's something I want to see again. In terms of the tone of the film, it looks at where we are as a people and has a universality about human experience.

One of the common themes you will read in interview after interview is the call to keep fighting for your vision. This is a message to women directors, producers, writers__nyone who wants to work in the business. Your voice counts. Your vision matters.

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect

I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love.

I__e never liked the term __ctor_._ Barron spoke slowly, joining hands with the cast members to his left and right. The rest of them formed a circle, also holding hands, and he continued. __eriously now, is anyone here __cting_? Is anyone here pretending? __e, I__ a theater director. One hundred percent, all the time. I__ not pretending, or acting, or trying to fool anyone. This is what I do, and I give it my all__ust like you. I look around me, and I don__ see a single phony. I see people who give their hearts, their minds, and their very lives to being serious performers on the stage. In the last weeks I__e watched every one of you give up the easy life to come here and bust a gut to make this show a reality. __hat__ why I call you performers. Not actors__erformers. Because when it__ time to prepare, you work out every nuance of a role. When it__ time to step in front of the crowd, you reach out and pull them in with both hands. When it__ time to say your lines, you deliver them with skill and meaning. That__ performance. And there__ nothing phony about that. There__ nothing pretend about that. There__ no acting that will take the place of that. __nd so that__ my wish for you tonight: Have a great performance. You__e done the work, you__e ready, and now it__ time to show off. Have fun out there, gang. Perform._ --Jerome Barron's opening night pep talk to the cast of Death Troupe

It was great. I mean, it's a blast directing underwater stuff.

The words of his various writing instructors and professional mentors over the years came back to him at times like these, and he found a new understanding in their advice: Writing is rewriting. The rough draft is just that. You can__ polish what you haven__ written. Things that made for a normal life__ike a daily routine that followed the sun__ook a back seat to times like these, and he exulted in that change because it served as proof that his writing was indeed the most important thing in his life. It wasn__ a conscious choice on his part, like deciding to repaint the bathroom or go buy the groceries, but an overarching reallocation of his existence that was as undeniable as breathing. Day turned into night, breakfast turned into dinner, and the laptop or the writing tablet beckoned even when he was asleep. He would often awake with a new idea__s if he__ merely been on a break and not unconscious__nd he would see the empty seat before the desk not as his station in some pointless assembly line, but as the pilot__ seat in a ship that could go anywhere.

Your boss takes a dim view of SEX?

That's what I love most about writers--they're such lousy actors.

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.

Or take this girl, for example. At a meeting just outside Paris, a fifteen-year-old girl came up to me and said that she'd been to see [The Double Life of] Véronique. She'd gone once, twice, three times and only wanted to say one thing really - that she realized that there is such a thing as a soul. She hadn't known before, but now she knew that the soul does exist. There's something very beautiful in that. It was worth making Véronique for that girl. It was worth working for a year, sacrificing all that money, energy, time, patience, torturing yourself, killing yourself, taking thousands of decisions, so that one young girl in Paris should realize that there is such a thing as a soul. It's worth it.

There__ something different about when a female directs versus a male. The level of maturity, mutual respect, and energy that you get from a female director is so different. I__e worked with male directors who aren__ good, and no one says anything about it, but then we had one female director who was kind of all over the place and everyone complained. It__ so gendered. I feel safer when working with a female director because I know it__ from a female gaze.

I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again.