Comprising the panel were director Neil LaBute who has turned several of his plays into films including The Shape of Things and Bash, and whose new play Rex recently opened at New York’s Public Theatre; 2006 DGA Honors recipient Arthur Penn, director of film and stage versions of The Miracle Worker and many other works; Julie Taymor of the Tony Award-nominated The Lion King; whose resume includes stage and screen versions of Titus Andronicus; and Sam Mendes, director of the 1999 DGA and Academy Award-winning feature American Beauty, who is presently at work on a stage production of The Vertical Hour. DGA Member David Jones, who began his career as a documentary filmmaker before directing theatre at both the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, moderated the evening. Jones, who was also the organizer of the evening, presently spends his time split between directing feature films, television and live theatre.
The audience of DGA and Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers members was treated to clips of the work of the directors, then the panelists joined Jones onstage and proceeded to talk about topics ranging from how they made the switch from stage to screen, to the biggest mistakes they made on their initial foray into film.
Mendes told of being wooed directly from the theatre work into film and having the good fortune to discover American Beauty in a pile of scripts from his agent. “I thought it was the best script I’d ever read and I went and pitched for it as a director-for-hire. And because I wanted to make it for a small amount of money, they decided to go with a first-time director.”
Although inexperienced in working with a camera, one of the ways Mendes was able to bring the best of his skills to bear was by freeing himself of the need to know everything and surrounding himself with technically proficient crewmembers like DP Conrad Hall. “For me it was very important to be able to articulate what I wanted to achieve and trust that other people would help me achieve it.”
On the contrary, Taymor, who had a similarly long history of stage productions, revealed that she had been preparing for a move into filmmaking by taking film courses at NYU. “Even if you have a great DP, you still have to have a notion of camera movement, where you go into a close-up, and how you use angles and lighting to tell a story,” said Taymor. But in her experience, the two mediums offered more similarities than differences. “I would call what I do cinematic theatre, or theatrical cinema. I find the bridge between the two. I’m a lover of Georges Méliès, F.W. Murnau and the early filmmakers who couldn’t go on location and used their imagination and the technology to create a world that required the audience to fill in the blanks and go with them.”
Penn touched on the differences in directing the stage and screen versions of The Miracle Worker, even though he was working with the same actors. “When we get the scene at the pump, that played on Broadway for two years and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. So I thought, ‘I’m just going to set a camera down here and let them do what they do so magnificently.’ Then I saw the dailies and thought I was going to die. I had gone from a film to a proscenium-like posture, which throws you into a theatre seat. I went back two days later and said, ‘Hey guys, we’re going to do this again from the top, piece by piece and moment by moment because this is film. That stuck with me forever. The stage is telling you the story, but in the movies, you’re living it.”
LaBute offered the opinion that by its very nature, in most cases film was a much more manipulative medium than the stage. “On the stage people can look where they want, but in the movies you can grab them by the back of the head and tell them where to look. I’m a big fan of the French New Wave director Eric Rohmer. He rarely uses a sound track, he uses a lot of medium shots, and he doesn’t push you in a direction and say, ‘you should look at this and feel this way.’ He presents, he doesn’t judge. His moral tales are all built on his premise of not moralizing, and I love that idea in a medium that’s so manipulative. You can still say, ‘You make the decisions. I’m not going to judge these characters for you.’”
Mendes agreed that amount of control offered to a director on a film was very different from what was available, or even necessary in the theatre world. “There has to be a point in the theatre where you turn the production over to the actors. You spend the entire time you’re with them enabling them to be their own director when the lights go up on opening night, and encouraging their outside eye. On a film you spend the whole time disabling their outside eye so that they won’t be self-conscious, let everything go and let the camera capture whatever it is you’re looking for.”
Although Mendes was wary of what he believed was the rehearsal processes’ tendency to creatively confuse the actors when they tried to reach back and recreate something they’d come up with weeks earlier, Taymor’s contention was that they were very helpful on a film being shot out of sequence. “If you’re trying to direct a play like Titus Andronicus and the first scene you’re shooting is the one where his hand is cut off, how the hell does your actor get to that point on day one and he has to deliver? But when you can work with the actors and see the arc, they’ll know they’ve built to that moment.” But she agreed that a director has to find a balance. “When I was working on Titus with Anthony Hopkins, we were scheduled to rehearse for three weeks and after two he said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I need to get out of this room, down in the mud and feel it on my face.’ There’s a certain point in a film where rehearsals aren’t useful anymore.”
At the end of the panel the forum opened to audience questions. LaBute advised the crowd to avoid the common trap of thinking of their first film as a calling card, and therefore adding extra things to it that ultimately only detract from the purity. “Do not think, beyond the film that you are making, in terms of where it will be played and what it could do for you. Think of it in terms of the story you want to tell and find the most efficient and clearest way to do that.”
