Mark W. Travis: The most important job to me is really simple if you think about it. First of all, the director of a film is a storyteller. In fact everybody who he’s working with is there to help tell one story. The director’s primary job is to be the shepherd of that story, take care of the story and tell the story as clearly, honestly and as authentically as possible. I say the story, not the script. The script, which we can talk about later, is a step towards getting the story told.
What you’re asking about in terms of the story being told at the center of the story, the most important part of the story, are the characters. It’s the characters who tell the story, not the cinematography, not the production design, not all those other elements. All those other elements are a support system to the story. The director needs to be focusing on the story and then on the characters and the strength of the performances, the authenticity of the performances, the clarity of characters, the clarity of relationships, the clarity of the journey of each character is really crucial in order to tell the story.
Well that’s the primary focus of a director and if a director can’t do that or loses sight of that the story is going to start to wobble and we’ve seen that a lot stories which wobble because simply because of performance even though a lot of the other elements may be brilliant like CGI and special effects, all that stuff is beautiful, it’s wonderful but it’s not the story.
Andy Rydzewski: There’s a joke that you’ll hear sometimes on set, like who has the least amount of experience on a set, and almost always, it’s the director. It’s just the nature of getting to a directing position, sometimes it’s who you know, sometimes you wrote a script, who knows?
I think one of the things that has to be the most challenging for a new director or an inexperienced director is there’s this big machine moving. At this point, for somebody like me, I have a lot more to learn but I’ve been doing it for a long time. When we’re looking at a scene and an actor is like Oh, I actually don’t want to sit here. I want to get up and I want to stand by the window, for some directors that might freak them out completely because they’ve made a plan. As soon as something breaks in the plan, be that an actor’s decision, or maybe bad weather or a location falls through or there’s an equipment malfunction, the ability to change and still you know whatever that intention of the scene is, can still find it but using none of what you planned…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
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