Danny Boyle has directed hit films in a wide array of genres—from the cautionary drug saga Trainspotting to the inspirational, Oscar-winning drama Slumdog Millionaire. In 2010, Danny Boyle enumerated his 15 Golden Rules of filmmaking exclusively for MovieMaker Magazine, just as 127 Hours hit theaters. His latest film, Trance, is still trolling around in theaters.
1. A DIRECTOR MUST BE A PEOPLE PERSON • Ninety-five
percent of your job is handling personnel. People who’ve never done it
imagine that it’s some act, like painting a Picasso from a blank canvas,
but it’s not like that. Directing is mostly about handling people’s
egos, vulnerabilities and moods. It’s all about trying to bring
everybody to a boil at the right moment. You’ve got to make sure
everyone is in the same film. It sounds stupidly simple, like ‘Of course
they’re in the same film!’ But you see films all the time where people
are clearly not in the same film together.
2. HIRE TALENTED PEOPLE • Your main job as a
director is to hire talented people and get the space right for them to
work in. I have a lot of respect for actors when they’re performing, and
I expect people to behave. I don’t want to see people reading
newspapers behind the camera or whispering or anything like that.
3. LEARN TO TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS • Ideally, you make
a film up as you go along. I don’t mean that you’re irresponsible and
you’ve literally got no idea, but the ideal is that you’ve covered
everything—every angle—so that you’re free to do it any of those ways.
Even on low-budget films, you have financial responsibilities. Should
you fuck it up, you can still fall back on one of those ways of doing
it. You’ve got Plan A to go back to, even though you should always make
it with Plan B if you can. That way keeps it fresh for the actors, and
for you.
4. FILM HAPPENS IN THE MOMENT • What’s extraordinary
about film is that you make it on the day, and then it’s like that
forever more. On that day, the actor may have broken up with his wife
the night before, so he’s inevitably going to read a scene differently.
He’s going to be a different person.
I come from theater, which is live and changes every night. I thought
film was going to be the opposite of that, but it’s not. It changes
every time you watch it: Different audiences, different places,
different moods that you’re in. The thing is logically fixed, but it
still changes all the time. You have to get your head around that.
5. IF YOUR LAST FILM WAS A SMASH HIT, DON’T PANIC • I had an obsession with the story of 127 Hours, which pre-dated Slumdog Millionaire. But I know—because I’m not an idiot—that the only reason [the studio] allowed us to make it was because Slumdog
made buckets of money for them and they felt an obligation of sorts.
Not an obligation to let me do whatever I want, but you kind of get a
free go on the merry-go-round.
6. DON’T BE AFRAID TO TELL STORIES ABOUT OTHER CULTURES
• You can’t just hijack a culture for your story, but you can benefit
from it. If you go into it with the right attitude, you can learn a lot
about yourself, as well as about the potential of film in other
cultures, which is something we tried to do with Slumdog Millionaire… Most films are still made in America, about Americans, and that’s fine. But things are changing and I think Slumdog was evidence of that. There will be more evidence as we go on.
7. USE YOUR POWER FOR GOOD • You have so much power
as director that if you’re any good at all, you should be able to use
that to the benefit of everyone. You have so much power to shape the
movie the way you want it that, if you’re on form and you’ve done your
prep right and you’re ready, you should be able to make a decent job of
it with the other people.
8. DON’T HAVE AN EGO • Your working process—the way
you treat people, your belief in people—will ultimately be reflected in
the product itself. The means of production are just as important as
what you produce. Not everyone believes that, but I do. I won’t stand
for anyone being treated badly by anyone. I don’t like anyone shouting
or abusing people or anything like that. You see people sometimes who
are waiting for you to be like that, because they’ve had an experience
like that in the past, but I’m not a believer in that. The texture of a
film is affected very much by the honor with which you make it.
9. MAKE THE TEST SCREENING PROCESS WORK FOR YOU •
Test screenings are tough. It makes you nervous, exposing the film, but
they’re very important and I’ve learned a great deal from using them.
Not so much from the whole process of cards and the discussions
afterwards, but the live experience of sitting in an auditorium with an
audience that doesn’t know much about the story you’re going to tell
them—I find that so valuable. I’ve learned not so much to like it, but
to value how important it is. I think you have to, really.
10. COME TO THE SET WITH A LOOK BOOK • I always have
a bible of photographs, images by which I illustrate a film. I don’t
mean strict storyboards, I just mean for inspiration for scenes, for
images, for ideas, for characters, for costumes, even for props. These
images can come from anywhere. They can come from obvious places like
great photographers, or they can come from magazine
advertisements—anywhere, really. I compile them into a book and I always
have it with me and I show it to the actors, the crew, everybody!
11. EVEN PERFECT FORMULAS DON’T ALWAYS WORK • As a
director your job is to find the pulse of the film through the actors,
which is partly linked to their talent and partly to their charisma.
Charisma is a bit indefinable, thank God, or else it would be prescribed
in the way that you chemically make a new painkiller. In the movies—and
this leads to a lot of tragedy and heartache—you can sometimes have the
most perfect formula and it still doesn’t work. That’s a reality that
we are all victims of sometimes and benefit from at other times. But if
you follow your own instincts and make a leap of faith, then you can at
least be proud of the way you did it.
12. TAKE INSPIRATION WHERE YOU FIND IT • When we were promoting Slumdog Millionaire, we were kind of side-by-side with Darren Aronofsky, who was also with Fox Searchlight and was promoting The Wrestler.
I watched it and it was really interesting; Darren just decided that he
was going to follow this actor around, and it was wonderful. I thought,
‘I want to make a film like that. I want to see if I can make a film
like that.’ It’s a film about one actor. It’s about the monolithic
nature of film sometimes, you know? It’s about a dominant performance.
13. PUSH THE PRAM • I think you should always try to
push things as far as you can, really. I call it “pushing the pram.”
You know, like a stroller that you push a baby around in? I think you
should always push the pram to the edge of the cliff—that’s what people
go to the cinema for. This could apply to a romantic comedy; you push
anything as far as it will stretch. I think that’s one of your duties as
a director… You’ll only ever regret not doing that, not having pushed
it. If you do your job well, you’ll be amazed at how far the audience
will go with you. They’ll go a long, long way—they’ve already come a
long way just to see your movie!
14. ALWAYS GIVE 100 PERCENT • You should be working
at your absolute maximum, all the time. Whether you’re credited with
stuff in the end doesn’t really matter. Focus on pushing yourself as
much as you can. I tend not to write, but I love bouncing off of
writing; I love having the writers write and then me bouncing off of it.
I bounce off writers the same way I bounce off actors.
15. FIND YOUR OWN “ESQUE” • A lesson I learned from A Life Less Ordinary
was about changing a tone—I’m not sure you can do that. We changed the
tone to a kind of Capra-esque tone, and whenever you do anything more
“esque,” you’re in trouble. That would be one of my rules: No “esques.”
Don’t try to Coen-esque anything or Capra-esque anything or
Tarkovsky-esque anything, because you’ll just get yourself in a lot of
trouble. You have to find your own “esque” and then stick to it.
Courtesy- http://www.moviemaker.com
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