Issue 124 – Filmmaking? Are You Serious?
Alan Parker
Alan Parker’s handy tips on a career in film.
Frankly, filmmaking is not such a great profession these days, so be really sure you want to do it. It’s tough. For every Once there’s a thousand films no one ever saw (except for the filmmakers’ closest relatives). Last year at the Sundance Festival – the Lourdes of independent film – they had five thousand entries. Of the twenty that were picked up by distributors, only five got their money back at the box office.
Listen to no one
As the veteran screenwriter William Goldman famously said about the movie business, ‘Nobody knows anything.’ If you’re a director you should always be truthful to yourself, to what you are trying to say and how you choose to say it. Frankly, directing is a crash course in megalomania. But always remember that a film doesn’t exist in a film can or on a DVD. It only exists when it flickers on a screen and an audience experiences it. So don’t ignore the tastes, emotions and expectations of all those people sitting there in the dark.
Listen to everyone
Filmmaking is a collaborative art form. No filmmaker in history ever made a film on his or her own. Film crews are your best friends and the true heroes of the film business. Let’s face it, even Leonardo needed a little help painting The Last Supper; Fellini needed a hundred people to help him shoot La dolce vita.
Filmmaking is rarely glamorous. Being ankle-deep in pig shit every day is the reality OK, sometimes you get to meet Andrea Corr.
It’s just as hard to make a bad film as a good one
The moment you start a film, you take a deep breath and leap off into a big black hole of uncertainty and doubt. A film director has to have the sensitivity of a poet and the stamina of a construction worker. The trouble is that rather too many of us get it the wrong way around.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 124.
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