I stumbled upon David Mamet’s now twenty-year-old book On Directing Film while looking for something else on Amazon, Jeff Bezos should be happy. Whatever algorithm is working behind the scenes spit out just what I was after.
I bought the book because I like Mammet’s writing for films like House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Wag the Dog, Ronin and State and Main. Like Aaron Sorkin’s double speed writing you can really tell a Mamet script by the halting cadence.
On Directing Film comes from a series of lectures Mammet gave at Columbia University after directing House of Games. The format is a transcript of Mamet’s lecture with his student’s responses to his questions.
There will be two moments to give you pause reading this book, one in the beginning when you pull out a dictionary to understand what Mammet means by uninflected a word he uses again and again. Another when you wonder if the book should be titled, On Writing for Film. Mamet does have a Pulitzer.
Mamet’s key point is that a movie is a story told in cuts. It should be created by juxtaposing uninflected images which tell the story. By uninflected he means something like unrelated. This is essentially Eisenstein’s theory of montage. Show the audience a series of images that move the story forward; tell the story in the simplest way without narration. There is an entire chapter on this here: David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross: text and performance
For a moment I wondered if this book was really about directing or if it was about writing drama. Really it’s a book about preparing. I think Mamet is very right when he says that being unprepared on set will not cause you to be creative, at the best you can copy something that you know works or do something interesting that may not be right for the story. He says that directing is all done before the cameras and crew show up.
Mamet shows his students how to see a film in manageable units. The largest unit is the film, the smallest is the shot and the unit of most interest to the director is the scene. Each scene should be a tiny drama of its own where the protagonist has a goal to achieve (or not). Then we are to break the scene down into beats and shots. For Mamet preparing this road map from shot to beat to scene to film is directing.
To better understand this, think of a scene. For example, the scene is “flee from a crime”. The protagonist’s goal is: get away. The beats are: a) get to the car, quickly b) start the car, c) drive away, unnoticed. At this point the shots start to fall into place: Running from a distance, tight shot of feet showing speed, looking over his shoulder, getting to the car, working the key in the lock, starting the car, hands on wheels, foot on pedal, eyes in mirror, tires spinning, car moving through the lot, turning onto the road, disappearing into traffic.
Mamet explains it much more convincingly then I could here, read the book. What you will learn is that this concept of looking at each scenes as a drama told in beats and shots provides a check-sum. An opportunity to see the story very close up (shot by shot) or to pull back to the beats or scenes and make sure that everything contributes to the through-line.
