12 Tips of filmmaking

The maverick director of John and Jane and Miss Lovely [ Ashim Ahluwalia 12 Tips of filmmaking] shared his insight on filmmaking. He advised first time directors against the following unspoken rules of the industry.

Rule 1: You need to have a bound script

Screenplay formats were designed for the Hollywood studio system. It’s actually meant for script readers who have to go through hundreds of scripts, that’s why they have invented this format.

The real script is worth worrying about. It’s without the formatting – one in which you write whatever you want to write. It’s the one that includes your own notes about atmosphere, colour and mood.

Write a “bound” script to raise money but the real thing should be a mess – notes, pictures, whatever. Godard wrote Breathless on the back of a paper napkin.

There is always an emphasis on safer films like rom-coms, films like you have seen before. But if you’re going to start like that, it’s never going to rise above the surface. Nobody is going to notice you. So throw this rule out and startle the spectator.

Rule 2:  Your screenplay should have Three Acts

Go to a Hollywood movie and check when the first explosion comes in – it will be around 10 minutes, the next one will be roughly around 20 minutes and in thirty minutes you will have some cliffhanger feeling because that’s the end of Act one. The thing works like clockwork which means every film works the same way.

The funny thing about the three-act structure is that it’s not a story structure at all. We don’t know why it became the norm; it just seems simple enough to follow. It particularly worked for simpler commercial films. But you can’t find it in our mythology. The Ramayana or the Mahabharata do not follow a three-act structure. The great stories of the past don’t have a three-act structure, so why is it being applied to screenplays?

The Greeks had no structure, they had plays with one act. The Romans had five acts. Japanese cinema sometimes has seven acts. So why are we stuck at three acts?

Sometimes you have a story that needs a certain ending and digression. Fuck the structure, do it the way you want to do. The key is to keep it engaging and to have enough plot points to move the story forward so that the momentum doesn’t get flat. But how you do it is really upto you.

Rule 3: Your film should have a clear meaning that everybody understands

People will ask you what your film is about, what is the theme, what is the subject?

You don’t need to summarize your film in one keyword. It’s not a pamphlet. It’s not an AV.  It’s a film.

It’s usually the producers who ask you to tell your story in one line. If that were the case, then there would be no films by masters like Tarkovsky especially The Mirror which is his best film. How do you describe that film in one line?

You would only have films propelled by action; that’s why all Hollywood and Bollywood films are propelled by action. You won’t have films which are ephemeral, like dreams for example.

Rule 4: You need to give people what they want

This is an abstract statement because nobody really knows what they want. People are really confused about their wants. This idea of giving them what they want is very dangerous for filmmakers. The moment you start thinking this way, you start second guessing your audience.

I think one of the most beautiful things in filmmaking is to not give people what they want. You make what you want to make.

Rule 5: You should cast known faces to get money and distribution

Unless you’re making a blockbuster or casting one of the five most famous people in the country, you’re not going to get money or distribution because of your actors. What you may get, on the contrary, is a headache from dealing with someone who is very difficult and frustrated because (s)he is not an “A” list star.

You’re very grateful that they have come to do your movie. They are taking your money anyway. You’re giving them a big chunk of your budget that you’re not going to recover. And they won’t let you do what you want because they don’t like their side profile, for example, or they might not like the way they look in a certain scene.

What’s going to happen is a conflict of interest and I’ve seen that with a lot of young filmmakers who want to cast a known face who is not a star. They think that their first film will gain more momentum because of that actor. But that actor doesn’t let them make the film they want to make, nor does (s)he bring any money.

Rule 6: You need to be a popular, universally-liked filmmaker

You really don’t have to cry if your film is not a blockbuster. Neither was Orson Welles’ Citizen Kanes. Breathless was also a commercial flop. So was Antonioni’s L’avventura, Coppola’s The Conversation, or any film by Werner Herzog.

Let’s ask another question – where are the blockbusters from 1975 or 1985, does anyone care? Let’s be honest – nobody is talking about the director of Kick.

The question of popularity is a very complex question. What’s popular now might be forgotten two weeks later. What’s completely written off today may be studied fifty years later. So when you think about popularity, think about a bigger shelf life.

Rule 7: You need to get all the finance in one go

If you really care to make your film, especially with digital today, you have no excuses. You got your cast right; you’ve got your locations. If you wait for all the money, you will never make your film.

Mumbai is full of producers who can fund your film but it’s a very dangerous situation to have a single producer especially if you’re making your first film. They can easily hijack your project. I strongly suggest – don’t think about the finance as a single chunk, think about it as pieces.

Rule 8: You need to have a certain degree of organization on shoot by making story boards, shoot boards etc.

I don’t think this is necessary unless you’re making a VFX film on a green screen. The reality is that filmmaking resists planning. There is a beautiful quote by Orson Welles that says – A real director presides over accidents. It needs to be understood that filmmaking is not a science. So if you try to make something and it fucks up, don’t be frustrated. Be open to accidents – what is in front of your eyes might be a hundred times more beautiful that what you have sat and imagined in your room.

Don’t think of planning, think of structure. Let those beautiful accidents make their way into the structure. Lose the script but remember that spontaneous aesthetics demands rigorous discipline.

Rule 9: You need to have a consistent style

Not true. You don’t need a consistent style. A lot of filmmakers blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, between different genres.

I come from a school where I love the idea of collapsing fiction and documentary. My first film John and Jane was set in a call centre. It was about real people who work in a call centre but I decided not to make a film about life in a call centre as a traditional documentary. I decided that this scenario of people working at night with a fake American accent reminds me of the kind of sci-fi films I used to watch as a kid where corporations would implant a chip in someone’s brain. So I thought it would be very interesting to merge a call centre film with a sci-fi dystopian film about the future. You don’t have to follow genre traditions. Genres can merge and collapse and interesting things can come out of them.

Rule 10: There is only one way to shoot a scene

There seems to be a certain accepted grammar of filmmaking, like when two people talk you show shot and countershot. You start with a long shot and cut to a close up. While making a film don’t just presume that things are shot in a certain prescribed way – establishing shot has to be in a certain way, a romantic shot has to be in a certain way. There is no one way of making a film. You can do it in so many different ways.

Rule 11: You need people to take on definitive roles on the set

The idea that you should have people with defined roles as ADs or art directors is absurd. It’s the industry way of thinking about filmmaking. Wong Kar Wai’s art director is also his editor. Using people in multiple roles makes the process much more interesting.

Rule 12: You shouldn’t startle the spectator too much

There is always an emphasis on safer films like rom-coms, films like you have seen before. But if you’re going to start like that, it’s never going to rise above the surface. Nobody is going to notice you. So throw this rule out and startle the spectator.