Aesthetics: Three Ideas From David Mamet’s On Directing Film
My experience as a director, and as a dramatist, is this: the piece is moving in proportion to how much the author can leave out.
A good writer gets better by learning to remove the ornamental, the descriptive… What remains? The story remains. What is the story? The story is the essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of her one goal.
How do we keep the audience’s attention? Certainly not by giving them more information but, on the contrary, by withholding information—by withholding all information except that information in the absence of which would make the progress of the story incomprehensible.
The making of a story… consists of the assiduous application of several very basic questions: What does the hero want? What hinders him from getting it? What happens if he does not get it? That’s what keeps the audience in their seats… The story can only be interesting because we find the progress of the protagonist interesting. As long as the protagonist wants something, the audience will want something.
Good stories have problems that are rooted in character. Our hero, Dumbo, has big ears. That’s his situation. His real problem is not his ears, it’s how he feels about his ears. But, he wants to not have big ears, and what he wants isn’t necessarily what he needs.
If you listen to the way people tell stories, you will hear that they tell them cinematically. They jump from one thing to the next, and the story is moved along by the juxtaposition of images—which is to say, by the cut.
People say, “I’m standing on the corner. It’s a foggy day. A bunch of people are running around crazy. Might have been the full moon. All of a sudden, a car comes up and the guy next to me says…”
If you think about it, that’s a shot list: (1) a guy standing on the corner; (2) shot of fog; (3) a full moon shining above; (4) a man says, “I think people get wacky this time of year”; (5) a car approaching.
What, you wonder, is going to happen next?
First the shot: it’s the juxtaposition of the shots that moves the film forward. The shots make up the scene. The scene is a formal essay. What is this particular scene about? What this particular scene is about is called the beat.
Get into a scene late, get out early. The dramatist’s task is not to create confrontation or chaos but, rather, to create order. Start with the disordering event, and let the beat be about the attempt to restore order.