Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Kenneth Johnson talks to Tamie Kwist about Directing, Producing and More...

Tamie: Can you please cover these three areas for me... directing, writing and producing for television? It is the "producing" that I am most unclear about, but would like to learn as much as possible about all three! And if you feel like throwing in camera operation/filming, I would be happy to learn about that too.

Kenneth Johnson: In television the producer is the one who shapes the overall project. He or she hires the director, hires the writer, and supervises the whole production from the beginning, middle, to the end. The producer is there before everybody else and after everybody else. So, the buck stops there. Most creative television producers are also writers and a few of them are directors as well. (In the case of a television series…) the person who creates the show generally becomes the executive producer and is the highest ranked person on the show. Underneath him/her will work a number of other producers who are generally writers as well. In my experience, on various TV series, such as Alien Nation and The Incredible Hulk, I have created, written and directed the pilot movie. And then once it goes to series, I become the executive producer and hire the rest of the team to help me shape it. The producers would help to work out what the various storylines would be. And then the scripts would be assigned to either themselves, or to staff writers, or, in some cases, to outside writers. Once the story is written to everyone’s satisfaction, then the writer goes on and writes a first draft of the script which everyone gives notes on to the executive producer, the studio, and/or the network, depending on those involved. It’s important for the producer, or the producers to fight for the things that they feel are important. And often you find yourself at odds with the studio or the network because either they don’t “get it”, or have other agendas that they’re dealing with, and it’s very important to hold onto the main vision that you started out with. I’ve run into that in most every project I have done. Sometimes their ideas are good and sometimes they’re not. And it becomes an exercise in creative diplomacy to try to hang onto what you feel is important, and what you feel is going to make the show successful versus the needs and desires of the network and the studio who are generally more interested in the bottom line (such as): Is it getting ratings? Is it making money? It’s a constant fight against art versus commerce. Once the script is approved for production, then the director becomes involved, and it’s his/her responsibility to take the script and realize it on the screen, ideally building organically from the strengths of the script and bringing the director’s own talents in order to enhance and mine all of the best stuff that’s in the script and find the best way to present it on the screen. That includes rehearsing the actors, getting them to understand what the points are that must be made in each scene/act of the story, and then deciding where to put the camera to best make the point of the scene. That’s the thing that I’m always asking myself, and other people that I’m working with… What’s the point of the scene? What are we trying to get across? Because everything that we do has to serve the play, as Shakespeare described to us in Hamlet’s Advice To The Players, before they presented the play, in Hamlet . The director is also responsible for getting the picture shot on time and efficiently. In episodic television, one has eight days, generally, in which to film forty-five minutes or so of story. That makes for an incredibly tense working environment where the director has to be completely prepared everyday, as he/she goes in, and know exactly what he/she wants and exactly what he/she has to get in order to accomplish getting the script translated to the screen. I formulate a very, very careful shot list which describes exactly what every shot will be, and in exactly what direction I am looking. And if there are multiple cameras involved, what each of them are shooting, in some cases, down to the specific lens. This shot list forms a basis from me to work from everyday and a checkpoint from where I can go back and say, “Am I going fast enough and getting the shots that I need?” It also gives me the flexibility on the set knowing what sort of the backbone my work is to be, but still giving me the flexibility and the opportunity to make those little inspirational discoveries that happen all the time when you suddenly discover a more interesting way to do it than what you had envisioned when you were just sitting in a room, and trying to figure it all out. A lot of things change when you are out there on the set. The director has to marshal his entire team and make sure they are all moving in the right direction as quickly and succinctly as possible. The director always needs to know what the next setup is going to be ahead of everybody asking him/her. To help you with that you have an assistant director, a couple of other directors, as well as the director of photography and the rest of the team. I always try to use their creative ideas and solicit ideas from them because they may think of things that I haven’t thought of that are better than the things that I’ve thought of, and the picture only ends up looking better that way. Once the film is shot and in the can, the editor has been working on it and presents the director with a rough cut which the director has to then go through and say, “No, you used the wrong take here. There’s a better performance in another scene (or) in another camera angle, (or) in another take.” And you sort of have to go through it literally, shot by shot and make sure that the editor is using all of the best material that is going to match the vision the director has had in trying to bring the writer’s vision to the screen. After the director makes his pass at the editing then, in series television, the executive producer or the producer would take the next shot at it. In some cases we would say, “It’s fine. Let’s leave it alone and move into post-production.” In other cases, you’ll re-edit the piece entirely, or just make a minute change here and there, to better enhance it, to get it down to the time it needs to be.
In motion pictures, as opposed to television, the director is still involved all the way through the whole process. And the director functions much more like the executive producer or the producer does in television and has much greater overall responsibility. Indeed, the title Executive Producer in film is generally a smaller, lesser credit than producer and is generally delegated to those people who are owed some type of credit because they helped get some of the money together or something like that. In film the producer is the stronger title. But ultimately it is the director who makes the motion picture. The director in film would also follow the production all the way through then post-production and dubbing process when the soundtrack is added to it and would even be present at the final answer print when it comes out of the lab. It is called an answer print because that is where you get the answers, if everything turned out all right. More often than not, in television now a days there is no answer print. It is done on video, as opposed to film. But when you are delivering on film you actually sit and look at the film with the color timer and the people at the lab to look at the film to make sure that it looks the way it is supposed to look.

Tamie: I am also an admirer of Steven Spielberg and Peter Weir’s works. Who are some of your favorite film directors?

Kenneth Johnson: I too enjoy Peter Weir’s work a great deal. I suppose my favorite director, if one has to characterize it that way, would be Akira Kurosawa, the great Japanese master, who created such extraordinary motion pictures. Probably my favorite film is The Seven Samurai which is his great epic about the samurai warriors. It’s a humanist piece that contains just about every kind of film making and emotional exploration there can be from action/adventure, to drama, to love story to true epic, all done with a sense of humor. If you have never seen it, you certainly should. In contemporary directors I think Steven Soderbergh’s work is quite interesting. Particularly the work that he did in Traffik. There was a wonderful sense of combining the important with the fanciful. And I always find his work to be very clever. Although I have only seen pieces of it at this point, I understand that Peter Jackson’s work in Lord of The Rings is also quite astonishing. And I am a great fan of François Truffaut, the French new wave director as well.

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