How to Make a Good Film - A Pep Talk for Fellow Bad Filmmakers

Making a feature is hard work, and it's easy to screw it up and even easier to get discouraged. Maybe you're one of those filmmakers who has an embarrassingly bad romantic comedy "calling card" wasting away in your closest (or, more likely, on your hard drive).

Well, don't feel bad. The first novel that Flaubert wrote was so bad his friends suggested he give up writing entirely. A few years later, he wrote Madame Bovary and changed the way novels are written. He didn't give up and now he's firmly ensconced in the Western canon.

We're not all born geniuses. Most of can't write a symphony at the age of eight like Mozart; most of us can't direct "Citizen Kane" at twenty-five. History is full of great artists whose earliest, unseen efforts are best left unseen. But they learned from those experiences, and they moved on. They didn't quit.

The point here, basically, is not to get discouraged. And to illustrate the point a little more personally, let me tell you about how I learned to make a film that was actually good.

The first film I ever made was called "The Suicide of Jacob Cedar". It was my final project for my senior year high school video class: a full-length feature film.

The story took place shortly after the titular event, and followed Jacob's girlfriend, best friend, and parents as they tried to deal with his mysterious death. It employed a very theatrical flashback structure in which during the course of a scene, Jacob would enter the scene, and then we'd be in a flashback, the dialogue continuing like the whole thing was one continuous scene.

It didn't have much plot, and was really created in an attempt to understand my own feelings regarding my father's death the year before. That was still too fresh, and I was unable to provide any insight into grief. Nothing original-- or, indeed, personal-- was present in the script. Instead, only the most banal of generalities were given lip service.

There were some things I liked about it-- some good performances from the cast, a couple of nice scenes, but on the whole, it was a terrible, pretentious and wholly unremarkable piece of schlock. As soon as I had shown it to my teacher (receiving an A, but more for effort than for accomplishment), I destroyed every copy I knew of.

That summer, my friend Stephanie and I collaborated on a film called "Veruca and Dylan". You remember how after "Pulp Fiction" there was a slew of ultra-hip crime movies in the mid-nineties, a trend which defined "independent film" for much of that decade? It was one of those. Trying to cash in on a trend is always a bad idea, but doing it in 2001, several years after it was chic, was just asking for trouble.

This film, in contrast to the first, had a plot. Veruca, a free spirit who occasionally borders on psychotic, meets Dylan, a relative innocent. Taken in by her aura of coolness, they hang out and eventually turn to crime. When things get violent, things start to fall apart.

It wasn't much of a plot, and I knew it, concentrating most of my time on the oh-so-witty dialogue and character work. Dylan I saw as an innocent, a complete baby face adrift in moral ambiguity, desired by both male and female like the youth in "Fellini Satyricon". Darrell Wheat, who played the character, interpreted it somewhat differently. In each scene, it seemed like he was given a different performance. I fought him all the way, kicking and screaming and trying to fit him into the little box of my script.

When I was editing the film, though, I saw that Darrell's performance was cohesive, a whole that was extremely interesting, edgy, and compelling. If I hadn't fought him-- if I had supported his choices, listened to his ideas, and just plain adapted, the film would have been much better.

As it stands, it's a mediocre entry into a dubious genre, with Darrell's performance the only real reason for watching it.

At that time, I was casting around for a project-- any project-- just something to do, fast. I mentioned to an acquaintance my hatred for the current spat of teen romantic comedies, and he suggested that I do one.

If there was one lesson to learn from the experience of making that film, "Courting Brit", it was to never do something that you hate. I wrote it as a satire on the genre, gleefully tearing into many of premises, tropes, and gender politics that I hated so dearly. I was all set to shoot, I had my cast and my locations. The only thing I didn't have was equipment.

And so began a struggle that last three years. Every time I was about to get equipment, something-- either the equipment deal or the cast-- would fall through. By the time I finally had purchased my own camera, I had recast the male lead eight times.

I had also lost interest. There was nothing really to the script, as is often the case with satires, especially those written in spite and anger. I could have-- and in retrospect, probably should have-- started a new project. But I argued that if I quit then, I would be giving myself permission to quit later. And I never wanted to quit, no matter how tough the going got.

And so I rewrote the script, trying to shoehorn in ideas and scenes that held my interest. Over the 256 drafts of the script (yes, 256, you read that right) during those three years that I searched for equipment and even while I was shooting, the dark anti-romantic comedy became increasingly surreal: a meditation on death and grief, a study of modern anti-Semitism, an homage to Dante and Godard... and I'm not even going to get started on the minotaur doing laundry.

It was a mess. The first cut of the film ran nearly three hours-- three extremely talky, pretentious, and ultimately boring three hours. The performances were, for the most part, strong, and some sequences were fairly crisp. But there was no reason to care about the film or its characters. Every frame was dripping with bile and cynicism.

I had wasted four years of my life. I had made three absolutely terrible films, one after the other. With each film, I had learned some lessons. But I had yet to really put those lessons into action. And besides, how many more absolutely terrible films did I have to make before I made one that was passable?

I was really discouraged, and I was ready to give up. That's when she came into my life.

Yes, she! This is a love story after all. Though to tell the truth, she came into my life while I was making Courting Brit. She tried to talk me down from my pretentiousness-- I was insisting on lighting the movie like a film noir, and I had a number of oddly-shaped split-screens. I was stubborn-- as stubborn as I had been with my second film, fighting Darrell over his interpretation of the character. But she married me anyway.

And the day after the wedding, I started writing a new script. It was about four insular people, people who had trouble communicating with each other. It was about that particular phenomenon in which, when trying to help another human being, you actually push them further away. It was about finding friends and learning to communicate and compromise with other people. It was about pain, and it was about overcoming it.

It had a positive outlook on life, the same outlook that Mary had and the same outlook that I have now. It was called "Milos", and I was extremely proud of it.

I still am. I see things in it now that I could have-- and probably should have-- done differently. But for the most part, the lessons of my first three films were present in the making of the fourth.

I did a film that I loved doing. I tried my best to be wholly honest. We told the story as best we could, trying not to confuse anybody and with no minotaur doing laundry.

But the biggest difference between this film and its predecessors was the fact that I actually had something to say, something meaningful, something that I thought might make a positive difference in people's lives. And I think that's the best advice I can give to anyone who wants to make a film: not to write what you know, but to first know something to write about.

The technical lessons-- why you should shoot multiple shots of a scene, why you should multiple takes of a shot, the 180 rule and the rule of thirds-- are important, sure. But there's been many bad films that are technically flawless. Films that are empty and false and mediocre.

To make a good film, you need to learn the far more important lessons of content and style. Now, it took me four films to produce one that had any kind of quality to it. I'm sure that you're much smarter than I am.

I bet you can do it in two.