Introduction
Prerequisites
Director as Storyteller
Director as Animator
Praise for Thinking Like a director

Advance praise for THINKING LIKE A DIRECTOR

"More engaging than a textbook, THINKING LIKE A DIRECTOR is a concise and highly practical guide to the craft. It's required reading for young stage and film directors, students, and anyone who wants to know what a skillful professional director does."
--Gilbert Cates Producing Director, Geffen Playhouse, Producer, Academy Awards Show

"Michael Bloom's THINKING LIKE A DIRECTOR helps fill the void of practical handbooks that are available to theatre directors. It is smart and lucidly written and should prove an invaluable guidebook for students and emerging directors."
--Donald Margulies, author, DINNER WITH FRIENDS, SIGHT UNSEEN

"It's rare for a 'how-to' book to be at the same time so practical and so literate."
--Robert Brustein

"Michael Bloom's deeply instructional and encouraging primer takes the mystery out of the art of directing without taking out the joy. I've never seen anything quite like it."
--Mariette Hartley, actress

"If I ever decided (Heaven and Hell forbid) to direct a play, I'd be sure to have Michael Bloom's illuminating text nearby to guide and challenge me, step-by-step, as I found my way."
--Ariel Dorfman

"THINKING LIKE A DIRECTOR is a lucid, concise, and admirably undogmatic manual for aspirant directors, from which writers, actors, and ordinary theatregoers will also learn much about the complex business of putting on plays."
--David Lodge

INTRODUCTION

If professions move in cycles of desirabilty and glamour, then directing is surely in an ascendant phase. In theater and film, training programs have burgeoned, while writers and actors by the dozens parlay their succes into directing. In contrast to the world of conglomerates and multinationals, directing is a means of creative expression, allowing a single artist a significant measure of control. Its allure is confirmed by the ubiquitous memo pad sold in bookshops that bears the epigram"...but what I really want to do is direct."

Yet the nature of a director's work, most notably in the theater, remains surprisingly vague and mysterious. Audiences generally assume directors tell actors where and when to move, and perhaps, how to recite certain lines. Critics often think directors are occupied primarily with speed and pace. Even some actors find it difficult to characterize the differences between one director's process and another's.

The truth is that there is no one accepted method for directing, any more than there is for any other art. How a director fares is greatly dependent on who that person is, his collaborators, and the project at hand. To complicate matters, the relationship between product and process isnt't always a direct and causal one. Some directors work themselves to the bone, while others do very little. Paradoxically, they achieve successes and failures in both categories. But it would be naive not to believe that most successful productions occur because of the intensive efforts of a skilled director. As this book's title indicates, a crucial step in acquiring and utilizing those skills is developing a particular way of thinking.

PREREQUISITES

An actor friend once asked my advice on whether he should become a director. He'd spent some years playing mostly less-than-rewarding roles and now wanted greater artistic control. He was a smart, talented performer who was attuned to the subtleties of the rehearsal process. His experience in acting and coaching others in scenes and auditions suggested that his knowledge of behavior and his intuitive sense of the dramatic would give him a head start. But that was all I knew about his qualifications.

When I said I wasn't sure how to advise him, he seemed puzzled. I explained that the actor-director interaction in rehearsals is often very different from coaching. As evidence, I cited how rarely master acting teachers become accomnplished directors. Did he have an appreciation for narrative, I asked, an instinct for staging, a strong visual imagination, an innate musicality, a critical facility, a background in theater history, and an ability to take the heat, ride the lows, and keep a level head around praise and criticism? While he certainly possessed some of these attributes, he confessed to not realizing the extent of the directorial job description.

The seminal American director Elia Kazan once put forward a far more daunting list of prerequisites that included expertise in economics, warfare, religion, food, travel, sports, and a host of other subjects. His point was that to create the world of a play, to sew a whole cloth from the threads of language, a director has to know a good deal about many things. For the director and critic Haroldd Clurman, the job entailed being "an organizer, a teacher, a poilitician, a psychic detective, a lay analyst, a technician, a creative being...All of which means he must be a great lover." A director is a medium--between actors and text, between the text and the physical elements, and of course between the producer and the production.

Directing demands polymaths, those who are at home in a library, a rehearsal hall, a pruduction meeting, and a producer's office. To construct entire worlds and coordinate so many elements, one must have an appreciation for literature, an understanding of the actor's craft, and a visual and verbal acuity. Other than an orchestra conductor, no other artist is as dependent on the contribution of others. Ultimately, the director is a creator of communities--someone who can recognize talent and inspire the very best from other artists, lead them but welcome their contributions, and make everyone feel they are important partners.

THE DIRECTOR AS STORYTELLER

In the most basic terms, the director is a production's primary storyteller. A play has only one plot (including subplots), but it contains many potential stories. The interpretation of the primary characters largely determines the story, so in effect, every production of the same play will inevitably tell a different tale. One of the most important functions a director fulfills is determining, with the actors and designers, which story to tell and how to tell it coherently.

As plots have become less linear, the job of telling a story has grown more complicated. While postmodernism and other aesthetics have increased our awareness of the disjunctions inherent in most stories, it has also incited some to reject identification betweeen characters and audience--and even storytelling itself--as passe. At the same time, many artists, in theater, film and novels, have demonstrated that coherent stoeries can accomodate contradictions and reflect a fragmented world.

One instinct in particular is indispensable to storytelling: the ability to discover what delights an audience. Throughout his writings, Peter Brook, one of the extraordinary minds of the modern theater, recounts how each time his ensemble of actors visited a remote corner of the world, whether a village, a hospital, or an open field, they were obliged to relearn how to hold an audience's attention. No matter how ambitious or experimental his work, Brook has never drifted far from the simple questions of what makes an audience respond. If this ability seems basic to doing theater, it is all too often absent in practice. Some time ago I attended a performance by a local ensemble that advertised stylized, cutting-edge theater based on new acting theories but actually produced a cartoon that completely concealed the performers as human beings. The play was meant to be a comedy, yet when I scanned the room, only the stage managers, seated behind me, were laughing. The production was raucous but completely failed to entertain because the actors and director were far too absorbed in celebrating their process to gauge the audience's attention.

THE DIRECTOR AS ANIMATOR

Nearly everything a director does is in the service of animating the story. To that end, most successful directors employ twin points of view simultaneously. One consists of living inside the play, discovering its energy by probing and empathizing with the characters' deepest desires and flaws. Using an actor's basic tools--action, obstacle, and given circumstances--the director animates the acting in a method, and with a vocabulary, that is organic to most actors.

By analogy, if we were to examine an automobile closely, we'd want to look at it from both inside and outside. We would study its engine to learn how it runs, and then we would scrutinize its design to determine its structure. This dual perspective would disclose far more than merely describing its color or accessories, which, in analyzing a play, would correspond to the superficiality of hunting for themes rather than probing more deeply for the inner workings of a play--its motor.

Like many actors, most directors work from inside out and from the outside in. They concentrate not only on the life of the characters but also on the play's structrual or external elements, including its central conflict, function, event, architecture, and suspense. As this book strives to demonstrate, in a dynamic directorial mindset these two angles of vision work in tandem, with each balancing the other.