When you write a script you give birth. Like a kid you don't know if you will like it very much or at all but you will love it till the day you die.
I see a screenplay as a skeleton that we hold on to during the rehearsals. To teach each other about the world we are about to populate. But once the actors become the characters I loose sight of the skeleton. Muscle and tissue begin to form around it and a living entity becomes clear.
What's hard is that other writers and directors live and die by the script. That means that most actors are used to that style of directing. It takes a bit of effort to free actors to live in the moment, outside of the script. Now though I have learned a different problem. Sometime, for some actors...the moments aren't the same. That's great for theatre but you have to edit film. In fifteen years you would have thought I would have had this problem already but I haven't. I had to learn how to keep a stallion wild but to only run on the track. I'm finding right now for actors like this coverage is the key. You have a much better chance to match them up if you have multiple cameras, lol.
I have turned the shoot into a one camera shoot because it was speeding up the shoots. Now I am bouncing between. Tomorrow I shoot the big dramatic end to the film and it needs to be one of these scenes. Perfect cuts but full emotional range. I'm confident that this is working. The answer to every problem I come across as a director is "Be like water." If you don't bend you will break and take a bunch of people and a feature film with you....and what a disaster that would be.
