From control to opportunity, how the single-author model is changing independent and studio film

The Case for Hyphenating

LOS ANGELES — The writer-director — the filmmaker who writes and directs their own material, controlling both the literary and visual conception of a film — is not a new model. Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, and Kubrick were all writer-directors of varying degrees. What has changed is the prevalence of the model at the independent and mid-budget level, where the economics of the contemporary film market make the hyphenate not merely an artistic preference but a practical strategy.

The argument for writing your own material and directing it is partly about control: the writer who directs does not have to persuade a director to realise the script as written, does not lose creative authority at the handoff between development and production, and retains the vision of the project from conception through post-production. It is also partly about opportunity: a distinctive written voice that demonstrates directorial vision — through the way dialogue reveals character, the way scenes are constructed for cinematic effect, the way the script implies visual grammar — can attract financing and producing partners more readily than a script that requires both a writer and a director to become a film.

The Skills Gap

Writing and directing require overlapping but distinct skill sets. The writer works alone, in time, through revision; the director works with many people, in real time, with limited revision available. Writers who direct for the first time consistently report that the social and managerial demands of directing — leading a crew, managing actors, making rapid decisions under time and budget pressure — are distinct from and not automatically available from writing skill, no matter how strong the writing.

Film schools have responded by integrating directing training into screenwriting programmes and vice versa. The The Wrap’s film coverage includes profiles of emerging writer-directors across the independent and studio spectrum. The model works when the individual has both skill sets. It fails, as all models fail, when the person behind it has one without the other and the market or the financing structure doesn’t catch it before production begins.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com