Jumping off Bridges director Kat Candler is teaching a film class this semester, and to compile the syllabus she asked her filmmaker friends to put together a "recommended reading" list comprised of books that have helped them in their professional lives. She agreed to let me publish this list, so here it is below, grouped by filmmaking discipline, with the names of the filmmakers who recommended each book in parentheses after the title.
Screenwriting
The Ice Storm: The Shooting Script (Newmarket Shooting Script Series Book) by James Schamus (Kat Candler)
Sex, Lies and Videotape (Faber Reel Classics) by Steven Soderberg (Jacob Vaughn)
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke and M.D. Herter Norton (Stacy Schoolfield)
Making a Good Script Great by Linda Seger (Jay Duplass)
Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman (John Bryant)
A Crackup at the Race Riots by Harmony Korine (Todd Rohal)
Production
Cassavetes on Cassavetes by John Cassavetes and Ray Carney (Mike Tully, Margaret Brown, Jay Duplass, Jacob Vaughn)
Rebel without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player by Robert Rodriguez (Stacy Schoolfield)
Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan by John Sayles (Kat Candler, Alex Smith)
Sculpting in Time: Tarkovsky The Great Russian Filmaker Discusses His Art by Andrey Tarkovsky and Kitty Hunter-Blair (Kyle Henry, Jacob Vaughn)
Getting Away With It: Or: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw by Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester (Jay Duplass)
Spike Lee's Gotta Have It: Inside Guerrilla Filmmaking by Spike Lee and Nelson George (Joe Swanberg)
Independent Feature Film Production: A Complete Guide from Concept Through Distribution by Gregory Goodell (Todd Rohal)
Directing
Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film & Television by Judith Weston (PJ Raval)
A Director Prepares by Anne Bogart (PJ Raval)
Moviemakers' Master Class: Private Lessons from the World's Foremost Directors by Laurent Tirard (Mark Osborn)
The Conversations by Walter Murch and Michael Ondaatje (Alex Smith)
Cinematography
Notes on the Cinematographer (Green Integer) by Robert Bresson (Lodge Kerrigan)
The Camera (Ansel Adams Photography, Book 1) by Ansel Adams and Robert Baker (Lodge Kerrigan)
The Negative (Ansel Adams Photography, Book 2) by Ansel Adams and Robert Baker (Lodge Kerrigan)
The Print (Ansel Adams Photography, Book 3) by Ansel Adams and Robert Baker (Lodge Kerrigan)
Acting
Respect for Acting by Uta Hagen and Haskel Frankel (Stacy Schoolfield)
True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor by David Mamet (Rhett Wilkins)
Producing
A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond by Christine Vachon, Austin Bunn, and John Pierson (Stacy Schoolfield)
Shooting to Kill by Christine Vachon and David Edelstein (Kat Candler)
Editing
In the Blink of an Eye Revised 2nd Edition by Walter Murchâ (Jacob Vaughn)
On Film Editing by Edward Dmytryk (Kat Candler)
Theory
Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov by Annette and Kevin O'Brien Michelson (Kyle Henry)
Film As Film: Understanding and Judging Movies by V. F. Perkins (Steve Collins)
Film As a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel and Scott MacDonald (Lodge Kerrigan)
For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies by Pauline Kael (Mark Osborn)
The Resistance Ten Years of Pop Culture that Shock the World by Armond White (Mark Osborn)
The Great Movies by Roger Ebert (Mark Osborn)
I didn't get it together to submit my list in time, but here are some additional titles that I'd offer up to aspiring filmmakers.
For its insights into studio politics and the conflicts between corporate agendas and a filmmaker's vision,
Steven Bach's Final Cut can't be beat. It's a look at the final days of United Artists told through the "making of" story of Michael Cimino's
Heaven's Gate. Bach, who was head of production at U.A. at the time, is painfully honest about his own failings and, more importantly, he clearly lays out the sequence of decisions that lead to the movie's skyrocketing budget and ultimate box-office failure. At each point, it seems as if the decision made is an understandable one, yet disaster still ensued.
Richard Stanley's Dust Devil Diary (or, I Wake Up, Screaming), which can be read at this link, is a chilling, surreal, and instructive journey inside the psyche of a director struggling to realize a dream project. Coming off of his sci-fi hit
Hardware, Richard Stanley travels to Namibia to tell a true-life story of a demonic African killer. Just about everything that can go wrong does, and Stanley's account of his dream's dismantling is both heartbreaking and horrifying. He interweaves the personal with the poltical, the nuts and bolts of production with the real-life spookiness of some of his locations and cohorts. There's a great moment near the end when Stanley, who has storyboarded his conclusion to pay homage to the final shoot-out in
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, realizes too late Leone's secret to filming that sequence.
Tarkovsky's Sculpting in Time would have been on my list too along with another book by the great Russian director:
Time within Time: The Diaries. (It's currently out of print, but excerpts can be read
here. There's not a ton of filmmaking advice in these diaries, most of which were penned between, not during, Tarkovsky's work on his movies. Instead, it's a fascinating glimpse into his emotions and psyche as he struggles to navigate the politics of official Russian film production. For those who decry the inequities of their own development forays it's helpful to read the words of one of the greatest directors of all time and realize that he shares the same fears and anxieties.
Many books on independent production contain a "rah-rah" mentality, but there's a particular kind of melancholia that can also set in on a film shoot. Relationships begin on the best of notes but are soon re-shaped and sometimes destroyed by circumstances. One book that captures this perfectly is Wim Wenders'
My Time with Antonioni: A Diary of an Extraordinary Experience. Wenders helps the great Italian filmmaker, who is aphasic after suffering a stroke and is unable to speak, realize his final full-length feature,
Beyond the Clouds. In addition to directing some of the film's wrap-around sequences, Wenders also signs on to be a "back-up" director in case Antonioni's health falters. The book, a diary of his "time with Antonioni," finds Wenders offering many interesting insights into Antonioni's vision, style of production, and methods of communication. It also honestly captures Wenders' mixed emotions as he finds himself marginalized during production by a willful Antonioni who, once the production funds have hit the bank, doesn't seem to need Wenders' help very much. Wenders writes, observes, and, despite some hurt feelings, concludes, "I do not regret I accompanied Michelangelo through this time."
What are the most helpful books in your filmmaking library? Please post.
# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/03/2007 07:43:00 PM
Comments (9)
Schrader on Schrader - solid book of interviews with Paul Schrader, a writer/director who still makes films about difficult subjects and survives in the industry doing it.
How To Read A Film - a great book on how to competently understand why a film does what it does to you.
Cinematography - by Blain Brown. A solid book on the theory and practice of light manipulation, equipment and beyond.
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posted by William @ 3/04/2007 6:20 PM
From Reel to Deal by Dov S-S Simens.
--this book is incredible. at the end of every chapter, it lists relevant books and contacts and even gives insight on how to make a 35mm film for $5000.
Shot by Shot by steven katz
Cinematic Motion by steven katz
--these are great books to skim through before the first day of shooting
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posted by The Third Man in Space @ 3/04/2007 10:04 PM
Good choices. I like Steven Monaco's "How to Read a Film" too.
"Schrader on Schrader" is great as is "Scorsese on Scorsese." Some of the early recountings by Scorsese of his wranglings with the financiers on films like "Boxcar Bertha" are really great for young filmmakers to keep in mind.
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posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3/05/2007 12:31 AM
When I think of the books that meant the most to me during my initial forays into film production, four you don't yet have listed there really stand out. All the books listed are about the doing, not the thought process beforehand, which to me, still remains the most critical. Ultimately, filmmaking is about how one sees the world, isn't it? Or rather, how what we see of the world, interpret, is then in turn seen and interpreted by others. The books that I think we need are about that, at least in my opinion.
First and foremost was John Waters' Shock Value. At age 16 or 17, I needed it's "everything is permitted" and "art dwells in unlikely places" celebratory cries to help recognize that although I hated everything mainstream media was creating, there might really be a place and an audience for something a little bit different. Now with the indie scene so fully co-opted and no real alternative screen gaining ground, it seems quite relevant again.
The other three all posses a remarkable power to regularly change the way I see the world, to provide that feeling of "recognition" -- to know again:
Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida
John Berger's Ways Of Seeing
George Bataille's Story Of The Eye
Barthes captured the immediate experience of what looking at film really was in such a way that it helped me accept that this is what I wanted to do with both my life and my labor, why I loved watching, and why I loved participating in the process.
Berger pointed to the responsibility inherent and often ignored in the process, what often was really being said, and how much harder I had think about the choices I made -- a discipline that I still need to remind myself of and totally enjoy.
Finally, Bataille showed the power of words, imagery, and story as it rallies up against society, culture, and history, all the meanwhile embodied and embolden by a great sense of fun and mischief. Although almost 90 years old, it still feels fresher than most things I get to read today.
The last three books all clock in at less than 150 pages each and two of them come complete with pictures. Read of the course of a day, along with the already cited and equally short and dense Notes On Cinematography, and aided by several cups of espresso and a soundtrack of The Clash, Bowie, Sex Pistols, Elvis Costello, and Neil Young, any filmmaker can not help but see the need to consistently change, regularly produce, and sometimes just not give a fuck what other people think.
And I still think that's better than what anyone can find in any film school, sad to say.
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posted by @ 3/05/2007 11:05 AM
Jeff Young's "Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films" is a book-length collection of interviews from the 1970s. Young walks Kazan through each of his movies and gets him to talk in-depth about his process -- especially, of course, how he directed his actors. Kazan's recollections are exhaustive, candid, and deeply instructive; he shows how Stanislavsky's Method is still a profoundly valid approach to capturing emotional truth in performance -- and how, contrary to popular misconception, the Method is all about harnessing performance to the larger collective goal of telling the story. All aspiring directors should take some acting classes to learn how to communicate with actors. After they get the basics of the process down, they should read this book to learn how a master did it.
Yeah, I know: he named names. But still.
I picked up more useful tips about screenwriting from John Brady's book of interviews "The Craft of the Screenwriter" than I did from any of the how-to tomes. Wise words from some of the best screenwriters of the 60s and 70s. And Neil Simon.
Following up on Ted Hope's point about books that provide inspiration rather than instruction, I'd heartily second one of Lodge Kerrigan's picks: Amos Vogel's "Film As a Subversive Art," the greatest free-your-mind blow-the-doors-of-perception-off-their-hinges film book I've ever seen. With hundreds of mini-essays and still reproductions, this book will make you want to run out and slit a sheep's eyeball in a hurry. Plus, it's a smallish trade paperback, so you can carry it around and open it for inspiration on the set, on the subway, on the shitter.
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posted by @ 3/06/2007 12:05 AM
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posted by tboot @ 3/06/2007 11:23 AM
I know there's already a Mamet book on the list, but I think his "On Directing Film" is fantastic.
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posted by tboot @ 3/06/2007 11:25 AM
Thanks for that list! I completely agree with Directing Actors by Judith Weston. It opened my eyes for the first time when I read it in film school. She really explores what it is to be a director and how important it is to establish a deep relationship your actors.
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posted by NYIndieSeen @ 3/07/2007 8:00 PM
A few that are inspiring to me:
Fellini on Fellini
Making Movies (Sydney Lumet): Did anyone list this? This is really about his experiences, and makes the whole filmmaking process fascinating without getting bogged down by too many theories of "the craft".
My Last Sigh (Luis Bunuel): because he's Bunuel
Something Like an Autobiography (Akira Kurosawa): interesting, and he also really brings home the message that it's all about the script
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posted by dinita @ 3/10/2007 5:59 PM
