Alexander Mackendrick: Tribeca Film Festival

[Michael Wisniewski]

During the Tribeca Film Festival, I had the good fortune to get dragged into a "work in progress" documentary on the legendary film teacher Alexander Mackendrick. The filmmaker was Paul Cronin.

 

I just wanted to say, I am completely in awe. Mackendrick not only gets it, but he gets you to "get it" too. Just amazing. The portion of the documentary I watched was 80% of his successful students relating what they learned from this man at Cal Arts and the other 20% was Mackendrick himself.

 

After the first 15 seconds, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, this is the stuff you're always looking for and can glean here and there through books and experience, but it's presented in a coherent well thought out way, from the mind of a master teacher. I'm absolutely jealous of anyone who was able to take his classes or be mentored by him. And I know this sounds like hyperbole, but in this case it really is a film school for the $10 I paid to get in.

 

Here's the catch, the documentary probably won't be finished for a few years. :huh: Paul Cronin's accompanying book on Mackendrick will be out later this year. Unfortunately, as Mackendrick pointed out, the minute you start writing about film, you're already in the wrong medium. :blink:

[David Mullen ASC]

Luckily for me, "Sandy" Mackendrick was one of my professors at CalArts. The most important lesson I learned from him was that how you shoot a scene is not determined by what looks the most interesting, but what tells the story the best. So before you could even decide what lens to use or how high or low the camera should be, or whether to move the camera, you had to first understand the scene and the writer's dramatic (or comedic) intent.

 

His office was covered with index cards of "rules" that he thought up for students. RULE #1: Student films come in three lengths: too long, much too long, and really much too long.

 

Other rules included:

 

Start a story as late as possible and end it as early as possible.

 

If you don't have a beginning, it's because you don't really have the ending.

 

End a scene on a question, not an answer.

 

I remember asking him how much technical knowledge should a director have, and he said just enough to know when the technicians are lying to you (typical Sandy attitude -- not the most sunny view of things...) He also said that technology is inherently seductive and a director spends his time on technical matters often as a way of avoiding the truly hard part of directing, dealing with emotions.

 

Part of his philosophy of training directors (I was not one of his directing students; I just took some of his lecture courses and of course, I ended up shooting a number of thesis projects for his directing students) was that where most film schools failed was in teaching directors how to talk to actors, so his program was a joint theater and film school effort, and directing students had to alternate making a short film and directing a play, plus take acting and story classes.

 

I also got to operate the camera on some of his own directing efforts in front of students, and it amused me to see him constantly break his own rules. As much as he believed philosophically in "finding" the scene with the actors and not telling them where to sit or stand, eventually he always ended up telling them exactly that because he was also a stickler for composition.

[Michael Wisniewski]

That's funny about being a stickler. There's a section of the doc where they go over how he used to work out scenes by himself beforehand and then he'd arrive early the next morning to put props exactly where he wanted them, in order for the actor to "discover" what he, as the director, really wanted them to do.

 

I thought it was funny, when he completely re-arranged his office furniture, for a documentary interview, so that the documentary crew was forced to put the camera only in the positions he had chosen.

Edited May 1, 2005 by Michael Wisniewski

[David Mullen ASC]

That was a valuable lesson I learned from him, and also from Allen Daviau, who said the same thing: arrange the furniture before the actors arrive so that they naturally block themselves to the camera (said Mackendrick) and light sources (said Daviau). I do it all the time. If an actor is going to pull down some book from a shelf in the scene, I place the book where it will be most advantageous for camera / lighting so the actor does not have to think as much about that. I turn chairs at a good angle in relation to sources, I work with the art department in the layout of a room so that it considers where the light will be coming from.