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Translating Concept to Screen: A Conversation with Alan J. Pakula
From: American Film Institute
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Alan J. Pakula, a movie buff at an early age, got permanently hooked on show business right after a high school summer job with a  theatrical agency. He set out for Hollywood immediately after receiving his degree in drama from Yale, and found his first job in the film industry as an assistant in the Warner Bros. Cartoon Department. In 1957, Pakula (right) began his career as a producer with Fear Strikes Out, but Pakula didn't realize his greatest ambition, to direct, until 1969, when he directed The Sterile Cuckoo. Pakula went on to garner critical acclaim for his directing, especially for his "paranoid thriller trilogy," Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974) and All the President's Men (1976).
In this excerpt from a 1985 AFI seminar, Pakula--three-time Academy Award nominee--outlines the central capability required of a director: to be able to translate your vision for a film from words on a page to magic on the screen. |
 art of the job is being an artist, part of it's being a general--organizing the troops--and part of it is being a communicator, so that the other creative people can do their best work within your concept. The other part is being a psychiatrist--in particular, working with actors. And that is not said in a facetious way, because acting is an emotional tool, and you have to have some sense of the person who's doing it and what they have to contribute to their character in order to get the performance you want out of them. |
Ingmar Bergman once said, "If you don't have something to say, don't make a film." And of course, he's correct. A director has to have a concept, some driving passion. Once you have that concept, you must communicate that concept to other people in the most effective way. |
You have to know exactly what will help the people you're working with. I don't, for example, discuss everything with the actors that I discuss with the cinematographer. On All the President's Men, I said to Gordon Willis when we discussed photographing the newsroom, "I want a world without shadows. I want a world that is a world of truth. Somewhere where nothing gets away, where everything is examined under this merciless glare." |
I subsequently worked that out with the Art Director and with Gordon Willis. I didn't sit down and say to the actors, "Now I want this to be a hard, sharp focus picture..."--they can't act sharp focus. But you do talk to the actors about what's happening in the character's psychology: "Why were you obsessed with that? Who were you? What were your fears? What were your motivations?" These are things they can act. |
It's crucial to choose what you say to each person very carefully. Your job as a director is to keep the whole integrated concept moving forward. |
On production design and locations
The importance of casting well holds not just for actors, but for all the other key people as well: your cinematographer, your production designer and your costume designer. Let me give you the example of my Production Designer on Dream Lover (1986), George Jenkins. |
I had one of those pivotal scenes in which the girl is alone in an apartment and is attacked by a strange man. In working out the set with the Art Director, I thought, "He'll hide in the bathroom." |
But when I staged the scene I thought, "It's absolutely wrong to play it there. It should be in the living room or the kitchen." Then I realized that there was no place for him to hide, and if he can't hide, the whole scene is down the drain--it was a terror moment. I was walking around the set thinking, "Where the hell do I hide this man?" |
Then I opened the front door and there was a little alcove on either side--which I hadn't asked George Jenkins to supply--so you could go right to the door and you don't see that man hiding until you're right at the door. I never asked for it. It was wonderful. George gives you little surprises and eccentricities beyond what you've worked out on the floor plan. We have that kind of rapport, and it's essential. |
On using camera movement
Once you've set your locations and had your sets designed, the look of the picture is locked in. I don't care what your cinematographer does. If it is a tiny room, you're photographing tiny spaces. If it is a colorful room, you're making a statement about bright color. |
To suddenly say, "I'm starting to shoot this film, now I'll create my visual style," is nonsense. The visual look is total ensemble work and it is extremely important that it be set very early on. |
The camera and camera movement are part of the vocabulary you use to make your statement. If you overuse camera movement, it's like screaming, "Help, help, help" all the time, or having 25 exclamation points. If you're looking at the eyes and face of a character and they're revealing emotions, why the hell move the camera unless that movement makes a statement? |
On the other hand, if I have a woman laughing on the phone and she gives this huge speech that's wildly funny and I pan down to her hands and her fingernails are digging holes into her palms and they're bleeding, there's a reason for that camera movement. |
There is one move in All the President's Men, which takes place in the Library of Congress. The camera starts on piles of library reference cards. The two reporters are on to something--you see dozens of these little cards. Then the camera pulls up slowly to the top of the library. They are in this huge, domelike building, and they are dwarfed. |
It was a tour de force camera move, but it was making a point: "My God, how tiny these people are, and how endless the search!" |
On scoring films effectively
In general, music and sound effects are dangerous weapons because they are overused so much. Klute and The Parallax View were films where the use of music was absolutely essential. |
Michael Small did an extraordinary thing for Parallax View. I said to him, "Some way you have to characterize a group of people, the Heavies, the Parallax People, who are never shown in this film. We don't know who they are." |
Essentially I was saying they represent the danger of domestic fascism hiding behind symbols of patriotism, and he created this cheerful, Sousa-like score. But there's an edge to it. There's something under that cheerful, martial thing that becomes threatening. |
In Klute there was another major problem for music to solve. It was the story of a girl who's obsessed with seducing. She feels impotent, herself. The only time she feels any sense of power is when she's sexually in control and knows a man wants her in a way she doesn't want him. It's this need to seduce that almost kills her. |
So I said to Michael, "How can we express this in the score? I want her pulled in, as though she is pulling herself toward her own destruction." We're talking about a siren song. |
He said, "Then we should use a woman's voice." There's a sick voice, like her own voice, pulling her forward, and it's threatening, endangering. |
In Sophie's Choice, I ran the film for Marvin Hamlisch and said to him, "the film is so emotional--the film is about such horror--that it runs the great danger of becoming emotional pornography. I would like something that gives a kind of dignity, and I'll use a strange expression, a sense of occasion about these people." Marvin wrote baroque music, which had that dignity and romantic quality, but controlled with a sense of occasion and an almost processional quality about it. |
On choosing projects
My films are very much narrative films. They reflect my childhood. They reflect going to films in the '40s and loving a story. They're far from avant-garde, although I experiment with techniques. I'd say I'm from a kind of Charles Dickens school of filmmaking. |
Somewhere we go back to the fact that we all have obsessions. If we're creative, if we're lucky, we have things that drive us, mysteries that we have to live and re-live and act out and re-enact. And each time, if you're creative and you're lucky, you get a picture or a book or a story out of it. |
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