In a piece over at Vanity Fair, Skyfall director Sam Mendes takes a break from preparing for Bond 24 to offer up 25 Rules for Directors in his acceptance speech as the Roundabout Theatre Company paid the director tribute at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan.
Here are my favorites:
1. Always choose good collaborators. It seems so obvious, but the best collaborators are the ones who disagree with you. It means they’re passionate, they have opinions, and they’ll only ever say yes if they mean it.
4. Learn to say, “I don’t know the answer.” It could be the beginning of a very good day’s rehearsal.
8. Confidence is essential, but ego is not.
10. Buy a good set of blinkers. Do not read reviews. It’s enough to know whether they’re good or they’re bad. When I started, artists vastly outnumbered commentators, and now, there are a thousand published public opinions for every work of art. However strong you are, confidence is essential to what you do, and confidence is a fragile thing. Protect it. As T.S. Eliot says, teach us to care, and not to care.
16. Peter Brooks said, “The journey is the destination.” Do not think of product, or, god forbid, audience response. Think only of discovery and process. One of my favorite quotes from Hamlet–Polonius: “We shall, by indirections, find the directions out.”
17. Learn when to shut up. I’m still working on this one.
18. When you have a cast of 20, this means you have 20 other imaginations in the room with you. Use them.
19. Please remember the Oscars are a TV show.
20. Get on with it. Robert Frost said, “Tell everything a little faster.” He wasn’t wrong.
22. Learn to accept the blame for everything. If the script was poor, you didn’t work hard enough with the writer. If the actors failed, you failed. If the sets, the lighting, the post, the costumes are wrong, you gave them the thumbs-up. So build up your shoulders, they need to be broad.
23. On screen, your hero can blow away 500 bad guys, but if he smokes one fucking cigarette, you’re in deep shit.
25. Never, ever, ever forget how lucky you are to do something that you love.
I love at #16 where he says “Do not think of product, or, god forbid, audience response. Think only of discovery and process.” This is exactly what has happened to studio filmmaking and it plays directly into #1. If a studio would merely hire good filmmakers and then trust them to do their jobs they wouldn’t have to worry about product or audience response, they would simply come as a result of good first decisions.
You can read the full list of 25 rules right here.
