It's Time to Change How We Talk About Directors
On good friction and bad friction
There are two kinds of friction in filmmaking: (1) the good kind; and (2) the bad kind.
Like steel on flint, good friction is creatively generative. It can come from a clash of collaborators: Scorsese and De Niro debating a character choice, or Jack Fisk and Emmanuel Lubezki lighting a set. It can come from process: Paul Thomas Anderson and his team waiting two days to screen dailies, or Phil Tippett studying four-legged animals to give The Empire Strikes Back’s walkers greater weight. It can even come from budget: forcing directors to deploy imaginative solutions to circumvent limited locations, performers or special effects.
Bad friction is creatively sapping. It’s the loose fabric at the back of a trainer, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing at your heels. Even the most patient filmmaker has been driven to the edge of driving hot needles through their eyeballs by contracts and rights and permits and insurance and budgeting and scheduling. Or the continuity tracking of costume design across different shooting days and locations. Or taking half a day to rig a crane for a four-second shot.
The great promise of technology is that it can eliminate the bad friction. The great threat of technology is that it can eliminate the good friction.
When adapting to new technology of any kind, the central issue therefore becomes identifying the parts of the process that should not be smoothed away and protecting them at all costs.
For seasoned pros, this is fairly easy. They know enough about their working methods to identify which parts are precious. For the rest of us, it is fairly hard. Without sufficient practical experience, we can easily mistake good friction for bad. Add to this our reasonable human impulse to take shortcuts, and you have a recipe for a kind of creative flattening. What’s that phrase about the baby and the bathwater?
I am at fault. In my bones, I believe in a sort of soft-auteurism. I believe directors often infuse a film with a part of themselves, and that it is rewarding (not to mention fun) to trace this across their filmographies. Perhaps you feel the same. So we talk in hushed tones of Kubrick as this otherworldly visionary, or Hitchcock as a meticulous control freak. And there is, of course, truth in these assessments. But they neglect the collaborative nature of filmmaking, implicitly replacing it with the idea that a movie is perfectly formed in the director’s head, and everything else is just a delivery mechanism to get it out. The whole process of filmmaking gets reduced to expensive, time-consuming meat puppetry. Bad friction.
And remember what happens to bad friction? It gets eliminated. Why have a production department, when it’s all in the director’s head? In fact, why bother having any other humans at all?
The responsibility, I think, of any of us who write about, talk about, care about movies, is to do the work to identify and celebrate the good friction. To make the positive case for when and why it is best to do it the hard way. This means studying craft. It means trying to make stuff ourselves. And yes, it means changing how we talk about directors.
"they neglect the collaborative nature of filmmaking, implicitly replacing it with the idea that a movie is perfectly formed in the director’s head, and everything else is just a delivery mechanism to get it out."
A slight tangent, but I think it's why a lot of the films with the strongest "auteur" voice are those of directors who work again and again with the same crews. So it's still collective, but it's the voice of that specific collective group of people (Wes Anderson, Vince Gilligan, etc).
Good friction vs. bad friction — or productive friction vs. unproductive friction — is a good way to think about AI use in general. We're such creatures of convenience; we forget that inconvenience (struggle, limitation, etc.) is essential to making art. Thank you!