How do you make a good film?

 

We've just been to see a stinker of a film (I will draw a veil over the name to save the perpetrators' blushes), but you all have been there and you have also all been to see a film where you came out of the cinema buzzing because it had really hit you in the right spot.

So what I was thinking was what distinguishes a turkey of a film from a golden egg? What is the chemistry that makes one film fly and another plummet? And thinking about it, I tried to come up with some rules. 

The words: Whoever writes and edits the script has to be aware that you cannot put crap into the mouths of your actors. There has to be some chance that whatever you are getting them to say could be said convincingly by a real person and is not just garbage. I have some history in this, because in lexicography we used to collect millions of words of speech to put into a 'corpus' of spoken English. We recorded and transcribed real people in normal environments, and I have to tell you, it does not sound like most scripts I have heard. We have all kinds of stops and starts ,we don't get to the point, we don't really answer questions, and we have idiosyncrasies that make us ourselves. A bad scriptwriter forgets this and writes things that no real person ever said. In Eastenders Phil Mitchell was always saying things like "What's that supposed to mean?" in a very stereotypical way. You can give your actors words like that to speak, but it won't convince anyone, and that's before we get to the next part.

The actors: Now I know you have your own favourites and so do I, but some actors are better than others, in all sorts of ways. Some of them can say the same words in ten different ways, to find the way that works. Some cannot. Some can make a piece of script sound like it comes spontaneously from their own head. Some cannot. Some can make their expression fit their words, and some cannot. But most irritatingly, some actors are liked by the camera, even with their gob shut. and some are not. I do not want to name actors who the camera does not love, but here are some that it does: Uma Thurman, Timothee Chalamet, Richard Gere, Juliet Binoche, Steve Newman, Lauren Bacall . I don't know what it is, but you can play this game with a friend and you will find surprising agreement on who is more cinematogenic (rather than photogenic). And if your actors are not, the film won't work. 

The acting and directing: Now this is probably the magic bit. Even if you have a good script and good actors, there are certain ways that a performance can be extracted which are better than others. The film is not just about the words; if it was it would be a book. The image is as powerful (more powerful perhaps) in getting a feeling or even a meaning across. The way that someone sits; the way they hold themselves; a tic that they have: all of these can tell you as much as the words. A silence to a question can be more powerful than a reply. And this is mainly in the hands of the director, although if the actors cannot follow and represent, it is their fault too. But even if you have the right script, the right actors and everything else, you still have to spark it to life. The frame in which the actors speak needs to be right; the mood you have set in the preceding scene needs to be right; and then when you call 'action', the way in which the actors interreact with their bodies and faces and gestures have to be right for the scene to work. 

I'm not saying it is easy, but it can be done if you really try hard. I will randomly give a few films where I feel it all did come together through work, skill and a bit of luck. 

American Beauty

True Grit (Coen Bros version)

No Country for Old Men

Chinatown

Amelie

Please feel free to add your own. And please never ask me to make a film. It looks so much like hard work.