The question of co-directing’s viability is one that is often brought up, especially among new filmmakers. Co-directing seems like it can be a great way to go, as, theoretically, each person should have to do only half as much work in a co-directing situation.
However, anyone who’s seen Season 2 of Project Green Light knows that this is rarely a certainty. In that season, we saw that co-directors tend to have disparate views of a single film and have a tendency to give conflicting information to their actors. This results in actors that really don’t know what sort of performance is expected from them and normally leads to horrible performances. (Luckily for the two directors in PGL 2, their actors were consummate professionals and were able to give convincing performances despite the issues.)
However, obviously there are famous examples of directing teams that work well together, from the Coen brothers to the Wachowski brothers. With that said, what can we learn from successful co-directing teams that would make this type of collaboration viable?
While the fact that most of these teams are related may seem to imply that only family members can be direct together, however this is actually more a sign that family members have often had the most time to learn how to communicate with one another. Direct and clear communication is an absolute necessity in any form of co-directing venture. (It’s an absolute necessity in filmmaking in general, but it’s even more so in co-directing because the final authority of the director is split in two.)
Another thing that some of these teams have in common is that each individual will choose one of the two main emphases to focus on, leaving the other to their partner. The Wachowski brothers were a well-known example of this, with one dealing with the cinematography direction and the other dealing with the acting direction. This is a great way to make sure that cross-communication is not occurring to the actors.
These considerations were part of a recent calculation I had to undertake when I chose to co-direct a film with a friend of mine whom I had never worked with before. (Normally, it’s ill-advised to co-direct anything with someone you haven’t worked on a project with, but nearly two years of pre-production allowed us to get familiar with one another’s work ethics and quirks.)
In 2005, shortly after starting Microfilmmaker Magazine, I was over at my audio engineer’s home, testing out some equipment for an upcoming review, where I met a client of his: Eric Henninger, the shaved-headed leader of a band named “Abraham’s Journey.” A film enthusiast and actor, when he found out about the filmmaking magazine I ran, Eric explained to me that he wanted to make a 30 minute short film called Collide. At the time, he had only written it in short story form, but intended to convert it to a screenplay.
I told him that when he was ready to make his film he should call me up and I would see if the magazine couldn’t help him make the film a reality. A week later he dropped off his story at my home so that I could read it and get a feel for it. While it had a few weak parts, its overall theme of a man who’s lost his only son and must choose between destroying his life because of his loss or choosing to live because of those who still remain was strong enough for me to be very interested in the project.
Life got hectic and I didn’t hear anything more from Eric until the summer of 2006, when he ran into an old college chum of mine who is also a no-budget filmmaker. This encounter caused Eric to pull out the Collide short story and convert it to a screenplay, which he then sent over to me and John, my audio engineer. We both told him that we’d help in our respective areas in whatever we could.
As Eric had decided to shoot for the summer of ’07, he decided to spend the time between the summer ’06 and January ’07 taking acting classes and trying to locate talent for his film. After the beginning of the year, we began to meet once a month, slowly creating a production team that I felt confident could make the film a reality.
Originally, I was simply coming on as a producer for the film, but when I realized that Eric had decided to that he wanted to play the lead role in the film, I strongly encouraged him to either find a different director entirely or for he and I to co-direct. As you probably guessed from the beginning of the article, normally I have some pretty serious reservations in the area of co-direction. However, I had witnessed his strong work ethic over the last year and a half and felt that he would be one of the few people I could co-direct with.
Due to Collide’s special needs (and to prevent the slow-decision making process that can occur in co-direction), we customized the co-directing concept even more than the Wachowski’s cinematography/ acting split. We decided that Eric would decide the shot-list with the DP ahead of time and he would rehearse with the actors, but, when it came to the actual shoot, I would be the exclusive voice of direction on set. This would allow Eric to concentrate on acting, rather than trying to direct while acting. (Directing while acting is possible for extremely experienced actor/directors like Mel Gibson and Clint Eastwood, but it is almost always a disaster for first time di1rectors, as I learned in my first film, Commissioned.) Then, after the film was shot, Eric would oversee the entire editing process, which is where much of the storytelling comes into play. On my end, this would also allow me to do the actual directing in production, without all the work in pre-production and post-production that’s normally involved in singularly directing, which I simply didn’t have time for.
Obviously, this could easily have blown up and we both had to have an immense amount of trust with the other. We also had to realize that things would seem very disproportionate at different times. (Both Eric and I worked as producers on the film, to say nothing of the amount of work Eric put into his role. But for illustration purposes, I list only the duties that actually relate to directing in the following paragraphs.) The following are some examples of this:
From my perspective, when it came to my realm of the actual production, our DP decided he couldn’t shoot for us a month out from the shoot, which required us to find a new DP. While we found a good DP to help, he came into the production schedule so late that most of the shot sheeting and storyboarding that Eric had done with the last DP didn’t get assimilated by the new DP. This required me to spend 50% of my time over the 3 and a half day/56 hour shooting schedule actively shot-sheeting with the DP, 50% of my time directing the actors, and 50% of my time trying to keep everything working on schedule, figuring out how to minimize pickup shoots as much as possible, and explaining to the producer why we still weren’t making our days. (Those of you good at math may have noticed that this added up to 150% of the time available. That’s not a typo.)
However, from the other perspective, Eric spent a larger amount of time with directorial duties before and after the production than I did in the actual production, no matter how long those three and a half days of production may have seemed at the time. He had to cast and rehearse with all the actors alone for a huge amount of time in the preceding months. He storyboarded the film with the DP in pre-production for the better part of a month before the DP bailed. And, in post, Eric spent endless hours reviewing the different takes and working with the editor and composer.
Despite all the mayhem that could have resulted in this unorthodox type of co-direction, everything actually came together really well. This peculiar arrangement allowed two people with special needs to helm the film at different times and, through direct communication, come up with a pretty decent product. (One of our non-connected film critics will be critiquing the film in the future, so, at that point, we’ll find out how decent the final result actually is.)
So, to answer our earlier question of whether co-direction is viable, I would definitely say that it does. However, it is something that requires a lot of communication, self-awareness, and willingness to think through the best form of co-direction for the people involved.
The
director of two feature length films and half a dozen short films,
Jeremy Hanke
founded Microfilmmaker Magazine to help all no-budget filmmakers make
better films. His first book on low-budget special effects techniques, GreenScreen Made Easy, (which he co-wrote with Michele Yamazaki) was released by MWP to very favorable reviews. He's curently working on the sci-fi film franchise, World of Depleted through Depleted: Day 419 and the feature film, Depleted.
The question of co-directing’s viability is one that is often brought up, especially among new filmmakers. Co-directing seems like it can be a great way to go, as, theoretically, each person should have to do only half as much work in a co-directing situation. 
