I just wanted to comment briefly, following the Oscars, on Martin Scorsese and the Best Director Oscar. As many have noted, the poor guy keeps losing out on Best Director to actors-turned-director (Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, and Clint Eastwood), despite pretty much everyone believing Scorsese is amongst the top handful of living directors. I’m amongst those who don’t necessarily feel that he should have won for The Aviator: it’s a good movie, and he did an impeccable job, but it’s certainly not so strong that his loss this year seems some kind of injustice. And Eastwood clearly now deserves recognition as a major director in his own right, so the actor-turned-director thing wasn’t an indignity this time either. (It was when Costner won).
But I was reminded of this post by Jaime J. Weinman about the Best Director Oscar. Weinman’s point is that if the director is in charge of bringing together all the other contributions to a film, why do we have a separate Oscar for the Best Director and the Best Picture? Shouldn’t they be the same? Here’s how Weinman argues it (in part):
…giving an award for best “direction,” separate from the film itself, strikes me as pointless. Writers, actors, costume designers, composers; all these people can get an award for their work because it’s only a part of the film. But the director, like the producer, is supposed to make sure that all these parts coalesce and add up to a good film. If the director didn’t make the best movie, then how can he be the best director, when the director’s job description is, basically, the job of making the best movie he can? The quality of “direction” is often defined as some visual flourish or cool camera angles, but that’s hardly the most important part of what a film director does. If a director creates a lot of great camera angles, but the acting is weak, then I don’t think you can say that he did a great directing job in spite of the bad acting; we need to ask, rather, why he didn’t get better performances out of the actors (maybe he was too busy with the camera angles). The weak performances in, say, Hitchcock’s The Birds are a failure of the director, not just of the actors, and that means that The Birds is not a particularly well-directed film no matter how many great shots Hitchcock pulls off.
I guess there are some cases where you can separate the director’s contribution from the film — like, say, when he was stuck with a bad script which the producer wouldn’t let him change; the director might do good work as far as the script allows. But those kinds of movies, B movies mostly, don’t get nominated for Oscars anyway, so the point isn’t really relevant. When it comes to the kinds of movies that do get nominated, the quality of the script is usually part of the director’s responsibility, just as it’s the responsibility of a magazine editor to get the best possible articles out of his or her writers.
Weinman is of course right that the director’s job is not just about flashy visual flourishes: I don’t think The Aviator is a well directed movie simply because of the showy scenes such as the great aerial scene near the start, during the filming of Hell’s Angels. But The Aviator is a classic example of a big budget movie (ie, not the B movie scenario Weinman cites) with script problems that prevent it from achieving real greatness. Its shortcomings are pretty much all script related: its simplistic explanation for Hughes’ neuroses; its inability to really bring the film to a proper conclusion; the poorly sketched relationships with the women in has life after he left Hepburn; and so on. However, I think Scorsese did an excellent job on pretty much everything that I’d consider the director’s job, including the non-visual components Weinman cites, such as getting good performances out of the actors.
I guess my difference with Weinman is that while I’ll include a lot of the intangible, non-visual things within the director’s purview, as well as a certain degree of supervisory stuff (ie guiding composers, and art directors, and s on to fulfill the director’s vision) I don’t think this necessarily extends to it being their job to get a good script. Getting a good script is often simply a matter of taking time to do rewrites, and unless we are talking about a writer-director, all the director can do in this situation is to try to convince the studio to hold of production until the script is done. But Hollywood is studio-driven and obsessed with release-dates, and it is a very short list of directors who can halt the juggernaut if the deal is done and the production is due to begin. Even Scorsese (who is universally respected, but far from box-office gold) is not on that list. Which means I think there is still a case for looking at something like The Aviator and saying that Scorsese’s direction is better than the movie itself.
Obviously its hard to separate the many-faceted contribution of the director from the overall quality of the film. But if we don’t attempt to, and see the directors’ job as just to get good results in all the other aspects of the production, then our notion of quality in direction becomes synonymous with high production values. I know scungy but well directed movies don’t end up competing for the Oscars, but at least theoretically, the best director Oscar should be able to recognise a director who did a good job of overcoming a poor script, or lack of good actors, or whatever else. It might be hard to define what exactly a director does, but I still think it is a craft, capable of independent assessment. (Incidentally, I should be reviewing The Aviator this weekend.)