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Directors Close Up: Interviews with Directors Nominated for Best Film by the Directors Guild of America

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I found DIRECTORS CLOSE UP to be a highly informative and entertaining read, full of insights into the filmmaker's creative process that you're not likely to find anywhere else. Speaking to an audience of their peers at an annual symposium at the Directors Guild, the participants (all critically acclaimed nominees for the DGA Award for Feature Film Directing), let their hair down and speak candidly about every aspect of the long, complicated, and sometimes fractious process of making a film.

Seasoned pros, aspiring filmmakers and cinema lovers will all find something to inspire and instruct them in this wide-ranging investigation of all the stages of giving birth to a film from script to post-production and beyond. Especially interesting is the section on casting, with insider tips on the varied techniques directors use to get audition-phobic actors to read for them. James Cameron (Titanic) tells a story of how Leo DiCaprio was just a name on a list to him, so he asked him to read, which DiCaprio at first refused to do until Cameron said "You're gonna read or you're gonna go home!" DiCaprio says, "Okay, let's read!" * and proceeds to blow away the director's doubts. Equally compelling is the chapter on editing in which Alexander Payne (Sideways) talks about how a film is magically transformed in ways you can't anticipate in the script stage, and why he welcomes cutting even some of his favorite scenes so the audience can start making connections as the film gets tighter. Come to think of it, don't miss the chapters on the script, rehearsal, production, or music and sound either, all of which provide pearls of wisdom from the likes of Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh and many more. Speaking of pearls, as an added bonus there's an essay by Elia Kazan, "On What Makes a Director," that should be required reading for every film student, not to mention prersonal script notes, storyboards, sketches, and on-set photos contributed by the filmmakers that provide a fascinating glimpses of the creative thinking behind their award-winning movies.

This book is a wonderful collection of insights to the Director's process and filmmaking in general. This is a great read for anyone interesting in directing, filmmaking or the creative process.