How to Direct a Movie

Learning how to direct a movie can be a huge undertaking. Anybody can grab a camera and shoot some footage, but making your final product into something passable takes a lot of craftsmanship. If you want to direct a movie, you'll need a reasonable understanding of every aspect of the filmmaking process, from camera work, to acting and editing.

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Step 1: Watch a lot of movies, especially films by great movie-makers. Learn everything you can from the masters. Pay especially close attention to films by pioneers like Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford. Watch experimental films, and study them. You should learn to watch movies actively. Watch them like a scholar, not like a normal viewer. The movies are your teachers, so listen to them.

Step 2: Read a lot about film directing. Pay especially close attention to technical issues and learn as much as you can about the more complex aspects of the craft. These things tend to trip up beginners, leading to films that don’t cut together well or disastrous shooting mistakes.

Step 3: Find a screenplay or write one yourself. Your first film should probably be a short practice project, but if you’re going to direct a movie, you might as well make something you actually want to see.

Step 4: Read the script, then envision your film. This is the most important step in the process. A director needs to have a vivid imagination. You must take a script and turn it into a mental movie. Use the playground of your mind to try things in different ways until you find an approach that you like.

Step 5: Record your initial thoughts. Write down the images you see and the way you imagine the scenes playing out. You want to get your intuitive gut instincts involved before you start looking at things in an analytical way.Your subconscious impulses often supply more useful insights than the reasoning part of your mind. 

Step 6: Take stock of your production situation. Ideally, the screenplay should be designed so that you can easily handle the practical budgetary issues like shooting locations and special effects. Going through the early visualization exercises can sometimes bring practical challenges to your attention.

Step 7: Make a shooting plan of some sort. Some directors choose to storyboard, while others make a shot list. Directors need to think about camera coverage, which means that you need a full understanding of what actions will take place on screen, and how you intend to show them. Angles of view, camera movements, and multiple camera angles should all be considered.

Step 8: Make sure your shooting plan is practical. Sometimes you may come up with a series of shots that aren’t actually possible because the location won’t allow for certain camera angles. It can be OK to let these things go and deal with them during the shoot, but if you notice something like this beforehand, you can avoid a fair amount of frustration.

Step 9: Arrange a shooting schedule. If this is an amateur production, your actors and the people in your crew will probably have day jobs, which make this especially challenging.

Step 10: Talk with your cinematographer beforehand about the storyboard or shot list. You should also go together to the location to make sure everything is workable. Lighting issues can often result in huge changes late in the process, and a cursory examination of the location can often help you avoid that.

Step 11: Rehearse each scene in front of the camera. Look through the lens, and make sure each shot looks good. Most lower budget productions are made with a single camera, which means the actors will have to do each scene several times from different angles. You’ll have to choreograph their movements so that the scene plays out in a dramatically correct fashion that also works well with the camera positioning. This sort of choreography is called “blocking”, and it often takes the more time than anything else when you direct a movie, especially if you put your actors in motion a lot.

Step 12: Film each shot as many times as you need to, and then film them a few more times. There is nothing worse than trying to edit a movie together when you don’t have enough footage to work with. You need to understand that it’s almost inevitable that you’re going to make huge errors the first time you direct a movie. Avoid this as much as possible by overcompensating with extra footage. If you aren’t sure about something, get another take or another camera angle.