Dan Attias, Director/Author: It's not the writer's job to tell the director how
to make the story the most compelling it can be.
Film Courage: The writers of Homeland didn't want to change [the script] or
they felt that the way it was written was fine?[Maggie's Testimony - Ep. 10 - Season 7]
Dan: This this opens up a lot of questions which I think are really features of collaborative
creativity that I find fascinating they had written the script and felt good about it they
thought it worked in a certain way and they they told me the way they thought it worked
but it's so interesting in features generally I think in general terms feet and features the
director is more the one empowered to kind of make a lot of the creative decisions in series
television it's weighted much more towards the writer and the show runner so that so that the
interesting challenge in coming into a series is I have to be serving the vision of the show runner I
can't change that it's not that's not my place but I can bring but but but what's interesting is that
the writer has to would be better off I think if they acknowledge we'll certainly get greater
creative contributions from others if they acknowledge that their work has to be interpreted
a script is really a fleshless blueprint when you think about it it's words on a page I mean I
say in the book it's like there's no such thing as filming the script that would be pictures of words
on the page you have to you have to interpret it you have to give the actors have to bring their
understanding of what's going on you have to dig deep for the kinds of inner life and subtext and
intentions that I've been describing and it's not really the writers the writer delivers a script
that they felt good about which is in this case they did and and and it turned out to be great now
I gave it a subtext and an inner life that they hadn't imagined but what fascinates me is
I wouldn't have arrived at my understanding of what the scene could be if the script had
been written any differently I looked at the speech Maggie gives and she references
her pain from childhood and that was a way that my experience in life my understanding
of how human beings work led me to bring my again bring my own experience to it to ask
to explore myself what those kind of issues and words evoked and they evoked me the possibility
that that may not just be in the past it might be now also so without a word changing I came to that
understanding and it was a clue embedded in the dialogue itself which the writers did not
did not consider consciously was even there but I believe and there's another chapter I
write on the an episode of the Americans where a very similar total transformation
happened without changing a word in that chapter I call rewriting the subtext
the Homeland chapter I call making meaning which is really what I felt I was doing it's not it's
not the writer's job to tell the director how to make the story most the most compelling it can be
the writer provides a script that they feel good about that's what these writers did it's my job
to interpret it and to translate it in a way that feels meaningful to me that I believe the audience
is going to respond to so that's one thing I really value about series television directing is
the limitations I'm given because it's a feature with unlimited budget if you can't do something
it's easy to solve a problem by throwing money at it or giving more days to shoot or whatever but
when you have limitations often that can inspire creative solutions because sometimes we take the
path of least resistance well the only way to do that is to shoot two extra days or to have a
thousand extras or whatever but wait you can't oh so how can I solve it another way there's a
story I tell in the book too it may be apocryphal but I it's funny I was an assistant director for
Francis Coppola but this is a story about Francis that I’d heard that there's a in Godfather 2 when
young Vito comes to Ellis Island there's a very iconic shot of well before I tell about that shot
the story anyway is that Francis wanted to film build a set that would be for ellis island that
would somewhere look out on the statue of liberty so that you could have young veto staring out of
the statue of liberty well that was impossible and budget didn't allow for it so the solution
that they came up with was to have young veto come to the window and stare out and in the glass
there was a reflection of the statue of liberty which was a picture of the statue of liberty
a backing and that was a beautiful poetic image you united in one image the statue of liberty and
the face of young veto and it's like if he could have just thrown money at it and just done it that
way he would have told the story but it wouldn't have had that he wouldn't have had that poetic
that poetic shot so so all of this points to to me the fascinating collaborative quality that
we all bring our own talents we all bring our own ways of seeing I feel this way when
an actor shows me something I never would have imagined an actor I've had experiences where I've
fully prepped I believe in that tremendously how important it is for a director to really
explore as much as you can and prep to really find out all the nuances you think are there
to figure out a staging which I prefer not to impose I like the actors to find it but I
but if but I will tend to I will want to make sure the staging is going to be something that
tells the story in behavior as well as in the dialogue so I can help guide the dire the actors
to finding that or if I have to if if there are time constraints and I have to impose a staging
right away I can do it I have it in my in my so I think being fully prepared some some directors
actually think well no I want to be creative in the moment I find I can be so much more creative
in the moment the more prepared I am because I've thought about what what is the key moment
what is the issue here and I've come up with a solution to bring that about but if someone
comes up with a better solution and I can plug o and I understand how that will that will enhance
this other moment will actually deepen the meaning I can employ it I can use it I can incorporate it
so all of this is to say I guess that I so value the collaboration that filmmaking entails and as
far as the writers not they're within their rights not to change the script they've that
they're performing their function if you're not a particularly talented writer you may hamstring
your collaborators in ways that are unfortunate but in this case I had very talented writers Alex
Gonza and Ron Nyswaner I think was the writer for this particular episode it it they were
tapping into a part of their unconscious I would say which is really where creativity originates
and even though they weren't necessarily conscious of the possibilities they they revealed to me
I from my own experience was able to discern what I wanted to do with it and how much do you
consider the audience especially for let's say a show like home man where you said there were other
episodes where that was really what the audience wanted kind of another really interesting
fact element to me of series directing is coming in as a director one has to respect
the audience's prior experience and their set of expectations
so that can manifest in several ways one of which is say the visual language you know I'm sure
everyone's favorite show has a particular way of photographing things I can remember in the
I guess it was the 1990s how NYPD Blue made such a splash because oh my goodness it's handheld camera
everywhere it's shaking and it's like it's a documentary oh that's so exciting it's like
I'm really there and and and and you wouldn't pan for example anticipating something from happening
because if you were a documentarian you wouldn't know that it was going to happen so you wait for
some character to talk and then you go over to find them and it creates a different subjective
experience in the audience and there are shows today that became a staple for many kinds of shows
but as an example if I were hired to do NYPD Blue which I didn't have a good fortune to work on I
can't come in and just say okay we're just do this all in walk-offs we're going to have elegant dolly
moves and you can't do that because a you'd be fired but b b even if you got through the episode
you would not be communicating the way you thought you would think you'd be communicating because the
audience has a different expectation so what you what what you how you deviate from those set those
expectations are is experienced as a deviation so they're not just watching that as if it's the
first show they've ever seen they're saying wait what's happening it's eerie it's still it's still
you might put them in an alert state wait that's not what I was trying to do
so you have to honor uh everything and also the tone I've feel very privileged to have directed
many different genres from it's Always Sunny in Philadelphia to The Wire and it's each each each
show has its own sensibility and one of the things I really value about what I get to do is I get to
immerse myself in different ways of seeing but when I enter any show
I have to honor it and I have to fully absorb its visual language it's tone it's sensibility
how points are made and and and that's if you don't do that you're you're you're not serving the
story well you've mentioned that you love Robert Bly yes and so I have just a quote here where
he says the best presenters have conversations with their audiences so even if you can't let's
say have a conversation with the audience of Homeland or the wire you you kind of know the
pulse of what they want yeah I told you I think I didn't get to your question so your question was
how much do I have to take into account the audience right okay yeah so an audience
comes in with a set of expectations and I and and you don't tune into the sopranos and want to watch
ballroom drama so it's like if you it's like so you if you're if you're providing it
and and the writers are generally almost universally very aware of that so they have
we know we've gone too long without a joke or we've gone too long without a so-and-so
and so you have to plug into that because if you don't you're you're not serving the show and that
and that tone that's where tone can really be a critical factor like for example I'm trying to
think I was a producer director on the show Big Love which was about a polygamous household in
Utah Mormon the kind of the what's the word the fundamentalist morbid mormon community
and there were these wonderful actors in it Bill Paxton and may rest in peace and
Chloe Sevigny and Jeanne Tripplehorn and it was just just a wealth of people and all these dramas
happening as you can imagine with three marriages and three wives and one guy and all that stuff
but one thing I had to be very mindful of which the producers were constantly reinforcing is in
Utah they're not a they're not a therapy friendly place people don't talk about their emotions
necessarily they don't display their emotions a lot so even though a scene might be rife with rich
subtext if you're shooting it in west Los Angeles where everybody's been to therapy
is perfectly happy to reveal their feelings and I don't know what you feel is what I feel that's not
that world that's not that world so if you're not attuned to the way so in a shall we say even even
repressed world or certainly suppressed people are very guarded and a lift eye lifted eyebrow
might be a very startling startling thing to do so you have to be sensitized to what not just
what the audience is expecting but what the world you don't want to betray the world of your story.