What is a set-piece?
Oh his blog, screenwriter John August defines it as...
A scene or sequence with escalated stakes and production values, as appropriate to the genre...
Done right, set-pieces are moments you remember weeks after seeing a movie.
So looking at movies from the past year; some examples of set-pieces would be
the airport fight in Captain America: Civil War,
the climactic dance sequence in La La Land,
or the destruction of Jedha in Rogue One.
With blockbuster movies in particular set-pieces have a special significance.
These are the scenes that cost the most the most money; that are going to be featured most heavily in
the trailers, and hopefully that will make the biggest impression on an audience and get them back again...
...and tell their friends and family.
When looking at the past hundred years of cinema, there's one filmmaker who stands above just about
everyone else when it comes to constructing set-pieces.
Not coincidentally, he's also probably the most famous filmmaker of all time...
...this guy (Steven Spielberg).
When you think of Spielberg and set-pieces a ton of scenes probably come to mind.
There's this one,
and this one,
and also this one,
and a couple dozen more.
So what is it that makes these scenes so effective?
Beyond Spielberg just being a brilliant filmmaker and arguably the greatest visual story-teller of the 20th century.
What is it that makes these sequences so iconic?
That makes them stick with us?
Even as the capabilities of visual effects grow and set-pieces become more elaborate.
Why do we keep returning to these ones?
To answer those questions, I want to dig into my personal favorite...
...the T-Rex attack in Jurassic Park.
(Ear-piercing scream)
The key aspect of Spielberg's approach here, and really through the vast majority of his film-making
is that the scene is shot subjectively.
We experience just about everything through the characters' perspectives.
The focus isn't on the T-Rex,
it's on how the characters are REACTING to the T-Rex.
We feel what they feel, which is mostly fear and extreme tension.
So you know the "Spielberg face"?
That shot of people looking up in awe at something off-screen?
He doesn't keep doing that because he thinks it looks cool.
He does it because he knows a moment is more powerful
if it's rooted in a character's emotional reaction to it.
In this situation, a huge man-eating dinosaur is scarier if we focus on the people in immediate danger of being eaten.
At the start here,
Spielberg uses one of the scene's few wide shots, which gives us a clear understanding of the geography.
We know where the two jeeps are, where the fence is, and what the surrounding area looks like.
This is helpful. Since most of the scene is shot from inside the Jeeps, where the characters are.
When there's a shot of Malcom and Grant looking at something off-screen
we know exactly what they're looking at and how far away they are.
One of the smartest things Spielberg does here is to make us afraid of the T-Rex before it even shows up.
He does this in a few steps.
First,
he uses the environment to establish its power through the now iconic shot of the water rippling in the cup.
If you're seeing this for the first time you don't know exactly what's causing that, but you know it's something big and powerful.
And of course, we see the characters react and how worried they are about whatever it is.
Then he escalates things by establishing the threat.
Specifically the fact that this massive, powerful thing is carnivorous.
This is done with the reveal of the severed goat's leg.
This moment is a perfect example of one of the great things about this scene; the way Spielberg mixes humor and tension.
Lex asks:
"Where's the goat?"
and then BOOM!
The goat is dead.
It serves three purposes.
It's a laugh,
it's a jump-scare,
and it ramps up the tension by introducing the element of death to the scene.
There's a complaint about Spielberg, usually from film students, that he tells us how to feel, but that's missing the point.
Every moment here is aiming to elicit a specific reaction or feeling,
and to state your intent to that clearly and follow through on it is a profoundly difficult feat for a filmmaker.
Spielberg has enough mastery over his craft to know that holding on this moment of quiet will make us tense up and hold our breath.
And then this sudden fast movement of the Rex will make us jump.
He knows that we'll chuckle at Malcolm wiping the condensation off windshield, giving us a momentary release...
...before he plunges us back into the horror of the scene.
In the rare moments that he does leave the perspective of the characters, like this POV shot of the T-Rex or this wide-shot,
is to emphasize the vulnerability of the humans and how outmatched they are.
The secret here is that for much of Jurassic Park, and this scene in particular, Spielberg is making a horror movie.
While most blockbuster set-pieces, especially in the past 20 years,
are designed to be fun, or cool, or mildly exciting.
Spielberg's goal here is to terrify us.
The film-making vocabulary he's working with isn't dissimilar to scenes from Halloween, Alien, or Night of the Living Dead.
Like the most memorable sequences in those movies, this is about things trying to kill people and those people trying desperately to stay alive.
Beyond Jurassic Park, this thread of horror runs through Spielberg's entire body of work.
It's funny that a director who film school snobs dismiss for being sappy,, or overly sentimental has spent much of his career.
Sure, Jaws might have begun the concept of the summer blockbuster, but instead of a gaudy CGI...
spectacle it's a horror movie full of jump-scares, vicious kills, and masterful suspense sequences.
Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom, while remembered as fun adventure movies,
contain numerous scenes that traumatized younger viewers.
More recently War or the Worlds, seemingly an alien invasion action movie starring Tome Cruise,
turned out to be bleak and brutal; and scarier than any movie in the Saw or Paranormal Activity franchises.
And less we forget, this is the same guy who wrote, produced, and helped direct Poltergeist.
Even Spielberg's less intense, more family friendly films contained horror elements.
E.T. and Close Encounters are remembered for their scenes of wonder, warmth, and emotion,
but what drew us in to both films were that many scenes early on played as horror.
As Spielberg piled on suspense and the fear of the unknown.
What I think makes Spielberg's skill with horror a key part of his success, is that it forces the audience to engage with the movie.
It creates a visceral experience.
The movies that make the biggest impression on us, that stick with us; are the ones the make us feel something.
And making us feel something is the whole point of horror.
To effectively direct a horror sequence, to use cinematic language in a deliberate way, to make an audience tense and afraid; requires particular skills.
You need to understand pacing, how to use space and geography, and what effects angles, camera movements, and edits will have pyshcologically and emotionally on a viewer.
And all these rules carry over to big action set-pieces.
Beyond Spielberg, many of the best blockbuster directors of the past couple decades began as excellent horror directors;
and continue to use that skill set and vocabulary in their big budget work.
Peter Jackson is probably the most famous example.
This isn't at all surprising if you look at Lord of the Rings;
which for an epic fantasy movie about hobbits features more than a few scenes that play as full-on horror.
Before Sam Raimi made a trilogy of Spiderman movies he made a trilogy of Evil Dead movies,
and the same gleeful, tension-filled roller-coaster set-pieces are present in both.
Whether they're focusing on demonic possession or super-hero battles.
Plus Spiderman 2 has this scene...
Guillermo Del Toro is mostly known as a horror director, but when he does a big blockbuster set-piece
he uses the same skills with escalating tension, jump scares, and occasional moments of levity to craft an action sequence that's genuinely thrilling.
James Wan directed Saw, then Insidious, then The Conjuring, and then he made the best action scene in the entire Fast and Furious series.
The year before he made The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Gore Verbinski made The Ring;
and lest we forget James Cameron's first two movies: The Terminator and Aliens are both
pretty much horror movies.
The Terminator is all about two people trying to survive a relentless, unstoppable force trying to kill them;
which is exactly what he did again in a movie called Titanic.
See a horror set-piece isn't far off from an action set-piece.
One is aiming to frighten an audience,
the other is aiming to excite them, but both when successful provide a truly engaging, visceral experience.
It's not a hard and fast rule, but usually if someone is an effective horror director they'll be an effective blockbuster director.
Part of why Spielberg makes such exciting set-pieces is because he happens to be a brilliant horror filmmaker.
Often times when inexperienced filmmakers direct a blockbuster for the first time, their authorial voice will slip away at the set-pieces;
as they turn it over to the second-unit directors or the visual effects team.
But for directors transitioning from horror, this is already how they work.
A horror set-piece functions similarly to a visual-effects driven action set-piece.
So while one might be a more complex production,
the approach is similar.
Making it a smoother transition for a horror director than one coming from indie comedies.
So as amazing as visual effects are and as much building smashing action as can be crammed in to movies these days;
if studios really wanna create blockbusters that make an impression on us they might wanna consider adding
just a bit more horror.
Hey guys,
so many years back when i was in college we had this assignment one time for a film class where we had to
bring in a scene that was an example of great directing.
(deep breath)
...and I brought in the T-Rex scene from Jurassic Park and, these being film students, everyone in the class (even the professor) was just like...
"Ewww...
why did you bring in a Spielberg film?"
and I always regretted that I didn't put up a stronger defense for it.
Sooo, consider THIS my super belated defense and if anyone from that class is watching this...
...you have dumb terrible taste or at least you did back then.
So anyway, enough pettiness left over from 2008.
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