On What Makes a Director by Elia Kazan

On the Waterfront (Directed by Elia Kazan)

In the view of Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan's career, from March 1943 through 1954, was "without a doubt the most astonishing epoch any American director ever experienced."  Co-founding the Actors Studio in New York in 1947 and winning two Tony Awards for outstanding theatre director (for Arthur Miller's All My Sons in 1947 and Miller's Death of a Salesman two years later), Kazan increasingly focused his artistic energies on cinema. 

Kazan was approached by producer Louis "Bud" Lighton of Twentieth Century Fox who gave Kazan Betty Smith's award-winning novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, launching a five-film deal with the studio. Kazan found various points of personal attachment in this story of Irish immigrants living in early twentieth-century Brooklyn. (Kazan was born to Greek parents in what is now Istanbul, Turkey, and relocated with his family eventually to New York).

In Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis' adaptation of Smith's story, Kazan was drawn to themes linked with immigrant ideals of American potential, “the first piece of material offered me that made me think about my own life and my own dilemma.”

Kazan is hailed as one of the greatest theatre directors-turned-filmmakers of all time while also being roundly rebuked for his infamous testimony against former colleagues and associates during the House Un-American Activities Committee's witch hunts in 1952. Many people have questioned if the voice of an unsettled conscience can be heard in Kazan's films, particularly On the Waterfront (1954). 

None, however, have questioned the strength, daring, and subtleties of Kazan's greatest and most enduring films, from A Face in the Crowd (1957)'s still-potent critique of media-made politics to the defiantly sordid vision of debased sexuality in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Baby Doll (1956). However, Kazan considered the United States to be his greatest and most intimate topic, which he examined with an intense sensitivity to American culture's contrasts. 

Indeed, such masterpieces as East of Eden (1955), Splendor in the Grass (1961), Wild River (1960), and America, America (1963) are marked by an insatiable search for the deeper spirit of the American experience. 

In the fall of 1973, after a two week retrospective of his films at Wesleyan University, Elia Kazan delivered a timeless speech on directing for film which can now be found in Kazan on Directing. 

It should be noted that at the Yale Drama School and elsewhere I had a valuable time as a backstage technician. I was a stage carpenter and I lit shows. Then there was a tedious time as a radio actor, playing hoodlums for bread. I had a particularly educational four years as a stage manager helping and watching directors and learning a great deal. And, in between, I had a lively career as a stage actor in some good plays. All these activities were very valuable to me.

In time, I was fortunate enough to have directed the works of the best dramatists of a couple of the decades which have now become history. I was privileged to serve Williams, Miller, Bill Inge, Archie MacLeish, Sam Behrman, and Bob Anderson and put some of their plays on the stage. I thought of my role with these men as that of a craftsman who tried to realize as well as he could the author’s intentions in the author’s vocabulary and within his range, style, and purpose.

I have not thought of my film work that way.

Some of you may have heard of the auteur theory. That concept is partly a critic’s plaything. Something for them to spat over and use to fill a column. But it has its point, and that point is simply that the director is the true author of the film. The director tells the film, using a vocabulary, the lesser part of which is an arrangement of words.

A screenplay’s worth has to be measured less by its language than by its architecture and how that dramatizes the theme. A screenplay, we directors soon enough learn, is not a piece of writing as much as it is a construction. We learn to feel for the skeleton under the skin of words.

Meyerhold, the great Russian stage director, said that words were the decoration on the skirts of action. He was talking about Theatre, but I’ve always thought his observations applied more aptly to film.

It occurred to me when I was considering what to say here that since you all don’t see directors—it’s unique for Wesleyan to have a filmmaker standing where I am after a showing of work, while you have novelists, historians, poets and writers of various kinds of studies living among you—that it might be fun if I were to try to list for you and for my own sport what a film director needs to know as what personal characteristics and attributes he might advantageously possess.

How must he educate himself?

Of what skills is his craft made?

Of course, I’m talking about a book-length subject. Stay easy, I’m not going to read a book to you tonight. I will merely try to list the fields of knowledge necessary to him, and later those personal qualities he might happily possess, give them to you as one might give chapter headings, section leads, first sentences of paragraphs, without elaboration.

Here we go.

Literature. Of course. All periods, all languages, all forms. Naturally a film director is better equipped if he’s well read. John Ford, who introduced himself with the words, “I make Westerns,” was an extremely well and widely read man.

The Literature of the Theatre. For one thing, so the film director will appreciate the difference from film. He should also study the classic theatre literature for construction, for exposition of theme, for the means of characterization, for dramatic poetry, for the elements of unity, especially that unity created by pointing to climax and then for climax as the essential and final embodiment of the theme.

The Craft of Screen Dramaturgy. Every director, even in those rare instances when he doesn’t work with a writer or two—Fellini works with a squadron—must take responsibility for the screenplay. He has not only to guide rewriting but to eliminate what’s unnecessary, cover faults, appreciate nonverbal possibilities, ensure correct structure, have a sense of screen time, how much will elapse, in what places, for what purposes. Robert Frost’s Tell Everything a Little Faster applies to all expositional parts. In the climaxes, time is unrealistically extended, “stretched,” usually by clasps.

The film director knows that beneath the surface of his screenplay there is a subtext, a calendar of intentions and feelings and inner events. What appears to be happening, he soon learns, is rarely what is happening. This subtext is one of the film director’s most valuable tools. It is what he directs. You will rarely see a veteran director holding a script as he works—or even looking at it. Beginners, yes.

Most directors’ goal today is to write their own scripts. But that is our oldest tradition. Chaplin would hear that Griffith Park had been flooded by a heavy rainfall. Packing his crew, his stand-by actors and his equipment in a few cars, he would rush there, making up the story of the two reel comedy en route, the details on the spot.

The director of films should know comedy as well as drama. Jack Ford used to call most parts “comics.” He meant, I suppose, a way of looking at people without false sentiment, through an objectivity that deflated false heroics and undercut self-favoring and finally revealed a saving humor in the most tense moments. The Human Comedy, another Frenchman called it. The fact that Billy Wilder is always amusing doesn’t make his films less serious.

Quite simply, the screen director must know either by training or by instinct how to feed a joke and how to score with it, how to anticipate and protect laughs. He might well study Chaplin and the other great two reel comedy-makers for what are called sight gags, non-verbal laughs, amusement derived from “business,” stunts and moves, and simply from funny faces and odd bodies. This vulgar foundation—the banana peel and the custard pie—are basic to our craft and part of its health. Wyler and Stevens began by making two reel comedies, and I seem to remember Capra did, too.

American film directors would do well to know our vaudeville traditions.

Just as Fellini adored the clowns, music hall performers, and the circuses of his country and paid them homage again and again in his work, our filmmaker would do well to study magic. I believe some of the wonderful cuts in Citizen Kane came from the fact that Welles was a practicing magician and so understood the drama of sudden unexpected appearances and the startling change. Think, too, of Bergman, how often he uses magicians and sleight of hand.

The director should know opera, its effects and its absurdities, a subject in which Bernardo Bertolucci is schooled. He should know the American musical stage and its tradition, but even more important, the great American musical films. He must not look down on these; we love them for very good reasons.

Our man should know acrobatics, the art of juggling and tumbling, the techniques of the wry comic song. The techniques of the Commedia dell’arte are used, it seems to me, in a film called O Lucky Man! Lindsay Anderson’s master, Bertolt Brecht, adored the Berlin satirical cabaret of his time and adapted their techniques.

Let’s move faster because it’s endless.

Painting and Sculpture; their history, their revolutions and counter revolutions. The painters of the Italian Renaissance used their mistresses as models for the Madonna, so who can blame a film director for using his girlfriend in a leading role—unless she does a bad job.

Many painters have worked in the Theatre. Bakst, Picasso, Aronson and Matisse come to mind. More will. Here, we are still with Disney.

Which brings us to Dance. In my opinion, it’s a considerable asset if the director’s knowledge here is not only theoretical but practical and personal. Dance is an essential part of a screen director’s education. It’s a great advantage for him if he can “move.” It will help him not only to move actors but move the camera. The film director, ideally, should be as able as a choreographer, quite literally. So I don’t mean the tango in Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris or the High School gym dance in American Graffiti as much as I do the battle scenes in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation which are pure choreography and very beautiful. Look at how Ford’s Cavalry charges that way. Or Jim Cagney’s dance of death on the long steps in The Roaring Twenties.

The film director must know music, classic, so called—too much of an umbrella word, that! Let us say of all periods. And as with sculpture and painting, he must know what social situations and currents the music came out of.

Of course he must be particularly into the music of his own day—acid rock; latin rock; blues and jazz; pop; tin pan alley; barbershop; corn; country; Chicago; New Orleans; Nashville. The film director should know the history of stage scenery, its development from background to environment and so to the settings inside which films are played out. Notice I stress inside which as opposed to in front of. The construction of scenery for filmmaking was traditionally the work of architects. The film director must study from life, from newspaper clippings and from his own photographs, dramatic environments and particularly how they affect behavior.

I recommend to every young director that he start his own collection of clippings and photographs and, if he’s able, his own sketches.

The film director must know costuming, its history through all periods, its techniques and what it can be as expression. Again, life is a prime source. We learn to study, as we enter each place, each room, how the people there have chosen to present themselves. “How he comes on,” we say.

Costuming in films is so expressive a means that it is inevitably the basic choice of the director. Visconti is brilliant here. So is Bergman in a more modest vein. The best way to study this again is to notice how people dress as an expression of what they wish to gain from any occasion, what their intention is. Study your husband, study your wife, how their attire is an expression of each day’s mood and hope, their good days, their days of low confidence, their time of stress and how it shows in clothing.