This past weekend I made my way to Indigo (kind of like Borders in the USA) and bought myself a couple books, one of which was “On Directing Film” by David Mamet. David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, and a director. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his play “Glengarry Glen Ross”.

The book was pretty short, so it was easy to finish fairly quickly, just took me a few hours to read, I wish it was a little longer and had some more meat to it (it was only 100 or so pages long). Nonetheless I enjoyed it, and thought it had some good ideas to learn from.

The key point that Mamet tries very hard to make over and over again is that you should aim to simplify your films. Don’t try to be to overt in the way you film your scenes, rather film them very basically, and only film what is necessary to the shot. For example, if you wanted to make it appear as though you are on a farm, you don’t need to film a sign that says “Farm”, or if you wanted to portray that your character is running late, you don’t need him saying “I’m late”. What Mamet would prefer is for you to avoid narration, and infer that your character is late through a series of shots.

The book is a good read, it’s short, and it’s pretty cheap. Although Mamet seems to contradict some other things I’ve read elsewhere, (unless I’m misunderstanding him, he seems to think establishing shots are sort of stupid) I think it would be a pretty good idea to see what his opinions are (he has won a Pulitzer). From what I’ve read in some interviews with him, he hates where film in America has gone, and really dislikes Hollywood. Anyway, here is his book.

Posted by Emmet Gibney on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 2:54 pm.