And, again, be nice about it. You do not want the setups to slow way down because you were a jerk to the gaffer or one of his col- leagues. This isn’t the army, it’s a film set. People are working hard (often at below their normal feature film day rate if it’s a short) to realize your vision. Be mindful of that truth. Steak House shares her wisdom:
“Be generous. Be as generous with your crew as you want them to be with you. I am interested in the personality of the director before I say I’ll read their script. Get your ex- pectations in order. I’ve met a lot of directors that are delu- sional. They think they’re the next P.T. Anderson, and you know what—maybe they are, but not yet. It’s the difference between pride and arrogance. Pride—good; arrogance— bad. I’ve done this enough times to be able to say 100% that when the director shows up on set with a smile on their face, with an ‘I’m the luckiest guy in the world, I get to make my movie!’ attitude, the crew responds in spades. People get behind you, the actors feel it, the crew feels it, and all that great energy gets directed right back to you. I’ve heard this over and over again from crews who make their decision to work with you based on the personality of the director. Is the set going to be professional, fun, and re- spectful? If the answer is not so much they walk away re- gardless of the credit they might get or the money you’re paying.”
And I’ve heard the same thing about the producer’s attitude toward the rest of the crew. You choose a producer based on her ability to get things done, but it cannot be at the cost of the in- tegrity of the set, as Madeleine Olnek points out:
“Most importantly, the producer should be someone who is always on your side and presents a unified front with you (and the film), as opposed to someone who is just thinking about how they are coming across. Otherwise you may find yourself in a good cop/bad cop situation, where you are the bad cop, and the producer is saying things to the DP like ‘Gee, I’d like to get you lenses [for the camera], but I talked to the director, and she said she wouldn’t pay for that.’ It is often very hard for artistic collaborators to understand when their request for something that is very important to them is turned down, and when the amount is discussed in a vac- uum with no other sense of the costs for all the other de- partments, and that vacuum amount cannot be paid (and that is blamed on you). It makes them feel underappreci- ated, it creates resentment and it damages their ability to work well with you. In a case like this, a good producer would say something like ‘Sorry, but there isn’t any money in the budget for that,’ so immediately the person gets a sense of the bigger picture and the situation is neutralized. A good producer always puts the movie rather than them- selves first, and ironically that makes a better movie, which ultimately makes them look better in the long run.”
I wholeheartedly agree. And this circle of positive energy includes your director of photography. On Dani and Alice, Geary McLeod kept his crew motivated not by being a hard-ass but by being conscientious and having a lot of fun. He made sure they ate before he did, that we had enough PAs to help them get their job done, he let them shut the set down after the allotted number of hours they’d signed on for had passed (while I cried in the corner lamenting not being able to make that one
last shot), and he massaged my shoulders assuring me we’d get
those shots the next day. And we did. Also, remember it’s the DP who is essentially standing for ten hours a day (while you
and the producer can sit and watch the monitor in video vil- lage). I was not only impressed by his attitude, I was inspired by it. Having Geary’s million-dollar smile made everyone on the shoot feel respected and important, including the actors, which is critical.
Same thing happened on the shoot of Happy Birthday. The director of photography, Alexa Harris, never stopped joking and laughing with the actors, her crew, and the PAs. She even made sure to include the often-ignored hair and makeup department (Angela Marinis, who came all the way to New York from Los Angeles just to help out).
As I noted previously, this was such a low-budget shoot that was understaffed from the top down, having Alexa there laugh- ing even when things were going wrong really made a huge dif- ference. In the moment, of course, I wanted to kill her! What was there to laugh about? We were hours behind in the sched- ule! People we were counting on hadn’t shown up! We’d lost a key location! But let me say for the record, retrospectively, she had the perfect attitude and personality to handle all these un- foreseen challenges.