Your bag is empty.
When I was in film school back in the 1980s, the goal was to tell a story visually. That’s why the old silent films are so interesting—even though some have dialogue cards, the best don’t have very many. Movies started as an exclusively visual medium. With the advent of sound, you were able to explain more things through dialogue, and people got used to witty banter and clever exchanges. Sometimes, we as writers fall back on that as a crutch. For me, the great challenge is to tell something visually.
Part of the emphasis on verbal storytelling comes from the process of script writing. The joke is that when studio executives read a script, they read just the dialogue—they skip over all the action and description. I don’t know if that’s true, but there are times when you feel that way. You’ll write something out visually—the way something happens to a character, or what they’re observing and how they’re processing it—and then you’ll get notes that the audience isn’t going to understand this and this. Generally, when you’re addressing notes, you’re writing dialogue to explain everything.
As filmmakers, we write all this exposition to shore something up, but the minute two actors get together, so much is spoken visually, through their facial expressions, the positioning of their bodies, the way they’re interacting spatially with each other. You assume you have to explain this and this, but then two charismatic actors appear on-screen and the minute they see each other, the audience goes, “They’re gonna fall in love.”
For the sex scene between Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm that begins Bridesmaids, we choreographed it like a dance and a fight at the same time. That’s what made us laugh: Let’s start this movie by just blasting it out of the gate with a woman who’s in a really bad relationship. You watch it and immediately think, My God, this poor thing. (Of course, if you watch my more recent film, A Simple Favor, you’ll realize I do the exact same thing every time I shoot a sex scene: It always starts in a wide shot, and as they hit the bed, I slowly push in and land on somebody’s face. And that’s about it.)
When Melissa McCarthy does her first kill in Spy, she gets in a fight with this guy who falls off a ledge and has a horrible death. She sees it and throws up on him, then drops the knife on him. That’s a very big visual, physical gag; as an audience member, you instantly go, “If I killed somebody, I would probably throw up.” It’s about finding what is visually attached to the story you’re telling.
I shot my new movie, Last Christmas, entirely in central London. Even though it’s a fairly verbal story of two people falling in love, it’s important that the visuals augment it to make you feel like you’re there. So that’s another level of visuals: providing a beautiful backdrop for the verbal.
It can be the hardest thing in the world for a director to figure out which movie to do next. But making films with female leads is all I’ve ever wanted to do. I really relate to women, and female characters have been portrayed so poorly on the screen for so long. I know so many funny, talented women, and a lot of female audience members weren’t seeing themselves in certain roles because of the language of movies and Hollywood’s patriarchal view of the world. The men were the heroes, and the women were the ones at home. And that’s not aspirational at all. Who watches that and goes, “Cool, I can’t wait to be one of these nagging wives who tell the hero he’s got to have dinner with the family instead of going out and stopping that nuclear bomb from blowing up the city”? Everybody wants to be the hero. The women in my life are all very heroic.
I was really drawn to doing Ghostbusters because the idea of the original movie is so great: funny, smart people trying to defeat the supernatural with technology. It’s so rich for more exploration. I told the studio, “You can’t make this small.” It has to be big and visual, which is why we did it in 3-D and came up with new tricks, like shooting the proton stream through the IMAX screen’s black bars. Honestly, my favorite way to watch our movie is in IMAX, because it’s such a different—and completely visual—experience.
What I love about what I do is we have to get it right only once. A lot of times we go in not knowing if we can get it right, and then there’s that lightning-in-a-bottle moment when two actors connect, or some stunt goes a way you didn’t think it would, or a train goes through the background of your shot right when you didn’t expect it. That’s what’s so wonderful about the visual: You lock in time every single element you wanted to control or wanted to create or were lucky enough to find. It’s these moments that bring that visual energy to an audience, and they get to watch it for hundreds of years after.
Read the Rest of The Playboy Symposium: On the Five Senses
Touch is More Than Touch by Emma Koenig
I See What I Hear by Sacha Jenkins
Taste Takes Time by Marina Tweed
Chlorine and Brunettes by Colman Andrews