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Title: Must reading for anyone who wants to direct
Review: Ignore the advice here at your peril. David Mamet has a forty-year career in the theater and in film because he KNOWS THINGS. In his books, like this one, he shares THOSE THINGS.Any intelligent reader picks the grain and leaves the chaff behind. You don't have to direct your actors to be "wooden" or "stilted." In fact, he never asks you to, not even in his equally excellent book on acting (/True and False/). If you are wise, however, you do consider what the shot means, how it is a unit of the scene, how to tell the story efficiently with action - in short, you master the vital parts of filmmaking FIRST.This isn't a technical manual - lots of good ones already exist - but a provocative, and therefore challenging, attempt to address the underlying principles behind making a film. If more film schools insisted their students master these concepts (yes, I have a friend who went through the directing program at AFI), we'd have less dreck at the cineplex.
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