In any event, this is a script problem, and should not be laid at the feet of the director. If you’re going to bash Ridley Scott, he can’t be blamed for that.
– Jackrabbit Slim on Ridley Scott
I don’t agree with this. If the script sucks it’s the directors fault. Unless he (I’m going to assume it’s a “he” for simplicity’s sake) had a gun to his head, he didn’t have to film what was on the page.
Let me get this straight first, I’ve never done any actual directing. The closest I’ve ever come to it was producing student theatre for a year (which I quit because, while I’m good at getting money, I have no organisational skills). What I saw of it was that there seems to be no formula for it. Some talk, some shout, some seem to do as little as possible and you always wonder how the thing ended up like it did (most of it pretty bad when it came to my student theatre group).
What I do believe though is that it is the directors fault if it was bad. The director is the main guy responsible for anything that goes on on the stage, or the screen, when it comes to film. All the elements he has to his disposal, script, actors, crew, orchestra, etc., are his to do with the best he can. He is the last arbiter, judge, tollboothman, what have you, on its way to the audience. If what ends up there is bad, for whatever reason – there was no money, the actor was crazy/hormonal, he was forced under gunpoint to do the script – it’s his fault. He should have found an alternative or got rid of it. Perhaps force majeur can be blamed – the stage was flooded, it came out the same week as 9-11, the Weinsteins took out the scissors – but even then I’m not sure.
Inversely and perhaps unfairly, for the same reasons, I don’t believe one can credit directly the director if it’s good. Hundreds of reasons it might be good. He might just have been lucky – good cast, good crew, great script, lots of money, the Weinsteins took out the scissors – and had very little to do with any of it. Unless you were there during filming, how would you know? Even if you were I’m guessing it’s hard.
The only way I can see to judge whether a director is any good (as an audience member. I’m sure producers, executives, crew members and actors have other criteria) is the number of good films he has made. There might still be an element of luck to it, though after a number of good films this is unlikely, or a good crew that make all the right decisions for him, but whatever it is he is doing he is doing it right.
Which is why I think it was right that Martin Scorsese got the award for Best Director last year, even if The Departed wasn’t his best film, or even the best film of that year. And why Ridley Scott should get the award this year.
Gone Elsewhere 
I suppose in general you’re right, but there are a lot of directors for hire who direct the scripts they’re assigned. To use an old baseball quote, you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit. If I were a first-time director given a shaky script, and I had no power, I wouldn’t quit if it meant I didn’t have food on my table. Since we can’t know the dynamics of who has the power in every film (except for the directors who write their own script) I feel uncomfortable assigning blame to a director for a script problem.
To use another sports analogy, I think directors are like quarterbacks in football. When they win, they get too much credit, and when they lose they get too much blame.
Well, to linger on your baseball quote, don’t put yourself in a position where you have to make a chicken sandwich out of chicken shit. Find some better ingredients or consider changing employer. If you don’t/can’t do that, don’t blame anyone else if it tastes like shit, since you made it.
Hoo boy, Nick, okay, if that’s how you think the world works, but I don’t see it that way. Choosing one’s employer is a nice luxury, but it doesn’t work out that way very often. If you were fresh out of film school and were offered a nice fat salary to direct a film, the only caveat being the script was written by the producer’s nephew and couldn’t be changed, and it was so-so, would you turn the job down? With the opportunities for directing film features coming along about as often as solar eclipses? I’d take the job and try to do the best I could with a difficult situation. I mean, there are hundreds of films produced just in the U.S. alone every year, and about 1-5 percent of them are any good. They all have to have directors, and directors need work. Sometimes you hold your nose and do what needs to be done.
And why are you giving the Oscar to Ridley Scott already? Have you seen American Gangster? Let’s see if it’s any good before giving him hardware for it.
I wouldn’t go to quite the same extreme; it’s not just the director’s fault when things aren’t good.
Works the other way, too, doesn’t it? You can hardly swing your arms without hitting a screenwriter who’s upset about the way one of their scripts was filmed. And with guild arbitration working the way it does, a director can write a very significant percentage of the script himself without being credited for it.
So I’m very comfortable saying that it’s hard to know how to portion the blame, and I’m not really interested in doing that anyway. But letting the director off the hook seems like a very poor way to evaluate these things – he does have the power to mitigate script problems and in some ways that’s precisely his job.
Listen, I know there are things beyond one’s control, and I give leeway for that. You have good days and bad days, and sometimes you’re forced to do things that you don’t feel like doing. Directing a bad script might be one of those things, or having your film implode on you another.
But directing a number of bad films? Then, I’m sorry, you’re doing something wrong and you’re a bad director. A number of skills are required from a good director, and one of the main ones is selecting good projects and managing to keep them together. And as Brian pointed out, you can always punch up the script in some way or another.
I used a time machine.