With some bad films getting anger directed at the director, how much of a films success really lies on the shoulders of a director?
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So in film and television, producers are in change of managing the business end of production, while directors coordinate the creative side. As such, directors are sort of like a project manager. They come in with a vision and direct a team of people working under them to execute that vision.
So the director will be working with the writing team on the script and developing story boards. On set, they’ll be providing instructions to the actors on how they want a scene performed. They’ll also be providing instructions to the heads of cinematography, sound, and lighting to determine how the scene will look. In post-production, they’ll give instructions for how they’d like the film edited. These teams do have some autonomy, as the director cannot possibly specialize in every aspect of filmmaking. But pretty much everything you see and hear on screen ultimately lies on their shoulders, once a project has been approved by the studio.
But like any project, regardless of the environment, even if you have the best people, having the wrong person lead them can result in disaster. In some cases, that person may be genuinely incompetent. However, it’s also possible to choose a competent person who just doesn’t have the skills or experience that a particular project demands. I’ll give a recent, well known example: Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Director Rian Johnson was mostly known for making high concept artsy films, some of which were pretty decent. However, he admitted in interviews he didn’t really understand Star Wars. But LucasFilm’s executive producers hired him to direct a blockbuster action-adventure film for a general audience, which he had zero experience doing. So what the public ultimately got was exactly that; a high concept art film, set in the Star Wars universe, made by someone who clearly didn’t ‘get’ the franchise. Fans hated it. Is he a bad director? Probably not, but he was the wrong choice for the project. That was a failure on the business end. But the way Hollywood works, the director is the public face of the film. Much like a CEO is the public face of a corporation. So they’re going to get the most heat when things go wrong. That’s just part of the job.
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