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Emotional experience and the capacity for enduring and retaining mental pictures of such experiences—these constitute the chief asset that distinguishes the master director from the rank and file. Practical explanations and a word of warning

Chapter I

What is the fundamental asset that makes the great motion picture director? The requisite that distinguishes the real artist from the rank and file? It is really the same asset that distinguishes the great artist in any walk of art from the less great.

When you put this question to a selected group of directors you are liable to receive a different answer from each one. In fact several were approached on the subject before this chapter was written. And very few of them agreed with one another. A still smaller number hit upon what seems the correct answer to the question.

It is quite true that the ability to “feel” a story and each one of its individual scenes, counts a lot in a director's favor. The proper “atmosphere,” the director's ability to achieve it, is vastly important. So also it is important to have the ability to properly “visualize” the continuous action of a picture even before the cameraman has once turned his crank.

But after all has been said and done on these scores it remains that the one determining factor that distinguishes the great from the near-great in the picture producing art is experience.

Other requirements are important, vastly so, but first of all and in capital letters EXPERIENCE.

It is fondly hoped that no one will presume to take this literally to the very capital letter. To produce a realistic crook story a director must not, of necessity, turn Raffles for a night. Nor to portray the effects of African “yaka water” on a white man, must he subject himself to a long siege of the drug itself. And doubtless a capable director can successfully picturize the life of a pearl fisher without diving into the briny deep.

Such specific experiences are not within the span of any one man's life. A director might know Africa thoroughly, might know what “yaka water” was as well as a “madeira chair” and then be handed a manuscript containing such nautical terms as “chain box,” “capstan,” “seacock” and “chain cable.” As a consequence a director must always hold himself in readiness for research work when a 'script containing such foreign terms comes his way.

But these experiences are largely physical experiences. And they are very minor when it comes to a summing up. No matter what peculiar terms and words are used in a story, it is the emotional content of it that counts as of greatest importance. Therefore the director with the most complete groundwork of emotional experience is the man most properly equipped to rise above his fellows. This groundwork of experience takes the shape of an emotional arc, an arc that includes on its line points representing each human emotion of life, reduced to specific and commonplace fundamentals. The more points of emotion upon the director's arc, the better craftsman he is.

Diagrams properly don't belong in books written upon an art such as directing. They should be confined to volumes on mathematics and astronomy, but a simple one introduced here will assist in illustrating the above point clearly.

Now let the arc pictured illustrate the entire span of emotional experience possible for a certain man, our great director, to have undergone. Say that the line and point A represent the emotion of suffering.

Our director has suffered in his early career. Perhaps he has slept on a park bench on a cold night with newspapers stuffed among his thin clothes to guard against the wind. His sleep has been fitful and in his moments of awakening he has thought the whole world against him—and roundly cursed it. In the morning he has risen with his bones aching and not even the two cents in his trousers necessary for the purchase of a cup of boiled muddy water called coffee down the line at Ben's Busy Bee.

This is a not uncommon case of suffering, specially in the world of make-believe, where genius is raised from poverty to affluence sometimes within the short space of a single day.

But while it is being experienced it is doubtless one of the most terrible adventures ever visited upon a human being. As a consequence in later years this experience of acute suffering remains stamped, consciously or subconsciously, on the individual's mind.

Now to the point where this experience will tell when the individual has become a director. The director is called upon to stage, we will say, the scene of Napoleon, a prisoner of the European powers on the island of St. Helena.

REX INGRAM, DRILLING SOME OF THE VARIOUS “TYPES” OF “THE FOUR HORSEMEN” IN THEIR PARTS

GEORGE FITZMAURICE TRANSFERRED “PETER IBBETSON” TO THE SCREEN RETAINING ALL ITS RARE CHARM

How can the director know how Napoleon felt? What does he know about his attitude of mind? The answers are he knows everything. Back in the photographic gallery of his mind he reaches for that scene of himself on the park bench. He recalls that that was the night during which he suffered, in his own mind, even to the extent that Napoleon had suffered.

Therefore, still in his mind's eye, our director refers to his arc of emotional experience. The point A represents the height of his suffering. He then merely extends the line A out and beyond his own emotional arc until it crosses the emotional arc of Napoleon at the point where he suffered the tortures of defeat, disillusionment and imprisonment.

On the other hand perhaps the scene of suffering that our director will be called upon to reproduce on the screen is one less important or vivid than his own. It might be a scene of a little boy stammering out his first lesson in school. Suffering, to be sure, but not of such great magnitude. In this case the line A is merely extended downward until the little boy's emotional arc is reached.

To reduce such a process of the intellect is indeed dangerous. An individual's emotional experience is no matter of diagrammatical science. However this science is purely imaginary. The whole process is carried out in the director's brain. It is only the fact that it is here reduced to cold type that makes it seem rather brutal.

Perhaps certain directors will scoff at the idea but to those it may be replied that they use such a process of reasoning whether they know it or not. The whole working out of the scheme is mechanical and subconscious to a certain extent.

Perhaps, too, there are those among the directors who believe that their moments of supreme suffering, park bench or otherwise, were far greater than Napoleon's sufferings. Nevertheless their own arcs of emotional experience still serve their good steads. Such a director merely reverses the process and goes down the line A until he reaches what he believes the arc of Napoleon, instead of going up the line. Such conceit on the part of the director does not, however, lead to the best results.

By the same process the director is able to live in his mind the greatest case of self-sacrifice that the world has ever known, provided that at one time in his career he has made a self-sacrifice that loomed of tremendous proportions at the time. His line of sacrifice, B, is followed to the point where it cuts the arc containing the greatest sacrificial act of the world. And of course on the line, B, as on all the other lines from all the other points innumerable other arcs cut across representing cases of emotion between the greatest and the humblest.

And so by his own experience, no matter how small or how large it is in comparison to the experience he is to picturize, the director is able to give a realistic and sensitive representation of it on the motion picture screen.

The case holds the same with all the other emotions of life. Perhaps with the case of love it is a bit different. For in the matter of other emotions the director may grant that someone else has experienced them in greater degree than he. But with the matter of his own romance or romances—no! All directors have no hesitancy in claiming, only to themselves of course, that theirs is the greatest in the world. Consequently there is no line C, but just the point. It is stationary. The director follows it neither up nor down to reach out for some similar point on another arc. Thus it is that romantic scenes are quite the most frequently done realistically and properly of all the emotional scenes contrived for the screen. This time the director's conceit does not stand in his way.

For the rest the great director's arc of emotional experience contains every emotion, every cross and mixture of emotions, that he has lived through during his life. His arc contains hundreds of lines, each one distinguished from the other by less than a hair's breadth. And yet, when he comes to employ the arc in his work, the exact line he desires immediately stands out in bold relief from the others and the director sets to work upon it.

Thus the greatest directors of today are the men who have run the greatest gamut of emotional experience. To converse with D. W. Griffith is to instantly realize that here is a man who has suffered, sacrificed, lost, loved, triumphed. His brain is a storehouse of emotional experience, his own particular arc contains so many points upon it that a dozen times a dozen alphabets would not suffice to represent them all.

Thomas H. Ince has confessed to tramping Broadway searching for work. Chance led him to the old Biograph studio. Today he is among the greatest producers in the art. And it is a safe wager that his beginnings and struggles have not been obliterated from his mind by his success—rather they have been responsible for it.

Charles Chaplin, greatest comedian in the world and his own director gives evidence in each of his pictures, mute, grand evidence of the sufferings, the sacrifices, the little joys and triumphs of the days of his youth when he had nothing.

And so does every great director today show in his pictures, whether he knows it or not, the experiences in his emotional career.

And let it be said also that the less great display a remarkable lack of experience.

It must be reiterated here that these chapters are not to be taken in the light of a text book. The writer would have a holy horror of having on his mind a happily married family man, who tossed up his business and his bank account to sleep on a park bench, and who tossed up his wife and children to enter upon one illicit love affair after another, just to complete his arc of emotional experience, because it has been stated here that the fullest arc produces the best results.

Such experiences must come naturally. The great director is a born artist. The born artist is a natural vagabond and nine-hundred and ninety-nine people of a thousand are not natural vagabonds.

After this fundamental requisite of experience come a dozen other assets that go to make the good director—the great director. The ability to handle people, to be a master of men, the knack of “visualization,” to inject those little touches into a scene that perform the miraculous act of “getting under the skin,” to achieve a proper and telling “atmosphere,” etc., etc. These requisites will be dealt with in other chapters, sometimes by the directors themselves.

But no matter how important these other essentials loom it may be stated again that first of all EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE counts.