What I’m particularly fascinated by, as this technology continues forward, is just how important, and common it will be for 270 degree video or such, where you’ll be able to see the field of view ahead of you, up and down, left and right, but that there’ll be a trend to really ignore looking behind you.

For my money, I think it’ll follow the aesthetic choices of aspect ratios in cinema now, where there are certain cinematic conventions that have an overall feel and convey tones.

That, and the fact that it quickly becomes tiring in a standard seat to have to look behind yourself all the time.

Not to mention the fact that there’s so much work involved in removing the operator from a scene.

270 degrees would change all that.

I had the very recent pleasure to sit down and chat with The Jungle Book director Jon Favreau.

Below is the transcription of our interview, which you can listen to at screendirector.org

Welcome to Screen Director Jon

My Pleasure.

How did you know you wanted to be a director?

Wow. I started off as an actor then I became a writer when I wrote Swingers but I had wanted to direct Swingers and I guess I had always wanted to eventually become a director, thinking that maybe if I worked my way up as an actor I could get into a position where I could get a small film made. But I thought it was going to take a whole career to get there. I thought I was going to be maybe an actor on Saturday Night Live, maybe a sitcom, maybe supporting roles in films. Then maybe once I built up a name, I would have enough leverage to try and get a script made or something like that. Have a career like Woody Allen.

But when I wrote Swingers I kind of leapfrogged through all those steps and found myself in a position where I was being offered things as a director and though none of those things really came together I did work as a rewriter and made a living that way. That was very helpful cause I learned to sit in development meetings and get notes, talk to other directors who were giving me guidance as a writer.

None of the stuff I wrote got made until Elf and I had been working about a year as a writer on that and part of the deal was if it got green lit then I would direct. I had done a small film called Made between Swingers, but Elf was the one that really, because of the commercial and critical success, it put me on the quote unquote lists that you have to be on to be considered a director.

And back then a lot more movies were getting made than are getting made now, so there was an opportunity to do that both in the independent world and smaller studio films.

That leads me to The Jungle Book, and I guess that given the gamut of your career, how have you found the process directing a largely animated film? And how does that differ from live action. I guess I’m particularly interested to know with the animated process, you can see the whole film in its entirety in an edit before you actually go on set and shoot something.

Do you want a really complicated version of this?

Yes please. Our audience is working directors

I figured it’s for directors, so here’s a little inside baseball.

We took the front end of the animation pipeline, and I’ve been watching the way they do it at Pixar, for many years and really impressed with the work that they’ve done and every time I’d hear interviews or talk with people like John Lasseter, who I’ve known for many years, they would always say the same thing. I would ask them technical questions and they’d always go back to story.

How do you do the visual effects? How do you render this and that?

Story. Story. Story.

That’s all they care about. And the way they explore story is through both writers and the story department.

In a live action film, what tends to happen is, they kinda hold back the green light. The way it was told to me is that before you have the green light, the studio has the gun to your head, but then once you’re in production you have the gun to the studios head. You’re off and running.

Whether that’s true or not, it is safe to say that a point of leverage shifts once the studio commits to making the movie. Up until the point they green light the film, they limit the amount of resources they invest in something so that if they decide to back out or make a different movie they’re not caught losing a lot of money.

Now if you look at the way Pixar does it, it’s a much different process. They put a lot of money into pre-production. They bring on a story department to do pencil sketches, storyboards, gag ideas. They bring on writers and production designers. They start designing environments. You could walk into rooms and between the storyboards, the illustrations and the colour studies, you really get a sense of what this movie’s going to be.

So they do pre-production as though they’re gonna make every movie.

That’s a much more expensive process and it takes more people and requires more of a commitment. But when they do finally go forward with a movie, they have a story that’s been stress tested. It has a lot more care and understanding and a lot more vision has gone into it as opposed to most live action movies that get green lit.

So when you’re working with a company like Marvel you have a release date that you’re rushing towards. You have a writer you’re working with. A director. Maybe there’s some illustrations being done but there’s a sense that you’ll discover a certain amount of it. You try to get a script as good as you can, but you allow for the fact that you’re probably going to learn something through the process. You’re gonna make discoveries in production and when you edit the movie, you’ll put some temporary visual effects in and put it in front of an audience to bounce it off a crowd and see if they like it. If there are parts that aren’t working out, you might shoot some additional days.

It’s this organic process that progresses all the way up to release.

You don’t have that luxury with an animated film. With an animated film, and this is dating all the way back to Walt Disney’s days, they would sweatbox showreels and put together pencils and really scrutinise this thing before you ever went to ink and paint, because even though it’s low tech compared to what we do today, was still a very expensive technical process. So if a scene ended up on the cutting room floor after it was inked and painted... they still talk about Snow White and there’s a scene where they’re scrubbing up and you can see the outtakes, but it was a big deal that there was one whole sequence that was removed whereas in a live action film, sequences disappear constantly. Sometimes whole reels disappear for the purposes of making a film more playable. But that’s all resources that end up on the cutting room floor that could have been invested in the film and when you dealing with a studio like Pixar or Disney Animation, you’re going to see a much more precise version of planning so that you don’t end up going through the expensive process of rendering these shots if they won’t end up in the film.

And so, I think that the reason the batting average oil animated films is so good versus live action is because so much care is put into the front end. So that’s part of what I presented as my vision for this thing as I approached the people from Disney who were interested in making this and hiring me.

They agreed.

Fortunately Disney’s a company that’e enjoyed a lot of success through animation, both in Pixar and Disney Animation, so they understood this workflow and they committed those resources before we were green lit. So I had a head of story and a story department, who were developing scripts and character tests. Animation tests would see how the talking would work and how photo real we could get things. We had engaged MPC (The Moving Picture Company) and Weta to be our partners and in helping with the technique I brought on Rob Legato who had built out the front end. And Joyce Cox who had worked on Avatar so we had an understanding of motion capture. Andy Jones, who was one of the lead animators on Avatar was our lead animator. I had a lot of people who had a lot of experience in motion capture and animation and so the long answer for one short question is that we planned it as though it was an animated film and then when you would normally go to layout and start laying in cameras and moving the characters, that’s when we went to motion capture. We treated this as though we were doing film like Avatar.

With Neel Sethi who is our Mowgli, we did a motion capture with a scratch track and pencils. When we went to the next phase we did a full motion capture version of the movie. On sets, with the motion capture suits we laid cameras in, we worked with Bill Pope and Rob Legato and our full crew and we came up with a cut of the movie.

That cut of the movie looked like a video game version of the film with all the voices and camera angles.

Once we signed off on that cut, that’s when we took a page out of the book of Gravity. Alfonso had planned all those shots and when he filmed his leads in there, it was almost like an element shoot. You had already committed to camera, lenses and lighting. By having all that information and having visual effects involved from pre-production through to the set, and having our editor cut each shot in, and having everybody sign off, look each other in the eye and give the thumbs up we knew that these elements we were shooting were going to work in a bullet proof way when it came to the photorealism.

Once we put that together and I looked at all the performances and did another pass at editing. Then of course you could do another pass at the animation and adjust what some characters were saying if something wasn’t working quite right. So you’d try to show it to crowds, it’s tough cause it’s in such rough form. Sometimes scenes are just in pencil.

You’d use your intuition and experience to make some final adjustments then you’d turn sequences over and the magicians would go to work. The visual effects people would do their thing.

Now you’re an animation director!

Andrew Stanton gave me some really valuable advice - we had gone up to Pixar to talk to the brains trust and show them cuts of the film, and they were very helpful and cooperative - and the one piece of advice he gave me, from working live action on John Carter, was have direct interaction with your animators.

Often times a director would deal with the visual effects supervisor and animation will fall under that umbrella. But in the case of this movie, so much performance is indicated by the animators that I would have sessions just with the animators everyday if I could and several times a week with Andy Jones, the supervisor there and I would deal directly with them. I’d often fly out to London to meet with MPC. As an actor I could give very specific notes and would sometimes act it out on videotape, where I’d lip-sync to the performances and we’d use the animation based on cameras we had on the actors whilst they were recording their voices, very often together.

I wanted to get their performance to come out in a natural way. Sometimes we’d find clips from old movies that these actors were in and I’d say look at that expression! “That’s the Bill Murray moment that I want there. Or see Chris Walken was in this scene, let’s see if we could get that type of eye contact going!”

So was there something particular about translating those performances to the film that was a particular hurdle but that you found some way around?

There were certain discoveries we made along the way. We went way out of our way to get either motion capture or what ILM calls Eye-Mo-Cap where you set up several cameras and create motion capture data from video images by triangulating multiple cameras.

So we would take the performances that they actually gave us with their facial expressions. For certain characters it was more important than others. For King Louie who’s a Gigantopithecus primate, it’s more important than a snake, than Kaa for Scarlett. But we always wanted the performance to dictate the performance of the animal, but we tried to transpose that through the physical language the animal would use.

A snake uses the way their body moves, whereas one of the wolves used their eyes a lot - very anthropomorphic eye movement.

With the cats like Shere Khan or Bagheera it’s more their body language. Big cats don’t really use their eyebrows in the same way humans do. We really didn’t want to overlap with the uncanny valley when it came to the expressions of the animals. But once we got a language for them we would take the performances the actors gave us and we’d layer them directly on, like King Louie, or the animators would interpret them to the language of that particular species.

Finally, what did you learn from this film that you’re going to take forward into the next project?

I was speaking to Edgar Wright when I was making this film and he’s a wonderful friend and fantastic filmmaker and he remarked that when filmmakers go through working in animation or something approximating animation it forces them to use a different set of tools and you see that the movies they do after they’ve dealt with animation show a different style of filmmaking that’s generally a bit more decisive than previously.

For example with myself, I encourage a lot of freedom and improvisation, a lot of camera angles and I tend to discover things on the set and even moreso in the editing room that shape it. With animation it’s very hard to do that. You have to plan ahead of time. You can allow for certain spontaneous moments, but for the most part every blade of grass in this film is something set in by an artist that I’ve approved. Every performance, every shot. It’s very mannered and I try very hard to give it a freedom, but it forced me out of my comfort zone of allowing things to be discovered through collaboration on the set, where happy accidents happen, but now I actually had to plan things in a way that looked like they were happy accidents.

As Edgar pointed out, when directors come out of that you see a different version of that director.

The one he pointed out to me most recently is George Miller.

You look at Mad Max, Road Warrior and even Thunderdome which are very exciting, energetic and entertaining films. But then he goes off and does Babe and Happy Feet and here he comes out the other end and Fury Road is, I would say the finest piece of cinema he’s done and certainly the best in the Mad Max series.

So that level of care and planning and storyboarding and when I was talking to him about he did it, he created it as a visual story moreso than a script. There was a script, but he’d designed reams and reams of storyboards. Each moment was planned out and thought through which just adds to the energy of that movie but it also makes you feel like you’re sitting and observing a master director doing this tremendous piece of cinema. The fact that it came very close to winning Best Picture means it was very well embraced. I was around for awards season, and involved with the DGA, I got to introduce him and the film when it was nominated, but now that the smoke has cleared, and other films may have won the awards, there certainly was a rousing ovation and sense of support and love of this guy.

The fact that a genre movie like Fury Road fought its way all the way through and won a slew of awards, just not the top one, were well deserved. Even the editing is a testament to how refined his filmmaking had become working through this medium.

Fantastic. Thank you very much for your time and we look forward to seeing your Fury Road in the very near future

Me too!

Bryan Unger with Director Ang Lee. Photo credit Directors Guild of America

G. Bryan Unger is the Associate National Executive Director of the Directors Guild of America. In our conversation we discussed the relationship between the DGA and ADG, how it’s changed since the ADG’s unionisation and the challenges facing directors guilds now and in the future.

How do you see the relationship between the ADG and DGA? Has it changed over time?

The ADG formed as a fraternal organisation (the Australian Screen Directors Association) early on.  They weren’t certified as a union, but they got a lot of Australian Directors together, going back to the first wave of Australian films – the Peter Weir, Philip Noyce, Fred Schepsi and Gillian Armstrong group. They were making films in Australia, which were then getting noticed in the U.S., and a lot of those directors were coming over to work for American studios, and eventually joining the DGA.

The relationship between the DGA and the ADG began when the ADG started taking on a more formal structure in the 1990s (again, as ASDA at that time).  There were some meetings with the English-speaking directors organisations:  Directors Guild of Canada, DGA, the former Directors Guild of Great Britain and ASDA – we have been in communication and exchanging ideas for some time.  The recent activity to become a union has sparked a renewed interest and opportunity to talk to people again and to help the ADG to facilitate its union’s formation.

Having now unionised do you think that’s going to help the current generation of Australian Directors coming to America and vice versa? Or is it more about guidance and the working relationships with producers, studios and production companies?

We’ve always had a great relationship with Australians – there are a number of people working here now who have fostered that. I don’t know that it affects the individual so much coming from here to there, though it does help.  For instance, with the Directors Guild of Canada, we have a more formalised structure because there is a sister organisation to talk to if there are any issues.  I do think it changes the way we deal with productions from the U.S. going to Australia. 

There are really three things going on in Australia: One is local production for Australian television and films. Secondly, there is international production – a great example is the recent announcement of Disney and Fox producing films that content-wise are not inherently Australian, they just happen to be filming in Australia. This is an area where we have a lot of experience dealing with conglomerates and at those budget levels. I think we can help add value to the ADG’s relationship there. 

Third is the re-use issue, which always comes up.  For example, the re-runs of Friends that end up on Australian TV and of course the Australian Directors always say that the local producer can’t produce original content cheaper than they can buy the re-run of Friends. Our directors share in some revenue of the sale of U.S. content to other markets, just like we hope Australian directors will one day share in the revenue streams of the projects they work on. On the other side of the coin, we want to encourage and promote Australian production. There’s a bigger international market that’s opening up because of online platforms like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. These companies are looking to acquire content and people are interested to see it. Top of the Lake was not Australian – but from New Zealand – and is an example of something that really found its audience through online platforms.

“It’s important to recognise and I believe the ADG recognises this too, that if you produce good content, people will watch.”

It’s interesting considering online, in terms of the Australian quota systems for broadcasters - yet the online players aren’t beholden to the same system. How do you see that as a challenge - particularly for Australian directors?

Each country has to look at where they are and what they want to promote in terms of their broadcasting. In some countries, it was found that without some form of government intervention, re-use and sports dominate.

In Australia, people are sports fanatics and watch of all kinds of sports. If you don’t have some protected space for dramas, you might not ever get them on television.

I look at much of the US programming in Australia as akin to dumping of agricultural produce - because we lack the language barrier that operates as a certain filter in many other markets - sure there’s the flip where our talent can come and work here with greater ease - but it does bear some focus on not the free speech issue, but rather the transformation of the economic models

It’s important to recognise and I believe the ADG recognises this too, that if you produce good content, people will watch.

When all they have are re-runs of Friends, we find that the audience will watch re-runs of Friends.  But if they ever have a choice – and this is as true in Canada as well as Australia – local productions are almost always more popular in terms of ratings, because people want to see their own culture.

But it has to be well made.

And the caveat is that the broadcaster has to put up the money, hire the people, and develop the scripts, as well as pay directors who know what they’re doing to make it good. The director plays a critical role in making good content that people will watch.

I’m curious in terms of craft - we have Thomas Schlamme coming to Australia to talk about his craft and hopefully be the first of many directors who visit - is there something that we can do to face some of these challenges? And the overall sharing of knowledge?

That is really the goal of this first step that we’re taking.  There are two levels, the first of which is that there is a lot to share in terms of the craft. Tommy is a great example of someone who has directed a lot, and at a very high level. His experiences will be helpful to other directors around the world, but particularly Australia. We have always been interested in the cultural exchange. It’s evolved naturally with people from Australia being involved with the DGA, such as Philip Noyce, who has been on our creative rights committee for many years.

Despite all the evolution in technology, at its core the process of a director taking a script, breaking it down, visualising it, guiding the actors through and covering it to make it visual - remains largely the same. 

The tools around it have changed significantly; editing, lighting, cameras. But the core hasn’t really changed.  Directors have found new and exciting ways to work with actors to elicit better performances and if you look back at older shows, there’s a much more naturalistic style now.

On that level, we’ve always been interested in sharing the craft. 

In terms of the business, there is an internationalisation of the broadcasting business. Film preceded this.  Our experience in international productions can be helpful and some of it translates to local production – but then there are things like the economics of Australian television, which are different.

The goal is really to be in a position to leverage our experience to offer assistance both on the business side and on the craft side. 

“A union helps to protect the director not just economically but by creating a framework within which they can do better artistic work.”

What else do you see as advantages of union recognition?

It’s very important that the ADG is being recognised as a union, and that they are being allowed to represent directors as artists. Our experience, which goes back almost 80 years, shows that artists in the entertainment industry need representation. This is a complex business in which large corporations with a lot of money are in in the position to potentially exploit the talents of an individual. Without some collective protection, and this is true for actors, writers and directors – the individual artist can have a very hard time surviving in that environment.  In the freelance environment, a director might be hired for an episode, but if the producer doesn’t happen to like her or him, they just don’t hire them again. They don’t even have to provide a reason, it’s just “see you later.” So it’s very difficult in that environment – and we see it in other parts of the world where there isn’t union representation for the director to say “Hey wait a minute, you paid me $3000 last week and now you want to pay me $2500, well I’m not going to accept that,” and instead the producer can just say “I’ll just get the next guy or woman to do it.”  We understand that collectively bargained protections, including minimum rates, terms and conditions are paramount.  

It is also important for the protection of directors as artists.  A union helps to protect the director not just economically but by creating a framework within which they can do better artistic work. They can be more creatively bold when they’re not worried about having their payments cut.

It’s an exciting time for the ADG to be moving into this representation area, which is long overdue.

What do you see as some of the most immediate challenges going forward? It almost feels like in Australia it’s evolved in a business model more akin to the Silicon Valley model, in that it is individuals against corporations. Going forward from Australian directors’ slightly weaker position do you think that the entrenched culture will face different hurdles? Is there some catching up to do for the ADG to be at parity with the DGA in terms of weight? And are there aspects that because we have had 80 years without a union, that will be harder to reverse?

The ADG has some catching up to do, but they’re starting now and they have taken a big step forward. Australia does have unions in the entertainment industry, MEAA is very powerful, so it is not like the ADG is starting from scratch.

The DGA in the United States is the product of eighty years of work, of coming from a different time when there were studios and the directors were their employees. As the entertainment industry workforce has moved towards the freelance model where the individual moves around from employer to employer, some of the social protections they might have had as an employee of a single employer were lost. 

What the Directors Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild, Writers Guild of America, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and the Teamsters do in the U.S. is fill in that gap. They become a social safety net by negotiating for and maintaining health and pension plans, and providing many other protections and services to their members.

The unions and guilds actually serve a function for the producer too. In our case, we do a lot of things like education, where we take on a lot of expenses to train our members, which the employers really benefit from. The ADG is the same. We’re bringing Tommy, who will talk with directors and maybe a couple will hear something that will make them better. Who’s going to benefit from that? The Australian broadcaster is going to benefit, having spent nothing for it.  The guilds all work on professional development which is in service to their members and the industry. 

There is a broader context that you have to look at, which really goes to the protection of the artist. Think about Australian culture and the filmmakers I mentioned, and their impact on the perception of Australia domestically as well as abroad. Those movies were exported and people around the world saw the Australian experience through the eyes of the filmmaker. That filmmaker – the director – created an experience for them and that’s really powerful. They certainly deserve to be fairly compensated and credited for their efforts.

Do you have any thoughts on the changing models of distribution for films in Australia, given the disparity in scale between most Hollywood films marketing budgets? Especially given the rarity of studio backing in Australian films?

Advertising and promotion, at least in terms of the budgets available to them, have really hurt independent films in the U.S. and it is a similar case for the Australian film. 

There are influencers in the media. There are people who, like Pauline Kael, could write a review about somebody and make or break them. Literally. One review could make or break a filmmaker. 

That still exists today in a certain way, through social media. One of the things that we have to do, to support independent film is to help our people find those influencers and reach out to them to steer people in their direction.

A lot of independent filmmakers are using social media. As the world has changed, it has become the go-to means to promote film. They start pushing out (tweeting) promotion stills and little leaks about something that happened on the set, so that you get social media talking about the film, because it’s free… well maybe it won’t be forever, but right now it’s free!

In terms of promoting films, directors have to think in a different way. Then there’s the reality of deciding whether you want your project to be seen in the theatre, or go with the home experience. 

Again it’s that issue of creating the experience that’s going to draw people in. We also have to support the infrastructure. You can make the greatest film in the world, but if there are no theatres to show it in, then it’s probably going to be only on television, because that’s the only outlet. You also have to look at the theatre owners in Australia and decide if it’s viable for them. 

In Los Angeles we have a pretty good theatre-going audience and it’s not just because the business is here, people in L.A. like going to the movies. We also have some of the best theatres in the world. In fact we happen to be sitting on top of one of them. But when you go outside the major cities, it becomes a little harder for people to drive to the local cinema – and then if the experience isn’t really good, if the projection isn’t really high quality, or it’s out of focus a little bit or the sound’s a little off, then people start to question why they paid all this money for the experience. 

Australia is definitely one of the highest saturation markets though, with several billion in box office each year. Especially with 2015 being the biggest box office year ever, with Mad Max and The Water Diviner carrying over and other films really helping to boost the numbers. That said, I can already see the headlines for 2016 which will promote doom and gloom, simply because it won’t be as big as this outlier year.

Definitely. For English language audio-visual products it’s a very big market.

How is that looked at from a guild’s perspective? Is there any way we can approach theatre owners and try to collaborate on achieving a better result?

With the ADG, you have a collective voice where you can go and meet with the theatre owners and voice concerns collaboratively. Should we go to the government together? How can we help each other? It opens up strategic partnerships and alliances, and where you have the strength of the body of directors. The opportunity the ADG has is to become the voice of filmmakers in a much more powerful way than it has been in the past.

“There are great stories of the founding of the DGA – which was established not by people who were struggling for work, but by people who had become very successful and said “We need to do this because of the people coming behind us.””

We have quite a lot of directors in Australia who have grown up in an everyone-for-themselves kind of framework. How should directors who have grown up in that environment see the value in coming together?

It’s not just Australians in the everyone-for themselves-situation.  There are great stories of the founding of the DGA – which was established not by people who were struggling for work, but by people who had become very successful and said “We need to do this because of the people coming behind us.” They recognised that without a guild, they would just get cut to ribbons by themselves.

When directors get together and start talking about the issues, they find the commonality of the things that they encounter to be very compelling.

It’s important in today’s society to remember that artists need to be able to make a living to continue to be artists. That’s why coming together gives a little bit more power, along with professionals who can advise the organisation. The pooling of the collective wisdom is important. In the U.S. for instance, residuals are a good example. By pooling resources and using economies of scale, the DGA is able to track, collect and distribute money to the directors much more efficiently than they could on their own. 

Steven Soderbergh gives an amazing talk on the future of cinema and the absurdity of the studio system's business model.  

​Today Vimeo has announced an incredible new feature, called Vimeo On Demand, which allows content creators to sell their work to their audience directly.

I think this is a really fantastic opportunity in enabling filmmakers to make a return on investment on their projects, which has been something missing from a lot of the streaming websites, outside of the advertised supported model, which I’m less favourable of.  

Once you can start to sell web series and other subscription format content direct, I think it’ll have a really great platform for fans of your work to support it, and the 90/10 split seems really fair as well.

Here’s hoping it’s a success and I think it really closes the gap in the online distribution models.