Everyone has a different approach to a score. Study films and you’ll hear music composed simply for the purpose of emphasis or to drive the action, others will be an internal emotion of the character or a “theme” for the character, even more will be to elicit an emotion from the audience. Of the three, I’m least fond of the last, as I think it’s both lazy and disingenuous to manipulate the audience so blatantly. For all their greatness, Steven Spielberg and John Williams I feel are the most guilty of this cinematic sin. 

But let’s start from the beginning - how do you even begin thinking about your film score? For me it starts at the script stage, where I’m piecing the shots and performance together, with emphasis on the latter. I like to think of a film score as part of performance, and wherever I feel I need music, I will write an verb / adverb that describes what I want the music to do at that point. For instance, if I’m filming a scene where a serial killer is trying to lure his next victim, I might write SEDUCE MENACINGLY or TRAP ICILY or something like that. These are the motivations for the music, and will be a valuable guideline later on.

From here I take a very unusual approach to a film score, in that I tend to make my score be an additional character in the film. I’ll never assign the music to be omniscient or godlike / all-seeing / all-knowing, but rather I like to think of the music as the one person who is the subject of the film and yet who is never seen. For Lilith that person was Hell itself, and for 6 Angry Women, I asked my longtime composer Will Brooks, aka dälek, to assume the voice of the one person who was not in that jury room or court case, and that was the black boy who was shot dead.

In order to do this, I treated dälek like any of my actors, talking about motivations and backstory so that he could react accordingly. As soon as he got a grasp of the character, I told him to watch the film and think about how this boy would react to all the deliberations about his life and his acquisition of justice. Every time he is supported, there might be a sound of hope, every time he is denied or disrespected, there is anger and dissonance. I asked dälek to assume the role of the ghost of the boy, something which we found to be profoundly creepy and revealing.

From there, dälek went to work, drawing together compositions that were in accordance to those emotions he was feeling as the boy. Since the boy was a ghost, he added layers of static and reverb to make it sound like the music was bleeding from the walls. Since we were working on something more abstract - something that wasn’t even in the film - it took us a couple of rounds to get it where I felt like it was doing justice to the boy, and we got the performance we needed. 

What results is something a bit jarring and eerie, music that initially doesn’t seem to have a place in the film and yet that is emotionally in concert to the narrative. It’s no John Williams or Hans Zimmer bombast, but rather something really affecting and subtle. You notice it but don’t notice it at the same time, which I felt is what the best music scores do.

Of course this is just my approach, yours can be completely different as it suits you. But I would like to emphasize to think about your score as performance and not just something that will boost what’s already on the screen. The best music scores are intricately integrated into the fabric of the film, and you can tell when a score was added as an afterthought, as a band-aid for failed dramatic attempts. A score like that reads as b-movie / amateurish, and unless you’re intentionally going for that kind of feel, you need to avoid it at all costs.

Watch this video. You'll recognize every moment:

It's hard not to get a little verklempt watching an inspirational speech on film. It riles us, makes us feel powerful, and stokes the flames of America's "can do, will do, will not be denied" ethos ever so perfectly.

And truthfully, as much as I love watching a formidable call to arms, I truly, deeply despise them.

I know. Blasphemy. Some of the greatest moments in cinematic history are drawn out speeches. But I always feel like these speeches pander and say very little about the people giving the speech. We get bland characterizations - grit, determined, powerful - pretty much the same monikers we give to professional athletes, but the only agenda of these speeches are to rile and build militaristic confidence. We never know that the guy (and it's very much usually a guy) is scared of or what troubles them. It's just a jingoistic, robotic missive of how to go out with honor. It's a cop out because they're telling us everything we want to hear. No surprises, no revealing of deeper character, all heart and no soul.

The truly amazing speeches of cinema give insight to the people telling them, to the situation they are in, and paint a very different angle of the human condition. You can still have a rally call, but have it mean something as opposed to a generic appeal to what we already know. Here's my favorite speech in all of cinema:

Look how much we learn from this. It's a rally call of a different sort, a blast of reality that no one wanted to hear, but had to be said. In this speech we learn just as much about Tommy as we do Renton. Personalities are reinforced. Renton's not being a pessimist, he's pointing out what needs to be recognized. He destroys idealism, jingoism and blind devotion in thirty seconds. Renton's speech would make me fight harder than any bland William Wallace grandstanding.

Speeches have to be very carefully selected. They take large chunks of cinematic time and is asking a lot of the audience, so they better be worthwhile not only to them but to the narrative. The honorable warrior speeches the moments before battle are purely cosmetic - when standing on the precipice of combat, assembled with the enemy in sight, combat is an inevitability. I'd rather William Wallace give a personal parable, to let me know something about himself that will make his army fight for what he believes in, that he understands the sacrifice that they are about to make. Instead we get a bully, a steroid-fueled call to mayhem.

Second thing about movie speeches is to avoid the soapbox. Your script will always have something to say but try to avoid having your characters literally say your viewpoint. I remember a speech in a film that I saw at the Toronto Film Festival many years ago, a film that shall go unnamed but was set in South Africa. A young woman, unable to realize a taboo lesbian relationship, goes into a long speech which she begins with the following line:

*Slams fists on table*

"I hate apartheid!"

Yes. That's a real line of dialogue. Spoken by an actor. In a feature film. What followed was a blow-by-blow account of why apartheid sucks, just in case we thought otherwise. It was awful. And it went on and on, forever, beating us over the head with self-righteousness. It said nothing about her other than that she opposes injustice. Well by that point in the film I would certainly hope we'd understand that.

Six Angry Women has two long speeches in it, which is why this post came to fruition. I took great care in crafting these segments with my actors, in that I wanted to avoid them being hammer-over-the-head obvious. The first speech was designed to be preachy, as it is one juror explaining her decision. She has a self-rightousness about her but she is unaware of it. Rather than delivering a message about a message, it delivers a message about her. This is a very important distinction.

The second speech ends the film, and it is a nasty, acidic piece of work by my actress Fawzia Mirza. Rather than lift people up and call people to arms, it serves to deconstruct everything that has been built before. There is a nihlistic patina to everything and it is the portrait of a woman cornered, a woman battling between what is right and what is permissable. I love it. It works for me becuase it is very much a commentary on society but through the vector of one woman's anger and defeat.

The second challenge with speeches is how we go about filming them. We can do them in one long, single take or we can break them up into wides, mediums and close-ups, intercut with reactions from the recepients of said speech. Or we can place that speech over a montage of the events that they portend, or even over the aftermath of the event. There are so many ways to do it, but the path you choose will reflect your intent.

Filming a speech in wide, MCU and ECU and then intercutting the reactions is, to me, the most standard way of doing it. If you have the ability to, I would use two cameras for it. You place Camera A on the orator, and with each take and setup you shift B-cam to capture different reactions. If you have one camera, then get your speech done first, as your actor will have only so much energy to give. I like to start in at ECU and move out, because during a speech you will cut to wides less frequently that close-ups, and you want the most intensity, focus and energy on your closes. Once your orator is covered, flip the camera and get reactions, with the orator performing behind the camera for the actors to react off of. Your orator will be exhausted but at least she won't have to be "on" as she would be in front of the camera. With reactions, wides become more important as you'll be cutting to them more frequently. Collect ECU's and MCU's of key players' reactions and then go for some free-flowing reactions in the crowd. In a two-camera setup, I like to basically invert the progression; A-cam is close-up on the orator, and B-cam is wide on the crowd, and as we move out on A-cam to wides, we move in on B-cam to MCUs and ECUs. It all takes a bit of planning but then again what doesn't, right?

A single take is intense and real-time, it imparts an urgency of message, and requires a strong performance that is paced and blocked out. Not easy to do, but when done well it is unlike anything else in cinema. I ended Six Angry Women with Fawzia performing an almost four-minute long single take monologue. We did it three times, each time changing only the pace and small inflections of words. Each of them incredible. Single takes require fair rehearsal time for camera and the performer. Rehearse at 10% energy, you don't want your actor burning out before you even go to take. If you're shooting digitally you may want to record your rehearsals, sometimes without your actor even knowing. You'll always get something interesting becuase the actor isn't doing neccessarily what they prepared for, and they'll give you something more relaxed and easy. Just make sure to let your intentions to record rehearsals to your sound and camera teams, and remember to end slate each take.

If we choose a montage then we have to collect enough varied footage for it to work, and this is when a speech can become labor intensive. Conversely it is a way to compress time, and if you're doing something like a battle scene, it is a way to convey an entire war in just a handful of shots. I remember David Fincher doing this beautifully in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Montages with speeches tend to impart a dream quality, as they compress time and space, so be aware of this before you plan to use them. You can take the dreamlike-edge off by not using dissolves, using harder cuts, changing the angle of your camera shutter, or using more active music, which you can try cutting on specific time signatures.

I'm in the home stretch of the first assembly of 6 Angry Women, with about four minutes left to cut together. I am editing the film in its entirety, and editing is something I enjoy immensely. I've edited all my work save for a few commercial and corporate assignments, and this is something I'd like to maintain. I feel all directors should at least edit the first assembly of the film, but that's just me, and my definition of a first assembly is a lot different than most.

My first assembly pretty much resembles about 90-95% of the final edit, as I pretty much edit in sequence and fine tune as I go along. It's not the prescribed way of editing, but it works for me because that's how my mind works.

It also works because of the way the film was conceived. As many of you might recall I didn't have a proper script for the film until about 12 hours before the shoot started. We'd improvised for six weeks in rehearsal and so much of the film was coming together in my head, and continued to piece itself together as we were shooting. I didn't have any storyboards or even a shot list, I pretty much made it up as I went along. 

My goal therefore as a director was to accumulate as much coverage as I could over 6 eight-hour shooting days. We had a lot of ground to cover so I really had to motor through the story, and since we had six equal speaking parts, everyone had to be covered at all times.

This was a monumental challenge, and it took us a a day or two to really figure out a method that would aid me best in the edit, I didn't want to be scouring random footage to piece together like a collage.

I broke the film up into chapters on paper, with each chapter dedicated to a single juror's vote. Which meant each chapter had a driving character, a primary antagonist / ally, and supporting arguments / reactions. My first goal was to attain a wide master; doing this would guarantee that at the minimum I had the entire sequence filmed. I would place my A camera behind the main protagonist of the scene, and capture a 3-shot from their over-the-shoulder perspective. Since I was shooting 4:3 aspect ratio, this was not an easy thing to figure out as our frame was compact. I'd place the B camera on the adjacent character, also a 3-shot from the other side. This covers my six jurors in entirety. Here's a crude diagram of the setup. 

Or here's a variation of it:

Here's a good example of what we see from A camera:

You see the B cam in the far corner; this gets cropped off in the 4:3 frame.

From here we can punch into close-ups of the characters that are facing the camera, but performance is a funny thing. I wanted to preserve the energy of the actors that were driving the scene, so I flipped the cameras around to the other side of the table and covered a wide and a close-up of the primary characters.

This is situational. If there is a heated debate going on between the primary character and a secondary, I would want to place equal emphasis on the reactions of the secondary. So I might place my cameras like this, getting two OTS or ECUs of each:

We work on variations of this throughout, changing up frame composition to keep things visually interesting. What we got were some pretty striking images, without compromising performance and not missing any valuable reactions. We get our wide, close-ups and ECUs, and run through the scene about 15-20 times in total before moving on to the next sequence.

We were able to facilitate the close-ups and ECU's by means of production design; our table was able to break apart into three pieces, so we were able to take parts out and move the cameras in close. It produced some very compelling images, things that give a different flavor than using a telephoto lens from afar.

Shooting this way allows me to edit the film in a very organic and natural way, but it is by no means easy. This is hands down the most difficult edit I've ever taken on. Between multiple takes of six perspectives and three layers of wides, CUs and ECUs, the number of combinations that any given sequence can have are infinite. I have to decide whose reaction is the most appropriate to the narrative, which composition tells the story best, and which of those elements cut together in the best way possible. It's a certifiably insane edit, and I'll go into more detail in coming posts.

I’ve been writing this blog for almost five years now and over those years I’ve extolled many a lesson I’ve learned during my journey as a filmmaker. I try to convey things as I learn them and never try to pretend that I know it all, there’s always something new to glean from personal experience.

Last night I had one of those moments of recollection, going back to 2003 when I started in the film business, reviewing the choices I’ve made. I do this to remind myself of the work I’ve accomplished and also the mistakes I hope not to repeat. I thought back to those first three years of trying to make it, of when I wrote a very ambitious screenplay called 'Ceremony' and spent years shopping it around with hopes that someone would give me the money to direct it, which never happened.

Ceremony was an interesting script, semi-autobiographical as most first-time screenplays tend to be, and really well written. I’d spent a year writing it, holed away in my apartment, devouring screenwriting books and watching countless movies for reference. The story had a tricky time travel element that weaved mythology and spirituality, and in hindsight it was actually a really beautiful script. I dug it out this morning before I started to write this post, and it really is quite well done, a bit idealistic perhaps, but nothing a few rewrites couldn’t solve.

And then I stopped myself right there. Having now made two feature films, and a third now in edit, I’ve learned a little something about the practicality of being an indie filmmaker, and this is likely one of the most important lessons I can pass on to you, my faithful readers.

And the lesson is this: when you write your first screenplay, write something you can make TODAY. It’s a tough one to follow because when we first start our careers as young filmmakers, our minds are overflowing with ideas and images, and we tend to overpopulate our first scripts with those ideas and images. We write things that are relatively expensive to pull off, requiring six and seven figure budgets, or the attachment of an influential actor or producer.

But I look at my current film, 6 Angry Women, and now realize that it was the type of film I should have made back in 2003. It is one room, seven actors, twelve crew, shot in six days on a five-figure budget. From greenlight to current edit, I’ve been at work for three months, and my goal is that by the end of January, my film should be mixed, conformed and ready to show. I was able to make it NOW, with little dependence upon others to make it happen.

Yours truly directing ‘6 Angry Women’ with my DoP Faroukh Mistry. Photo by Fawzia Mirza.

With Ceremony I needed to raise about two million dollars to realistically make it happen, and for someone with zero film credentials and no connections, that’s an impossible task. I was trying to sell a movie that I couldn’t make. It’d be a different story if I wanted to make a living as a screenwriter, where I could then write anything and try to sell the script to people who have the means to get it made, with a director and cast that are not of my choosing. But that’s not what I want to do. I want to direct. That’s always been my goal.

Write films that can be made today. Look at Shane Carruth’s Primer, which he made for $7,000. Or Evan Glodell’s Bellflower, which was made for $20,000. These were films that could be made now, today, without the aid of a studio or any kind of attachments. They are feasible, plausible, and exceptionally creative.

Note that I never said they were easy. It never is. Making a low / zero budget movie, if you’re serious about making a true creative statement, is one of the most difficult things you’ll ever do. Don’t settle for three people mumbling about being bored and listless in a room. Throw genre into it. Make it science fiction, make it horror, make it with wall-to-wall sex, or all three combined. But it should say something, and say it in the most inspired, intriguing and creative way possible. Come up with that script you can make right now and greenlight it tomorrow.

Wait- science fiction? That’s expensive! No, it really isn’t. Primer was about time travel but it used its narrative as special effects. Mike Cahill and Brit Marling’s Another Earth is essentially the same thing as Interstellar but one was made for $200k while the other was made for $200 million. Remember that the greatest special effect is the human condition. Show your creativity, your intelligence, your gusto on the page and you will see the universe expand in front of you. Then greenlight it.

Once you make that decision to greenlight, your work will be focused and determined because you’re working on something that you know is going to get made, as opposed to something that might get made. It’s a HUGE difference.

As many of you already know, I did not have a screenplay when I greenlit the production of 'Six Angry Women.' We built the screenplay over six weeks of rehearsals and had a shooting script literally 22 hours before the first day of shooting. It was a remarkable way of screenwriting, one that I was initially terrified by, but once I got the hang of it I found it to be extremely gratifying.

When I greenlit the film in late September, I had a vague idea of what the story was going to be about. In one sentence, it was a jury deliberation for the shooting of a young black man. The jury consisted of six women, five white and one non-white. We know how the story begins - six women walk into a jury room - and we know how it ends, with them finding the shooter not guilty because of the wording of a law that permits him to stand his ground and shoot the boy. That's all I had.

Being that this was a character piece, I recall in my readings on Mike Leigh's process that my first and most important objective was to build my characters. My first responsibility therefore was to cast my actresses, and bring them on as co-writers on the project. In assessing my actors, I needed to find women who themselves were writers, or had the ability to create and improvise. In our auditions (which were basically 2-3 hour meetings in coffee shops), I'd ask questions and see how they answered, if they were coming up with ideas of their own. After two weeks of casting, I had found my actors and we were set for rehearsals and beginning the writing process.

Of the six week rehearsal time, two and half weeks were dedicated to individual actor meetings where we just focused on individual characters. There was no talk of the justice system, of the case, of anything pertaining to the plot of the film. I didn't mention any of the other actors / characters to them, we focused on the individual. Only character. I had them base the characters off of people that they knew or characters they'd played on stage, or from literary characters. We'd build from there in a series of questions and answers, where I'd ask how they think their character would react in a specific situation. We devised daily routines, diets and social circles. We talked more intimate details of private lives.

The last part of the one-on-one sessions was that I asked my actors to come up with a secret. Something that they don't want anyone to know about them, that they will guard fiercely with their lives. Something that would change their entire dynamic if it was found out. And I instructed them to never, ever reveal it. Not to anyone, to their fellow cast members or even me. Even after filming I still don't know the secrets that they have. I'm deadly curious.

Throughout these sessions I'd been taking copious notes. Not only of the discussions we had about the character, but also about the many side discussions we'd have about life and other issues. I made notes about body language, habits and personal fears. Things that meant something to my actors on a personal level: family, their bodies, decorum, etc..

By the end of the one-on-one sessions (I'd done three with each actor, eighteen sessions in total, each of them three hours) we had built fairly complete characters. Because we were doing a jury movie, I had them select names for each character but that too was something we wouldn't share. From there on out they were only known as their jury numbers. It was now time to have them meet each other.

In the following weeks we still didn't address the trial, which I had been building over time, doing research and consulting legal entities for veracity. Since this was a fictional narrative, I could change the case to address particular hot spots in the characters for dramatic effect, and still not lose focus of the real meaning of the case, which was about determining what was justice versus what was legal.

During our rehearsal sessions I would hold focus group sessions, where I had my actresses conduct a focus group in character, on a subject that I would choose. I wanted to select subjects that would challenge their characters, e.g. one character was a protective mother of two, so we chose the subject of vaccinations at school. We did a group about the CBC sexual assault case and Gian Gomeshi. We did one about sexy Halloween costumes. We did one about home and beauty products. With each session I'd try to find a balance between letting them riff and giving them specific objectives, but the more important thing was to learn character tendencies and see how they react. We recorded the sessions and I'd take as many notes as possible.

I'd send my actresses home with homework, to interact with the world in character, and when we came back together we'd discuss what happened, how they felt, and how other people reacted to them.

After six weeks, in our second-to-last session I finally presented the case to them, and had them think about the structure of the film, of where we needed to go. I then sent everyone home and got to writing the script some 48 hours before shooting started.

I had hired a writing assistant, Ashwaty Chennat, before the group rehearsals began and she and I sat down and made notecards of all the pieces of evidence and arguments in the trial. We made corresponding notecards about specific character's reactions to those trial elements, reactions gleaned from the rehearsal improv sessions. A lot of these were objectives like "to defend" or "to cower" or "to persuade" and by then end of the process we had beats and reactions. I sent Ashwaty home and got to writing, and for the next 20 hours I just wrote and wrote and wrote. It was a quick process because all of my characters had clearly defined voices, and it was very easy for me to imagine them saying things and reacting in a specific way. I'd never had a faster and easier physical writing experience in my life.

The day before the shoot began, I held my last rehearsal session and presented the full bound script to my actors. We did a couple of read-throughs with my script supervisor present, and we timed the film and discussed small changes. It was pretty effortless for them to embrace and absorb the script because their characters were already defined.

During the shoot my actors and I changed and improvised large portions of the script, but it very much stayed true to the screenplay I'd drafted. Every morning of the shoot we'd discuss the pages to shoot and any changes we wanted to make. We continued to sculpt and craft the screenplay as we performed it.

My shooting script during production, one side to design shots the other to revise the screenplay.

What resulted is a formal screenplay but written in a reverse engineered fashion, and I enjoyed the process immensely. Having fully formed characters to write around is a blessing, because you can literally put them into any given situation and imagine how they react immediately. It becomes quick and instinctual.

Came back from NYC and was there when the Eric Garner decision was announced. Spent some time in Times Square with protestors and asked questions. What is our endgame? How do we find a path to justice, as opposed to simply being mad?

There are tons of good cops and lots of shitty cops, just as there are good citizens and shitty citizens. Cops are people, but they've been anointed with authority, and right now they're fearful. Fearful of getting shot themselves. When fear rules the roost, preemptive action starts to take afoot. Shoot before you get shot. Stop a situation before it escalates.

This is symptomatic of an America post 9/11. The CIA torture reports are no different than the cops. People in positions of power and authority trying to stop things before they happen by any means necessary. Sounds fine on paper, but what's not on paper is that preemptive action involves a fuck-ton of racial profiling and violations of human rights. Oh and murder.

Eric Garner was killed because stereotypes say he's a possible threat. Trayvon the same. Muslims were tortured at Guantanamo because it was believed that they held information to thwart future attacks. This might be true. But for every one detained Muslim that holds information, there are a hundred that don't. Do you waterboard them all? You can see how this is a slippery slope.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in all of this is that the perpetrators of these crimes are GETTING AWAY WITH IT. The judicial system is failing miserably. When a country's judicial system fails, the country cannot prosper. The moral compass dissolves. It becomes okay to squash, suppress, maim, rape and murder.

Who is the threat? Why is America so afraid? We're supposedly the most powerful, the most free, the most wealthy nation on the planet. If that's the case then what are we so afraid of? This is what happens when you have income inequality. The top gets nervous and preemptive actions become rule of the day. Gotta protect the stash. They're coming after my precious. Ridiculous shit like that.

The solution to all of this is to reduce the income gap. Not eliminate (impossible to do) but reduce it. When everyone's able to access a piece of the pie, the fear goes down. The crime goes down. The paranoia goes down. Black folk and Muslims stop being the threat to white Christian America. Police officers no longer become the servants of the 1%, they can be the people's protectors once again.

We reduce the income gap by empowering movement. Support education funding, vote for campaign finance reform, hold banks and hedge funds responsible for the ruination of our economy, let there be real stakes for their crimes. The rest of the world got rid of the grand jury system, and so should we. You enact these changes first and foremost by voting, by being part of the political process. Take it a step further and propose a new law. Anyone can do it, it's our constitutional right. We are the lawmakers, not the suits in DC, who work for US. They are there to make our ideas happen. And if they don't make it happen, then don't give them your vote. Simple as that.

I've been a part of a lot of student activism and I can honestly say that while protesting in the streets is a place to vent anger and let the world know of injustice, protesting itself does not create change. Votes create change. Laws create change. WORK creates change.

We saw this in Tahrir Square in Egypt, where the protests elicited a violent reaction from the incumbent government, and exposed the brutality and callousness of the state. It spurred an election, and the election simply replaced one evil with another. The protestors did not have a plan of action, they were better protestors than lawmakers. We need more lawmakers, more thinkers, more doers. It's simply not enough to protest. Gandhi said it best: be the change you wish to see in the world.

Until the laws change, the cops that killed Eric Garner, the cops that killed Robert Saylor, the cops that killed countless unarmed citizens will continue to get away. We can even fucking video them killing someone and they will get away, because they way the justice system is structured. It is that structure which needs to be changed, and that should be the focus of our energies. Our lives and our future children's lives depend on it.

Robert Saylor's killers - three cops - were acquitted by a grand jury in Maryland. This despite the coroner report conclusively showing evidence of homicide by asphyxia.