A Tale of Two Directors: The True Film School is Inside You

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Learning & Life Columnist

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This is the story of two people like you. They dreamed of directing. It's not an unusual dream. In fact, you can probably find it in at least one person in every movie theatre audience, not to mention half of Hollywood (that would be the half that's not focused on acting or selling a screenplay).

The two people in this tale are different, however, in that they weren't waiting for a green light and a budget from a powerful studio in order to direct. They made their breakthrough films on their own with small budgets (in one case historically small). Coincidentally, each of those films is set on tough, gritty third-world streets. Each film won the attention of powerful movie executives, and launched the directors' careers.

The two directors are Mira Nair (Salaam-her breakthrough movie-Bombay, Vanity Fair) and Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Sin City). Nair first broke the $100-million box office mark with her delightful 2001 comedy Monsoon Wedding; Rodriguez made it big with his imaginative Spy Kids in 2001.

You can go to film school to be a director like they did, and you'll learn skills that will further your career. But what will separate you from the film school graduates who will never direct a feature? This is about the true film school-the one that takes place inside you.

An Experiment on Bombay's Streets

Mira Nair was born to a middle-class Indian family in a small town 300 miles south of Calcutta. While studying sociology at Delhi University, she became involved in acting workshops and political street theatre. At 19, she got a scholarship to Harvard, but she found the acting programs there to be too conservative. She switched to studying documentary filmmaking.

She made several documentaries after college, winning a number of film festival awards. But in 1987, she broke away from the genre because "I got tired of waiting for things to happen-I wanted to make things happen."

For her first feature, she took to the streets of Bombay to conduct a unique experiment. She and a screenwriter interviewed street children and wrote a screenplay that was a composite of several of their lives. Then they gathered 30 of the children for a 3-month acting workshop. It wasn't to teach "acting;" however, they taught the kids how to be natural in front of the camera.

The children became the cast for Salaam Bombay, a feature about a young boy she shot in 1987 entirely on Bombay's streets. It was hailed by Roger Ebert as "a film that has the everyday, unforced reality of documentary, and yet the emotional power of great drama." It went on to international success, winning the Camera d'Or at Cannes for Best First Film, and it brought Nair with invitations from Hollywood to pitch ideas.

After a number of successful features, she shot Monsoon Wedding in 2001. The movie had 148 scenes in just 30 days, used a cast of 68 people, and worked under a budget of $1.2 million. A comedy about a family wedding, it touched hearts in theatres all over the world. "It was made in the spirit of experimentation," Nair said. "I wanted to make a film that didn't involve many millions of dollars, special effects, and other excesses associated with fiction films. I hoped to inspire younger people to make films cheaply."

Film courses gave Mira Nair documentary-making skills. But her true film school has been an on-going passion for experimentation and a Punjabi spirit from her upbringing that she calls "an intoxication with life."

Robert Rodriguez: Creativity Rather than Money

Robert Rodriguez's start is another inspiration for film students everywhere. "Coming from a family of 10 kids," he says, "we always prided ourselves on being able to do things for less, because we had to. We had that survival instinct; everything had to be done for two bucks."

Growing up, Rodriguez used a video camera and a cast of his brothers and sisters to make over 20 action comedies. He won a scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, but he was later turned down by its film school for "lack of academic promise." Unfazed, he made another film using his brothers and sisters, won festival prizes, and got in.

But it's what he did after film school that made him a legend. He enrolled to be a guinea pig in a month-long medical study to get cash and time to write a script. Then he took a borrowed 16mm camera and a friend, went to a Mexican Border town and shot "El Mariachi," a feature length movie about a musician tangling with an assassin, for just $7,000.

He had only intended to sell the film directly to the Spanish video market. But while shopping it at LA's International Creative Management, it was seen by a powerful agent. Rodriguez got a contract, and El Mariachi became the lowest budget feature ever released by a major studio.

Film School Continues

To enhance his creativity, Rodriguez has taught himself many production skills. While making Spy Kids 2, for instance, he operated largely out of his home, which also serves as his soundstage and editing bay. He not only wrote, directed, and produced the feature, but he also edited it, composed the music, supervised the visual effects, shot it, and served as the production designer.

Wearing all these hats lets him find creative new ways of doing things. In one scene actor Steve Buscemi is in a big underground lair, with many stalactite-type rocks behind him. Because Rodriguez designed the scene AND shot it, he made only three rocks and put them on wheels. Then he moved them about and lit them differently for each shot, creating the illusion of a massive set. "No production designer would ever allow the director to show up in the lair and see three rocks," Rodriguez says. "He would have wanted 50 rocks. But knowing what I can do, it'll look like 50 rocks in the end."

As he documents in his book Rebel Without a Crew, film school helped Rodriguez learn the rules so he knew which ones to break creatively. "Video technology puts production back in the hands of the people," he says. Who's next?

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