On Wednesday, IFTA hosted a Directing Masterclass with John Crowley, IFTA and BAFTA winning director of films including Brooklyn, Intermission, Boy A and We Live in Time, and TV drama including episodes of Black Mirror and True Detective.
This masterclass was hosted in the IFI, supported by Screen Ireland, and was moderated by IFTA-winning director Hannah Quinn (The Boy That Never Was, Vikings Valhalla).
John spoke with Hannah about his early career in theatre, directing at the Abbey and Gate before moving to London. He returned to Ireland to direct his first film Intermission, collaborating with writer Mark O’Rowe. It was a challenge mounting an independent film with a quick turnaround, but he quoted Steven Soderbergh saying “We were willing to sacrifice formal perfection for the right energy”. “It is shocking to think I was the only person on the set who’d never done the job before, but I did know what I was doing with the actors, and I did know the story I wanted to tell, and on a very basic level, that is your job to communicate, what’s the aim?”
His next collaboration with O’Rowe was Boy A: “I knew it had a completely different feeling to Intermission, and there was nothing visually connected to it. It had a completely different aesthetic, and needed to have a totally different look, both in the design and especially in the frame.” The film marked Andrew Garfield’s first leading role, and John said: “He's touched with something, you know, he's conducting it from the somewhere else”.
He spoke about rehearsal: “Rehearsal is really important, and not over-rehearsing. And some actors are very scared of rehearsing, quite rightly so, because you can squeeze the emotion out of a scene before you’ve even shot it, and I would never do that, but I think it's critical that we're all on the same page about what the scene is trying to do before you get near it.”
John spoke of how directing an episode of Black Mirror was similar to directing a feature film but with a tighter schedule: “Charlie Brooker wants those episodes to each have their own identity, they’re very happy for you to bring your creative game”.
He answered questions from attendees, including a question on collaborating and communicating your vision to cinematographers. He said “You arrive with a set of ideas, if the idea takes hold and makes sense and speaks to the middle of the material… sometimes you have to allow yourself the opportunity to get bad ideas and throw them on the table and they don’t work. With Boy A, the idea of ghostliness absolutely chimed with Rob Hardy’s sensibility. With Roger Deakins (on The Goldfinch), who’s going to tell him what it should look like? More than any DOP I’ve worked with, he’s wanted more time with me talking through the script in extreme detail, to hear everything I had to say about what those characters were going through”.
Hannah concluded by asking John if there’s one thing he wish he’d known from the top of his career that would one useful for emerging directors. He replied “Try and avoid the chunks of not working, keep learning, keep staying open. In the hands of a tiny number of special people, directing aspires to be an art. A director’s job is mostly craft and you have to practice it to get better at it. Do not wait to be given permission to direct, you probably know more about your job than the people doling out the money. Make your film, if it’s a film you wanna make, you have to find your way of making it’”.
