The complete guide to low-budget feature filmmaking

Picked this up at Border's last week. Becker, if you recall, is the guy with the website (beckerfilms.com) who is always ranting and raving about how films have gone downhill in the past 30 years... you know, the guy who doesn't even like widescreen. His book is pretty restrained though, one of those standard low-budget film books, although his definition of a low budget is $100,000.

I put this book in the same category as The Film Director by Richard Bare. Bare is best known as the director of Green Acres though he did some features. It's a nice read, an assortment of director tricks, observations and war stories. Good to read on the plane which is why I bought it years ago. Like Bare, Becker is best known for his TV work (Hercules, Xena) though he has worked on some features. His latest effort is Alien Apocalypse, a B'er than B made-for-TV movie.

The thing that struck me most about Becker's book was his advice about directing actors which contradicts everything you'll read out there including John Badham and Judith Weston's books. Here's an excerpt:

On a very basic level, the actors need to know the director is there with them and that they're not out there all by themselves looking foolish. If you like what an actor is doing, tell them so. If you think your reading a line for the actor will help, then do it. If you need to act the whole scene out for them, then do that. Frequently I will tell actors which words I want them to stress in a line... The actors at Warner Brothers in the 1930s and 40s used to regularly make fun of the great director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, Mildred Pierce) because he always acted out the scenes for the actors with his very thick Hungarian accent. That may have seemed silly to Cagney and Bogart, but Curtiz managed to communicate his ideas and consistently got strong performances. The main directorial approach of my favorite director, William Wyler, was to be consistently disappointed with the actor's performances and to let them know it, and this seemed to make them try harder and harder. He took Charlton Heston aside early in the shooting on Ben-Hur and said, "Chuck, you're just not good enough." Heston asked what could he do? Wyler shook his head in disappointment and said, "I don't know" and walked away. Charlton Heston got the Best Actor Oscar for that performance...