When you put this question to a selected group of directors you are liable to receive a different answer from each one. In fact several were approached on the subject before this chapter was written. And very few of them agreed with one another. A still smaller number hit upon what seems the correct answer to the question.
It is quite true that the ability to “feel” a story and each one of its individual scenes, counts a lot in a director's favor. The proper “atmosphere,” the director's ability to achieve it, is vastly important. So also it is important to have the ability to properly “visualize” the continuous action of a picture even before the cameraman has once turned his crank.
But after all has been said and done on these scores it remains that the one determining factor that distinguishes the great from the near-great in the picture producing art is experience.
Other requirements are important, vastly so, but first of all and in capital letters EXPERIENCE.
It is fondly hoped that no one will presume to take this literally to the very capital letter. To produce a realistic crook story a director must not, of necessity, turn Raffles for a night. Nor to portray the effects of African “yaka water” on a white man, must he subject himself to a long siege of the drug itself. And doubtless a capable director can successfully picturize the life of a pearl fisher without diving into the briny deep.
Such specific experiences are not within the span of any one man's life. A director might know Africa thoroughly, might know what “yaka water” was as well as a “madeira chair” and then be handed a manuscript containing such nautical terms as “chain box,” “capstan,” “seacock” and “chain cable.” As a consequence a director must always hold himself in readiness for research work when a 'script containing such foreign terms comes his way.
But these experiences are largely physical experiences. And they are very minor when it comes to a summing up. No matter what peculiar terms and words are used in a story, it is the emotional content of it that counts as of greatest importance. Therefore the director with the most complete groundwork of emotional experience is the man most properly equipped to rise above his fellows. This groundwork of experience takes the shape of an emotional arc, an arc that includes on its line points representing each human emotion of life, reduced to specific and commonplace fundamentals. The more points of emotion upon the director's arc, the better craftsman he is.
Diagrams properly don't belong in books written upon an art such as directing. They should be confined to volumes on mathematics and astronomy, but a simple one introduced here will assist in illustrating the above point clearly.
Now let the arc pictured illustrate the entire span of emotional experience possible for a certain man, our great director, to have undergone. Say that the line and point A represent the emotion of suffering.