<p>OP, you are seeking advice from anonymous posters; how can you tell which advice is useful and which is not?</p>
<p>You are sure you want to be a film director: what does that mean? 1. Making tiny short films? 2. An indie feature 3. a studio picture? 4. Or making your living as a film director? These all means very different things. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Anyone can make a short. They are cheap and fun. You can make them on weekends. If you are broke, use Kickstarter for capital, not difficult.</p></li>
<li><p>Indie feature, much harder, exhausting, still a lot of fun. No money to speak of for you maybe a little to barely live on. You’re shooting a lot of pages a day, it’s all crazy but can be thrilling. You likely have to do all the post yourself, takes months, not as much fun. Let’s say the best happens, you enter and get into a lot of fests, you win some awards, you get some distribution. Maybe a bit of advance but nowadays that’s rare. But let’s say you’re an outlier, and you land a 1990s style Sundance distribution deal with 1-2 mil up front. Wow! Great! Now what? </p></li>
<li><p>Let’s say your first or second indie is a hit, gets you a real job, a studio picture, with a real budget. Now you’re shooting 1-3 pages a day, in complete comfort with a full crew, great craft service, dailies, veteran keys, the whole shot.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Guess what? This can be a disappointment. You have studio execs on your back to make your day - if you fall behind sched three days in a row, you will likely be fired. You have to deal with power trips - the stars, the studio, the agencies all probably have more clout than you. You have to deal with tedium. Shooting big pictures is often like watching paint dry, it’s so slow. </p>
<p>Still thrilled with this? Now go make a living at it. Film directors, like actors, spend most of their time chasing the next gig not doing the work itself. Deals come and go. Unless you are shooting series television, when you get work, you are likely on location far away for the entire 6-10 wk shoot. This is fun the first few times. Sooner or later you start growing up, you may have friends, a partner, children. All back home, not where you are. When you are home you are not working. When you are working you are not home. Let’s say none of this matters, you really love the whole thing year after year. But the years won’t love you. The older you get after thirty, the harder it is. You know Kubrick, how about Billy Wilder? He could not find work for the last twenty five years of his life. I met the guy, I know. Meanwhile your costs live with you - mortgage, car, advisors, maybe your alimony, child support bills and your recreational chemicals. You are sweating it out, hoping for the next job. Film directing looks fun and glamorous. The truth is it’s sporadic, work for hire toil.</p>
<p>Still interested? Here’s a plan: somehow, get on a shoot just to do coffee or even nothing, just be permission to get on a major shoot and be there, day after day. Watch what the director does (and doesn’t do), day after day. You’re in some flyover state? Contact your state film commission, there may be a big feature set to be on location. If not, get on a commercial shoot - as big as possible. Commercials also have slo-mo production schedule, except they are days not weeks. You have to be able to deal with a lot of tedium and petty politics as a director. </p>
<p>If this experience still hasn’t put you off, you have two paths to directing - one through story and one through deal making. Story means learning a craft like acting, writing. Get good at one of these and you can jump to directing. You will learn a lot about directing by working with directors as an actor or writer. But these are risky ways to do it. Best way - learn editing. You can do this in college, in night school or on your own. Editing is storytelling with technical expertise and there is a whole lot more available work for editors than for actors or writers. Second route- deal making involves more traditional education - you need business chops, contract law, budgeting. In short, producing. A lot of producers have law degrees and/or MBAs. You have to be willing to work at the corporate level, producing is business (they don’t call this industry “show art”). </p>
<p>College can be great, rewarding. Grad school too. Bottom line for with, vis a vis, filmmaking, the degrees might be helpful years along , if you can to teach. But college per se, meh. Ever heard of DreamWorks? The three founders are not college grads. Spielberg, a college drop out, Geffen has a high school degree, Katzenberg dropped out of high school after sophomore year.</p>
<p>But what do I know? Is all of this fact or fable or a mix or the two? How can you tell?</p>