I thought I was the big guy on the shoot. My fee alone gave me a certain swagger and it doesn’t hurt when the grips call me Sir.
But what I chose not to think about was that I am paid about the same rate as a production designer. Not bad and I’m not saying I’m worth any more but who knew? For all these years I’ve looked at the AICP form and seen how much lovely money is headed my way. For a while I feel special, verging on important.
And then I go to work. I have meetings that go on endlessly. I attend casting sessions, review these, think about wardrobe, make choices, adapt to revised budget news, scour locations, talk production design, do storyboards, revise storyboards, choose crew, and run the pre-pro meeting. Then, oh yes, I get to spend a day or two at the shoot. (And I haven’t even included the hours conceiving, writing and presenting the treatment that was presumably thought good enough to get me the job.)
As an amusement I added up all the hours I spent leading up to a recent one-day shoot. My sense of self-importance was severely shaken. I spent about 70 hours before the shoot and about 12 at the shoot so a quick add and divide and I get a fraction higher hourly rate than an AD. This thought came up because I bid on a job for an agency and we were told that in the event they had to cancel the job at the last moment only fixed costs would be paid. No AICP guidelines for them! So no director pay irrespective of any work that had been done to this point.
This started me thinking. If we book DPs for a job that doesn’t come off, we pretty much have to pay. We’ve stopped them from taking another job and we’ve given our word. Sounds fair to me. But if directors are to be paid, for some reason they have actually to direct something in which cameras are involved. Which seems like a pretty narrow view of directing.
Maybe we need to rethink how directors are paid. As a rule a two-day shoot, for example, is not twice as time consuming as a one-day shoot, and similarly a one-day shoot is often only a bit less work than a two-day shoot. So to be paid on the basis of how many shooting hours is illogical.
Here’s a suggestion: Don’t have a day rate based on shoot days. Instead submit a director’s fee for the entire project. It seems that some jobs don’t require that much work while others do and this has often nothing to do with the amount of days allocated for shooting. With a fee approach we may end up at the same place but we won’t have clients thinking that we are highly overpaid. We might get some respect for the long hours we actually put in rather than being thought of as some effete artist who finally gets to display his brilliance only at the shoot. We’re hired for the project so why not pay us for the project?
I recently had a painter repaint a large area of my house. Before the final touch-ups he had helped choose the color, put down protection, applied masking tape, skim coated, primed and put on two coats. And then he tidied up. I paid him for his entire work and never thought his value was just about the final coat. We’re not so different, the painter and me. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to call him Sir.
Jeremy Warshaw is a director at The Observatory, New York.
