Script. Actors. Direction. Editing. What’s the most important?

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What is a good film?

To keep things simple let’s assume the objective is to make a “good, watchable fictional feature film”.

It has to be better than average. When this happens, the movie finds a decent audience and can make its money back.

The big departments of filmmaking are the script, actors, direction, cinematography, sound, music and editing.

Depending on whom you ask, everyone’s got an opinion on what’s the most important. So I wanted to approach this from a more logical perspective. We can do it in several ways.

The first, is the most brutally logical way. You might hate it, but there’s no going around logic and history.

The question is:

Can you make a good film without any of the departments?

E.g., Music is easy to give a skip, because lots of good films have been made without music. Examples that come to mind are Network, No Country for Old Men, Winter Light, etc.

Don’t get me wrong. Music’s great, but historically it has been shown you can make a good movie without music. What about cinematography?

Films like Paranormal Activity and the Blair Witch Project show you can make films without great camerawork and lighting. Movies are shot in natural light all the time, and for a while the Dogme 95 idea was quite popular. So, even though cinematography is great, good movies have been made without any attention to cinematography, except the task of switching on a camera, pointing it at the actors and getting okay exposure. Most people who record family videos on their mobile phones do exactly this, so you can’t really argue this activity is any different.

Then there’s sound design. It’s hard to sit through a movie without good sound. But what about no sound? During the age of silent cinema, they had no sound design or dialogues at all. Most theaters could afford orchestras or some form of music, even if it was just one musician playing a guitar or piano. You can have a film without music, but you can’t have a silent film without it.

So it would seem some sound is critical for a good film. Without it most human beings would just lose interest. I give sound design a thumbs up here.

What about direction? Every filmmaker is taught that good film direction makes or breaks a film. But the reality is, most directors, even great directors, cannot consistently guarantee great direction. Sometimes they screw up big time, even if they have had a large body of excellent films behind them.

There is something about how a film comes together that’s beyond even the best directors or teams. In other words, you can’t throw everything into a pot and expect a good movie.

All said and done, though,  it’s pretty clear a movie must have some direction for it to be watchable. I can’t imagine a random group of shots being watchable.

Then we have editing. Is editing important? Of course it is.

Out of all the disciplines that filmmaking incorporates, editing is unique to cinema. Even cinematography has some similarities to painting and photography, but there’s nothing like editing. However, on a purely logical level, movies have been made without editing. The simplest example is a movie that is shot in just one long take.

Woody Harrelson’s Lost in London is a good example. You can have movies where the edit is hidden, like 1917, Birdman and Hitchcock’s Rope. In these movies the editor’s role is purely functional, because there’s nothing to do except cut at the point the director has pre-decided. As alarming as the idea seems, on a purely logical level, you can make a good movie without editing.

Then we have the screenplay or script, whatever you want to call it. I don’t think there’s a film school on the planet that doesn’t tell you the script is everything. Yet, one of the most surprising discoveries I made while reading about great directors is, many of them don’t really care about the script.

Some need it just for a guideline, others do it to calm the nerves of the executives in film studios, or to deal with stars. There are many examples of filmmakers who start making movies with no story or screenplay.

Terrence Malick never shares a script, if there was one. The French New Wave had many directors setting off to make movies without knowing what they were going to do. A couple of recent examples from Hollywood are Coherence and Best in Show. There are so many intangibles and unforeseen events that it’s almost impossible to guarantee that a script can be followed 100%, let alone have the responsibility of carrying a film. 

And finally we come to actors. Since we’re talking about fictional films, we need actors. Even animals need to be good actors. Humans have a tendency to project human emotions to animals and inanimate objects, like Wall-E  or Bambi. We can also make them talk, like Nemo or Cars. There have been movies with only real animals, but it’s always animal as stand-in for human. It’s called anthropomorphism.

In the history of cinema, I can’t recall a single watchable film that didn’t have good acting. You can have a film with a few bad lead actors. But the supporting characters can carry the film and make it watchable. When all the actors are bad, the film is never watchable. It’s like listening to bad audio. It just grates on the nerves.

On a purely logical level, we’re left with acting, direction and sound.

Looking at it logically only one way to tackle this problem. There’s another way to approach it. Let’s assume we have the best of all departments. Every department is perfect – great script, great director, great actors, the whole shebang. Now ask yourself this question:

Which element can be taken away and still guarantee a good film?

I don’t think you can take away the actors. If you remove the sound the film will not be watchable, unless you’re a fan of torture. The editing can’t be removed because the film will no longer be coherent.

The music can go, and most people wouldn’t notice. Great music can change a movie. Two examples are Psycho and Jaws. A lot of people thought Psycho was terrible before the music. So it’s unfair to first say music is perfect and then assume it can be taken away. The same applies to the script. If it’s a good script and the director is bound to follow it, then taking it away will change the structure of the film.

What about the direction? Here we are in a grey area. If you gave the same script to a thousand directors, they’ll make a thousand different movies. Let’s say if you replaced a great director with somebody not so great, or a robot who just followed the script and shot everything from one vantage point with zero direction.

If the actors are great, which they are, the film will still be watchable and interesting. It might not be great, or it might be, who knows? But looking at things this way you realize the director is not as important as the rest. 

The third way to tackle this by asking yet another question. Let’s say all the departments are just good enough. Not great, just good enough this time. Question:

Which department can lower the bar to make the movie unwatchable?

This shows the resilience of a particular department. Let’s start with direction. We can have a slightly worse director and still come out with an okay film.

The script can have flaws, as can the editing. The music can be off, and as long as it’s not too loud people will tolerate bad music. But the one thing they won’t tolerate is bad audio. The moment you lower audio quality by a certain threshold, it becomes unbearable. 

The last way we can tackle this problem is by assuming every department is equally bad.

Is there one aspect of filmmaking that can be improved that will make a drastic difference to make the film watchable?

If the direction slightly improves, the effect will not be that perceptible. The same applies to cinematography or the script or editing. The only two departments that will bring about immediate and noticeable improvements is sound and acting.

Once you have acceptable sound, there’s no real room for improvement for the film as a whole. You can make the sound incredible, but it won’t make it more watchable than the passable audio version. That’s because the audience doesn’t have trained ears. However, the acting can make an incredible difference. If you replace bad acting with good acting, the difference is not only obvious, but the effect is tremendous.

So it would seem the top spot is a fight between acting and sound. I must give it to acting.

There are a lot of film critics out there. Most of them have never made a film, yet assume they are qualified to talk about the editing or film direction. Sidney Lumet said it best. How do the critics know what clips were shot or left out? What they think is good editing might be bad editing, if only they knew what clips were not used. And what they think as bad film direction might be great direction. Maybe the director saved a terrible film through sheer genius and energy. 

But the two things that are obvious to even lay persons are good acting and sound. If the sound is bad, everyone will know. But if the sound is amazing, they probably won’t. Most people listen to studio monitors but still can’t tell if they’re any better than consumer grade speakers. On the other hand, when good acting turns into great acting, people feel it. It’s the human connection that’s the strongest. You don’t need to know anything about filmmaking or film theory to appreciate great acting. 

Which is why I consider acting the most important aspect of filmmaking. People instinctively  know when an actor is fake, or if a dialogue is not delivered correctly. We know because we’re all actors in the real world.

At number two we have sound. Poor audio is easily recognizable. Good audio is a pleasure, and great audio is not noticed, which is why sound is second.

At number three we have direction. You need some direction. Everything has to be directed – the camera, the actors, the sound, the editing, and even the screenplay in many cases. Direction is the act of taking decisions. Somebody’s gotta do them. But you can replace directors and as long as they do a functional job, the film will still be watchable. The studio system of old Hollywood used this to great advantage.  Which is why it’s at number three.

At number four we have editing. Great editing is unfortunately impossible to detect. You don’t know what happened in the editing room. As long as the editing doesn’t draw attention to itself we know the editing is good. Even bad editing can be watchable. A shot held for a bit longer or shorter will not ruin a film. As long as the editor follows continuity of action, which is dictated by what the actors are doing, the film will be coherent.

At number five we have music. Bad music is instinctively recognizable. The wrong music at the wrong time is jarring. Good music is invisible, we shouldn’t even notice it, just feel its effects. Occasionally the music can come center stage and become powerful, like how Sergio Leone used it.

Next, to everyone’s horror, we have the script. Young directors who have just started out, and film professors will all turn red here, but I’ve read the words of lots of directors who’ve had decades of experience, you’ll find links to books in the description. The universal idea is that the script is not as important as people make them out to be. You can’t be a slave to the script, there are too many variables. And the best and worst part of a script is you can change it. A great scene can be replaced by another totally different great scene. A great scene can be removed completely from the final edit and nobody will know. A poorly written scene can be acted so well it becomes a great scene, or maybe the actors and director improvise to make it special. 

So why does everyone keep telling us that the script is everything? I don’t know, but I think it’s just a hangover from theater. In theater the actors, the director and the stage design can change all the time, and the only constant is the script. But a film is different. Maybe this is why screenwriters are poorly paid in cinema. As sad as it sounds, it’s because the script isn’t as important as people make it out to be.

The script is a great guideline, but that’s about it. If you want the screen to come alive, you need to focus on your actors. Then focus on the sound, and so on. 

Last for me comes cinematography. As important as the camera is, it’s not nearly important enough as far as the audience’s perception of a good film goes.

The most important aspects of filmmaking

In descending order:

• Acting
• Sound Design
• Film Direction
• Editing
• Music
• Script
• Cinematography

Bottom line

Every aspect of filmmaking is important. Every element has the potential to add to or subtract from your film and make it special.

But, some are more equal than others.

At the top of the food chain are the actors. Which is probably why they get paid the most. The producers know it, the audience knows it, and the actors know it, too. It’s only the directors who refuse to believe it, until they learn it the hard way.

What do you think?