The Joy of Storytelling
Why the best filmmaking happens when directors unlearn their own rules. A personal essay on wabi-sabi, Godard's jump cuts, and the joy of imperfection in cinema.
I stood in front of a painting in the National Gallery, unable to move. The rest of the room had drifted toward other artists' work. I hadn't. Something about the landscape in front of me, the fields rolling out, the light pooling somewhere far off, had pulled me in until I was close enough to see individual brush strokes.
I started reading them like clues. Sharp, jagged strokes near the top. Angry, I decided. Then I noticed the water: soft curves, patient, the kind of control you can't fake in a fit of rage. No angry person paints like that. He must have been calm. Observant, even a little bored.
Somewhere in those five minutes, I'd stopped looking at the painting and started interrogating it. I'd become a critic when all I wanted to do was feel something.
This happens to filmmakers all the time. It happened to me long before it happened in that gallery. The more film theory you read, the more restorations you sit through, the more workshops you take on lighting ratios and lens compression, the more your eye changes. You stop watching a film and start auditing it. A shot that used to wreck you now gets filed under 'nice use of negative space'. You've traded wonder for expertise, and nobody warns you it's a bad trade.
A few years ago I came across the idea of wabi-sabi, the Japanese sense of beauty in things that are imperfect, unfinished, plainly made. Ozu understood this before the word ever crossed into film criticism. He shot from the height of someone kneeling on a tatami mat, let his actors sit in silence a beat too long, and never once apologized for a static frame. His films aren't beautiful because they're precise. They're beautiful because they're honest about being small and still.
I've sat in rooms where a director spends twenty minutes explaining the 180-degree rule and why one specific frame breaks it. Or the light spilling in from behind an actor's shoulder that "shouldn't" be there. And sure, technique matters, I'm not arguing for chaos. But every rule in filmmaking was invented to solve a problem, not to become a religion. The 180-degree line exists so an audience doesn't get spatially confused about who's looking at whom. That's it. It's a tool. The moment it becomes the point of the scene instead of the scene itself, you've lost the plot, literally. Godard broke that rule on purpose in Breathless. The film ran too long, and instead of smoothing the cuts the way Hollywood convention demanded, he left them jagged. It shouldn't have worked. It became one of the defining tricks of the French New Wave, because it caught something true about how a restless mind actually experiences time.
Spielberg didn't get that lucky by choice. On Jaws, the mechanical shark barely worked, so he couldn't shoot it the way he'd planned. What he ended up with instead is scarier than the shark would ever have been: a fin, a POV shot, and John Williams doing most of the terrifying. The limitation became the style.
I've watched people walk off a set because the lens they wanted wasn't available. I've done it myself, if I'm honest, early on. What actually changes? You saw someone use a certain lens in a film you loved, and now your brain has decided that's the only correct choice. You're not making decisions anymore. You're doing an impression of someone else's decision.
I've spent more time on set than in my own bed for the better part of a decade now, and here's what I keep relearning: the moment I unlearn the rulebook, the work turns into something alive. The moment I get stubborn about a specific performance or a specific camera move, everything goes stiff. It can still work, people clap after the take sometimes. But something's missing underneath the applause, that flicker of surprise, the sense that anything could have happened and something did.
The real joy of making a film was never written down on a call sheet. It shows up in the uncertainty, in the willingness to be a little unsure and shoot anyway. That's the only place it lives. Stop counting brush strokes long enough, and you might actually see the painting.