How Relationships Skills can lead to Directing Fame & Fortune, LA Actress/Puppeteer MUA Yvette Edery, from the Red Carpet

On the wee bit I know about directing:

I wouldn't say I know much about directing but I will drop whatever knowledge I can here in order to share and teach and hopefully it will be of use to someone reading.

When I was in high school I chose directing as my career and I set out to stage Catholic School Girls by Casey Curtey, a play I had seen in middle school, and loved very much.

I had four extremely talented actresses- very bold, very funny, very dedicated, and the best assistant ever imaginable. I find having the best assistant ever imaginable has been my lucky charm and secret to directing success. I always seem to get the best- the one willing to make me pasta just like I like it and cry with me when I cry, the one who shows up after two other jobs to work with me till 4 AM till we both stink and look like crazies from working so hard to make our dreams real. Someone has to take notes while you dream aloud and then organize those like a jedi master for the cast and crew. Your job is to see pictures, to compose them, to direct the blocking or action, to get character A to location A and to move them to location B in the way that touches you most. It is emotional and you need actors you can trust to be the characters in your dreams; you need an assistant to wrangle them together exactly as you've planned. If not, no matter how many trustworthy people who love you are there to help, you will fall short. The assistant director is the glue between you, your dreams, and everyone and everything else.

You have a play or a script, either given to you, or one you have written, and you are in charge of creating the visualization. The script says there is a girl. That's all. You choose what she looks, sounds, and moves like and where. You have written it with a girl you loved in mind and so you choose a girl that has those qualities in great measure, put her in settings of contrast to create composition and a visual dialog, you ask her to say what you feel she is really saying all the time with her presence anyway. You ask her to look into camera or away depending on whether you want her in connection or disconnection. This is done line by line for as long as it takes, first on paper, and then in front of the camera or on stage, then once more in the edit room if on film.

"Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak." —Rachel Zoe

"What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language." —Miuccia Prada

These quotes say a lot about the above. Most actors feel their job is to emote until the person watching feels uncomfortable. In fact, I am so comfortable in the theater, that most actors know there is a director in the audience and one in a few will every so often, almost break character, and certainly the 4th wall, or invisible line that separates the action on stage from the audience, in order to direct all their emotion including eye contact directly at me, to see if I will react. This is bullshit acting. This is not understanding the Zoe quote. The actors are there to walk when they should, talk when they should, and not more, and believe it or not, to do that well under imaginary circumstances and great pressure is phenomenally hard. Do you ever trip in real life? It has happened to you, I'm sure. It is not allowed on stage or on camera unless the director chooses it. In life it is embarrassing; professionally it can get you fired. The worst part of directing is seeing thousands of actors who want you to talk to their managers about their ability to cry on camera when all you desperately want is the one who doesn't need to cry because when they walk on stage, their very bodies say in posture and language that they have been weeping. We see things instantaneously. A poor actor will bring you to your death counting the drama just babbling but a great actor (maybe 1 in 1000) will just create worlds by how she stands.

The best part of directing is when all the pieces come together perfectly.

"Clothes are like a good meal, a good movie, great pieces of music." —Michael Kors

The genius of this statement is in how the pieces come together. A director writes a piece about a girl she knows, puts her in an environment where she is forced to act and encounter her obstacles and to grow, and chooses the actress (1 in 1000) she feels will compliment this girl, and then the director hires the person to clothe her, the location to represent the one in the script, the builders who will create her world of props, a makeup artist or puppeteer to redesign her as archetypically as possible, a lighting designer to catch the glint in her eye just right, a composer to write music which makes us feel as though we know why she has been weeping, etcetera.

All of these people must be paid and scheduled into a safe and controlled environment, like a clock with many parts, the music is in the harmonious turning of all the interwoven or interlocking moving pieces. I so believe in this quote and in the work of Michael Kors that I sleep in his gowns, apply his lip gloss and signature perfume right before bed and the first thing I do upon waking is say a prayer of thanks, meditate for ten minutes, then reapply the gloss.
("Don't be into trends. Don't make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way to live." —Gianni Versace. Aka, apply the gloss!) You see in order for all pieces to work smoothly, the longer or more difficult a production is, the more when you pull it off, it is almost like a miracle. Every film I have created or play I have staged has had the miracle and gone on to win awards based on the ability of those moving parts to keep moving; when the time is tight, we nailed the last shot, when the costumer failed to make the glowsuit, the art crew did it, and it performed beautifully under the blacklight. That's the work: overcoming every obstacle (sick crew member called out, not enough money to buy needed equipment, location must be returned in three days, someone keeps calling the set and causing distractions, you missed lunch) to create something caught on film or video or in front of a live audience where when the clock strikes noon, the actress appears, wearing the perfect outfit, she looks up in perfect makeup, just as fake rain begins to lightly drizzle, so soft music begins to spill into the frame, just as she ever so naturally sighs and puts her head back down, as the lights begin to dim and fade to black ("I know what women want. They want to be beautiful." —Valentino Garavani). This one moment where are pieces work like clockwork, must be repeated through broken ribs, no lunch, disastrous meetings, cut funding, tight deadlines...and when it does...it is what makes life worth living for...like all those things, a good meal, a good movie, great pieces of music.

"I don't do fashion. I am fashion." —Coco Chanel.

It isn't easy to work for a director. After all, it is their vision and it isn't their business how it will be accomplished, it is everyone else's, within reason. That is why people with the attitudes of amateurs are a sickness on the set. The true professional needs only minutes to adapt to the needs of the director and with a tried and true skill set, build what is needed. The amateur will make a piece of it and demand immediate gratification and compensation. The professional knows the rewards are in the art and will be gratified by the results of their efforts on whole, with a body of work and an excellent portfolio, of completed projects of their own design. The parts must work and the best way to accomplish that is with well made parts! As well made as possible! I don't do puppeteering. I am puppetry.

I don't do directing. I am direction.

"You can never take too much care over the choice of your shoes. Too many women think that they are unimportant, but the real proof of an elegant woman is what is on her feet." —Christian Dior

"We must never confuse elegance with snobbery." —Yves Saint Laurent

I use these two quotes to elaborate on how to tell when something is well directed. I dream of having many more awards for my directing but how to tell where I stand within my peers or the competition? Clearly an emotional tone must be set and there must be staggering emotional payoff! People should leave the theater or movie house wiping their wet faces from laughter and empathy, healed on their own issues with humanity's emotional struggles! There are techniques which the beginner can employ- guestus, the details, and how and when they are presented, and with what flavor. Is it the uniform the girls must wear in Catholic School Girls that causes them shame? Is it the glass that shatters in the first scene that foreshadows the poisoning in the last? Is it the desk the girl sits at that she cannot seem to escape that exemplifies her lonliness and frustration? Do we care because her very soul depends on the uniform, glass, desk, etcetera? There is no cheap answer that can be covered over by loud special effects. We have to care about the characters and their world should be as easily identifiable as they are. Presence or object. In fact, this is why a director would choose a puppet over a live actor- if it can be said better by animating a uniform, a glass, or a desk, then by all means give them eyes and a mouth and let them speak. If not, let a live actor use them to represent the universe they live in.

"The hardest thing in fashion is not to be known for a logo, but to be known for a silhouette." —Giambattista Valli

Good directing takes time to create a style that will speak for itself and the trifecta of this phenomenon presents itself as the finished product has a style which upon immediate view is clearly recognizable and saying something uniquely. The logo before the film is not the film. The film is the 1 in 1000 actor holding the object that represents the entire story or universe, in moving sequence- the very first frame to the last, silently speaking 1,000 words- all the same, repeated 1,000 times, for as long as the film runs. (A bird only makes one sound, a river only runs in one direction, the sun only beams light in one way, and a director's films too have one expression. It never changes, it just gets better, purer, more elegant. "Elegance is elimination." —Cristóbal Balenciaga) The director has a perception that the character and her object are the living example of and the director moves them both until like a flower they have budded, bloomed, and died, according to the director's wishes. That's life and that's the story the director tells. This can be seen in all the work of the great directors.

So, if you can accomplish or achieve the above, you are invited at no cost to you to attend film festivals on the red carpet and museums approach you to have your work in their collections. Really! ("I don't approach fashion. Fashion approaches me!" —Daphne Guinness) You may go onwithoutabox.combut once you are accepted to Santa Barbara or San Francisco or Toronto film festival then eventually you just get emails in your inbox invitating you elsewhere. The Walker Art Center or the MoMA sends you an email letting you know they want your film in the archives. You stop sending people money to consider playing your film and you start charging thousands for them to have a copy. You go on the red carpet and deal with the haters, and you'd better have as many dresses as you plan to have pictures because the same dress on a red carpet in every city is a sick joke. How to choose what to wear? My advice for that period in your career:

"When in doubt, wear red." Bill Blass

About the author:

After a decade of professional experience as a world reknown puppeteer, volunteering in children's hospitals, shelters, and schools, while working on every major children's television show from Sesame Street to Reading Rainbow, Yvette now is solely focused on taking her award winning children's film, winner of the Audience Choice and Jury Prize, after Official Selection of hundreds of Academy Qualifier film festivals internationally, and developing it into a feature film series under the title of The Foretoken Collection, which is dedicated to her mentor Darren Aronofsky and in honor and memory of her grandmother Mina Grossman. Pieces of The Foretoken Collection are now in the permanent archives of The MoMA in NYC, the Walker Art Center in MN, the Museum of Tolerance in LA, CA and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel. After five years of teaching performance at Tisch NYU, Princeton University, and film festivals internationally, thirteenth world tours as a solo performer as an ambassador for the arts on grants and scholarship, Yvette intends to use her fully formed LLC registered in Delaware, to gain partnership and finance for the uplifting, creative, empowering, unique feature film series now in preproduction. An award winning full time makeup artist, costumer, puppeteer, and screen auter- Yvette has always made her mission clear- spiritual light, human hope, prayers for a beautiful future.

BH,

Yvette Edery
Founder/Sole Owner, Asharia LLC
Named 1 in 6 female filmmakers to watch by Indiewire Magazine
Creator The Foretoken Collection