By Kira Ricarte
On Wednesday, March 19, students inside the screening room at the sixth floor of Brooklyn College’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema. At the very front, below a large white screen, two men sat and chatted with each other waiting for an audience to arrive: dean of the American Film Institute (AFI) Richard Gladstein, and Rob Spera, film and TV director of shows like “Criminal Minds,” as well as an acting professor who teaches at the AFI in Los Angeles, California, and speaker for the night.
Spera’s lecture focuses on his book: the “Film/TV Director’s Field Manual,” which distills his two decades’ worth of filmmaking and directing experiences into a small black book of 205 pages. Copies were later distributed among the students with Spera’s personal stamp on the third page.
Before Spera began talking about his book, both he and Gladstein told the story of how he became a film director. Spera once trained as an actor, but he wasn’t getting hired. Still, he did not want to take on any job just to get by.
“I didn’t want to spend my early twenties working at the bar or the restaurant,”
So, he became an acting teacher for his acting friends. Due to this, he was able to make sure his “survival job” was still engaging with what he is passionate about.
Spera began producing theater, which introduced him to a lot of famous actors like John Turturro and Cathy Baker. But as he began directing, Spera switched to film, enrolling in the AFI Conservatory as a student. He would soon find out that the classes he was taking weren’t teaching the basic concepts. So, Spera left the AFI and taught himself the basics of filmmaking with everything he could find about the subject:books, articles, and movies. Eventually, he created his own program he could teach to others that, to him, was “very practical and accessible, with far-reaching ramifications down the road in terms of depth and meaning.”
In his “Film/TV Director’s Field Manual,” there are 70 maxims that Spera emphasized before the Feirstein students as “tools” to be used, instead of rules to be followed, regardless of what kind of film is being made.
“The maxims transcend genre,” Spera explained to the students. “They transcend tastes. They transcend sensibilities, and they transcend time.” The same tools were used 100 years ago, and are still used now.
In his lecture, Spera laid out what he called “the director’s toolkit”: the camera, the actor, the light, production design, blocking, music, sound, and editing. He explained each element, which ended up teaching a few of his maxims in his book. He would explain how shifting the camera angle of a performance could turn a previously terrible scene into a great one. For example, adding light to an actor’s face can elevate an inexperienced actor’s performance. Spera also recommended that a director should adopt a “hands-off” approach towards their actors and be able to experiment, but also come prepared with multiple versions of the same scene to not get caught off-guard. Going in-depth on sound, Spera discussed how music and sound should punctuate a scene to emotionally enhance the scene, but not to overtake the film to the point that it’s all the viewer can remember.
Spera touched upon dialogue, and how good dialogue is written after the script is completed. During all this, he would show stills from TV shows and films as old as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Suspicion,” and as recent as Celine Song’s “Past Lives,” allowing for students to analyze them and see how lighting, camera angle, and setting can tell the story of the film even in one scene alone.
To conclude the talk, Spera gave an assignment to the students, which was to open the Q&A and ask many questions to help further understand his teachings and to get grounded advice for their filmmaking. Among these pieces of advice, Spera mentioned always being a staunch supporter for your own work.
“You’re the director…you want to remain an advocate for the material. That’s your job, be an advocate,” he stated. “You can’t wait till your big movie to care. You have to care now.”; and to not be afraid to fail, and to “try something”.
By the end of the lecture, students left inspired and engaged, with a few falling in line to get their books signed by Spera. One of whom was Adia Braithwaite, a junior Feirstein student who is also a member of The Fireflies, a BC club centered around women in film.
“It’s always nice to hear when people in those spaces you want to be in are like ‘Just start doing things,’” Braithwaite told The Vanguard.
“Like it’s always reinforcing the idea that I just have to start […] just starting and failing, and failing big, it was inspirational to hear.”