What I Learned Joining a Film Halfway Through

I want to talk about Infection.

It is a short film I am directing this year for Kids in the Spotlight. The shorthand I have been using is Severance meets American Psycho. The longer version is harder to summarize. Infection is about a young woman named Jane who works for a company in the middle of being acquired. Her boss hands her an impossible deadline, a stack of new responsibilities, and a pair of white gloves. A rash starts to appear on her hand. The rash gets worse. The promotion is right there. So is the next husk in the white gloves who came before her.

It is a horror film about a kind of American workplace cruelty that does not look like cruelty from the outside. The kind where the violence is delivered in HR-approved language. Where everyone is being incredibly polite while something foundational is being taken from you.

But the part of Infection I actually want to write about today is not the film. It is what it has been like to make it.

The Phone Call

The script was already in motion when Charissa Kennedy, the KITS program director, called me, because that’s how the program works. For 10 weeks, under the guidance of industry mentors, students in the program work together in writers’ rooms, working collaboratively to refine their scripts while gaining invaluable career insights. Acting classes provide new communication tools, and auditions, both for themselves and professional actors, empower them with decision-making skills. On production day, professional directors and crews of up to 40 volunteers per film, partner with the youth to bring cinematic visions to life, offering shadowing opportunities and mentorship.

The screenplay had been built in a writers room with five young writers — Chelsea Franklin, Faleb Lindo, Fanny Gallegos, Matthew Miller, and Tyler Ohaya — guided by instructor Hakim Hill. They had done the foundational work. They had built the world. The film I was being invited to direct was, in a real sense, already a film. It just needed somebody to bring the directorial craft that would get it across the finish line, but most importantly, a collaborator who shows students in the program the craft.

I think it is one of the most important and least-discussed director skill sets in our industry.

The Instinct to Author

Most filmmakers, when invited to step into a project mid-stream, will tell you their first instinct is to bend the material toward themselves. Rewrite the script. Re-cast the characters in their own image. Make it theirs. There is a powerful gravitational pull, especially for directors trained on auteur-theory hagiography, to treat directing as authorship and to be uncomfortable with any project that does not feel fully yours.

I am here to tell you that this instinct, while understandable, is wrong, and that learning to override it is one of the most useful things a director can practice.

The job, when the script and the writers and the producers are already this strong, is to be useful, not to be the author. The credit for Infection will read as my film, but the truth is more interesting and more accurate: it is a film I was invited to direct, that exists because of the people who built it before I got the call. That is a lineage worth being honest about.

What “Useful” Actually Looks Like

Here is what the discipline of being useful has meant for me on this film, in the order I have learned it.

Read everything before pitching anything. Before I made a single creative suggestion, I read every draft of the script, sat down for world-building discussions outside of the script (tl;dr, “what happened to these characters before and after the written plot”), and had numerous correspondences between the writers and the program. I needed to understand what they had already considered and rejected before I started suggesting things they had probably already considered and rejected.

Ask before assuming. When I read a scene I did not fully understand, my instinct as a writer-director would have been to rewrite it toward what made sense to me. The discipline of being a director-only on this film has been to first ask the writers what they were trying to do with it. Roughly half the time, the answer revealed an intention I would not have arrived at on my own, and the scene got stronger for being honored rather than overwritten.

Build the visual language around the script that exists. The shot list, lens package, and visual grammar I have built for Infection — the static surveillance-grade compositions, the Cooke Panchro/i lens set, the Angenieux EZ-1 reserved for three deliberate moments of psychological infection — all of it serves the script that was on the page when I arrived. I did not design the visuals first and ask the script to bend toward them. The reverse.

Take notes from the writers. This sounds obvious. It is the opposite of how most directors operate. I asked the writers to weigh in on production design, to read through performance options with me. They are not on set as observers. They are collaborators whose work I am stewarding, and the best way to steward it is to keep them in the room.

What I Hope It Means For The Film

I think Infection is going to be sharper, weirder, and more specific than the version of it I would have made if I had been writing it from scratch alone. That is the test, for me. If a film is better because the director treated the existing material as a gift rather than a starting point, the director did the right job. This is also how you teach the next generation of filmmakers how the process works.

I will be writing more about Infection as production approaches. We even made a custom alien-language font we built for the in-world prop documents, which will be its own essay. There is a lot of texture here, and I want to share it.

For now, I want to leave other directors with one thought. The next time you are invited into a project mid-stream, before you instinctively reach for the rewrite, ask yourself: what would it look like to be useful here, instead of authorial?

The answer might be the most directorial thing you do all year.

— James