Acknowledge Your Mistakes
Abrams is a popular filmmaker but also one who faces more scrutiny than most. Part of that is because he’s taken on franchises that already have huge groups of hardcore fans. And although he doesn’t do it in a defensive manner, he’ll be the first to admit he’s wrong about things that either made the fans mad or that the critics and audience identified as faults in his work. He’s his own worst critic, to the point he’ll even apologize for something in a movie that is mostly loved.
He takes the blame with his movies, and he seems to use his mistakes as a learning experience. The reason Star Trek Into Darkness was such a disappointment, he told Buzzfeed last December, “was not anyone’s fault but mine, or, frankly, anyone’s problem but mine.”
He goes on about the Star Trek sequel:
I found myself frustrated by my choices, and unable to hang my hat on an undeniable thread of the main story,” Abrams said. “So then I found myself on that movie basically tap-dancing as well as I could to try and make the sequences as entertaining as possible.
And here he is on the faults of Super 8:
“Certain things worked; certain scenes were good; certain relationships I was really happy with. But ultimately, I couldn’t look anyone in the eye and say, ‘The script is great,’” he said. “It wasn’t that there was anything that I felt overtly didn’t work, but I wish I had better integrated this alien/monster/sci-fi story with the emotional, sort of comedic story of these kids and what they were going through. It just felt like the last third of the movie didn’t have the sense of inevitability that I wish it did.”
And then, of course, there’s his much-mocked use of lens flares. He’s apologized for that, too. In the red carpet interview with Crave below, in which he addresses an overuse of flair in Star Trek Into Darkness, he even jokes about being an addict and how the first step is to admit that.
Ask: What Would Steven Spielberg Do?
Abrams apologized for the problems of Super 8, even though it’s actually “certified fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes (as is Star Trek Into Darkness). It is true it’s considered a disappointment by many fans and critics, but it’s interesting that Abrams takes full blame when he’s such a collaborator (he’s got that community) and when he had such hands-on help with that film from his idol, producer Steven Spielberg.
Steven helped at every stage, including editorial. He spent hours with me in the editing room — he would offer suggestions but never mandate a thing. He’d say, “What I would do is…” and give a suggestion. It would always make me laugh inside, because I can’t tell you how many times I would work on something and wonder, “What the hell would Spielberg do here?”
That’s a bit of a 2011 interview with Time magazine, and it’s funny because it is something a lot of today’s young filmmakers surely ask themselves. Yet Abrams has had a connection to Spielberg for most of his life. As teenagers, Abrams and Matt Reeves won an award at a youth-focused Super 8 film festival. Spielberg’s then-assistant Kathleen Kennedy (now head of Lucasfilm and producer of Abrams’s Star Wars movie) read about them and told her boss to hire them to restore his old 8mm films from his childhood.
At that time, Abrams didn’t meet Spielberg in person. They eventually got together for Super 8, of course. But even before that, Spielberg tried to get him to write War of the Worlds. Abrams later showed him the script for Star Trek for approval. And Spielberg recommended Abrams for The Force Awakens. Now Abrams continues to look to him for assistance and feedback in his work.
According to an interview Abrams did with The Telegraph last December, Spielberg was one of the inner circle (again, community) who got to see cuts of The Force Awakens and offer thoughts. Spielberg watched five rough cuts plus the completed film and would talk to Abrams about the storytelling needing to come down to “what’s essential, or what’s efficient.” Here’s more from the interview:
Spielberg, he goes on, taught him how “not to work so hard to make a point, but do something that, in a brush-stroke, in a look or a thought, the audience understands what it means.” In other words: in an age where blockbusters are often measured by how much they can pile on the screen, the maestro gave him the confidence to take things away.
Now you, too, can know what Steven Spielberg would do (there ought to be WWSSD bumper stickers), by way of Abrams.
NEXT: 5 FILMMAKING TIPS FROM MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE DIRECTORS
What We’ve Learned
Abrams has been both very lucky and also deserving of his success. It could be hard to follow in his footsteps, but he’s humbly of the belief that anyone can do it by just doing it and that everyone, even someone as big as him, now, makes mistakes along the way. You need a rich background, but rich as in cultured and full of friends, not necessarily rich as in wealth. Still, the more powerful and connected the friends the better. As for tips on style, you can have signatures that many people find annoying because it gets you notice and you can just apologize for them later.
Related Topics: Filmmaking Tips, JJ Abrams, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steven Spielberg
