On Capturing Women (Part 2)
In yesterday’s essay, I discussed how to capture women when it comes to writing—how to write them well such that the female characters are three-dimensional and feel like actual women. This then has the side effect of capturing the attention of women, in that they are drawn to you and your work, which is nothing you should take advantage of for personal gain, or write with the specific goal of achieving—it should be a natural consequence. If you do use it for anything, you should use it for what the next step should be, which is working with actresses in order to bring those words, those female characters, to life. Today we’ll focus on how to go about that—how to capture women when it comes to them and your camera.
First and foremost, you need to understand that every actress you will ever meet in your life is far more beautiful than you could ever be prepared for. You could have seen tons of captivating photos and video of them before meeting, but nothing can steady you for what the actual feeling is of being in their presence and looking into their eyes. An old saying goes that ‘the camera adds ten pounds’—that’s in reference to how certain lenses behave (there’s a specific science to it) but what I think is even more true, albeit less literally true, is that the camera subtracts a few hotness points. Even if the actress is preposterously gorgeous on camera, that is still her being reduced to something lesser than she actually is—a ‘lossy’ format compared to her at her ‘lossless’ state, for you nerds out there. I bring this up only because it’s important to know that, no matter what you do, no matter how skillful you are with your lenses and lighting and composition, you are funhouse mirror-ing her in some way. She may like how she looks in your movie, and you may too, but both of you will always know that deep down, what has been captured in the 0’s and 1’s of the digital information, or even the actual celluloid, is just a cheap caricature of her. Be someone who understands this, and can explain the concept to her if needed, and her insecurities will lessen—she will stop thinking it’s her that dropped the ball, or you, and realize that the medium itself is a ball drop.
That said, there is so much you can do to use the lesser-ing aspect of the camera to your advantage—it can be the key to her becoming her character on screen. Her character, in essence, is a lesser version of herself, anyway—a less-aware version, at the very least. The actress understands the nature of reality beyond the character—that a movie is being created, that words have been written, whereas the character is stuck inside the simulation. In that sense, it’s of benefit that the actress is reduced the moment the camera is pointed at her, as a character is inherently a reduction. This essay might be getting a bit headier than you had anticipated, but women love this shit—discussing these aspects openly and honestly with them will put you and any actresses you are working with on the same page. The concepts doesn’t necessarily have to arise, but they naturally do, go there, get deep with it. You’re in this together after all, and knowledge is power, and shared knowledge more so.
Thus far it might sound like all of these concepts apply to working with men too, and they do—they apply to working with anyone, but I’ve found that actors are considerably less interested in this sort of thing. This is the intellectual domain of actresses and filmmakers—a more natural and timeless pairing than actors and filmmakers. From the moment a camera came into existence it just made more sense to point it at a woman than a man, like it makes more sense to photograph a flower than dirt. Art is biased towards the capturing of pure beauty—men, although necessary, are less beautiful, or at least less obviously or fascinatingly so. This isn’t my heterosexuality talking—even gay men, and straight women, would agree. A beautiful woman entrances in and of herself, beyond mere sexual attraction to her.
I’m focusing on beauty a lot here (maybe uncomfortably so for some) but it’s important—when you’re making something, you really have to understand beauty and the capturing of it. You are not doing anyone any favors by creating ugly images, and you are not ‘being polite’ by just hitting the record button with no consideration for the visuals you are preserving for all of eternity and which you and the actress will have to live with forever. It is the total fucking asshole who has a beautiful woman’s time and attention and presence and wastes it, capturing her lazily—it is an affront not just to her but to art itself. You are not a ‘nice guy’, you are not ‘being respectful’—you are being awkward and stupid and treating the entire reason she’s even there like an elephant in the room to ignore. You wouldn’t have cast her if you didn’t want your character to be imbued by her and her beauty, so don’t get in the way of letting that imbuing process actually occur. Put your hands in the clay of the moment and form it to the image of the movie—otherwise, all is for naught.
If you approach the capturing of women with the philosophy of all the above, you will succeed, you will make good art. Technical considerations like lenses, and diffused lighting, and angles, and whatever else are all well and good, but if you don’t have solid intention behind it all, there’s no art to it—better to put your heart into a polaroid than to heartlessly press record on the best camera in the world. Your heart is really what it all comes down to—you need to fall in love with these women, the actresses and the characters, in some capacity. Occasionally I’ve been asked if I’ve ever fallen for any of the women I’ve worked with, and the actual answer is ‘yes—every single one’. This is because they wouldn’t even be there if I didn’t love some aspect of them so much that I wanted to preserve it for all time. That doesn’t mean I’m some horndog, or that I’d want to date or be with any of them—art is this beautiful place where you can appreciate the beauty of people without having to get tangled up in their entire being. The actual amount of people you truly need to be romantically involved with in life is a pretty short list for anyone, and I think we could reduce the vast amount of horrible dating experiences overall if people just made art together instead of dated—perhaps even doing all the same things, just with the goal of capturing something beautiful. On the other hand though, with less horrible dating experiences in the world, we’d have way less fodder for storytelling, so I don’t know what the answer is—all I do know is how to capture women well, and hopefully my words on the subject will help you to be able to do so too.
Thank you for reading, and if you like me and my movies, support my film studio, Kill The Lion Films, at $2 per month. If enough people do that, I will be supported fully by my art, which is every artist’s dream.