I was reading through an interview with Godard in Cahiers du Cinema from 1962 for some studies on New Wave Cinema and some passages really stood out to the stuff that we’re doing in terms of looking at the way directors work and the way they look at covering

“I improvise, certainly, but with material which goes a long way back. Over the years you accumulate things and then suddenly you use them in what you’re doing. My first shorts were prepared very carefully and shot very quickly. A bout de souffle began this way. I had written the first scene (Jean Seberg on the Champs-Elysees), and for the rest I had a pile of notes for each scene. I said to myself, this is terrible. I stopped everything. Then I thought: in a single day, if one knows how to go about it, one should be able to complete a dozen takes. Only instead of planning ahead, I shall invent at the last minute. If you know where you’re going it ought to be possible. This isn’t improvisation but last-minute focusing. Obviously, you must have an overall plan and stick to it; you can modify it up to a point, but when shooting begins it should still change as little as possible, otherwise it’s catastrophic. [.…]

As I make low budget films, I can ask the producer for a five-week schedule, knowing there will be two weeks of actual shooting. Vivre sa vie took four weeks, but shooting stopped during the whole second weeks. The big difficulty is that I need people who can be at my disposal the whole time. Sometimes they have to wait a whole day before I can tell them what I want them to do. I have to ask them not to leave the location  in case we start shooting again. Of course they don’t like it. That’s why I always try to see that people who work with me are well paid. Actors don’t like it for a different reason: an actor like’s to feel he’s in control of his character, even if it isn’t true, and with me they rarely do. The terrible thing is that in cinema it is so difficult to do what a painter does quite naturally: he stops, steps back, gets discouraged, starts again, changes something. He can please himself.”

For me, Godard’s statements bring to mind the question, is coverage implicit in script?

(I haven’t seen Breathless but it might be a good idea to do so and investigate – or unpack – the structure and complexity of the first scene, as compared to the rest of the film) . It also focuses my attention to whether or not the script (as opposed to a synopsis) that shapes coverage? Is that the inherent decider?

Even then, notes can be thrown out, story boards rewritten. Coverage is about the way the director wants to communicate their vision of the world to an audience.

Godard – at the height of the French New Wave – would not be a director I would look to directly to understand coverage. He tests the bounds, he tries to break things down, whilst important, it’s not ideal for investigating coverage that shows us non-standard ways to cover (what I want to call) standard scenes.

I’ve had problems with choosing scenes. I’ve been watching a LOT of films but not finding scenes that stick out in terms of great camera work and good use of space and people. Because we’ve been making two actors, one space, one time, and focusing on the dynamic between the two that’s what I’ve been looking for. Either I’ve been finding too much ellipsis, or not enough focus in a scene. Are the kind of scenes we’re studying absent from cinema? There seem to be plenty of them in tv, however they are covered in the efficient way (shot-reverse-shot). The mind of coverage that we’re searching for seems to exist in old European cinema, not in hollywood and not in the French rule-breakers of the sixties… what Godard was doing, whilst important, was largely about getting himself into the position of respect through his work with the Cahiers to enable his methodology to be explored and gain publicity and a reputation.

Godard’s final point, about being able to step away from the work – like a painter – also highlights another key discussion point on filmmaking that has come to light throughout the semester: in filmmaking, no man is an island. You can not  do it on your own. And so you must achieve a degree of compromise in your work, or you must focus entirely on being able to communicate a vision with a team. Stepping back, in a moment on set, in a moment of discussion is difficult and I have seen someone do it. Its also harder to start again. Its a building that continues down the road rather then up into the sky. Going back, redoing things, trying things in alternate ways happens at the expense of others (both physically and literally). Goddard says he deals with this by always ensuring he pays actors and crew reasonable to good rates. From what I’ve experienced of the media industry in Melbourne  today, we don’t have that luxury. So how can we make it worth the crew’s while? When its not their baby? When its not their master project, it’s a big ask to have people around to do as you please and you’d need to build up a fair number of favours for that to work…