After reading Chapter 24 of Tom Reily’s book, I want to say to assistant director what Jeff Winger said to Abed in the first episode of Community, “I see your value now.”

I always have this concern about filmmaking: if I were to shoot a scene, how do I know the ‘background’ in my film is authentic? How do I recreate a scenario that I have never experienced before? What if the director is from another culture? I have seen Wong Kar-Wai done it in My Blueberry Nights (2007), I don’t know how he did it or whether he did it right. Tom Reily answered my question; the assistant director will stage the background for you.

It seems that an assistant director’s job overlaps with production designers to some degree, since they both oversee the process of creating the world on screen. But the production designers’ job apparently emphases on ‘design’, while assistant director’s main focus is ‘staging’. Staging is related to life experience and human behavior. It is more than looking authentic, I find it more about the atmosphere from Reily’s book. The script may use a simple description to depict an environment, but it can require a lot effort to visualize it. Think about Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010), Ellen Page is in it as the ‘architect’. Many people think of her equal as a production designer in these dreams (scenes) Leonardo directed, but in fact, she is also the assistant director. When she creates the dreams, she also creates the backgrounds. In the second layer of Fisher’s dream, as soon as people in the background behave abnormal, so becomes the atmosphere, the dream (a scene) immediately becomes inconvincible (a video is provided below). It proves that the background, especially the people in the background, are essential for the authenticity of the film. And that is the magical work of an assistant director to keep them in order.

(Personally I’m really against screen recording in cinema)

Of course, assistant directors are not encyclopedia. As Tom Reily mentions, there are events “occur behind the doors”. However, I am not to talk about the part where they bring experts to consult, I want to extend beyond that and talk about an audience’s relationship with the replication of these events on screen. When presenting scenarios that are not in our common knowledge, how does the audience know if it is real? A scene can get every detail wrong but still be convincible when no one scrutinizes. For example, for decades screen culture had portrayed police officers as donut-lovers. Audience passively receives this kind of information regardless since most people do not deal with cops on daily basis. In such cases, authenticity cannot be examined if most of the viewers are not familiar with the background, and that can cause severe misrepresentation of a certain group of people. This may not be the topic we discuss in terms of coverage, but I do believe that this authenticity of staging the background is more than just the credibility of a film; it is also about sending the accurate message to the audience.