HOW DO YOU FIND YOUR VOICE?
A Brief Anti-Manual for the Filmmaker
A student came with a question. The question. Not “How do I work with actors?” (important, yes), not “How do I block a scene?” (depends), not “What do I need to know about lenses?” (let the physics serve the storytelling, the emotion), not “How much rehearsal do I need per page?” (maybe you have the wrong idea here?), not “How many scenes should there be in a movie?” (you’ve definitely got the wrong end of the stick), nor “Should I storyboard or not storyboard?” (pre-visualization, on-set flexibility the more fundamental considerations), but “How do you find your voice?”
“How do I find my answer?” I mused. If only I knew, I could pen a best-seller, rest up into my dotage. Impulse, too often my muse, instructed me to offer a few pithy references. Susan Sontag on how limitations form voice. (Know them, embrace them, and there you have it.) T S Eliot on how “immature writers imitate, and mature writers steal.” (It’s not what you pilfer but how you use what you’ve pilfered.) Hilary Mantel on the creative act — coming from the gut, she posits, as she reflects from her head. (Nabokov said the act of writing a story begins with a throb.) Offer half a dozen such maxims, I hoped, and I could disguise my inability to come up with an answer. But no, I realized — it was high time I thought the student’s question through, providing them with more helpful considerations even if a definitive answer might prove elusive.
First things first: what do we mean by the concept of voice? It’s a word everyone uses, a notion we all affect to understand — but do we? Where to start? Always a challenge when common usage has long since buried meaning. Back to basics then — what’s in the dictionary? As a Brit my go-to is The Shorter Oxford. Open the app… enter voice, a nano-pause and… the literal meaning heads the list: Sound produced by the vocal organs of humans or animals… A moment to consider. What are we looking for? Voice, in our sense, is used metaphorically, thus that sound correlates with… what? Address? Style? Tone? Choice of subject matter, genre, dramatic register, world? Which? Then: produced by the vocal organs. How might this work figuratively? What might vocal organs represent? The psyche of the filmmaker? Their persona? Their background, personal history, circumstances? Their traumas, complex PTSD, general screwed-upness? Or something more mysterious? Their soul? Their creative soul? (How do you define that?) Or are the processes of filmmaking themselves, the story-making, story understanding and telling, the processes of pre-production, collaboration, the shoot, the cut and post-production, are these, metaphorically speaking, those vocal organs, aquiver at the delivery of a story? Or is the filmmaker’s choice of material — their story and characters, their milieu, conflict, theme, drama not the aforementioned sound itself but the vocal organs, the means of its dissemination?
Then follow the figurative definitions. (A word can be like a tree — a trunk of original meaning, branches its usage in varying contexts, twigs and leaves its figurative resonances.) The right to have a part or share in the control or deciding of something; an opportunity to express an opinion etc.; a say. This helps. Decisions. Selection. Chosen mode of expression. Opinion. A say in what we know as “the conversation”. All are aspects of a filmmaker’s voice. Then, again: The expressed opinion or will of the people, a group, etc. Stop there… a filmmaker can speak for a community, a culture, can give “voice” to the oppressed, the under-represented, the marginalized, the disrespected, the abused, those blocked from opportunity, participation, and fulfillment by the structures of society and politics and the people these serve. Black filmmakers, Latinx, female, LGBTQ, working class directors, writers, cinematographers can voice (note the use of the word as a verb) the soul, agendas, sensibility, humanity, the dignity of where they come from — the paradox here being that in doing so they render the particular universal. Add to this the individual voice of the artist and we have a voice within a voice, a double resonance for double amplitude. And there’s another word here to help: Will. Voice as the will of the filmmaker. Their inclination, determination, assertion, their sense of purpose — in telling their story, in posing its insoluble questions, in finding and showing its poetry, its mystery, its mischief. Soon after comes this: an expression of a person’s opinion or preference. Preference. Voice as the sum of the filmmakers’ preferences maybe, for genre, mood, character configuration, single or multiple narrative point of view, for tenor, scope and scale, for showing or suggesting, seducing or provoking, whispering or shouting. Later and we find this: Utterance or expression of feeling, opinion. Utterance. This I like. A movie as the utterance of the filmmaker. Later still, and even better: The agency or means by which something specified is expressed, represented, or revealed. Voice as agency, the agency of the filmmaker in communicating their vision to the world, the power, the act of doing what they do, the practice, the capability, the talent. Next up: General or common talk; (a) rumour, (a) report. Not sure the first helps us, the general, the common (unless these haven’t been voiced before) but I like (a) rumour very much. More than (a) report, although the distance inherent in a report might yield voice — the dispassionate stance, unsugared, unbeguiling, frank and honest no matter what the image, the action shown. I favor rumour (American rumor), because a rumor can be unreliable, manipulative, mischievous, can exaggerate, sensationalize, hone in on our desires, our fears, can circulate and resonate — the filmmaker not as clinical witness but as conspirator, as winder-up, stirrer-up, rogue chemist of emotion, desire, dread. There’s something irresponsible about a rumor. It comes with the territory. This sounds like the voice of a filmmaker, of Hitchcock, Kubrick, Ramsay, Martel, Barry Jenkins, Lynch, Arnold, Park Chan-wook, except that these directors are irresponsible in order to be responsible — they spread a rumor to reveal a truth, subverting apparent reality to reveal the questions hidden beneath its veneer.
I missed this, earlier in the dictionary: the quality of a verb as indicated by a particular voice. active voice, middle voice, passive voice. Can a filmmaker’s voice be active or passive? Active as in interacting with/participating in the energy and emotion of the story and characters — by lighting, lensing, camera angle and movement, by editing — the interplay of material and storytelling. Like Scorsese, Aster, The Safdie Bros. Can voice be passive on the other hand, the filmmaker patiently observing, their camera often static, framing broadly perhaps, and usually “invisible”. Like Edward Yang, like Chloe Zhou maybe, like Ozu himself, master of tension simmering under equanimity, his Tokyo Story yielding a single brief tracking shot in 135 minutes of exquisite stillness. And what about middle voice? As in “the window broke”, rather than “the stone broke the window”? Maybe sometimes for the filmmaker yes, as and when they vest objects and things with agency — as if it’s not the stone that breaks the glass but the glass itself that takes the decision to fragment. Not voice entirely perhaps, but an element of it — cause before effect — a fundamental resource for the storyteller.
There follow the musical definitions: A person’s capacity for singing. Good. The filmmaker’s voice as their capacity for the song their film sings. Then: Also, a constituent part of a fugue. True of a filmmaker’s voice if they revisit themes, questions, worlds, characters, tones, each of their movies echo and reinvention of previous ones. Like 2 minutes of a J. S. Bach fugue lasting a lifetime. (The longer the career, the richer the voice?). Also, we have: Each of the lines or notes able to be played simultaneously on a musical instrument. A sense here of voice as a combination of tones, the sweet and the sour, the violent and the lyrical, the majestic and the satirical, the sad and the funny. The filmmaker as prestidigitator of tonality — their juggling of attitude towards their material in order to create anticipation, uncertainty, and suspense.
One other brief reference — in my book What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay I say that voice suggests a perspective on material, a vision of life and humanity particular to the filmmaker. This suggests a conscious engagement, but I might have added there’s more to it than that…
Time to return to the student’s question: how do you find your voice? As an audience we may know voice when we see it. A director may know it when they perceive it in the work of another director, but can they spot it — should they be blessed with it — in their own work? Is it better that they don’t? Might they become too self-aware, too self-serving should they do so? And if it’s better they don’t see it, how could they ever consciously find it, or know when they had? Shouldn’t finding it be an unconscious process? Perhaps — to go on from that thought — it’s not the filmmaker who finds their voice but the voice that finds their filmmaker? Let the filmmaker meet their tasks, forming and understanding the story, designing how it’s to be told, telling it — in the casting, shooting, editing and post — from one project to the next while trying to think not “Where and what is my voice,” but “Does this work?”, “Does this excite me”, or “Do I have to do it this way — what other ways are there?” or “Is this a question I cannot put out of my mind?” or “Is this the film I want to watch, that I have to make so I can watch it because no one else has made it?” Yes, make the film that — were you not the filmmaker — you would want to see. Recall Nabokov’s throb, the charge you felt when you first engaged with the idea, the story, the screenplay. Keep seeing if you feel it — maybe not each and every day but often enough to keep you on the rails of authenticity and truth, truth to what excites you, to yourself, to life.
My AFI alum Zal Batmanglij made a feature The Sound of My Voice. Maybe it’s when you hear the sound of your voice as you make your film even though you might not entirely understand it, as indeed you should not — because who can understand their subconscious completely — that you get the inkling you’ve found your voice, or it’s found you. Was it always there perhaps, waiting for the opportunity to speak? Or has it been it born with your filmmaking, the pearl of art from the grit of process? And how might it compare with your everyday persona? Is it louder than you? Quieter? More flamboyant? More restrained? You yourself probably can’t tell because you’ve sensed rather than found it. And maybe sensing is better than finding, because if you’ve found it you may know it too well. It’s no longer a mystery, no longer works subconsciously but, out in the open plains of familiarity, loses its potency, loses its connection with heart, guts, and soul.
So, I’ve arrived at my answer to the student’s question: It’s not a matter of “How do you find your voice.” but “How do you sense your voice?”
You don’t search for it, you listen.
Peter Markham January 2021
Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)
