IN CREATIVE WORK ONE MUST AIM HIGH

The director must have confidence in himself, he must set high aims and work boldly.

The director's self-confidence derives from his strong artistic opinions, and is based on his profound understanding and independent interpretation of life and the arts. His self-confidence also emanates from an elevated political awareness of his responsibility for the process of film-making and a strong conviction that through his artistic activities he serves the cause of the revolution.

If he is to succeed in his creative work, the director must bring strong personal opinions and a bold approach to his task. If the director, the commander of the creative group, has no strong opinions of his own, the group loses confidence in the production and cannot work well. A director who has strong opinions of his own, who has a lively imagination and works boldly, will be successful, but a

director who is overcautious will never produce anything worthwhile. To say that the director should set his sights high in his creative work means that he should set himself the objective of solving certain new and significant problems in the re-educating of the people and the development of society.

The director must base his approach in the great concept of Juche and work from his own understanding and opinions concerning life and the arts. Then he will always be able to set himself new and higher tasks in the creation of artistic images and be able to achieve them.

Self-confidence is based on knowledge. If a person is ignorant, and yet insists on his own point of view, he is merely being stubborn. The director gains confidence when he has fully mastered the concept of Juche and possesses extensive knowledge of life and the arts.

If the director has set himself a high standard in creative work and wishes to attain it, he must put forward an original idea at the initial, conceptual stage of his work.

The director's conception is the blueprint of the film which is to be made, his creative plan for the coordinated guidance of his whole team in the creation of a consistent interpretation of the theme. Just as the military commander in charge of an army must have a clearly defined operational plan, so must the director, as the commander of the film-making group. The fate of a film largely depends on the working-out of this plan.

a new plan is required if a new house is to be built, so the director must have an original conception if he is to create an original film. No original work of cinematic art can be expected from a director who has no opinions of his own, who copies other people's ideas and conceives every production in a stereotyped manner. The essence of artistic creativity lies in the ability to find new subjects and explore the presentation of fresh images in a distinctive manner.

The director must introduce new subjects in his own distinctive manner.

Every effective artistic image is achieved through the creative individuality of the artist, and in literature and the arts life can only be depicted in this way. When making a film the director must adhere scrupulously to the script but not blindly, word for word, producing an unintelligent copy. A director who has no ideas of his own, beyond those expressed in the script, cannot create any works which are his own. Such a director cannot even create a correct copy of a literary work.

In order to adapt the presentation of the theme set out in the script to the characteristic requirements of film art, the director must possess a high level of creative energy and passionate enthusiasm. When the director launches into his quest with zeal and spirit, he is assured of finding a new image. He can only create something new, something of his own, when he consistently maintains a high level of creative enthusiasm, throughout the process which begins with the interpretation of life and literature and ends in the creation of realized

characters.

A bold new creative idea can only come to fruition if it is based on real life. However talented a director may be, he cannot conceive a new and audacious cinematic work if he lacks a thorough knowledge of the Party's policies and a rich experience of life.

The director can produce nothing new if he sits in his study, mechanically attempting to produce a script from a literary work which was created by a writer who entered into the situations of real life and lived amongst the people. If after reading the literary work the director does not conduct a serious study of the conditions of real life and just wastes his time in his study, hoping that the writer will be able to create a perfect cinematic realization of the theme, he will encounter many problems in his subsequent work.

The director must base his creative work on his experience and understanding of life. He should store away in his mind his experience of every meaningful occurrences, of every dimension, from trifling details to stirring historic events. When he has accumulated an experience of life and is so consumed with passion that he simply has to describe it, his creative work will flow smoothly and become pleasant and rewarding.

If a writer has spent time together with the heroic workers of a steel plant and written a work based on their noble and creative work, then the director should also seek to experience their way of life.

Needless to say, the director cannot follow precisely the same sequence of creative work as the writer. He must form his own

opinions and accumulate his own experience, taking careful note of each vivid image of the human beings who are building a new life. Only in this way will the director achieve a good understanding of the lives of the men described in the script and be able to find accurate and appropriate means of representing them and so establish his own independent creative viewpoint.

The correct analysis and understanding of the seed of the literary work is fundamental to the process by which the director establishes a fresh and distinctive plan of work.

In the creative process the seed not only constitutes the driving force which propels the director's creative work forward, it is also the practical foundation which determines the scope and orientation of his activity.

How to work out the plan and write the script, how to realize its portrayal on the screen, how to manage the creative work of individual artists—these are all problems which have to be solved by the director in accordance with the requirements of the seed. He cannot conceive any plan of creative work without considering the seed. Only when his understanding of the seed of the work is profound and secure can he draw up a bold plan of action and embark on the creation of a full-scale interpretation.

It is not easy to arrive at a correct understanding of the seed of a work and define its ideological and artistic value and significance accurately. However talented and well-versed in literature a director may be, simply reading a work through a few times will not allow him

to fully understand its content or develop individual characterizations. He has to study the writer's works closely and systematically in order to develop an accurate understanding of his creative individuality. Only then, can he correctly understand the artistic images in the work. He must study the way of life depicted in the script and then carefully consider their interpretation. Only then, can he clearly understand the writer's intention and attitude.

When analysing a work an able director does not draw hasty conclusions, he is not impressed by a few outstanding points and overcome by the urge to improvize. Even if certain individual scenes are quite impressive, an able director will be concerned if the work as a whole appears vague and unconvincing. He is not delighted by the appeal and impact of individual scenes, but by the fact that the seed which the writers have planted with such devotion is clearly expressed and provides a vital impulse for creative work. The force of the passion he experiences when nurturing an excellent seed fuels his activity.

The director must treasure the seed of a work as his own artistic discovery and support it enthusiastically, concentrating all his efforts on encouraging its unique growth and bringing it to full flower.

The seed of the work is not abstract; it lives in the lives of the hero and the other characters. The unity of the elements of representation derived from the seed is always achieved through the portrayal of the characters surrounding the hero. Therefore, the director must correctly understand the individual features of the characters

represented in the literary work and clearly define the tasks to be solved by them in their actions. In particular, he must set the hero firmly in the centre of the drama and closely arrange the actions of all the other characters around the hero's line of action.

A character's personality is the result of specific circumstances. In visualizing the living characters of his production the director should accurately determine the basic facts and events underlying these circumstances which have an archetypal significance and carefully select the appropriate details. However interesting events and details may be in themselves, if they are not representative and obstruct the realization of the characters as living individuals they must be boldly discarded.

At the stage of initial conception the director must also establish the genre and mood of the film correctly. If the director fails to perceive them in the structure of the seed, he will not be able to find the appropriate genre for the content or determine accurately the appropriate emotional tonality for the production.

When the characters have become clear in his conception, and the circumstances of their lives are clearly envisaged, the director should go on to visualize their relationships to various events through which conflicts are established and the plot develops, taking a clear view of the overall composition of the film. At the stage of conception, when the content of the production is defined and the narrative line is determined, the genre and mood of the film must be established in greater detail.

When the composition of the film has been finalized and the means and techniques of interpretation have been selected on the basis of the requirements of the seed, the director should be able to see the individual scenes and the overall flow of the film in his mind. If the film is to be original and distinctive the director's plan must express a new human problem and portray new people and their new life.

To develop a mature plan the director requires a lively, creative imagination. When he has imagination, he can set high standards and attain his goal.

In order to create original artistic images the director must have a diverse, rich and bold imagination. If he is making a film from a literary work, the director must have the imagination to adapt it to the cinema, the creative imagination to produce something original based on real life. Imagination is crucial in the adaptation of literary works for the screen, but if one relies on imagination alone, it will prove impossible to modify the script to enrich its expression of the theme. If in the process of developing his creative imagination the director discovers aspects of life which the writer has failed to depict, the presentation of the theme will be enriched.

Creative imagination must always be based on real life. The director cannot depict life truthfully if he produces an absurd work which is divorced from life, or if he is engrossed in inventing spectacular scenes which are devoid of all intrinsic significance.

A debate once took place on the problem of filming the story of an ancient general who had repulsed foreign invaders. One director

said that he would produce a wonderful portrayal of that heroic national resistance if only he was given 500 horses. Acclaiming the director's imagination as rich and bold, some people even envied him. But is this really rich and bold artistic imagination? What would happen if one started making films, excited by the idea of a spectacular panorama in which 500 horses charge like a hurricane over a wide expanse of fields and thunderous cheers are heard above a forest of glittering spears?

A film director who does not see the essential content of life and considers that only the genre and scale of the work are important cannot be successful. Before imagining the 500 horses, the director should have pictured the gallant people who rose up against foreign aggressors and should have planned a vivid depiction of their heroic struggle.

There should be no hasty improvisations in the process of artistic creation. Improvisation leads to error. In creative work it is impossible to ignore the momentary impact of a strong emotion and the image which springs from it, but careful and deliberate consideration is necessary before including it as a link in the chain of development of the overall conception. Improvisation is especially taboo for the director who commands the creative group. If he is carried away by emotional impulses and starts introducing random changes in questions of creative work which have already been agreed by the group, that work will be thrown into irretrievable confusion and the production will be marred.

The idea of the work which has matured at the stage of conception should be specifically stated in the director's script.

The director must not hastily attempt to write down the script as soon as his conception has begun to mature. However hard he may have worked on the conception, he must subject it to careful review. He must carefully examine whether the seed has been precisely planted, whether the character portrayals are distinctive, whether real life is truthfully reflected, whether the fabric of the story is woven in a cinematic manner, and whether the sequence of scenes is smooth and holds the viewer's attention. In brief, he must check thoroughly to make sure that the cinematic realization of the work achieved at the stage of conception has been clearly defined.

The director can only transcribe the conception into his script when his perception of it is clear, both logically and emotionally. The director's script is the blueprint of the film, in which the cinematic depiction formed at the stage of conception is realized in words. It is the director's initial creation.

In preparing this script it is better to combine the efforts and wisdom of many creative workers, such as cameramen, art designers, composers and assistant directors, than to leave it to the director's unaided efforts. However distinguished a director may be, he cannot match the combined efforts and wisdom of the collective. Since this script is to be transformed into a film by the teamwork of all the creative workers, the combination of their efforts and wisdom from the very beginning has many advantages.

Only when the film depicted in the director's script comes to life as a single, unified image in the minds of all the creative workers, can the intentions of the director be reflected accurately on the screen.

The director must be confident of his abilities and perform the work of artistic creation boldly and thoroughly, moving from the study of life and the literary work to the conception, from the conception to the script, and from the script to shooting. Only in this way can he be assured of attaining a high artistic level.

THE DIRECTOR SHOULD CLEARLY