Dan Attias, Director, Producer and Author: It’s not the writer’s job to tell the director how to make the story the most compelling it can be.
Film Courage: The writers of Homeland didn’t want to change [the script] or they felt that the way it was written was fine [Maggie’s Testimony – Ep. 10 – Season 7]?
Dan: This opens up a lot of questions which I think are really features of collaborative creativity that I find fascinating. They had written the script and felt good about it. They thought it worked in a certain way and they told me the way they thought it worked. It’s so interesting, in features generally I think (in general terms) the director is more the one empowered to kind of make a lot of the creative decisions. In series television it’s weighted much more towards the writer and the show runner so that the interesting challenge in coming into a series is I have to be serving the vision of the show runner. I can’t change that, it’s not my place. What’s interesting is that the writer has to be better off if they acknowledge we will certainly get greater creative contributions from others if they acknowledge that their work has to be interpreted. A script is really a fleshless blueprint when you think about it, it’s words on a page. I say in the book [DIRECTING GREAT TELEVISION: Inside TV’s New Golden Age] it’s like there’s no such thing as filming the script. That would be pictures of words on the page. You have to interpret it, the actors have to bring their understanding of what’s going on. You have to dig deep for the kinds of inner life and subtext and intentions that I’ve been describing and it’s not really the writers…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BUY THE BOOK – DIRECTING GREAT TELEVISION: Inside TV’s New Golden Age
BIO:
Dan Attias has worked as a director in the film and television industry for 37 years. As a director of series television he has received the Directors Guild of America award for outstanding direction of dramatic television and has been nominated for multiple Emmy awards for his comedy directing. He continues to work on some of the most celebrated and critically acclaimed American television shows, including Homeland, The Americans, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Billions, and The Boys. Previously he has directed The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, True Blood, Entourage, The Killing, The Walking Dead, True Detective, Ray Donovan, Bloodline, Friday Night Lights, Northern Exposure, House, Lost, Alias, among many others. His first professional directing assignment was the feature film, Stephen King’s Silver Bullet, produced by Dino DeLaurentiis. Dan started his career studying acting, then worked as an assistant director on E.T. The Extraterrestrial, Airplane!, One From the Heart and several other feature films. He has taught acting and directing workshops in the United States, and has appeared as a guest speaker at festivals in Italy, Brazil, Greece, Mexico and Canada. Before working in the film and television industry, Dan was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in English literature at U.C.L.A., then transferred to the Theater Arts Department where he earned an M.F.A. in film production.
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