Risks are the lifeblood of cinema. Without intrepid directors—and the producers and companies that support them—we wouldn't enjoy the diverse array of filmmaking techniques and creative visions that abound today. Through risk-taking, directors challenge the very way we experience movies, pushing technology and artistry to its limits to deliver a cinematic experience that surpasses our wildest imaginations.
Below, we've highlighted a few major risks directors took in movies this year. Whether pertaining to unconventional narrative structure, technical innovation, or the resuscitation of one of history's most famous unfinished films, these directors embody the value of cinematic bravado.
See also: The boldest risks directors took in 2017 and 2016.
Searching — Reinventing filmmaking on the computer screen
'Search'
When Searching premiered at Sundance last year, it did so in the typical NEXT fashion: as a sleeper hit. Those who managed to see it, however, were let in on a secret. Aneesh Chaganty's film had reinvented filmmaking.
Chaganty, a first-time filmmaker, and his co-writer and producer, Sev Ohanian, crafted an emotionally resonant character-driven thriller set entirely on a computer screen. The film stars John Cho as a father who, after his daughter goes missing, desperately tries to find her by turning over every stone imaginable—and previously unimaginable to him—on her computer. When combing through her Instagram and hacking his way into her Facebook account proves less than fruitful, Cho stumbles across a self-streaming site called YouCast, which will ultimately lead him deeper into the labyrinth that is the internet, and, accordingly, the teenage mind.
The nail-biting action unfolds on various apps and devices such as FaceTime, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, text messages, YouTube, desktop navigation, and even GPS. Among many other things, Searching is an anthropological study of human behavior with technology; in one scene, Cho's character wordlessly considers the subtleties of texting an exclamation point or a period. He types out a long, explosive text message, only to delete it and send something shorter and more rational. He is constantly multi-tasking: texting while in meetings, FaceTiming while surfing the internet. The action is so engrossing that when the screen goes blank in a pivotal moment, leaving only the Apple "flurry" screensaver suspended in a void, we feel disembodied, robbed of agency, and utterly alone—not unlike how the main character feels throughout the entire movie.
Like many films that end up on this list every year, Searching almost didn't happen—but not for the usual reasons. It wasn't a lack of funding, a skittish exec, or a production complication that nearly killed the film; it was Chaganty, whose creative integrity was nearly a non-starter. The production company that produced Unfriended, a commercially successful film that was set entirely on Skype, asked Chaganty and Ohanion to expand upon their idea for a short set on a computer screen. The company would fully finance the film. But Chaganty didn't think his short had enough meat to become a feature. "I did not want to make a first movie that took place in a computer screen," he told No Film School at Sundance. "It just didn't feel like a natural story. It felt like there were more corporate reasons for it than there were emotional or character reasons, and that was the reason that I said no."
"Every single department in this film has to relearn their job to pull off this movie."
After noodling on the idea, however, Chaganty and Ohanion came up with a story that felt genuine. "All of a sudden we had not just a gimmick but something that felt like it was a commentary," said Chaganty. "It was character-based, it was thrilling, it was emotional, and most of all, it was cinematic."
"As we were putting together the first outline," Ohanion said, "we were exploring all the things that we do on our computers every day: the text messages we send, the FaceTime videos, the emails that we're waiting for, how we're navigating to get somewhere. Then, we tried to isolate all of the emotions that happen during those moments. We found all those moments and we made sure to incorporate them into our script in a very organic way so that when the traditional mystery twists and turns are happening—because it's happening through this device that we all spend our lives on every day—it's more relatable and more grounded. Our objective was finding the story first and then adapting it into something that takes place on computers."
But how, exactly, were Chaganty and Ohanion going to film it? There was no roadmap for a movie set on a computer screen. The rules of writing, directing, cinematography, acting, and editing would have to be reimagined entirely.
"Every single department in this film had to relearn their job to pull off this movie," said Chaganty. "That goes for the writing, too. Immediately we had the challenge of, 'How the hell are we going to write this thing?' We couldn't write it like a traditional screenplay: INTERIOR: GOOGLE CHROME - FACEBOOK NEWSFEED - NIGHT. Within the first few days of writing, we were just talking about how it was even going to be presented."
They ended up with something they termed a "scriptment," or a hybrid between a treatment and a script, which featured every line of dialogue and text in a readable fashion. "All the texts were presented how they were presented onscreen," said Chaganty. "If someone typed something and backspaced it, it would be crossed off. It was a playful presentation, but it was able to convey the entire story."
Then came the daunting challenge of capturing the action, both within the platform interfaces and on camera, via Skype or FaceTime. "There are two cameras in the film, essentially," Chaganty explained. "There are the cameras with which we shoot all the footage that's presented in the world of the movie, like Skype calls or news footage. Then there's the camera that we, the movie, are looking at everything through. To understand how those two play with each other, we needed to treat this movie like a Pixar movie and make it animatic. We also needed to be able to communicate with the actors what the hell they were doing on set."
"It so exceeded the traditional bounds of editing that we actually created another title for them: Directors of Screen Photography."
To accomplish this, Chaganty and Ohanion shot a full-length version of the film that stars Chaganty in every role. They shot it exactly how they would shoot the film: using GoPros rigged to laptops, which Cho would ultimately act against in scenes that featured him using FaceTime or Skype. This prototype also served to set the eyelines for the film. "We showed that on set to the cast—especially John, because he's usually the one operating the computers," said Chaganty. "It was important that he knew exactly at what line or when and where to press buttons." This proto-film also served to address the major problem of directing audience attention; Chaganty and Ohanion had to figure out how to create focal points within the screen. (In the final film, a cursor serves to guide our attention. Ingeniously, they created a main character with a habit of compulsively highlighting the text he is reading.)
"Without a doubt, the first and foremost department that had to relearn their job were the editors," said Chaganty. "Their job was to capture the footage, frame the footage, graphic design the images, animate the images, etc. It so exceeded the traditional bounds of editing that we actually created another title for them: Directors of Screen Photography."
To complicate matters further, Chaganty and Ohanion's film required editing software beyond the bounds of modern technology. "Most movies on their editing timeline have maybe two layers of video," Chaganty said. "We had 37. So, every 10 minutes, our computers would be crashing. It kind of felt like we had gone back in time and we were editing on an ancient editing software because everything took so long. We always had to keep our focus, keep ourselves grounded, and not lose sight of the forest for the trees."
"It took a while," Ohanion said. "We're never doing this again."
The Guilty— A film set entirely on one side of a phone call
'The Guilty'
Perhaps the most underutilized tool in a director's arsenal is the imagination—not theirs, but the audience's. First-time director Gustav Möller knows this better than anyone. His thriller, The Guilty, which won the Audience Award in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at last year's Sundance, harnesses the power of the viewer's own imagery to upend expectations until the very last moment.
Möller's exhilarating, twisty thriller takes place in an emergency call center, as a dispatcher receives an untraceable call from a woman who says she has been kidnapped. Because the dispatcher—and the audience—can only assess the situation from his side of the phone call, we are forced to make inferences based on limited and subjective aural information. Through tightly engineered storytelling, Möller and his team deliver a suspenseful ride in which the audience's imagination is the true perpetrator.
In an interview with No Film School at Sundance, Möller explained how he landed on this particular narrative structure—a risky proposition that would require exacting attention to detail and flawless performances to pull off. "I stumbled across a YouTube clip, a real recording of a 9-1-1 call," Möller said. "At first, I was gripped by how suspenseful it was just listening to sound. But the really big thing for me was the fact that I felt like I had seen images, even though I had only listened to sound. I realized that every single person listening to that sound clip would see different images."
Crafting the narrative would require a carefully engineered stream of exposition that toed the line between evocative and minimalist. Too much and it would feel off-putting, unbelievable, or pandering; not enough information and the audience would have too little to work with in creating their mental representations of the story. For inspiration on this technique of distributing exposition, Möller looked to Serial. "In the first season, we were really inspired by how gradually you get more information about the case in every episode, and as you do, the imagery of the people and the locations change," he said. "We worked a lot with that in the writing." But a lot of the fine-tuning was done in the editing room. "The editor, Carla Luff, should have a big credit in this respect," said Möller. "Towards the end of the editing process, she peeled off more and more information in every cut."
As for what happens onscreen, much of the film rests on the performance of the lead actor, Jakob Cedergren, who plays the dispatcher. Möller and DP Jasper Spanning decided to shoot his performance in Cinemascope. "I know a lot of people say scope is not a portrait format—that it's a format for landscapes," said Möller. "But I love scope for portraits. You don't have to do a lot to make it look claustrophobic with a dead-on shot." Möller employed three cameras and Sidney Lumet's relentless directing technique from Dog Day Afternoon to push Cedergren's performance to the next level.
Another challenge was making the film visually interesting, despite the fact that its sole location was a drab, institutional-looking room. Möller and Spanning tackled this by dividing the script into eight parts, each with a distinct visual evolution. "I asked myself, 'What's the feeling [of this part]? Is it control? Is it distance?" said Möller. "The choice of lens, framing, and everything else would change with each part, based on where he's at psychologically. Of course, hopefully, it comes together ultimately as an organic flow."
At Eternity's Gate — Treating cinematography like impressionist painting
'At Eternity's Gate'Credit: CBS Films
Cinematographer Benoit Delhomme met Julian Schnabel on the set of Salome, where Schabel was advising Al Pacino's directorial efforts. At the end of a shooting day, Schnabel approached Delhomme behind the camera. "He said, 'It looks incredible,'" Delhomme told No Film School at last year's New York Film Festival, "'but I have to give you one very interesting tip. Sometimes, when the camera was abandoned during the day by the camera assistant or the grip, it could have been shooting something incredibly beautiful that you even didn't notice. This shot nobody was trying to frame could have been the best shot of the day. Sometimes, when you don't control anything, it is the best art."
Delhomme, who creates art in his free time, appreciated this unique perspective. "I think only a painter can think like that," he said. "If you're a director, you think you have to control [everything] because you have to build a story. You think you have to know what you are shooting."
"He was not respecting any rules of normal storytelling or Hollywood."
Years later, when Delhomme saw The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, the DP knew he had to find a way to work with Schnabel. "He was using the camera as a texture," Delhomme said. "He was not respecting any rules of normal storytelling or Hollywood."
One day, he'd get the chance. Schnabel invited Delhomme to his studio in Montauk to observe him painting. "I had a small camera with me," Delhomme remembered. "I shot him painting for an hour. It was at the end of the day, and he painted until it was dark. It was an incredible moment. I felt we were doing kind of a dance. He was painting, and I was filming around him."
It turned out to be a test, of sorts—the director was sizing Delhomme up for his new film, At Eternity's Gate, about Vincent van Gogh. "Julian gave me the chance to make images—to show him what I could do," said Delhomme. "I'd never done that before. With Julian, this is how things work. He's not a normal director, in a good way." Delhomme got the job.
At Eternity's Gate features unbridled, impressionistic cinematography that evokes the frenetic intensity of van Gogh. "I think I managed, for the first time in my life, to work as a DP as I work as a painter," said Delhomme. "I didn't care about beauty. I didn't care if the frame was perfect. I cared about the soul of the shot—and van Gogh's soul."
Schnabel often encouraged his DP to try things Delhomme admits sound crazy. "One day, my camera had a problem with the monitor," Delhomme recalled. "I could not see what I was filming, because the splitter went black. Julian said, 'Keep shooting. Close your eyes and imagine the frame.' I thought, 'What? A guy is telling you to frame with your eyes closed, and maybe we'll get something incredible?' But he was right."
"I was surprised about what was in front of me, and used it in a nonconventional way. Those would be mistakes for some people."
Just before shooting, Schnabel mailed Delhomme a pair of yellow bifocal glasses and asked the DP to replicate the visual experience. (He used split diopters for the bottom of the lens with a monochromatic filter that emphasized yellows.) Schnabel also asked Delhomme to "get the scene in one shot," which required the DP to shoot extended long takes and to operate the camera himself, without a Steadicam. At Schnabel's behest, Delhomme shot with wide-angle lenses. With landscapes, it created a dreamy effect; shooting people, however, "you get this kind of strange distortion. It wasn't ugly, but it was an interesting way to shoot people."
Delhomme said that working with Schnabel was a transformative experience—one that forced him to relinquish control and to expand his conceptions of traditionally beautiful cinematography. "If you're scared to make mistakes and you try to make things perfect, you limit yourself artistically," Delhomme said. "This is what painters know. When painting, mistakes are welcome. They are beautiful. I think I managed, for the first time in my life, to work as a DP as I work as a painter. I was surprised about what was in front of me, and used it in a nonconventional way. Those would be mistakes for some people."
"People want to control things," he added. "Some people would have applied some kind of Steadicam application to make [the images] softer. I didn't do that. I decided to keep the unsteadiness—the shakiness of the film. Julian said to me, 'Benoit, the camera can never be too shaky, because life is shaky, and I want to show that. Van Gogh's life is shaky.'"
Unsane — Pushing the limits of iPhone filmmaking
'Unsane'Credit: Bleecker Street Films
It was only a matter of time before Steven Soderbergh, one of indie film's most ardent risk-takers, took up the iPhone. Of course, venturing into iPhone filmmaking alone isn't a risk in and of itself; a handful of others have broken that ground. It's the way that Soderbergh so blithely dispenses with the limitations of the phone—and the work he puts it up to, despite its shortcomings—that make his efforts with Unsane so bold.
In true Soderbergh fashion, the director told no one as he assembled a skeleton crew of a dozen people, a small amount of money, and a location that didn't require a lot of production design (an abandoned hospital in upstate New York) to shoot Unsane, a thriller about a successful woman, Sawyer (Claire Foy), who relocates in order to escape a stalker. But an attempt to put her life back together and recover from the trauma of the experience finds her instead checked into a psychiatric ward for 24-hour observation, entirely against her will. When her stalker appears at the facility as the new nurse hire, the audience is forced to consider whether it's all in her head.
"There should always be something that scares you when you’re making a movie."
Unsane is just the kind of disorienting story that lends itself well to experiments in filmmaking. Shooting with three iPhone 7 Plus phones, three Moment lenses (18mm, 60mm, and a fisheye) and a hand-held DJI Osmo stabilizer, Soderbergh exploits the device's dexterity—arguably that model's greatest cinematic asset. He puts it in a car boot; he races with it down hospital corridors; he places it on a countertop, between two characters having a conversation. Often, the camera takes on a voyeuristic quality; its inconspicuous nature feels conspicuous onscreen, as if somehow we are implicated in Sawyer's claustrophobia. (The iPhone's deep depth of field, despite Soderbergh's cramped angles, contributes to this dizzying sensation.) To film scenes with maximum intimacy, Soderbergh used the $15 app FiLMiC Pro and its remote, which allowed him to view playback from a different phone and to remotely control shutter speed, color, and focus.
Soderbergh also pushes the camera well past its limitations. He shoots in very low light, using the eerie "nighttime mode" to a surreal, blue-hued effect. The hospital's muted color palette and institutional lighting emphasize the phone's tendency to produce muddy images.
The director told Dazed that his desire to "push the limits of what the phone could do" was a result of years of experimenting with the phone's tonality and composition. "It’s the same when I work with an actor; I try to get to know them a little bit as a person before we start filming, so that if there’s some aspect of their personality that I want to amplify, I have a sense of it before we get on set."
"It wasn’t just about working out what the sensor did well," he continued. "It was also about asking, what are the things that it doesn’t do well, and is there a way to use that in addition to the things that it does well? Because sometimes you think something is a problem, but when you embrace it and double down on it, it turns out to be a really interesting anomaly that you can take advantage of."
Soderbergh told Dazed he was most concerned about shooting a particularly suspenseful sequence in the woods at night. "I’d made a very conscious decision to go for this very stylised day-from-night look," he said. "If it didn’t work I was kind of screwed. A traditional movie would have lined up a bank of 18Ks to light that forest up like crazy in order to shoot that sequence, but low-budget movies can’t do that; they have to figure out another way. It was about halfway through shooting it that I thought, ‘No, I think this will be cool.’ I really like the dream-like quality it has. That whole sequence was scary to make, but in a good way: there should always be something that scares you when you’re making a movie."
Free Solo — Filming when your subject could die at any second
'Free Solo'
"From my experience, it’s a lot easier to go from a world-class climber to great cinematographer, than a great cinematographer to world-class climber," Chin explained to Indiewire. "It has to be second nature to be on the wall and get to the top of El Cap... There’s a head-game aspect of this and we needed to be focused on the technical filmmaking challenges. The safety side and climbing can’t be a question."
Chin and Vasarhelyi worked with 15 professional climbers, many of whom knew Honnold personally, to shoot the film. With adequate rehearsal, the climber-DPs managed to climb and shoot with the bulky Canon C300. "They could move in that kind of terrain," Chin said in an interview with No Film School from Oakley Anderson-Moore. "They were doing multiple jobs. They were running their audio, pulling their focus. They were their own ACs. They could rig on their own. They were these solo units. I think of them as like a super elite special ops team. They were so badass."
The shot list, positioning, rigging, and logistics had to be "totally surgical," as Chin described it.
"As Alex rehearsed, we were rehearsing," Vasarhelyi said. "The plan was pretty clear. It didn't change all that much. It was this very close-knit group of climber-cinematographers who worked alongside him for two years."
Vasarhelyi told Indiewire that high-angle shooting enabled the filmmakers to edit in situ. "So we’re constantly looking at the shots and trying to economize on what is the impact and what we really need," she said. "That way we can improve and make it stronger."
The crew was careful not to do anything that might distract Honnold. In fact, deciding to make the film itself posed major ethical considerations. Writes Anderson-Moore: "Free soloing is usually a private, highly focused act where filming could inadvertently create enough distraction to cause the climber to fall to his or her death ... There are darker implications. Is filming the free soloer, at its philosophical core, entertaining an audience whose joy is predicated on the possible outcome that the climber might fall—in essence, commodifying death?"
"Alex was going to do this no matter what," Vasarhelyi told No Film School. "Alex thinks a lot about death, clearly. He free solos without a rope and he was at peace with that. For me, I was like, 'This film celebrates Alex and I respect him for that,' as long as we just don't mess up, you know? It can't be because of us. I had an exit clause if Jimmy got hurt. I needed to know that I didn't have to make that movie ... We had to have two press releases prepared, but our job was to insulate him from our own concerns. It was heavy and we're very, very happy it's over."
Read More: The boldest risks directors took in 2017 and 2016.
