One of the more controversial ideas currently in film discourse is the notion of the auteur: a director with a personal vision that heavily impacts the film. The auteur director, in theory, will produce a body of work that features their identifiable ‘stamps’ in terms of style and theme. The controversy surrounding this theory stems from the belief that framing film art in terms of authorship unfairly diminishes the collaboration of other creatives on the film, whilst others also argue that the construct of the auteur bolsters a culture (even a cult, some suggest) of privilege granted primarily to white male directors.
Part of the problem with the auteur theory, especially regarding its role as a descriptor, is that no one has a settled definition. Even its original debates veer towards vagueness and much of the current understanding stands in contrast as to how the earlier thinkers, primarily the Cahiers Du Cinema and Andrew Sarris, conceived it. For many, especially laypersons, the term has become a means of describing a heavily micromanaging director; one who dictates every choice made in the film, controlling, intimately, each area of production. Some critics grimace at this notion, believing it unfairly credits the director at the expense of others’ contributions: often this argument is framed as, “you can never really know whose idea it truly was!” However, a challenge to that may be that, ultimately, the director influences all choices — if they dislike an idea, would it be used in the film?
This view of the director as ‘primary creative’ may be descriptive of the directorial position in general: the director is the principal creative on a film, typically hired to bring a particular vision to the project, or has a particular project they have brought along from the ground up. They are with the project longer than any other member of the staff, from scripting to the final edits. Micromanaging, of course, describes a style of direction: some directors may be very hands-on across the board, others more delegating; some downright incompetent and heavily reliant on the skill-sets of their crew.
Part of the complexity with the use of the term is there is no singular mode of directing. A director might choose to be a keen collaborator or more autocratic with their wants. Some directors might choose to be heavily involved in…
