The curious phenomenon of ghost directing:… | Little White Lies

The curi­ous phe­nom­e­non of ghost direct­ing: Hollywood’s best worst kept secret

06 Aug 2017

Words by Padraig Cotter

Three men in night-time scene, with one man gesturing and the other two observing.
Three men in night-time scene, with one man gesturing and the other two observing.
These famous movies weren’t made by who you think…

And, can­did­ly, Steven Spiel­berg direct­ed that movie. There’s no ques­tion.” This quote comes from a recent inter­view with vet­er­an cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er John Leonet­ti, who worked as assis­tant first cam­era­man on Pol­ter­geist, which seem­ing­ly con­firms a long-stand­ing rumour that it was in fact Spiel­berg and not Tobe Hoop­er who direct­ed the film.

While Spiel­berg is cred­it­ed as pro­duc­er on Pol­ter­geist, every­thing from behind-the-scenes footage to numer­ous ret­ro­spec­tive inter­views with cast and crew appear to show he was very much in charge. The Director’s Guild of Amer­i­ca even inves­ti­gat­ed the pro­duc­tion when com­ments by Spiel­berg sug­gest­ed he called the shots, prompt­ing him to pen an open let­ter to Hoop­er prais­ing his work. Leonet­ti was in a unique posi­tion to know who was direct­ing since he would have behind the cam­era for most of pro­duc­tion. He acknowl­edges that while Hoop­er had cre­ative input and shot some footage, it was Spielberg’s baby.

This sit­u­a­tion is by no means unique to Pol­ter­geist. In 2006 Kurt Rus­sell con­fessed that he ghost direct­ed the hit west­ern Tomb­stone after orig­i­nal direc­tor Kevin Jarre was fired by the stu­dio, who urged Rus­sell to take over on the con­di­tion that he didn’t receive a cred­it. He ulti­mate­ly brought on George P Cos­matos with the under­stand­ing that he would fol­low Russell’s instruc­tions to the let­ter. I’d go to George’s room, give him the shot list for the next day, that was the deal.” Russell’s agree­ment with Cos­matos includ­ed a vow of secre­cy while the helmer was alive, with the actor only reveal­ing the truth of their col­lab­o­ra­tion after the direc­tor had passed.

While ghost direct­ing and cre­ative inter­fer­ence is acknowl­edged with­in the indus­try, very few pro­duc­tions are upfront about it. It’s also true that in the cast of tent­pole movies, the line between direc­tor, stu­dio, pro­duc­er and top-billed cast is often blur­ry. Sylvester Stal­lone is famous for tak­ing con­trol of pro­duc­tions – indeed, Cos­matos got the Tomb­stone gig off the back of Stallone’s rec­om­men­da­tion, hav­ing per­formed a sim­i­lar func­tion on First Blood Part II and Cobra. Like­wise, when Mel Gib­son was unhap­py with the ini­tial cut of Pay­back he effec­tive­ly replaced Bri­an Hel­ge­land with a still unnamed direc­tor to reshoot the entire third act, demand­ing exten­sive re-edits to give his bru­tal char­ac­ter a soft­er edge.

While the age of the all-pow­er­ful movie star is fad­ing some­what, a cho­sen few still wield a lot of pow­er. Accord­ing to an in-depth report pub­lished by Vari­ety, Tom Cruise was con­trac­tu­al­ly giv­en cre­ative sign off on 2017’s remake of The Mum­my. This was part of what drew him to the project, where he hired writ­ers to rework the script to focus more on his char­ac­ter and less on the actu­al Mum­my, and he had a large say dur­ing editing.

Direc­tor Alex Kurtz­man, whose pre­vi­ous cred­its include The Amaz­ing Spi­der-Man and Star Trek, was a rel­a­tive new­bie to lead­ing a large scale pro­duc­tion, while Cruise is an old hand both as star and pro­duc­er. Even crew mem­bers work­ing on The Mum­my spoke of the actor com­ing on set, instruct­ing the direc­tor, ask­ing about the lens being used and so on. It paints a pic­ture of a pow­er­ful star who essen­tial­ly direct­ed the movie he want­ed made, with the actu­al direc­tor there to guide his vision.

In the mod­ern era of con­nect­ed uni­vers­es and fran­chise dom­i­nat­ed release sched­ules, direc­tors are often treat­ed like hired guns there to realise the vision of a com­mit­tee. Mar­vel and DC are per­haps the biggest expo­nents of this, with Sui­cide Squad famous­ly being re-edit­ed off the back of a trail­er which made it look like a colour­ful romp loaded with quips, pop songs and action. Direc­tor David Ayer made made some­thing dark­er and gloomi­er, and so exten­sive reshoots were required to bright­en it up. In post-pro­duc­tion dif­fer­ent edits were assem­bled – includ­ing a ver­sion edit­ed by the com­pa­ny respon­si­ble for the trail­er – and test­ed. This explains why chunks of footage from ear­li­er trail­ers went AWOL, and why Ayer’s dis­tinct voice feels muf­fled by mis­placed humour and odd sound­track choices.

Even guar­an­teed hits like Star Wars are sub­ject to intense over­sight. Direc­tor Tony Gilroy was air-dropped into Rogue One to over­see reshoots and re-edits after prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy, at a cost of $5 mil­lion to the stu­dio. If it wasn’t for him and one of the film’s edi­tors, Jebez Olssen, the famed Darth Vad­er cli­max wouldn’t have been added, so per­haps his inter­ven­tion was mon­ey well spent, though it does call into ques­tion just how much of Rogue One is his and how much belongs to cred­it­ed direc­tor Gareth Edwards.

Of course, ghost direct­ing is hard­ly a new phe­nom­e­non. Despite Chris­t­ian Nyby’s direct­ing cred­it on 1951’s The Thing from Anoth­er World, it is unmis­tak­ably the work of pro­duc­er Howard Hawks. Sub­se­quent­ly even the cast and crew argued over who real­ly direct­ed it, with the con­sen­sus favour­ing Hawks. What­ev­er the truth behind the likes of Pol­ter­geist and The Thing from Anoth­er World, how­ev­er, the result in each case was extreme­ly pos­i­tive, which is more than can be said for many mod­ern comparisons.

In spite of the var­i­ous behind-the-scenes issues which beset many of the the films men­tioned above, most of them turned out just fine. But one that def­i­nite­ly didn’t is Piran­ha II: The Spawn­ing, James Cameron’s first” film. In real­i­ty, the rook­ie direc­tor was only on set for two weeks before being fired by pro­duc­er Ovidio Asoni­tis, who took over but kept Cameron’s cred­it for con­trac­tu­al rea­sons. Their con­flict-rid­den col­lab­o­ra­tion is the polar oppo­site of Spielberg/​Hooper, and while the final prod­uct is undoubt­ed­ly poor, it pro­vides a fas­ci­nat­ing win­dow into the hid­den world of ghost directing.

Cameron has since dis­tanced him­self from Piran­ha II, though he does con­sid­er it the finest fly­ing piran­ha movie ever made.” The expe­ri­ence also pre­sent­ed him with an unex­pect­ed gift; dur­ing his brief spell work­ing on the film, he had a fever­ish night­mare about a woman being chased by an unstop­pable man/​half machine killer. Thus, The Ter­mi­na­tor was born, and Cameron made sure that from then on he would always retain full cre­ative con­trol on his films, which has cer­tain­ly served him well on his way to becom­ing Hollywood’s high­est-gross­ing director.

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