On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director
(Faber and Faber, 2004; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)
A 300-page collection of writings and sketches by British film director Alexander Mackendrick, edited by Paul Cronin.
Here for extracts published in Scriptwriter magazine. Here and here for articles about Mackendrick‘s teachings. Here for Mackendrick’s artwork for one of his unrealised projects. Article here about Mackendrick’s life and work. Here for an extract in French, as published in Positif. Here and here for details of retrospectives. Here and here for two important essays (from 1974) by Charles Barr about about Ealing Studios, where Mackendrick made five films. Here for an essay by John Ellis (from 1975) about Ealing.
Buy the book here and here. Flyer here. French edition. Japanese edition. Accompanying film: Mackendrick on Film (flyer here).
2012 marks one hundred years since Mackendrick’s birth. Details of the centenary celebrations here.
Invaluable… I can easily imagine a college without a film program building a curriculum around these writings.
Extraordinarily useful.
Mr. Cronin has provided a great service in his work on Mackendrick. Tight Little Island and The Ladykillers are perfect films. Any director knows they are worthy of both study and awe, and this book brings them, and Mackendrick, into contemporary focus perfectly.
Staggeringly good.
Remarkable… It has the salutary effect of demystifying the art of film direction.
Anyone contemplating a film career can do no better than read Mackendrick’s On Film-Making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director. It offers the lifetime experience and thoughts of one of cinema’s greatest masters.
If I’d had this book before I went to film school, I wouldn’t have gone to film school. I would simply have taken the money I’d saved on tuition and made movies. These are the lectures I had hoped to hear in film school and never did. They seem to me the perfect synthesis of what one must know to tell stories on film. I cannot imagine anyone setting out to make movies without reading this book.
A fascinating book, being essentially the notes by which Alexander Mackendrick taught at CalArts. It is intelligent and practical – nothing like the film business.
Mackendrick was a fine director and a superb teacher, and his book offers incisive advice on all phases of production, from screenwriting to editing. On Film-Making forms one of our finest records of a director’s conception of his art and craft.
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
Mackendrick had a gift for lucidity of thought and language that helped to demystify film-making while retaining a sense of its magic and wonder. This book is as vital and enjoyable for the watcher of films as their potential maker.
Exhilarating… eminently readable.
Impressive… Mackendrick’s voice – practical, ironic, articulate, intensely sceptical of the least hint of ‘director as superstar’ – comes through strongly.
An invaluable analysis of the director’s art and craft.
There are riches here for anyone seeking a clearer understanding of why good film-making is so powerful and poor practice generates dull viewing.
The work of a superb teacher, constituting one of the best books ever written on the poetics of cinema.
This eminently accessible collection of teaching notes and sketches lays bare the myth of moviemaking, and should prove essential reading for anyone with an interest in its art and craft.
Packed with wisdom about directing.