When People Judge Direction, What are they Really Judging?

Overall feel. How it makes you feel.
Actor performance is also crucial. Some directors are much better than others at making performances seem real. If the actor performance is bad, it's easy to tune out of the emotion and the impact that the story is supposed to be having on the audience.

Spielberg, Milos Forman, Sidney Lumet, Scorsese, David O Russell, PTA, Peter Weir. These guys are phenomenal at getting raw human emotions from their actors. Not in some over the top way. The actors in their films behave like real people.

Yes, I understand that, which is why I added the caveat of 'investor'. I'm referring to the term Director in its purest sense. If you make an independent movie, for example, on a limited budget, then the Director wields a good deal more power. I'm not really referring to blockbusters, as the term director (small 'd') is something of a mystery, which if we're honest, most audiences wouldn't know if they fell over them, despite their healthy bank balances.

Most of the Directors I have spoken with are keen to be captain of their ship. They don't need to have bought the ship, however. As far as Director's Cuts go, there isn't enough of them produced by Directors of small budget films to make a correlation between Director (at the time) and Director (with hindsight and some spare cash floating about to make a different version).

Additionally, Directors Cut's aren't always about a new found artistic freedom somehow absent during the initial creative process that allows the Director to make another version, it could just be that they decided they didn't like it the old version. There are as many needless Directors Cuts made as useful ones. I wouldn't be so naive as to imagine that these are just for correcting an artistic wrong. The marketing department of most studios would love us to think like that, but, well, no.

A great director has to know how to put it all together. Each team will have responsibility for their own area and their awareness will be limited to that but the director has to have awareness and responsibility for each area. They have to create unity; even if other people have equally as large inputs, it has to fit together as a whole.

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You cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love can never be a great dancer. Never. (The Red Shoes, 1948)