Moviemakers Leigh, Jaglom, Duvall and Loach are latest in a long line of "naturalistic" directors or nearly as long as cinema has existed, moviemakers have believed that their artform is a worthy rival of the novel and the play as a vehicle for revealing and exploring the truth of the human condition. The Italian Neorealists believed it, as evidenced by films like Vittorio De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, which showed that the story of an average man could be as poignant and powerful as any studio epic. Later, American mavericks like John Cassavetes showed they believed it, too, by rejecting the comfortable narrative conceits of a previous generation. Today it isn't difficult to trace the lineage of directors who place a premium on realism in their work—which is intended to confront audiences as much as entertain them.

l to r: Mike Leigh, Henry Jaglom, Robert Duvall and Ken Loach are just four contemporary moviemakers following in the naturalistic style of such auteurs as Vittorio De Sica and John Cassavetes.

Cassavetes re-cut the end of Shadows after watching it with a preview audience... because they'd gotten up and cheered! Artists like him know what audiences expect, but want to give them something different. They believe cinema should cast a light into places we might otherwise turn away from. Their films can be funny, exciting, boring and even frustrating—but never conventional. It is invariably marked by a level of authenticity and naturalism which sets them apart from the mainstream. Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Henry Jaglom and Robert Duvall are four of these contemporary moviemakers. They all work in this "naturalistic" spirit, constructing narratives from a unique synthesis of improvised and scripted material.

For Mike Leigh (All or Nothing, Secrets and Lies), writing and directing have essentially become one process: he constructs his "script" over the course of extended rehearsals, which generally last between five and six months. Working from an outline plotted beforehand, Leigh builds the characters and situations of the film in collaboration with the actors, until he has constructed a scenario that he feels is ready to go before the cameras.

To Leigh, this use of improvisation is essential and extensive—but it takes place almost entirely before principal photography begins. "I arrive at something very tightly structured, in which there is seldom any improvisation in front of the camera, but all of which has evolved organically from extensive rehearsal. The world of the characters and their relationships has been researched and discussed, employing millions of improvisations, through which [the actors] come into the characters. I'm absolutely in on the ground floor and responsible every step of the way in terms of how the characters develop. For example, who the characters are and what sort of people they are is very much my responsibility, though it's all about giving the actors endless amounts of space to explore. In no way do I let people go off and come back with random characters, then merely sculpt the story from there."

Offers actor Timothy Spall, who has worked with Leigh on All or Nothing, Topsy-Turvy and Secrets & Lies: "He is absolutely the dramatist, because he's put all the seeds and all the component parts in place." Yet, amazingly, Leigh never puts a script down on paper. "It all comes out of very comprehensive improvisations."

For Robert Duvall, whose Assassination Tango was released this spring, improvisation serves to augment—and in some instances, replace—previously scripted material. His latest picture is the story of an American assassin (Duvall) whose work brings him to Argentina. While on a prolonged stakeout, he becomes involved with a beautiful Argentine woman (played by real-life girlfriend, Luciana Pedraza). "There was a complete script," relates the director. "In the American part of the film, it was all scripted, though there was a little bit of improvisation to embellish if it made it better... I try to treat the text itself as an improvisation, and let it go any way it wants. But when we got to Argentina we made three [characters] out of one, and therefore had to find a way of doing things a little different. It was imperative to have an improvisational—and at times semi-improvisational—approach."

A key scene for the two lovers takes place in a coffee shop. The material, though called for in the script, was essentially improvised. Duvall and Pedraza used the location to rehearse ahead of time, then, having established a basic outline, allowed the scene to unfold, unscripted, as cameras rolled. "We would sit in this one coffee shop, all hours, rehearsing," recalls Duvall. "Luciana had a line: 'Where are you from?' If at the moment we did the scene I had an edge she'd say 'New York.' If I didn't, she wouldn't say anything. So the day we did it I had a bit of an edge so [she said, 'New York']. It was up to the other person to reply in a way that felt authentic for their character, in the moment; it's partially improvised. We used two cameras; I told everyone to sit down and just see what happens. I think we only shot the scene three times and then went home for the day rather than covering it to death. We got the freshness we wanted, and the points were made. But you have to set it up so that the people working within that imaginary set of circumstances are able to talk and behave as if it's life... I've seen people be natural but there's no impulse; there have got to be impulses with the naturalness, otherwise it's just an empty style."

The key, from Duvall's point of view, is for the actors to be in the moment. "I've seen improvisations become a little indulgent, a little heady, a little cerebral... You only have yourself. From a certain angle you appear as if you're the character—but it's always you, whether you play Stalin or Hamlet. You only have one set of emotions, one psyche. It's being in the moment that works."

For Ken Loach, whose new picture, Sweet Sixteen, is imbued with a seemingly effortless aura of realism, the script is the most important creative act in the moviemaking process. Though he may use improvisations extensively during rehearsals and auditions, he keeps fairly close to the text during production.

"It can become indulgent very quickly," he says. If it works, it has to be very focused and very tight—not just rambling for the sake of rambling. We shoot our films in six or seven weeks at the most, so you've got to be very tight in what you're doing and I think actors respond better if they have a strong sense of where they're going in each scene." Loach will often use improvisations to play out what happens to the characters just before the scripted scene begins, or he may keep the camera rolling after the written dialogue has run its course, fishing for whatever turns up. "It's changing the odd line or two—or just letting a scene continue rather than cutting. I try not to say 'cut.' The two words we don't use are 'action' and 'cut.' Every take should have a kind of natural start: you never pick up in the middle of a scene; you need to have gotten there somehow. It's a question of starting each take where people feel comfortable starting. The text is the line of the melody and you sometimes work like a jazz musician who will skit around it. There should be a sense of freedom about the words you use, but invariably you end up coming back to the words in the script or a close approximation of them."

One of Loach's primary objectives as director is to give the actors the sense that they can play with the material. "They should feel in control; they should feel 'I can express myself in this.' The test of the writing is if the way the actor expresses him or herself is absolutely down the center of the way the writer has written it. So that [the writer] has judged the writing so finely that it's in tune with the instinctive response of the person playing the part." Sweet Sixteen, like many of Loach's pictures, contains moments that are the direct result of this brand of disciplined freedom. "There's always the space for people to do whatever feels like the right thing without even thinking about it. I think if that works you can touch the actors' own responses and get a three-dimensional response."

This sense that the actors' own impulses and history represent an enormous pool of possibilities to pull from is at the heart of what led Henry Jaglom (Festival At Cannes; A Safe Place) to do away with a conventional, scripted approach his work. For Jaglom, who may start production with a loose, 70- or 80-page script, improvisation is central to the moviemaking process. By casting actors with whom he is already well-acquainted and whom he believes are right for the material, Jaglom works with his cast to create a sense of who the characters are, the general curve of the story and what needs to be achieved in each scene.

"Outside of that, I don't want to write for them; I don't want to force them into my thinking." Jaglom's method is, on one level, the exact opposite of Leigh's approach: in a Jaglom film, every moment that appears on-camera is to some degree improvised by the actors while the camera rolls. Whereas Leigh works through improvisations toward a finely-tuned structure during rehearsals, and Loach or Duvall may use improvisations to augment the script, Jaglom frequently creates his films in the editing room.

"I think I protect the moments that don't work and the actors give me great moments that I could never in a million years write and try to squeeze somebody into," says Jaglom. "The actors are, in that sense, the authors of that moment. You have to create the circumstance where they really feel open and vulnerable and willing to give all that. It's really their moment. In every one of my movies there are moments that are particularly resonant with the audience: an actor says something I couldn't in a million years write, because they have a different history, they have a whole memory and language of their own... I know how I want the movie to feel at the end, but I don't know what I want it to sound like."

The camera on a Jaglom production is, by necessity, handmaiden to the actor, as you can't plot out the visuals on one of his films. Jaglom frequently conducts the DP while shooting, panning and zooming according to his sense of where the juice of the scene is at any given moment.

"I love old Hollwood movies," says Jaglom. "But when I was in college, someone took me to my first screening—Cassavetes' Shadows—and I saw real life on the streets. I was thinking already about becoming a director, and I thought, 'This guy is telling the truth. It's awkward, it's rough, the actors aren't very good, the lighting is terrible and the sound is off, but there's something very truthful that doesn't exist in all those wonderful Hollywood movies that I love... I wanted to try and capture the life that I knew all around me, rather than create a sort of artificial Hollywood world. I wanted to try and create the world that I know and get bits and pieces of it up on the screen."

This aspect of what moviemakers like Jaglom, Leigh, Duvall or Loach are able to achieve—this ability to mirror life—is what attracts people to their singular, unflinching brand of cinema. "What I always felt my goal was," enthuses Jaglom, "was to share with audiences something about their own lives which would make them feel less alone, less crazy, less isolated. It's about giving the audience an experience that is truthful and lets them know other people are going through the same problems; that's the goal." MM