6 Filmmaking Tips From J.J. Abrams

Filmmaking lessons from a Galaxy Far Far Away.

You can joke about lens flares and nepotism when discussing both how J.J. Abrams makes his movies and how he got started in Hollywood. But the truth is he is and has been a hard working filmmaker since his youth and has done well enough by the industry and the audience that we continue to be interested in him. Plus he did a great — maybe not perfect, but still great — job resurrecting Star Wars with The Force Awakens.

So, any advice Abrams has to impart is very valuable. Much of what he offers directly is familiar to anyone reading this column regularly. Most filmmakers say the same things these days. For instance, Abrams often suggests that you just need to make something. Or write something. Don’t say you want to be a director or writer. Be one. He did it as a kid, and there wasn’t all the technology that makes it so much easier now.

There are six other tips we’ve found from interviews and talks he’s given that are more unique to him. Get inspired by reading them below.

Have a Conversation With Your Audience

Obviously we have to address the Mystery Box. In 2007, Abrams gave a TED Talk where he brought out an old box of magic tricks he’s had for 35 years and never opened. He has no idea what is inside (unless he read this 2011 New York Times piece spoiling it), and that’s been turned into a metaphor for various things associated with creating and viewing TV and movies. There’s the movie theater as mystery box, there’s the blank page as mystery box and there’s the setting up of expectations (not false but sort of misdirected) as mystery box, among his explanations.

The biggest in terms of relaying advice involves a creating a kind of dialogue between filmmaker and audience. Through the movie or TV show, that is, not literally and directly. You start off by showing the audience something that makes them ask a question, then you respond with something that is either an answer or something that has them asking more questions, or it’s both. But there’s a back and forth going on, basically an engagement, that propels the storytelling on both sides. Interestingly enough, in the TED Talk, he uses Star Wars to describe what he means.

Abrams has also addressed this elsewhere as being more common or at least easier with television. The pilot of a show should end by setting up questions and promise of what is to come. Of course, with a TV series (say, Lost), the answers often never come, and that can frustrate the audience. It’s true of some movies, too. But, hey, Abrams never opened that box, so maybe he doesn’t relate to that frustration. He also talks below about the related idea of withholding information or obscuring the big picture of a story or creature. It’s all about giving the audience a reason to stick with this conversation they’re having with the material.

Learn What to Make Movies About

From a critical standpoint, it’s more important how a movie is about than what it is about. For filmmakers it might be the other way around. Abrams thinks so, based on advice he received from his father (TV movie producer Gerald W. Abrams) before he decided on an academic college (Sarah Lawrence) rather than film school. “’It’s more important that you go off to learn what to make movies about,’” he quotes in the below interview (at 5:45) with BAFTA Guru, “’than how to make movies.’”

That’s certainly true for filmmakers who want to write their own material. You can’t write things you don’t know about. You can’t tell a story or create characters you don’t understand. And you can’t just make a lot of movies about movie directors. You need that broader education and cultural experience.

Find a Community

Yes, Abrams grew up in the business. Not only is his father a producer, but his mother (the late Carol Adams) became one, too. As a kid, he hung out on the Paramount lot. He watched what his father did. But he didn’t totally take advantage of the nepotism angle when starting out. “I mean, my dad’s a television producer, and I knew I could get a job as an assistant or a reader with one of his friends, but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do,” he told Movieline magazine in a profile on him way back in 1992.

It was nepotism that got him his big break, however. While still a senior at Sarah Lawrence, he co-wrote a treatment for what became Taking Care of Business with Jill Mazursky, who passed the idea on to her father, filmmaker Paul Mazursky, who turned it over to Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney. “I owe everything I have to Jill. She, like, totally made my career,” he says in the Movieline interview, and he’s acknowledged that connection — which also led to them collaborating on Gone Fishin’ — many times since.

But Jill could have been anyone. When he spoke at Loyala Marymount University in 2013, Abrams talked of the importance of just meeting people and is paraphrased in the school’s magazine as saying, “someone will get a job, and it may be a friend.” He grew up with guys like filmmaker Matt Reeves and actor Greg Grunberg, both of whom he’s continued to collaborate with in adulthood. He told the LMU students that the great thing about Hollywood is there’s “no clear way to get in.” And it doesn’t matter how much education or training you put in. “There is no moment when you become that person you want to be,” Abrams said at the school. “You are that person right now. The key is to find a community.”

Keep Your Excitement In Your Pants

This tip may seem very specific. Abrams grew up a huge fan of Star Wars and then he got to make a Star Wars movie. But it’s actually becoming more and more common in Hollywood that everything is a huge tentpole resurrecting a classic franchise or adapting a popular comic book character or a video game, and a lot of today’s younger directors go into their projects as fans of the material. And that’s not even actually that new. Filmmakers have always developed projects based on novels or stories they love and are passionate about. So this tip, from an interview with Wired ahead of the release of The Force Awakens, should be relevant to nearly anyone:

The key to doing this movie, for me — and I think I share this exact sentiment with everyone else in the crew — was to acknowledge, embrace and appreciate your fandom, and then put it in your pocket. I couldn’t be on the set and be a fanboy. I needed to be a director. Harrison, Carrie, Mark, Anthony [Daniels], Peter — none of the original actors wanted a fanboy to work with. They needed someone who would give them criticism, feedback, notes, ideas. So while there were moments — almost every day — where I would find myself gasping that it was happening, I would have to suppress that and do the job required, because no one, and certainly not the movie, would benefit from my being blinded by the love of Star Wars.

Acknowledge Your Mistakes

Abrams is a popular filmmaker but also one who faces more scrutiny than most. Part of that is because he’s taken on franchises that already have huge groups of hardcore fans. And although he doesn’t do it in a defensive manner, he’ll be the first to admit he’s wrong about things that either made the fans mad or that the critics and audience identified as faults in his work. He’s his own worst critic, to the point he’ll even apologize for something in a movie that is mostly loved.

He takes the blame with his movies, and he seems to use his mistakes as a learning experience. The reason Star Trek Into Darkness was such a disappointment, he told Buzzfeed last December, “was not anyone’s fault but mine, or, frankly, anyone’s problem but mine.”

He goes on about the Star Trek sequel:

I found myself frustrated by my choices, and unable to hang my hat on an undeniable thread of the main story,” Abrams said. “So then I found myself on that movie basically tap-dancing as well as I could to try and make the sequences as entertaining as possible.

And here he is on the faults of Super 8:

“Certain things worked; certain scenes were good; certain relationships I was really happy with. But ultimately, I couldn’t look anyone in the eye and say, ‘The script is great,’” he said. “It wasn’t that there was anything that I felt overtly didn’t work, but I wish I had better integrated this alien/monster/sci-fi story with the emotional, sort of comedic story of these kids and what they were going through. It just felt like the last third of the movie didn’t have the sense of inevitability that I wish it did.”

And then, of course, there’s his much-mocked use of lens flares. He’s apologized for that, too. In the red carpet interview with Crave below, in which he addresses an overuse of flair in Star Trek Into Darkness, he even jokes about being an addict and how the first step is to admit that.

Ask: What Would Steven Spielberg Do?

Abrams apologized for the problems of Super 8, even though it’s actually “certified fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes (as is Star Trek Into Darkness). It is true it’s considered a disappointment by many fans and critics, but it’s interesting that Abrams takes full blame when he’s such a collaborator (he’s got that community) and when he had such hands-on help with that film from his idol, producer Steven Spielberg.

Steven helped at every stage, including editorial. He spent hours with me in the editing room — he would offer suggestions but never mandate a thing. He’d say, “What I would do is…” and give a suggestion. It would always make me laugh inside, because I can’t tell you how many times I would work on something and wonder, “What the hell would Spielberg do here?”

That’s a bit of a 2011 interview with Time magazine, and it’s funny because it is something a lot of today’s young filmmakers surely ask themselves. Yet Abrams has had a connection to Spielberg for most of his life. As teenagers, Abrams and Matt Reeves won an award at a youth-focused Super 8 film festival. Spielberg’s then-assistant Kathleen Kennedy (now head of Lucasfilm and producer of Abrams’s Star Wars movie) read about them and told her boss to hire them to restore his old 8mm films from his childhood.

At that time, Abrams didn’t meet Spielberg in person. They eventually got together for Super 8, of course. But even before that, Spielberg tried to get him to write War of the Worlds. Abrams later showed him the script for Star Trek for approval. And Spielberg recommended Abrams for The Force Awakens. Now Abrams continues to look to him for assistance and feedback in his work.

According to an interview Abrams did with The Telegraph last December, Spielberg was one of the inner circle (again, community) who got to see cuts of The Force Awakens and offer thoughts. Spielberg watched five rough cuts plus the completed film and would talk to Abrams about the storytelling needing to come down to “what’s essential, or what’s efficient.” Here’s more from the interview:

Spielberg, he goes on, taught him how “not to work so hard to make a point, but do something that, in a brush-stroke, in a look or a thought, the audience understands what it means.” In other words: in an age where blockbusters are often measured by how much they can pile on the screen, the maestro gave him the confidence to take things away.

Now you, too, can know what Steven Spielberg would do (there ought to be WWSSD bumper stickers), by way of Abrams.

NEXT: 5 FILMMAKING TIPS FROM MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE DIRECTORS

What We’ve Learned

Abrams has been both very lucky and also deserving of his success. It could be hard to follow in his footsteps, but he’s humbly of the belief that anyone can do it by just doing it and that everyone, even someone as big as him, now, makes mistakes along the way. You need a rich background, but rich as in cultured and full of friends, not necessarily rich as in wealth. Still, the more powerful and connected the friends the better. As for tips on style, you can have signatures that many people find annoying because it gets you notice and you can just apologize for them later.