Generally speaking, do you prefer to work with directors who are heavily involved in cinematography, or directors who primarily focus on directing actors?
Neither!! That's a bit of a bizarre question to be honest, it's a bit like asking which airplane manufacturer would you prefer; one which focuses on engine design or one who focuses on aerodynamics? In fact, an airplane manufacturer wouldn't be an airplane manufacturer even if it focused on engine design and aerodynamics equally because an actual airplane also needs avionics, control systems/surfaces, structural engineering, etc. Personally, I would prefer an airplane manufacturer who focuses on the airplane itself, on how ALL the components work together to result in a safe, flyable airplane!
In film terms, I suppose one could answer your question by saying that directing the actors is more important. On the basis that a director could in theory leave all the cinematography to the DOP but if the director is not directing the actors, then no one is! As with the airplane analogy though, directing the actors and cinematography are both fundamentally important components but "film" is more than just these two components. In practice, filmmaking is not about how good the cinematography or directing of the actors is, it's about how they AND all the other components of a film work together in harmony. It's this overview of how everything works together which must always be the primary focus of the director!
The director should, at least, be the jack of all trades.
I disagree. You really need to consider the meaning of the whole saying:
Jack of all trades, master of none. The implication being; the more trades, the less mastery. The difficulty with filmmaking is that it involves so many diverse trades there's simply not the time/resources to become even a "Jack" of all of them, let alone a master. In practise what usually happens is that no/lo budget filmmakers are usually forced and/or decide to gain semi-mastery in some trades, become a "Jack" of some others, outsource some others and pretty much ignore other trades altogether! Not only is the advice to become a "Jack of all trades" impractical but the attempt to do so also seriously dilutes the attempt to gain any mastery of the trade of "directing" itself!
If you don't know anything about cameras, you're not a filmmaker and as a director, you'll be unable to come up with a realistic vision for your film.
One can easily have a vision for the film without knowing anything about cameras or other technical filmmaking equipment. In fact, there's a good argument for saying exactly the opposite! That technical knowledge restricts the "vision". Most, if not all of history's great filmmakers had a vision for their film/s which commonly either ignored or were simply ignorant of camera or other filmmaking equipment limitations. The result was either; that the expert operators of that equipment had to develop creative new ways of employing it, that new technology actually had to be invented, that the director had to compromise their vision or often, some sort of combination.
Obviously, at the no/lo budget level, one has fewer resources and therefore needs more consideration of what is "realistic" when developing a vision. On the other hand, at the no/lo budget level it's maybe even more important that HODs are pushed to find creative solutions beyond the apparent resource limitations. In other words, a balance needs to be reached and the director's job is to arbitrate the options presented by the experts (HODs), to best fulfil their "initial vision" and arrive at a "final vision" throughout development/pre-production. It is not possible for the director to be a master (or even an aspiring master) of all trades and therefore a final vision based solely on a director's mediocre understanding of the technical operation of all the filmmaking equipment/resources will,
at best, be mediocre!! So yes, as Jax says; "the director doesn't need to know about cameras per se", they do however need to know enough about cinematography, all the other crafts and the language of film itself, in order to: 1. Communicate their initial vision effectively (to elicit appropriate options) and 2. Then evaluate the presented options in context of the other crafts and the whole film, to finalise a vision!
The more you understand lighting and lenses, the more you understand the language of cinema. And it is through language that we communicate our vision.
I don't agree with the first sentence, or rather I only agree with it within a certain context. Lighting and lenses are only a part of cinematography and cinematography is itself only a part of the language of film. It's a bit like saying, the more you understand/know vocabulary the better a writer you will be. While it's true that a better knowledge of vocabulary will probably improve one's writing skills, without syntax vocabulary is useless and even syntax and vocabulary together are effectively useless, unless one has actually has a story to tell or something worthwhile to communicate. The potential danger of delving too deeply into vocabulary is that it becomes easy to define language in terms of vocabulary and then it becomes an end in itself rather than just a means to an end! I see this sort of thing, as applied to filmmaking as a whole, extremely commonly here on IT. People focusing on certain aspects of certain filmmaking crafts, to the detriment of the film itself!
G
