Auteur

In practice

An auteur is a filmmaker, usually a director, whose films carry such a consistent personal style and set of concerns that they can be seen as the work of one author. The word is French for author. Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Wes Anderson and Wong Kar-wai are names often given as examples.

The idea comes from auteur theory, developed by French critics at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s and brought to American criticism by Andrew Sarris in the 1960s. It argued that even inside the studio system, a strong director could stamp films with a recognizable vision, and that criticism should study a director's body of work as a whole.

For screenwriters the idea is double-edged. Many auteurs write their own scripts, and their voice starts on the page. But the theory's focus on the director has long frustrated writers, whose contribution it can erase, and the Writers Guild of America has argued for decades against the possessory credit, A Film By, that expresses it.

A writer-director's voice on the page

The action lines do more than report. The color, the joke about the realtor and the egg timer that stares back are a point of view, the kind of voice readers associate with a writer-director whose films will look and feel like this. A spec writer can have a voice too; it just has to serve the story rather than show off.

What an auteur is

Merriam-Webster defines an auteur as a filmmaker whose individual style and complete control over all elements of production give a film its personal and unique stamp. More loosely, the word is used for any director whose films share recognizable themes, images and techniques across a career.

An auteur's signature can be visual, thematic or both. Wes Anderson's symmetrical frames and pastel palettes, Kubrick's cold precision and slow tracking shots, Hitchcock's suspense set pieces and recurring blonde heroines, and Varda's mix of documentary and fiction are each recognizable within a few minutes of a film.

Being called an auteur is a critical judgment, not a job title. No credit or union rule makes a director an auteur, and critics continue to argue about who deserves the label. Writer-directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Spike Lee and Greta Gerwig are often included because they control both the script and its staging.

The history of auteur theory

In 1954, François Truffaut published an essay in Cahiers du Cinéma, A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema, attacking literary, script-driven French films and praising directors who brought a personal vision to their work. The critics around the magazine, among them Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, called this the politique des auteurs.

These critics championed Hollywood directors such as Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray, whom many at the time saw as studio craftsmen. They argued that a strong director's personality showed through even genre assignments. Several of them went on to become directors themselves and lead the French New Wave.

Andrew Sarris introduced the idea to American readers in his 1962 essay Notes on the Auteur Theory, which named it auteur theory. Pauline Kael answered with Circles and Squares in 1963, arguing that the theory valued a director's consistency over the quality of individual films. Their debate shaped film criticism for decades.

Auteur theory and screenwriters

The theory's emphasis on the director has always sat uneasily with screenwriters. Many celebrated films were shaped decisively by their writers, and critics such as Richard Corliss argued in the 1970s that screenwriters deserved a similar critical study of their own body of work.

The disagreement continues in credits. The possessory credit, A Film By followed by the director's name, implies single authorship, and the Writers Guild of America has opposed its routine use for decades. The Directors Guild of America defends it as a matter of directors' creative rights, and the two guilds have negotiated limits on it more than once.

In practice most films are collaborations. The auteur idea is most persuasive for writer-directors and for directors with strong control over their projects, and least persuasive where a film's voice clearly comes from its script, its stars or its producers. Writers can still learn from it: a consistent voice and set of concerns is part of what makes any writer's work recognizable.

Auteur examples

Alfred Hitchcock was the auteur critics' central case. Across decades and studios, his films return to suspense, guilt, voyeurism and wrongly accused men, and Truffaut's book-length interview with him, Hitchcock/Truffaut (1966), became one of the most influential studies of a director's craft.

Stanley Kubrick controlled his films to an unusual degree, from script to release prints, and his work across genres, war, science fiction, horror, period drama, shares a detached, exacting style. Quentin Tarantino writes all his own scripts, and their dialogue, structure and pop-culture references are as much his signature as their camera style.

Outside Hollywood, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Agnès Varda, Wong Kar-wai and Bong Joon-ho are commonly called auteurs. Many of them wrote or cowrote their films, which is one reason their work feels so consistent.

How writers can learn from auteurs

Develop recurring concerns. Auteurs return to the same questions in different forms: Kubrick to control and its failure, Varda to time and memory, Bong to class. Writers who know which questions they care about write scripts that feel connected, and readers start to recognize them.

Let your voice show in the action lines. A screenplay is a technical document, but its description can still have personality, as in the excerpt above. A distinctive voice is one of the qualities readers mention most when a script stands out, as long as it stays clear and fast to read.

Study a filmmaker's whole body of work, not a single film. Watching or reading one writer-director's films in order shows how a voice develops and which elements stay constant. It is the method the auteur critics proposed, and it works just as well for learning a craft as for criticism.