In such cases the bulky equipment and the large professional crew simply get in the way of the project. They become handicaps rather than tools to make the job easier. Martin Heidegger made an important distinction in one's use of equipment. A hammer, for instance, is ready-to-hand when it is used to nail something and one's attention is on the job itself. In that case, the tool "disappears" in the project to nail something on the wall. On the contrary, that same hammer becomes present-at-hand when its handle is wobbly and one's attention is on avoiding hitting a finger rather than on the task itself. 37 If one cares to keep control over what is going on, it is thus important to work with crews and equipment of the ready-to-hand type. Big crews operating with huge vans full of everything one could possibly ever need often also turn out to be the most conservative in their thinking. Both Godard and Jaglom have had to deal with reluctant crew members. Godard's solution was most poetic. He recalled that on the set of Everyman for Himself (1980):
When nothing was happening I would tell [the camera crew] to go out in the sun, stay there and rest for a while, listen to some music, bring a friend, whatever. The production would pay for it. Just pay attention to the way the light changes and tell me about it afterwards, for instance, that during the day, in full sun, there were four different types of light and "that" one was particularly nice. This was not so bizarre, but their reaction to it was rather violent, they were taken aback.38
As for Jaglom, he got good advice from Orson Welles: "whenever a crew tells you 'It won't cut, it doesn't work, it doesn't make sense, you can't find it in the pages [of the script],' you just say to them, 'It's a dream sequence.' Suddenly [the director of photography] didn't need his rules about what cuts and what's logical and so on."39 If large crews require the constant attention of the director, small crews less than ten people allow the director to concentrate on the scene at hand. The film comes out the winner.
VIII
More intractable yet is the problem of the actors. Once upon a time Cecil B. De Mille could "explain" acting with the following anecdote:
