What makes good directing? – Voting for the Awards

29 October 09

Ever wondered how the voting process for the Film Awards works? Or what voting members look for when assessing a particular craft, like Direction, in a piece of work? Find out how the voting process breaks down, and hear from some award-winning filmmakers on how they judge direction.

How do you judge Direction?

We asked three members of our Directing Chapter what they look for when assessing a film’s direction:

“I look to see whether the director has made the film more than it was on the page,” says Peter Kosminsky, a five-time BAFTA winner for such TV dramas as Britz and The Government Inspector. “I set this against my second criterion: has the director drawn attention to him or herself with their direction, (thus bumping us out of the drama), rather than staying invisible as an interpreter of the script.

“As you can imagine, there is a very real creative tension between these two criteria and it is the way the director walks the fine line between the two that helps me decide.”

John Hillcoat, Australian director of The Road, looks “for overall consistency in style and performance, how well the story is told via the tools of the medium, how bold/original the work is, and how much passion/heart is in there.”

“I suppose I look for many things in direction: telling the story cinematically; coherence between actors, setting and plot; being surprised or challenged,” says director Julian Jarrold, whose film work includes Kinky Boots, Becoming Jane and Brideshead Revisited. “But sometimes a simple story well told will suffice.”

Finally, when asked which recent BAFTA-nominated or winning films/series they would cite as examples of good direction, a diverse range of work emerged. Kosminsky highlights TV dramas The Mark Of Cain (dir: Marc Munden) and Boy A (dir: John Crowley), Hillcoat hails Steve McQueen’s Hunger, whilst Jarrold points to Slumdog Millionaire (dir: Danny Boyle) and The Lives Of Others (dir: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck).

The Voting Process

Approximately 250 films are entered for the Film Awards each year by our members or the film’s distributor. BAFTA Film Voters have to reduce this list to just five nominations and one winner in each category. This is done through three rounds of voting.
As our membership is large and technically varied, we divide them into specialised ‘Chapters’ according to their area of professional expertise. These Chapters correspond with certain Film Awards categories – the Editing Chapter have special voting rights in the Editing category, the Sound Chapter have special voting rights for the Sound category, and so on. Votes are cast in each of the Film Awards categories by a combination of all film-voting members and the specialised Chapters.

Voting: Round One

In this round, all members vote in all categories and each member can cast up to 12 votes. The top 15 in each category go through to the second round – these top 15 are referred to as the ‘long list’. If a category has a voting Chapter (e.g. Editing, Music, Sound), the Chapter’s top five go through automatically and are flagged in the long list as Chapter selections.

Voting: Round Two

In the second round of voting, all members vote in all categories and can cast up to five votes each. This reduces the long list of 15 to five in each category. These five are then announced as the nominees.

Voting: Round Three

In the final round, all members vote to select the winners in the following six categories: Best Film, Leading Actor, Leading Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress and Film Not in the English Language. Each member gets one vote per category. In all other categories*, members of the specialist Chapters cast one vote each to determine the winner.

**Not including: the Fellowship, Outstanding British Contribution to Film, Outstanding British Film, Carl Foreman Award, Short Film and Short Animation.