Gabriele Muccino: the pursuit of film-making

It takes more than simple camera techniques to become a director. Every shot matters, and the story must always come first. Jasper Rees talks to the accomplished Italian film-maker Gabriele Muccino, who just happens to be one of Will Smith's best friends.

Patrick Gosling

The lens is tightly focused on the blue sign of a police station. It's across the road, so I'm on full zoom. I try to remember what I've been told. Make the camera invisible. Tell the story. OK, we're all set. Take one, London street scene, and action. With the press of a button the lens pulls away from the station and takes in a moody, good-looking figure in half-profile who's talking to someone off-camera. It's just me behind the camera - there is no sound crew or lighting team or best boys, key grips and all the other oddly titled people who populate a film set. I raise my left arm and indicate to the actor that I want him to turn and walk into the building to his left.

"What do you want me to do?" He sounds nonplussed, and Italian. "Maybe we should discuss blocking the scene first." Cut. The world is full of film-makers. Everyone with a mobile phone has a film facility on it and is not afraid to use it. Of course, not everyone knows how to use it. Yes, we can all hit the "record" button and point at a subject. But getting a camera to become a more sinuous and subtle participant in even the shortest visual narrative is not a skill vouchsafed to just anyone. This is what I'm discovering in a masterclass I'm taking with a Hollywood film-maker.

Born in Rome 43 years ago, Gabriele Muccino came to prominence with films such as L'ultimo Bacio (One Last Kiss) in 2001. His best-known film is The Pursuit Of Happyness (2006), the first of two movies he has made with Will Smith. Smith saw The Last Kiss, a mega-hit that ran for six months in Muccino's native Italy, and insisted to Columbia studio executives that they hire its director. His hunch paid off. Smith was nominated for an Oscar and the film, based on the true story of a homeless salesman who made it as a stockbroker, grossed more than $300 million (Dh 1.1billion) worldwide. Their next collaboration, Seven Pounds, made another $170 million (Dh624million). Recently, in Rome, Muccino shot a beautiful commercial for the Italian beer Peroni Nastro Azzurro that is being shown widely in cinemas and pays luscious homage to the swooning romanticism of 1960s Italian cinema.

And I've wangled a lesson with him. We meet in Locanda Locatelli, the extremely smart Italian eatery in Mayfair. Muccino is getting away with a slightly orange corduroy jacket as only a certain type of rumpled Italian middle-aged male can. Having just arrived from Los Angeles, he looks jet-lagged. But he's good to go when I ask him some basic stuff. "I am a strong believer that the story is going to determine your own style," he says in thickly accented English. "The camera has to move always organically for the story. For example, The Pursuit of Happyness has a very subtle style. I wanted to have the feeling that I was stealing the story. In The Last Kissall the characters are incredibly caught by their own neuroses and the camera is much more energetic in following them. In Seven Pounds the character was very tormented and so the camera literally filmed the back of his head to see things from his point of view."

We're going to shoot in the kitchen. Poking our heads through a swing door, we are greeted by a mass of culinary humanity confined to a long narrow space. It's a noisy, frantic environment. You've seen something like it captured in films set in New York by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. But where to start? "At the door," says Muccino, asking a young woman to go out and walk back in. "I like to combine somebody entering a place and seeing it beyond their shoulders," he says, training the lens on her. "I could follow her into the room as well."

She walks through the crowd and we follow. Bodies begrudgingly shift aside to let us through. It's like the parting of the Red Sea. We do a circuit, then stop and look at the footage. It flows beautifully, the sense of the room being introduced as a dynamic character in a clear narrative. How about that person walking in front of the camera? "I love that," Muccino says. "Gives you a sense of realism and life."

It all seems so effortless. Of course, it helps that we're using a tiny Flip high-definition camera. In the old days an amateur filmmaker had to muck about with more complex equipment. With every generation of new camera it has been getting less complicated. First, built-in microphones meant you no longer had to sync film with sound; then the cameras got smaller, as did the videotapes. Eventually, digital replaced film altogether, and then, for amateurs the iPhone replaced the stand-alone camera.

But it takes more than good kit to produce a coherent cinematic style. "The problem is when you shoot things just to show you are good," Muccino warns. "That's where you sense the camerawork and feel more attached to that than the story." Next it's my turn to be filmed. Muccino trains the camera on me. I feel self-conscious but do as I'm told. He walks behind me, filming the back of my head. I stop and talk to someone. We check the result. The back of my head doesn't look as cool as Will Smith's.

"You look a bit goofy," says Muccino. Muccino was an actor once - "by accident," he says. "My goal was to be accepted on set as a fourth assistant director but I was rebuffed. A director offered me a chance to become an actor and I was so desperate I accepted." He escaped behind the camera as quickly as he could, initially by making mini-docudramas for Italian TV. "But it was always with a video camera. I didn't put film into my camera until I was 29. I did a little short on 35mm and when the cameras started rolling and when I heard the sound I nearly cried."

He mentions more tips: hand-held for arguing, Steadicam for walking, hand-held on a golf cart for running. I ask him how to stop dialogue looking static. "Have the actors walking and move the camera with them in one shot. This way you don't get bored." He has strong views about shooting a large group: "The secret is the long lens. You feel you are inside. It tells you what is really happening without feeling the camera."

Enough talking. Now it's my turn. We go outside. I want to work on my entering-door and back-of-head technique. Take one, starring Will Smith's favourite director, is a total flop. We embark on take two. I use the police station as an establishing shot, then pull away to watch Muccino talking to someone in the street. Cop or criminal? That's the idea anyway. It's a lot harder than it sounds to make the dialogue look natural, so I cut the conversation short and direct him inside with a hand signal.

He lopes through the door, while I follow. The back of his head is surprisingly cool under pressure, I note, as he pushes into the crowded kitchen. This is the big moment. Time to show I've picked up the precepts. I slavishly follow him through the melée, concentrating hard. And then suddenly something happens. I act on instinct. I'm struck by the desire to be a maverick, to disobey. I stop where I am and let him do the circuit on his own. His head disappears behind pots and pans, then reappears. It looks badly unplanned. He's going to hate it.

We watch it, a minute and a half of footage: a long take for a movie. I wince until it finishes. So, any good, maestro? "You captured the kitchen without being too destructive," he says. "Enter the room without the audience realising there's a camera. Not bad." It seems I've passed lesson one. "So what we need now is an actual story," I say. "Yes," he says, and smiles. "That takes more time."