Louis C.K. directs the way he tells a joke: put the camera down, let the scene happen, cut before the point is laboured. On Louie and the first year of Better Things it made television that looked like nobody else's. The features are another matter.
Fi1m perspective
A camera set down in a kitchen and left there. Two people talk, one leaves, the shot stays on the empty doorway a beat longer than it should, and then the scene simply stops. Nothing has been resolved because nothing was set up. That is the Louis C.K. habit, and once you have seen it you find it everywhere in his work. He does not storyboard or plan much in advance; he decides on the day, with a crew he can talk to in shorthand, and he prefers a fixed frame and a single take to coverage. The half-hour resets each week, so an episode owes nothing to the one before it.
He came to directing sideways. He was doing stand-up from the late 1980s while writing for late-night television, and he made shorts before his first feature, Tomorrow Night (1998), and then Pootie Tang (2001) with Chris Rock. Neither found much of an audience, and the responses were mixed. The work that mattered was Louie (2010–2015), which he created, wrote, directed, edited and starred in across five seasons. "To me, the default is to do it all—write, shoot, and then cut it together," he said, and Louie is what that looks like: shot on real streets, with strange things allowed to happen in them, the everyday oddness of a stand-up set turned into pictures.
Then came Better Things (2016), created with Pamela Adlon, who had acted in Louie. He wrote and directed the pilot and a good deal of the first season, with Paul Koestner shooting, and that first year has his fingerprints all over it: short pieces, cut hard, actors filmed as if nobody had told them where the camera was. We liked it. A scene that ends in a bathroom because the day has run out is closer to a house with three children in it than any plot would be, and we were glad someone on television trusted us to follow that.
But our review of Better Things is honest about what happened next. Adlon went on without him, and the series got looser, slower and better. She let shots run where he would have cut. His instinct is to get out before a moment is milked; hers is to sit in it and see what it does, and over five seasons hers was the richer instinct. What he handed her was a shape, not a finished thing, and she grew it into something he had not made himself.
So the verdict is a divided one. As a maker of half-hours he found a form and proved it worked, and Louie is the place to see it whole. As a maker of features he has not yet shown that the form survives two hours. Everything he directs is, in the end, stand-up with a camera: the observation, the cut, the next observation. That is a gift for twenty-three minutes, and it may be all it is.
Biography
Louis C.K., born Louis Székely on 12 September 1967 in Washington, D.C., is an American comedian, actor, writer, director and producer.
He co-created the FX series Better Things (2016) with Pamela Adlon and received credits as creator, writer, teleplay writer, director, editor and story contributor on episodes in its first two seasons. He has also created, written, directed and starred in the series Louie (2010–2015) and appeared in films including American Hustle (2013) and Blue Jasmine (2013).
In November 2017, following public allegations of sexual misconduct which he admitted, FX ended its association with him and he had no further involvement in Better Things.
