Leading Lines in Drive

Drive, directed Nicolas Winding Refn, is a technically proficient film. Despite suffering from boring story, dialogue, and acting, it utilizes interesting choices in font and music, excellent editing, especially during action scenes, and cinematographic elements such as frequent use of large depth of frame. One other cinematographic element used often but not always well in this film is leading lines. Leading lines are lines which guide your eye through the frame. They help a viewer quickly identify the point of interest of a shot, making them very useful for scenes with fast cuts. One film which uses leading lines very well and very often is The Incredibles, directed by Brad Bird. Since this is an animated film, each shot is scrupulously crafted and almost always contains leading lines. Drive may not utilize leading lines as much or as well as The Incredibles, but it still uses them effectively.

One example of leading lines is when the driver and Irene speak in a restaurant. The previous shot's point of interest was Irene on the right of the frame, so this is where the viewer's eye begins on the reverse shot for the driver. The shot has a very busy background and it would be easy to get lost in its clutter if not for the leading lines of the bridge against the sky. This guides the eyes of the viewer to the eyes of the driver.

The shot where the driver is walking through this hallway ready to smash some hands is another use of leading lines, which are in this case created by the light bulbs on the wall. They point to the back of the driver's head and create a good point of interest.

One last example of good use of leading lines is this shot of Shannon in the car shop. Leading lines are very important in this shot because his face is the darkest part of the frame. The leading lines created by the conduit and change in paint color lead the eye away from the brighter bottom of his shirt and right side of the frame to his eyes.

Not every use of leading lines in this film is a good one. In this shot of Bernie in the car shop, leading lines made by the hanging florescent light fixtures lead the eye to an incorrect point of interest, his neck, when the correct point of interest is his eyes. Whether or not a viewer notices it precisely, being lead to a character's neck rather than their eyes is distracting and is an error in cinematography. This problem could have been easily mitigated by pedestaling the camera the slightest bit higher or changing the blocking so that Bernie is standing a little bit further away from the camera. Drive is a great film, but it is not flawless.