But going back to my question, and it wasn't just a rhetorical flourish or idle wondering - it was really a genuine question in that it's something that I don't have the answer to and so I asked all of you lot, expecting, not perhaps a whole and complete answer, but maybe a little light being shed by those who know more about the whole thing than i do.
What I'm asking is; surely it's not just me who finds it a little surprising that Ben Affleck is capable of directing a film, and a pretty good one at that? When it says "Directed by Ben Affleck" does that mean that he really directed it properly, fully, like when Steven Spielberg does it? Or does it mean that he had a guy who did all the stuff that directors do but Affleck was his boss? Like when I saw Saul the other day he was telling me about being in the studio with this guy who is a pretty famous producer/dj etc now. I don't really know him, his name is very nondescript but it's like Mark Ronson or something, and Saul was saying that when he "produces" something for someone he comes into the studio with his team and he really just lies on the sofa eating crisps and his engineers just do it.
I don't necessarily mean this as a criticism, I understand that the term Producer is so wide that it could be talking about someone who literally records every drum sound and every other sound so that it sounds like it is supposed to in his vision, and then he puts all of those sounds together to make the record fit his aesthetic. But equally it could be that the producer has the vision of the overall thing and he has more technical guys working for him to do the nuts and bolts of building the individual sounds. Or maybe they are not "more technical" but they are just on a level where he trusts them to be able to get the sounds he wants - the raw materials for the building - while he builds the thing.
So there are lots of things that a person might do as part of the process of recording some sounds and changing them into a record that can be released and be in the charts, and various parts of the job could happen to or happen not to fall under the category of "stuff that a producer does" - so the job itself can be quite varied.
And I guess I'm saying that some people look like they are doing nothing to earn their producer money, but they aren't really doing nothing. But I also have a suspicion that this vagueness does allow the odd person to "produce" a record by doing absolutely fuck all while their servants do it for them and their name is on it. And I wonder if the same can happen with directing, and if so, do you reckon that that is what Ben Affleck did? Or perhaps he just turned out to be a really good director, who can say.