"As a point of departure and case study I consider two seemingly opposed insights into the nature of cinema as a collaborative/interdisciplinary art form, specifically the role of the director. These arise, not from academia, but from interdisciplinary practitioners themselves, specifically, three of cinema’s most celebrated directors. The first comes from Orson Welles, according to whom the only real value a director can add is something more than what would already happen when collaborators do their jobs well. Only when a director is something of a cameraperson, editor, actor, writer etc. is their contribution “a real one.” The second came out of a conversation between Terry Gilliam and Quentin Tarantino. In answer to a young Tarantino’s question about how to get the vision in your head on screen, Gilliam explained, “you have to understand, as a director you don’t have to do that. Your job is to hire talented people who can do that. Your job is explaining your vision.” I explore the idea that the tension here—that between multi-disciplinarian, able to move deftly between and integrate the disciplines, and meta-disciplinarian working one step removed from disciplines themselves—has resonance, more broadly, for the role of interdisciplinarians in collaboration."