When my team and I were making my first short film, BROKEN, we really wanted to have functional and professional-looking guns for the project. Obviously, we weren’t going to use real guns, and getting our hands on working prop guns was too cost-prohibited. We also wanted to ensure that everyone on set was safe, which was our main priority.
We knew we could create some badass muzzle flashes in visual effects, but I wanted to have some realistic-looking guns on-set that had blowback to enhance the VFX and ultimately make the gunfights look real.
These Airsoft guns added so much realism to the film. The combination of practical blowback with high-end visual effects was a great combo.
Safety First
When using Airsoft guns or any firearm prop on set, you MUST assign someone to be responsible for all the weaponry. These guns might not be real, but they can hurt people. By law, if you use professional prop guns, you need an armorer on set at all times. Everyone on a film crew must act professionally, even if you are using Airsoft weapons on a low-budget independent film.
The late actor Brandon Lee was infamously killed on the set of The Crow by a misfiring prop gun. (Brandon Lee Death)
More recently, a terrible incident on a professional film set in New Mexico occurred where actor Alec Baldwin accidentally killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza with a misfiring prop gun. Prop guns, even Airsoft BB guns, are no joke and NEED to be respected as if they were real.
Also, please check your local state and city laws in regard to owning or using Airsoft guns. Always be careful, responsible, and above all, safe. Getting some cool shots in an indie film is not worth getting people hurt or worse.
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This is the way to go if you want to have real-looking guns in your film. We purchased most of our guns through a local Airsoft or Air Gun reseller, Amazon.com.
We even asked the local reseller if he had any broken Airsoft guns in the back. He gave most of them to us for FREE and charged $5-$10 for $100 pistols. They didn’t work, but they look great on camera.
Click on any of the links below to get some examples of Airsoft weapons.
Airsoft Prop Gun – Pistols Metal Pistols (with Blow Back):
If I may quote one of my favorite Christmas films:
“You’ll shoot your eye out kid.” – A Christmas Story
It may be funny, but it’s true. Have fun and be very careful. Good luck and happy filming.
Spoiler
A lot of the things that we used in BROKEN were done on a shoestring. One of the bigger things that we ended up having to use as far as props were concerned were the weapons, and the guns that we decided to go with were airsoft weapons; airsoft weapons gave us the ability to have blowback as well as a realistic feel and look to them, the nine-millimeter weapons that we used for a lot of the main characters and the 45, those things had an amazing amount of blowback, which looked very realistic. The shotgun was completely composited and, and, and plastic and metal weapon and the realism that imparted on to, to the shoot were, you know, insert me, it was irreplaceable because we would never have been able to acquire weapons of either having a real professional there with real guns or some kind of a weapons Wrangler, that would have been able to give us the resources.
Plus, from an insurance standpoint, there is no way that we could have afforded to have weapons that were blank-firing or squibs going off or anything of that effect. That was just not something that we could have done logistically or financially. The weapons, the guns themselves that have blowback, are powered by something called green gas. And what you basically do is the clip that’s normally filled with bullets or any kind of a projectile comes out of the bottom of the gun, you take it, flip it upside down, and then force the can nozzle into the top of the weapon. By doing that, you force the compressed green gas into the chamber, which is very cold. And it’s pretty, it’s pretty toxic as well.
So you don’t want to inhale it or anything like that. Once you put it back into the weapon, and you caulk it like you would a regular weapon, you have blowback, and it kind of also shot a bit of the cold air because the room was so hot, it shot a bit of that cold green gas would come up off the top and gave a great look as well for the transitions that the vs. VFX guys needed for, for the weapons to integrate the visual effects with the practical shooting of the weapon itself. You would think that the level of these weapons would be expensive, but they actually weren’t relatively; we found for a lot of the static shots that we use that we didn’t have to use actual working weapons; we bought weapons for as little as two or $3. apiece, the larger weapons and the weapons that actually had blowback were a little bit more costly, but they weren’t any more expensive than 20 to $30.
We were very fortunate to be able to locate them at the airsoft depot here in South Florida. And we recommend that you either go online or visit one of these locations if you’re going to use these weapons because they’re both safe. And as long as you don’t put a projectile in them. You have nothing to worry about. And just get somebody to be responsible for them and, you know, make them completely responsible, not anybody else. touch those guns and make sure they get anything else in there because you don’t want a liability problem on your hands.
If you want to be a screenwriter you have to read screenplays. There’s no better place to start than reading the masters of the craft. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) published this list of the top ten best screenplays ever written and I would have to agree.
My personal favorites on this list are Casablanca, Chinatown, and Annie Hall. Click on the links below and start reading. Happy Reading…then get to writing.
1.CASABLANCA Screenplay by Julius J. & Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch. Based on the play “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
2.THE GODFATHER
Screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola.
1999 was a watershed year for people in my generation, as it no doubt was for other generations as well. On the eve of the new millennium, we were caught in a place between excitement and apprehension.
The 21st century loomed large with promises of technological and sociological innovations, yet we were beset by decidedly 20th century baggage, like an adultery scandal in the White House or the nebulous threat of Y2K.
This potent atmosphere naturally created its fair share of zeitgeist pop culture work, but no works had more of an impact on the public that year than The Wachowski Brothers’ THE MATRIX and David Fincher’s FIGHT CLUB. I was only in middle school at the time, but FIGHT CLUB in particular captivated my friends and I with the palpable substance behind its visceral style.
As a kid already consumed by a runaway love for movies, FIGHT CLUB was one of the earliest instances in which I was acutely aware of a director’s distinct voice. As such, the films of director David Fincher were among the first that I sought out as a means to study film as an art form and a product of a singular creative entity.
His easily identifiable aesthetic influenced me heavily during those early days, and despite having taken cues from a much larger world of film artists as I’ve grown, Fincher’s unique worldview still shapes my own in a fundamental way.
David Fincher was essentially the first mainstream feature director to emerge from the world of music videos. Ever the technological pioneer, David Fincher innovated several ideas about the nascent music video format that are still in use today. This spirit of innovation and a positive shooting experience on the set of 2007’s ZODIAC eventually led to him becoming a key proponent of digital filmmaking before its widespread adoption.
A student of Stanley Kubrick’s disciplined perfectionism and Ridley Scott’s imaginative world-building, David Fincher established his own voice with a cold, clinical aesthetic that finds relevancy in our increasing dependency and complicated relationship with technology.
David Fincher was born in 1962, in Denver, Colorado. His father, Howard, worked as the bureau chief for LIFE Magazine and his mother, Claire Mae, worked in drug addition facilities as a mental health nurse.
David Fincher spent most of his formative years in northern California’s Marin County (a setting he’d explore in his features THE GAME (1997) and ZODIAC), as well as the small town of Ashland, Oregon. Inspired by George Ray Hill’s BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969), an 8 year-old David Fincher started to make little movies of his own using his family’s 8mm film camera.
Having grown up in a time when film schools were well established, David Fincher—rather interestingly—opted against them in favor of going directly into the workforce under Korty Films and Industrial Light and Magic (where we would work on 1983’s RETURN OF THE JEDI).
It was David Fincher’s time at ILM specifically that would shape his fundamental understanding of and appreciation for visual effects, and his incorporation of ILM’s techniques into his music videos no doubt led to his breakout as a director.
AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY: “SMOKING FETUS” (1984)
At the age of 22, David Fincher directed his very first professional work, an anti-smoking ad for the American Cancer Society called“SMOKING FETUS”. Anti-smoking ads are infamous for being shocking and transgressive as a means to literally scare people out of lighting up.
“SMOKING FETUS” was the spot that undoubtedly started it all by featuring a fetus in utero, taking a long drag from a cigarette. The crude puppetry of the fetus is horrifying and nightmarish—an unholy image that delivers a brilliant whallop.
David Fincher has often been called a modern-day Kubrick because of his visual precision and notoriety for demanding obscene numbers of takes—a comparison made all the more salient when given that both men shared a thematic fascination with man’s relationship (and conflict with) technology.
David Fincher’s modeling of his aesthetic after Kubrick’s can be seen even in his earliest of works. Shot against a black background, the fetus floating in space resembles the Star Child of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). “SMOKING FETUS” brought David Fincher to the attention of Propoganda Films, who subsequently signed him on in earnest, effectively launching his career.
RICK SPRINGFIELD: “DANCE THIS WORLD AWAY” (1984)
Due to the strength of “SMOKING FETUS”, 80’s rock superstar Rick Springfield enlisted David Fincher to direct his 1984 concert film, THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM. The responsibility also entailed the shooting of four pre-filmed music videos to incorporate into the live show.
“DANCE THIS WORLD AWAY” features three vignettes: a man dancing amongst the ruins of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a happy-go-lucky TV show for kids, and a ballroom filled with socialites oblivious to the nuclear missile launching from underneath the dance floor. The piece establishes several traits that David Fincher would incorporate into his mature aesthetic like stylized, theatrical lighting, an inspired use of visual effects and elaborate production design.
RICK SPRINGFIELD: “CELEBRATE YOUTH” (1984)
“CELEBRATE YOUTH” is presented in stark black and white, punctuated by bright pops of color like the red of Springfield’s bandana or the indigo of a child’s sneakers. This conceit further points to David Fincher’s familiarity with special effects, as such a look requires the shooting of the original footage in color and isolating specific elements in post production.
The look predates a similar conceit used by Frank Miller’s SIN CITY (both the 2005 film and the comic it was based upon), so it’s reasonable to assume that David Fincher’s video very well could have served as an influence for Miller. “CELEBRATE YOUTH” also highlights David Fincher’s inspired sense of camera movement, utilizing cranes and dollies to add energy and flair to the proceeds.
RICK SPRINGFIELD: “BOP TIL YOU DROP” (1984)
“BOP TIL YOU DROP” tells David Fincher’s first narrative story in the form of a slave revolt inside of a futuristic METROPOLIS-style dystopia. This is Fincher’s earliest instance of world-building, using elaborate creature and set design, confident camera movements and theatrical lighting (as well as lots of special visual effects) to tell an archetypal story of revolution.
RICK SPRINGFIELD: “STATE OF THE HEART”(1984)
Rounding out David Fincher’s quartet of Rick Springfield videos is “STATE OF THE HEART”, which compared to the others, is relatively sedate and low-key in its execution. While the piece takes place inside of a single room, David Fincher still brings a sense of inspired production design in the form of a cool, metallic color palette. Indeed, “STATE OF THE HEART” is the first instance within Fincher’s filmography of the cool, steely color palette that would later become his signature.
THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM (1984)
All of the aforementioned music videos, while capable of acting as standalone pieces, were produced for eventual incorporation into Rick Springfield’s larger concert film, THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM.
With his first feature-length work, David Fincher more or less follows the established format of concert films—performance, audience cutaways, wide shots that give us the full scope of the theatrics, etc. He makes heavy use of a crane to achieve his shots, partly out of necessity since he can’t exactly be on-stage, yet it still shows a remarkable degree of confidence in moving the camera on David Fincher’s part.
And while it probably wasn’t Fincher’s idea or decision, THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM contains a pretty blatant Kubrick nod in the form of a guitarist wearing Malcolm McDowell’s iconic outfit from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971).
The concert film format doesn’t allow much room for David Fincher to exercise his personal artistic voice, but he does manage to add a few stylistic flourishes in the form of visual effects that were added in after the live filming.
He adds a CGI blimp hovering over the stage, as well as fireballs that erupt from various places throughout the stadium (several audience cutaways appear blatantly staged to accommodate the inclusion of these effects).
Despite being something of a time capsule for ridiculous 80’s hair rock, it’s a high quality romp through Springfield’s discography that briskly clips along its brief 70 minute running time without ever really sagging.
Fincher’s involvement with THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM wasn’t going to net him any opportunities to transition into features, but it did generate a significant amount of buzz for him in the music video and commercial world, where he’d spend the better part of a decade as one of the medium’s most sought-after directors.
The success of THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM (1984), director David Fincher’s feature-length concert film for Rick Springfield, led to a very prolific period of music video assignments for the burgeoning auteur. In three short years, David Fincher established himself as a top music video director, held in high regard and higher demand by the biggest pop artists of the era. It was the golden age of music videos, and Fincher was the tastemaker at the forefront developing it into a legitimate art form.
THE MOTELS: “SHAME” (1985)
In his early professional career, Fincher’s most visible influence is the work of brothers Ridley and Tony Scott, two feature directors who were quite en vogue at the time due to blockbuster, high-fashion work like BLADE RUNNER (1982) and THE HUNGER (1983). Tony in particular was a key aesthetic influence, with David Fincher borrowing the English director’s love for theatrical lighting and the noir-ish slat shadows cast by venetian blinds.
For The Motels’ “SHAME”, Fincher makes heavy use of this look in his vignette of a woman stuck in a motel room who dreams of a glamorous life outside her window. Because computer-generated imagery was still in its infancy at the time, Fincher’s penchant for using special effects in his music video work is limited mostly to compositing effects, like the motion billboard and the fake sky behind it.
THE MOTELS: “SHOCK” (1985)
David Fincher’s second video for the Motels features lead singer Martha Davis as she’s chased by an unseen presence in a dark, empty house late at night. The concept allows Fincher to create an imaginative lighting and production design scheme.“SHOCK” also makes lurid use of Fincher’s preferred cold color palette, while a Steadicam rig allows David Fincher to chase Martha around the house like a gliding, ominous force. This subjective POV conceit echoes a similar shot that David Fincher would incorporate into his first feature, 1992’s ALIEN 3, whereby we assume the point of view of a xenomorph as it chases its victims down a tunnel. The piece also feature some low-key effects via a dramatic, stormy sky.
THE OUTFIELD: “ALL THE LOVE IN THE WORLD” (1986)
By 1986, David Fincher’s music video aesthetics were pretty well-established: cold color palettes, theatrical lighting schemes commonly utilizing venetian blinds, and visual effects. While The Outfield’s “ALL THE LOVE IN THE WORLD” was shot on film, David Fincher embraces the trappings of the nascent video format by incorporating tape static and a surveillance-style van.
THE OUTFIELD: “EVERY TIME YOU CRY” (1986)
David Fincher’s second video for The Outfield in 1986, “EVERY TIME YOU CRY”, is a concert performance piece a la THE BEAT OF THE LIVE DRUM. Like the latter’s incorporation of rudimentary visual effects, here Fincher uses the technology to replace the sky with a cosmic light show and add in a dramatic moonrise.
HOWARD HEWETT: “STAY” (1986)
In “STAY”, a piece for Howard Hewett, David Fincher makes use of another of Tony Scott’s aesthetic fascinations—billowing curtains. He projects impressionistic silhouettes onto said curtains, giving his cold color palette some visual punch.
JERMAINE STEWART: “WE DON’T HAVE TO TAKE OUR CLOTHES OFF” (1986)
While Jermaine Stewart’s “WE DON’T HAVE TO TAKE OUR CLOTHES OFF” is a relatively conventional music video, David Fincher’s direction of it is anything but. The core aesthetic conceit of the piece is the playful exploration of aspect ratio boundaries. David Fincher conceives of the black bars at the top and bottom of your screen as arbitrary lines in physical space, so when the camera moves to the side, those lines skew appropriately in proportion to your perspective. He takes the idea a step further by superimposing performance elements shot in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio over the main 2.35:1 anamorphic footage, giving the effect of visuals that transcend the constraints and the edges of their frame.
Throughout the 80’s, David Fincher became a director in high demand thanks to his stunning music videos. As he crossed over into the world of commercials, his imaginative style and technical mastery began to command the attention of studio executives, who desired to see his visceral aesthetic to features. During the late 80’s and early 90’s, Fincher churned out some of his most memorable music video work and worked with some of the biggest stars around.
YM MAGAZINE “HER WORLD” (1988)
While his “SMOKING FETUS” spot for the American Cancer Society in 1984 was his first commercial, Fincher’s “HER WORLD”, a spot commissioned by Young Miss Magazine, kicked off his commercial directing career in earnest. The spot stars a young, pre-fame Angelina Jolie walking towards us, clutching a copy of YM Magazine as several cars painted with the words “sex, “love”, “work”, “family”, and others zip and crash around her in a ballet of violence. Even when working in the branding-conscious world of advertising, Fincher is able to retain his trademark aesthetic (indeed, you don’t hire someone like Fincher if you want a friendly, cuddly vibe). His characteristic cold color palette is accentuated by stark lighting and slick streets. An eye for stylized violence that would give 1999’s FIGHT CLUB its power can be glimpsed here through the jarring collisions of the cars.
Alien 3 (1992)
The runaway success of director James Cameron’s ALIENS sequel in 1986 turned the property into a major franchise for Twentieth Century Fox. Executives wanted to strike with a third ALIEN film while the iron was hot, but coming up with the right story proved tricky.
Adding to the threequel’s film’s development woes, a revolving door of writers and directors experienced immense frustration with a studio that was too meddlesome with its prized jewel of a franchise.
In a long search for an inexperienced, yet talented, director that they could control and micromanage, Fox settled on David Fincher—a rising star in the commercial and music video realm with a professed love for the ALIEN franchise and its founding director, Ridley Scott.
Fincher jumped at the offer to direct his first feature film, but in retrospect it was a naïve move that almost destroyed his career before it even began. His supreme confidence and bold vision clashed with the conservative executives, causing a long, miserable experience for the young director.
He eventually disowned ALIEN 3, abandoning it to flail and die at the box office. However, as Fincher has grown to become recognized as one of America’s major contemporary auteurs, his debut has undergone something of a reappraisal in the film community, with fans choosing to see the good in it instead of the bad.
More than twenty years after its release, ALIEN 3’s legacy to the medium is that it makes a hard case against the kind of filmmaking-by-committee that meddlesome studio executives still impose on gifted visionaries to this day.
ALIEN 3 picks up where ALIENS left off, with Lt. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), Hicks (Michael Biehn), and Newt (Carrie Henn) resting in cryosleep as their ship, The Sulaco, drifts peacefully through space.
However, in their hibernating state, they are unaware of the fact that an alien facehugger has stowed away onboard their craft. Its attempts to penetrate and impregnate our heroes leads to a fire on deck and the cryosleep chambers are jettisoned away in an escape pod that crash lands on nearby on Fiorina 161, a sulfurous industrial prison planet colloquially known as Fury.
Tragically, Hicks and Newt don’t survive the crash, but Ripley does when she’s discovered by a group of inmates and nursed back to health. Once restored, Ripley finds herself thrust into an all-male, religious extremist culture that hasn’t seen a woman in decades.
Ripley quickly toughens up to counter the sexual aggression of the inmates, but her problems multiply when its discovered that one of the alien xenomorphs has followed her to Fury 161 and is picking off the inmates one by one.
A distress signal is dispatched to a rescue ship, but Ripley and the inmates still have to contend with the xenomorph before help arrives, a task made all the more difficult by the lack of conventional weapons anywhere in the prison facility, as well as the discovery that Ripley is hosting the embryo of a new egg-laying Queen alien inside of her.
In her third performance as Ripley, Weaver yet again transforms the character via a radical evolution into a tough, resilient survivor. Her arc throughout the three films is compelling, and for all the controversies over the film’s storyline, Weaver deserves a lot of credit for never phoning it in when she very easily could have.
Hers is the only familiar face in this hellish new world, save for the mutilated visage of Lance Henriksen’s android Bishop (and his flesh-and-blood counterpart that appears towards the end of the film).
Among the fresh blood, so to speak, Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance and Pete Postlethwaite stand out as the most compelling inmates on Fury 161. Dutton plays Dillon, a tough, righteous voice of spiritual authority that the other inmates can rally behind.
Dance plays Clemens, the sensitive, intellectual medical officer who helps Ripley acclimate to this harsh world and harbors a dark secret of his own. The late, great character actor Postlethwaite plays David, an observant prisoner with a high degree of intelligence.
David Fincher’s collaborations with director of photography Jeff Cronenweth in the music video realm led to Fincher hiring his father, the legendary Jordan Cronenweth, as ALIEN 3’s cinematographer. Best known for his work on Ridley Scott’s seminal 1982 masterpiece, BLADE RUNNER (itself a huge influence on Fincher’s aesthetic), Cronenweth was being slowly consumed by Parkinsons Disease during filming.
The earliest of ALIEN 3’s several considerable production woes, Cronenweth’s condition deteriorated so quickly that cinematographer Alex Thomson had to step in and replace him only two weeks into the shoot. Despite this setback, ALIEN 3 is a visual stunner that firmly established David Fincher’s uncompromising style in the feature realm.
Fincher’s stark, grungy aesthetic translates well into the theatrical anamorphic aspect ratio format, with the smoky, industrial production design by Norman Reynolds giving Fincher plentiful opportunities to incorporate artful silhouettes and his signature cold, desaturated color palette (only David Fincher can make a palette that deals heavily in oranges and browns feel “cold”).
Fincher’s emphasis on architecture and world-building manifests in a subtle, surprising way—he chooses to shoot a great deal of the film in low angle shots that look up at the characters and expose the ceiling. This creates an air of helplessness that pervades the film, like we’re way over our heads and drowning in despair.
While this hopeless mood ultimately might have contributed to the film’s failure at the box office, it’s an inspired way for David Fincher to communicate a real, tangible world that draws us into it—most sets are built without a ceiling so a lighting grid can be easily installed overhead, but by showing the audience the existence of a ceiling, it subconsciously tells us we are in a place that exists in real life… and that the events of the film could very well happen to us.
Fincher and Thomson’s camerawork in ALIEN 3 is also worth noting. Fincher has always had a firm, visionary command of camera movement, and the considerable resources of studio backing allows him to indulge in sweeping, virtuoso moves that bring a fresh, terrifying energy to the film.
A particular highlight is a tunnel sequence towards the end of the film, where the xenomorph chases the inmates through a huge, twisting labyrinth. David Fincher uses a steadicam that assumes the POV of the Xenomorph as it rages through the tunnels, twisting and spinning at seemingly impossible angles to communicate the alien’s terrifying agility and speed.
The industrial, foreboding nature of Fincher’s visuals are echoed in composer Elliot Goldenthal’s atmospheric score. Instead of using traditional symphonic arrangements, Goldenthal blurs the line between music and sound effects by incorporating non-instruments and electronic machinations into an atonal blend of sounds.
In many ways, this approach proves to be even scarier than a conventional orchestral sound could conjure up. To reflect the medieval, religious nature of Fury 161’s inhabitants, Goldenthal also adapts haunting choral requiems that weave themselves into his tapestry of ominous sounds and tones.
ALIEN 3’s infamous production disasters are well documented, hopefully as a means to ensure that the film industry as a collective learns from the production’s mistakes. These woes began during the earliest stages of pre-production which saw the hiring and resigning of director Renny Harlin before Vincent Ward came onboard for a short period to realize his vision of a wooden cathedral planet populated by apocalyptic monks.
While a semblance of this conceit remains in the finished film, the script was changed radically several times before cameras started rolling, and even then the filmmakers didn’t have a finished version to work from. The ramifications of this were numerous, from actors being frustrated with constantly-changing character arcs, plot inconsistencies, and even $7 million being wasted on sets that were built and never used.
The process was particularly hard on David Fincher, who was constantly fighting a losing battle against incessant studio meddling that overruled his decisions and undermined his authority. Fed up with the lack of respect his vision was being given, the young director barely hung on long enough to wrap production, and walked off entirely when it came time for editing. The fact that he ever decided to make another feature film again after that ordeal is something of a miracle.
Despite constant challenges to his control of the film, Fincher’s hand is readily apparent in every frame of ALIEN 3. A science fiction film such as this is heavily reliant on special effects, a niche that David Fincher’s background at ILM makes him well suited for.
Computer-generated imagery was still in its infancy in 1992, so Fincher and company had to pull off ALIEN 3’s steam-punk vision of hell and the devil through a considered mix of miniatures, puppets, animatics and matte paintings. Some of the earliest CGI in film history is also seen here in the film, in the scene where the skull of the hot-lead-covered Xenomorph cracks under the sudden onset of cold water before exploding.
Fincher’s fascination with technology plays well into the ALIEN universe, where the complete absence of technology—and for that matter, weapons—is used as a compelling plot device to generate suspense and amplify the hopelessness of the characters’ scenario. In order to vanquish the monster, they ultimately have to resort to the oldest form of technology known to mankind: fire.
ALIEN 3 fared decently at the box office, mostly due to franchise recognition and the considerable fan base built up by the film’s two predecessors, but was mercilessly savaged by critics (as was to be expected).
Long considered the worst entry in the series until Jeanne-Pierre Jeunet gave David Fincher a run for his money with 1997’s ALIEN: EVOLUTION, ALIEN 3 has become something of a cult classic as Fincher’s profile has risen. Fans forgave the film of its transgressions because they knew Fincher’s vision had been hijacked and tampered with. They knew that somewhere out there, in the countless reels of film that were shot, David Fincher’s original vision was waiting to be given shape.
In 2003, Fox attempted to make amends by creating a new edit of the film, dubbed the Assembly Cut, for release in their Alien Quadrilogy DVD box set. Fincher refused to participate in the re-edit, understandably, so Fox had to go off his notes in restoring the auteur’s original vision.
The 2003 Assembly Cut differs markedly from the 1992 original, restoring entire character arcs and adding a good 50 minutes worth of footage back into the story. There’s several key changes in this new cut, like Ripley being discovered on the beach instead of her escape pod, the Xenomorph bursting out of an ox (and not a dog), and the removal of the newborn alien queen bursting out of Ripley’s chest as she falls to her death.
The end result is a much better version of the film, giving us greater insight to the characters and their actions. While it doesn’t quite make up for the studio’s stunning lack of respect for Fincher during the making of the film, it ultimately proved that their concerns that the untested young director didn’t know what he was doing were completely unfounded, and were the film’s ultimate undoing.
The experience of making ALIEN 3 would be enough for any director to quit filmmaking forever, but thankfully this wasn’t the end for David Fincher. He would go back to the music video and commercial sector to lick his wounds for a while, but his true feature breakout was just on the horizon.
COMMERICALS & MUSIC VIDEO (1992-1995)
The abject failure of ALIEN 3 was director David Fincher’s first high-profile disappointment. It nearly made him swear off filmmaking altogether and he publicly even threatened as much— but when the dust settled, Fincher was able to slip back into commercial and music video directing with ease. Working once again in his comfort sphere, David Fincher churned out some of his best promotional work between the years 1992 and 1995.
NIKE: “INSTANT KARMA” (1992)
1992 saw sports gear giant Nike commission Fincher for a trio of commercials. The most well-known of these is “INSTANT KARMA”, which mimics the energetic pace of music videos. David Fincher’s touch is immediately evident here, with his high-contrast look that incorporates key components of his style like silhouettes and a cold color scheme.
NIKE: “BARKLEY ON BROADWAY” (1992)
Nike’s “BARKELY ON BROADWAY” is shot in black and white, a curious choice for a high-profile spot like this. The central conceit of a theatrical stage show lends itself quite well to Fincher’s talent for imaginative production design and lighting. Like “INSTANT KARMA”, “BARKLEY ON BROADWAY” has taken on something of a cult status, especially because of Charles Barkley’s cheeky persona.
NIKE: “MAGAZINE WARS” (1992)
The third spot, “MAGAZINE WARS”, revolves around the conceit of sports magazine covers in a newsstand coming to life and causing a mess. The idea is heavily reliant on visual effects, which comes naturally to David Fincher. While it’s a brilliant idea, it’s one that’s most likely inspired by a similar scene in Gus Van Sant’s feature MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, which had come out only a year earlier.
NIKE: “BARKLEY OF SEVILLE” (1993)
In 1993, Fincher once again collaborated with NBA superstar Charles Barkley on another spot for Nike called “BARKLEY OF SEVILLE” that makes use of some potent old world imagery that David Fincher’s prime influence Stanley Kubrick used so excellently in 1975’s BARRY LYNDON (while also foreshadowing the eerie Illuminati imagery that Kubrick would depict inEYES WIDE SHUT six years later). The piece is textbook Fincher, featuring a dueling orange and blue color palette, theatrical lighting that highlights some excellent production design and casts artful silhouettes.
BUDWEISER: “GINGER OR MARIANNE” (1993)
Also in 1993, Fincher took on two spots for Budweiser beer. The first, “GINGER OR MARIANNE” features young adults playing pool and debating their preferences of old TV character crushes. The pool hall is lit in smoky, desaturated warm tones with high contrast, as per Fincher’s established aesthetic.
BUDWEISER: “CLASSIC ROCK” (1993)
The second Budweiser spot, “CLASSIC ROCK”, features a handful of middle-aged dudes golfing and arguing over their favorite acts. David Fincher utilizes the high contrast natural light on the scenic golf course, supplementing it with a subtle gliding camera as it follows the characters. The result is a pretty conventional, but no less well-crafted, piece of advertising.
CHANEL: “THE DIRECTOR” (1993)
Fincher’s spot for Chanel, called “THE DIRECTOR”, is an excellent example of his “grunge-glam” aesthetic. The piece makes evocative use of its cold, blue color palette and smoky, European urban setting, with the director’s high contrast lighting bouncing off the wet streets and old-world architecture. Fincher’s fondness for revealing the artifice of the shooting process is incorporated into the narrative, as his opening vignette is revealed to be the shoot for a large movie, with the titular director being shown mostly in abstract, silhouette form.
COCA-COLA: “BLADE ROLLER” (1993)
Fincher’s filmography owes a lot to the work of Ridley Scott and his brother, Tony Scott. Ridley’s influence in particular is deeply felt in the fundamental building blocks of David Fincher’s aesthetic, and Fincher’s “BLADE ROLLER” spot for Coca-Cola seems to be directly lifted from Ridley’s visionary sci-fi masterpiece BLADE RUNNER (1982).
We see a dystopian city of the future, characterized by neon lights and Asian architecture, bathed in perpetual smoke and soaked through to the bone. Fincher’s signature high contrast, cold look plays directly into the BLADE RUNNER style, which the young director builds upon by adding his own flourishes like artful silhouettes and a high-energy camera that screams through the cityscape.“BLADE ROLLER” is one of David Fincher’s most well-known commercials, and easily one of his best.
AT&T: “YOU WILL” CAMPAIGN (1993)
It’s not uncommon for advertisers to create entire campaigns with multiple spots centered around a singular idea. In 1993, AT&T wanted to communicate how their technologies were going to be at the forefront of the digital revolution, which would have long-term ramifications for how we live our lives and connect with others.
To convey this message, AT&T hired Fincher—a director well known for his fascination with technology—for their “YOU WILL” campaign. The campaign is a series of seven spots that actually predict many of the things that are commonplace today, albeit in a laughably clunky, primitive form that was the 90’s version of “hi-tech”.
The spots show us various vignettes of people connecting with others through AT&T’s theoretical future tech: GPS navigation, doctors looking at injuries over video-link, video phone calls, sending faxes over tablets, and more. Fincher’s high contrast, cold palette serves him well with this campaign, further enhancing the appeal of this promising technology that aims to transform our lives.
Looking back at these spots over twenty years, it’s easy to laugh at the clunky tech on display, but it’s remarkable how much of it they actually got right.
MADONNA: “BAD GIRL” (1993)
David Fincher’s output during this period of his career was heavily weighted with commercials, but he did make a few music videos, one of which was another collaboration with pop diva Madonna for her track “BAD GIRL”.
The video incorporates some Hollywood talent in the form of Christopher Walken who plays a silent, watchful guardian angel of sorts and supporting character stalwart Jim Rebhorn, who would later appear in Fincher’s THE GAME four years later.
The look of“BAD GIRL” is similar to Fincher’s previous collaborations with Madonna, featuring high contrast lighting, diffused highlights and a smoky, cold color palette. The video is very cinematic, no doubt owing to a large budget afforded by the combined clout of Madonna and David Fincher (as well as Walken’s goofy dancing, seen briefly towards the middle).
LEVI’S: “KEEP IT LOOSE” (1993)
The first of several spots that Fincher would take on for jeans-maker Levi’s, “KEEP IT LOOSE” features the director’s iconic blue color palette as a static background, with a variety of actors composited into the scene dancing wildly and expressing themselves in their hilariously baggy 90’s jeans.
LEVI’S: “REASON 259: RIVETS” (1994)
1994 saw several more Levi’s spots put on Fincher’s plate, with “REASON 259: RIVETS” being the standout. The piece features the cold, blue high contrast look David Fincher is known for, along with a premise centering around tech—in this instance, a machine that is able to punch a single jeans rivet into someone’s nose as a decorative stud. The spot as it exists online currently can’t be embedded, but you can watch it here.
THE ROLLING STONES: “LOVE IS STRONG” (1994)
Fincher’s video for The Rolling Stones’ “LOVE IS STRONG” is shot in high contrast black and white, featuring grungy bohemian types in a smoky, urban setting.
The video shows off Fincher’s natural talent for visual effects, as he composites his actors as giants against various NYC landmarks, using the dwarfed city below them as their own personal playground. It’s a pretty simple concept, but extremely well-executed and staged—a credit to Fincher’s meticulousness.
SE7EN (1995)
In the mid-90’s, a script by newcomer Andrew Kevin Walker called SE7EN (a stylization of “seven”) was making the rounds and generating excitement all over town. Readers and creative executives alike hailed its bold, original storyline and that ending.
That audacious, coup-de-grace ending that nobody saw coming. That ending that could possibly never be put into the finished film and thus had to be rewritten and castrated into oblivion for fear that its inclusion could break cinema itself. Indulgent hyperbole aside, it was the ending that cajoled a young David Fincher back into the director’s seat that he had so publicly sworn off after a catastrophic experience with his debut, ALIEN 3 (1992).
While David Fincher didn’t have enough clout on his own to drop mandates that the original ending would remain as written, his stars (Hollywood heavyweights) Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman did, and they used that clout to back up this untested auteur. As such, Fincher was in an enviable position to infuse this hauntingly original story—free from the baggage of franchise—with his unflinching style and uncompromising vision.
SE7EN takes place in an unnamed, crumbling metropolis of perpetual precipitation and endless blight—an oppressive environment where hope goes to die. Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman), a longtime member of the city’s police force, is in his last week of retirement, with a young, headstrong detective named Mills (Brad Pitt) arriving in town to take his place.
On their first day together, they are called to a murder scene where an obese man has been forced to literally eat himself to death.
Initially assuming it to be another one of the city’s routine murders—business as usual—, a similar scene at a lawyer’s office the next day (where the victim was forced to carve up his own body and the word “greed” is painted on the floor in his blood) prompts a second look at the fat man’s murder scene (where Somerset finds “gluttony” written in grease behind the fridge).
This discovery prompts the detectives to realize that they are in the midst of a killing spree perpetrated by a psychopath who carries out his murders in accordance with the seven deadly sins and leaves behind grisly scenes that taunt and challenge his pursuers. With the days passing and the bodies piling up, Somerset and Mills must race against time to deduce the killer’s identity and stop him before his grand plan reaches its shocking and grisly conclusion.
Morgan Freeman is pitch perfect as the insightful, bookish Detective Somerset—a man haunted by the mistakes of his past and the city that threatens to consume him. His presence lends a great deal of gravitas and authority to the film, grounding the outlandish story developments in reason and logic and making them all the more scarier because of their realism.
Brad Pitt’s performance as the hotheaded, impatient Detective Mills is interesting in that the performance itself tends to be wooden at times but we as the audience are still pulled into his swirling emotional whirlpool.
Perhaps it’s only because Pitt has become such a sublimely subtle actor in the twenty years since that his forcefulness in SE7EN reads now as a younger man struggling with inherent talent but an unpolished craft. Mills’ impatience and stubbornness is well set-up throughout the film—when assigned a handful of heavy philosophical books by Somerset, he opts instead to read the Cliff Notes versions.
Because he takes shortcuts and is quick to action without necessarily thinking things through, he’s in a prime position to be manipulated by Spacey’s John Doe and play into his twisted, murderous scheme.
Speaking of John Doe, Kevin Spacey absolutely murders it as SE7EN’s creepy, calculating killer (puns!). Spacey imbues this psychopath with a degree of intelligence and brilliance that one doesn’t necessarily expect in their garden-variety serial killer.
For Doe, his life’s work IS his life—he has no job or relationships to speak of, only a single-minded focus to complete his grand plan and etch himself permanently into the criminal history books. As evidenced by Netflix’s HOUSE OF CARDS series, Spacey is at his best under Fincher’s direction, and their first collaboration together in SE7EN results in the actor’s most mesmerizing performance in a career stuffed with them.
While the potency of SE7EN’s story hinges on this trifecta of brilliant performers, Fincher doesn’t skimp in the supporting department either. He enlists Gwyneth Paltrow (who coincidentally was dating Pitt at the time) to play Pitt’s supportive, sweet wife, Tracy.
Paltrow has something of a bland reputation of an actress, but collaborating with auteurs like David Fincher, James Gray, or Paul Thomas Anderson bring out the very best in her and remind us why she’s an excellent actress.
Paltrow takes what could easily be the standard non-confrontational, supporting house wife stock character and infuses it with a creeping pathos and dread— grappling with moral conflict over bringing a child into the dark, overbearing world that Fincher has created on-screen.
In another nod to director Stanly Kubrick’s profound influence on Fincher, FULL METAL JACKET’s (1987) fire-and-brimstone drill sergeant R. Lee Ermey shows up here as Somerset’s weary precinct captain. Additionally, John C McGinley shows up against-type as a militaristically macho SWAT commander, as does Mark Boone Junior as a shady, scruffy informant to Somerset.
To accomplish his stark, pitch-black vision, Fincher enlists the eye of cinematographer Darius Khondji, who is able to translate David Fincher’s signature aesthetic (high contrast lighting, cold color palette, silhouettes and deep wells of shadow) onto the 35mm film image.
The film is presented in the 2.35:1 anamorphic aspect ratio, but in watching some of the film’s supplemental features (and with no other evidence to go on), I’m convinced that Fincher and Khondji didn’t actually shoot anamorphic.
It appears the 2.35:1 aspect ratio was achieved via a matte in post-production, which plays into Fincher’s reputation as a visual perfectionist who uses digital technology to exert control over the image down to the smallest detail. This control extends to the camera movement, which uses cranes and dollies for measured effect, echoing John Doe’s precise, predetermined nature.
In fact, the only time that Fincher goes handheld is during the foot-chase sequence in Doe’s apartment complex and the finale in the desert, both of which are the only moments in the film that the balance of control is tipped out of any one person’s favor, leaving only chaos to determine what happens next.
While SE7EN was filmed in downtown Los Angeles, David Fincher intended for it to stand in for an unnamed East Coast city, which he successfully achieved via a mix of careful location selection and production designer Arthur Max’s vision of oppressive decay.
A never-ending, torrential downpour of rain amplifies Fincher’s signature grunge aesthetic, although its presence was initially less about thematics and more about creating continuity with Pitt’s scenes (who had to film all of his part first before leaving to work on Terry Gilliam’s 12 MONKEYS).
Howard Shore crafts an ominous score that utilizes a particular brassy sound evocative of old-school noir cinema, but its’ in Fincher’s source cue selection that SE7EN’s music really stands out.
He uses a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” for the opening credits, foreshadowing David Fincher’s later collaborations with NIN frontman Trent Reznor on the scores for THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010) and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011).
Other standout cues include a Marvin Gaye track playing in the Mills apartment, and—in another nod to Kubrick—classical arrangements that waft through the cavernous library Somerset conducts his research in.
It’s also worth highlighting SE7EN as Fincher’s first collaboration with Ren Klyce, who would go on create the visceral, evocative soundscapes of Fincher’s subsequent films.
Overall, SE7EN is a supreme technical achievement on all fronts— a fact realized by the studio (New Line Cinema), who then mounted an aggressive awards campaign on the film’s behalf. Only Richard Francis-Bruce’s crisp editing was nominated at the Academy Awards, with neither David Fincher nor his stellar cast getting a nod.
Despite the cast turning in great, truly original performances, it’s apparent that Fincher’s emphasis on the visuals and the technical aspects of the production came at the expense of devoting as much energy and attention to the performances as he probably should have.
The result is a visually groundbreaking film with slightly wooden performances, despite the cast’s best efforts and a first-rate narrative.
An oft-mentioned aspect of SE7EN is its haunting opening credits sequence, designed by Kyle Cooper. The sequence acts as a preview of John Doe’s meticulous psychosis, with jittery text trying to literally crawl away from the disturbing images that we’re shown in quick, rapid succession.
Shot separately from the main shoot after the original scripted opening credits sequence was trashed, the piece both pulls us into this sick, twisted world and prepares us for what comes next. The sequence was shot by late, great cinematographer Harris Savides—who would go on to lens Fincher’s THE GAME (1997) and ZODIAC (2007)—and edited by Angus Wall, who has since become one of David Fincher’s key editors.
Fincher, more so than a great deal of his contemporaries, uses the opening credits of his features to set the mood and the tone of his story in a highly creative and stimulating style. His incorporation of the technique began in earnest with SE7EN, but the practice hails back to the work of Alfred Hitchchock, who pioneered the idea of opening credits as part of the storytelling and not just an arbitrary device to let the audience know who did what.
SE7EN is one of the earliest instances in Fincher’s feature filmography in which his aesthetic coalesces into something immediately identifiable—no small feat for a man at bat for only the second time. The film places a subtle, yet strong emphasis on architecture—specifically, an early twentieth-century kind of civic architecture seen in noir films and old New York buildings (a mix of classical and art deco).
There’s a distinct claustrophobic feeling to the city David Fincher is portraying, which is reinforced by his framing of several shots from a low angle looking up at the ceiling (implying that the walls are closing in around our characters).
Fincher’s fascination with technology is also reflected in a mix of cutting-edge forensic tools and outdated computer systems that are used by the protagonists to find their man. Lastly, a strong air of nihilism marks Fincher’s filmography, with the incorporation of its philosophy giving SE7EN its pitch-black resonance.
Several story elements, like the moral ambiguity of Detective Mills, the rapid decay of the city aided and abetted by uncaring bureaucrats, and the darkly attractive nature of John Doe’s crimes cause a severe existential crisis for our protagonists.
SE7EN was a huge hit upon its release, and put David Fincher on the map in a way that ALIEN 3 never did (or could have done)—precisely because it was an original property in which Fincher could assert himself, free from the excessive studio needling that plagued top-dollar franchises back then (and still today).
This freedom resulted in one of the most shocking thrillers in recent memory, jolting audiences from apathy and re-energizing a fear response that had been dulled by the onslaught of uninspired slasher films during the 80’s.
SE7EN, along with Fincher’s other zeitgeist-y film FIGHT CLUB (1999), is frequently cited as one of the best pictures of the 90’s, perfectly capturing the existential, grungy essence of the decade. Above all, SE7EN is a gift—for David Fincher, another chance to prove himself after the failure of ALIEN 3, and for us, a groundbreaking new voice in the cinematic conversation.
That, my friends, is what was in the box.
THE GAME (1997)
Director David Fincher had built up quite a career for himself in the commercial and music video realm through his association with Propaganda Films. After the breakout success of his feature SE7EN (1995), Fincher was able to leverage this newfound clout into a collaboration with Propaganda for his third feature, a suspenseful puzzle thriller in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock called THE GAME (1997).
THE GAME’s origins are interesting in and of itself, with Fincher actually being attached to direct the script by John Brancato and Michael Ferris as his return to features after his abysmal experience onALIEN 3 (1992). The sudden availability of SE7EN star Brad Pitt forced the production of that film to go first and delayed THE GAME by several years.
Ultimately, this proved to be a good thing, as SE7EN’s runaway success set THE GAME up for similar success with a built-in audience hungry for the visionary director’s next work.
Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is a wealthy investment banker who lives by himself in a huge mansion outside of San Francisco. His solitary existence keeps him at an emotional distance to those around him, a result of some deep emotional scarring that stemmed from his father’s suicide during childhood.
On a particularly fateful birthday (having reached the age his father was when he killed himself), Nick’s brother Conrad (Sean Penn) shows up with an unusual present: the opportunity to participate in a live-action game, organized by an enigmatic entertainment company called Consumer Recreation Services.
Nick ventures over to the CRS offices to indulge his curiosity, but after a rigorous mental and physical evaluation, he’s ultimately deemed unfit to take part in the game.
So imagine his surprise when he arrives home that night to find a clown mannequin in his driveway (placed in the same position that his father was found after jumping off the mansion’s roof), and the nightly news anchor interrupts his television broadcast to address Nick personally and announce the beginning of his “Game”.
Trying to ascertain just what exactly is going on, Nick follows a series of perplexing and macabre clues, eventually encountering a waitress named Christine (Deborah Kara Unger) who may or may not be a part of this Game.
As his life is manipulated to increasingly dangerous degrees, Nick loses control of his orderly lifestyle and begins to question CRS’ true intentions for him—- is this really just a game, or is it an elaborate con designed to drain his considerable fortune and rub him out in the process?
With THE GAME, Fincher has constructed an intricate puzzle for the audience to solve, wisely placing the narrative firmly within Nick’s perspective so that we’re taken along for his wild ride. Because the story is so dependent on shocking twists and turns, subsequent re-watchings can’t replicate the exhilarating experience of seeing it for the first time.
However, Fincher does a great job of peppering clues throughout that are so subtle I didn’t even notice them until my fourth time around, such as Unger’s character being on the periphery of the first restaurant scene without so much as a close-up or wide shot of her face to announce her presence.
Likewise, Nick’s first visit to CRS contains a strange interaction wherein the receptionist appears to give an order to the Vice President of Engineering (played by recently-diseased character actor James Rebhorn)—- why would a receptionist be telling a VP what to do?
These are only two subtle clues in a story that’s absolutely stuffed with them, which makes for something new to find with each re-watching.
Douglas turns in a fine performance as a cold, lizard-like Scrooge archetype. Nicolas Van Orton plays like a subdued, less flamboyant version of WALL STREET’s Gordon Gekko, which works because the distant, calculating aristocrat archetype is one that Douglas can pull off better than anyone.
David Fincher’s casting of Douglas also adds reinforcement to the idea of Fincher as Stanley Kubrick’s heir apparent (Douglas’ father, Kirk Douglas, was also a famous film star who headlined Kubrick’s PATHS OF GLORY (1957) and SPARTACUS (1960).
As the cold, cynical waitress Christine, Deborah Kara Unger is a great foil to Douglas’ character, as well as an inspired female part that resists becoming a conventional “love interest” trope. Her ability to mask her feelings and intentions is crucial to the success of THE GAME, leaving Douglas and the audience constantly trying to figure out where her loyalties lay.
Sean Penn’s role as younger brother Conrad is smaller than his usual performances, but he is no less memorable as a disheveled, mischievous agent of chaos. The late character actor James Rebhorn may have never held the spotlight in his own right, but every one of his performances was never anything less than solid, as can be seen in his performance as the disorganized, CRS VP of Engineering Jim Feingold. Rebhorn’s talents get a chance to truly shine in THE GAME, becoming the human face of the ominous CRS entity and, by extension, the film’s de facto antagonist.
David Fincher also throws in some small cameos in the form of fellow Propaganda director Spike Jonze as a medic towards the conclusion and SE7EN’s Mark Boone Junior as a private investigator tailing Nick.
THE GAME is also Fincher’s first collaboration with the late, great cinematographer Harris Savides in the feature world (they had previously shot a number of commercials together). The anamorphic 35mm film frame is awash in steely blues and teals, accentuated by high contrast lighting that signifies David Fincher’s signature touch. Flashback sequences filmed on 8mm provide a dreamlike nostalgia that appropriately dances along the line of sentimentality and melancholy.
Savides is well-suited to translate Fincher’s vision to screen, ably creating a push-and-pull dichotomy between the sleek polish of Nick’s old money world and the slick CRS offices and the seedy grunge of the back alleyways and slums that Nick’s Game takes him to.
The film is essentially about Nick’s loss of control, which juxtaposes his confused flailing against deliberate, observational compositions and precise dolly movements as a way to echo CRS’ forceful herding of Nick along a predetermined path.
This visual precision is highly reminiscent of Kubrick’s work, and very well may be what it would have looked like if Kubrick had ever decided to make an Alfred Hitchchock thriller. Another nod to Kubrick can see in the video slideshow that Nick watches as part of his initial evaluation, which in and of itself highly resembles its infamous counterpart in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971).
SE7EN’s Howard Shore returns to create the score for THE GAME, crafting an intriguing, brassy sound to reflect the propulsive mystery and peppered with a tinge of melancholy piano that hints at Nick’s inability to move past his father’s death.
David Fincher’s stellar ear for needle drops also results in the incorporation of the White Rabbits’ iconic “Somebody To Love” as a psychedelic taunting mechanism in the scene where Nick arrives at his mansion to find it’s been vandalized with black light graffiti.
All of these elements are tied together by Ren Klyce’s sound design into an evocative sonic landscape that draws us further into the puzzle.
Fincher’s music video work often explored the boundaries of the film frame, transgressing arbitrary lines to see what was being hidden from view. Most of the time, this meant that the artifice of the production process (crew, set facades, equipment, etc.) was made known to the viewer.
THE GAME is an appropriate avenue to explore this idea in feature form because the story concerns itself with what happens when Nick is essentially placed inside of his own movie. This plays out in the form of any close inspection of a given object or development by Nick reveals its inherent fakery and connection to filmmaking.
Christine’s apartment is revealed as a fake set via various set dressing techniques Nick stumbles upon. The hail of gunfire directed at Nick and Christine by masked gunmen is comprised of harmless blanks. Nick’s iconic plunge from the top of a San Francisco skyscraper is cushioned by a giant stunt airbag.
The game Nick has been thrust into is an elaborate, deliberate manipulation of actors and events designed to take him on a film-like character arc and transformation.
To this effect, architecture (another of David Fincher’s thematic fascinations) plays a huge role in the proceedings. Fincher’s locations and sets are always architecturally impressive, and THE GAME doesn’t disappoint in the classical style seen in Nick’s mansion and San Francisco’s financial district, as well as the sleek modernity of CRS’ futuristic offices.
David Fincher often frames his subjects from a low angle in order to show the ceilings—this accomplishes the dual effect of establishing the realism of the space as well as conveying a subtle sense of claustrophobia (a sensation very important to THE GAME’s tension).
Production designer Jeffrey Beecroft makes great use of lines as a way to direct your eye (especially in the CRS headquarters set). These lines subtly point Nick (and by extension, us) in the right direction to go despite the orchestrated chaos around him.
Fincher is able to find several instances within the story to indulge in other fascinations. THE GAME uses technology to striking ends in advancing the plot, like the television magically talking to Nick in his own home, or the hidden video camera lodged inside the clown mannequin’s eye.
A distinct punk aesthetic runs through Fincher’s filmography, with the most literal examples being found in FIGHT CLUB (1999) and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011), but even in a cold-Scrooge-turned-good tale such as THE GAME, David Fincher is able to incorporate elements of punk culture in a natural way (the aforementioned mansion break-in and black light graffiti vandalism sequence).
And finally, Fincher’s approach to the story is informed by a nihilistic sensibility, in that Nick is inherently a cynical, selfish person, along with the prominent theme of suicide and the ultimate revelation of the film’s events as orchestrated manipulations and inherently false.
THE GAME was a modest hit upon its release, bolstered by a compelling story and strong performances that were, in this author’s opinion, much better than those seen in SE7EN. By achieving a balance between engrossing performances and superb technical mastery, Fincher shows off huge growth as a director with THE GAME.
Ultimately, the film itself was somewhat lost in the sea of late 90’s releases, and for the longest time it languished on a bare-bones catalog DVD with a neglected transfer. Thankfully, THE GAME has undergone something of a cultural reappraisal with the release of The Criterion Collection’s outstanding Blu Ray transfer.
Now, THE GAME is often referenced among film circles in the same breath as his best work, and is fondly remembered as one of the best films of the 1990’s (alongside SE7EN and FIGHT CLUB). For David Fincher, THE GAME cemented his reputation as a great director with hard edge and reliable commercial appeal.
FIGHT CLUB (1999)
1999’s FIGHT CLUB was the first David Fincher film I ever saw, and it became a watershed moment for me in that it was absolutely unlike any movie I had ever seen. Granted, I was only in middle school at the time and hadn’t quite discovered the world of film at large beyond what was available in the multiplex.
FIGHT CLUB was one of the earliest experiences that turned me on to the idea of a director having a distinct style, a stamp he could punch onto the film that claimed it as his own. My own experience with FIGHT CLUB was easily dwarfed by the larger reaction to the film, which has since become something of an anthem for Generation X—a bottling up of the 90’s zeitgeist that fermented into a potent countercultural brew.
Coming off the modest success of 1997’s THE GAME, director David Fincher was in the process of looking for a follow-up project when he was sent “Fight Club”, a novel by the groundbreaking author (and Portland son) Chuck Palahniuk.
A self-avowed non-reader, David Fincher nonetheless blazed through the novel, and by the time he had put the book down he knew it was going to be his next project. There was just one problem—the book had been optioned and was in development at Twentieth Century Fox, his sworn enemies.
Their incessant meddling and subterfuge during the production of Fincher’s ALIEN 3(1992) made for a miserable shooting experience, ultimately ruined the film, and nearly caused Fincher to swear off feature filmmaking forever.
This time, however, he would be ready. He was now a director in high demand, having gained significant clout from the success of SE7EN (1995), and he used said clout to successfully pitch his vision of FIGHT CLUB to Laura Ziskin and the other executives at Fox.
The studio had learned the error of its ways and was eager to mend relations with the maverick director, so they allowed him a huge amount of leeway in realizing his vision. Armed with the luxury of not having to bend to the whims of nervous studio executives, David Fincher was able to fashion a pitch-black comedy about masculinity in crisis and the battle between modern commercialism and our primal, animalistic natures.
The novel takes place in Wilmington, Delaware (home to the headquarters of several major credit card companies), but Fincher sets his adaptation in an unnamed city, mostly because of legal clearance reasons (which would have been a nightmare considering how much FIGHT CLUB disparages major corporations and institutions).
Our protagonist is the unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton), an insomniac office drone obsessed with Swedish furniture and support groups for serious, terminal diseases he doesn’t have. He finds in these support groups an emotional release and a cure for his insomnia, achieving a stasis that props him up while pushing down the nagging feeling that he’s wasting his life away.
His world is up-ended by the arrival of the acidic Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), a fellow support group freeloader that confounds his perceived progress at all turns.
Constant travel because of his job as a recall analyst for a major car manufacturer provides some relief, and it is on one particular flight home that he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), whose effortless cool is unlike anything the Narrator has found in his so-called “single-serving” flight companions. Upon returning home, he finds his apartment has blown up due to mysterious circumstances. With nowhere else to turn, the Narrator calls up Tyler on a whim, who offers him a place at his ramshackle squatter mansion on the industrial fringes of town.
As the two men bond, they discover a cathartic release from an unexpected source: fighting. They channel this release into the founding of an underground brawling organization called Fight Club, where similarly culturally disenfranchised men can get together and unleash their primal side in bareknuckle grappling matches.
Soon, the duo’s entire outlook on life and masculinity changes, with the Narrator in particular taking charge of his own destiny and liberating himself from his perceived shackles at work.
In Fight Club, they have tapped into something very primal within the male psyche—a psyche subdued in the wake of rampant commercialism, feminism, and political correctness, just itching to be unleashed.
Fight Club grows larger than Tyler or The Narrator had ever hoped or expected, with satellite chapters popping up in other cities and the purpose of the secretive club evolving to include acts of domestic terrorism and anarchy.
When The Narrator finds himself losing control of the monster that they’ve created, he comes into mortal conflict with Tyler, who has gone off the deep end in his attempts to fundamentally and radically change the world.
Norton brings a droll, dry sense of humor to his performance as the Narrator, a medicated and sedate man who must “wake up”. In what is one of his most memorable roles, Norton ably projects the perverse, profoundly morbid thoughts of his character with sardonic wit and a sickly physicality. This frail, scrawny physicality is all the more remarkable considering Norton had just come off the production of Tony Kaye’s AMERICAN HISTORY X (1998), where made him bulk up with a considerable amount of muscle.
In his second collaboration with David Fincher after their successful team-up in SE7EN, Brad Pitt also turns in a career highlight performance as Tyler Durden, a soap salesman and anarchist with a weaponized masculinity and radical, seductive worldview that he is fully committed to living out.
His character’s name and persona have entered our pop culture lexicon as the personification of the unleashed, masculine id and the grungy, counter-commercial mentalities that defined the 1990’s.
Helena Bonham Carter counters the overbearing masculinity of David Fincher’s vision while oddly complementing it as Marla Singer, the very definition of a hot mess. Marla is a cold, cynical woman dressed up in black, Goth affectations.
Her aggressive feminine presence is an appropriate counterbalance to Tyler Durden’s roaring machismo, as well as serves to highlight the film’s homoerotic undertones. Meat Loaf, a popular musician in his own right, plays Bob—a huge, blubbering mess with “bitch tits” and a cuddly demeanor, while Jared Leto bleaches his hair to the point of anonymity in his role as a prominent acolyte of Durden’s (and thorn in the side of The Narrator).
To achieve FIGHT CLUB’s oppressively grungy look, David Fincher enlists the eye of cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, the son of legendary DP Jordan Cronenweth (who had previously worked with Fincher on ALIEN 3). The younger Cronenweth would go on to lens several of Fincher’s later works due to the strength of their first collaboration on FIGHT CLUB.
The film is shot on Super 35mm and presented in the 2.40:1 aspect ratio, but it wasn’t shot anamorphic—it was instead shot with spherical lenses in order to help convey the gritty tone Fincher intended. Indeed, FIGHT CLUB is easily David Fincher’s grungiest work to date—the image is coated in a thick layer of grime and sludge that’s representative of the toxic philosophies espoused by its antihero subjects.
The foundation of FIGHT CLUB’s distinct look is built with Fincher’s aesthetic signature: high contrast lighting (with lots of practical lights incorporated into the framing), and a cold, sickly green/teal color tint. David Fincher and Cronenweth further expanded on this by employing a combination of contrast-stretching, underexposing, and re-silvering during the printing process in order to achieve a dirty, decaying look.
The production of FIGHT CLUB also generated some of the earliest public reports of Fincher’s proclivity for shooting obscene numbers of takes—a technique also employed by David Fincher’s cinematic forebear, Stanley Kubrick.
Both men employed the technique as a way to exert control over their actors’ performances and wear them down to a place of naturalistic “non-acting”. While this earns the ire of many a performer, it also earn as much respect for a director willing to sit through the tedium of dozens upon dozens of takes in order to really mold a performance in the editing room.
In a career full of visually dynamic films, FIGHT CLUB is easily the most volatile and kinetic of them all. Fincher employs a number of visual tricks to help convey a sense of surrealist reality: speed-ramping, playing with the scale of objects (i.e, presenting the contents of a garbage can as if we were flying through the Grand Canyon), and Norton’s Narrator breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly (a technique he’d later use to infamous effect in Netflix’s HOUSE OF CARDS series).
Production designer Alex McDowell supplements David Fincher’s grimy vision with imaginative, dungeon-like sets in which to house this unleashed sense of masculinity, all while countering the sterile, color-less environments of the Narrator’s office and apartment.
Interestingly enough, the Narrator’s apartment is based almost exactly off of Fincher’s first apartment in (soul-suckingly bland) Westwood, an apartment he claims that he had always wanted to blow up.
THE GAME’s James Haygood returns to sew all these elements together into a breathtaking edit with manic pacing and psychotic energy, creating something of an apex of the particular sort of music-video-style editing that emerged in 90’s feature films.
FIGHT CLUB might just be the farthest thing (commercially-speaking) from a conventional Hollywood film, so it stands to reason that a conventional Hollywood score would be ill-fitting at best, and disastrously incompatible at worst. This mean that Howard Shore, who had scored David Fincher’s previous two features, had to go.
Really, ANY conventional film composer had to go in favor of something entirely new. In his selection of electronic trip-hop duo The Dust Brothers, Fincher received a groundbreaking score, comprised almost entirely of drum loops and “found” sounds. I have almost every note from that score memorized—I used to listen to the soundtrack CD almost every day during high school as I did my homework.
And then, of course, there’s The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”: a rock song that will live in infamy because of its inclusion inFIGHT CLUB’s face-melting finale. Sound and picture are now inextricably linked in our collective consciousness— I defy you to find someone whose perception of that particular song has not been forever colored by the image of skyscrapers imploding on themselves and toppling to the ground.
The music of FIGHT CLUB is further heightened by the contributions of David Fincher’s regular sound designer Ren Klyce, who was awarded with an Oscar nomination for his work on the film.
A main reason that Fincher responded so strongly to his initial reading of Palahniuk’s novel is that it possessed several themes that David Fincher was fascinated by and liked to explore in his films.
On a philosophical level, the story contains strong ties to nihilism with Tyler Durden’s enthusiastic rejection and destruction of institutions and value systems, and the subsequent de-humanization that stems from Fight Club’s evolved mission objective (which extrapolates nihilistic virtues to their extreme).
The novel’s overarching screed against commercialism also appealed to Fincher, who gleefully recognized the inherent irony in a director of commercials making a film about consumerism as the ultimate evil. David Fincher plays up this irony throughout the film by including lots of blatant product placement (there’s apparently a Starbucks cup present in every single scene).
This countercultural cry against commercialism and corporate appeasement is inherently punk, which is yet another aesthetic that Fincher has made potent use of throughout his career.
With FIGHT CLUB, David Fincher also finds ample opportunity to indulge in his own personal fascinations. His background at ILM and subsequent familiarity with visual effects results in an approach that relies heavily on cutting-edge FX.
This can be seen in the strangest sex sequence in cinematic history, which borrows the “bullet-time” photography technique from THE MATRIX (1999) to turn Pitt and Carter into enormous copulating monuments that blend and morph into one single mass of biology.
The idea of stitching numerous still photographs to convey movement (where the traditional use of a motion picture camera would have been impractical or impossible) also allows Fincher to rocket through time and space, such as in the scene where we scream from the top of a skyscraper down to find a van packed with explosives in the basement garage.
Architecture also plays in important role, with Durden’s decrepit (yet organic) house on Paper Street resembling the grand old Victorian houses in LA’s Angelino Heights juxtaposed against the faceless, monolithic city skyscrapers that are destroyed in the film’s climax.
Here, as in his earlier features, David Fincher tends to frame his subjects from a low angle looking up—this is done as a way to establish the realism of his sets and locations while imbuing the subjects themselves with an exaggerated sense of power and authority.
FIGHT CLUB also contains Fincher’s most well-known opening credits sequence: a dizzying roller-coaster ride through the Narrator’s brain.
Beginning with the firing of impulses in the fear center, the camera pulls back at breakneck speed, with our scale changing organically until we emerge from a pore on Norton’s sweat-slicked forehead and slide down the polished nickel of the gun barrel lodged in his mouth. It’s an incredibly arresting way to start a film, and prepares us for the wild ride ahead.
Finally, FIGHT CLUB allows David Fincher to really play with the boundaries of his frame and reveal the inherent artifice of the film’s making. This conceit is best illustrated in two scenes. The first is the “cigarette burns” projection-room scene where the Narrator reveals Tyler’s fondness for splicing single frames of hardcore pornography into children’s films by explaining the projection process to the audience in layman’s terms.
This scene is present in the novel, but Fincher’s approach of it is further informed by his own experience working as a movie projectionist at the age of 16, where he had a co-worker who collected random snippets of a given film’s most lurid moments into a secret envelope.
The second scene in question is Tyler’s infamous “you are not your fucking khakis” monologue to camera, whereby his intensity causes the film he is recorded onto to literally wobble and expose the film strip’s sprocket holes. The effect is that of the film literally disintegrating before our eyes—the story has gone off the rails and now we’re helpless to do anything but just go along for the ride.
David Fincher’s terrible experience with the studio on ALIEN 3 directly contributed to FIGHT CLUB being as groundbreaking and shocking as it was. When studio executives (most notably Laura Ziskin) inevitably bristled at the sight of David Fincher’s bold, uncompromising vision in all its glory, their attempts to tone it down were blown up in their faces by a director who had already been burned by their tactics once before and was one step ahead of their game.
A great example of this is Ziskin asking David Fincher to change a controversial line (Marla Singer telling Tyler Durden that she wants to have his abortion), which David Fincher responded to by agreeing to change the line under the condition that it couldn’t be changed any further after that. Ziskin quickly agreed, because how could anything be worse than that?
Imagine her outrage, then, when Fincher came back with Marla’s line changed to “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school” and she couldn’t do anything to change it back. Once David Fincher knew how to play his meddlesome executives to his benefit, he became truly unstoppable.
FIGHT CLUB made its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and its worldwide theatrical run was met with polarized reviews and box office disappointment. Quite simply, audiences were not ready for Fincher’s abrasive vision.
However, it was one of the first films to benefit from the DVD home video format, where it spread like wildfire amongst eager young cinephiles until it became a bona fide cult hit. It probably couldn’t have been any other way— FIGHT CLUB was made to re-watch over and over again, to pore over all the little details and easter eggs that David Fincher and company peppered throughout to clue us into the true nature of Tyler Durden’s existence.
FIGHT CLUB’s release also had real-world implications in the formation of actual underground fight clubs all across the country. In mining the dramatic potential of a fictional masculinity crisis, FIGHT CLUB tapped into a very real one that was fueled by a noxious brew of feminism, political correct-ness, the new millennium, metrosexuality and frat-boy culture (a subgroup that glorified the carnage and violence while ironically failing to recognize the film’s very palpable homoerotic undertones and thus assuming them into their own lifestyle).
Fifteen years removed from FIGHT CLUB’s release, the film stands as the apex of the cynical pop culture mentality of the 1990’s, as well as a defining thesis statement for a cutting-edge filmmaker with razor-sharp relevancy
If you want more inside info on the making of Fight Club, take a listen to the IFH Interview with FC screenwriter Jim Uhls.
PANIC ROOM (2000)
The expansive, sprawling nature of FIGHT CLUB’s story meant that director David Fincher spent a great deal of the film’s production in a van traveling to and from the film’s four hundred locations. Naturally, he wished to downscale his efforts with his next project and find a story that took place in a single location.
He found it in a screenplay by David Koepp called PANIC ROOM, inspired by true stories of small, impenetrable fortresses that New York City’s wealthy elite were building for themselves inside their homes. Because the story lent itself so well to an overtly Hitchockian style of execution and form, David Fincher approached PANIC ROOM (2002) as an exercise in pure genre, refusing to “elevate” the material with the infusion of potent allegory and subtextual thematics like he had done with FIGHT CLUB or SE7EN (1995).
The film is expertly constructed in a way that only Fincher could have envisioned, with top-notch filmmaking on par with any of his best work. However, PANIC ROOMwas somewhat lost in the noise of 2002’s other releases, and thus doesn’t enjoy the same cherished status of David Fincher’s higher-profile work (despite the argument that it should).
Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) is a recently divorced single mom, looking for a new home in Manhattan for her and her young daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart). They are shown a beautiful, expansive brownstone complete with cathedral ceilings, original crown molding, and a panic room—a hidden concrete room outfitted with survival and communications tech and designed as a refuge in the event of a home invasion.
Despite Meg’s misgivings that the property is simply too much house for the two of them, she buys it anyway. As Meg and Sarah sleep during their first night in the house, three burglars—Junior (Jared Leto), Burnham (Forest Whitaker), and Raoul (Dwight Yoakam) break inside.
Meg and Sarah are awakened by the commotion, and instinctually barricade themselves in the panic room. Any assurance of safety soon vanishes when Meg realizes that she never hooked up the panic room’s dedicated phone line, along with the revelation that what the burglars are after—millions of dollars in US bonds—is hidden in a floor safe underneath their feet.
What ensues is a suspenseful, contained thriller that would make Hitchcock green with envy as Meg and Sarah fend off this trio of unpredictable male intruders who will stop at nothing to get what they want.
Jodie Foster is compelling as lead heroine Meg Altman, a fiercely maternal woman whose initial mild-mannered-ness gives way to a resourceful, cunning bravery. Interestingly, Foster replaced original actress Nicole Kidman, who had to leave the production due to the aggravation of an earlier injury (she still has a voice cameo as Meg’s ex-husband’s new girlfriend).
Despite the short notice, Foster exhibited enormous dedication to the role by giving up her chair on the Cannes Film Festival Jury as well as working through the pregnancy of her second child. Kristen Stewart, who was only eleven at the time of filming, turns in a great performance as Sarah, Meg’s punk-y daughter with a cynical attitude and intelligence beyond her years.
Stewart provides a nice balance to Meg’s refined femininity with a rough, tomboyish and androgynous quality (something which Foster had herself at Stewart’s age). In making the character of Sarah a diabetic, Stewart is able to become an active participant in the suspense and engage us on a personal, visceral level.
The three burglars prove just as compelling as our female protagonists due to a complex combination of values and virtues that causes conflict between them. The most accessible of the three is Forest Whitaker as Burnam, a professional builder of panic rooms and a sensitive, honorable man who projects a warm, authoritative presence.
This complex physicality is essential to the success of the role, and Fincher’s choice of Whitaker, who he previously knew not as an actor but as a fellow director at Propaganda Films, is an inspired one. Burnham is compelled not by greed but by obligation to his family, meaning that while he’s misguided in his attempts to right his wrongs, he’s not beyond saving.
His antithesis is Raoul, a mysterious, volatile man who quickly asserts himself as the group’s dangerous wild card. Raoul is played by Dwight Yoakam, a country singer turned actor who injects a great deal of menace to the proceedings.
Jared Leto, who previously appeared in David Fincher’s FIGHT CLUB in a small role, benefits from the expanded screen presence that the character of Junior affords him. Junior is the self-designated leader of the operation, but he quickly finds control of the situation slipping from his grasp as the night unfolds.
Leto finds an inspired angle into what would otherwise be the stock hotheaded, impatient villain archetype by turning Junior into a trust-fund kid who’s ill-advised attempts at giving himself some edge (take those atrocious dreadlocks, for instance) only lead to the hardened criminals he’s trying to impress taking him less seriously.
PANIC ROOM, like all of Fincher’s pre-ZODIAC (2007) feature work, was filmed in the Super 35mm film format. While shot open-matte in the full-frame Academy aspect ratio, the finished film is presented on the widescreen 2.40:1 aspect ratio so that David Fincher had total freedom to compose the frame as he saw fit. He did it this way, as opposed to shooting in the anamorphic aspect ratio, because he apparently hates the limited lens choices and shallow depth of field that plagues the anamorphic process.
Fincher hired Darius Khondji, who had previously shot SE7EN, but Khondji left the production two weeks into the shoot due to creative differences with David Fincher’s meticulously planned and extensively pre-visualized approach (which stifled any on-set spontaneity). Cinematography duties were then passed on to Conrad W. Hall (not to be confused with his father, the legendary Conrad Hall who shot ROAD TO PERDITION (2002) and COOL HAND LUKE (1967)).
Hall Junior proves adept at replicating Fincher’s signature aesthetic via a high-contrast lighting scheme and a cold color palette whereby traditionally warm incandescent bulbs glow a pale yellow and the harsh fluorescents of the panic room take on a blue/teal cast. Fincher’s mise-en-scene is dotted with practical lights, creating an underexposed, moody image that is bolstered by a “no light” approach—meaning that David Fincher and Hall sought as much darkness as they could get away with, primarily using the extremely soft light afforded by kino-flo rigs.
A highlight of PANIC ROOM’s look is a constant, fluid, and precise camera that glides and floats through the house, as if unfettered by the limitations of human operation. This technique is achieved through the combination of the Technocrane and CGI that stitches multiple shots into one, seamless move.
The best example of this in the film is the virtuoso long take that occurs as the burglars break into the house. We first see them arrive, and swoop through the house as they try various entry points, all the while taking the time to show us Meg and Sarah asleep and unaware of the impending danger.
This shot would have been impossible to achieve before the rise of digital effects, a revolution that Fincher helped usher in due to his familiarity with the process from his days at ILM.
Because of his natural grasp on digital filmmaking tech, he is able to turn this incredibly complicated shot into a “thesis” money shot that condenses his entire visual approach to the film into a single moment while effortlessly establishing the geography of the house and orienting us for what’s to come.
As I mentioned before, the extensive location shoots and setups required by FIGHT CLUB resulted in Fincher desiring a singular, contained scenario for his next project. In developing PANIC ROOM, he realized he wanted to create the entire house as a studio set (a la Alfred Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW (1954) so that he could exert complete control.
Toward that end, he hired SE7EN’s production designer, Arthur Max, to construct the full-featured house inside a large soundstage as one continuous structure whose walls could be flown out to accommodate a camera gliding through the set.
Max’s work here is nothing less than masterful, as nary a seam of the complicated construction exposes itself throughout the entire film. The same could be said of the fluid edit by Fincher’s regular editor James Haygood, working in collaboration with Angus Wall.
Wall had previously edited bits and pieces of David Fincher’s commercial work, as well as the opening credits to SE7EN, but PANIC ROOM is Wall’s first feature editing job for David Fincher, and his success here has to led to continued employment in Fincher’s later features.
After a brief hiatus taken during the production of FIGHT CLUB, composer Howard Shore returns to David Fincher’s fold with a brassy, old-school score that oozes intrigue and foreboding.
During this time, Shore was consumed with scoring duties for Peter Jackson’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, so PANIC ROOM was an assignment taken on precisely because of its low musical demands.
As it turns out, Shore’s work in PANIC ROOM is generally regarded as some of his best and most brooding. The score is complemented by a superb sound mix by David Fincher’s regular sound designer, Ren Klyce.
When done right, genre is a potent conduit for complex ideas and allegory with real-world implications. PANIC ROOM is essentially about two women fending off three male home invaders, but it is also about much more: the surveillance state, income equality, the switching of the parent-child dynamic…. the list goes on.
A visionary director like David Fincher is able to take a seemingly generic home invasion thriller and turn it into an exploration of themes and ideas. For instance, PANIC ROOMaffords Fincher the opportunity to indulge in his love for architecture, letting him essentially design and build an entire house from scratch.
The type of architecture that the house employs is also telling, adopting the handsome wood and crown molding of traditional brownstone houses found on the East Coast.
Architecture also serves an important narrative purpose, with the story incorporating building guts like air vents and telephone lines as dramatic hinging points that obstruct our heroes’ progress and build suspense.
Again, David Fincher employs low angle compositions to reveal the set ceiling in a bid to communicate the location’s “real-ness” as well as instill a sense of claustrophobia.
Fincher’s fascination with tech is woven directly into the storyline, which allows him to explore the dramatic potential of a concrete room with a laser-activated door and surveillance cameras/monitors.
The twist, however, is that despite all this cutting-edge technology (circa 2002, provided), both the protagonists and the antagonists have to resort to lo-fi means to advance their cause. Another aesthetic conceit that David Fincher had been playing with during this period is the idea of micro-sized objects sized up to a macro scale.
In FIGHT CLUB, this could be seen with the shot of the camera pulling back out of a trashcan, its contents seemingly as large as planets.
Fincher echoes this conceit in PANIC ROOM via zooming in on crumbling concrete until it’s as big as a mountain, diving through the gas hose as the burglars pump propane gas into the panic room, and jumping inside the glass enclosure of a flashlight to see a close up of the bulb spark on and off.
David Fincher ties this visual idea in with another signature of his films—imaginative opening credits sequences. With PANIC ROOM, he places his collaborators’ names against the steel and glass canyons of New York City, as if the letters themselves were as big as skyscrapers and had always been a part of their respective structures.
As interesting of an idea it is, I’m not sure the large scope that these credits imply fully gels with a movie that’s so self-contained and insular. And finally, the punk/nihilistic flair that hangs over David Fincher’s filmography has a small presence in Kristen Stewart’s androgynous punk stylings, as well as the appearance of The Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious on one of her t-shirts.
Fincher’s desire to exert total control of the shoot via meticulous set-building and extensive computer pre-visualization ended up working against him, making for a long, strenuous shoot bogged down by technical difficulties and slow advancement.
However, the effort was worth it—PANIC ROOM became a box office hit upon its release, receiving generally positive reviews. As a lean, mean thriller, PANIC ROOM is incredibly exhilarating and well-made; perhaps even one of the best home invasion films ever made.
More importantly, PANIC ROOM would be the last feature that David Fincher ever shot on celluloid film (as of this writing). The 2000’s would bring the swift rise of digital filmmaking, a technology that Fincher—as a noted perfectionist and control-freak—would swiftly embrace.
PANIC ROOM closes the book on the first phase of David Fincher’s feature career (marked by gritty, subversive fare shot on film), heralding the arrival of a new phase that would solidify Fincher’s legacy amongst our most prestigious filmmakers
COMMERICALS & MUSIC VIDEO (2002-2007)
After the release of director David Fincher’s fifth feature, PANIC ROOM (2002), he took a five-year hiatus from feature work. However, this doesn’t mean he was lounging poolside with margaritas for half a decade.
He was hard at work in other arenas: prepping a sprawling film adaptation of the infamous San Francisco Zodiac murders during the 70’s, as well as taking on select commercial and music video work. During this five-year period, David Fincher created some of his highest profile (and most controversial) short-form work.
Fincher’s 2002 spot for Adidas, called “MECHANICAL LEGS” is a great little bit of advertising done in the classic David Fincher visual style: high contrast lighting, steely color palette and a constantly-moving camera.
The entire piece is a digital creation, featuring a pair of disembodied robot legs exhibiting superhuman agility and speed as they test out a new pair of Adidas sneakers. Fincher’s flair for visual effects and dynamic compositions really makes the spot effective and, more importantly, memorable.
COCA-COLA: “THE ARQUETTES” (2003)
I remember this particular ad, Coca-Cola’s “THE ARQUETTES” when it came out, as it received a lot of airplay based on the popularity of the titular couple following Courtney’s successful run on FRIENDS as well as their combined appearances in Wes Craven’s SCREAM films.
Of course, I had no idea David Fincher was behind the spot when I first saw it, but having grown accustomed to his aesthetic, I can easily spot it now. It’s evident in the desaturated warm tones that favor slightly colder yellows instead of typical oranges, as well as the high contrast lighting. The spot’s tagline, “True Love”, is poetically tragic now after the couple’s divorce in 2011.
XELEBRI: “BEAUTY FOR SALE” (2004)
In 2004, Fincher was commissioned by Xelebri to realize a stunning concept in the spot for “BEAUTY FOR SALE”. The piece takes place in a futuristic world, filled with the imaginative production design and world-building Fincher is known for, and bolstered by the visually arresting conceit of normal people wearing supermodel bodies as costumes (achieved through clever CGI and other visual effects). A cold color palette and high contrast lighting wraps everything up into a neat little David Fincher package.
HEINEKEN: “BEER RUN” (2005)
Fincher’s spot for Heineken called “BEER RUN” is also a commercial that I remember quite well from its initial run, primarily due to the fact that it was a big, lavish Super Bowl ad. The piece stars Fincher’s regular feature collaborator Brad Pitt as himself, adventurously trekking out into the urban night for a case of Heineken while avoiding the hordes of paparazzi.
Visually, a green/yellow color cast is applied over the image which accentuates the high contrast lighting and evokes not only the color branding of Heineken itself, but David Fincher’s FIGHT CLUB (1999). Dynamic camera movement and the inclusion of The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” over the soundtrack further point to Fincher’s confident vision.
NINE INCH NAILS: “ONLY” (2005)
Fincher’s only music video during this period was created for Nine Inch Nails’ single “ONLY”. Fincher had already been associated with NIN frontman Trent Reznor due to the inclusion of a remix of Reznor’s “Closer” in the opening credits toSE7EN (1995), but this is the first instance of the two men working together directly. This is notable because Reznor would go on to become a regular composer for David Fincher, beginning with 2010’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK and continuing to the present day.
Interestingly, the video is presented in the square 4:3 aspect ratio, but the look is classic Fincher: high contrast lighting, a steely/sterile grey color palette and a constantly-moving camera that gives the simple concept a dose of electric energy.
The concept serves Fincher’s fascination for tech, with a Mac laptop acting as the centerpiece to this 21st century orchestra. CGI is used to inspired effect in incorporating sound waves on the surface of coffee, as well as conveying Reznor’s face and performance via those needle-art slabs that were popular during the era.
MOTOROLA: “PEBL” (2006)
In 2006, David Fincher reteamed with his cinematographer on THE GAME (1997), the late Harris Savides, to shoot a commercial for Motorola called “PEBL”. The spot tracks the long, slow erosion of a rock until it becomes so smooth that is adopts the form factor of Motorola’s Pebl mobile phone.
Fincher uses CGI in the form of meteors, craters, and weather to portray eons of time in only sixty seconds. This spot was filmed with digital cameras, and is credited with giving Fincher and Savides to adopt the format for the production of their next feature collaboration, 2007’s ZODIAC.
ORVILLE REDENBACHERS: “REANIMATED” (2007)
A commercial recently started airing that digitally recreates the late Audrey Hepburn, and understandably caused a lot of furor. There’s a huge ethical debate about using CGI advancements to bring long-dead celebrities back to life, a debate that more or less began in 2007 when David Fincher and Orville Redenbachers had the audacity to bring Orville himself back from the dead to hawk some popcorn.
I understand advancing the technology so that it can be used for necessary purposes (i.e, finishing the performance of an actor who died during production like Paul Walker), but the final effect is never truly convincing. It’s mildly upsetting at best, and pants-shitting horrifying at worst.
Here, Fincher’s familiarity with effects works against him, with his excitement at bringing dear old Orville back from the dead perhaps blinding him to the resulting “uncanny valley” effect. “REANIMATED”is easily one of Fincher’s most controversial videos, and for good reason.
LEXUS: “POLLEN” (2007)
Another spot that’s heavily-reliant on CGI, Lexus’ “POLLEN” is set inside of a greenhouse that was created entirely in the digital realm. Here, David Fincher is able to exact total control over his image and dial in a high contrast, steely color palette that highlights the car’s streamlined design.
The main takeaway from this period of Fincher’s career is his experimentation with digital cameras and acquisition would result in his overall confidence in the format and its future. Once he shot the majority of ZODIAC on digital, his film days were basically over.
His early adoption transformed him into the poster boy for the cinematic potential of the nascent digital format on a large, blockbuster scale.
ZODIAC (2007)
I’ve written before in my essays on Paul Thomas Anderson and The Coen Brothers about how 2007 was a watershed year in modern cinema. That specific year saw the release of three films that are widely considered to be the best films of the decade, the apex of efforts by specialty studio shingles like Paramount Vantage and Warner Independent.
Mid-level divisions like these flourished during the Aughts, with studios putting up considerable financial backing into artistic efforts by bold voices in an attempt to capture the lucrative windfall that came with awards season prestige.
It was a great time to be a cinephile, but it was also ultimately an unsustainable bubble—a bubble that would violently pop the following year when these shingles shuttered their doors and studios turned their attention to blockbuster properties and mega-franchises (ugh) like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
As an eager student in film school, 2007 was a very formative year for me personally. It was the year that Anderson’s THERE WILL Be BLOOD and The Coens’ NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN were released, but those films are not the focus of this article. This particular essay concerns the third film in the trifecta, David Fincher’s masterful ZODIAC.
When the film was released, I was already a David Fincher acolyte and had been awaiting his return to the big screen five years after PANIC ROOM. As I took in my first screening of ZODIAC on that warm, Boston spring afternoon, I became acutely aware that I was watching a contender for the best film of the decade.
ZODIAC’s journey to the screen was a long, arduous one—much like the real-life investigation itself. The breakthrough came when writer James Vanderbilt based his take off of Robert Graysmith’s book of the same name.
From Graysmith’s template, Vanderbilt fashioned a huge tome of a screenplay that was then sent to director David Fincher—helmer of the serial-killer-genre-defining SE7EN (1995)—basically out of respect.
Fully expecting Fincher to pass, Vanderbilt and the project’s producers were quite surprised to learn of the director’s interest and connection to the material— but Fincher himself wasn’t surprised in the least. He remembered his childhood in the Bay Area, where Zodiac’s unfolding reign of terror was the subject of adults’ hushed whispers and his own captivated imagination.
In an oblique way, ZODIAC is an autobiographical and sentimental film for David Fincher—a paean to an older, more idyllic San Francisco whose innocence was shattered by the Zodiac murders and ultimately lost to the negative economic byproducts of rampant gentrification.
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ZODIAC spans three decades of San Francisco history, beginning in 1969 and ending in 1991. The focusing prism of this portrait is the sense of paranoia and panic that enveloped the city during the reign of terror perpetrated by a mysterious serial killer known only as The Zodiac. Simply murdering people at random is a scary enough prospect to shake any city to its foundations, but Zodiac’s command of the media via chilling correspondence sent to newspaper editors and TV stations allowed him to disseminate his message and strike mortal fear into the heart of the entire state of California.
At the San Francisco Chronicle, crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) takes up the Zodiac beat and finds an unlikely ally and partner in plucky cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose familiarity with pictorial language and messages aids in the endeavor to decode the Zodiac’s cryptic hieroglyphics.
Meanwhile, Inspector Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) is breathlessly canvassing the populace and questioning hundreds upon hundreds of suspects in an effort to crack the Zodiac case, only to find frustration and confusion at every turn.
As the months turn to years, Zodiac’s body count continues to rise—until one day, it stops entirely. Time passes, nobody hears from the Zodiac for several years and the city moves on (including the increasingly alcoholic Avery).
That is, with the exception of Graysmith and Toschi, whose nagging obsession continues to consume them whole. With each passing year, their prospects of solving the case drastically decreases, which only amplifies their urgency in bringing The Zodiac to justice before he slips away entirely.
What sets ZODIAC apart from other serial-killer thrillers of its ilk is its dogged attention to detail. Fincher and Vanderbilt built their story using only the facts—eyewitness testimony, authentic police documentation and forensics evidence.
For instance, the film doesn’t depict any murder sequence in which there weren’t any survivors to provide accurate details about what went down. Another differentiating aspect about the film is the passage of time as a major theme, conveyed not only via on-screen “x months/years later” subtitles but also with inspired vignettes like a changing cityscape and music radio montages over a black screen.
ZODIAC’s focus lies in the maddening contradiction of factual accounts that stymied real-life investigators and led to missed clues and dead-end leads. The true identity of The Zodiac was never solved, and the film goes to painstaking lengths to show us exactly why that was the outcome.
ZODIAC attempts to deconstruct the larger-than-life myth of its namesake, but it also can’t help exaggerating him in our own cultural consciousness as the serial killer who got away—a modern boogeyman like Jason or Freddy that transcends the constraints of time and could pop up again at any time to resume his bloody campaign.
ZODIAC centers itself around a triptych of leads in Gyllenhaal, Downey and Ruffalo. The author of the film’s source text, Robert Graysmith, is depicted by Gyllenhaal as a goody-two-shoes boy scout and single father who throws himself into a downward spiral of obsession.
His sweet-natured pluckiness is the antithesis of the hard-boiled, cynical detective archetype we’ve come to expect from these types of films. Downey, per usual, steals every scene he’s in as the flamboyant, acid-witted Paul Avery. Ruffalo more than holds his own as the detail-oriented police inspector in a bowtie, David Toschi (whose actions during the Zodiac case inspired the character of Dirty Harry).
These three unconventional leads ooze period authenticity and help to immerse the audience into the story for the entirety of its marathon three hour running time.
By this point, Fincher had built up such an esteemed reputation for himself that he could probably cast any actor he desired. With ZODIAC’s supporting cast, Fincher has assembled a, unexpected and truly eclectic mix of fine character actors. John Carroll Lynch plays Arthur Lee Allen, the prime suspect in Toschi and Graysmith’s investigation.
Lynch assumes an inherently creepy demeanor that, at the same time, is not overtly threatening. Lynch understands that he has a huge obligation in playing Allen responsibly, since the storyline effectively convicts him as the Zodiac killer posthumously (when it may very well be not true at all).
When the Zodiac killer is seen on-screen, you’ll notice that it’s not Lynch playing the role. David Fincher wisely uses a different actor for each on-screen Zodiac appearance as a way to further cloud the killer’s true identity and abstain from implicating Allen further than the storyline already does. Additionally, this echoes actual survivor testimonies, which were riddle with conflicting and mismatching appearance descriptions.
Indie queen Chloe Sevigny plays the nerdy, meek character of Melanie. As the years pass in the film, she becomes Graysmith’s second wife and grows increasingly alienated by his obsession. She possesses a quiet strength that’s never overbearing and never indulgent.
Brian Cox plays San Francisco television personality Melvin Belli as something of a dandy and honored member of the literati. His depiction of a well-known local celebrity oozes confidence and gravitas. Elias Koteas plays Sergeant Mulanax, an embattled Vallejo police chief, while Dermot Mulroney plays Toschi’s own chief, Captain Marty Lee.
PT Anderson company regular Phillip Baker Hall appears as Sherwood Morrill, an esteemed handwriting analyst whose expertise is thrown into question as he succumbs to an escalating alcohol problem. Comedian Adam Goldberg appears in a small role as Duffy Jennings, Avery’s sarcastic replacement at The Chronicle, and eagle-eyed Fincher fanatics will also spot the presence of Zach Grenier, who played Edward Norton’s boss in FIGHT CLUB (1999).
ZODIAC is a very important film within Fincher’s filmography in that it marks a drastic shift in his style, ushering in a second act of creative reinvigoration fueled by the rise of digital filmmaking cameras and tools that could match celluloid pixel for crystal.
Fincher’s early adoption became a tastemaker’s vote of confidence in a fledgling technology and substantially bolstered the rate of adoption by other filmmakers.
Having shot several of his previous commercials on digital with THE GAME’s cinematographer Harris Savides, David Fincher was confident enough that digital cameras could meet the rigorous demands of his vision for ZODIAC and subsequently enlisted Savides’ experience as insurance towards that end.
Shooting on the Thomson Viper Filmstream camera in 1080p and presenting in the 2.40:1 aspect ratio, Fincher is able to successfully replicate his signature aesthetic while substantially building on it with the new tools afforded to him by digital.
Because of digital’s extraordinary low-light sensitivity, Fincher and Savides confidently underexpose their image with high contrast, shadowy lighting—many times using just the available practical lights, which resulted in moody, cavernous interior sequences and bright, idyllic exteriors. Fincher also is able to create something of a mundane, workaday look that stays within his established color space of yellow warm tones and blue/teal cold casts.
The procedural, methodical nature of the story is echoed in the observational, objective camera movement and editing. David Fincher’s dolly and technocrane work is deliberate and precise, as is every cut by Angus Wall in his first solo editing gig for Fincher having co-edited several of his previous features.
Wall’s work was certainly cut out for him, judging by Fincher’s well-documented insistence on doing as many takes as required in order to get the performance he wanted (it’s not uncommon in a David Fincher film for the number of takes to reach into the 50’s or 60’s).
To my eyes, ZODIAC is quite simply one of the most realistic and authentic-looking period films I’ve ever seen, owing credit to Donald Graham Burt’s meticulous production design. Burt and Fincher aren’t after a stylized, exaggerated vintage look like PT Anderson’s BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997), but rather a lived-in, well-worn, and low-key aesthetic.
Absolutely nothing feels out of place or time. Fincher’s borderline-obsessive attention to historical detail extended as far as flying in trees via helicopter in one instance to make the Lake Berryessa locale look just as it did at the time.
Practical solutions like this were augmented by clever, well-hidden CGI and digital matte paintings that never call attention to themselves. Funnily enough for a film so predicated upon its historical authenticity, David Fincher also acknowledges a surprising amount of artistic license taken with the film’s story— compiling composites of characters and re-imagining real-life events in a bid for a streamlined, clean narrative.
In developing the film, Fincher initially didn’t want to use a traditional score, instead preferring to incorporate a rich tapestry of popular period songs, radio commercials, and other audio recordings.
Toward that end, he used several different styles of music to reflect the changing decades, such as jazz, R&B and psychedelic folk rock like Donavan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man”, which takes on a pitch-black foreboding feel when it plays over the film’s brilliantly-staged opening murder sequence.
Once the film was well into its editing, Fincher’s regular sound designer Ren Klyce suggested that the film could really use some score during key moments.
David Fincher agreed, and reached out to David Shire—the composer of Alan J. Pakula’s ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976), a film that served as ZODIAC’s tonal influence.
Shire’s score is spare, utilizing mainly piano chords to create a brooding suite of cues that echoes the oblique danger and consuming obsession that the story deals in.
The story of ZODIAC is perfectly suited to Fincher’s particular thematic fascinations. Architecture plays a big role, with Fincher depicting San Francisco as a city in transition. He shows cranes on the skyline, holes in the ground waiting to be filled, and most famously, an impressionistic timelapse of the TransAmerica tower’s construction.
This approach extends to his interiors, specifically the Chronicle offices, which slowly transform over the years from a beige bullpen of clacking typewriters and cathedral ceilings to a brighter workspace with low-slung tile ceilings and fluorescent light fixtures (as seen in the well-composed low angle shots that pepper the film).
Nihilism— another key recurring theme throughout David Fincher’s work— pervades the storyline and the actions of its characters. Because they’re unable to solve the mystery and tie things up with a neat Hollywood ending, they either fall into an existential crisis about all their wasted efforts, or they simply lose interest and move on.
Fincher’s exploration of film’s inherent artifice is present here in very meta stylings: film canisters and their contents become promising leads and clues, and the characters get to watch movies about themselves on the screen (Fincher makes a big show of Toschi attending the Dirty Harry premiere). ZODIAC’s unique tone and subtext is perfectly indicative of David Fincher’s sensibilities as an artist, and frankly, it’s impossible to imagine this story as made by someone else.
ZODIAC bowed at the Cannes Film Festival to great views, its praise echoed by a cabal of prominent critics stateside. They hailed it as a masterpiece and Fincher’s first truly mature work as a filmmaker—the implication being that the maverick director was ready to join the Oscar pantheon of Great Filmmakers.
The critics’ high praise hasn’t eroded since either; it consistently ranks as one of the best films of the decade, if certainly not the most underrated. I wish the same could be said of the box office take of its original theatrical run, which was so poor that it only made back its budget when worldwide grosses were accounted for.
Thankfully, the release of Fincher’s director’s cut on home video managed to bring the film a great deal of respect and attention. As a reflection of David Fincher’s strict adherence to facts and eyewitness testimony in making the case for Arthur Lee Allen as the Zodiac, the long-dormant case was actually re-opened by Bay Area authorities for further investigation. When the pieces are put all together, the evidence clearly points to ZODIAC as Fincher’s grandest achievement yet.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (2008)
With some films, there’s an intense connection that you can’t fully explain. It resonates deep inside of you, in that cloud of unconsciousness. At the risk of sounding a little hippy-dippy, director David Fincher’s THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (2008) is one such film for me. It feels like a life that I’ve already lived before, despite the fact that I’ve never been to the South and I was born too late in the twentieth century to remember most of it.
Yet, there’s something about the film’s eroded-paint interiors in particular that reminds me of a distinct time in my life, a time when I was re-discovering my hometown of Portland, Oregon with new eyes during summer breaks from college.
I only realized it after my most recent viewing, but the film also sublimely foreshadows major developments in my own life: The treasured tugboat upon which Benjamin Button spends a great deal of his early adult years is named The Chelsea (coincidentally the name of my fiancée), and the love of his life is an elegant dancer (again, the soon-to-be Mrs.).
I can’t make it through the film without tearing up a little bit (or a lot), especially during the last montage where David Fincher shows us the smiling faces from Button’s life as Button himself opines in voiceover about how relationships are life’s biggest treasure. The scene utterly slays me. Every. Single. Time.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is based off the F. Scott Fitzgerald book of the same name, published in 1922. A film adaptation had been in development since the 1970’s, associated with a wide variety of big-time Hollywood names like Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, and Jack Nicholson.
Due to the storyline of a man aging in reverse, which would require 5 different actors playing Button at various stages of his life, the idea never picked up much steam. A leading role split up between five men wouldn’t appeal to any one movie star, and the studio couldn’t justify the required budget with unknowns. After a while, most executives considered it to simply be one of those great screenplays that never got made.
By the early 2000’s, executives began to realize that CGI technology had caught up with the demand for a single actor to portray Button throughout the ages. They brought FORREST GUMP scribe Eric Roth aboard to try his hand at a new draft, but the project really began generating momentum when Fincher, fresh off his success with 2002’s PANIC ROOM, became involved.
Working with Spielberg’s producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall (in addition to his own regular producer, Cean Chaffin), he developed the film simultaneously with his 2007 feature ZODIAC, which ended up going before cameras first. David Fincher’s creative steerage was instrumental in securing the participation of Brad Pitt, and with the decision to forsake the novel’s original Baltimore setting in favor of New Orleans and its generous post-Katrina tax incentives, the project was finally given the greenlight after decades of development.
Within Fincher’s filmography, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is just that—a curious case. It’s his most honored film, and certainly his most emotionally resonant and powerful. However, the film is not well-liked amongst the film community at large, let alone his devoted fanbase. It is commonly accused of maudlin sentiments, which at the time of its release were at odds with a cynical American mentality wrought by terrorism and an unpopular war abroad.
However, as the long march of time strips the film of the context of its release, its fundamental integrity increasingly reveals itself. Like its sister project ZODIAC, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON makes a strong case for one of the best films of its decade.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is bookended with a framing narrative that concerns an elderly woman named Daisy (Cate Blanchett) lying on her deathbed in a hospital while Hurricane Katrina approaches. She implores her daughter to read her a series of journal entries she’s saved in a box, all of them written by a mysterious man known only as Benjamin Button.
His story begins on the eve of World War 1’s end in New Orleans, where a baby is born with quite the defect: severely wrinkled skin and a frail condition that’s consistent with an old man at the end of his life.
The baby’s mother dies during labor, and the father, wealthy button manufacturer Thomas Button (Jason Flemyng), flees with the baby in horror, abandoning him on the back steps of a nursing home. The home’s caretaker, a fiercely maternal soul named Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) discovers the baby and takes him in as her own, giving him the name of Benjamin.
The child confounds all expectations as he continues growing up into an elderly-looking little boy, appearing better and healthier every day. Benjamin (Brad Pitt) fits right in with the residents of the creaky old nursing home, and they become something of an extended family around him. One day, Benjamin meets a precocious little girl named Daisy, who sense just how different he is, and they begin a lifelong friendship.
As the years give way to decades, Benjamin continues to age in reverse, becoming more youthful and virile as he sets out into the world on a grand adventure that places him against the backdrop of the 20th’s century historical moments.
He becomes a master sailor, battles Nazi submarines in open waters, and even experiences a secret love affair with an old married woman (Tilda Swinton) in Russia. When Benjamin returns home from his adventures, he finds Daisy has grown into a beautiful young woman as well as a successful ballet dancer in New York.
Their attraction towards each other alternates erratically, never overlapping until Daisy’s career is cut short after getting hit by a taxi in Paris. Middle age sets in, and as Daisy becomes acutely aware of her mortality, she and Benjamin finally give in to each other and start a grand romance.
When Daisy announces she’s pregnant, Benjamin becomes withdrawn emotionally—he’s reluctant about becoming a father because as the child grows, he’ll only get younger still and, as he puts it, “(she) can’t raise the both of us”.
As Benjamin’s singularly unique life plays out, the film reveals itself to ultimately be about the heartbreak of age and time. It plays like a melancholic yearning for youth, while at the same praises the experience of life and living it to the fullest with the time you have.
Brad Pitt’s third collaboration with David Fincher is also his most sophisticated. As Benjamin Button, Pitt needs to be able to convey a complex life through all its various stages and differing attitudes. The main through-line of Pitt’s performance is that of a curious innocent, who soaks in everything around him with wide-eyed glee because he was never supposed to live long enough to see it anyway. The majority of Pitt’s performance is augmented by CGI, but his characterization is consistent and his physicality is believable across the spectrum of age. Simply put, Pitt’s performance is a career-best that takes advantage of his off-kilter leading man sensibilities.
Blanchett’s Daisy is an inspired counterpart as a complex character who is both tender and cold, idealistic and practical. Like Pitt, Blanchett must convey the full spectrum of womanhood with her performance, and does so entirely convincingly (with a little help from CGI “youth-inizing” techniques and conventional makeup prosthetics).
Tilda Swinton plays Liz Abbott, Benjamin’s mistress and lover during his short residency in a grand, old Russian hotel. Swinton, like Blanchett, is capable of playing a wide variety of age ranges, and here performs beautifully as an older, sophisticated and worldly woman who introduces Benjamin to the world of caviar and secret love affairs.
As Benjamin’s adopted mother Queenie, Taraji P. Henson is a revelation. She projects a strong, resilient dignity that allows her to essentially run the show at the old folks home Benjamin lives in. Mahershala Ali, better known for his role in Fincher’sHOUSE OF CARDS series, works for the first with the director here as Tizzy, Queenie’s lover and a distinguished, mild-mannered father figure to Benjamin.
Jason Flemyng plays Benjamin’s real father, Thomas Button, as a man besieged by melancholy over how his life has turned out. He’s a rich man, but all of the money in the world couldn’t have prevented his current situation, so he keeps Benjamin at an emotional distance until its time to pass his legacy and wealth on.
And last but not least, Elias Koteas— in his second consecutive performance for Fincher following ZODIAC—plays Monsieur Gateau, a blind clockmaker. Consumed by grief after losing his son to the Great War, Gateau constructs a clock that hangs in the New Orleans train station and runs backwards—thus paralleling Benjamin Button’s own life.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON furthers David Fincher’s foray into the digital realm. Working with a new visual collaborator in cinematographer Claudio Miranda, Fincher once again utilizes the Viper Filmstream camera to establish an all-digital workflow. Indeed, not a single frame of the film was ever printed to film before the striking of release prints.
Acquisition, editing and mastering was done entirely with bits and pixels— ones and zeroes. Presented in David Fincher’s preferred 2.40:1 widescreen aspect ratio, the film is easily the director’s warmest-looking picture to date. The frame is tinged with a slight layer of sepia, while the warm tones veer towards the yellow part of the color spectrum and a cold blue/teal cast defines the current-day Katrina sequences.
The incorporation of practical lights into the frame creates a high contrast lighting scheme while making for moody, intimate interiors that evoke the old world feel of New Orleans.
Fincher’s color palette deals mainly in earth tones, which makes the presence of red (see Daisy’s dress during their first romantic date) all the more striking when it finally appears.
Red in general seldom makes an appearance in David Fincher’s work (except for blood, of course), a phenomenon that can be chalked up to Fincher’s self-avowed aversion to the color as it appears on film due to its distracting nature. However, with Daisy’s dress in particular, the costume designers were able to convince Fincher that the distraction served a legitimate story purpose.
For a director well known for his dynamic sense of camera movement, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is a surprisingly sedate affair.
While certain key moments are punctuated with dolly or Technocrane movements, for the most part David Fincher is content to let the frame stay static and allow the performances to take center stage. This approach is bolstered by returning production designer Donald Graham Burt’s exceptional period reconstructions (themselves augmented with CGI and digital matte paintings).
Fincher’s regular editor Angus Wall stitches everything together in a deliberate, meaningful fashion that eschews flash in favor of truth and emotion. Kirk Baxter joins Wall, and would go on to become part of Fincher’s core editing team himself.
For the film’s music, David Fincher collaborates with Alexandre Desplat, who creates an elegiac, nostalgic score that sounds lush and romantic. Desplat’s work stands in stark contrast to the moody, foreboding scores that Howard Shore or David Shire created for Fincher’s earlier films.
Fincher supplements Desplat’s whimsical suite of cues with several historical needledrops that fill out the period: southern ragtime, R&B crooner hits like The Platters’ “My Prayer”, and even The Beatles’ “Twist And Shout”. Above all of these, the incorporation of Scott Joplin’s Bethena waltz stands out as the most powerful and cutting of cues (in my mind, at least). The song is as Old Time Dixie as it comes, but it’s a nostalgic little tune that resonates with me on a very strange level.
I can’t hear it without tearing up a little, and I can’t figure out why besides the obvious beauty of the song. The best way I can describe it as if it’s some remnant from a previous life that only my unconscious soul recognizes—which is an odd thing to say coming from a guy who doesn’t believe in reincarnation.
For a lot of people, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON doesn’t feel like a David Fincher film, mainly because of its overall optimistic and sentimental tone that stands at stark odds with the rest of his emotionally cold, nihilistic filmography. However, the film is right in line with the trajectory of Fincher’s other thematic explorations.
While the passage of time is a key theme specific to the film’s story, it builds upon the foundation that Fincher established in ZODIAC (a story that also took place over the course of several decades). The old world New Orleans setting allows for lots of Victorian/classical architecture in the form of ornate southern mansions and municipal buildings that, as the years tick by, give way to a distinct midcentury modern feel (see the duplex where Benjamin and Daisy’s daughter is born).
And finally, despite being shot on digital, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON plays with the artificial constructs of the film medium. Flashback sequences, like the blind clockmaker scenes and a man getting struck by lightning seven times are treated to look like old silent pictures from the Edison era—jittery frames, contrast fluctuations, and heavy scratches, etc.
These filters, applied in post-production, serve to differentiate the flashbacks from the sumptuously-shot main story, but they also clue in to a curious phenomenon that has risen out of the industry’s quick shift into digital filmmaking: the treating of digital footage to look like film, which is akin to a vegetarian trying to make a soy patty taste just like the chicken he refuses to eat in the first place.
To my memory, THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON is one of the earliest instances of applying filmic artifacts onto a digitally “pure” image, along with Robert Rodriguez’s PLANET TERROR in 2006.
It’s a commonly held tenet that age softens even the hardest of personalities. The production of THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON saw David Fincher enter middle age and come to grips with his own mortality after the death of his father. As such, the film stands as a testament of an artist looking back on life and softening his edge without sacrificing who he is.
The film’s release in 2008 was met with modest commercial success and polarized reviews, with some deriding it as aFORREST GUMP knockoff while an equally vocal contingent hailed it as a technical triumph and a masterpiece of storytelling.
Fincher had his first real brush with the Oscars after the film’s release, with his direction receiving a nomination in addition to a nomination for Best Picture amongst a slew of actual Oscar wins for its groundbreaking visual effects work in seamlessly mapping a CG face onto a live-action body performance.
The cherry on top of the film’s success was its induction into the hallowed Criterion Collection, which—while met with scorn by Criterion fanboys for its perceived maudlin mawkishness— earned Fincher his place in the pantheon of important auteurs. It is an admittedly easy film to dismiss for cynical reasons, but THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON holds many treasures for those who choose to embrace it.
Like its unique protagonist, the film will persist through the ages precisely because of its poignant insights into the meaning of our fragile, fleeting existence on this earth.
COMMERICALS & MUSIC VIDEO (2008-2010)
The release of 2008’s THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON found director David Fincher without a follow-up project immediately in the pipeline. His search for new material would eventually lead him to Aaron Sorkin and 2010’s masterful THE SOCIAL NETWORK, but due to the fact that the story wasn’t nearly as development-intensive as his previous film, Fincher was able to squeeze in a few commercials. His most notable work from this brief period consisted of multiple spots done for Nike and Apple, both giants in their respective fields.
NIKE: “SPEED CHAIN” (2008)
One of several spots that Fincher created for Nike in 2008, “SPEED CHAIN” is simply masterful in concept and execution. It depicts the evolution of speed, starting with a snake coming out of the water, morphing into a man, a leopard, a car, and finally a speeding bullet train. The piece is presented in David Fincher’s preferred 2.40:1 aspect ratio, as well as his signature cold color palette and dynamic camera movements that are augmented by CGI.
NIKE: “FATE: LEAVE NOTHING” (2008)
“FATE: LEAVE NOTHING” is yet another exceptional piece of advertising, set to a trip-hop remix of Ennio Morricone’s score for THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY (1966) as two young boys grow and develop essential football skills like agility and strength. It all culminates in a key confrontation between the two on the field as they collide with explosive force. Alongside the ever-present visual signatures, the piece is indicative of a major fascination of Fincher’s from this period in his career—the passage of time.
NIKE: “OLYMPICS FILMSTRIP” (2008)
Fincher’s third spot for Nike, “OLYMPICS FILMSTRIP” is heavy on the post-production, framing Olympians in film frames as the strips themselves run and twist through the frame. Shot by THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON’s cinematographer Claudio Miranda in David Fincher’s characteristic steely color palette, the piece also falls in nicely with Fincher’s continued exploration of the film frame’s boundaries and the mechanics of film itself as an artificial imaging medium.
STAND UP 2 CANCER: “PSA” (2008)
Stand Up 2 Cancer’s “PSA” spot features several vignettes in which celebrities (and scores of regular people too) stand up and face the camera—an admittedly literal concept. Several of Fincher’s previous feature collaborators make an appearance here: Tilda Swinton, Morgan Freeman, Elle Fanning, and Jodie Foster. Others, like Susan Sarandon, Keanu Reeves, Casey Affleck, and Tobey Maguire also pop up.
SOFTBANK: “INTERNET MACHINE” (2008)
David Fincher’s “INTERNET MACHINE” is a spot for a foreign cell phone company that, to my knowledge, never aired stateside. It’s a strange piece, and so dark that we almost can’t see what’s going on at all. Cast in a heavy, David Fincher-esque green color tint, Brad Pitt walks down the street and casually talking on his phone— all while CGI cars are blown away by apocalyptic winds behind him.
APPLE: “IPHONE 3G” (2009)
In 2009, Fincher did two spots for Apple’s iPhone line of products. The first, “IPHONE 3G” teases the secrecy that usually surrounds the release of a new iPhone by depicting the complicated security process of accessing the prototype stored within Apple’s laboratories.
The sleek, high contrast and steely look is characteristic of Fincher, but fits in quite sublimely with Apple’s own branding. The colorless set is full of various security tech and looks like something out of a Stanley Kubrick movie, which is fitting for a director whose work is profoundly influenced by him.
APPLE: “BREAK IN” (2009)
“BREAK IN” advertises the imminent release of the 3G’s successor, the iPhone 3GS. This spot echoes the look of “IPHONE 3G” with a similar steely color palette and Kubrick-style set piece, but this time around David Fincher has a little more fun with the storyline and technology on display.
LEXUS: “CUSTOM CAR” (2009)
“CUSTOM CAR”, done for Lexus, is simple in concept and execution, featuring Fincher’s steely, cold, urban aesthetic and fascination with mankind’s relationship to technology—seen here via the convenience of custom car settings that help identify ownership in the absence of visual differentiation.
The piece isn’t available to embed as far as I can tell.
NIKE: “TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION” (2009)
Fincher’s 2009 spot for Nike, “TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION” is incredibly artful in its high contrast, black and white approach. It might be one of the most expressionistic depictions of football I’ve ever seen.
David Fincher’s characteristic use of CGI as a storytelling tool (not just for visual flash) can be seen at the end, where the football player/protagonist retires to the locker room and exhibits a lizard-like skin pattern of scales.
NIKE: “GAMEBREAKERS” (2010)
“GAMEBREAKERS” is all computer-generated, and as such it hasn’t aged as well. It looks more like an old videogame, but perhaps that was the intent. Fincher once again works with cinematographer Claudio Miranda, who shot live-action face elements that were then mapped onto CG bodies. The idea is similar to the tech employed for THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, but reversed and applied to a dynamic action sequence.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010)
Facebook is easily the biggest, most transformative development of the early twenty-first century. It completely revolutionized how we communicate with each other, how we keep in touch with old friends and family, and even how we use the Internet on a fundamental level. It single-handedly ushered in the era of “Web 2.0” that experts spent most of the 90’s predicting and theorizing about.
The fact that Facebook was born in the dorm room of some Harvard kid meant we had entered a brave, new digital age. We were now in a world that benefitted the young and the savvy, the likes of who didn’t wait to “pay their dues” or obtain a blessing from the old guard before going about casually changing the world.
At the end of the day, however, Facebook is a tool. A product. A collection of ones and zeroes organized just so and projected onto our monitors. So, when it was announced that THE WEST WING creator Aaron Sorkin had written a screenplay based off “The Accidental Billionaires”, Ben Mezrich’s book on Facebook’s turbulent founding, the question on everyone’s minds (as well as the film’s own marketing materials) was: “how could they ever make a movie out of Facebook?”
As Mezrich’s book revealed (and Sorkin’s screenplay built upon), the inside story of Facebook’s genesis was fraught with a level of drama, intrigue, and betrayal normally reserved for Shakespeare.
Sorkin’s script, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, was a high-profile project from day one. It attracted the efforts of top producers like Scott Rudin, in addition to well-known personalities like Kevin Spacey, who signed on to executive produce the film. Directing duties were eventually handed to David Fincher—- the right decision, given that literally nobody else could’ve made this film as masterfully as he has done here.
When THE SOCIAL NETWORK debuted in October of 2010, it enjoyed very healthy box office receipts, mostly due to the name recognition of Facebook as well as a collective curiosity about its eccentric founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Others—like me—simply came to worship at the altar of David Fincher, subject matter be damned.
Because life is unfair, THE SOCIAL NETWORK came close to Oscar glory but was ultimately robbed by some movie about a cussing monarch or whatever that nobody will remember in ten years. There’s a strong case to be made that THE SOCIAL NETWORK is the best film in Fincher’s entire body of work, but that’s a hard case to argue considering the strength of the rest of his filmography.
One thing is for certain: we hadn’t even completed the first year of the Teens before David Fincher had given us a strong contender for the best film of the new decade. THE SOCIAL NETWORK uses Zuckerberg’s deposition hearings as framing devices, allowing for the bulk to story to occur as flashback while the “present-day” sequences orient us in time and space and help keep us on the same page as the characters.
We see Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) under fire from two fronts—Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence) are suing him because they believe Facebook was an original idea of theirs that Zuckerberg stole, while Zuckerberg’s former best friend and Facebook CFO is suing him because he cheated him out of millions of dollars that were rightfully his. Fincher then transports us to Cambridge, Massachusetts during the mid-2000’s where Zuckerberg was an undergrad at Harvard.
When his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) dumps him for being a cold, cynical little twerp, Zuckerberg goes home and creates Facemash—a website that compares randomly-generated portraits of female students. The ensuing traffic crashes Harvard’s computer network and gains him a large degree of notoriety among the student body as well as disciplinary action from Harvard’s board.
Word of his antics reach the Winklevoss twins (henceforth known as the Winklevii), who hire him to realize their idea of a Harvard-exclusive social networking site called Harvard Connect while dangling the vague possibility of an invitation to their prestigious Final Club in front of him like a carrot.
But in bouncing their idea off of his friend Saverin, Zuckerberg realizes he has a much better one, disregarding his commission to build Facebook with Saverin instead. The popularity of Facebook explodes around the campus, turning Zuckerberg and Saverin into local celebrities. It’s not long until the site expands its user base to other Ivy League schools as well as Stanford, located right in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Understandably, the Winklevii finds themselves humiliated and infuriated by Zuckerberg’s deceit, and so begin building a nasty lawsuit against him.
Having left Boston for the warmer climes of Palo Alto for the summer, Zuckerberg and Saverin hustle to find more capital for their successful little business, eventually starting a partnership with Napster founder Sean Parker, who helps set them up with meetings with big-time investors as well as some primo office space.
As Facebook is launched into the stratosphere, Zuckerberg finds himself accumulating enemies faster than friends. Much is made in the film about the inherent irony of the creator behind the world’s most successful social networking endeavor losing all of his friends in the process.
This idea is most potent in the major conflict between Zuckerberg and a scorned, exiled Saverin who rages back with venomous litigation after he’s deceived out of hundreds of millions of dollars in potential earnings.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK would live or die on the strengths of its performances, a notion that the technically-minded Fincher recognized and applied to his strategy by putting an unusual amount of focus (for him) on the performances.
Beginning with a generous three weeks of rehearsal time prior to the shoot, and following through with consistently demanding obscene numbers of takes (the opening scene had 99 takes alone), David Fincher led his cast into delivering searing, career-best performances.
The lion’s share of the attention and the film’s only acting nomination at the Oscars went to Jesse Eisenberg’s pitch-perfect performance as Mark Zuckerberg, or rather, the fictional version of the real-life Facebook founder that Sorkin had created. Eisenberg portrays Zuckerberg as a cold genius with sarcastic, antisocial tendencies. He is regularly absent from the present—his mind is elsewhere, preoccupied by his duties back at the office.
At the same time, he can be calculating and ruthless when he needs to be. As Eduardo Saverin—the initial investor and embattled ex-CFO of Facebook—Andrew Garfield delivers a breakout performance. Decent, passionate, and perhaps a little squirrely, Saverin is Zuckerberg’s closest friend and confidant; a brother. But their relationship is a Cain and Abel story, and because of his blind trust that Zuckerberg will do the right thing and look out for him, he inevitably assumes the Abel position.
Pop icon Justin Timberlake— in a performance that legitimized his status as a capable actor— plays Sean Parker, the creator of Napster and Silicon Valley’s de facto “bad boy”. Timberlake easily channels a flashy, cocky, and flamboyant physicality that’s at once both undeniably attractive to Zuckerberg and duplicitously sleazy to Saverin.
Fincher’s casting of Timberlake is quite playful, and he doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to pointing out the irony of a pop star playing a man who single-handedly transformed (some might say ruined) his industry.
Fincher’s eclectic supporting players serve as rock-solid satellites that orbit around the film’s three titanic leads. David Fincher’s series of collaborations with the Mara clan begins here with the casting of Rooney Mara as Erica Albright, Zuckerberg’s ex girlfriend. She’s patient and honest, but in a no-bullshit kind of way that’s not afraid to tell people off and put them in their place.
Mara’s character is presented as a major driving force behind Zuckerberg’s actions, with their breakup becoming the inciting event that drives him to create Facemash in the first place. Mara turns in a spectacular low-profile performance that would lead to high-profile roles in other films, not the least of which was as the lead in Fincher’s next project, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011).
Rashida Jones, better known for her work on PARKS & REC, plays the admittedly thankless role of Marilyn Delpy, an insightful young lawyer in Zuckerberg’s deposition. Her knack for comedy is well documented in her larger body of work, but in THE SOCIAL NETWORK she shows off a fantastic serious side that is consistently realistic.
Armie Hammer’s dual performance as the Winklevoss twins was yet another of the film’s many breakouts. Hammer’s portrayal of the film’s primary set of antagonists required the dashing young actor to not only change his physicality between Tyler and Cameron by mere degrees, but also to undergo the arduous process of motion-capturing his face for its later digital compositing onto the body of actor Josh Pence.
Pence, it should be noted, is the great hero of the piece, as he valiantly forfeited his own performance in service to Fincher’s vision. And last but not least, Joseph Mazzello turns up in his highest-profile role since 1993’s JURASSIC PARK as the anxious, nerdy Dustin Moskovitz— Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard and one of Facebook’s founding fathers.
As I’ve grown older and more entrenched in Los Angeles’ film community, I’ve found that my connections to major studio films have become increasingly personal, and my degrees of separation from the prominent directors and actors I admire decreasing exponentially. THE SOCIAL NETWORK is a personal flashpoint then, in that a lot of my friends and acquaintances are a part of the film.
I suppose this is due to the story’s dependence on talent in their early twenties, as well as just being associated with the larger Los Angeles film community at the right time. For instance, my co-producer on my 2012 feature HERE BUILD YOUR HOMES, Josh Woolf, worked on the film as a production assistant and was there during the filming of the aerial title shot with Zuckerberg running across Harvard Square (a shot we’ll address in detail later).
Additionally, an actor friend of mine who I shot a short film with in January 2014, Toby Meuli, plays one of the more-prominent Harvard students during the Facemash sequence. A member of my group of friends from University of Oregon makes a brief appearance during a Final Club party sequence in which he chugs from a bottle of liquor and hands it off to Andew Garfield standing behind him.
I even went to a party in Los Feliz in 2010 that was thrown by the young woman with a pixie cut who was featured prominently during the opening frat party sequence. And finally, Mike Bash—a very close friend of mine—was cast in a great scene that followed the Bill Gates seminar. He was originally the guy who didn’t know that it was actually Bill Gates who was speaking. The scene was initially shot in Boston, but his role was cut when David Fincher eventually decided that he didn’t like how he directed the scene.
Rather than live with what he had, David Fincher reshot the scene in LA with new actors. Naturally, Bash was pretty despondent over his exclusion from the finished product, despite my assurances that he achieved a dream that eludes the grand majority of aspiring (and successful) actors: receiving direction from David Fucking Fincher.
David Fincher’s foray into digital filmmaking soldiers on in THE SOCIAL NETWORK, but this time he swaps out the Viper Filmstream camera with its maximum resolution of 1080 pixels for the glorious 4k visuals of the Red One camera.
His FIGHT CLUB cinematographer, Jeff Cronenweth, returns to shoot THE SOCIAL NETWORK in Fincher’s preferred 2.40:1 aspect ratio, ultimately bagging a Cinematography Oscar nomination for his trouble. Fincher and Cronenweth convey an overall cold tone without relying on the obvious blue side of the color spectrum. Warmer shots are dialed in to a yellow hue, with a prominent green cast coating several shots.
David Fincher’s visual signature is immediately apparent, once again utilizing high contrast lighting and practical lamps that make for dark, cavernous interiors. In shooting the film, Fincher and Cronenweth pursued a simple, unadorned look. Combined with the digital format’s increased sensitivity to light, most lighting setups were reportedly completed in twenty minutes or less.
The camerawork is sedate and observational, containing none of the flashiness of its kindred tonal spirit, FIGHT CLUB. When the camera does move, the name of the game is precision—meaning calculated dolly moves or the motion-controlled perfection of the Technocrane. There’s only one handheld shot in the entire film, when Timberlake’s Parker drunkenly approaches a bedroom door at a house party to find police on the other side.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK marks production designer Donald Graham Burt’s third consecutive collaboration with Fincher—and third consecutive period piece. Thankfully, reconstructing the mid-2000’s isn’t as arduous a process as recreating the 70’s or large swaths of the twentieth century.
The major challenge on Burt’s part was replicating a well-known campus like Harvard in an authentic manner when the school refused to let the production film on their grounds. Shots filmed at Johns Hopkins University, as well as various locations in Los Angeles are unified in time and space by David Fincher’s editing team of Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter.
The director’s adoption of digital techniques extends well into the post-production realm, with any promise of the technology’s ability to make editing easier going right out the window because of Fincher’s preferred shooting style.
Fincher had routinely used two cameras for each setup, effectively doubling his coverage, in addition to regularly demanding dozens upon dozens of takes until he was satisfied. At the end of it all, Wall and Baxter were left with over 268 hours of raw digital footage to sift through—a momentous task made all the more complicated by David Fincher’s tendency to mix and match elements from various takes right down to individual syllables of audio to achieve the cadence of performance he desired.
The new tools that digital filmmaking affords have certainly unleashed Fincher’s control-freak tendencies, but when that same obsession results in his strongest work to date and Oscar wins for his editing team, it can hardly be called a bad thing.
One of the most immediate and striking aspects of THE SOCIAL NETWORK is its unconventional musical score, written by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor in his first scoring job after a series of casual collaborations with Fincher (SE7EN’s opening credits and the music video for Reznor’s “ONLY”).
Partnering with Atticus Ross, Reznor has managed to create an entirely electronic sound that not only evokes his own artistic aesthetic, but also complements the film’s tone perfectly. Reznor’s Oscar-winning suite of cues is quite spooky, incorporating a haunting droning sound that unifies all the disparate elements. It almost sounds like someone dancing upon a razor’s edge.
The now-iconic main theme uses melancholy piano plunks that recall nostalgia and childhood, slowly getting softer and lost to audio buzz and droning as Zuckerberg strays from innocence. Another standout is a rearrangement of the Edvard Grieg’s classical masterpiece “In The Hall Of The Mountain King” that appears during the Henley Regatta rowing sequence, which sounds as through it were filtered through the manic, electric prism of Wendy Carlos (Stanley Kubrick’s composer for THE SHINING (1980).
Fincher’s go-to sound guy Ren Klyce layers everything into a coherent audio mix that would net him his own Oscar nomination. Klyce and David Fincher’s approach to the sonic palette of THE SOCIAL NETWORK is quite interesting, in that they don’t shy away from mixing in loud music and ambience during crowded scenes like the opening tavern sequence or the midpoint nightclub sequence.
The dialogue is almost lost amongst the loud din of activity, becoming a counterintuitive strategy to invest the audience and signal to them that they’ll really have to listen over the next two hours. Despite being a primarily talky film, the experience of watching THE SOCIAL NETWORK is anything but passive.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK takes all of Fincher’s core thematic fascinations and bottles them up into a singular experience. The director’s opening credits are always inspired, and THE SOCIAL NETWORK is no different (despite being relatively low-key).
Echoing Zuckerberg the character’s composed, plodding nature, David Fincher shows us Eisenberg running robotically through the Harvard campus late at night, which not only establishes the setting well, but also introduces us to the lead character’s relentless forward focus. Treating the text to disappear like it might on a computer screen and laying Reznor’s haunting theme over the whole thing are additional little touches that complete the package.
The title shot in this sequence, where we see Zuckerbeg run through Harvard Square from an overhead, aerial vantage point, also shows off Fincher’s inspired use of digital technology in subtle ways. The shot was achieved by placing three Red One cameras next to each other on top of a building and looking down at the action below.
This setup later allowed Fincher to stitch all three shots into one super-wide panorama of the scene that he could then pan through virtually in order to follow Zuckerberg. It’s insane. It’s genius.
Mankind’s relationship to technology has always been a major staple of David Fincher’s films, a thematic fascination influenced by his forebear Stanley Kubrick. In THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Fincher’s career-exploration of this theme comes to a head as the story’s main engine. The saga of Mark Zuckerberg is inherently about computers, the Internet, our complicated interactions with it, and its effect on our physical-world relationships.
Whereas Kubrick painted technology as dehumanizing and something to be feared, Fincher sees it as something to embrace—- something that distinctly enhances humanity and differentiates one person from the other. In David Fincher’s work, the human element tends to coalesce around the nihilistic punk subculture.
Our protagonist is inherently nihilistic and narcissistic, willing to burn whatever bridge he needs to advance his own personal cause, despite his actions not being fueled by money or power. The story hits on Fincher’s punk fascinations with Zuckerberg’s rebelliousness and devil-may-care attitude, in addition to the overt imagery of antisocial computer hackers and the inclusion of The Ramones’ “California Uber Alles”.
Finally, Fincher’s emphasis on architecture helps to evoke a sense of time and place, mixing in the old-world Harvard brownstones with the sleek modernism of the Facebook offices and deposition rooms that echoes the film’s subtext of the old guard stubbornly giving way to a new order.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK is easily David Fincher’s best-received film. When it was released, it scored high marks both in performance and critical reviews, going on to earn several Oscar nominations and even taking home gold statues for some of the big categories like Editing (Wall & Baxter) and Adapted Screenplay (Sorkin).
Ultimately, Fincher himself lost out on its deserved Best Director and Best Picture awards to THE KING’S SPEECH, but anybody could tell you which of the two films will be remembered in the decades to come. THE SOCIAL NETWORK again finds Fincher operating at the top of his game —a position he’s held since SE7EN even though he only broke through into true prestige with 2007’s ZODIAC.
It may not be an entirely accurate reflection of its true-life subject, but THE SOCIAL NETWORK is a pitch-perfect reflection of what Zuckerberg left in his wake: a society that would never be the same, fundamentally changed by a radical new prism of communication.
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011)
The late 2000’s was a golden era for young adult fiction in both the novel and film mediums. Just look at the runaway success of the TWILIGHT series or THE HUNGER GAMES—books or films. Doesn’t matter, because they both are equally prominent within their respective mediums. Despite your personal stance on these properties (trust me, I want them gone and buried just as much as you), you can’t deny their impact on pop culture.
During this time, another book series and subsequent set movie adaptations captivated an admittedly older set—Stieg Larsson’s MILLENNIUM trilogy. Named after the muckracking news magazine that central character Mikael Blomvkist works for, the books (and movies) comprise three titles: “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”, “The Girl Who Played With Fire”, and “The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest”. In 2009, the first of the Swedish film adaptations came out based on “Dragon Tattoo”, featuring newcomer Noomi Rapace in a star-making turn as the series’ cyper-punk heroine, Lisbeth Salander.
As the Swedish film trilogy proved successful both at home and abroad, it was inevitable that the major US studios would remake the property for American audiences. The task fell to Sony Pictures, who set up THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO with super-producer Scott Rudin overseeing a screenplay by esteemed writer Steve Zaillian.
Rudin’s natural choice for a director was David Fincher, who he had previously worked on the very successful THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010) with. Fincher was drawn to the story of two mismatched misfits trying to solve a decades old murder, despite his misgivings that he had become the go-to guy for serial killer films after the success of SE7EN (1995) and ZODIAC (2007).
The tipping point came in Fincher’s realization that he would be at the helm of one of the rarest projects in mainstream studio filmmaking: a hard R-rated franchise. As expected, David Fincher delivered a top-notch film with Oscar-caliber performances and effortless style. For whatever reason, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO didn’t connect with audiences, and its lackluster box office performance probably aborted any further plans for completing the trilogy.
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is structured differently than most other thrillers, in that it eschews the traditional three-act design in favor of five acts. This might be perhaps why the film floundered in the United States, where audiences have been subliminally conditioned to accept the ebb and flow of three acts as acceptable narrative form.
The film’s first half tells a two-pronged story, with one thread following Mikael Blomvkist (Daniel Craig)—a disgraced journalist who has recently lost a high-profile lawsuit against wealthy industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. After taking some time off from his co-editor gig at news magazine Millennium, he is approached by Henrick Vanger (Christopher Plummer), a rival of Wennestrom’s and a wealthy industrialist in his own right. Vanger brings Blomvkist to his sprawling estate in rural Hedestat under the auspices of authoring a book of his memoirs.
However, the true purpose of Blomvkist’s employment is much more compelling—to try and solve the decades-old case of Henrick’s granddaughter Harriet, who went missing in the 1960’s and is presumed killed.
Blomvkist takes up residence in a guest cottage on the property and dutifully begins poring over the family records and taking testimony from the various relatives, some of who have shady ties to the Nazi Party in their pasts.
Meanwhile in Stockholm, a young computer expert named Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) grapples with the fallout of her foster father’s debilitating stroke. She’s forced to meet with state bureaucrats for evaluation of her mental faculties and state of preparedness for life on her own.
Her case worker—a portly, morally-bankrupt man named Yils Bjurman (Yorick van Wageningen)—forces her to perform fellatio on him in exchange for rent money, his abuse eventually culminating in Salander’s brutal rape.
However, he doesn’t expect Salander’s ruthlessness and resolve, made readily apparent when she returns the favor and rapes him right back.
Blomvkist requests the help of a research assistant, and in an ironic twist, is paired with Salander—- the very person who performed the background check on him prior to Vanger’s offer of employment.
They make for an unlikely, yet inspired pairing—both professionally as well as sexually. Together, they set about cracking the case, only to discover their suspect is much closer—and much deadlier—than they could’ve imagined.
James Bond himself headlines David Fincher’s pitch-black tale, but it’s a testament to Daniel Craig’s ability that we never are actually reminded of his secret agent exploits throughout the near-three-hour running time.
Craig has been able to avoid the sort of typecasting that doomed others like Mark Hamill or Pierce Brosnan before him, simply because he refuses to let his roles define him. As disgraced journalist Mikael Blomvkist, he projects a slightly disheveled appearance (despite still being an ace fucking dresser). It may not be the most memorable role of his career but he turns in a solid, faultless performance regardless.
The true spotlight goes to Rooney Mara’s cold, antisocial hacker punk, Lisbeth Salander. Mara underwent a radical transformation for the role, even so far as getting real piercings, tattoos, dye jobs, even having her eyebrows bleached.
Considering her previous collaboration with David Fincher was as the squeaky-clean girl-next-door Erica Albright in THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Mara’s appearance in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is gut-level arresting.
The depth of Mara’s talent is evident in her unflinching confrontation with the most brutal aspects of her character arc. By giving herself over to the role entirely, she’s able to take a character that was already so well-defined by Rapace in the Swedish versions and make it completely into her own. Her Best Actress nomination at the Oscars was very much deserved.
Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgard, and Robin Wright round out Fincher’s compelling cast. Plummer is convincing as Henrick Vanger, depicting the retired industrialist as a good-natured yet haunted old man, as well as a bit of a dandy.
Skarsgard’s Martin Vanger is the current CEO of the family business, and his distinguished-gentleman persona cleverly hides his psychopathic, murderous inclinations. Wright plays Erika Berger, Blomvkist’s co-editor at Millennium and his on-again, off-again lover. Wright is by her nature an intelligent and savvy woman, as evidenced not just here but in her subsequent collaboration with Fincher in HOUSE OF CARDS as Kevin Spacey’s Lady MacBeth-ian spouse.
In keeping with David Fincher’s affinity for digital filmmaking technology, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO takes advantage of the Red Epic digital cameras, the next generation of the type that THE SOCIAL NETWORK was shot on.
The film is presented in Fincher’s preferred 2.40:1 aspect ratio, but again it is not true anamorphic. Besides being a reflection of David Fincher’s general distaste for the limitations of anamorphic lenses, the shooting of the image in full-frame and the later addition of a widescreen matte in postproduction is a testament to Fincher’s need for control.
This method allows him to compose the frame exactly as he wants, and the Red Epic’s ability to capture 5000 lines of resolution allows him an even greater degree of precision in zooming in on certain details, blowing up the image, or re-composing the shot without any loss in picture quality.
This technology also affords better image stabilization without any of the warping artifacts that plague the process.
Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth returns for his third collaboration with Fincher, having replaced original director of photography Fredrik Backar eight weeks into the shoot for reasons unknown.
Despite his initial position as a replacement DP, Cronenweth makes the picture his own, with his efforts rewarded by another Oscar nomination. David Fincher’s signature aesthetic is very appropriate for the wintery subject matter, his steely color palette of blues, greens and teals evoking the stark Swedish landscape— even warmer tones are dialed back to a cold yellow in Fincher’s hands.
The high contrast visuals are augmented by realistically placed practical lights that suggest cavernous interiors. Fincher’s sedate camera eschews flash in favor of locked-off, strong compositions and observant, calculated dolly work. When the camera moves, it really stands out in an affecting way.
Nowhere in the film is this more evident than in the shot where Craig’s Blomvkist is in the car approaching Vanger’s extravagant mansion for the first time. Presented from the forward-travelling POV of the car itself, the mansion grows larger in the center of frame— the symmetrical framing conceit suggesting ominous perfection.
The fact that the camera is stabilized makes for a smooth foreboding shot that takes any sort of human element out of the equation and replaces it with a fundamentally uneasy feeling. In the commentary for the film, David Fincher cites a favorite book from childhood, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”—the sequence in which Harker approaches Dracula’s Castle serving as inspiration for his approach to this particular shot.
The connection is certainly not lost on this writer. Like several key shots in Fincher’s larger filmography, the Vanger Estate Approach (as I like to call it) would become a tastemaker shot that has not only been copied in his successive project HOUSE OF CARDS, but in subsequent pop culture works by other artists as well.
Production designer Donald Graham Burt returns for his fourth Fincher film, artfully creating an authentic sense of place in the Swedish locations while showing off his impeccable taste and eye for detail.
Editing team Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter are key collaborators within David Fincher’s filmography, and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO would become their second consecutive Oscar win for editing under the director’s eye.
Their work for THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO really utilizes the advantages that digital filmmaking has to offer in realizing David Fincher’s vision and creating a tone that’s moody but yet unlike conventional missing-person thrillers.
Angus and Wall establish a patient, plodding pace that draws the audience deeper into the mystery before they’re even aware of it, echoing Blomvkist’s own growing obsession with the case.
Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and his music partner Atticus Ross reprise their scoring duties, giving the musical palette of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO an appropriately electronic and cold, wintery feeling.
Primarily achieved via a recurring motif of atonal bells and ambient soundscapes, the score is also supplemented by a throbbing, heartbeat-like percussion that echoes Salander’s simmering anger as well as the encroaching danger at hand.
One of Reznor’s masterstrokes is his reworking of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” for the opening credits and trailer, featuring vocals by Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O. Given a new coat of industrial electronic grunge, the rearrangement instantly conveys the tone and style of the film.
Fincher’s needledrops are few and far between in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, but one sourced music track stands out because of the sheer audaciousness of its inclusion. In the scene where Skarsgard’s Martin Vanger tortures Blomvkist in anticipation of butchering his prey, he fires up the basement’s stereo system and plays, of all songs, Enya’s Orinoco Flow.
I remember the moment getting a huge laugh in the theatre, and rightfully so—the song is just so cheesy and stereotypically Nordic that it acts as a great counterpoint to the sheer darkness of the scene’s events.
The laughter instead becomes a nervous sort of chuckle, the kind we employ to hide a certain kind of fundamental unease and anxiety. Fincher’s go-to sound guy Ren Klyce was nominated for another Oscar with his standout mix, taking this noxious brew of sounds and turning it into a razor-sharp sonic landscape that complements David Fincher’s visuals perfectly.
On its face, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO doesn’t seem like it would call for a substantial amount of computer-generated visual effects. Fincher’s background in VFX results in the incorporation of a surprisingly large quantity of effects shots.
Almost every exterior shot during the Vanger sequences has some degree of digital manipulation applied to it in the way of subtle matte paintings, scenery extensions and weather elements that blend together seamlessly in conveying Fincher’s moody vision and desire for total control over his visuals.
His affinity for imaginative opening title sequences continues here, in what is arguably his most imaginative effort to date. Set to the aforementioned “Immigrant Song” cover, the sequence plays like a dark nightmare version of those iconic James Bond title sequence, depicting key moments from the film in abstract, archetypical form as a thick black ooze splashes around violently. The choice to incorporate a black on black color scheme is undeniably stylish.
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO sees David Fincher at the peak of his punk and technological aesthetic explorations. While not Fincher’s creation, the character of Lisbeth Salander fits in quite comfortably within his larger body of work—the culmination of a long flirtation with punk culture.
She is most certainly the product of the cyberpunk mentality, which values not only rebelliousness but technological proficiency as well. Unlike other depictions of this subculture in mass media, it’s easy to see that Fincher obviously respects it for what it is and aims to portray them in a realistic manner.
He builds upon the downplayed foundation he laid in THE SOCIAL NETWORK here by refusing to generate fake interfaces for Salander to use. He shows Salander actively Googling things, looking up people on Wikipedia, etc—he doesn’t shy away from showing corporate logos and interfaces as they appear in real life.
While a lot of people have a problem with blatant product placement, I can respect a director who doesn’t go out of his way to hide (or aggressively feature for that matter) brands and logos when depicting a realistic world. After all, we live in a world awash with corporate branding, so why pretend it doesn’t exist?
David Fincher’s body of work is defined by a distinctly nihilistic attitude towards story and character, even though I don’t believe he’s nihilistic himself. With THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO in particular, these sentiments are a prominent part of the storytelling.
These protagonists are morally flawed people who aren’t afraid of doing bad things to get ahead. They’re mostly atheists, and they don’t care whether you like them or not. The themes of abuse that run through the narrative also reflect this overarching mentality, playing out in the form of authority figures exerting their influence and selfish desires over the women that depend on them.
We see this reflected both on the bureaucratic level with Salander’s lecherous case worker, as well as on the familial level in Harriet Vanger’s repeated rape and abuse at the hands of her brother and father.
Architecture plays a subtle, yet evocative role in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. One of the core themes of the story is the clash between new Sweden (Salander’s weapons-grade sexual ambiguity and technical proficiency) and old Sweden (the Vanger family’s moneyed lifestyle and sprawling compound).
This clash is echoed in the architecture that Fincher chooses to present. The Vanger estate consists of classical Victorian stylings and rustic cottages; compare that to the harsh lines and modern trappings Martin Vanger’s minimalist cliffside residence (all clean lines and floor-to-ceiling glass), as well as the whole of Stockholm—very much the model of a modern European city. In showing us this duality of place and time, Fincher is able to draw a line that also points us directly to the narrative’s major emphasis on the duality of man.
Despite THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO’s impeccable pedigree and unimpeachable quality, it was a modest disappointment at the box office. It opened at a disadvantage, placing third on its debut weekend and never rising above it during the rest of its run.
There were, of course, the inevitable comparisons to the original series of film adaptations, with purists preferring them over David Fincher’s “remake”.
Having seen Fincher’s version before I ever touched the originals, I quickly found that I couldn’t get through the first few minutes of the Swedish opening installment—Fincher’s execution, to me, was so much more superior in every way that it made the originals look like cheap TV movies of the week.
Unfortunately, we will probably never get to see what David Fincher would have done with the remaining two entries in the series, as the poor box office performance of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO most likely put the kibosh on further installments.
But, as I’ve come to discover again and again since I’ve started this essay series project, time has a way of revealing the true quality of a given work. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is only three years old as of this writing, but the groundswell of appreciation is already growing—hailing the film as the most underrated in Fincher’s filmography and an effort on par with his best work.
HALO 4 “SCANNED” TRAILER (2012)
In 2012, the long-awaited, highly anticipated HALO 4 was released for the Xbox 360. During the buildup to the release, the game-makers enlisted director David Fincher to craft an unconventionally long commercial/teaser trailer.
Titled“SCANNED”, the piece takes on the POV of Master Chief, showing us flashbacks from his life as he was selected for the Master Chief program, surgically enhanced, and let loose into the galaxy to protect Earth. The flashbacks are triumphant in nature, which only underscores the severity of the situation when we cut to the present and reveal Master Chief in captivity, facing off against what appears to be a greater threat than he’s ever encountered.
“SCANNED” is a combination of live-action and all-CG elements, evoking the slick commercial work of David Fincher’s earlier advertising career as well as reiterating his confident grasp on visual effects. The high contrast, cold/blue color palette is one of the piece’s few Fincher signatures, in addition to the focus on the futurist technology required to make Master Chief in the first place. At two minutes long, “SCANNED” is a supersized spot and must have been incredibly expensive. Considering that both the HALO video game series and Fincher have huge fan bases between them, it’s a bit surprising to see that their collaboration here wasn’t hyped more than it was.
There’s not a lot of growth to see on David Fincher’s part here, other than the observation that his long, successful commercial career has made him the go-to director for only the highest-profile spots and campaigns.
HOUSE OF CARDS “CHAPTER 1 & 2” (2013)
Director David Fincher has long been a tastemaker when it comes to commercial American media. His two pilot episodes for Netflix’s HOUSE OF CARDS, released in 2013, are simply the latest in a long string of works that have influenced how movies are made, how commercials are engineered, and how music videos have evolved.
Due to HOUSE OF CARDS’ runaway success, he has played a crucial part in making the all-episodes-at-once model the indisputable future of serialized entertainment and reinforcing the notion that we’re living in a new golden age of television.
HOUSE OF CARDS had originally been a successful television series in the United Kingdom, so of course it had to be re-adapted for American audiences, who presumably have no patience for British parliamentary politics.
On principle, I think this is a terrible practice that discourages us from learning about other cultures based off the assumption that we’re too lazy to read subtitles. But like Fincher’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011) before it, once in a while the practice can create an inspired new spin on existing work that distinctly enhances its legacy within the collective consciousness.
HOUSE OF CARDS’ origins stretch back to 2008, when David Fincher’s agent approached the director with the idea while he was finishing up THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON. Fincher was interested in the idea, and enlisted hisBENJAMIN BUTTON writer Eric Roth to help him executive produce and develop the series.
After shopping it around to various cable networks around town, they found an unexpected home in streaming movie delivery service Netflix, who was in the first stages of building a block of original programming in order to compete with the likes of HBO and Showtime while bolstering their customer base. Along with LILYHAMMER and the revived ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT, HOUSE OF CARDS formed part of the first wave of this original programming, which took advantage of Netflix customers’ binge-watching habits by releasing all episodes at once instead of parsing them out over the space of several weeks.
It was (and still is) a groundbreaking way to consume television, and despite the naysayers, the strategy worked brilliantly. Funnily enough, the reunion between Fincher and SE7EN (1995) star Kevin Spacey didn’t occur out of their natural friendship, but because Netflix found in its performance statistics a substantial overlap between customers who had an affinity for David Fincher and Spacey, respectively.
As such, executives at Netflix were able to deduce and mathematically reinforce the conclusion that another collaboration between both men would generate their biggest audience. This also gave them the confidence to commit to two full seasons from the outset instead of adhering to traditional television’s tired-and-true practice of producing a pilot before ordering a full series.
Admittedly, the use of metrics and numbers instead of gut instinct might be a cynical way to approach programming, but in HOUSE OF CARDS’ case, the idea really paid off. Under Fincher’s expert guidance, Spacey has delivered the best performance of his career and HOUSE OF CARDS has emerged as one of the best serialized dramas around, rivaling the likes of such heavyweights as MAD MEN, THE WIRE, and BREAKING BAD.
Fincher directed the first two episodes in the series, which takes place during the inauguration of fictional President Garrett Walker. Walker wouldn’t even be taking the oath of office if it weren’t for the substantial canvassing done by House Majority Whip Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) in exchange for the coveted position of Secretary of State.
After taking office, however, Walker has a change of heart and reneges on his promise. Underwood shows grace and discipline in accepting the President Elect’s decision, but immediately begins scheming how to manipulate his way to the top. He’s simultaneously challenged and reinforced by his wife Claire (Robin Wright), the CEO of a prominent nonprofit and a strong-willed leader in her own right.
On the President’s first day in office, Underwood targets the new nominee for Secretary of State, Michael Kern, via an education reform bill— which is revealed to be radically left-leaning and unacceptable to the public’s interests.
Underwood leaks the bill to the press through Washington Herald reporter Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara), whose story on the matter lands on the Herald’s front page and prompts the education reform chairman to step aside and designate Frank himself to head up the authorship of a new bill.
It isn’t long until Underwood manages to unseat Kern by exploiting his handicaps via hardline questions from the press, subsequently installing a pawn of his own as the new candidate. Over the course of the first season, Underwood’s machinations and orchestrations will whisk him up into the upper echelons of power and within a heartbeat of the highest office in the land.
Kevin Spacey has always been a well-respected actor, but his performance as Frank Underwood reminds us of his unparalleled level of talent. Underwood is an unconventional narrator, straddling a line between an omniscient and personal point of view.
A southern gentleman from South Carolina first, a Democrat second, and currently the House Majority Whip (a temporary position, to be sure), Underwood is a ruthlessly calculating and manipulative politician—but at the same time he’s endlessly charismatic and armed with an endless supply of euphemisms and folksy proverbs.
Although Spacey and David Fincher haven’t worked together on this close a scale since 1995, it seems they’re able to slip right into the proceedings with a great degree of confidence and comfort.
Robin Wright, also on her second collaboration with Fincher after THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, plays Underwood’s wife, Claire. Every bit as strong and calculating as her husband, the character of Claire adds a distinctly Shakespearean air to the story by channeling the insidiously supportive archetype of Lady Macbeth.
The CEO of a successful nonprofit firm, Claire pulls her weight around the Underwood household and becomes Frank’s rock during difficult times. Wright does a great job of making Claire inherently likeable and relatable, despite her outwardly cold characterization.
With HOUSE OF CARDS, the Mara family has established something of a dynasty in their collaborations with Fincher. After Rooney’s career-making performances in THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010) and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, older sister Kate proves every bit her equal as Zoe Barnes, a wet-around-the-ears journalist for the Washington Herald. Plucky, street smart and ambitious, Barnes is able to use her intelligence as a tool of empowerment just as well as her sex.
Corey Stoll and Mahershala Ali, as Peter Russo and Remy Denton respectively, prove to be revelations that stick out amidst the clutter of David Fincher’s supporting cast. Stoll’s Russo is a politician from East Pennsylvania who has problems with alcohol and drug abuse. He’s severely disorganized and impulsive, despite his promising intelligence and ambition.
Ali’s Denton is almost the exact opposite—super focused, disciplined, and exceedingly principled. Denton is a high-powered lawyer who serves as a great foil to Underwood’s scheming. Ali’s performance also benefits due having worked with Fincher on THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON.
Like all of Fincher’s late-career work, HOUSE OF CARDS is shot entirely digitally, taking advantage of the Red Epic’s pure, clean image to convey the series’ sterile, almost-surgical tone. Instead of hiring a cinematographer he’s worked with before, David Fincher enlists the eye of Eigil Bryld, who ably replicates the director’s signature aesthetic.
The cold, steely color palette has been desaturated to a pallid monotone in its treatment of blues, teals, and greys. Warm tones, like practical lights that serve to create a soft, cavernous luminance in interior chambers, are dialed into the yellow side of the color spectrum.
The aesthetic deviates from Fincher’s style, however, in opting for a much shallower focus—even in wide shots. Curiously, the aspect ratio seems to be fluid from format to format. When streamed on Netflix, HOUSE OF CARDS is presented in 1.85:1, but watching it on Blu Ray, the image appears to be cropped to Fincher’s preferred 2.40:1 aspect ratio, making for an inherently more-cinematic experience.
HOUSE OF CARDS plays like an old-school potboiler/espionage thriller, featuring shadowy compositions and strategic placement of subjects in his frame that are reminiscent of classic cloak-and-dagger cinema.
The camera work is sedate, employing subtle dolly work when need be. The effect is a patient, plodding pace that echoes Underwood’s unrelenting focus and forward-driven ambition. Perhaps the most effective visual motif is the inspired breaking of the fourth wall, when Spacey pulls out of the scene at hand to monologue directly to camera (which makes the audience complicit in his nefarious plot).
Spacey delivers these sidebar moments with a deliciously dry wit, enriching what might otherwise be a stale story of everyday politics and injecting it with the weight of Shakespearean drama. The foundation of this technique can be seen in 1999’s FIGHT CLUB, where David Fincher had Edward Norton address the audience directly in a few select sequences. HOUSE OF CARDS fully commits to this idea, doing away with conventional voiceover entirely.
While it’s been used in endless parodies since the series’ release, the very fact that the technique is commonly joked about points to its fundamental power.
Another visual conceit that has been copied by other pop culture works like NONSTOP (2014) is the superimposition of text message conversations over the action, rather than cutting to an insert shot of the message displayed on the cell phone’s screen.
Considering that characters have been texting each other in movies for almost ten years now, I’m frankly surprised it took us this long for the on-screen subtitle conceit to enter into the common cinematic language. It’s an inspired way to dramatize pedestrian, everyday exchanges that act as the modern-day equivalent of coded messages in cloak-and-dagger stories.
Behind the camera, Fincher retains most of his regular department heads save for one new face. Donald Graham Burt returns as Production Designer, creating authentic replicas of the hallowed halls and chambers of Washington DC. Kirk Baxter, who normally edits Fincher’s features with Angus Wall, goes solo in HOUSE OF CARDS and weaves everything together in a minimalist, yet effective fashion.
The ever-dependable Ren Klyce returns as Sound Designer, giving an overly-talkie drama some much-needed sonic embellishment. The only new face in the mix is Jeff Beal, who composes the series’ music. Beal’s theme for HOUSE OF CARDS is instantly iconic, fueled by an electronic pulse that bolsters traditional orchestral strings and horns— echoing the romantic statues of fallen heroes that dot the DC landscape with a patriotic, mournful sound.
The series doesn’t rely on much in the way of needledrops, so David Fincher’s inclusion of two pre-recorded tracks is worth noting. The first episode features an inaugural ball where we hear Dmiti Shostakovich’s “Second Waltz”, which cinephiles should recognize as the main theme to Kubrick’s EYES WIDE SHUT (1999).
Additionally, the second episode features Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” when Russo goes to visit a conspiracy theorist in rural Massachusetts. While not exactly the most original choice of music, it’s appropriate enough.
For visionary directors like Fincher, television is tough because of the need to work within a strictly defined set of aesthetic boundaries. While this is changing and becoming a better stage for visually dynamic work every day, the basic rule of thumb is to direct the pilot in order to set the style in place and make the entire series conform around it.
In that regard, HOUSE OF CARDS as a series absolutely oozes Fincher’s influence, despite 24 of the (to-date) 26 episodes being helmed by different directors. This phenomenon can be ascribed to the fact that David Fincher’s episodes dovetail quite nicely with several themes and imagery he’s built his career on exploring.
Take the opening titles for instance—while they are usually part and parcel with the conventional television experience, Fincher makes them his own by showing time-lapse footage of Washington DC locales, suggesting the bustling scope of his stage while further exploring the passage of time as a thematic idea— also seen in earlier work like ZODIAC (2007) or THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON.
This theme is also reflected in Fincher’s depiction of DC’s iconic architecture. Like he did in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, his compositions and location selections when taken as a whole suggest a clash between the old Washington and the new.
Old DC, marked by classical, colonial structures like The White House and The Lincoln Memorial, face off against the growing tide of steel and glass towers, or the modern infrastructural design of subway stations. A key takeaway of HOUSE OF CARDS is that Washington DC, a city defined by its romantic memorials to the past, is increasingly modernizing into a world city of the future.
This transition is aided by mankind’s increasing dependence on— and complicated relationship with—technology; another core idea that David Fincher has grappled with throughout his career. HOUSE OF CARDS’ focusing prism is communication: cell phones, text messages, the Internet, Apple computers, CNN, etc.
The series goes to great lengths to depict how information is disseminated in the digital age, with government and the media forming a complex, symbiotic relationship.
In asking the audience to root for, essentially, the bad guy, HOUSE OF CARDS echoes the strong undercurrent of nihilism that marks Fincher’s stories. Underwood is less of a protagonist than he is an antihero.
Objectively, he’s a bad person who’s scheming to outright steal the Presidency to rule the world as he sees fit. In real life, we’d react to this sort of notion with outrage—just ask anyone who’s ever irrationally obsessed over a particular birth certificate of a certain standing President. However, we can’t help but root for Underwood to succeed, simply because he’s just so damn attractive and charismatic (on top of actually being, you know, a fully-fleshed out, relatable person with moral shades of grey and not a stock villain archetype).
HOUSE OF CARDS’ groundbreaking release was met with quite the warm reception. It was nominated for several Emmys (a big deal for a series that hadn’t been broadcast first on television), and launched Netflix into HBO’s orbit in terms of compelling original content.
For Fincher as a director, HOUSE OF CARDS served as a great comeback after the disappointment of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. The series, whose third season is scheduled to premiere in February 2015, is a confident, near-flawless exploration of man’s lust for power and our complicated governmental structure—and wouldn’t be nearly as successful without David Fincher’s guiding hand. My one regret with HOUSE OF CARDS is that he didn’t direct more episodes.
COMMERICALS & MUSIC VIDEO (2013-2014)
Director David Fincher barely had any time to notice the modestly-disappointing performance of 2011’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, what with the continuing development of several projects he was attached to make. It would be 3 years before he was back in cinemas with another feature, but the years between 2011-2014 were by no means a fallow period.
His sheer love for directing and for being on set couldn’t keep him away for long— and so in 2013 he returned to the arena that first made his name, armed with a new commercial and a new music video.
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE: “SUIT & TIE” (2013)
You couldn’t go anywhere in the Summer of 2013 without hearing Justin Timberlake’s “Suit & Tie” on the airwaves. As Timberlake’s own bid for Michael Jackson’s pop throne, the song’s broad appeal couldn’t be denied.
The inevitable music video for the song couldn’t be trusted with just any filmmaker—it was too high-profile to go to anyone but the biggest directors in town. Most likely due to their successful collaboration in 2010’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Timberlake chose Fincher as the director for “SUIT & TIE”—their union begetting one of the better music videos in many, many years.
Fincher’s visual aesthetic proves quite adept at its translation into the world of high fashion and style. He uses black and white digital cinematography and a 2.40:1 aspect ratio to echo the polished, sleek vibe of Timberlake’s song.
While a lot of his earlier music videos were shot in black and white to achieve a sense of grit, David Fincher’s use of it here echoes the crispness of a black tuxedo against a white shirt.
There’s a great interplay between light and dark throughout the piece, both in the broad strokes like the dramatic silhouettes he gets from his high contrast lighting setups, as well as smaller touches like Timberlake’s white socks that peek out from between black pants and shoes (another homage to Michael Jackson).
Despite being primarily a for-hire vehicle for Timberlake and a selling tool for his single, “SUIT & TIE” manages to incorporate a few of Fincher’s long-held thematic fascinations.
Fincher’s exploration of our relationship with technology sees a brief occurrence here as Timberlake and Jay-Z utilize state of the art recording equipment in the studio, as well as employing iPads as part of the songwriting process.
David Fincher features Apple products in his work so much more prominently than other filmmakers that I’m beginning to think he has a secret product placement deal with them. Architecture also plays a subtle role in the video, seen in Timberlake’s slick, modern bachelor pad as well as the Art Deco stylings and graceful arches of the stage he performs on.
One strange thing I noticed, though: the size of the stage itself doesn’t match the venue it’s housed in. For example, when the camera looks towards Timberlake, the stage extends pretty deep behind him like it was the Hollywood Bowl.
But when we cut to the reverse angle and see the audience, the venue is revealed to be disproportionally shallow and intimate. If you were to draw out the geography onto a blueprint, you’d realize it was a very unbalanced auditorium. Most likely, these two shots were shot in separate locations and stitched together with editing.
As his first music video in several years, “SUIT & TIE” finds Fincher working at the top of his game in familiar territory. It’s easily one of his best music videos and will no doubt serve as a taste-making piece and influencer for many pop videos to come.
CALVIN KLEIN: “DOWNTOWN” (2013)
Later the same year, Fincher collaborated with his THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO star Rooney Mara in a spot for Calvin Klein perfume called “DOWNTOWN”. Also shot in digital black and white, the spot finds David Fincher and Mara eschewing the punk-y grunge of their previous collaboration in favor of an edgy, glamorous look.
Mara herself is depicted as a modern day Audrey Hepburn—being adored by the press as she attends junkets and does photo shoots—but is also seen engaging in daily urban life and riding the subway (while listening to her iPod, natch). Fincher’s love of architecture is seen in several setups, the most notable being a shot prominently featuring Mara framed against NYC’s George Washington Bridge. The whole piece is scored to a track by Karen O, a kindred spirit of Mara’s and Fincher’s who provided the vocals for Trent Reznor’s re-arrangement of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” for THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. Overall,“DOWNTOWN” is a brilliantly executed and stylish spot that sells its product beautifully.
GAP: “DRESS NORMAL” CAMPAIGN (2014)
2014 marked director David Fincher’s return to cinema screens with his domestic thriller GONE GIRL, following a three year hiatus from feature filmmaking. It also saw the infamous provocateur release a series of four commercial spots for the blandest clothing label in the business: Gap.
In a transparent bid to regain some cultural relevancy, Gap released a campaign entitled “DRESS NORMAL”, a move that could be construed as the struggling brand capitalizing on their sudden popularity amongst the emergent “normcore” crowd– arguably one of the more idiotic non-trends in recent memory.
To his credit, Fincher achieves Gap’s goals brilliantly, creating four effortlessly cool and stylish pieces (despite what some of the more-cynical voices in the blogosphere might say). Titled “Golf”, “Stairs”, “Kiss”, and “Drive”, all are presented in stark shades of black and white, rendered crisply onto the digital frame.
Fincher eschews a sense of modernity for a jazzy mid-century vibe, with the old-fashioned production design and cinematography coming across as a particularly well-preserved lost film from the French New Wave. Each spot pairs together a couple (or groups) of beautiful urbanites living out the prime of their youth in generic urban environs.
David Fincher’s hand is most evident in the sleek, modern camerawork that belies the campaign’s timeless appeal. He employs a variety of ultra-smooth dolly and technocrane movements that effortlessly glide across his vignettes while hiding the true complexity of the moves themselves.
All in all, Fincher’s “DRESS NORMAL” spots are quite effective, injecting some much-needed style and sex appeal into Gap’s tired branding efforts.
GONE GIRL (2014)
Since the beginning of time, men and women have been at odds with each other. One of the grand ironies of the universe is that testosterone and estrogen act against each other despite needing to work in harmony in order to perpetuate the species.
We scoff at the term “battle of the sexes”, like it’s some absurdly epic war over territory or ideology, but the fact of the matter is that, no matter how hard we try to bridge the gap, men and women just aren’t built to fully comprehend each other like they would a member of their own sex.
Yet despite these fundamental differences of opinion and perspective, we continue coupling up and procreating in the name of love, family, and civilization. In this light, the institution of marriage can be seen as something of an armistice, or a treaty– an agreement by two combative parties to equally reciprocate affection, protection and support.
Naturally, when this treaty is violated in a high-profile way like, say, the murder or sudden disappearance of someone at the hands of his or her spouse, we can’t help but find ourselves captivated by the lurid headlines and ensuing media frenzy. Names like OJ Simpson, Robert Blake, or Scott Peterson loom large in our collective psyche as boogeymen symbolizing the ultimate marital transgression.
The treacherous world of domesticity serves as the setting of director David Fincher’s tenth feature film, GONE GIRL(2014). Adapted by author Gillian Flynn from her novel of the same name, the film marks David Fincher’s return to the big screen after a three year absence following the disappointing reception of 2011’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.
In that time, he had refreshed his artistic energies with Netflix’s razor-sharp political thriller HOUSE OF CARDS (2013), with the serial’s warm reaction boosting his stock amongst the Hollywood elite.
Fincher’s oeuvre trades in nihilistic protagonists with black hearts and ruthless convictions, so naturally, the churning machinations and double crosses of Flynn’s book were an effortless match for his sensibilities.
Working with producers Joshua Donen, Arnon Milchan, Reese Witherspoon, as well as his own producing partner Cean Chaffin, Fincher manages to infuse a nasty undercurrent of his trademark gallows humor into GONE GIRL, making for a highly enjoyable domestic thriller that stands to be included amongst his very best work.
GONE GIRL begins like any other normal day for Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck). But this day isn’t like any others– it’s the fifth anniversary of his wedding to wife Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), a privileged New York socialite and the real-life inspiration for “Amazing Amy”, the main character in a series of successful children’s books authored by her parents.
He leaves home to check in on the bar he runs in the nearby town of North Carthage, Missouri, expressing his dread of the occasion to his twin sister Margot, who mixes drinks there. When he arrives back at the generic suburban McMansion he shares with Amy, he finds a grisly scene– overturned furniture, shattered glass, streaks of blood… and no Amy.
The police launch an investigation into Amy’s whereabouts, with her status as minor literary celebrity causing a disproportionate stir in the media. He’s taunted at every turn by deceitful talk show hosts and news anchors, as well as clues from Amy herself, left behind in the form of letters that are part of gift-finding game that’s become their anniversary tradition.
In her absence, the clues have taken on a more much foreboding aura– channeling similar vibes and imagery from David Fincher’s 1997 classic mystery THE GAME. The media’s increased scrutiny on Nick’s life and the history of his relationship with Amy drags his flaws as a husband out into the light, where they’re subsequently used against him to raise the possibility that he just might be responsible for her disappearance. But did he kill his wife? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t… but the truth will be more surprising than anyone could’ve expected.
Ben Affleck headlines the film as Nick Dunne, skewering his real-life image as a handsome leading man by bringing to the fore a natural douchebag quality we’ve always suspected he possessed. Dunne covers up his supreme narcissism and anger issues with a thin layer of charm, finding the perfect balance between a sympathetic protagonist who is way in over his head and a slick operator who thinks he’s got his game on lock.
Affleck proves inspired casting on Fincher’s part, and it’s nice to be reminded that besides being a great director in his own right, he’s still a great performer. As Amy Dunne, Rosamund Pike conjures up one of the most terrifying villainesses in screen history.
An icy, calculating sociopath, Amy will do anything and everything necessary to carry out the perfect plot against her husband– even if the physical harm she deals out is on herself. Pike’s skincrawling performance resulted in the film’s only Academy Award nomination, but it’s a well-deserved one that will be remembered for quite some time.
If the pairing of Affleck and Pike as GONE GIRL’s leads seems a bit odd or off-center, then Fincher’s supporting cast boast an even-more eclectic collection of characters. Neil Patrick Harris– Doogie Howser himself– plays Amy’s college sweetheart Desi Collins.
A rich pretty boy and pseudo-stalker with bottomless reserves of inherited funds, he’s so intent on dazzling Amy with his high-tech toys and spacious homes that he’s completely oblivious to her machinations against him. Primarily known for his comedic roles in TV and film, NPH makes a successful bid for more serious roles with a performance that’s every bit as twisted as the two leads.
Beating him in the stunt casting department, however, is maligned director Tyler Perry, whose films are often derided by critics as patronizing and shamelessly pandering despite their immense popularity amongst the African American population. The news of his involvement in GONE GIRL with met with gasps of disbelief and confusion by the blogosphere, but here’s the thing– Tyler Perry is great in this movie.
He effortlessly falls into the role of Tanner bolt, a high-powered celebrity lawyer from New York, soothing Nick with his seasoned expertise and wearing expensive designer suits so comfortably they might as well be sweatpants. He’s extremely convincing as a whip-smart, cunning attorney, never once hinting at the fact this is the same man who became rich and famous for wearing a fat suit under a mumu.
Emily Ratajkowski and Patrick Fugit are great as Nick’s jiggly co-ed mistress Andie and the no-nonsense Officer Gilpin, respectively, but GONE GIRL’s real revelation is character actress Kim Dickens.
Calling to mind a modern, more serious version of Frances McDormand’s folksy homicide investigator in FARGO (1996), Dickens’ Detective Boney is highly observant and sly– almost to a fault. The joy in watching Dickens’ performance is seeing her internal struggle against the growing realization that none of her prior experience or expertise could ever prepare her for Amy’s level of scheming.
GONE GIRL retains David Fincher’s signature look, thanks to the return of his regular cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth. As a team, they’ve built their careers out of using new filmmaking technologies to fit their needs, and GONE GIRL isn’t one to break the tradition.
One of the earliest features to shoot on Red Cinema’s new Dragon sensor, GONE GIRL was captured full-frame at 6k resolution and then thrown into a 2.35:1-matted 4k timeline in post-production.
This allowed Fincher and his editing partner Kirk Baxter to re-compose their frames as they saw fit with razor-precision and minimal quality degradation. This circumstance also afforded the ability to employ better camera stabilization in a bid to perfect that impossibly-smooth sense of movement that Fincher prefers.
As one of the medium’s most vocal proponents of digital technology, David Fincher inherently understands the advantages of the format– an understanding that empowers him with the ability to make truly uncompromised work.
Appropriate to its subject matter, GONE GIRL is a very dark film. Fincher and Cronenweth use dark wells of shadow to convey a foreboding mood, while Fincher’s signature cold color palette renders Nick’s trials in bleak hues of blue, yellow, green, and grey.
Red, a color that David Fincher claims to find too distracting on film, rarely appears in GONE GIRL, save for when he specifically wants your attention on a small detail of the frame– like, say, a small blood splatter on the hood over the kitchen stove.
Despite the consistent gloom, the film does occasionally find short moments of warm, golden sunlight and deeply-saturated color. Fincher’s slow, creeping camerawork leers with omniscience, placing its characters at an emotional arm’s distance.
Knowing Fincher’s background as a commercial director, it’s not surprising to see GONE GIRL throw around nonchalant product placement for flyover-country conglomerations like Walmart, KFC and Dunkin Donuts.
Looking back over his other features, it’s clear that David Fincher has never been one to shy away from the presence of well-known brands in his frame– indeed, a large chunk of his bank account is there as a direct result of his interaction with brand names and logos.
Product placement is a controversial topic amongst filmmakers, with many seeing the intrusion of commerce as an almost-pornographic sacrilege towards art, but Fincher’s view seems to be that reality is simply saturated with corporate logos, branding, and advertisements, so why should a film striving for realism be any different?
In Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and his musical partner Atticus Ross, Fincher has found a kindred dark soul, and their third collaboration together after 2010’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK and THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO doesn’t surprise in its aim to bring something entirely unexpected to the proceedings.
Working from David Fincher’s brief that the music reside in the space between calm and dread, Reznor and Ross’s electronic score for GONE GIRL is characterized by soothing ambient tones interrupted by a pulsing staccato that conveys the razor-sharp undercurrents of malice that Amy so effortlessly hides behind her statuesque facade.
Outside of John Williams and Steven Spielberg, it’s hard to think of a composer/director partnership where each artist’s aesthetic is so perfectly suited towards the other. Reznor, Ross, and Fincher have cultivated a symbiotic relationship that, together with Fincher’s regular sound designer Ren Klyce and his consistently excellent and immersive soundscapes, elevates any project they undertake into a darkly sublime experience.
A nihilistic sentiment abounds in the style of GONE GIRL, falling quite effortlessly into David Fincher’s larger body of work. The same attention to detail and insight into the banal side of law enforcement (paperwork, legal red-tape, etc.) that marked 2007’s ZODIAC is present in GONE GIRL’s almost-clinical depiction of the day-to-day process of investigating such a luridly mysterious crime.
Two of David Fincher’s most consistent fascinations as a director– architecture and technology– play substantial roles in the drama, but never at the expense of story and character. The architecture that Fincher concerns himself with in GONE GIRL is the domestic structures in which we house our families, or to put it another way, the castles in which we shelter our charges.
However, as seen through the perspective of David Fincher’s particularly dark and ironic sense of humor, our suburban castles instead become prisons. The neutral tones of upper-middle-class domesticity that pervade Amy and Nick’s McMansion are almost oppressive in their blandness, while the structural elements on which they’re painted bear no characteristics of the values of those who inhabit them.
Fincher reinforces this idea by shooting from low angles to expose the ceiling, suggesting that the walls are figuratively closing in on his characters. Likewise, Desi Collins’ grandiose, rustic lakeside retreat is simply too spacious to ever feel constricting or claustrophobic, what with it’s cathedral-height vaulted ceilings and oversized windows letting in an abundance of sunlight.
However, Desi has rigged his well-appointed home with an overblown array of security cameras and other surveillance, effectively trapping Amy inside if she wishes to remain under the auspices of “missing, presumed dead”. And speaking of technology, David Fincher places a substantial focus on Nick’s distractions with video games, cell phones, oversized televisions and robot dogs.
This “boys with toys” mentality is quite appropriate to Fincher’s vision, as it is crucial to the authenticity of Amy’s convictions that Nick has fallen prey to that all-too-common suburban phenomenon of men turning to the stimulation afforded by electronics and gadgets after growing tired of their wives.
The dangers of growing complacent in your marriage– whereby we distract ourselves with screens instead of with each other– is a key message in GONE GIRL, and Fincher’s career-long exploration of mankind’s relationship to technology makes him a particularly suitable messenger.
Thanks in part to GONE GIRL’s high profile as a bestselling book as well as David Fincher’s own profile as a highly skilled artist with a fervent cult following, the film was a strong success at the box office. As of this writing, it actually holds the records for Fincher’s highest-grossing theatrical run in the United States.
Critical reviews were mostly positive, and while it received only one nomination for Pike’s performance at the 2015 Oscars, it’s generally regarded as one of the best films of the year. The tone and subject matter of GONE GIRL may not feel particularly new for Fincher (a notion that may have played into the film’s lack of Oscar nominations), but this well-trodden ground provides a solid platform for David Fincher to perfect what he already does best: delivering taut, stylish thrillers with razor-sharp edges.
Now firmly into middle age (52 as of this writing), Fincher could be forgiven for what so many other artists his age do: slowing down, mellowing out, looking backwards, worrying about legacy, etc. It’s pretty evident however that he has no intention of doing any of those things. While his next feature has yet to be announced, he’s deep in development on several projects running the gamut from theatrical to television.
Fincher’s skill set may have become more refined and sophisticated in its taste, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone soft on us. Indeed, he’s actually grown much sharper.
He’s cleaved off extraneous waste from his aesthetic, and in return he’s able to focus his energies to the point of laser precision. One only needs to look at GONE GIRL’s gut-churning sex/murder sequence to see that he hasn’t lost his unflinching eye for the macabre and his affinity for stunning his audience out of complacency.
He may be older, yes, but in many ways, he’s still that same young buck eager to shock the world with Gwyneth’s head in a box.
Author Cameron Beyl is the creator of The Directors Series and an award-winning filmmaker of narrative features, shorts, and music videos. His work has screened at numerous film festivals and museums, in addition to being featured on tastemaking online media platforms like Vice Creators Project, Slate, Popular Mechanics and Indiewire.
THE DIRECTORS SERIES is an educational collection of video and text essays by filmmaker Cameron Beyl exploring the works of contemporary and classic film directors.
Few figures in the world of cinema cast a shadow as long as Francis Ford Coppola’s. He’s a giant of the art form, with a handful of movies that have redefined film as we know it. His inherent genius, which has cost him considerable grief throughout his career, is abundant enough to be passed down to his offspring.
Indeed, the Coppola family dynasty is something of a phenomenon– there’s his daughter, indie darling Sofia Coppola, as well as his filmmaker son Roman (and that’s not even counting more distant family like Jason Schwartzman or Nicolas Cage). His recent films may only have a fraction of the power of his early work, but Coppola’s place in the annals of cinema history is undeniable.
Born in Detroit, but raised in New York City, Coppola found his love for film by way of the theatre. Suffering from polio during his childhood, Coppola entertained himself by putting on puppet shows and dabbling with the family’s 8mm film camera. This led to substantial training in music and theater, capped by a bachelor’s degree from Hofstra University.
It wasn’t until he enrolled in graduate school at UCLA that he began formally studying film. Influenced by the works of Elia Kazan and Sergei Eisenstein, Coppola was a member of the earliest wave of directors to directly benefit from a dedicated filmmaking program. It was during this time that Coppola cut his teeth with shorts like THE TWO CHRISTOPHERS and AYAMONN THE TERRIBLE.
What’s interesting about the beginnings of Coppola’s career is that his work found wide distribution before he even graduated. A full five years before he earned his graduate degree from UCLA, Coppola had already made several feature-length films. Some of these have been lost to time, such as his first work– 1962’s TONIGHT FOR SURE– a softcore comedy meant to titillate rather than entertain.
THE BELLBOY AND THE PLAYGIRLS (1962)
His next work, however, exists in bits and pieces around the internet. Also shot in 1962, THE BELLBOY AND THE PLAYGIRLS was more of an editing job than a directing one. However, recutting and adding new footage to German director Fritz Umgelter’s film MIT EVA FING DIE SUNDE AN earned him a full director’s credit.
The film, shot in black and white, was yet another stag/nudie comedy. The only clip I’ve been able to find, presented above, makes no mention of whether the footage belongs to Coppola or Umgelter. It doesn’t appear to be dubbed, so for the sake of this article I’ll assume it’s Coppola’s.
This brief snippet shows an intimate scene between newlyweds, as the husband tries to cajole his timid new wife into sex. Coppola shoots wide and straight-on, capturing the action dispassionately until we pull back to reveal that these characters are actually actors rehearsing for a play.
It’s a playful move on Coppola’s part to deceive us using only the boundaries of the frame– an effective trick that hints at Coppola’s budding desires to challenge convention and redefine the language of cinema.
BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN (1962)
That same year, Coppola found work as an assistant to legendary B-movie producer Roger Corman. Coppola’s first task under Corman was a daunting one: westernize an existing Soviet sci-fi film entitled NEBO ZOVYOT for American audiences.
Coppola’s take on the material, subsequently retitled BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN, became a schlocky monster film, albeit one with the conviction and resourcefulness of a young director with something to prove.
BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN (presented above in its entirety) concerns a space race between a unified Earth’s two latitudinal hemispheres, set in a then-future 1997. Which is hilarious, by the way. When the South Hemis nation attempts to beat the North to Mars and crash-lands on a nearby moon, the two powers must work together and fend off vicious space monsters so they can return to Earth safely.
This film is probably the epitome of Eisenhower-era B-movie cheese. Spacecraft models and props are janky, special effects are laughable, and the limited understanding of actual space travel is preciously quaint. However, it is surprisingly watchable, if only for the glimpses of Coppola’s earliest directorial choices.
His largest contribution to the film, besides the dubbing over of dialogue with American actors, was to inject a space monster battle midway through the film. Long before Ridley Scott made the sexualization of aliens cool in ALIEN (1979), Coppola crafted his dueling monsters to resemble vaginas and penises. This was a common characteristic of the lurid films that Corman produced, all of which were churned out rapidly and cheaply to maximize profit.
Ultimately, these films aren’t reliable indicators of Coppola’s growth as a filmmaker. Put simply, they’re glorified editing jobs where Coppola got to re-conceptualize an existing film and conform his edit accordingly. However, they’re fascinating looks into how film school students gained experience in the early days of the institution, when the costly nature of celluloid prompted experience gained via unconventional avenues.
Coppola’s work with Corman would eventually lead to the making and distribution of his first, true feature film. His early works served as important stepping-stones on that path, and now they serve as assurance for up-and-coming filmmakers that even the greats had to start somewhere.
DEMENTIA 13 (1963)
In 1963, director Francis Ford Coppola was deep into his apprenticeship with schlock mogul Roger Corman. That year also found Coppola in Ireland, working as the sound man for Corman’s feature THE YOUNG RACERS. When filming was finished, Corman found that he had a substantial amount of money leftover in the budget.
He may not have been a great film director, but Corman was undoubtedly a shrewd businessman, and he saw an opportunity to invest that money in Coppola’s untapped talent.
Corman gave the money to Coppola, with an assignment to stay behind in Ireland with a few of THE YOUNG RACERS’ cast members and make a low-budget horror film in the vein of Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960). Coppola responded to the challenge with DEMENTIA 13, his first true feature film of his own making.
While today the film comes off as understandably dated, low-budget and schlocky, it also offers a captivating insight into the mindset of a young, hungry director who would go on to become one of the greats.
The story of DEMENTIA 13 is well-rooted in classical and cliche horror-tropes. When her husband unexpectedly dies of a heart attack during a late-night boating excursion, Louise Haloran (Luan Anders) unceremoniously dumps his body overboard and heads to his family’s ancestral home in Ireland.
Acting under the guise that her husband is still alive and absent on a business trip, she maneuvers to get written into his mother’s will so she can cut out with a hefty portion of the family’s wealth. What she doesn’t count on, however, are the meddlings of her husband’s two brothers (William Campbell and Bart Patton), their macabre obsession with their deceased sister Kathleen, and a mysterious axe murderer stalking the grounds.
Despite DEMENTIA 13’s campy, trashy roots, the cast seems to be aware that they’re working with a great director, accordingly giving themselves over entirely to their performances. Anders is the archetypal Hitchcock blonde at the center of the story, and her shrewd, calculating ways aren’t as off-putting as they are lurid and compelling.
Campbell and Patton are the brothers to Louise’s dead husband, and they embody stubborn conviction and haunted torment, respectively. Veteran character actor Patrick Magee delivers a standout performance as Justin Caleb, the family doctor whose gruff mentality raises questions about his true intentions within the story.
DEMENTIA 13 is positioned as a slasher film, but it also dabbles in the murder mystery genre by giving us a gallery of characters with their own potentially-murderous motivations. Due to the speed in which Coppola wrote the screenplay, the identity of the murderer is easily deduced about halfway through the film– which doesn’t make for much in the way of suspense.
However, the pure excellence of Coppola’s craft, even at this early, low-budget stage, is undeniable. DEMENTIA 13 is absolutely the kind of film that shouldn’t hold up fifty years after its release, but there’s a small, palpable aura of prestige that lingers over it. Yes, it’s shlock, but it’s the kind of schlock you might find given a reverent release by the Criterion Collection.
Coppola’s camerawork is simplistic, belying the shoestring nature of the production. However, its minimalism draw inspiration from classical filmmaking techniques that give the film a timeless feel. This low-key approach amplifies the few stylistic flourishes peppered throughout; the opening high-angle shot looking down on a rowboat bobbing in the lake, as well as the floating, dreamlike nature of the underwater photography come to mind.
As lensed by Director of Photography Charles Hannawalt, the 35mm film image uses the low-budget necessity of the black-and-white format to its advantage. The contrast is crisp and moody, alternating between naturalistic and high-key lighting scenarios as needed. A vicious knifing sequence halfway through the film uses rapid-fire edits to create disorientation and a sheer sense of terror.
The homage is so apparent that it matches PYSCHO’s infamous shower murder scene shot-for-shot. This doesn’t read so much as Coppola trying to rip off Hitchock as it does as an example of Corman’s business model for deliberately emulating successful films in his cheap knock-offs. The same practice still exists today, most notably in “masterpieces” like SNAKES ON A TRAIN, churned out monthly by cheap production companies like The Asylum.
The music of DEMENTIA 13, provided by Ronald Stein, is appropriately gothic and mysterious. It’s traditional in that it’s composed like most orchestral scores of its day, but Coppola’s rebelliousness as a young filmmaker gets another chance to shine with the sly inclusion of diagetic rockabilly music. Using prerecorded source tracks may be commonplace in films now, but In the early 60’s, it was virtually unheard of.
The practice didn’t really gain steam until a generation of film brats like Coppola, George Lucas, Brian DePalma, and Martin Scorsese adopted it as an aesthetic trademark.
As a low-budget genre/exploitation film, DEMENTIA 13 doesn’t give us much in the way of a personal insight into Coppola’s psyche or development as a filmmaker. While it trades heavily in the tropes of schlock cinema, such as weak acting and easily-corrected inconsistencies (if the film takes place in Ireland, how come nobody is actually Irish?), it also carries a great deal of pathos and understated style.
It might seem dated by today’s standards, but I was surprised to find how effective DEMENTIA 13 was as an old school chiller. Its gothic iconography has considerable spooky charm, and it’s easily one of the better films within Corman’s extensive library. But most of all, it’s a solidly-constructed first effort from a blossoming filmmaker (who was still in film school, to boot) who was on the verge of shaking up the entire art form.
YOU’RE A BIG BOY NOW (1966)
It’s an inarguable fact that director Francis Ford Coppola benefited greatly from the nascent days of the film school institution. Making a film wasn’t as commonplace as it was now– back in the 60’s, your film was remarkable for the fact that you even made it.
Coppola was a different force altogether– before he had finished his master’s degree at UCLA, he already had the successfully-released features DEMENTIA 13 (1963) and BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN (1962) under his belt.
In order to graduate, Coppola needed to complete his master’s thesis film. Naturally, he crafted the most ambitious student film ever, a feat unmatched even by today’s standards. This effort was 1966’s YOU’RE A BIG BOY NOW, a feature adaptation of the David Benedictus novel.
Shot for the obscene sum of $800,000, Coppola’s little “student film” eventually premiered in competition at Cannes, secured distribution with Warner Brothers, and netted an Academy Award nomination for supporting actress Geraldine Page. If this were to happen to a student filmmaker today, he’d be hailed as the second coming of Christ– but for Coppola, this was only a taste of things to come.
YOU’RE A BIG BOY NOW tells the story of Bernard Chanticleer (Peter Kastner), a bookish, virginal young man who works in his father’s library in New York. HIs mother Margery (Geraldine Page), sets him up with an apartment in the city but aggressively warns him about the dangers and evils of women. Now living on his own for the first time, the sheltered young man’s eyes are opened to a whole world of sexuality and danger.
He begins dating the sweet Amy Partlett (Karen Black), but he quickly finds he can’t help himself when a beautiful, glamorous go-go dancer (Elizabeth Hartman) shows interest in him as well. Caught between Mrs. Right and Mrs. Right Now (I hate that I just wrote that), Bernard learns that there’s a lot more to love than sex.
The performances are appropriately outsized to match the comedic, absurd plot developments, but they also traffic heavily in a rebelliousness that lends the film a countercultural quality. The dynamics between the excitable Kastner and the seductive Hartman are well-drawn, if not a little cliche.
Kastner does an admirable job as the lead, delivering a performance reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman in THE GRADUATE (1967)– despite the fact that he had never seen it himself (THE GRADUATE was still a year away from release). Hartman’s character of Barbara Darling is distant and cold, completely unaware of the psychological damage she inflicts on her suitors. She fully embodies the weaponized sexuality that was an unintended product of the free love era.
Page’s Oscar-nominated performance is quite funny, if not entirely memorable. Her conviction that girls are the devil is a well-worn character trait, but she performs the role with a fresh urgency. Torn and Black would go on to have bigger careers after this film, so it’s incredibly interesting to see them as young upstarts here.
Torn is so young and fresh-faced that he’s nearly unrecognizable as Bernard’s stern, reserved father. Black does an admirable job embodying the kind of girl that a budding lothario knows he should pursue, even if that comes at the cost of a milquetoast characterization. While she’s innocent and sweet, she doesn’t judge Bernard for his transgressions, which is refreshing for her character’s archetype.
Bucking the trend of student films shooting on 16mm film, Coppola uses his considerable budget to film on 35mm. Andrew Laszlo, serving as Director of Photography, gives the film a fresh, energetic look that suits Coppola’s countercultural aesthetic.
The cold grays of New York City are contrasted with bright pops of color seen in the young characters’ attire and props. Indeed, all the adults are depicted in boring, neutral tones so as to make the teenagers’ vibrancy stand out. One great instance of this is the film’s opening shot, which starts wide on a dull, quiet library scene.
Suddenly, the camera rushes in towards the door, and Hartman’s character storms into the room. Clad in screaming orange and accompanied by the blasts of rock and roll music, her entrance signifies nothing less than the arrival of a new generation intent on upending the traditional order.
Editor Aram Avakian complements this attitude by employing fast-paced, experimental editing influenced by the then-burgeoning French New Wave. Other stylistic flourishes, like on-screen titles animated to resemble typewriting, further push the experimental tone that Coppola is after. As a result, the film must have felt very fresh and bleeding-edge in its techniques upon its release.
Robert Prince contributes a jaunty, energetic score, but the musical soul of the film belongs to rock band Loving Spoonful, which firmly roots the film in the teenage counterculture of the 60’s. It’s unpolished guitar riffs chafe against the edges of the frame, encroaching ever closer and eventually consuming its characters entirely.
YOU’RE A BIG BOY NOW finds Coppola combining his experience with his early softcore comedies with the hard-edged vitality of the emergent youth culture. The film’s tone is breezy and playful, with the kind of boundless optimism and curiosity reserved only for the young. There’s even a sense of burgeoning filmography to Coppola’s craft, manifested by the use of footage from DEMENTIA 13 as an art installation in a nightclub sequence.
By this point in his career, Coppola had yet to establish a consistent visual aesthetic, but his taste for experimentation and boundary-pushing is quite evident. With the release of YOU’RE A BIG BOY NOW, Coppola established himself at the forefront of his generation’s ascent into the industry. Not bad for a student film.
FINIAN’S RAINBOW (1968)
Full disclosure- I’m not a big fan of musicals. Something about people spontaneously bursting into song and dance makes me profoundly uncomfortable, and I can’t explain it. Naturally, I approached my viewing of FINIAN’S RAINBOW (1968), director Francis Ford Coppola’s third true feature film, with a large degree of hesitation.
While I don’t plan on watching it again, I have to admit it was much better and watchable than I expected it to be, thanks to young Coppola’s considerable storytelling ability and an evocative Southern setting. FINIAN’S RAINBOW, distributed by Warner Brothers, is Coppola’s first big studio picture, and the modest success of the film would further propel his career to new heights.
FINIAN’S RAINBOW is about Finian McLonergan (Fred Astaire) and his daughter Sharon (Petula Clark), who’ve recently left their native Ireland to venture to the mythical land of Rainbow Valley, Missitucky. Unbeknownst to Sharon, Finian is carrying a bag full of gold that he stole from a leprechaun named Og (Tommy Steele), and plans to place the gold in close proximity to Fort Knox so that it may multiply.
While Sharon falls in love with Rainbow Valley’s most eligible bachelor, Woody Mahoney (Don Francks), Og The Leprechaun tracks down Finian to Missitucky and attempts to take back his gold before he becomes mortal. Toss in a little song and dance, and a lot of Irish stereotypes and you’ve got the idea. It was by complete coincidence that I watched this very Irish film on St. Patrick’s Day, but my general amusement at that fact helped my enjoyment of the film overall.
Every member of the cast seems fully devoted to Coppola’s vision. Even the seasoned movie star and dancing legend Fred Astaire gives himself fully over to Coppla’s whims. Pushing 70 during the film’s production, FINIAN’S RAINBOW became Astaire’s last major movie musical. It’s a great send-off that allows Astaire to retain his youthful vigor, dazzling grin, and fancy-free footwork despite his elderly, frail state.
Clark garnered a great deal of acclaim for her singing talent as Irish lass Sharon McLonergan. Francks drew from the folk persona of Woody Guthrie for his portrayal of the rakish Mahoney. Keenan Wynn is a good sport, allowing himself to be humiliated at every turn as the film’s racist, lily-white antagonist, Senator Rawkins.
The sprightly Barbara Hancock plays Susan the Silent, who is unable to speak but communicates effortlessly via dance. As the cartoonish leprechaun Og, Tommy Steel received the bulk of ire directed at the film. His goofy, slapstick-laden performance was decidedly off-tone (despite the inherent whimsical nature of the story). I can’t say I blame his detractors– I hated that guy’s shit-eating grin, too.
FINIAN’S RAINBOW sees one of the largest casts that Coppola has ever assembled, and he does a great job filling out the population of Rainbow Valley with outsized, memorable personas. The expansive world-building on display proves to be a great training ground for the kind of epic filmmaking Coppola would take on in THE GODFATHER (1972) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979).
Indeed, FINIAN’S RAINBOW marks a considerable uptick in scale and production value for Coppola, who makes great use of all the extra toys afforded him. The sunny, springtime exterior locales are given scope via extensive crane and dolly movements (and even the occasional helicopter shot), and all the set dressings required to sell his story are in abundant supply.
Curiously enough, Coppola mashes together location/exterior footage and sets made to look exterior with reckless abandon, oftentimes creating jarring transitions and leaps in logic. While some of these sets were built for valid reasons (lighting a forest at night would be too expensive), others seem to have little explanation.
However it does illuminate Coppola’s internal battle over shooting the film like a traditional Hollywood musical or indulging his experimental, more-realistic tendencies cultivated in film school. One instance of this indulgence is allowing specks of water to remain on the camera lens during a firefighting sequence, which gives the scene an immediate presence not unlike documentary.
While the film is decidedly old-school in its approach, an undercurrent of film brat rebellion charges the picture with a harder edge than it normally would have.
As lensed by Director of Photography Philip H. Lathrop, the 35mm film image– framed at the 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio– is heavily saturated with the gonzo hues of Technicolor and lit within an inch of its life. Coppola and Lathrop show an aptness for staging complicated group numbers with a breezy energy that draws the audience into being active participants in the song and dance.
The sleepy southern town of Rainbow Valley and its rich, brown/green color palette is fleshed out in great detail by production designer Hilyard M. Brown. Ray Heindorf rounds out the list of technical collaborators with his arrangement of the musical’s many numbers into jaunty, energetic orchestrations that retain a decidedly Irish influence.
Having been released in the prime days of the Civil Rights movement, FINIAN’S RAINBOW’s racial and cultural politics have now aged into amusing, quaint oddities. Its incorporation of actor Keenan Wynn playing blackface (having been magically transformed from white to black in the course of the story) was understandably met with controversy upon its release.
So many decades on, it still comes off as extremely politically incorrect, but is now more-easily written off as a product of antiquated cultural views. This is further reflected in the film with earnest, positive expressions about the benefits of credit, and even asbestos. Moments like these paint a fuller picture of an optimistic time gone by, albeit at the cost of losing a certain, timeless aura.
Coppola does an admiral job directing FINIAN’S RAINBOW, breezily clipping along the film’s 2 ½ hour running time so that it’s not a complete snoozefest. There are many positive things to recommend about it– Astaire’s performance, and the set design to name a few– as there are negative.
Its cultural legacy has since become its relevancy to Coppola’s development as a filmmaker. It was a huge step up for him, and the first real test of his talent. The sheer task of directing such a big, mainstream production would efficiently prepare Coppola for the biggest challenges of his career, and would allow him to soar like Astaire himself when lesser filmmakers would’ve fallen flat on their faces.
THE RAIN PEOPLE (1969)
A year after releasing his first big-budget studio film (1968’s FINIAN’S RAINBOW), director Francis Ford Coppola was back in theaters with a markedly different feature film. Channeling the experimental sensibilities and understated narratives of the French New Wave, 1969’s THE RAIN PEOPLE was a subtle, introspective road picture that eschewed all the frills of contemporary studio filmmaking.
For Coppola personally, the film is further notable in that it was the first project released under his fledgling production studio, American Zoetrope. In the years since, American Zoetrope has been a source of great trial and tribulation for Coppola and his associates, but has consistently delivered on its promise of making original, thought-provoking acts of cinema. As Zoetrope’s first feature release, THE RAIN PEOPLE is a fascinating window into the principles and ideals that shaped an upstart indie studio into a cinematic institution.
THE RAIN PEOPLE assumes the perspective of Natalie Ravenna, a lonely housewife who abruptly picks up and hits the road upon learning that she’s pregnant. Spurning her husband’s pleas to return home, she picks up a handsome, mentally stunted hitchhiker named Killer (James Caan). The two form an unlikely friendship, with Natalie becoming something of a caretaker to the young man.
Inevitably, Killer falls in love with Natalie, which doesn’t make their situation any easier when Natalie becomes romantically involved with a lonely police officer named Gordon (Robert Duvall).
Coppola’s command of his cast’s performances, especially in regards to their emotional restraint, is superb. Natalie, as played by Knight, is reserved and conflicted as she suddenly finds herself in the throes of a quarter-life crisis brought about by pregnancy. It’s a haunting performance, and Knight was rightfully recognized for the strength of her portrayal.
In hindsight, the most interesting aspect of Coppola’s casting is the first instance of collaboration with both James Caan and Robert Duvall. Everyone knows they’d both go on to legendary performances in Coppola’s next film, THE GODFATHER (1972), but not a lot of people know that Duvall and Caan were actually roommates at one point. If that doesn’t compel you to amicably figure out who’s taking care of those dishes in the sink tonight, I don’t know what will.
Caan is fresh-faced and quiet as Jimmy Kilgannon, affectionately nicknamed Killer. His character was a college football player who was left mentally stunted after a particularly bad concussion. He embodies a child-like innocence, with an unflagging loyalty and obedience to Natalie that’s not unlike a dog. Duvall, in contrast, is inquisitive and tough as a widowed cop looking for some rough love.
He’s dangerous and unpredictable, which makes him so attractive to Natalie in the first place. The battle between these two men is well built-up to, and when it finally explodes, it does so with the force of an atomic bomb.
What struck me most upon watching this film was Coppola’s visual treatment of the story. The picture, lensed by Director of Photography Wilmer Butler, is simple and unadorned. Coppola and Butler are content to let the 1.85:1 frame simply dwell on its subject, passively observing long, quiet moments of reflection and malaise.
The lighting is as naturalistic as the performances, and the air of realism hangs heavy over the proceedings. It’s almost the prototypical mumblecore film, what with its low-key look, simple performances and barely perceptible plot developments.
Ronald Stein, who previously supplied the score for Coppola’s DEMENTIA 13 (1963), creates a staccato, melancholy score here that also infuses a little bit of jazz into the rural West Virginian setting. Contrasting with the musical bombast that was FINIAN’S RAINBOW, Coppola adopts a reserved approach to music that matches his minimalist aesthetic. Even the film’s opening credits eschew music, opting instead for the quiet patter of early-morning rain and ambient clanking of garbage truck machinery in a quiet suburban neighborhood.
Curiously incongruent with the low-key nature of the photography, however, is Barry Malkin’s editing. Borrowing heavily from the innovations of the nascent wave of cinema rebels in France, Malkin incorporates a variety of avant-garde techniques like jump-cuts, poetic juxtaposition, mismatched sound cues, etc. Coppola and Malkin often pepper dialogue scenes with wordless flashes of perpendicular action, flashing forward or backwards to illuminate events that bring greater meaning to the dialogue sequence at hand.
The groundbreaking editing, when combined with the minimalist visual style, gives the film a very European vibe.
This points to a common, definitive trait of the “Film Brat” generation of directors– that of reference and/or allusion to classic works as well as the work of their contemporaries abroad. Unlike the directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, directors like Coppola were part of a larger community of filmmakers inspiring each other in their attempts to redefine the language of cinema.
Coppola counts THE RAIN PEOPLE among the top five favorite films of his own making, and for good reason. It’s a strikingly confident work, free of the studio interference that would come to plague him as he became more successful. It was also his first collaboration with future STAR WARS creator George Lucas, who served as production associate on the film.
Filmmakers like Lucas were one of the reasons that Coppola founded American Zoetrope– he sought not only to advance his own cinematic interests, but to further the innovative spirit of filmmaking by empowering like-minded directors and giving them the resources to create outside of a stifling studio system.
Ironically enough, Coppola’s next film would beholden him to the studio system more so than he ever wanted (albeit at great benefit to his career). In that context, THE RAIN PEOPLE is an interesting look into an artistically pure Coppola, unfettered by outside opinions and influence, as he cements his particular brand of storytelling and characterization.
THE GODFATHER (1972)
What more is there to possibly say about 1972’s THE GODFATHER that hasn’t already been said? It is undoubtedly, inarguably one of the greatest films ever made. It’s a goddamn institution of cinema that dares you to find fault with it. Yes, you could say it’s overlong, convoluted, even boring– but by no means can you not respect it. I suspect that director Francis Ford Coppola had no idea what he was getting into when cameras first started rolling that fateful day in 1972.
Coppola initially took the job, not for passion, but for money. American Zoetrope, the company he founded with the intent to liberate himself from the studio system of filmmaking, found itself in debt to those very same studios due to budget overruns on his good friend George Lucas’ directorial debut, THX 1138 (1971). As the producer on that film, Coppola found himself deeply in debt and took on THE GODFATHER so that he could afford to feed his growing family.
It was precisely this familial element of the film’s genesis that threw the story into focus for Coppola. Paramount saw another cheap gangster film that would turn an easy profit, but Coppola saw a sprawling epic about loyalty, family, and honor that became a grand metaphor for the ruthless mechanics of American capitalism. So convinced of his own vision was he, Coppola endured a trial by fire wrought by studio executives who made very vocal their distaste of his casting and directorial choices at every step along the way.
It was the single most formative experience of Coppola’s career, even more so than his fiasco of a shoot in the jungle for APOCALYPSE NOW (1979).
We all know the characters, and we all know the story– to a varying degree, of course. THE GODFATHER’s famously labyrinthine plotting slowly reveals itself only through multiple viewings. By my own estimations, this was the the third or fourth time I’ve seen the film, but it was probably the first time where I was able to really follow what was going on throughout.
I also had the distinct pleasure of watching the film with my girlfriend (hi, Chelsea!), who was watching it for the first time. Many of the film’s sequences are iconic, but it was refreshing to see someone experience it for the first time, and still be actively engaged in a story that is nearly forty years old. This speaks to the great deal of timelessness that THE GODFATHER is imbued with– it’s truly a film that will endure through the ages.
THE GODFATHER focuses on the Corleone crime syndicate, a close-knit Sicilian-Italian family who have amassed a tremendous fortune through illegal gambling operations. As run by aging patriarch Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), the Corleones are a well-oiled, efficient operation with friends in high places.
Set in New York in the decade following World War 2, THE GODFATHER chronicles the internal upheaval that the Corleones experience when pressure builds to join the increasingly-profitable narcotics trade, or risk losing their relevance in the world of organized crime. As a man of honor and principe, Vito is staunchly opposed to dealing drugs, which angers the heads of rival crime families.
An unsuccessful assassination attempt on Vito’s life sparks open warfare involving his sons, particularly Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), a war hero and the youngest of Vito’s progeny. When the heir apparent to Vito’s empire, hotheaded eldest son Sonny (James Caan) is betrayed by his brother-in-law and brutally gunned down in the street, and middle son Fredo (John Cazale) is deemed unfit to head the operation, Michael decides to assume control of the family. However, the cost of this decision will be his very soul.
The performances in THE GODFATHER are career-defining, and nothing short of legendary. A great deal of the film’s power comes from the sheer pathos and gravitas embodied by each and every character. This is all the more-remarkable due to the fact that the studio infamously hated the cast and fought to have some of the key players replaced.
Brando won the Best Actor Oscar for his role as Don Vito (and famously refused to accept it in order to call attention to the terrible depiction of Native Americans in cinema). Only 45 at the time of shooting, Brando assumed the affectations of a man twenty years his senior, all while under heavy prosthetic makeup and an elaborate jaw appliance that gave him a severe underbite. His heartbreak at the sight of his empire crumbling and the corruption of his sons is heartbreaking to watch, and makes his performance one of the most iconic in history.
Pacino’s portrayal of Michael Corleone became his career breakout and instantly established him as one of his generation’s top acting talents. Pacino’s Michael is vindictive and ruthless while still remaining likable, which makes for a believable performance as a man fated to become the very devil he meant to dispel. His character arc is one of the most compelling trajectories ever devised, and while it came close to a reality several times throughout production, it’s very hard to imagine anyone else other than Pacino in the role.
James Caan and Robert Duvall continue their collaboration with Coppola as Sonny and consigliere Tom Hagen, respectively. Caan is all fiery temper and braggadocio as the heir apparent to Vito’s criminal empire. Despite his presence in only 1/9 of the entire GODFATHER TRILOGY’s 9-hour running time, his presence hangs heavy over the entirety of it like a specter.
While Caan would continue delivering iconic performances throughout his career, his portrayal of Sonny Corleone will arguably be the one he is always remembered for. Same goes for Duvall, who as Vito’s adopted son of Irish and German descent, is one of the family’s most trusted outsiders. Acting publicly as the family’s lawyer, he privately takes on an advisor role to Vito, dispensing wisdom and objective reason.
Filling out the Corleone family is the inimitable Cazale in his film debut as middle son Fredo, as well as Coppola’s real-life sister Talia Shire as their sister Connie. While Cazale’s true importance lies in the events of THE GODFATHER PART II (1974), the roots of those problems are firmly established here by depicting Fredo as somewhat of a black sheep, too stupid and clumsy to reliably lead the Corleone family on his own.
Filling out the cast are Diane Keaton and Sterling Hayden as key players in the Corleone family saga. The impeccable Hayden plays Captain McCluskey, the repugnant, corrupt cop that Michael murders in cold blood. Keaton plays Kay Adams, who becomes Michael’s wife in the film.
Her anglo-saxon, WASP-y ways stand in stark contrast to the Corleone’s reserved familial identity, a dynamic visually reinforced by having her continually clad in bright primary colors that scream compared to the dark neutral shades that The Family dresses in. Her growing despair at the realization of Michael’s corruption is a focal point for the saga’s continuing conversation about ethics, and she becomes an avatar of sorts for our own arms-length distance from the family affairs.
Coppola finds an elegant way to visually depict this at the film’s end, when Kay stands outside the inner chamber of Michael’s office as his capos come to kiss his ring as the new Don Corleone. We see the remove from her perspective, and then Coppola elegantly cuts to the reverse shot– a close up of Kay’s falling expression as the door closes on her. The moment is pure cinema: the culmination of all that came before it and a charged beat that brings the film’s central conceit into clear focus.
The mastery of craft on display extends to the film’s cinematography, courtesy of Gordon Willis- a man who who’s ability to capture evocative shadows earned him the moniker “The Prince of Darkness”. Indeed, THE GODFATHER is a very dark experience visually and thematically. Shot on 35mm film, the image’s pervading darkness is broken only by strategically placed pools of light which create an exaggerated chiaroscuro without departing too far from reality.
Colors are washed out and desaturated, taking on a warm sepia tone that resembles a faded old family photograph. The darkly handsome 1.85:1 frame is given life by elegant, classical camera movements and deep focus that highlights well-worn, distinctive set dressing by production designer Dean Tavoularis. THE GODFATHER is often imitated and held up as a gold standard in cinematography, and after recent restoration efforts by Coppola himself, the film looks just as good as it did when it first unspooled on unsuspecting audiences forty years ago.
Any discussion of THE GODFATHER wouldn’t be complete with mentioning the film’s iconic musical theme. Composed by Nino Rota, the theme has ingrained itself into pop culture so much that it is instantly recognizable, even among those who haven’t seen the film. It’s a mournful waltz that effortlessly incorporates the major themes of the film into musical form.
The music is one of those serendipitous things that just resonates with the zeitgeist and becomes a part of the human experience– the mere mention of the words THE GODFATHER makes you immediately hear the song in the head (admit it, you’re humming it to yourself even now) . Part of why the films will never be forgotten is due to Rota’s score being so damn unforgettable. As for Coppola personally, it will accompany him in major milestones for the rest of his life– Oscar wins, public appearances, etc. I’d bet it’s even played at his funeral.
THE GODFATHER is a master-class in directing, revealing new insights upon each subsequent viewing. Many things, like Coppola’s inclusion of oranges in a given sequence as a bellwether of impending death are well known, but many more of THE GODFATHER’s secrets aren’t given up so easily.
Coppola’s rich explorations of the themes of family, loyalty, and obligation can be seen as explorations into his own cultural identity and heritage. For Coppola, and Italian culture at large, communal rituals, traditions and ceremonies are major life milestones by which the plot points of our lives are played out. The film begins with a lavish wedding steeped in Old World custom, designed to introduce us not only to this detailed world but to the complicated characters who inhabit it.
Conversely, Coppola ends the film with a baptism by both water and blood. It’s the most stunning sequence of the film, and arguably the single best contribution Coppola has ever made to the ever-evolving language of cinema: as Michael’s nephew and godson is baptized into the Catholic Church (and thus delivered into the proverbial saving grace of God), Michael’s capos carry out an elaborate series of murders designed to knock off the Corleones’ rivals and consolidate power in a baptism of blood (thus delivering Michael into the hands of Satan).
It’s a bone-chilling and haunting sequence, effortlessly orchestrated by Coppola in a way that takes full advantage of his experimental affectations. It literally created the cross-cut, a perpendicular editing technique that is still used to today to lend immense power to films like SKYFALL (2012) or THE DARK KNIGHT (2008).
Even Coppola’s contemporaries have referenced it, most notably in the Jedi extermination/creation of the Empire sequence in George Lucas’ STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH (2005). In this sequence in particular, THE GODFATHER’s hidden, double meaning as a title is revealed. While initially presented in assumed reference to Corleone patriarch Don Vito, it’s not until the end that we realize its in reference to Michael as he fully embraces his descent into evil.
THE GODFATHER has left an enduring legacy on the American psyche that’s almost unfathomable to comprehend. It was a bonafide phenomenon and instant classic upon its release, resulting in the highest box office returns and acclaim in Coppola’s career.
It catapulted him into the echelons of cinema’s great directors nearly overnight, and even though many of his contemporaries’ films have lost some of their luster upon reappraisal, THE GODFATHER still holds up as a sterling example of what cinema is and should be. It truly is one of the greatest films ever made, and anyone who thinks different is liable to find themselves sleeping with the fishes.
THE CONVERSATION (1974)
I have a strange, contentious relationship to director Francis Ford Coppola’s feature film THE CONVERSATION (1974). It is widely regarded amongst film circles as a masterpiece in its own right, and I tend to agree. However, there’s something intangible that I find alienating on a personal level. I don’t know what it is, so I can’t really explain it.
I had the same reaction the first time I saw the film in college– that of a deep, yet cold respect that left little in the way of actually loving it. I was hoping that this might change upon revisiting the film, but I can’t really say that it has.
After the Best Picture win for 1972’s THE GODFATHER, Coppola was awash in acclaim and could choose any project he wanted. Despite the calls to go right into production on a sequel to THE GODFATHER, Coppola chose instead to shoot a small, personal project as a palette cleanser.
This arguably began the trend of successful directors leveraging a blockbuster’s warm reception into making a passion project of their own design (a trend continued most recently by Christopher Nolan when he made 2010’s INCEPTION between the two final chapters of his DARK KNIGHT TRILOGY).
THE CONVERSATION concerns a private investigator named Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) who specializes in audio surveillance. He and a team of associates have been contracted to record a clandestine conversation between two seemingly-innocuous pedestrians in a crowded San Francisco park.
As Caul refines and mixes his recordings in his warehouse studio, the nature of the conversation reveals itself to be of murderous intent. Thinking he might be indirectly enabling a horrible crime to occur, Caul descends into an abyss of paranoia and mystery, convinced that he has become a target of surveillance himself.
The film was released just as the Watergate scandal broke, which made the story feel extremely relevant. The performances, which tapped into a fundamental distrust of authority figures, are striking without being over-the-top. As Caul, Gene Hackman eschewed his leading-man good looks by donning ill-fitting glasses and an unflattering plastic jacket that looks not unlike a placenta.
However, he injects a paranoid pathos that is utterly compelling, taking us along for the ride as he descends into madness. Caul might be one of the more intriguing protagonists in recent memory: his career consists of recording unsuspecting targets, but he has developed an extreme case of paranoia about his own privacy– even going so far as to tear up his entire apartment when he suspects it’s been bugged.
Coppola also enlists the help of GODFATHER alumnus John Cazale, who plays Stan, Caul’s bookish surveillance assistant. Out of the six films in which Cazale appeared during his lifetime, this is probably his smallest role, while also being his least neurotic/eccentric. Despite the limited screen time, Cazale brings a highly memorable presence to the film.
It really is a shame that we lost Cazale so early, as he might have been one of cinema’s most treasured character actors.
Rounding out the cast is Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Harrison Ford, and recurring Coppola collaborator Robert Duvall. Garfield plays Bernie Moran, a sound surveillance expert from New York and a friendly rival of Caul’s. Williams plays Ann, the anxious, vulnerable woman at the center of Caul’s surveillance. Ford, who was introduced to Coppola via George Lucas’ AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), plays Martin Stelt, a well-dressed businessman who stalks Caul in pursuit of his recordings.
It’s interesting to watch Ford in his pre-Han Solo days, as his developing talents are very noticeable. He’s not particularly good in THE CONVERSATION, but you can tell the potential is there. Meanwhile, Duvall appears in somewhat of a glorified cameo as the mystery man who commissions Haul to record the targets, only to find himself a victim of his own suspicions.
THE CONVERSATION has a much more even look compared to the amber-soaked visuals of THE GODFATHER. Originally lensed by director of photography Haskell Wexler, Wexler proved to be combative with Coppola and was replaced by Bill Butler, Coppola’s DP from THE RAIN PEOPLE (1969). The 1.85:1 35mm film frame is appropriately gritty and seedy, dealing in a bland color palette of grays and neutrals.
This color scheme is further reflected by Dean Tavoularis’ production design, which features cold, brutalist architecture at odds with its picturesque San Francisco setting. Perhaps this is why I feel so alienated by the film– a great deal of the film’s story takes places in cold, imposing locales that blot out clarity and logic. While opting for a relatively realistic presentation, Coppola does include an impressionistic dream sequence rendered in a cobalt blue through a thick layer of smoke.
Despite the unassuming visual presentation, Coppola makes artful use of his camerawork in a way that reinforces the story’s central themes. A recurring visual motif is “machinery in motion”, most notably seen in the whirring gears of Caul’s audio equipment. Telephoto lenses prove to be a boon to Coppola’s aesthetic, giving the film’s surveillance sequences a verite feel that’s highly effective.
The opening shot (a slow zoom-in from a bird’s-eye perspective that finds a single conversation amongst a crowd of people) is one of the most famous of its kind, praised for its virtuoso sound editing by legendary cutter Walter Murch.
The camera movements are mostly restricted to the functional movement of actual surveillance cameras (the ending shot that pans back and forth is the clearest example). This is an inspired move from Coppola, and yet another example of how he has redefined the visual language of cinema throughout his career to better tell his stories.
THE CONVERSATION utilizes the jazzy piano work of David Shire for its score, which combines the sounds of swing and ragtime music with minor keys that suggest intrigue and mystery with sinister underpinnings. While it may seem odd for such a low-key, paranoid film, the sound reflects Caul’s own musical inclinations– he’s seen throughout the film playing his saxophone along to jazz records when he’s alone in his apartment.
For the entirety of the 1970’s, Coppola found himself on a directing hot streak in which he could do no wrong. THE CONVERSATION falls somewhere in the middle of this streak, and sees Coppola embracing the low-key aesthetics of his independent roots while applying them to the trappings of a big-budget genre picture.
Coppola looked to his filmmaking peers abroad for inspiration when crafting the film, a practice that would come to define the film school-bred directors of his generation. His chief influence was Michelangelo Antonioni’s Italian hit, BLOW-UP (1966), which featured a similar plot of using recordings (photographs in Antonioni’s film) to uncover a murderous conspiracy.
It could also be argued that Akira Kurosawa’s RASHOMON (1950) was another big inspiration to Coppola, with its multilayered narrative featuring different interpretations of a single event. These European sensibilities lend at once both a worldliness as well as a bracing sense of innovation to what was somewhat of a stale period of American filmmaking.
THE CONVERSATION went on to snag the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and has since joined the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, thereby stitching itself into the very fabric of American culture. Coppola himself has stated that THE CONVERSATION is his favorite film of his own, owing to the very personal nature of the story. For Coppola’s production studio, American Zoetrope, the film’s success was a validation of everything he had set out to do with its creation.
By tackling a smaller, radically different film after the success of THE GODFATHER, Coppola bought time to creatively refresh himself before embarking on production of THE GODFATHER PART II that very same year. THE CONVERSATION has aged remarkably well since its release, becoming a classic in its own right. While I still found myself inexplicably put-off by its subdued charm, I can’t deny the film’s sheer excellence that has contributed to its longevity. THE CONVERSATION still has many secrets to tell us… all we have to do is listen.
THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)
As a general rule, sequels are pale imitations of the original films whose stories they continue. In the modern Hollywood climate where franchised properties rule supreme (and nine out of ten films are a sequel, prequel or remake), it’s almost unfathomable to think of a time when sequels were looked down upon with disdain.
It would take nothing less than the man who single-handedly re-energized American cinema to make a sequel that stood on equal footing with its predecessor and usher in the age of the serial film franchise. Released in 1974, director Francis Ford Coppola’s THE GODFATHER PART IIundoubtedly (and ironically) became the genesis for today’s serialized cinematic landscape.
There is considerable discussion as to which is the superior film, with a substantial camp proclaiming THE GODFATHER PART II as not only superior to the 1972 original, but one of the greatest films of all time. Personally, I fall into this mode of thought as I find THE GODFATHERPART II to be a richer exploration of the themes of loyalty and succession that so brazenly defined THE GODFATHER.
The film marks a substantial expansion in scope and vision for Coppola, who enjoyed abundant resources and minimal studio intrusion during the shoot due to the runaway success of the original film. As such, THE GODFATHER PART II is arguably Coppola’s biggest, most-fully-realized film– and undoubtedly his best.
Picking up right where the first film left off, THE GODFATHER PART II finds the Corleone family thriving in their adopted home of Lake Tahoe, Nevada. On the occasion of Michael’s eldest child receiving his first communion, interfamilial conflict is brewing anew.
The new leader of Clemenza’s spinoff caporegime, Frankie Pentangeli (Michael Gazzo), comes to Michael (Al Pacino) requesting his help in resolving a dispute with the NY-based Rosato brothers. Michael refuses, citing a conflict of interests with the Rosato brothers’ employer, a Florida-based Jewish gangster Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg.
That night, an unsuccessful assassination attempt is made on Michael’s life, throwing the Corleone compound into chaos. Michael travels to see Roth in Havana on the eve of the Cuban revolution, whilst trying to figure out who betrayed his family. As the truth becomes evident that the betrayal rests inside his innermost circle of trusted advisors, Michael must sink to an unprecedented level of darkness to consolidate his power, even if it comes at the cost of his own family.
Meanwhile, a parallel narrative runs side by side Michael’s 1958 storyline. This alternate story takes place in New York City’s Little Italy during the early twentieth century, as a young Vito Corleone (Robert DeNiro) rises to become the all-powerful Don Corleone introduced to us in THE GODFATHER. Arriving in Ellis Island as a child refugee from his hometown of Corleone, Sicily, Vito adapts well to his community’s particular brand of American capitalism.
The major milestones of Vito’s life are presented in comparison with Michael’s own tyrannical reign, which creates nothing less than the grand American Epic in its chronicle of power and destiny.
Chances are if you ask any professional actor about their reaction to THE GODFATHER series, they will gush at length about their love of the performances. The series boasts one of the most unexpectedly impeccable casts of all time, and THE GODFATHER II resulted in no less than five acting nominations at that year’s Academy Awards. Of those five (Pacino, DeNiro, Talia Shire, Lee Strasberg, Michael Gazzo), only DeNiro walked away with a golden statue, but that doesn’t mean any of the other performances are less distinguished.
THE GODFATHER PART II is Pacino’s show, showcasing his total embrace of moral bankruptcy and fundamental distaste for the necessity of his sins. It’s a tour de force performance, embodied by a quiet, haunting intensity that lingers on a fundamental level.
DeNiro, an unknown whom Coppola cast after remembering his strong audition for the original film, is impeccable as the young Vito, channeling all of the physicality that Marlon Brando made famous while giving it the vigor and virility of a young man. DeNiro’s Vito is the strong, silent type– a family man with vision and honor that could easily become a feared criminal leader.
The role was DeNiro’s breakout performance among mainstream American audiences (he had previously made a splash as Johnny Boy in Martin Scorsese’s MEAN STREETS a year prior), and was a stunning first act to one of the most acclaimed careers in cinema. The presence of young Vito makes the entire GODFATHER saga richer and is the best manifestation of Coppola’s exploration of what it means, to quote those infamous opening lines to the original, to “believe in America”.
The supporting cast is just as compelling as the marquee talent, helped largely by the considerable investment audiences made in their emotional arcs during the first film. Diane Keaton reprises her role as Michael’s wife, Kay, continuing her trajectory as a disenfranchised wife who finds she must do the unthinkable in order to truly hurt him as much as he’s hurt her.
Regular Coppola collaborator Robert Duvall’s reprisal of consigliere Tom Hagen is also given added responsibility this time around as a reluctant accomplice to Michael’s nefarious aims.
John Cazale returns as Fredo, playing a much larger role in the Corleone’s Shakespearean drama as the older brother who’s upset over being passed over. Cazale’s performance in this film is easily his career-best, imbued with a seething resentment stemming from his incompetence. As I’ve written before, Cazale was only with us as an actor for a very short time.
He only made six films before suffering a premature death, but what impeccable films those six were (the two GODFATHERS, Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (1974), Michael Cimino’s THE DEER HUNTER (1978), and Sydney Lumet’s DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975)). Cazale is heartbreaking here in that his actions lead to very tragic consequences, even though he’s just trying to earn a little respect. Cazale will always be synonymous with his depiction of Fredo Corleone, and it’s a shame he was never formally recognized for his subtle, excellent performance.
Talia Shire returns as Connie, who has fallen into bouts of deep depression and ill-advised relationships with men Michael doesn’t approve of, all as a way to get back at him for having her first husband murdered. No longer the hysterical, tearful woman that she was in the first film, the Connie found in THE GODFATHER PART II is refined and elegant, taking her first steps on the path to becoming the Corleone matriarch after her mother’s passing.
A gathering of new faces breathe fresh blood and dramatically-rich conflict into the series, most notably Lee Strassberg and Michael Gazzo. As the wizened Jewish gangster Hyman Roth, Strassberg was lured out of retirement to craft an unforgettable character who’s frailty belies a lethal menace. Initially presented as somewhat of a buffoon, Gazzo’s Frankie Pentangeli is an unexpected, conflicted antagonist to the Corleones whose actions cause key members of the Corleone family to question their own motivations.
Surprisingly, a young Harry Dean Stanton pops up as Frankie’s bodyguard, who I had never noticed in the film during previous viewings. And last, but not least, James Caan famously received his entire pay from the first GODFATHER for his one day shoot reprising Sonny Corleone for a flashback sequence at the end of the film. The balls on that guy, but credit is due since he actually pulled it off.
One of the defining traits of THE GODFATHER series is that all the films visually resemble each other. When taken together, all three films coalesce to form a single, nine hour magnum opus. This is due in large part to Director of Photography Gordon Willis, who devised THE GODFATHER’s striking visual look and replicated it in subsequent installments.
The 1.85:1 frame, shot on 35mm film, is rich in darkness, continuing the sepia-tinged aesthetic established in the first film. The increased budget means more resources, which Coppola uses to great effect to expand the scope of his story with sweeping, operatic camera moves and a heavily detailed period recreation by production designer Dean Tavoularis.
One interesting thing that Willis does to help differentiate the two time periods can be found in the 1917 sequences, where sunlight is depicted in interior sequences as an intense glow that gives a distinct halo to characters when they stand in front of windows. This approach subtly recreates the evolving nature of photography at the turn of the century, where greater degrees of latitude had yet to be developed and there was a much harsher contrast between light and dark.
Composer Nino Rota returns with his mournful, elegiac waltz of a score that has lingered in our collective consciousness for decades. With THE GODFATHER PART II, he builds upon themes and leitmotifs that show the progression of Mario Puzo’s beloved characters and to reflect their growing inner turmoil as the stakes stack ever-higher.
Coppola also includes a variety of diagetic source cues that paint a bigger picture of the Italian culture at large. This is most notable in the Fest of San Gennaro sequence (which I’ll discuss at length later), which uses the fascistic Old World sound of “Marcia Religioso” to astounding effect.
Put simply, THE GODFATHER PART II is a staggering accomplishment of directorial prowess. That Coppola reached this level of skill so early on in his career is astounding. While many sequels fail in their rush to rehash the story beats that worked in the original, Coppola’s original vision for THE GODFATHER was so strong and compelling that, when given carte blanche to do as he pleased, the subject matter yielded entirely new, unexpected and shocking ways for the story to continue.
Many casual filmgoers don’t know this, but while the original film was based off of Mario Puzo’s novel, there was never an accompanying sequel novel off which to base a film version. The entire story of the Corleones in midcentury Lake Tahoe (and their presence during the Cuban revolution) are entirely new fabrications devised by Coppola himself, albeit with some help from co-writer Puzo. The Little Italy sequences set in 1917 are derived from a single chapter in Puzo’s original novel, yet fleshed out in a way that contrasts Michael’s fall from grace with Vito’s rise to power.
Indeed, this parallel rendering of a father and son at the same point in their lives during different time periods is one of the most affecting and relatable aspects of the film, and an unprecedented, inspired move on Coppola’s part. As a young man myself, trying to establish my career and rise up to become whatever person I’m meant to be, I often find myself reflecting on how my own father came to be the person that I now look upon as a leader in his community and a model of manhood and success.
Obviously, he didn’t shoot people or join organized crime to get where he is, but the pursuit of the American Dream is something that everyone can relate and aspire to, regardless of their trade. So naturally, I respond on a profound level to this kind of portraiture that Coppola has developed.
There’s one scene in particular I’d like to highlight as profoundly effective on me as a filmmaker, while also being a master-grade illustration of what just might be the perfect cinematic sequence. Succession and ascendance into power are primary themes in the trilogy, with an act of murder usually serving as the initiation into the upper echelons.
In THE GODFATHER, this is shown when Michael murders Salazzo and Captain McCluskey at a quiet Italian restaurant. In THE GODFATHER PART II, we witness young Vito’s own baptism of blood, which takes place during the famous San Gennaro street festival in Little Italy. Vito stalks the rooftops above the celebration, following the movements of his target: Don Fanucci, a wealthy gangster who’s been oppressing and intimidating the community. The soaring brass of “Marcia Religioso” serves as a quasi-fascistic accompaniment to the proceedings and lifts it to the level of opera.
If THE GODFATHER is about rising to power via succession, then THE GODFATHER PART II– with its inclusion of this sequence and the Cuban revolution storyline– is about taking power by force. Coppola’s sequel is about the deposition of kings, and how delicate that power is to hold onto once achieved. The San Genarro sequence itself is perfectly paced, with nary a single shot wasted.
Each detail and moment is precisely calculated to generate suspense: from Vito’s prolonged stalking, to his manipulation of the lightbulb, to the use of a towel to dampen the sound of his gunfire, to Don Fanucci’s stunned reaction to the messy, imperfect red button that’s been punched haphazardly into his cheek and through his brain. As far as the construction of a sequence goes, it’s perfect. Coppola earned his first Oscar for directing with THE GODFATHER PART II, arguably in large part to this simple, yet riveting sequence.
Due to the relative freedom he enjoyed making the film, THE GODFATHER PART II is a view into Coppola at his most unfiltered. As his own family was growing and he bought an estate out in Napa, CA to house them, he channeled the insights learned from these life experiences into his depiction of the Corleone family. The story is a deeper exploration of the customs and culture of his ancestral heritage, which yields some of the most memorable and dramatically-rich plot developments in cinematic history. Furthermore, the story requires Coppola to run a production on a personally unprecedented scale, especially in the young Vito Corleone sequences. For a filmmaker who’s start was in small-budget schlock films (indeed, Coppola’s old boss Roger Corman makes a cameo appearance in the Senate Committee scenes), Coppola rises to the considerable challenge with bold vision and an effortless grace.
Objectively speaking, this is the pinnacle of Coppola’s career as a filmmaker. It was met with a huge box office take, but ironically had a modest critical reception that only grew as people had a time to reflect on it. This proved to be beneficial as THE GODFATHER PART II swept that year Academy’s Awards, netting gold statues for Best Art Direction (Tavoularis), Best Score (Rota), Best Adapted Screenplay (Coppola & Puzo), Best Supporting Actor (DeNiro), a repeat Director (Coppola), and Best Picture.
All the more astounding for the fact that it was a sequel (and one that started the trend of including numbers in the title to boot), THE GODFATHER PART II became a phenomenon that cemented the series’ place in pop culture and cinematic history. Furthermore, the Library of Congress deemed it significant and worth preserving in 1993 when it inducted the film into the National Film Registry.
A film can’t get any more successful than that. Even though his recent output has been somewhat weak, Coppola remains at the top of the heap of respected auteurs precisely because of the lasting fallout from this film. THE GODFATHER PART II is a cornerstone in the house that cinema built, and it will endure long after its makers are gone.
APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)
Some films are to be cursed from their very inception. They taunt their makers with Herculean obstacles, only to break their spirits when they fall far short of their goals. Some of these filmmakers would never recover (like Michael Cimino and 1980’s HEAVEN’S GATE), their careers never again retaining the same heady heights as their previous successes.
A select few manage to overcome these soul-crushing challenges, and fewer still actually manage to make a truly transcendent piece of work. No film’s making more embodies the term “fiasco” than director Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project APOCALYPSE NOW (1979). Shot as the follow-up to the unfathomably successful THE GODFATHER PART II (1974), Coppola suddenly found himself in those most treacherous of directorial waters: complete financial freedom.
The production of APOCALYPSE NOW, which dragged on for close to three years, most certainly took many years off of Coppola’s life (as well as hundreds of pounds). However, this sacrificial (and literal) pound of flesh netted him something much more valuable: immortality, in the form of one of the greatest and culturally significant films of all time.
APOCALYPSE NOW is nothing less than a cinematic descent into madness. Based off Joseph Conrad’s lurid novella HEART OF DARKNESS, Coppola and screenwriter John Milius have kept the basic plot conceits while updating the setting from a turn-of-the-century Congo River to the Vietnam War.
Initially developed to be a directing vehicle for Coppola’s American Zoetrope colleague George Lucas, Coppola took the helm after Lucas departed to make 1977’s STAR WARS (a move which insulted Coppola so much they didn’t speak for years). Coppola’s vision was to paint the Vietnam War as it truly was– a psychedelic, deeply disturbing voyage into the darkest corners of men’s souls. Coppola aimed to make the greatest film ever created; an allegory for the entire American experience in Vietnam. It’s safe to say that he more or less succeeded, despite the infamously-troubled production nearly killing him.
APOCALYPSE NOW tells the story of Willard (Martin Sheen), a burnt-out Army captain who’s sent out on a confidential mission: find and execute a rogue Colonel, Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) who’s gone insane and established his own kingdom of brutality in the upriver jungles of Cambodia.
To transport him up the river, Willard is assigned a patrol boat operated by a small team of Naval officers. As they inch ever closer to Kurtz’s savage compound, the men endure the hells and existential crises of the Vietnam War that rages around them. When they finally arrive, Willard experiences a strange emotional connection to Kurtz’s deranged dogma that threatens to foil his mission and consume his sanity.
The film is a staggering achievement on all fronts. As to be expected from Coppola, the cast is exemplary, with many turning in career-defining work despite the brutal filming conditions. Martin Sheen, who replaced original actor Harvey Keitel two weeks into production, gives one of the best performances of his career as Captain Willard.
We first meet Willard as a strung-out husk of a man, rotting away in his hotel room in wait for an assignment that may never come. Sheen’s haunting voiceover provides a dark, interior perspective to the events of the film, helping us to understand his psychological connection to Kurtz.
Sheen gives all of himself over to his character, even to the point where he infamously suffered a heart attack at the age of 36 as a result of the stress he endured during production. With his haunting performance, Sheen seared himself into our collective consciousness and became an avatar for the American experience in Vietnam.
Marlon Brando, despite only having a few minutes of actual screen time, easily earns his top billing by ominously towering over the story as the near-mythical Col. Kurtz. Coppola managed to lure the reclusive star into the jungle for one more collaboration, but Brando certainly didn’t make it easy for his exhausted director. Famously, Brando not only showed up (late) to set overweight and bald, but having not read the screenplay or Conrad’s original novel.
Brando battled Coppola on every single element of his character, but given the unfathomable genius of Brando’s performance, it’s easy to see there was a method to his madness. Coppola shot Brando in shadows and close-ups mainly as a way to hide his enormous girth, but in doing so, he created a staggering personification of unknowable evil.
Of his late career roles, Brando’s performance as Col. Kurtz eclipses even that of Vito Corleone in Coppola’s THE GODFATHER. While he would go on to do a handful of roles in smaller films until his death, APOCALYPSE NOW marks Brando’s last great appearance in cinema, closing the book on one of the medium’s most talented personas with a pitch black conclusion.
Robert Duvall, who by this point had appeared in every Coppola film since 1969’s THE RAIN PEOPLE, channels a very different kind of unhinged psychopath in the form of Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore. Duvall’s Kilgore heads the 9th Air Cavalry Regiment, a cocksure squad of gung-ho helicopter jockeys who tear ass across the jungle while blasting Wagner’s “Ride of The Valkyries”.
Representing the testosterone-laden braggadocio that led us into the Vietnam War in the first place, Kilgore barks each line with a forceful authority. His eyes obscured behind pitch-black sunglasses, Kilgore’s specialized brand of cowboy diplomacy leaves nothing but fire and death in its wake. His lust for war is matched only by his love of surfing, which he manages to pack in even under heavy artillery fire.
Duvall clearly enjoys the chance to chew scenery, which he doesn’t usually get to do under Coppola’s direction. Despite a comparable screen time to Brando, Duvall’s performance is highly memorable due to his pathological delivery of enduring lines as “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the only one on the entire production who actually had any fun.
Accompanying Sheen on his journey upriver are the colorful characters of the PBR boat, manned by the gruff quartermaster George Philips (Albert Hall). The late Sam Bottoms appears as Lance, a boyish California surfer whose clean-cut persona descends into a druggy haze as he tries to cope with the horrors of the war.
A young Laurence Fishburne (only 14 at the time) plays Mr. Clean, a cocky kid whose self-deceit over his own mortality will be his ruin. Finally there’s Frederic Forrest, who previously appeared in Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (1974). Forrest plays Chef, a mustachioed saucier from New Orleans and an unpredictable, manic presence. These characters help to establish levity and companionship as the circumstances grow more dire.
Rounding out the cast are Dennis Hopper, Harrison Ford, and G.D. Spradlin. Hopper plays The Photojournalist, the strung-out jester of Kurtz’s court. Hopper adds a great deal of energy late into the film, drawing on his hippie persona that he established ten years earlier in EASY RIDER while taking it to a dark extreme.
A pre-STAR WARS Ford, having previously appeared in THE CONVERSATION for Coppola, plays Col. Lucas, a bookish officer who briefs Willard on the mission. Spradlin, who played Senator Geary in THE GODFATHER PART II, plays the general that gives Willard his assignment.
To create APOCALYPSE NOW’s acid-baked look, Coppola turned to Director of Photography Vittorio Storaro. Filmed on 35mm film, Coppola and Storaro take advantage of the panoramic 2.35:1 aspect ratio to capture Vietnam’s nightmarish vistas. A palette of saturated earth tones and yellow highlights gives a sweaty, slightly sick look to the visuals.
This burnt-out look is further complemented by the use of lens flares and relentlessly plodding camerawork. Coppola utilizes a great deal of aerial photography to give an uneasy majesty to the proceedings, capturing Dean Tavoularis’ exhaustive production design in all its sprawling glory. The editors (Walter Murch, Lisa Fruchtman, and Gerald B. Greenberg) make recurring use of crossfade transitions and double-exposed/layered shots that give the film the surreal aura of a bad acid trip. APOCALYPSE NOW is easily Coppola’s most visually stylized film apart from 1992’s BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, accentuating the psychedelic, nightmarish nature of Vietnam.
Sound plays an enormous part in Coppola’s grand vision, beginning with its pioneering use of the Dolby 5.1 Surround sound system– which has since become the exhibition standard for all major films. APOCALYPSE NOW paints a sonic portrait of Vietnam even more hellish than its imagery, punctuated by concussive bomb blasts and the menacing drone of helicopter rotors.
Coppola’s vision for a psychedelic experience extends to the sound design, where he synthesized many sound effects so as to be indistinguishable from the score (the helicopter droning being the most famous example). Continuing his penchant for collaborating with family members, Coppola enlists the help of his father Carmine to craft the score.
Coppola the elder creates a foreboding electronic score that uses discordant tones to create a fundamental unease and an encroaching sense of malice. Francis Coppola also utilizes the druggy sound of The Doors and The Rolling Stones to further establish the psychedelic aspects of his vision.
It’s a big feat when a filmmaker is able to indelibly link a pre-existing song to a film so strongly that they become inseparable. The auteurs rising up amongst the Film Brat generation realized the power of well-placed music, not the least of whom was Coppola himself. With APOCALYPSE NOW, Coppola creates several such such moments as easily as you would tie your shoe.
There’s the brooding vocals of Jim Morrison’s “This Is The End” playing over silent footage of napalm reducing an entire jungle to cinders, or the unforgettable “Ride Of The Valkyries” sequence (which was referenced later in Sam Mendes’ JARHEAD (2005) as a way to pump up young Marines on the eve of their deployment to Kuwait). There’s even Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Susie Q”, which accompanies the appearance of three dancing Playmates during a rowdy USO show. I can’t think of another film that so brilliantly and creatively mixes sound and music to such striking effect.
Coppola’s habit for experimentation with the language of cinema is on full display with APOCALYPSE NOW. He paints Willard’s journey upriver as an allegory for a journey backwards in time, beginning with the machine-based warfare of the present and reaching back to the primitive, sacrificial nature of tribe-based social systems.
He also released the film without titles or credits, originally intending to tour the film around the country with printed programs. While this didn’t exactly come to pass, most home video releases of the film omit credits, making for a fully immersive descent into madness free from conventional cinematic constructs.
In a rare move, Coppola appears in a cameo as a newsreel director who yells “pretend you’re fighting!” to soldiers as they run by his camera. This is, of course, an allusion to the manufactured image that the television/entertainment complex depicted the war with, but it also goes a long way towards establishing the story’s startlingly self-aware viewpoint.
The Vietnam War was the first major war to be beamed directly into our households via television, and Coppola gracefully touches on the point while making a concise point about the media’s perversion of combat.
The story of APOCALYPSE NOW’s production has been extensively documented in print and film (most notably in wife Eleanor Coppola’s brilliant HEARTS OF DARKNESSdocumentary), so I won’t go into too much detail. It was (and still is) the biggest production Coppola has ever mounted, with a scale and scope so staggeringly massive that one film could barely contain it all.
THE ODYSSEY-like nature of the story required an equally operatic point of view, which Coppola was well-equipped to handle due to his previous experiences. What he wasn’t equipped for, however, were the almost-biblical challenges he had to face with shooting the film in the primordial jungles of the Phillippines.
Before he even could get a firm handle on his operation, the production ballooned millions of dollars over-budget and months behind schedule. A six-week shoot turned into almost thirty, and the tempestuous tropical climate wreaked havoc on expensive sets as well as morale. Coppola found himself shouldering nearly all of the burden alone, losing nearly 100 pounds during the process. Simply put, the shoot was hell. The fact that such a great film, let alone a coherent film, emerged from the wreckage is nothing short of a miracle.
APOCALYPSE NOW was made during the tail end of the auteur era, perhaps even contributing to its demise. While it was met with widespread acclaim and box office success, its particular brand of scorched-earth filmmaking influenced directors like Michael Cimino to launch elaborate productions of their own– resulting in the atomic bomb that was HEAVEN’S GATE. These two extravagantly-made films caused studio executives to assert more control over their runaway productions, and subsequently ushered in the epoch of the blockbuster.
Fortunately for Coppola, APOCALYPSE NOW was received as a qualified masterpiece on par with his two GODFATHER entries. It managed to win the coveted Palm D’Or at Cannes, which is more impressive when you consider that Coppola only screened an unfinished cut. It went on to win Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Sound, and was even inducted into the National Film Registry in 2000.
In 2001, Coppola and editor Walter Murch went back to the source elements and created a new edit of the film, dubbed APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX. This longer cut (running almost three and a half hours) included several deleted scenes that shed further light on Coppola’s darkly complex characters. There’s significant debate within the film community as to which version is better.
For the purposes of this essay, I watched both versions to arrive at my own personal conclusion. While both versions are excellent, I’d have to give the edge to REDUX, mainly for its more-expansive exploration into man’s primordial darkness.
APOCALYPSE NOW is an unforgettable film, made even more so by the utter misery the filmmakers experienced in shooting it. Its cinematic legacy is assured, judging by the deep respect and reverence bestowed upon the film in the thirty years since its release. Furthermore, it is the capstone to a truly remarkable decade for Coppola– each of his four films in this period went on to become cultural institutions in their own right.
All of this success came at a heavy price, however; to this day Coppola has been unable to attain such raw, visceral power in his subsequent projects (not even 1990’s THE GODFATHER PART III).
Did APOCALYPSE NOW use up all Coppola’s talent? Did the overwhelming stress ultimately break him? Did he lose his soul to insanity like Kurtz or Willard? We may never know exactly what happened in that jungle, but what came out of it was northing less than a bloodsoaked rebirth for cinema.
ONE FROM THE HEART (1982)
The word “irony” is not lost on director Francis Ford Coppola. One could argue that Coppola’s entire career is ironic, due to him becoming a symbol of the very same studio system that he initially sought to oppose. After entering the pantheon of great American filmmakers with his two GODFATHER films and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), his next project would ironically bring him back to down to earth with a massive failure matched only by Michael Cimino’s HEAVEN’S GATE (1980).
This one-two punch of opulent misfires effectively ended the auteur era in Hollywood, with executives reasserting control over projects that subsequently usher in the age of the blockbuster.
After the success of APOCALYPSE NOW, Coppola sought to make the exact opposite kind of film– a breezy, low-budget musical filmed entirely on soundstages. This project, entitled ONE FROM THE HEART (1982), was originally supposed to be made for only two million dollars– a mere fraction of the sum that consumed APOCALYPSE NOW.
y the time Coppola finished shooting, however, the costs had ballooned to over twenty-five million. The film had become an albatross of a distinctively different breed.
ONE FROM THE HEART’s story is very minimal, instead choosing to focus its attentions on lavish set design, lighting, and visual trickery. The plot is set in Las Vegas, where a young, unmarried couple– Hank (Frederic Forrest) and Frannie (Teri Garr)– have reached a point of mutual dissatisfaction in their relationship. Following an explosive argument, they set out into the night, intent on finding comfort in the embrace of new lovers.
Frannie finds herself in the bed of Ray (Raul Julia), a smooth-talking Latin lover and aspiring crooner, while Hank takes up with Leila (Nastassja Kinski), an alluring circus girl with a bohemian bent. Throughout the course of the night, Hank and Frannie’s separate encounters lead them to believe that maybe they do really still love each other after all, and that love is worth fighting for.
It’s a story we’ve all seen a million times, but we’ve never seen it done quite like this. The performances, while admirable, inevitably sink underneath the weight of Coppola and production designer Dean Tavoularis’ heavily-stylized mise-en-scene. Forrest, a Coppola regular who had previously played Chef in APOCALYPSE NOW, now takes center stage and assumes the affectation of a young Marlon Brando in his brutish, blue-collar take on Hank.
Garr is energetic and makes the most of her comic abilities as the jaded, temperamental Frannie. Julia and Kinksi do a great job of being attractive and exotically-alluring characters, each with their distinct charms. Rounding out the cast, Lainie Kazan plays Maggie, a friend and confidant of Frannie’s, and veteran character actor Harry Dean Stanton (who had previously played a bit part for Coppola in THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)) plays Moe, Hank’s curly-haired and leisure-suited best friend.
Despite the tired story tropes and underdeveloped characters, Coppola crafts an unforgettable look that’s based around an overarching theatre conceit. Coppola famously eschewed location shooting, choosing instead to shoot the entirety of ONE FROM THE HEART on soundstages. In this regard, the central conceit is the film’s biggest success.
Returning Director of Photography Vittori Storaro (working with Ronald V. Garcia) fills Tavoularis’ beautifully-designed sets with cathedral-esque shafts of neon light and striking bursts of color. Coppola and his twin DPs have adopted an unusual aspect ratio (1.37:1), but it’s a little unclear as to why– perhaps it’s to further Coppola’s visual conceit by evoking the literal, square proscenium of traditional theatre. This is further supplemented by real-time lighting changes not unlike one would see in a stage play.
Why take this visual approach, especially when it was largely responsible for extreme budget overruns? I suspect that Coppola was actively trying to evoke what it truly feels like to fall in love– that is, finding beauty and theatricality in the everyday and mundane. Romantic love brings heightened emotions that, upon future reflection, tend to take on an idealized, slightly surreal quality. If this was indeed his intention, Coppola absolutely nails it.
Ever the experimentalist, Coppola continues his pursuit of redefining the cinematic language that was so eloquently established by his cinematic forebear, Sergei Eisenstein. Besides the aforementioned proscenium conceit and in-camera lighting changes, Coppola plays with double exposures, as well as parallel action being projected onto the set to portray simultaneous events (as opposed to the more traditional cross-cutting).
This approach also extends to the music, where it eschews the traditional definition of a musical by denying the characters of song or dance. Instead, the musicality comes non-diagetically, from the smoky, unmistakeable vocal chords of Tom Waits. In his first original film score, Waits crafts a moody, jazzy sound resembling old torch songs that perfectly evokes the Las Vegas setting and Coppola’s melancholy musings on love. It’s not for everyone, but it’s undeniable how well it actually works within the film.
If APOCALYPSE NOW saw Coppola at the height of his directorial powers, ONE FROM THE HEART is the first work in a long, drawn-out decline that would see his influence severely weakened. Much like how Cimino’s excesses and self-indulgence on HEAVEN’S GATE led to box office disaster and the sinking of United Artists, ONE FROM THE HEART performed abysmally in theatres— forcing Coppola to declare bankruptcy.
It was a steep fall for a director who had been heretofore regarded as untouchable. The majority of his output for the ensuing two decades were primarily efforts to pay back the massive debt he incurred on ONE FROM THE HEART. To this day, his reputation has never fully recovered; not even a third GODFATHER film, shot in 1990, could restore him to former glory.
Thankfully, time heals all wounds, and all the venom spewed at and around the film upon its release has largely fallen away. What remains is the film itself, left to stand on its own merits. In this light, ONE FROM THE HEART is still a heavily flawed film, but its remarkable vision is creatively executed with considerable flair by a director firmly in command of his craft. You have to hand it to Coppola: the man makes even failing look fantastic.
THE OUTSIDERS (1983)
I, like millions of other American kids, read S.E. Hinton’s teen angst novel The Outsiders in a high school English class and identified with it. My favorite part of reading a novel in English class, however, was getting to watch the movie adaptation afterwards, which would always eat up a couple days of class. Naturally, we watched Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 adaptation, which I remember quite liking at the time. If memory serves me right, that might have even been the first time I had seen a Coppola film.
Thirty years after its release, Coppola’s THE OUTSIDERS has aged somewhat well, but certainly feels dated in that it’s rooted to a particular place and time. The film was a modest success for Coppola, albeit a much needed one after the nuclear bomb that was ONE FROM THE HEART (1982). It would be a crowning gem in any director’s body of work, but considering Coppola’s exceptionally strong oeuvre, it becomes a minor work at best.
The film adaptation of THE OUTSIDERS got its start when Coppola received a letter from a Fresno middle school. The letter, penned by a teacher and signed by all her students, implored Coppola to turn the classic novel about lost innocence into a feature film. Moved by this unique display, Coppola secured the rights to the novel and began production.
We’re all familiar with the story: the constant battling between the Soc’s– the well-heeled, preppy rich kids– and the Greasers– the poor kids from the the wrong side of the tracks– and how it manifests in a tragedy that claims casualties on both sides. At the center of all this is Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell), a sensitive young man who aspires to something better than his hardscrabble existence.
In this midwestern town in the 1950’s, the teenage social constructs are boiled down to two distinct classes: the haves and the have-nots. It may be an unrealistically simplistic concept (after all, Hinton was only sixteen years old when she wrote the novel), but the story’s power is derived from the cultural cache these archetypes bring. The stakes couldn’t be any more meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but in their world, every altercation means life or death.
The strongest thing about the film, by far, is the casting. Coppola and producer Fred Roos assembled a pitch-perfect ensemble of the era’s brightest up-and-comers. It’s fascinating to see so many well-established and respected stars as fresh-faced kids, full of optimism and energy. The aforementioned Howell is compelling to watch as Ponyboy, and his lack of star power is actually beneficial for serving as the audience’s point of entry into this strange, yet familiar world.
Matt Dillon is pitch perfect as Dallas, a hotheaded delinquent who serves as a role model to the more impressionable minds of the group. Ralph Macchio, of KARATE KID fame, plays Johnny with the appropriate scruffiness and skittishness. The late Patrick Swayze, by far the oldest of the cast, is thoroughly convincing as Darrel, Ponyboy’s brother, guardian, and father-figure all rolled up into one.
Rounding out the cast are a mix of faces who were at the time just breaking out into the mainstream. For many, this was their debut feature film. This was certainly the case for Rob Lowe, who played the middle brother of the Curtis clan, Sodapop. Lowe is energetic and sensitive like his younger brother, but unfortunately saw the majority of his screen time cut in the theatrical release.
Martin Sheen’s son, Emilio Estevez, plays Two-Bit, the Mickey Mouse T-shirt-wearing jester of the group. Tom Cruise, baring a truly hideous set of crooked teeth, brings a manic, wild energy to his depiction of Steve. Then there’s the inimitable Diane Lane as Cherry, an insightful Soc who bridges the gap and finds common ground with the Greasers. In a film filled with heavy doses of male braggadocio, she’s a welcome bit of femininity and elegant grace.
Coppola eschews any extravagant aesthetic styling in favor of a toned-down, realistic approach. As lensed by Director of Photography Stephen H. Burum, Coppola paints the rusted-out industrial environs of midcentury Tulsa, OK with a saturated, yet natural color palette and a high-key, noir-ish lighting scheme.
Interpreting the subject matter as somewhat of a rockabilly version of Victor Fleming’s GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), Coppola adopts the panoramic 2:35:1 aspect ratio and covers a fair amount of action with sweeping dolly movements. This approach also extends to more stylish flourishes like projected backgrounds (the infamous “stay gold” sunset sequence draws many visual comparisons to the romantic cinematography of GONE WITH THE WIND).
As far as Coppola’s visual execution goes, THE OUTSIDERS is pretty straightforward. There’s no discernible attempt at experimentation, save for Coppola’s affection for double-exposed, multi-layered images. He peppers a few shots throughout the film that feature the subject in extreme close-up and a background element in wide shot, yet both are in equal focus.
This is indicative of Coppola’s attempts to push the boundaries of cinematic language, and he accomplished these tricky shots by using a split-field diopter on the camera lens, which works not unlike a pair of bifocals. Other recurring visual elements, like the smoky park in which Dallas meets his violent end, and an on-camera appearance by musician Tom Waits, hark back to previous Coppola films by virtue of their inclusion.
Coppola’s use of technology as a tool to further his storytelling was also incorporated into an extensive rehearsal process before the shoot. Video was a nascent medium in the early 1980’s, and Coppola was bullish about its benefits. He incorporated video’s primary usefulness at the time– cheap image recording– to document the rehearsals, effectively constructing a video version of the entire film. Yes, he was so excited about the ease of video shooting that he managed to shoot the entire film on video before he even began making the film itself.
Also consistent with Coppola’s previous films, THE OUTSIDERS is a family affair. The aforementioned Estevez is Martin Sheen’s son, who we all remember played Captain Willard in APOCALYPSE NOW (1979). Coppola’s own (late) son, Gian-Carlo Coppola, served as a producer on the film alongside Roos, Kim Aubry, and Gray Frederickson.
Coppola also enlisted his father, Carmine Coppola, once again for score duties. Coppola the elder crafts a rocking/surfer vibe for his score, which complements the rebelliousness of the central characters. Coppola the younger also included a mix of well-known rock tunes, like Van Morrison’s “Gloria”, as well as commissioned the original ballad from Stevie Wonder that opens the film.
THE OUTSIDERS was severely cut upon its release in order to have a more palatable running time. When Coppola again began receiving letters asking for a version of the movie that more resembled the book, he took it to heart. In 2005, he unboxed the original negatives and put back in an additional twenty-five minutes. He also replaced a great deal of Carmine Coppola’s original score with a variety of prerecorded rock tracks that give the film a distinct, entirely new flavor.
This alternate cut, known as The Complete Novel, now appears to have supplanted the original cut as Coppola’s preferred vision of the film. The new cut was greeted with a great deal of praise and appreciation, not the least of which was by actor Rob Lowe, who saw the vast majority of his cut footage reintegrated into the film and his character’s importance boosted.
THE OUTSIDERS has aged only slightly since its release, but what struck me most upon revisiting the film is that it seems like it belongs somewhere within Coppola’s pre-GODFATHER early work, as opposed to his mid-career efforts. It’s much more simplistic as a film, and there’s no grandiose statements about the nature of the American experience as there in his other adaptations of novels like THE GODFATHER (1972) or APOCALYPSE NOW.
In short, it’s a small story about male camaraderie and the deep bond formed in moments of crisis. It’s unpretentiousness is one of its strongest points– offering an earnest, optimistic point of view that captures the boundless energy of teenage life.
In watching THE OUTSIDERS, I was briefly transported back to my first encounters with the material in high school, and I found myself waxing nostalgic about the good old days… a time where everything was simpler and affairs of the heart consumed every waking thought and desire. I suspect this was Coppola’s intention all along, to return us to a more innocent place and time, in hopes that we’ll reconnect with the rambunctious child that still lives deep inside ourselves. If that was indeed his intention, then THE OUTSIDERS is truly a success.
RUMBLE FISH (1983)
In 1983, director Francis Ford Coppola found himself in Tulsa, OK, and in the middle of a creative hot streak. Midway into the production of THE OUTSIDERS (1983), Coppola approached the novel’s author S.E. Hinton, and asked if she had any other works he could adapt.
Hinton responded with Rumble Fish, an avant-garde, misunderstood novel that had failed to gain the kind of wide audience that The Outsiders did. After Coppola read the book, he decided that not only was it going to be his next film, but that he’d film it back to back with THE OUTSIDERS, utilizing the same Tulsa locale and much of that film’s cast and crew.
Released later on in 1983, Coppola’s adaption was not met with the same kind of critical and financial success that THE OUTSIDERS enjoyed. In fact, it sunk Coppola ever lower into debt and threw the existence of his independent studio, American Zoetrope, into jeopardy.
The film’s stylized, avant-garde aesthetic also turned off a lot of fans and critics, as it was so strikingly different from his previous work. Like much of Coppola’s misunderstood work, however, it has gained a deep appreciation and a cult following in the years since its release.
RUMBLEFISH’s story isn’t immediately clear upon first viewing; indeed it strikes one as much more of an exercise in style-over-substance. Set in an unnamed Midwestern industrial town in the 50’s or 60’s, the story revolves around a headstrong wanna-be hood, Rusty James (Matt Dillon), who spends his nights romancing the pretty, preppy Patty (Diane Lane), and engaging in wild rumbles with the town’s various miscreants.
One day, his older brother—known only as Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke)—returns to town after a long excursion into California. Rusty James wants nothing more than to be just like his older brother, but Motorcycle Boy is old enough to realize the error of his ways, and finds it a difficult task to discourage his brother from following in his footsteps before it’s too late.
What’s lacking in story is more than compensated for by the brawny, muscular performances from Coppola’s young cast. Dillon, taking on the lead role right after his work in THE OUTSIDERS, channels a juvenile delinquent of a different breed as Rusty James.
His is an idealistic machismo, and he’s set on proving his worth as a man through violent brawls and burning through the town’s supply of women. In one of his earliest starring roles, Dillon proves to be a veritable force of nature.
Mickey Rourke, looking trim and handsome in his pre-boxing/hamburger-face years, goes against expectations with his portrayal of Motorcycle Boy. Rourke is sensitive, quiet, and observant. He speaks softly, but can be absolutely ferocious when need be.
Motorcycle Boy is a deeply troubled character, haunted by unseen eternal demons that manifest themselves in colorblindness, occasional deafness, and bouts of withdrawn melancholy. It’s a fine, pulpy performance that belies Rourke’s tough exterior.
The supporting cast is filled out with regular collaborators and faces new to the Coppola fold. Diane Lane joins Dillon in hopping right from production on THE OUTSIDERS to play Patty, a teenage schoolgirl with a sultry, tempestuous temperament.
Two old friends from 1979’s APOCALPYSE NOW—Dennis Hopper and Laurence Fishburne—also join the fray. Hopper plays Rourke and Dillon’s father, who’s a crazy-eyed, shambling drunk of a man—the kind of character Hopper can play in his sleep.
Fishburne, having physically filled out dramatically in the four years since APOCALYPSE NOW, is nearly unrecognizable as Midgit, a well-dressed confidante of Rusty James’, who may just be a figment of his imagination.
Then there’s Nicolas Cage and the late Chris Penn, in small roles that serve to challenge Rusty James’ self-proclaimed authority. In keeping with Coppola’s tradition of casting family in his films, the bouffant-ed Cage (Coppola’s nephew) makes his film debut with RUMBLE FISH, and it appears he was just as loony and eccentric as he is now.
Furthermore, Coppola’s daughter, Sofia, appears in her own bit role as Patty’s kid sister. What’s immediately apparent about RUMBLE FISH’s artistic merits is its bracing visual style. Filmed on 35mm black-and-white film stock (to emulate Motorcycle Boy’s color blindness), Coppola and returning Director of Photography Stephen H. Burum craft a look unlike anything in Coppola’s body of work.
Drawing equally from the handheld, verite aesthetic of the French New Wave and the high-key, stylized chiaroscuro of German Expressionism, Coppola’s neo-noir is a hallucinogenic blend of realism and fantasy. Clouds scream past along the sky while characters look up at them in wonder—a trick achieved using timelapse photography to suggest that time is lost on the young, moving much faster than they might realize.
The monotone look highlights the raw, sweaty nature of Burum’s cinematography, which is peppered with bursts of striking color whenever the titular “rumble fish” make an onscreen appearance.
This striking dichotomy is evident in two scenes in particular: the violent rumble that introduces Motorcycle Boy, and a wild romp through a downtown pool hall. The brawl sequence, choreographed by a professional dancer, is almost elegant in its ballet of blood, punctuated by flashes of lightning and daring feats of acrobatics.
It’s an incredibly expressionistic sequence that calls to mind the laboratory creation sequence from James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931), albeit on LSD. The second sequence –more Cassavetes than Murnau– plays fast and loose with its camerawork in capturing the feel of a booze-soaked night on the town. The sequence takes on the air of documentary, finding fleeting moments of unscripted interaction and revelry that could never be truly replicated with traditional methods.
Music, provided by composer Stewart Copeland, is equally as baroque and avant-garde. It perverts the sound and conceits of rock-and-roll music into a fevered cavalcade of percussion that ramps up our anxiety, much like how the restless Rusty James must feel en route to a brawl.
This bizarre blend of picture and sound alienated a lot of people when RUMBLE FISH was released. Many claimed that Coppola had gone too far in his attempts to deconstruct the art form and reassemble it in his own vision.
I can certainly see that argument, but I view the look as a shot in the arm for the medium during a period of time that saw a relatively flat, bland aesthetic become the commercial standard-bearer. I know that I’m not alone in that assessment—its influences can be seen in a wide variety of subsequent works by then-burgeoning directors, most notably in Gus Vant Sant’s breakout debut, MALA NOCHE (1986).
There are a few other curious elements that peg RUMBLE FISH as distinctly Coppola’s. There’s the aforementioned use of family members in the cast (and recruiting of sons Gian-Carlo and Roman in producing roles), but there’s also his copious use of smoke during expressionistic sequences, and a highly experimental sound design that calls to mind the inner psychedelics of APOCALYPSE NOW.
RUMBLE FISH also sees Coppola’s continuation of a unique preproduction process that he dubbed Electric Cinema, where he used green-screen technology to shoot his rehearsals against photographs or rough sketches of the location to create a full version of the film on video before production even began.
Is it a needlessly complex process? Maybe. Especially in a time where video often equals the quality of film, the idea might now seem quaint and extraneous, but the benefits of an involving rehearsal process is really apparent in RUMBLE FISH’S final product.
I think there’s something to be said in the fact that, even after all the critical trashing and financial disappointment, RUMBLE FISH is in Coppola’s top five favorite films of his own. Time has divorced the film from its overshadowing companion piece and given it an identity all its own.
It’s not for everyone, to be sure, and even those who give it a shot will find it an acquired taste at first. At the end of the day, the film is an instance of a supremely gifted director using his substantial resources to carry out his full vision, without any regard for how eccentric it might appear. In that regard, RUMBLE FISH is a piece of pure, unadulterated pop art by a strong-willed director who refuses to become complacent.
THE COTTON CLUB (1984)
There is a club in downtown Los Angeles called the Cicada Club, and stepping inside its doors is like crossing the threshold into another era. Inside these walls, it’s as if time froze around 1944—the art deco architecture is pristine and polished, the live music is appropriately old-timey, and the clientele are impeccably dressed in tuxedos, zoot suits, and WWII army uniforms.
The effect is like stepping into that infamous photograph at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980). The Cicada Club is a hidden diamond in downtown’s rough, and I would never have known it ever existed if my girlfriend hadn’t been dancing there for the past few years.
THE COTTON CLUB (1984), director Francis Ford Coppola’s follow-up to his twin 1983 S.E. Hinton adaptations THE OUTSIDERS and RUMBLE FISH, very much plays in the same world as the Cicada Club, so much so that I couldn’t help but wonder if the film directly inspired the Cicada’s creation.
The film marks something of a return to form for Coppola, who was working from a script originally written by the creator of THE GODFATHER (1972), Mario Puzo. Finding its origins in the oral history of the real-life Harlem club of the same name, THE COTTON CLUB was shepherded by THE GODFATHER producer Robert Evans, who brought Coppola onboard, despite his financial troubles following ONE FROM THE HEART’s(1982) bombing at the box office.
The film’s story dealt with organized crime and corruption in an opulent New York setting, which seemed like a perfect chance for Coppola to recapture some of that GODFATHER charm and success.
THE COTTON CLUB is set in Jazz-era Harlem, 1928. Dixie Dywer (Richard Gere) is a promising cornet soloist who catches the attention of a local crime lord, Dutch (James Remar) and his emotionally cold flapper moll, Vera Cicero (Diane Lane).
As Dixie’s reputation as a talented musician grows, he soon finds himself the star of a hit Hollywood movie where he plays a ruthless mob boss. This makes Dutch furious, as he believes Dixie’s performance is a thinly-veiled parody of himself. When Dixie falls for Vera, Dutch declares open war on his former employee, and the Cotton Club is caught in the middle of the crossfire.
The film boasts several great performances from a committed cast, albeit the characterizations tend to be a little bit on the cartoonish side. Gere is well-cast as the talented musician at the center of the story, bearing a pencil-thin mustache with suave confidence and righteous virtue.
His dedication even went as far as learning to play the cornet at an advanced level. James Remar shaved back his hairline to resemble Al Capone in his portrayal of the crime boss Dutch. The veteran character actor gives his antagonist a crazy-eyed stare, with a ferocious, murderous unpredictability.
Caught between these two men is femme fatale Diane Lane, who is on her third consecutive Coppola collaboration. A woman firmly of her time, Diane’s Vera Cicero flashes the latest in flapper fashion as she uses her feminine wiles to advance her station in life, ultimately taking possession of a nightclub all her own. She’s ambitious, feisty, and street-smart, which makes her attractiveness undeniable.
Filling out the cast are a variety of faces, many of which have been seen in previous Coppola films. There’s his nephew Nicolas Cage as Vincent “Mad Dog” Dwyer, Dixie’s ambitious brother whose impatience is his undoing. Laurence Fishburne makes his third Coppola appearance as Bumpy Rhodes, an enforcer for Harlem’s black elite.
Tom Waits also pops up as a programmer and emcee for entertainment at the club. (I think there’s something interesting to observe in Coppola’s aesthetic with his continued inclusion of Lane, Fishburne, and Waits, but I’m not sure what that might be exactly). New to the Coppola talent fold are Gregory Hines, Lonette McKee, Bob Hoskins, and Jennifer Grey.
Hines plays Sandman Williams, a gifted tap dancer and hopeless romantic, with McKee as the target of his affections. Hoskins plays Owney Madden, the owner of the Cotton Club with a firm authority over the feuding crimelords that frequent his establishment. Jennifer Grey, who you may recognize as Matthew Broderick’s vindictive sister from FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF (1986), plays Cage’s young, unmannered wife.
Stephen Goldblatt, Tony Scott’s Director of Photography for THE HUNGER (1983), finds himself in Coppola’s employ for THE COTTON CLUB, which sees a refreshing of talent behind the camera in many major departments. Shooting on 35mm film, Goldblatt creates a reserved aesthetic that could be read as more of a stylized take on THE GODFATHER’s visual look.
The 1.85:1 frame draws from a brown, black, and red color palette that’s appropriately saturated to reflect the earth-tone patina of Richard Sylbert’s production design (who takes over for Coppola’s frequent Art Director Dean Tavoularis). Coppola tells the story of THE COTTON CLUB with handheld and steadicam-based camera movements that complement the traditional photography, and he even throws in a few dutch angles for variety.
John Barry, he of James Bond fame, comes aboard as THE COTTON CLUB’s musical maestro. Using a variety of string, woodwind and brass instruments, Barry’s score evokes the old Hollywood sound of The Jazz Age, which is also reflected in the many live musical performances that run the gamut from ragtime to swing. There’s a distinct musicality to the film, which lends a unique vigor and firm sense of place and time.
Given its relative obscurity, THE COTTON CLUB is an unexpectedly strong work. It performed terribly at the box office upon release, but was nominated for two Oscars (One for Sybert’s production design, and the other for editors Robert Lovett and Barry Malkin).
It channels Coppola’s strengths in the organized crime genre, and even has a few moments where it recalls the genius construction of THE GODFATHER, most notably in Dutch’s murder sequence towards the end. This is further evidenced by Coppola’s collaboration with GODFATHER producer Robert Evans—although the two apparently had a falling out during production and Coppola banned Evans from set altogether.
There isn’t much in the way of personal development as a filmmaker on Coppola’s end. Despite the inclusion of a few signature elements like double exposed frames, and an experimental sound design (one scene takes a diagetic tap-dancing performance and uses it as non-diagetic score in a parallel cross-cut scene occurring elsewhere), THE COTTON CLUB feels like it could have been made by a number of other filmmakers.
THE GODFATHER influences signify the film as distinctly Coppola-esque, but the slightly cartoonish treatment of the characters and violence suggests instead the vision of a director influenced by Coppola. Like much of Coppola’s output in the 80’s and 90’s, it was made not because of a genuine ambition, but to reduce Coppola’s significant debt at the time.
THE COTTON CLUB, while not having aged as well as some of his other work, is a strong and underrated film However, it pales in comparison to Coppola’s groundbreaking 70’s work, which was always going to be a tough act to follow. But, if anyone can do it, it’s the man himself.
By this point in his career, Coppola was still a young man, with plenty of time to recapture glory—if only he could dig himself out of the hole opened up by his indulgences.
CAPTAIN EO (1986)
Following the middling reception of 1984’s THE COTTON CLUB, director Francis Ford Coppola found himself slowly but steadily pulling out of the debt spiral that began with 1982’s ONE FROM THE HEART. Coppola could not afford to rest on his laurels, needing to work consistently to pay off said debt.
As his next feature film project began to take the shape of 1986’s PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, Coppola first would tackle a project of a very different kind, one that endeavored to quite literally push the boundaries of cinema.
The mid-80’s was an interesting time to be in media. Conglomerations like Pepsi and Disney were tapping into American pop culture as a way to shill product. Michael Jackson, the King of Pop himself, became heavily involved in corporate branding and lent an aura of star power to commercial campaigns.
His collaboration with Disney manifested in a short film/music video that would be played in the mouse house’s various theme parks as part of an integrated “4D” viewing experience. Titled CAPTAIN EO and originally set to be directed by Steven Spielberg, this experience would incorporate hydraulic seats, scent sprays, synced smoke, lasers, and a variety of other things to create an immersive ride that went beyond 3D’s stereoscopic imaging.
The script was co-written by Coppola’s friend George Lucas, who by this point had already completed his groundbreaking STAR WARS TRILOGY and was well familiar with spaced-based swashbuckling action. After Spielberg dropped out, Lucas’ old buddy seemed like a good bet to helm a project whose presentation lay in uncharted territory.
Due to its elaborate presentation, the story was appropriately simplified to feature Michael Jackson as Captain Eo, a brave space traveller who guides his crew to a dark, industrial planet in an attempt to breathe new life into its inhabitants with the help of music and dance.
Jackson’s crew is populated by a variety of space-age Muppets, a robot, and a stop-motion animation butterfly/rat thing. Anjelica Huston is nearly unrecognizable as the Supreme Leader, Eo’s main antagonist. The Supreme Leader’s makeup and costume design is one of the strongest points of the film, fusing a cyberpunk aesthetic with the machinations of a spider.
While frequent Coppola cinematographer Vittorio Storaro apparently served as a lighting director, Peter Anderson gets the cinematographer credit for CAPTAIN EO. Anderson’s photography effectively captures the saturated, bright colors of Eo’s spaceship and the cold blacks of the Supreme Leader’s lair, in an inspired design from Art Director Geoffrey Kirkland.
Coppola crafts a slightly cheesy, chintzy sci-fi aesthetic that harkens back to his Roger Corman days. Visual effects are quaint and intentionally shaky-looking, which I suppose adds a degree of charm. I imagine that experiencing CAPTAIN EO during its run in various Disney theme parks was a sight to behold, but I just so happened to view the film on Youtube, which came from a VHS recording of the only time the film was ever broadcast on TV.
As you can imagine, it looked pretty terrible. And unless the Mouse House sees fit to release the short to the public, this shitty VHS dub is the best you’re ever going to get. At seventeen minutes long, CAPTAIN EO is basically one big music video.
And at a cost of $1 million dollars per minute of finished film, it also ranks as one of the most expensive films ever made (on a minute-by-minute basis). For those accustomed to the idea of Coppola as the esteemed auteur behind THE GODFATHER (1972), watching CAPTAIN EO comes as somewhat of a shock.
It may even come off as a desperate, pathetic money grab on Coppola’s part—another rung lower in the fall from greatness. Personally, I see the film fitting quite comfortably into Coppola’s oeuvre, albeit in unexpected ways.
Coppola’s career-long pursuit of redefining cinematic language is given a rigorous exercise with the demands of an immersive theme park theatrical presentation. Not only did Coppola have to rely on sound and image to tell his story, but motion and smell as well. It’s a literal bursting forth from the constraining proscenium wall that had so beautifully contained his ideas in ONE FROM THE HEART.
Watching the film now, CAPTAIN EO feels inescapably dated, as if it were a forgotten relic of 1980’s pop culture. It enjoyed a brief resurgence when it was brought back to Disney theme parks in tribute form following Michael Jackson’s death in 2010, but the very nature of its conception means it can never be truly timeless like most of Coppola’s other works.
That is the nature of pop—an art form that is so focused on being “of the moment” that it completely overlooks the fact that the chosen moment passes by all too quickly. At least Coppola’s foray into pop commanded a collaboration with no less than the King himself.
PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986)
Director Francis Ford Coppola spent the majority of the 1980’s taking on for-hire film work featuring commercially-viable stories as a way to erase the debt suffered by 1982’s box office disaster ONE FROM THE HEART. Unfortunately, most of these films were hit-or-miss themselves, and the infallible talent that gave us THE GODFATHER (1972) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) now seemed to be washed up, all of its promise drained.
The year 1986 saw a brief respite for Coppola, in the form of a feature film called PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED. While not a particularly great film, it was enjoyable and channeled a certain nostalgia for midcentury Americana to modest box office gains. Indeed, the film’s upbeat, optimistic tone mirrored the fact that things were looking up for Coppola, for the first time in years.
PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED is a dramatic comedy about a faded beauty named Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner), who is anxious about attending her high school class reunion after a bitter divorce from her appliance baron husband Charlie Bodell (Nicolas Cage).
When she’s crowned reunion queen (that’s a thing?), she faints during the coronation. She wakes up, only to find that she’s back in the year 1960, and back in high school. Blessed with the knowledge of what the future will bring, she relishes the chance to connect with long-dead family members and tries to reconfigure her romantic life to avoid her eventual marriage to boyfriend Charlie. However, she learns that even a second chance at youth can’t change fate.
It’s a powerful question: if you had a second chance to re-live your youth, what would you do differently? Coppola’s cast gamely explores this conceit through wry characterization that must be presented differently in two distinct timeframes.
As the central character, Turner changes gradually in a conventional arc, much like Jimmy Stewart’s character in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946). The weary Peggy Sue starts the film as a shell of her former self, reluctant to engage old friends because of the natural life-comparison that occurs at reunions.
Throughout the film, her dalliances with a mysterious young beatnik and a reconnection with her immediate family changes her outlook, making her cognizant of the true value of the people in her adult life.
Coppola continues his collaboration with his nephew Nicolas Cage, who plays Peggy Sue’s estranged husband Charlie Bodell. A complete goober of a man, Charlie is presented as a schlubby, has-been appliance tycoon, but the past sequences show an outrageously energetic, wildly-bouffanted young man that aspires to fame and riches as a doo-wop singer.
Those who take delight in Cage’s eccentric characterizations will find themselves satisfied in PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED—Cage adopts a strange vocal inflection for his character that’s nasally and off-putting. Coppola almost fired his own nephew over the voice, but somehow Cage argued his case and it stayed. The jury’s still out on whether it actually works or not, however.
The supporting cast is filled out with a variety of fresh faces that have since gone on to fame in their own right. A young Helen Hunt and Joan Allen make appearances as Peggy Sue’s daughter and high school friend, respectively.
The most interesting bit of casting is a young Jim Carrey, who steals his scenes as class clown Walter Getz. This is Carrey even before his IN LIVING COLOR days; that unmistakable gawkiness blessed with the elasticity of youth. It’s really quite wild to see.
PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED is one of Coppola’s most straightforward-looking films. Shot on 35mm film and lensed by legendary Director of Photography Jordan Cronenweth, Coppola paints his idyllic Americana setting in naturally saturated and bright colors.
Camerawork is non-intrusive, objectively and sedately capturing Coppola and returning Production Designer Dean Tavoularis’ midcentury rockabilly aesthetic. One might say it’s bland photography, but it effectively sets the tone of the story and allows the performances to take center stage.
For the music, Coppola once again collaborates with Bond composer John Barry, who creates a lushly romantic score with traditional string instruments. Like 1983’S THE OUTSIDERS before it, PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED also boasts a selection of classic rock-and-roll hits from acts like Buddy Holly, who sings the song from which the film takes its name.
Overall, there’s not a lot to the film that classifies it as distinctly Coppola’s. The only dead giveaway is the inclusion of his daughter Sofia as Peggy Sue’s kid sister. There’s a distinct lack of experimentation, which gives a rather anonymous quality to the direction, but perhaps that is why the film was so well-received.
The age of Reagan wasn’t a particularly progressive time, so it makes sense that a box office hit could be achieved by playing it safe. But in doing so, Coppola is able to zero in on what makes a film like this work—emotion—and scores his first bonafide hit in years.
FAERIE TALE THEATRE: “RIP VAN WINKLE” EPISODE (1987)
In the year 1982, actress Shelly Duvall began producing a television series called FAERIE TALE THEATRE. Originally conceived as a nourishing antidote to commercial-heavy children’s programming, Duvall and company set out to create a series of fairy tale retellings with lavish vision and elaborate production design.
I like to think she started it to reclaim some assurance in the natural goodness of the world after Stanley Kubrick tormented her to the point of insanity on the set of THE SHINING (1980).
In 1987, the show began its sixth and final season with a retelling of the legend of Rip Van Winkle. Director Francis Ford Coppola, still struggling to climb a mountain of debt, signed on to direct his friend Harry Dean Stanton in the title role.
Despite the depressing nature of this development, Stanton and Coppola really give their all to the charmingly cheesy children’s show. It has aged terribly in the time since—its handcrafted set designs don’t hold up against the hyper-bright colors of LCD televisions—but what remains is a fascinating look at how far children’s programming has become, if not saying much in the way of Coppola’s directorial development.
We’re all familiar with the tale of Rip Van Winkle, who went to sleep as a young man and woke up twenty years later as an old man. Told over the course of an hour, Coppola’s RIP VAN WINKLE fleshes out the story significantly, adding in an interesting dramatic through-line by placing the action in the Catskills of New York in the mid-1700s.
We first meet Van Winkle as a lazy oaf of a man that has to endure his screeching wife (Coppola’s sister Talia Shire) and her attempts to get him to do some work around the house. One day, he wanders out into the mountains and happens across a band of pirates, or ghosts, or something.
They all end up having a merry time, get Van Winkle drunk, and he passes out. When he wakes, it’s twenty years later and everyone he knows (save for his son) is dead. To make things even more confusing, his country has seemingly changed hands overnight into the United States of America, and his loyalty to King George puts him at great odds with the patriotic townspeople.
Coming in six seasons deep, I can’t imagine Coppola had much of a say in the visual look of the show. The series, or at least the episode I watched, seems to use a theatrical proscenium conceit much like Coppola used in ONE FROM THE HEART (1982).
This is supplemented by the lighting, which is heavily colored and stylized to match the intended mood. Elaborate, hand-crafted backdrops and costumes populate the 4:3 television frame, and a crude version of green-screen visual effects seem to be employed to further add to the whimsical-ness.
Interestingly enough, RIP VAN WINKLE seems to be Coppola’s first brush with video as a finishing format (he had previously shot full versions of 1983’s THE OUTSIDERS and RUMBLE FISH on video using only rehearsal footage). The magical-sounding music is provided by Carmine Coppola, Francis’ father, in what is yet another family affair for the seasoned director.
RIP VAN WINKLE is similar to 1986’s CAPTAIN EO short, in that Coppola indulges a cheesy, shambled aesthetic that seems considerably beneath someone of Coppola’s cinematic stature. It’s a forgettable foray into disposable programming, and another relic in the video-tinged graveyard that was 80’s pop culture.
It’s a curious move by Coppola, but people will do some weird shit for cash. At least he continues to keep us on our toes. And hey, a young Chris Penn is in it too. I guess that’s something. FAERIE TALE THEATRE: RIP VAN WINKLE is currently available on Hulu Plus, or you can watch it all on Youtube via the embed above.
GARDENS OF STONE (1987)
The 1980’s could read like a lost decade for director Francis Ford Coppola. After the career coronation that was 1979’s APOCALYPSE NOW, there seemed to be nowhere else for Coppola to go but down. Most of his films from this period are either regarded as outright disasters or merely forgettable.
However, time has allowed these films to become removed from the context of their releases, and objective conclusions are easier reached. As such, many of his lesser films are in a prime position for re-evaluation and tend to be better than most remember.
The year 1987 saw the release of GARDENS OF STONE, Coppola’s follow-up to the surprise hit PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986). His first real heavy drama in more than a decade, Coppola channels the reserved vision of THE GODFATHER (1972) and THE CONVERSATION (1974) to tell the somber story of a tight-knit group of soldiers who stayed behind in America during the Vietnam War to bury those who came back in body bags.
It’s a handsome-looking film, devoid of indulgent flash or a sense of self-importance. As a result, GARDENS OF STONE—while not terribly well-received upon release—is a rare glimpse at the dynamo filmmaker Coppola had been a decade before, and is perhaps the strongest film to come out of that period in his career.
Returning to the emotional fallout of a war that he had previously explored in APOCALYPSE NOW, Coppola assembles several old friends to help him tell the story. James Caan, who hadn’t been seen in a Coppola film since 1974’s THE GODFATHERPART II, plays Sergeant Hazard, a lonely military-man who made the army his family after his wife and son left him.
Together with his pal, Sergeant Goody Nelson (James Earl Jones), Hazard leads the members of Fort Meyers’ Old Guard: the stoic soldiers who perform ceremonial duties (like the 21 gun salute) at Arlington Cemetery military funerals.
An ambitious recuit, Jackie Willow (DB Sweeney), soon endears himself as a son-figure to these two old men, and they take an active interest in his development. They support his desire to go the front lines of Vietnam (despite there not being a front line to speak of), even though they’re well aware of the horrors that await him there.
As the war rages on, the characters will find that holding down the fort at home won’t save them from the emotional turmoil of Vietnam. GARDENS OF STONE is a return to form for Coppola, especially in his ability to command arresting performances.
There’s not an ounce of the hotheaded, cocksure Sonny Corleone in Caan’s portrayal of a middle-aged man who finds that marriage to the military isn’t exactly fulfilling. Anjelica Huston, fresh off her collaboration with Coppola in 1986’s CAPTAIN EO, plays Samantha Davis—a middle-aged journalist who manages to dismantle Caan’s armor.
James Earl Jones is a particular delight, in a rare energetic turn that utilizes that lusciously smooth voice of his to charming effect. I’m so used to seeing him as a grizzled old-man figure, it was arresting to watch him engage in young-man shenanigans like getting plastered and wailing on punks. Lonette McKee, who previously acted for Coppola in THE COTTON CLUB, plays Jones’ feisty southern belle of a wife.
I wasn’t too familiar with Sweeney’s work before watching GARDENS OF STONE, but he is effective as the wide-eyed young man who naively yearns for glory on exotic battlefields. It should be noted that this role was originally supposed to be filled by Griffin O’Neal.
However, a boating accident during filming that occurred due to his drug use not only resulted in jail time for him, but more unfortunately, resulted in the death of Coppola’s son and sometime-producing partner, Gian-Carlo.
A few familiar faces from APOCALYPSE NOW return for a PBR-boat reunion of sorts. Sam Bottoms plays Lt. Weber, albeit he’s not given a terrible lot to do. Laurence Fishburne, who by this point had become a regular in Coppola’s work, plays Sergeant Flanagan, a gruff drill sergeant at Fort Meyers.
And then there’s Elias Koteas, that absolute favorite character actor of mine, as a young military clerk in a small, early role. If you were to make a list of all the great directors Koteas has worked with, you would be convinced that he might be the greatest actor to have ever lived. He’s literally worked with everyone–maybe even more so than Kevin Bacon.
GARDENS OF STONE is a handsomely somber-looking film. Shot on 35mm in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio, the film retains the services of legendary cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, who shot Coppola’s previous feature. Subtle, reserved camerawork complements a naturalistic lighting and color scheme, which draws from a palette of forest greens and khaki tones.
The late 60’s setting is recreated in great detail by Coppola’s production designer Dean Tavoularis, without having to resort to an aesthetic that’s not blatantly period. The subtle, reserved camerawork is appropriate for the film’s serious tone, recalling the visual restraint that made THE GODFATHER so emotionally potent.
Coppola’s father Carmine returns to score the film, utilizing a mix of military-style trumpets and horns (in addition to traditional string arrangements) to create an elegiac mood. Authentic military hymns are scattered throughout to give a greater insight into the ritualistic world of the story, and the use of modern rock music from The Doors during a bar brawl sequence further conveys the time period while also subtly calling back to APOCALYPSE NOW.
With its militaristic setting and detailed recruit drill sequences, GARDENS OF STONE brings to mind Stanley Kubrick’s FULL METAL JACKET, which actually came out that same year. The two films couldn’t be any more different, however.
Whereas FULL METAL JACKET irreverently explores the inherent insanity and inhumanity of war, GARDENS OF STONE examines the emotional fallout that stems from that loss of humanity when (or if) the warriors return home from the battlefield.
There is a heavy sense of loss that pervades the film, visualized by endless rows of white slabs—each one signifying a lost soul taken in the name of their country. This feeling really hits home due to Coppola’s personal connection to the subject matter.
I mentioned before that his eldest son, Gian-Carlo, was killed during production. For a film that dwells so much on the experience of death as lived by those left behind, Coppola was able to tap into his own grief and channel it into a cathartic experience.
Family members have always been key collaborators in Coppola’s films, and the institution has always played a large role in the kinds of stories he tells, so it makes sense that the familial themes of GARDENS OF STONE are so prominent and poignant given the circumstances.
We may never know the pain of losing a loved one to armed conflict, but GARDENS OF STONE makes one universal truth quite clear—we will all experience loss at some point. Unsurprisingly, somber stories about death and sorrow don’t exactly translate to big box office.
GARDENS OF STONE was misunderstood upon its release, bombing both financially and critically, and further adding to Coppola’s spotty track record in the 1980’s. Today, it remains an under-seen and underappreciated work in his filmography, but it holds up to the ravages of time quite well.
As an elegy for those lost in Vietnam, it’s a sobering experience. As an artist’s paean to his lost son, it’s devastating. But ultimately, GARDENS OF STONE is a compelling portrait of a side of war that is seldom seen—the experience of those left behind on the homefront. GARDENS OF STONE is currently available on standard definition DVD via Mill Creek and Columbia TriStar.
TUCKER: THE MAN & HIS DREAM (1988)
Despite the minor failure of 1987’s GARDENS OF STONE at the box office, director Francis Ford Coppola seemed to be experiencing a second wind. Spurred on by the loss of his eldest son–a producing partner and car enthusiast– Coppola turned his attentions to a long-gestating passion project about a plucky entrepreneur’s quest to revolutionize the auto industry.
Titled TUCKER: THE MAN & HIS DREAM (1988), the film was first conceived by Coppola in childhood, and continued to occupy his interest as his career developed. When it was finally released, the film was met with substantial critical praise that resulted in three Oscar nominations—most notably for Martin Landau in the Supporting Actor category. Despite poor box office performance, Coppola suddenly found himself relevant again.
Set in Michigan during the year 1945, TUCKER: THE MAN & HIS DREAM tells the story of Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges), a successful businessman and local celebrity who desires to change the car business with an automobile of his own groundbreaking design. Painted as a virtuous, insightful and gracious family man, Tucker finds his character and his patience tested when disapproving Big Auto tries to shut his entire operation down.
It’s rare nowadays to have a protagonist that is so earnest and optimistic, with nary a character flaw. It’s a credit to Bridges’ inherent likeability and talent that Tucker comes off as compelling as he does. Bridges’ Tucker is a natural showman—a visionary with big ideas and an even bigger heart.
He draws inspiration from such forebears as Thomas Edison, and his obsession with detail plays like a midcentury Steve Jobs. It’s an energetic, boyishly charming performance that helps sustain the film’s chipper tone without being off-putting to the cynical members of the audience.
It’s hard to imagine anyone else but Bridges playing the part, but interestingly enough, Coppola had initially envisioned the film decades prior with Marlon Brando as the lead. Joan Allen, who previously worked with Coppola in PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED (1986), has a much larger role to play here as Tucker’s eternally-supportive wife, Vera.
Allen carries herself with an elegant, feminine grace—a grace that gives strength to Tucker in his darkest moments. Her sharp, porcelain features are easy on the eyes, but admittedly confounding to logic—she doesn’t appear many years older than the actors playing her grown children!
As I mentioned before, venerated character actor Martin Landau was nominated for a Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as Abe, Tucker’s grumpy business partner and advisor. Landau plays the character as an old New York Italian type—one that wouldn’t be out of place in THE GODFATHER series.
His grumpiness soon proves endearing, and he effortlessly becomes one of the film’s shining strengths. It’s a nomination well-deserved. Among the faces returning to the Coppola fold are those belonging to Frederick Forrest, Elias Koteas, and Dean Stockwell.
Forrest, who was the lead in 1982’s ONE FROM THE HEART, plays Eddie, another member of Tucker’s team. His relation to the family isn’t very defined, but it appears that he’s the chief mechanic and a good-natured cynic. Koteas plays Alex, an ambitious designer who quits the Air Force and shows up on Tucker’s doorstep to ask for a job.
His talented drawings soon earn him a spot as Tucker’s key designer. Stockwell, who appeared as various bit characters in Coppola films past, assumes the towering personality of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes in a short cameo.
Hughes seems to be an intriguing character in the minds of Coppola’s filmmaking contemporaries. His close friend, Martin Scorsese, would of course go on to make THE AVIATOR (2004) with Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes during his Spruce Goose era (which also features in this film).
And finally, a baby-faced Christian Slater appears as Tucker’s ambitious son, Junior. In his big screen debut, Slater shows a lot of promise, and it’s easy to see why he continued working after the fact. Like Coppola himself, Slater’s talent seemed to fizzle out in middle age as well, and unfortunately Slater has since become more of a direct-to-video punch line than a prestigious actor of note.
Coppola re-enlists frequent Director of Photography Vittorio Storaro to capture the vibrant patina of Tucker’s experience. The 35mm film is shot in the 2.35:1 anamorphic aspect ratio, lending an epic feel to a story about an equally epic life.
Scope is created through the use of sweeping crane shots, and Storaro uses strong yellow key light in several scenes to establish a golden, nostalgic tone. Many sequences also adopt the conceits of early newsreel films, complete with kitschy black and white documentary footage and an overly earnest voiceover narration.
Production Designer Dean Tavoularis also returns, continuing the midcentury Americana aesthetic that Coppola sustained in his films throughout the 1980’s. Overall, Coppola and company are able to make such a plucky character like Tucker succeed due to their embrace of an overtly kitschy, tongue-in-cheek tone.
For the music of TUCKER: THE MAN & HIS DREAM, Coppola eschewed his regular collaboration with his father, Carmine, in favor of working with Joe Jackson. Jackson creates a plucky, big-band sound that fits in with Tucker’s grandiose personality and viewpoint.
The many period details are reinforced with the incorporation of a variety of ragtime and swing source cues that meld well with Jackson’s original score. The late 1980’s and 1990’s saw Coppola tone down his experimental explorations, but TUCKER: THE MAN & HIS DREAM does feature an interesting new take on that time–honored cinematic shorthand: the split-screen telephone conversation scene.
Instead of simply using an optically-printed line down the middle to separate two simultaneously-occurring moments in space, Coppola uses negative space in the frame as a canvas on which to superimpose the other side of the conversation.
This works substantially better than it sounds in print, trust me. It’s an intriguing way to subvert one of cinema’s most basic examples of visual shorthand, which can undoubtedly be traced to Coppola’s lifelong attempts to redefine cinematic language.
It’s worth noting that Coppola’s good friend George Lucas is credited as an executive producer. This simple credit belies a bigger story, where after Coppola’s previous attempts to get the film made had ended in failure, Lucas rescued the project by setting it up at his own production company (Lucasfilm) and financing it himself.
It ultimately became a losing hand for Lucas, as the film fared poorly at the box office. At least the critics appreciated it; I don’t think Lucas ever lost any sleep over misplacing a couple million dollars.
For our purposes, TUCKER: THE MAN & HIS DREAM is an intriguing insight into Coppola’s psyche, almost like a heavily-disguised biopic of the man himself. Both men are blessed with large families that they entrust their life’s work with on a regular basis—Tucker creates and executes his designs with his family in his own home, and Coppola frequently utilizes father Carmine, daughter Sofia, sister Talia Shire, nephew Nicholas Cage and others in his films.
In addition, both men see themselves as the little guy that must do battle with overbearing corporate interests out to squash their vision. And both men ultimately prevail by sticking to their guns and coming out the other end with an inspiring product to show for their efforts. Coppola must have felt a great sense of relief when the film was well-received by critics—in a strange way, the warm reception validated his entire life story.
As a particularly brutal decade for Coppola’s reputation came to a close, the director was approaching middle age, and was beginning to think about his legacy. To date, the majority of his studio filmmaking experiences had been difficult, if not absolutely dismal.
Coppola finished TUCKER: THE MAN & HIS DREAM thinking it was going to be his last Hollywood film. He had diversified, branching out of film by launching his own lifestyle brand that included wine amidst other things. He imagined himself continuing to make movies, but of the experimental independent kind.
Ironically, his studio days were far from over. In the 1970’s, he was considered untouchable, but how would time judge him now, in light of the string of misfires that generated a massive debt that he had still yet to pay off entirely? All of these concerns coalesced to form a desire to do something Coppola thought he’d never seriously do: tackle a third GODFATHER film.
NEW YORK STORIES SEGMENT: “LIFE WITHOUT ZOE” (1989)
Director Francis Ford Coppola closed out a particularly brutal decade for his career on a down note, unfortunately. Having firmly established himself as one of the leading filmmakers in his generation (dubbed the Film Brats due to their being the first wave to come up through the institution of film school), Coppola collaborated with two of his biggest compatriots—Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen—on an anthology filmed named NEW YORK STORIES.
Each director crafted a forty-minute film that expresses their love for the city that never sleeps, but Coppola’s entry– LIFE WITHOUT ZOE– was the least-liked of the bunch. Granted, it’s easy to be the lesser filmmaker when one is up against the likes of Scorsese and Allen, but LIFE WITHOUT ZOE can’t help but feel phoned in at best, and simply awful at worst.
In what could easily be a story devised by Wes Anderson, LIFE WITHOUT ZOE concerns a precocious young socialite named Zoe (Heather McComb) who lives in a hotel with her mother in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She’s got the intellect and wit of a woman twice her age, and commands the unwavering loyalty of her Chanel-clad minions at school.
When a new boy joins their class—an exotic young prince from an oil-rich Middle Eastern nation—the girls get involved with his familial affairs and regard him as a major curiosity. Meanwhile, Zoe attempts to reconcile her estranged father– a world-famous flutist (Giancarlo Giannini)– and her weary mother (Coppola’s sister Talia Shire).
If that plot sounds a little vague, that’s because the story itself isn’t particularly well-developed. Coppola shoots from a script he co-wrote with his daughter Sofia (the traits that would later mark her own directorial debut are very noticeable even at an early age here), but the result is indulgent and out of touch.
I’ve previously written about how I admired the fact that Coppola incorporated his family so much into his art, but LIFE WITHOUT ZOE and its successor, 1990’s THE GODFATHER PART III, stand as an example of when the practice crossed the line into nepotism and unnecessary indulgence.
The cast is comprised mostly of unknown child actors, but there a few recognizable faces. The excellent European character actor Giancarlo Giannini (most would recognize him as Mathis in Martin Campbell’s CASINO ROYALE (2006)) is easily the best part of the film.
Shire, who has appeared in all three GODFATHER films, also turns in a great performance as Charlotte, Zoe’s beleaguered mother. Comedic character actor Chris Elliott makes a small appearance as a robber, and apparently Adrien Brody is in there somewhere, but I never saw him.
Produced by Coppola’s regular partners Fred Roos and Fred Fuchs, LIFE WITHOUT ZOE also retains the services of Director of Photography Vittorio Storaro and production designer Dean Tavoularis. Storaro shoots the 35mm film with an eye for bold colors, striking contrast, and canted camera angles.
Tavoularis’ production design is as reliable as always, but the influence (some might call it meddling) of Sofia is easily seen via the film’s costumes, which typically are obscenely rich haute couture staples like Chanel and Louis Vuitton awkwardly worn by rich little brats stinking of stale Old Money.
Carmine Coppola scores the film, crafting a very 1990’s-style pop character that evokes Phil Spector’s “Wall Of Sound”, while also using the flute for whimsical renditions of famous childhood lullabies. It’s weird, but it fits.
If it weren’t for a few instances of double exposures and crossfade cuts, the film wouldn’t necessarily stand out as a Coppola film. This is the kind of Coppola that is capable of making JACK (1996), not the Coppola who floored us with THE GODFATHER (1972).
It might very well be the worst thing he’s made yet, but it’s not without its redeeming moments. The family element of the film is poignant and powerful, especially in the relationship between Zoe and her father.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where the fundamental disconnect lies. For me, it’s the completely alienating tone and setting. I realize that the upper crust of the Upper East Side is an exclusive world of decadence all its own within a city full of different, contained lifestyles, but I can’t help but only see repulsive, spoiled brats—and not quirky, precocious trendsetters as their makers intended them to be.
There also isn’t a great deal of inspiration driving Coppola here, and it’s always disappointing to see a great filmmaker not giving his best. Fortunately, his next feature—a return to the venerable GODFATHER franchise—would see Coppola striving to work at top form once again.
THE GODFATHER: PART III (1990)
Facing a seemingly-insurmountable mountain of debt stemming from the box office failure of 1982’s ONE FROM THE HEART, director Francis Ford Coppola struggled throughout the 1980’s to make films that would dig him out, only to see them fail and Debt Mountain rise even higher.
By 1990, Coppola had to do something drastic, something he thought he’d never do—he had to make a third GODFATHER film. Paramount had always extended a long-standing offer to him to make another sequel, but when he finally took them up on it, they kicked him while he was down. They gave him only a million dollars to write, produce, direct, and edit the film, as well as a measly deadline of six weeks in which to write the script.
With the deck stacked against him, Coppola summoned everything he had to make a film that would stand up to the saga’s two cinema-defining predecessors. In the end, the long-awaited final product—THE GODFATHER PART III—did modestly well at the box office, but disappointed its audience and has since become known as an “awful film”, the black sheep of a sterling silver lineage.
What most people forget, however, is that the film was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and despite a few fatal flaws, THE GODFATHER PART III holds up surprisingly well as an inspired, yet unexpected conclusion to an epic saga.
The story picks up in New York City, circa 1979. The Corleone family consiegliere, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) is dead, and Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is an old man intent on salvaging his legacy and bringing legitimacy to the Corleone name.
He taps his considerable wealth to buy a controlling share in Immobiliare, an ancient Italian real estate conglomerate with ties to the Vatican. In doing so, he has to contend with the cardinals of the Catholic Church, who are well aware of his sins and fight to prevent his takeover.
At the same time, the bastard son of Sonny Corleone, Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia) is rising fast in the mafia ranks, making known his intention to succeed Michael as Don of the Corleone family. He begins an affair with his cousin (and Michael’s daughter) Mary (Sofia Coppola), while also battling with the Corleone’s family rival, Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna).
As these two story threads converge, Michael realizes that he can never be saved from his sins, but he can do everything in his power to save his family. THE GODFATHER SAGA is known for its iconic performances, and while PART III more or less holds up to that standard, it falters along the way.
Pacino is as great as ever, imbuing his older version of Michael Corleone with the hunched back that comes with heavy burdens and aging complications. We last saw him as a distinguished, suave young man, but PART III finds Michael as a soft-spoken diabetic, ashamed of his past and wracked by guilt.
It’s a haunting performance, especially in the film’s final moments. Oddly enough, it was the only one of Pacino’s three performances as Michael not to receive an Oscar nomination, but it’s just as worthy.
Diane Keaton returns as Michael’s estranged wife Kay, who is also been made weary by time, but finds herself softening to Michael in her advanced years. She no longer sees a murdering monster, but a good man who lost his soul doing what he thought was the right thing for his family.
Kay has always been the audience’s point of sympathetic access to this world, and her arc is necessary to hammer home the key theme of forgiveness and redemption. As Corleone family upstart Vincent Mancini, Andy Garcia is the highlight of the film, channeling his late father’s hotheadedness and charisma to secure his place at Michael’s table, only to learn he was born a few years too late and organized crime isn’t really the Corleone’s thing anymore.
Garcia is sly and charming, a natural successor to Corleone’s criminal empire—he would have made a perfect Michael Corleone himself if THE GODFATHER (1972) had been made twenty years later. The supporting cast is filled with actors of the highest caliber.
Talia Shire returns as Connie Corleone, fully in command of her status as the matriarch. Her years in service to Michael have made her a calculating woman, not unlike a Lady Macbeth. Whereas in PART II she railed against Michael’s tyranny, in PART III she is a full partner and Michael’s closest confidante.
An elderly Eli Wallach plays Don Altobello, a good-natured old man who becomes an unexpected nemesis to the Corleones in the wake of Zasa’s rivalry. As Joey Zasa, Joe Mantegna steals his scenes with a smug, vainglourious attitude and a slippery, treacherous demeanor.
Zasa is the closest the film gets to a traditional GODFATHER antagonist, and Mantegna has never been better than he is here. John Savage, who had once appeared in a film that took enormous inspiration from THE GODFATHER (Michael Cimino’s THE DEER HUNTER (1978), comes off believably as Tom Hagen’s son Andrew, a friendly priest on assignment to the Corleone’s native Sicily.
He doesn’t get a lot to do, but fans of the actor will find his inclusion memorable nonetheless. And then there’s the elephant in the room. I’m talking about Sofia Coppola, handpicked by her father to sub in for Winona Ryder after she dropped out of the key role of Michael’s daughter Mary.
Now, I respect the hell out of Sofia and truly love her directorial work, but it’s no secret that her acting is outright atrocious. It might have even been the decisive factor which kept the film from attaining the same kind of Oscar glory that its counterparts enjoyed.
Her flat delivery and blank stare is devoid of life and robs the film’s resolution of substantial dramatic impact. Coppola is to be admired in how he collaborates with his family to create great art, but charges of nepotism are certainly justified in this case. Simply put, his judgment was clouded, and his impaired foresight almost sank the entire ship.
For a sequel made sixteen years after its last entry, the look of THE GODFATHER PART III is remarkably consistent with its predecessors, due entirely to returning cinematographer Gordon Willis. The 1.85:1 35mm frame boasts deep shadows and keeps the same color-faded sepia tone that evokes old family photographs that so distinguished the previous two films.
However, I also noticed that the image is considerably pink-er than the others, as if shot through rose-colored glasses. Willis and Coppola capture the various New York and Sicilian locales with the same reserved camerawork that was employed by its predecessors, and returning Production Designer Dean Tavoularis authentically recreates a subtle period aesthetic circa 1979.
We see a much more decrepit NYC this time around, consistent with the griminess of the city at the time, but it also suggests the growing inner decay of the film’s morally bankrupt characters. This is most apparent in scenes with Vincent Mancini, who operates underground in a time where gangsters aren’t afforded the same type of respectable, dignified public image they once were.
Instead of Nino Rota, Coppola’s father Carmine comes on board to score the film, adapting much of Rota’s iconic themes into new arrangements that give the music a somber, distant and forlorn patina to reflect Michael’s regret.
The unmistakable waltz theme fires up right at the beginning of the film, reassuring as we slip right back into the mafia’s world as if no time had passed at all. The trademark inclusion of opera music and church hymnals are also retained, while a few dashes of rock music are scattered throughout to reflect how times have changed for our favorite crime family.
Musically, Carmine’s work is probably the weakest of the three scores, but it still packs an emotional punch—especially through his arrangement of “Cavelleria Rusticana” in the film’s denouement. THE GODFATHER SAGA is well-known for several sequences that are reference-grade work on great direction.
Scenes like the Baptism Murder sequence in PART I, and a young Vito stalking his prey along the rooftops of New York’s Little Italy in PART II are some of the best individual sequences in cinema. PART III, unfortunately, has only a handful of similar sequences—none of them packing the same kind of emotional punch as the aforementioned scenes.
The only one that comes close is the ending, in which Coppola depicts Michael’s agony over (spoilers) the death of his daughter Mary by shooting. While the scene is shot fairly conventionally in terms of coverage, legendary editor Walter Murch made a daring, inspired choice to cut out the sound of Michael’s anguished scream so that his face becomes a silent contortion of grief.
Michael’s heart problems are alluded to throughout the film, so for a moment it seems like he could be suffering a major cardiac arrest until he finally finds his wind and lets out a neutered whimper. It’s heartbreaking to watch, and what was initially a happy accident becomes the film’s most memorable moment.
Like the previous two films, I had seen THE GODFATHER PART III several times before watching it for the purposes of The Directors Series. I had always thought it to be an excellent film, despite its poor reputation. Watching it in the context of Coppola’s career development, I was able to read into the film deeper than ever before.
While the key themes of the series—religious ceremony/ritual, family, and a cross-cutting, murderous climax—are all present and accounted for, I saw a very autobiographical aspect to Michael Corleone’s storyline this time around. Coppola’s previous feature, TUCKER: THE MAN & HIS DREAM (1988) had previously explored this territory in much more overt fashion, but THE GODFATHER PART III comes at it from a more compelling angle.
I’ve written before about how by this point in his career, Coppola was firmly into middle-age, and his best work was most likely behind him. Faced with a sharp downturn in the quality of his product, Coppola no doubt must have felt the desire to salvage his cinematic legacy from ruin—much like how Corleone was compelled to clean the dirt from his family name as he became an old man.
Both men’s efforts are constantly foiled by the products of their own sins and indulgences: Corleone’s demons are the ones he has birthed himself from the wreckage of his tyrannical crime empire, and Coppola’s is the inability to distinguish himself in new ways in the eyes of an audience who has judged him to only be capable of one way.
Both men ultimately save their souls by selling them—Corleone reluctantly embraces his old criminal methods and Coppola has to make the one kind of film his audience wants him to make. It’s a well-known fact that Coppola, having envisioned it as simply an epilogue to the first two films and not a true PART III, wanted to name the film “The Death of Michael Corleone”.
It could be argued that an equally appropriate title would be “The Death of Francis Ford Coppola”, with Michael standing in for Coppola as a man struggling to stay afloat in the wake of a child’s death, a stalled career, and a public perception at odds with the legacy he wishes to leave. THE GODFATHER PART III is an expression of remorse and hope for a fallen soul. It is a confession, both Corleone’s and Coppola’s alike.
This impassioned approach undoubtedly shows in the finished product, resulting in one of the finest films Coppola has ever made. THEGODFATHER PART III is quite literally Coppola filming for his life, as an act of cinematic survival.
It’s not a perfect film, still prone to nepotistic indulgences and stubborn auteurism, but it’s a worthy conclusion to one of the greatest American film series of all time, and a valiant effort to recapture that ineffable talent that never quite found its way out of the jungles of APOCALYPSE NOW (1979).
BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1992)
Despite its disappointing critical reception, director Francis Ford Coppola’s decision to make THE GODFATHER PART III proved to be a fruitful one. His company, American Zoetrope, earned a stay of execution by the forces of bankruptcy, but it wasn’t in the clear yet.
Coppola’s next project came from an unexpected source: Winona Ryder, who had previously dropped out of playing the role of Mary Corleone for Coppola without explanation, came to him with the idea of a new take on Bram Stoker’s iconic literary creation, Count Dracula.
Sensing an opportunity to explore the unworldly and deeply erotic undertones of Stoker’s vampire story, Coppola channeled his inspiration into one of the most original visions in cinematic history—boldly forward thinking but achievable using cinema’s most primitive effect techniques—and saved American Zoetrope from obliteration in the process.
The result, 1992’s BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA, distinguishes itself by loyally adhering itself to the source novel, while presenting a lavishly surreal vision of gothic horror. You know the story, but not like this:
It is the year 1897. The Victorian period is on its way out in Europe, and a fascinating new invention named cinema—that is, moving pictures—has captured the imagination of the public. A young, English real estate broker named Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves) travels to distant Transylvania to negotiate a contract for a piece of prime London property with its buyer, the reclusive and supremely mysterious Count Dracula (Gary Oldman).
Seemingly held against his will, Harker languishes in Dracula’s ancient desolate castle while Dracula spirits away to London in search of the blood of virile young women. He sets his sights on Harker’s young fiancé (Ryder), but soon finds himself falling in love with the girl, who may be a reincarnation of his own lost love from centuries ago.
When Dracula’s vampiric nature is deduced, a scholar of the occult named Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) is called in to help Harker destroy Dracula before he turns Mina into his own bride of blood. To think of Dracula is to imagine ancient, cobwebbed castles, cheesy flying bats, and sinister shadows.
But most of all, we think of the unmistakable visage of Bela Lugosi, who literally defined the role in the original Universal monster movie DRACULA (1931). His depiction of the infamous Count has towered over every other incarnation for just over sixty years, so what would Coppola need to be do differently to reinvent a character who had already been so firmly established in our collective subconscious?
What Coppola has chosen to do here is something of a triumph, quite honestly. From day one, his interpretation of Stoker’s novel was meant to be strikingly original. His initial intent was to reduce the sets to artful configurations of shadows and light akin to the German expressionism found in such early silent films as THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1920), while pouring the art budget into elaborately designed costumes.
When his financiers balked at this idea, Coppola agreed to make a more conventional looking film, but the heavily-stylized design conceits would remain. The result is nothing short of a complete visual tour de force, the likes of which may never be seen again on a scale like this.
Coppola’s cast, an eclectic mix of acting powerhouses and young, attractive stars, breathes life into the director’s grand, baroque design. Gary Oldman is perfectly cast as the infamous Count, completely shredding any lingering impressions of Bela Lugosi while still paying a tremendous deal of respect to Lugosi’s interpretation.
An apt comparison would be the Heather Ledger’s take on The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s THE DARK KNIGHT (2008), against Jack Nicholson’s depiction in Tim Burton’s BATMAN (1989). Oldman assumes many guises—each one of them horrifying, oftentimes acting under pounds of prosthetic makeup.
It’s a radical reinvention of the character, and apparently much closer to Stoker’s original vision for the character than the form the Count has taken in pop culture. Winona Ryder plays Mina Harker, a mischievous young socialite who finds herself caught up in Dracula’s gaze, and unable to resist his advances.
Ryder gives all of herself to the role, no doubt making up for lost opportunity when she bowed out of THE GODFATHER PART III. Anthony Hopkins turns in a predictably powerhouse performance as Van Helsing, giving the iconic character an Old World flair and a somewhat-scruffy, wild-eyed demeanor.
Whereas in the classic Universal version of DRACULA, Van Helsing was portrayed as a dignified, elderly intellectual, Coppola’s take on the story finds the character considerably sexed up, prone to fallibility and temptation. Hopkins is one of the finest actors of his generation, and BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA is yet another showcase of his superlative talent.
The inverse can be said for poor Keanu Reeves, who I don’t find to be a particularly terrible actor in general, but rather one with an extremely narrow range. In a performance that evokes the fiasco that was Sofia Coppola in THE GODFATHER PART III, Reeves’ utter inability to convince as a wealthy English aristocrat drags Coppola’s entire vision down.
He tries so hard to speak his lines in a Victorian English accent, that he completely forgets to emote, resulting in one of the most wooden performances I’ve ever seen. His casting reads as a cynical move on Coppola’s part, who has publicly stated that he needed “hot young actors” to lure in the youth audience.
As to why he didn’t pick from the sizable pool of attractive young stars that could actually pull this role off, I’ll never know. Cary Elwes and Tom Waits are the performances of note that round out the supporting cast. Elwes plays Lord Holmwood, a dandy-ish aristocrat who is drawn into Dracula’s insidious activity when his new wife is infected with vampirism.
Waits, a regular performer for Coppola in the 80’s, plays Renfield, the infamous character who is driven mad by his encounter with Dracula and eats rats for sustenance. Waits’ take on Renfield channels something of a steampunk aesthetic, and the musician’s insane, disheveled mannerisms are the most exaggerated displays of Acting (with a capital A) that I’ve ever seen from the man.
Every penny of the film’s budget is thrown right up on the screen in dripping color. For the cinematography, Coppola enlists the help of a new collaborator, Michael Ballhaus, who captures the director’s sinister, baroque vision with feverish aplomb.
The 35mm film gauge is typical of a modern Hollywood film, but Coppola and Ballhaus channel the spirit of cinema’s magician roots to convey a look that’s firmly entrenched in techniques of the past yet altogether entirely new.
Drawing quite liberally from the aesthetics of German Expressionism and Japanese shadow puppet theatre, the film affects a preternaturally creepy persona via perspective tricks, stylized theatrical lighting, billowing cloth, and subtly unnatural visual cues.
Understandably, the color red is the dominant color in Coppola’s palette, but even more interestingly is his treatment of the green end of the spectrum—particularly in the appearance of foliage and other plant life.
Most visibly evident in springtime garden sequences featuring Mina Harker, Ballhaus and Coppola have dramatically desaturated the green from the surrounding trees and hedges, thereby draining the film of life itself. In Coppola’s vision, the rules of nature and physics bend to the will of the undead, and the stench of rot is overbearing.
For a film set during the dawn of cinema, Coppola’s chiaroscuro appropriately and heavily borrows from the aesthetics of silent film, most notably from F.W. Murnau’s NOSFERATU (1922). The production design, by first-time Coppola collaborator Thomas E. Sanders is first-rate, but the lion’s share of acclaim really goes to costume designer Eiko Ishioka, who won the Oscar for her Japanese kabuki theatre-influenced costumes.
By far, BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA is Coppola’s most elaborately stylized film to date, and its loving references to cinema’s beginnings blend sublimely with the rest of the mise-en-scene.
In a move indicative of his love for collaborating with direct family, Coppola famously fired his visual effects team when they were unable to give him what he wanted, and replaced them with his young son, Roman. Some might say this stinks of nepotism, a further indulgence of the kind that stained THE GODFATHER PART III; however, Roman’s youth and relative inexperience proved to be serendipitous and liberating.
Literally every single effect was achieved in-camera via forced perspective, painstaking multiple exposures, miniatures and other tricks of the trade. As a result, this film—like its undead antihero—will never age, forever existing in the realm of pure cinematic magic and unblemished by outdated computer renderings.
The amount of creativity on display is simply astounding, and it is a standard that visual effects artists should hold themselves too more often. The score is supplied by a new collaborator for Coppola, one Wojciech Kilar. His gothic, mysterious cues recall the ominous bombast of the classic Universal monster films while adding an unworldly soprano voice that hints at Dracula’s deeply-buried humanity.
Coppola’s decidedly romantic vision is complemented by Kilar’s lush palette, as well as by an orchestra of frenzied voices, wails, and screams that somehow defy the chaos to harmonize into a feverish sound design.
After returning to his stylistic roots with THE GODFATHER PART III, Coppola forges entirely new ground in an attempt to bring class and elegance back to gothic horror. Ever the innovator, Coppola’s use of ancient filmmaking techniques was unprecedented in this day and age, and it also became the first major film to utilize a nonlinear editing system in its construction (as the digital era had yet to descend on the industry, traditional flatbed editing was still in widespread use at the time of the film’s release).
But most of all, Coppola’s risky vision paid off at the box office and finally saved his long-beleaguered American Zoetrope from financial ruin. In the years since its release, BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA has been gently forgotten, dwarfed by more mainstream vampire fare like INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (1994), or a certain popular book series adaption that I refuse to name, but those who take the time to reacquaint themselves with Coppola’s vision will find a timeless masterwork by one of cinema’s most brilliant minds. Just don’t get too hung up on Keanu.
BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA is currently available on high definition Blu Ray via Sony Pictures (although it’s a little known fact that it was issued as a part of the Criterion Collection during the Laserdisc days).
JACK (1996)
I knew this moment was coming, and I was dreading it just as soon I decided to focus on the work of director Francis Ford Coppola. How is that one man can be the author behind both one of the greatest films of all time, and yet also be responsible for one of the worst as well? It quite literally defies the laws of physics.
The first time someone, anyone hears that Coppola directed JACK (1996), they stop in their tracks, struck dumb by shocked disbelief. How could this… thing exist in the world and not have the universe collapse in on itself?
Hyperbolic rhetoric aside, JACK is a confounding entry in Coppola’s oeuvre. We’ve seen Coppola capable of some head-scratchingly awful work before, but at least it was awful in the attempt of pushing boundaries, or challenging himself. JACK, while infuriatingly poignant by the end, commits the worst sin in art: indifference.
The film knows exactly what it is but doesn’t try to be anything more than that, its “drama” culled from cliché sentimentality and blatantly manipulative storytelling. This was my second viewing of JACK, and I’ll admit that I couldn’t help shedding a tear as the film drew to a close, but I was angry with myself over doing so— that emotion wasn’t earned by good storytelling, it simply exploited the overt poignancy of the moment and cranked up the sad music and soft-focus cinematography to 11 in a rapacious attempt to force me into feeling something.
JACK, first and foremost, is a family film— which I guess is where its connection to the Coppola filmography begins and ends. It tells the story of Jack Powell (Robin Williams), a sweet, energetic little ten-year old boy who, because of a severe aging defect, has the outward appearance of… well, Robin Williams.
The film deals with his decision to stop his secluded home schooling and enter into the dangerous world of public school alongside normal children. He’s regarded as a freak at first, but his charm and innocence soon win over his classmates. Ultimately, he conquers the emotional wreckage of his defect and manages to live a full, albeit very short life.
I’ll say this—the performances are as good as they can be. I honestly don’t mind Robin Williams at all, and I love it when he subverts his image with darker roles, like in DEATH TO SMOOCHY, INSOMNIA, and ONE HOUR PHOTO (all of which, fascinatingly, were released in 2002).
Williams’ hyperactive style of delivery is appropriate for the role of an overgrown ten year old boy, and it is chiefly Williams that makes the movie as (infuriatingly) touching as it is. You may disagree with the quality of his performance, but you can’t deny that it was at least perfect casting.
Diane Lane, who worked with Coppola before on THE OUTSIDERS (1983) RUMBLE FISH (1984) and THE COTTON CLUB (1984), plays Jack’s caring mother Karen. Lane has that whole “unconditional love of a mother” thing down pat, even when she looks like she could be her son’s younger sister.
Dedicated to making his short life the happiest it can be, she indulges in rowdy games with Jack, and convincingly appears anxious when the outside world begins to exert its will over her son. Her performance is easily the best thing about this film, and its been a special experience to see her grow from innocent teenager, to confident sex kitten, to finally a courageous mother through the course of Coppola’s work.
Brian Kerwin plays Brian Powell, Jack’s dad, and does a fine job without particularly standing out. Bill “Pudding Pops” Cosby is Lawrence Woodruff, Jack’s cool-as-a-cucumber private tutor and de facto best friend (at least at the beginning of the film).
Jennifer Lopez, who has had the terrible misfortune of being both in this film andGIGLI (2003), is sweet and effective in her role of Miss Marquez, Jack’s homeroom teacher and first crush. And then there’s Fran Drescher, who plays a local mother named DD.
DD quickly gets the hots for Jack, ignorant of the fact that he’s mentally and emotionally ten years old, and unwittingly initiates him into the very adult world of sex. Drescher in general irritates me, as a person—that grating smoker’s voice with that terrible Atlantic City accent, and that fucking laugh of hers. I can hear it right now in my head, and it’s making me grind my molars together.
To lens this incredibly milquetoast-looking film, Coppola works for the first time with Director of Photography John Toll (who would go on to shoot Terrence Malick’s gorgeous THE THIN RED LINE two years later). Shot on 35mm film in the standard Academy 1.89:1 aspect ratio, JACK is full of natural, bright primary colors that evoke a sunny, optimistic demeanor.
There’s no particular style to the film, and there’s absolutely no experimentation—everything is presented exactly as straightforward as it can be. This makes for a very visually dull film, but it’s appropriate for the subject matter. Coppola’s frequent Production Designer, Dean Tavoularis, returns to craft a childlike, nostalgic aesthetic.
The film’s Bay Area setting helps towards this end immensely by providing plentiful clean, golden sunlight to shower upon Coppola’s subjects. Michael Kamen is on scoring duty in his first collaboration with Coppola.
In what is probably the most conventional element in a heavily conventional film, Kamen’s score has that typical “kid’s movie” orchestral sound—a sound that I’ve personally dubbed “shenanigans!”. You’ll know it when you hear it. Bryan Adams shows up as well, lending an overly earnest theme song to the film that I guess fits with the tone, if indeed there is a tone at work here.
JACK was released to abysmal reviews and poor box office receipts, and Coppola’s career hasn’t really been able to recover from it. I know I’ve spent the better part of 2 pages shitting all over the film, so I’ll try to think of the positives, in the spirit of Jack Powell’s boundless optimism.
The look of the film is appealing in a charming, inoffensive way. The performances are surprisingly effective, tapping into the burdens of adult life that they feel they must protect Jack from. There isn’t an ounce of cynicism to be had on Coppola’s part.
And he also reigns in his at-times overbearing desire to fly in the face of convention to deliver a sweet, simple story about a misunderstood little boy who’s not big enough for his britches. JACK is generic and bland, yes, but is the world any worse off because it exists?
Are we just being reactionary when we say that JACK is the worst film ever made? Maybe. Probably. I agree that Coppola defied our expectations of him by choosing to tackle this film, but hasn’t he been defying our expectations his entire career?
He’s proven himself as a competent (if not formidable) filmmaker in just about every genre except science fiction, so why is a family film any different? By rejecting this film, we judge Coppola for failing to live up to our assumptions of his character, but we’re also not allowing him to be who he really is. Maybe that’s why we hate JACK so much: we’re completely missing the point.
THE RAINMAKER (1997)
The 1990’s saw director Francis Ford Coppola regain some of the clout he had squandered in the 80’s with high profile hits like THE GODFATHER PART III (1990) and BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1992). Fortunately, he was able to close out the decade (and the millennium) on a high note by adapting a popular John Grisham novel into an entertaining character drama.
Titled THE RAINMAKER (1997), Coppola’s last big studio film (so far) was greeted with a fair deal of praise and grossed just barely above its production budget. It was a small victory for a man who was in dire need of them.
THE RAINMAKER stars Matt Damon as Rudy Baylor, an ambitious and eager law student who gets his first job working for an eccentric, flamboyant, and possibly corrupt lawyer named Bruiser Stone (Mickey Rourke). When his employment doesn’t turn out as life-affirming as he expected, Baylor teams up with Stone’s pint-sized business partner Deck Shiffle (Danny DeVito) to form their own firm.
To drum up their client list, they set their sights on the case of a young man dying of bone marrow cancer who’s life would have been saved if his health insurance covered a certain operation. Sensing a wrongful death suit, Baylor and Shiffle set about investigating the business practices of the boy’s insurance carrier, Great Benefit.
They unwittingly discover a vast conspiracy of denying claims to those in need purely for profit purposes, so the two enterprising lawmen launch a civil suit to expose this massive corporate malfeasance. In the process, Baylor finds he can’t help breaking his number one rule: don’t get personally and emotionally involved with his clients.
Coppola has assembled a fine cast here, and everyone is convincing and effective in their roles. Damon, looking slim and boyish in one of his earliest film performances, adopts a southern drawl to better communicate the film’s Memphis setting. His Rudy Baylor is virtuous, whip-smart, and caring—everything you’d expect a protagonist to be. It’s a strong performance by Damon, but not necessarily standout—despite starring in a Francis Ford Coppola film, he didn’t turn any heads until later that year in Gus Van Sant’s GOOD WILL HUNTING.
DeVito, as usual, steals the show as Baylor’s disheveled business partner, Deck Shiffle. DeVito imbues the character with a sleazy, yet loveable charm. The man, who isn’t exactly a lawyer himself since he failed the Bar six times, pursues potential new clients with reckless abandon—even while they’re recuperating in a hospital bed.
Normally, we’d view this behavior as despicable, but DeVito pulls it off with a degree of good-natured earnestness that gives him more of the aura of “loveable scamp” instead of “sleazy shark”. Jon Voight plays Leo Drummond—a genial, well-heeled southern gentleman who represents his client Great Benefit, which makes him the de-facto antagonist.
Drummond is slippery, smooth, and razor-sharp. He’s the kind of lawyer that knows every trick in the book and will turn the tables on you without you realizing until it’s too late. It’s a strong, subdued performance from Voight, one that gives the film palpable tension without resorting to cliché “bad guy” archetypes.
And speaking of archetypes, there is a love interest in the film, played by Claire Danes (who was then experiencing a surge in fame after her performance as one half of the titular couple in Baz Luhrmann’s ROMEO + JULIET (1996)). Her character, Kelly Riker, spends most of her screen time under heavy bandages as a victim of serial domestic abuse.
She’s young, pretty, and strong—especially when she has to defend her life against her abusive husband. A bevy of familiar faces rounds out Coppola’s supporting cast, starting with Mickey Rourke as Baylor’s first boss, Bruiser.
Rourke imbues the role with a thuggish, flamboyant sensibility that telegraphs his corrupt nature like a street sign. Regular Coppola performer Dean Stockwell returns as Judge Hale, a grumpy, sickly man who abruptly dies at the outset of Baylor’s suit against Great Benefit.
He is replaced by Danny Glover, who’s Judge Kipler character is a hardass, by-the-book kind of fellow. Virgina Madsen appears as Jackie, one of Baylor’s key witnesses who could break the entire case open, but instead crumples into a sobbing pile under Voight’s expert counter-examinations.
And finally there’s Roy Scheider—of Coppola contemporary Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (1975) fame—who has a small, yet key role as Wilford Keeley, the ultra-wealthy CEO of Great Benefit. There’s a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo thrown around by all parties involved, and it’s a testament to their talent and Coppola’s direction that they all actually sound like they know what they’re talking about.
The look of THE RAINMAKER harkens back to the somber, reserved aesthetic Coppola popularized in THE GODFATHER TRILOGY. Working again with JACK (1996) cinematographer John Toll, Coppola gives the 35mm film frame a subdued color palette, dealing mainly in earth tones, deep shadows, and an overall blue/green color cast.
The reserved camerawork favors wide compositions, enhanced by the use of the 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Tone-wise, the film looks dead serious, but Coppola finds plenty of opportunity to inject natural, subtle comedy to help lighten the mood.
Music is provided by legendary composer Elmer Bernstein, who uses the film’s Memphis setting as inspiration for a blues-y, jazzy orchestral sound similar to David Shire’s work on THE CONVERSATION (1974). As such, the score doesn’t carry the portentous weight that one might expect from a courtroom drama.
Instead, it bops along to the riffs of a church organ and other iconic Memphis sounds. It’s an unexpected choice, but goes a long way towards establishing a unique, local flavor to the film and gives us a better view into the mindsets of its characters through their environment.
THE RAINMAKER doesn’t show a great deal of growth on Coppola’s part, but that’s to be expected for a middle-aged filmmaker with multiple masterpieces under his belt. With this film, Coppola is treading well within his wheelhouse, but he’s not complacently resting on his laurels, either.
As his last big studio film so far, and his last film of the 20th century, Coppola has crafted a fine, respectable drama with a distinct character. It may become increasingly forgotten as time goes by, but the work speaks for itself. It’ll hold up in the court of public opinion where so many of its bigger, mainstream contemporaries will fall flat. In the long run, that’s the only verdict that matters.
YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (2007)
After the release of 1997’s THE RAINMAKER, director Francis Ford Coppola’s next move was the most surprising of an already-unconventional career: he took a ten-year hiatus. Like his counterpart Terrence Malick, Coppola all but disappeared from the film scene for a ridiculously extended period of time, and many assumed he was simply retired.
It had been a brutal two decades for Coppola, who saw the infallible image given to him by his quartet of masterpieces in the 1970’s battered to near-death by a string of flops and audience-alienating indulgences in the 80’s and 90’s. The man certainly deserved a break, but when he came back, he came back with his priorities realigned and his creativity refreshed.
I have written before about how Coppola used the considerable wealth he had garnered from his directorial triumphs to diversify into other endeavors, most notably his lifestyle brand, Francis Ford Coppola Presents. During his decade-long sabbatical, the aging Coppola tended to his business endeavors– the most profitable of which was his winery.
Frustrated by the studio meddling that comes with studio financing, Coppola was probably unsure how to proceed forward with his bold, experimental style in an industry that had become too “safe” for radical artists like him.
Perhaps it was his intention all along, but the answer to his artistic woes were right under his nose– swishing around in his glass as the aroma of fermented grapes invaded his nostrils. He could get around the tampering of clueless studio executives by robbing them of their leverage; that is to say, he could regain creative control by financing his films with the considerable profits from his wine business.
An unexpected result of this decision was a radical shift of direction in Coppola’s career. Coppola was taking a firm step away from the studio method of filmmaking that he had practically re-energized single-handedly with THE GODFATHER (1972), and was striking out on his own as a maverick filmmaker, answerable to no one.
Budgets would be a mere fraction of what he was used to, but this also meant he was much lighter on his feet and possessed more leverage to assert total creative control. By unavailing himself from the tools of complacency brought about by bountiful resources, Coppola was able to approach filmmaking with the energy and experimentalism of a hungry film student.
Coppola’s first project under this new philosophy, 2007’s YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH, marked his return to cinema after ten years in the woods. An adaption of the novel by Romanian author Mircea Eliade, the nonlinear, surreal nature of the story provided plenty of room for experimentation.
The film concerns an old man living in pre-WW2 Romania named Dominic Matei (Tim Roth) who is suddenly zapped by a bolt of lightning in the town square. Instead of being fried to death, Dominic finds himself alive and well, much to his doctors’ bewilderment.
Astonishingly, he appears nearly thirty years younger when the bandages come off, blessed with the virility and energy that comes with youth. Given a second lease on life, he toils through the middle decades of the twentieth century, trying to answer the mystery of his condition.
He soon comes into contact with a beautiful woman named Veronica (Alexandra Lara), who he takes as a research subject and lover when she is similarly transformed by a freak occurrence of nature. Instead of aging, she becomes possessed by primitive forces during her sleep, each night babbling in a different language that reaches back further and further into mankind’s past and the origins of speech.
However, his extended presence has negative consequences for her—namely, she ages exponentially while Dominic remains the same age. Dominic finds himself torn between letting her suffer further for the potential discovery of our linguistic origins, or sacrifice love and happiness so that she may be young and healthy.
It’s all very heady stuff, and the cast demonstrates a firm grasp on the intricate subject matter. Tim Roth gives one of his best performances as Dominic, both as a reflective, somber elderly man under pounds of prosthetic makeup, and as the sprightly, intellectual younger version of the character.
The time rift experienced by Dominic also fractures his identity, manifested in a malevolent double that appears only in mirrors but has an agenda all its own. Roth effortlessly transitions between both sides of his identity, making for an engrossing and disturbing performance.
Interestingly, Roth is the only recognizable actor in Coppola’s cast. The lovely Alexandra Lara holds her own against veteran Hollywood talent as Roth’s lover, Veronica. Her descent in the dark interior jungle of man’s origins is frightening and captivating, and she naturally spouts off dozens of primitive languages without stumbling once. It is a truly impressive performance.
While the remainder of the cast does a fine job, the most noteworthy supporting performance belongs to a cameo—Matt Damon, in his second Coppola appearance following his starring turn in THE RAINMAKER. Damon appears only in one scene (he seems to do this a lot for respected directors like Gus Vant Sant or Steven Soderbergh), but his shady American intelligence agent does a great job of illuminating the broader context of the times, and the secrecy-shrouded backroom dealings of The Cold War.
YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH is notable in Coppola’s filmography for being his first feature shot on the high definition digital format, instead of the traditional celluloid film. Digital filmmaking was still in its nascent stages in 2007, but Coppola saw its potential for creating striking-looking cinema on a smaller budget.
His work with a new format is reflected in his hiring of a new cinematographer, Mihai Malaimare Jr., who shot the film using Sony’s F950 camera (which no doubt had been recommended to Coppola by his colleague George Lucas after using it on 2005’s STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH).
The HD image is striking, creating one of the best-looking early examples of the format’s capabilities. Using the traditional anamorphic 2.35:1 aspect ratio as a canvas, Coppola and Malaimare make a seamless transition into the digital realm with a handsome, filmic image.
The cinematography evokes a cross between Coppola’s aesthetic for THE GODFATHER and BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1992)— that is, dark shadows and an earth-toned, amber wash is interspersed with bright colors and expressionistic compositions.
Camerawork is mostly of the reserved, traditional variety—except when the camera itself is turned on its side or upended entirely. High-key, expressionistic lighting reflects Coppola’s baroque, dreamlike tone, while also becoming a subtle visual signifier when the whimsical morphs into the nightmarish.
All in all, YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH is a stunning looking film that shows off the lush beauty that a then-fledgling format was capable of. The film’s music is provided by Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov, who gives the musical palette an Old World, romantic flavor.
Golijov is not specifically a film composer by trade, but his relative inexperience makes for a fresh, dynamic sound. The film’s overarching theme of time is reflected through the use of arrhythmic percussion and chimes similar to the grinding of intricate machinery.
Golijov strikes a good balance between traditional, romantic orchestration and ambient, enigmatic tones that propel the film’s sense of mystery and wonder. Also reflecting the midcentury European setting is the inclusion of a handful of popular songs from the era (think Edith Piaf, even though I don’t believe any of her songs specifically make an appearance).
While a number of Coppola’s key creative personnel are new (Malaimare Jr and Production Designer Calin Papura), YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH benefits from the participation of veteran colleagues like longtime producer Fred Roos, editor Walter Murch, and son Roman on second unit directing duties.
And for the first time in a long while, this actually feels like a Coppola film—his signature crossfades, double exposures, and other layering techniques create a rich tapestry that eschews the harsh lines of the traditional editing language.
Indeed, language itself is one of YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH’s most prominent themes, so it only stands to reason that Coppola would use the story as a springboard for the further exploration of unconventional storytelling techniques that have distinguished his career.
YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH channels a charming Euro Art Deco aesthetic, right down to the opening titles that resemble those old, colorful olive oil posters you see in Italian restaurants. For a film that’s so distinctly unfamiliar in its telling, an Old World mise-en-scene is a comforting inclusion that also gives the film a great deal of class.
However, it was not enough to win over a wide audience upon release. It failed to make back its meager production budget, and critics experienced mixed reactions running the gamut between lavish praise and hateful scorn.
I had seen the film once before sometime after graduating college, and I wasn’t exactly taken with it. Ironically, it took a second viewing years later for me to realize how subconsciously profound an influence it was on me in determining the aesthetic of my own 2009 feature,
SO LONG, LONESOME. The nonlinear presentation of chronology, the juxtaposition of bright and saturated colors with drab, toned-down images, and unconventional framing techniques all rubbed off on me as ways to convey a heightened reality in tune with the metaphysical. The film’s enchanted, lived-in aesthetic also could have feasibly served as a reference for a thematically similar work, David Fincher’s THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (2008).
YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH is a challenging film, no doubt. It requires your undivided attention and multiple viewings in order to truly appreciate its mysteries. While watching the film for the purposes of The Directors Series, I realized that I had not given the film enough of my attention the first time around, hence my original lukewarm reception to it.
This time, I found myself more engrossed by the intricate storyline, and connected more with its potent musings on age and the ravages of time. I certainly wouldn’t recommend this film to just anyone, but those with the necessary patience will find YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH a richly rewarding experience.
For his grand return to filmmaking after a prolonged absence, Coppola’s YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH marks the beginning of a bold, experimental phase for the seasoned director. His productivity will no doubt decline, whether it’s due to a leisurely development schedule or his own advancing age, but I find it heartening to see a director of Coppola’s stature getting back in touch with his roots as an indie maverick.
His best years might surely be behind him, and his new work may turn off a great deal of his fans, but Coppola has consistently and unabashedly followed his heart where his art is concerned and the results are never boring. YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH is not unlike renewing one’s marriage vows, in that Coppola is dedicating himself anew to his life’s passion with vigor.
In doing so, Coppola has rediscovered his own youth, and has successfully channeled it into an ambitious, challenging film unlike anything he’s done before. He may have been away for a while, but don’t count him out yet.
TETRO (2009)
The release of 2007’s YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH, while middling in its critical reception, proved to be a reinvigorating event for director Francis Ford Coppola. After a decade-long absence from the screen, the middle-aged filmmaker had found an energy and inspiration matching that of an ambitious and inquisitive film student forty years his junior.
After a long run of compromise and disappointment in the studio system, he had finally found a method that worked for him. By financing his own films entirely from his winery profits, he could assume total creative control and succeed or fail on his own terms.
Not long after YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH wrapped production, Coppola began working on his follow-up: a darkly romantic tale of familial discord between two estranged brothers in Buenos Aires. Titled TETRO (2007), the film would harken back to his earliest work by focusing on subtle relationship dynamics and gorgeous, unadorned cinematography.
Like its cinematic predecessor, TETRO was similarly received with mixed reactions and lackluster box office returns, but Coppola’s daring vision makes for his strongest and most-respected film in years. A teenaged boy, Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), arrives in Buenos Aires after the cruise line he works as a waiter for suddenly experiences an engine room fire and has to dock for a few days.
He takes advantage of the scenario by calling upon his older brother Tetro (Vincent Gallo), who took off on a mysterious writing “sabbatical” when Bennie was only a child and hasn’t been seen since. When Bennie reunites with Tetro, he finds a deeply-cynical and mean-spirited man who wants nothing to do with his family, and his past.
The only way of understanding Tetro’s current state of disdain, as well as Bennie’s own heritage, is to examine his scribbled writings, which Bennie procures through the deception of Tetro’s well-intentioned girlfriend Miranda (Mariba Verdu). In doing so, Bennie uncovers a complicated family history and a shocking secret about his true lineage.
Part of Coppola’s new filmmaking method seems to be anchoring a cast of talented international unknowns around a singular star name. YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH had Tim Roth, TETRO has film renegade and provocateur, Vincent Gallo. Gallo, who swears by the benefits of improvisation during the production process on his own directorial work, had to realign himself with Coppola’s own meticulously-rehearsed philosophy.
The result is a strong performance by Gallo, who uses his trademark eccentricity to striking effect as a reclusive, disgruntled genius. Gallo’s Tetro is volatile and prone to psychotic outbursts, but he also finds an inherent humanity that pays off in the film’s final moments.
Of the unknown cast, Ehrenreich and Verdu stand out the most. Ehrenreich drew comparisons to a young Leonardo DiCaprio in his performance as an inquisitive young man with a well-travelled innocence. Verdu projects a feminine warmth and grace as Miranda, Tetro’s demure girlfriend who gave up a promising career in medicine to attend to his off-kilter needs.
Together, both actors create a tangible foundation for Gallo to build off of, reigning in what could have been an indulgently bizarre performance and turning it into something insightful and touching. Coppola re-enlists the services of cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr, who appears to be this career phase’s incarnation of Vittorio Storaro.
Seeing TETRO as a thematic companion piece to his 1984 film RUMBLE FISH, Coppola wanted to emulate the black and white cinematography of the latter, while also evoking the texture and compositional elegance of old photographs.
TETRO also marks Coppola’s second time using the high definition digital format as his acquisition medium, which makes for razor-sharp lines that heighten the noirish, black and white photography. The camera never moves, utilizing carefully-composed 2.35:1 frames to tell Coppola’s story.
Ever the visual pioneer, Coppola uses another conceit to redefine our notions of the tried-and-true “flashback”. Shot in a letterboxed 4:3 aspect ratio that evokes the boundaries of old 8mm film, Coppola shows us the twists and turns of Tetro’s complicated family history in striking color and handheld camerawork.
These don’t resemble home movies, however—the glossy sheen of the digital cinematography makes these sequences appear as if they were concurrent along the main story’s timeline. The warm color tones that Coppola emphasizes during these sequences depict an objective truth that is obscured in the expressionistic, stark sequences set in the present day.
Also reprising his role in Coppola’s key creative team is Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov, who crafts a somber, jazzy score that calls to mind 1974’s THE CONVERSATION, albeit with an accordion-based, Latin influence.
Coppola also indulges his affectations for opera music throughout the film by incorporating an entire subplot around it. This paints cosmopolitan Buenos Aires as a cultured city of good taste and history, making the juxtaposition of pop and rock cues all the more striking.
Coppola is well within his directorial wheelhouse here, combining several thematic conceits from films throughout his career. The aforementioned RUMBLE FISH connection is the most obvious, but there are other hidden references, such as a visual callback to his 1963 debut, DEMENTIA 13.
The subtle relationship dynamics call to mind Coppola’s understate film, THE RAIN PEOPLE (1969), while the themes of family and success evoke THE GODFATHER TRILOGY. By returning to his low-budget roots, Coppola proves to a powerful and fearless independent filmmaker.
The man’s career has always been predicated upon the theme of family, both as a dramatic focus as well as his collaborative tendencies (son Roman once again serves as the second unit director). While Coppola’s Italian roots have been extensively explored throughout his life, TETRO finds Coppola grappling with his other, Argentinian bloodline.
The film allows him to draw a throughline between both cultures to find the similarities in their tastes in art and architecture, their lifestyles and social customs, and most of all, in their attitudes towards the family unit. Coppola has publicly stated that TETRO is a very autobiographical film, albeit one that doesn’t contain a single true event.
The truth Coppola speaks of is in the emotions at play– an apt reference for art itself, where the only truth that matters is emotional truth. As of this writing, Coppola has since directed another feature—2011’s TWIXT—which has yet to be released to a wide American audience.
As such, my analysis of Coppola’s career and filmography concludes (for now) with TETRO. The man is a giant of international cinema, with an inarguably profound legacy. Careers like his are some of the most rewarding for the purposes of The Directors Series, as they provide a decades-long examination, complete with highs and lows that welcome insightful analysis when freed of the context of the times they were released in.
My general takeaway on Coppola’s development is that he has always been an innovator, challenging his audience by redefining how films are constructed and presented. One of his earliest influences was Sergei Eisenstein, the father of film editing technique and theory.
While they are commonplace to the point of invisibility today, Eisenstein’s innovations were radical and incredibly influential during the earliest days of cinema. An entire visual language sprung up around cinematic storytelling, and Coppola spent the majority of his career building upon that language and challenging our relationship to it.
Coppola will always be remembered as one of the greatest directors of all time, mainly due to the uninterrupted run of absolute masterpieces he released during the 1970’s. Each of those four films—THE GODFATHER (1972), THE CONVERSATION ,THE GODFATHER PART II (1974), and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)—is highly regarded not just in film circles but in the entirety of art.
Each of them have been deemed culturally significant and worthy of preservation by the National Film Registry. They netted Coppola Academy Awards and Cannes Palme d’Ors. He could have only made these four films and still be considered one of the greatest that ever lived.
Luckily, Coppola was not one to rest on his laurels, and always strove to push the boundaries of the art form, at great risk to his own legacy. His failures may have tarnished his reputation as a filmmaker, where priority is placed on commercial success, but they have solidified his legacy as a true artist.
Coppola will always surprise us, because his work isn’t preoccupied with the popularity contest of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. He began as a maverick on the fringes, and that is where he will end it. But until that day comes, keep those surprises coming.
TWIXT (2011)
By 2011, director Francis Ford Coppola was well into a new phase of his career, a phase that saw him financing his films independently with the profits from his lifestyle brand, Francis Ford Coppola Presents. This approach resulted in the reinvigorating success of 2007’s YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH and 2009’s TETRO—so naturally, Coppola was keen to go a similar route for his next project, 2011’s TWIXT.
The idea for TWIXT came to Coppola in a dream, where he encountered the author Edgar Allan Poe in a gothic, wooded setting. After working through his idea a little more, Coppola ended up with a story about a washed-up author of horror fiction who finds inspiration in a series of nightmares he has during a book tour stop in a mysteriously sleepy town.
But just as Coppola’s unabashed adherence to his vision cost him in the form of several failures throughout his career, so too does TWIXT—a pretty terrible film any way you slice it—become a large stumbling block to progress in Coppola’s delicately nascent indie phase.
The story of TWIXT begins when has-been horror writer Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), described as a bargain basement Stephen King, stops in the sleepy town of Swann Valley during a humiliatingly ill-attended book tour of his latest work. Standing watch over the town is a giant clock tower, each wall adorned by a giant clock.
Each of these clocks tells a different time, so no one quite knows exactly what time it is in this town. Hall is approached by a grizzled Sherriff named LaGrange (Bruce Dern), who happens to be an aspiring writer himself. He proposes a collaboration with Hall—a new book based on a story he’s concocted about a series of murders that occurred in the town.
Hall is intrigued by LaGrange’s concept, and spends his days trying to hammer out an outline while trying to convince his publisher to forward an advance to his nagging wife (played by Kilmer’s real-life ex-wife). When night falls, however, Hall finds himself transported to a Gothic dreamscape, populated by ethereal children, a ghostly young girl named V (Elle Fanning), and his own literary idol, Edgar Allan Poe.
Through these nocturnal encounters, Hall uncovers the dark secrets of the town while stitching himself into the very fabric of its mysteries. As the washed-up protagonist, Val Kilmer ably projects the aura of a has-been alcoholic with the requisite middle-aged bloat and a truly disgusting ponytail.
TWIXT is the first time to my own eyes where Kilmer truly looks he’s aged tremendously, and to think he played Batman/Bruce Wayne in BATMAN FOREVER only eighteen years ago. There has to be some sort of voodoo curse on him, because even working with a world-class director like Coppola can’t save the movie from going straight to video in America.
He gives a spirited performance, but he can’t transcend the messy mise-en-scene around him. As V, Elle Fanning spends the movie bathed in an ethereal glow and heavy makeup. She’s initially presented as a sweet, ghostly young girl with a giant set of braces on her teeth, but her true nature as a vampire is revealed in a not-surprising twist.
Bruce Dern plays Sheriff LaGrange, a backwoods cop who brings a lot of comedic relief despite his serious intentions. Rounding out the cast is Alden Ehrenreich, who previously starred in TETRO for Coppola. In TWIXT he plays Flamingo, the goth/punk leader of the vampires who hang out “across the river”.
And finally, Tom Waits—a regular performer in Coppola’s canon—appears via a brief voiceover narration at the beginning. However, his inclusion is a little odd considering his narration never occurs again for the remainder of the film.
Like Coppola’s previous two films, TWIXT is shot digitally by returning cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. While their first two films together were gorgeous works of art that showed off the beauty that digital is capable of, TWIXT is unilaterally awful-looking.
There’s no excuse for how bad it looks; how can this be the same cinematographer who shot Paul Thomas Anderson’s gorgeous 2012 film THE MASTER?. It’s overly crisp, overly lit, and completely fake-looking for the grand majority of its running time.
It’s as if the backgrounds were digitally inserted using entry-level compositing software—it’s THAT bad. Counteracting with the bland static of the “reality” sequences is a stylized nightmare dreamscape. These sequences were obviously shot during the day and color-timed after the fact, with Coppola adopting a silvery-cobalt monochromatic look punctuated by bright crimson and unnatural oranges.
The biggest strike against TWIXT’s visuals lies not in Coppola’s clearly imaginative inspiration, but in the execution— specifically, the visual effects. Most of the effects are of such a shoddy bargain-basement quality that they look like they were ripped from a 90’s PC game.
It’s so bad that that it has to be intentional—there’s no comprehensible reason a world-class director like Coppola would let such shoddy work slide. TETRO’S Osvaldo Golijov returns to score the film, this time collaborating with Dan Deacon to create a cheeky
gothic score. It’s deliberately cheesy, like a low-budget schlock film you might find in VHS in the 1980’s. I suspect that the score is the sole part of the film that’s accurately conveying Coppola’s intentions. If his intention was to create high art out of low-brow direct-to-video horror trash, then he’s certainly pulled it off—and we’ve been reading the film totally wrong this entire time.
Coppola’s directorial style wasn’t built on aesthetic conceits like most of his contemporaries. Rather, every choice he makes is informed by a constant goal: to find new cinematic vernaculars, new ways to express ideas on-screen.
One of the main reasons Coppola even made the film was because of an idea that would innovate the film-watching experience using the new tools that digital filmmaking had to offer. He wanted to redefine what it meant to watch a movie unfold, live in the theatre.
To this end, he worked out a plan to literally “remix” the film live, responding to the audience in real time and adjusting his edit on the fly. Perhaps this conceit was a little too ambitious, as he could never quite figure out a way to make it practical.
There’s no telling if the concept would’ve caught on had he been successful, but if it had, he would’ve revolutionized the way we consume movies and imbued the dying institution of the movie theatre with a newfound life and relevance.
Unfortunately, this was not meant to be, so Coppola was forced to edit together a definitive master cut of the film culled from the various pieces he had shot, making for consistently un-even viewing experience. By embracing the independent realm, Coppola has empowered himself to make intensely personal work that would otherwise be compromised in the studio system.
TETRO was very clearly about Coppola’s Argentinian roots as well as his own immediate family. TWIXT, however, takes more of a literal tack, with Coppola incorporating a subplot in which Kilmer’s character is haunted by the death of his young daughter, who died on a boating accident that he could’ve prevented had he not been too hungover to go along.
In real life, this is almost exactly what happened with Coppola’s eldest son Gian-Carlo, who was killed in a boating accident in 1986 at the tragically young age of 22. Coppola had always felt responsible because he could’ve been there and prevented it, and TWIXT provided a conduit in which he could own up to his regret and maybe even forgive himself.
To put it simply, TWIXT was a huge failure for Coppola. The fact that he financed it himself meant that he stood to lose a lot from a flop, and he did. But that’s the price you pay for creative freedom. His next project has yet to be announced, so it’s hard to ascertain as of this writing whether he’ll continue the independent route.
Given his conflict-laden history with the studios, I’d stand to venture that he does keep on self-financing his work. Even if they’re all failures like TWIXT, their very existence is valuable because they are the manifestations of a true visionary’s unchecked creativity.
Author Cameron Beyl is the creator of The Directors Series and an award-winning filmmaker of narrative features, shorts, and music videos. His work has screened at numerous film festivals and museums, in addition to being featured on tastemaking online media platforms like Vice Creators Project, Slate, Popular Mechanics and Indiewire. To see more of Cameron’s work – go to directorsseries.net.
THE DIRECTORS SERIES is an educational collection of video and text essays by filmmaker Cameron Beyl exploring the works of contemporary and classic film directors. ——>Watch the Directors Series Here <———
There’s not much more to write about director Stanley Kubrick than what’s already been written. His work has been analyzed, pored-over and dissected as long as it’s been around. He’s held up as the gold standard in filmmaking—the benchmark by which all other directors aspire to, and all critics compare against.
Each of his major films, from 1956’s THE KILLING to 1999’s EYES WIDE SHUT, can be considered masterpieces in their own right, possessing lurid qualities that continue to draw us into Kubrick’s meticulously crafted worlds and beckon us to uncover their secrets.
He was a calculating genius in every sense of the term, seemingly born as a fully formed artist— suited particularly to the moving image. Had film school existed when he was a young man, he probably wouldn’t have gone out of principle alone.
Kubrick’s sterling legacy is somewhat ironic, considering that most of his films were misunderstood, controversial, and lukewarmly received upon their release. It wasn’t until many years later that his work achieved the kind of cultural value and respect it holds now. Considering that his career spanned five decades, Kubrick’s filmography is surprisingly small, consisting of just thirteen features.
This can be attributed to his reputation as a demanding perfectionist and obsessive researcher. He was notorious, especially later in life, for taking several years between projects, which he spent amassing obscene amounts of research. For instance, in compiling information for his long-gestating (but never-made) passion project NAPOLEON, he constructed a card filing system that was so thorough that it had entry for every single day of Napoleon’s life.
He wasn’t just a master dramaturge however—his storytelling prowess extended to the technical side of the craft, and many of his films are famous for their groundbreaking innovations in cinematography. 1968’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY pioneered realistic space effects that are still unrivaled today.
BARRY LYNDON (1975) broke new ground in low-light photography by using specialized NASA-designed lenses, often filming gorgeous tableaus by nothing more than candlelight.THE SHINING (1980) introduced the ethereal, floating specter of Steadicam to audiences around the world and freed the camera from its heavy constraints.
The controversy over his work’s challenging subject matter would turn Kubrick into a recluse late in life, which projected a great air of mystery and myth about him—indeed, many of his fans didn’t even know what he looked like. While the details of his advanced are closely guarded family secrets, Kubrick’s early life is well documented in the public forum.
He was born in New York City in 1928, to Jacob Leonard Kubrick, a prominent doctor, and his wife Sadie Gertrude Kubrick. The Kubricks were of Polish, Austrian, and Romanian descent, and they identified as ethnically Jewish, although they did not raise Stanley as religious. As a bookish lad growing up in the Bronx, Kubrick wasn’t interested in the normal, mischievous pursuits of boyhood.
He was obsessed with chess, which his father taught him at the age of twelve—he appreciated the game’s emphasis on patience and discipline, traits that would mark his filmmaking style later on. His love of visual art began at age 13, when his father gave him a still camera and encouraged an interest in photography.
The teenage Kubrick was more interested in jazz drumming and catching double features at the local cinema instead of attending school, where he wasn’t much of a model student. His poor grades, combined with the influx of returning World War 2 vets in 1945, pushed him out of the opportunity to attend college after graduation.
To compensate, he took night classes at City College of New York while working as a freelance photographer by day. In 1946, he became an apprentice photographer for the prestigious Look Magazine, and it wasn’t long until he was promoted to full-time staff. He married his high school sweetheart Toba Metz in 1948, and they moved into the Greenwich Village neighborhood in Manhattan.
It was around this time that Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and became enamored by the work of directors like Max Ophuls and Elia Kazan. While most of his formative years were spent developing a love for image-making, it was only around the late 1940’s that his ambitions coalesced into a firm desire to make cinema.
DAY OF THE FIGHT (1951)
Kubrick’s first foray into the moving image is relatively nondescript and pedestrian— an independently financed newsreel intended for distribution by the MARCH OF TIME series. Essentially working on spec, Kubrick based DAY OF THE FIGHT off of an earlier photo feature he had done for Look Magazine in 1949 on Irish middleweight boxer Walter Cartier. The short film follows Cartier on the day of his big fight against fellow middleweight Bobby James on April 17th, 1950.
Kubrick and his small crew shot DAY OF THE FIGHT using specialized, daylight-loading cameras that took 100 foot spools of black-and-white 35mm film. The camerawork is extremely conservative, confined to a static tripod except for a single shot that is executed with a subtle dolly. What Kubrick lacks in style and finesse, he makes up here in an excellent visual sensibility.
His background in photography Kubrick gives him the capability to imbue a compelling depth in his compositions, as well as an inherent understanding of light and its importance in storytelling. Narrated by Douglas Edwards and scored by Kubrick’s childhood friend Gerald Fried, DAY OF THE FIGHT falls very much in line with newsreel shorts of the day, incorporating a musical sound that’s very civic and MATLOCK-sounding in its jaunty sense of self-seriousness.
It would be ludicrous to suggest that Kubrick’s signature themes and storytelling fascinations are fully formed on his first time at bat, but Kubrick’s long exploration with man’s relationship to creation and religion sees modest roots in DAY OF THE FIGHT with a sequence that shows Cartier and his twin brother attending church and receiving communion before the match.
Kubrick’s efforts turned out successful when he sold DAY OF THE FIGHT to RKO for four thousand dollars. He only made a profit of $100 after his out-of-pocket production expenses of $3900 were recouped, but he had managed to establish himself as a working director and start his career off on a strong note.
FLYING PADRE (1951)
Kubrick’s second newsreel short, FLYING PADRE, was also created in 1951 and features Father Fred Stadtmuller as its subject—a priest whose parish is so spread out (400 square miles to be exact), he must fly a small plane to get wherever he’s needed. Produced by Burton Benjamin and narrated by CBS announcer Bob Hite, FLYING PADRE is similar in style to DAY OF THE FIGHT and other newsreels of the day.
Shooting again on black and white 35mm film, Kubrick makes use of the bright, even light of the prairie, evoking the earnest sensibilities of a western film (whereas DAY OF THE FIGHT’s treatment of light resembled film noir). The camera, locked to a tripod, is observational and unobtrusive save for one striking shot at the very end where it tracks backwards away from Father Stadtmuller and his plane.
This is the earliest instance of a shot that Kubrick would employ (to striking effect) throughout his work, helping to define his style as a director. Aside from the religious aspect of his subject, Kubrick’s other defining signature—the exploration of man’s relationship to technology—begins here in FLYING PADRE with an in-depth look at how the modern miracle of flight enables Father Stadtmuller to overcome the intimidating challenges of tending to such a large parish.
DAY OF THE FIGHT and FLYING PADRE are highly representative of Kubrick’s humble, journeyman beginnings. These newsreel shorts are devoid of style, feeling very much like a bland product of “the establishment”—a nebulous entity that Kubrick would very soon turn on and stake his career against.
While not particularly notable in their own right, these two newsreel shorts would firmly establish the arrival of one of cinema’s most important and treasured auteurs and enable the opportunity for his first feature.
FEAR & DESIRE (1953)
Aspiring directors making their first features under scrappy, shoestring budgets and/or a shallow pool of production resources is a grand tradition within the art of cinema. Oftentimes, directors’ first films are their most electrifying—a shrill cry of independence and assertion of artistic existence wrought from a primal desire for expression.
Scorsese, Coppola, Cassavettes, Lynch, Malick…. any major director born after World War 2 that you could think of, odds are they have a scrappy, rough-around-the-edges feature at the beginning of their filmographies (with Cassavettes in particular, that’s pretty much ALL you’d find). All of those films– and their maverick makers—owe a debt of gratitude to what could perhaps be considered the original indie debut, Stanley Kubrick’s FEAR AND DESIRE (1953).
Kubrick’s body of work needs no introduction—indeed, he intentionally deprived us of one by writing off his debut feature as a “bumbling amateur exercise” and barring it from public exhibition. He was a director who valued total artistic control over all else, and he would rather have the film world’s first true taste of his talent be something much more polished, like 1955’sKILLER’S KISS.
However, time has shown that Kubrick himself served as his own worst critic when it came to passing final judgment on FEAR AND DESIRE—the film certainly has its share of major flaws, make no mistake, but today’s critics regard it not as an albatross, but as an intellectual curiosity that exposes Kubrick’s vulnerabilities while establishing a platform for future greatness.
FEAR AND DESIRE started out like any other new film project from a burgeoning young director—pregnant with optimistic hopes, excitement, and visions of greatness. Just twenty-five years old at the time, Kubrick quit his job as a photographer at Look Magazine to focus on the project full-time, acquiring the financing when his father cashed in his life insurance policy and his uncle chipped in some earnings from his pharmaceutical business.
Kubrick recruited Howard Sackler, a high school classmate and aspiring poet, to write the screenplay (which probably accounts for the ham-fisted internal monologue voiceovers that pervade the film). Kubrick shot the film silently as a way to stretch his meager $13,000 budget, but he hadn’t planned on the expensive necessity of redubbing the actors’ lines in a studio.
Kubrick was initially proud of his completed first feature, with critics at the time praising the young directors evident promise and talent if not the film itself.However, as Kubrick developed as an artist, he came to see FEAR AND DESIRE as an embarrassment, denouncing it as such in public interviews and burying any possibility of further public screenings by burning the negative.
For decades, FEAR AND DESIRE was touted as Kubrick’s “lost” film, and the only way to see it was via the Kubrick estate or, more recently, a poor-quality VHS bootleg (with Italian subtitles) that was uploaded to Youtube. Thankfully for us—and unfortunately for Kubrick—a print was found recently in the George Eastman Kodak archives and restored to its original glory and released publicly through Kino Lorber and the Library of Congress.
While the ethics of going against the wishes of a deceased filmmaker is another conversation unto itself, FEAR AND DESIRE is nonetheless an important document in the history of cinema that should be preserved.
Set in an unnamed country during an unnamed conflict, Kubrick’s approach to FEAR AND DESIRE uses the generic idea of combat to better access the psychological underpinnings that fascinate him. The story begins when a combat plane crashes in the mountains, and a small squadron of four men must find their way back home safely.
Complicating matters is the fact they’re miles behind enemy lines without any gear, food, or weapons. As they follow the riverbanks towards home, they encounter a lovely native girl, who they tie to a tree so she can’t escape and reveal their presence to the enemy (whose base they’d discovered during a scout).
When one of the squad members loses his self-control and forces himself on the girl– only to kill her as she makes her escape– the squadron recognizes the sincere existential threat of their situation. With mounting desperation, the squadron comes up with a plan to make a last-ditch escape that involves stealing one of the enemy base’s airplanes while leaving behind one of their own to distract guards by firing on them from the river.
As the squadron sets its plan into motion and storms the enemy base, they are confounded to find that the enemy general and his soldiers are their exact look-alikes, further deepening the existential mystery at the heart of FEAR AND DESIRE.
Kubrick’s cast is comprised mainly of unknowns, headed up by Kenneth Harp as Lieutenant Korby and Frank Silvera as Sergeant Mac. Korby is styled in the vein of the traditional romantic hero archetype common in midcentury American cinema— confident and virtuous, but ultimately quite vanilla and devoid of any sort of edge.
Silvera imbues Sergeant Mac with another archetype—the gruff and tough military man, disgruntled by his long experience in the armed forces. Paul Mazursky, who would later go on to become a film director in his own right, plays Private Sidney—a squirrely young recruit who is so affected by his transgressions against Virginia Leith’s Native Girl that he ultimately goes mad (think shades of the Renfield character in DRACULA).
Finally Stephen Coit plays a small, rather unobtrusive role as Private Fletcher, the fourth member of the squadron. In a move befitting a shoestring-budget indie feature, Kubrick performed most of the duties of a film crew himself, with only his wife, Toba Metz, serving as script supervisor, Herbert Lebowitz working as the production designer, and a crew of Mexican day laborers acting as impromptu grips.
In the beginning development of his penchant for total control, Kubrick served as his own cinematographer and editor, shooting the film in black and white mostly for budgetary reasons, but also because he could maximize his experience in lighting for black and white so as to achieve more of a “professional” look. Kubrick and company shot in southern California’s San Gabriel mountains, their shooting style severely limited by a lack of resources.
Special effects were improvised with unconventional equipment, like a crop sprayer that was used for smoke and fog (which naturally made the cast and crew violently ill), or a baby carriage standing in for a dolly. Kubrick’s eye, for the most part, is quite competent and is able to recognize compelling framing.
However, it’s evident that the young filmmaker hadn’t quite grasped the concept of eyelines and spatial geometry. This translates to a rather jarring and incoherent edit, where Kubrick routinely cuts away to close-ups that are framed in awkward angles or brazenly cross the 180 degree line. When combined with a thick layer of overwrought, existential voiceover that tries hard at sounding “profound” only to come off as hackneyed and trite, it’s easy to see why Kubrick would strive so hard to keep FEAR AND DESIRE from being seen by mass audiences.
Childhood friend Gerald Fried, who provided the music for Kubrick’s first newsreel shorts DAY OF THE FIGHT and FLYING PADRE (1951), composed the score for FEAR AND DESIRE, utilizing a bombastic, orchestral sound headlined by an elegiac oboe as a recurring motif.
Low, arrhythmic drums rumble like distant thunder, indicating far-off battles and keeping the tension on a simmer. Kubrick would later be well known for his musical taste, but his scrappy beginnings here don’t show any notable evidence in that regard.
Despite being something of a crash-course in feature filmmaking for the young auteur, several of Kubrick’s long-running thematic explorations make their first appearance in FEAR AND DESIRE. Kubrick’s main fascination was the deconstruction of the human condition, rooting out and exploiting those primal forces that compel us to act for– or against– our fellow man.
He was most interested, ultimately, in what makes us “human” and how fragile and tenuous those circumstances really are. Violence and sex, admittedly, are two polar extremes in the spectrum of human experience, and two of the most potent, uncontrollable forces we will experience in our own lifetimes.
Kubrick would later go on to explore the psychological nature of warfare and combat to much greater degrees in films like PATHS OF GLORY (1957) or FULL METAL JACKET (1987), but FEAR AND DESIRE serves as our first true taste into Kubrick’s mentality towards violence.
As it stands, the violence is FEAR AND DESIRE is rather surface-level, but Kubrick films it in a particularly expressionistic, impactful, way. One memorable instance occurs halfway through the film when the squadron storms a small guard outpost and kills the guards within.
Instead of showing us the explicit act of a knife sliding into the belly of a hapless soldier, Kubrick shows us an extreme close-up of the orange the soldier had been eating prior to being unexpectedly ambushed. His fist squeezes the orange ever tighter until it bursts, spilling juice all over his hand and the floor. Frankly, it’s hard to think of a more graceful and fitting way to communicate the traumatic explosion of a soul as it’s extinguished against its will.
The other thematic pole– sexuality—again better explored in later films like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) and EYES WIDE SHUT (1999), receives the most examination in FEAR AND DESIRE during the sequence with the Native Girl tied to a tree.
Kubrick makes his audience complicit with Private Sidney’s most primitive instincts and desires by repeatedly cutting to close-ups of The Girl’s lips, eyes, hands, etc. Kubrick casts each body part in the harsh light of the male gaze, and it is this same sexuality that The Girl uses to free herself from her bonds and make her ill-fated escape.
The consequences of this development cause Private Sidney to lose himself in the grips of madness, which is yet another big theme present throughout Kubrick’s work: dehumanization and mankind’s mental frailty against forces that are much larger than them, forces which are more often than not supernatural in origin.
In FEAR AND DESIRE, for instance, the squadron encounters their look-alikes at the enemy base, which references the folklore of dopplegangers. The subsequent murder of their look-alikes at their own hands throws the surviving members of the squadron into an existential funk at the end of the film, where they ruminate on the true cost of warfare and whether they can ever truly bring themselves back from the brink they experienced behind enemy lines.
Admittedly, the use of dopplegangers to convey this rather trite philosophical idea screams “film school”, but Kubrick’s sheer commitment to the idea makes it effective. The release of FEAR AND DESIRE came amid a tumultuous period of Kubrick’s life.
He had divorced Toba Metz shortly after production wrapped, and by this point had remarried to an Austrian-born dancer and theatrical designer named Ruth Sobotka. The finished feature was well-received by critics of the day, who offered much more generous praise than the film probably deserved, but it fell far short in what the industry considers “true” success: box office.
Shortly after its release, Kubrick would grow mortified of its shortcomings and suppressed any further release of the film by burning the negative and prohibiting the public exhibition of any bootleg copies or prints. Long considered all but lost, prints of the film began popping up in archival vaults—the most famous case of which was its discovery inside the George Eastman House vaults.
These bootleg prints began to circulate among film circles, helped by the fact that FEAR AND DESIRE had entered into the public domain and couldn’t be recalled by its owner any further. After a long existence locked away in dark basements and vaults, FEAR AND DESIRE is now widely available to the filmgoing public and serves as the intriguing, long-denied introduction to one of the greatest filmographies to ever grace our screens.
THE SEAFARERS (1953)
Following the release of director Stanley Kubrick’s FEAR AND DESIRE (1953), the burgeoning auteur might have been dismayed to find that his first feature-length narrative effort didn’t generate a great deal of forward momentum for his career.
While he gained a good deal of new friends in the critic’s circle, his phone wasn’t exactly ringing off the hook with calls from Hollywood. For Kubrick, there was no turning back– he was now committed as a full-time filmmaker, and until he found success in that line of work, he would have to put food on the table with commissioned work instead.
Luckily, he found such work fairly quickly in the form of THE SEAFARERS (1953), an industrial film for the Seafarers International Union. Hosted by CBS newscaster Don Hollenbeck , THE SEAFARERS exists as a way to articulate SIU values and ideals while enticing prospective new members. Using an unnamed East Coast headquarters location as a reference point, the short film provides an in-depth look into the seafaring industry from a worker’s perspective.
Kubrick’s treatment of the SIU headquarters makes it seem like something of a clubhouse, and considering the fact that the SIU’s members are transient by the nature of their work, the headquarters would essentially need to function as such—a home away from home. The seafaring union and industry as a whole is treated as a very noble entity, committed to the betterment of its members and their families.
As an industry film, it’s fairly unremarkable, but it takes on a much more fascinating aura when viewed in the context of Kubrick’s canon. Shot by Kubrick himself, the film is the director’s first to be shot entirely on color 35mm film.
Kubrick’s confidence in cinematography comes from his background in black and white photography, but that confidence wavers somewhat in the transition to color. Kubrick understands that the way subjects are lit will change in the switch from black and white to color, but his inexperience in the matter causes the image to suffer.
Utilizing a broad, even lighting scheme, Kubrick creates an image that’s a little bit over-exposed, but that also could admittedly be due to the print transfer or the film stock itself. To my eyes, the way that the colors are rendered suggests THE SEAFARERS was shot on cheaper reversal stock instead of negative.
Industry films are by their nature very dry and informational, and THE SEAFARERS is no different in its emphasis on the communication of helpful information at the expense of Kubrick’s personal artistic aesthetic. However, one of Kubrick’s favorite camera moves—the slow, long dolly shot—pops up during the cafeteria segment and gives us a clue as to the identity of the wizard behind the curtain.
THE SEAFARERS is also short on Kubrick’s thematic fascinations as an artist, but there are glimpses into the young director’s developing psyche for those determined to wring meaning from insignificance.
For instance, those wanting to see how Kubrick’s exploration of technology (and mankind’s relationship to it) is depicted in THE SEAFARERS could look to the brief section on how the SIU incorporates machines into their daily operation.
Likewise, one could point to the close-up of a poster in the barbershop featuring a pin-up girl’s breasts as evidence of Kubrick’s fascination with complicated sexual mores. However, this is probably reading way too much into things.
THE SEAFARERS is, ultimately, a minor curiosity in Kubrick’s body of work– notable mainly because of its color photography seven years prior to his first major color work, SPARTACUS (1960), as well as its status as the master filmmaker’s very last short-form work. In terms of the director’s development, THE SEAFARERS doesn’t give us much to go off of, but from a historical standpoint, the film serves as an interesting artifact of a bygone, romantic and idealized era.
KISS (1955)
The release of 1953’s FEAR AND DESIRE did not bring director Stanley Kubrick the kind of career momentum he might have hoped for. Instead of jumping on another feature straight away, Kubrick took a detour with a short industrial film called THE SEAFARERS (1953) as a way to pay the rent.
He wouldn’t make another film for two years, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t busy. He was actively developing the story for his follow-up and scraping the resources together, all the while navigating a divorce from his first wife Toba Metz and taking a second—a prominent New York City ballerina named Ruth Sobotka.
For his follow-up, Kubrick looked back to the world of boxing, which he had depicted in documentary newsreel form in 1951’s DAY OF THE FIGHT (his first filmed effort). Working with FEAR & DESIRE’s screenwriter and aspiring poet Howard Sackler, Kubrick spun a tough, gritty yarn he ultimately called KILLER’S KISS—at once both a noir thriller and a romance whose mainstream sensibilities he hoped would bring him the success that had so far eluded him.
Despite his ambitions, Kubrick’s efforts were not on the most solid of foundations—the twenty-six year old director was on welfare during production, and most of the financing was borrowed once again from his wealthy uncle, the owner of a prominent drug-store in the city.
This time, Kubrick’s gamble paid off with a remarkably accomplished low-budget feature that solidified his talent and applied the lessons he had learned on FEAR AND DESIRE, paving the way for further opportunities and giving the young director a decent platform to build from.
KILLER’S KISS begins inside New York’s iconic, now-demolished Old Penn Station, with a man pacing and smoking as he waits for a train to arrive. His internal voiceover monologue (no doubt the work of Sackler, judging by a similar conceit used in FEAR AND DESIRE) introduces us to his predicament—he’s waiting for a girl that may or may not ever arrive, a girl he’s wrecked his entire life for.
The bulk of the film is a flashback, with Kubrick showing us everything that leads to this point. The man is a boxer named Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), living a spartan existence in a small, dumpy studio apartment within a dilapidated New York neighborhood.
The one window in his place looks out onto the apartment of Gloria (Irene Kane), a beautiful young taxi dancer that he is pining after. One night, he witnesses her being attacked, so he dashes over to save her as her assailant makes his escape. Davey helps Gloria calm down and clean up, with their mutual attraction becoming quickly apparent.
Before they know it, they’ve fallen in love and are making plans to run away together and escape their hardscrabble Gotham existence. But there’s just one problem—her boss, a slick cigar-chomping businessman named Vincent Rapallo (FEAR AND DESIRE’s Frank Silvera)—loves her too, and he’s not going to let her go without a fight.
Davey finds himself drawn deeper into New York’s criminal underworld as he attempts to extricate Gloria from it, and this boxer will have to fight like hell for his happy ending. The performances in KILLER’S KISS are rough and unpolished, much like the film itself, but are leagues beyond the talent on display in FEAR AND DESIRE.
Frank Silvera is the only holdover from Kubrick’s earlier effort, and he shows a decent amount of range as the seedy boss Vincent Rapallo. His worldly, weary cynicism serves as a decent foil to Jamie Smith’s idealistic, naïve boxer. As Davey Gordon, Smith plays well at looking like he’s in over his head, which adds some spice to a character with fairly uncomplicated values and ethics.
As the love interest Gloria Price, Irene Kane fills a necessary void in the story with a soft-edged femme fatale archetype that leaves a lot to be desired. Kubrick’s wife, Ruth, makes a short cameo as Gloria’s deceased sister and accomplished ballerina in a flashback sequence.
Much like FEAR AND DESIRE before it, the shoestring nature of KILLER’S KISS’s production meant that Kubrick himself had to serve as both the cinematographer and editor. Kubrick’s background in photography serves him well here, with the cinematography being one of the film’s strongest assets.
The 1.37:1 black and white 35mm film image might be cheap by its nature, but Kubrick imbues it with dark, rich shadows and a fantastic sense of depth that suggest a budget three times its size. Kubrick lights KILLER’S KISS like a polished Hollywood noir film, creating evocative compositions whose deep focus draws us further into his world.
The camerawork matches this approach, such as in a moment when Kubrick slowly dollies down the length of a dance hall to add grandeur and scale despite the relative cheapness of the technique. Indeed, many of these shots were achieved from the back of a pickup truck, which came in handy when Kubrick’s inability to secure location permits often necessitated a covert approach.
KILLER’S KISS stands out amongst Kubrick’s filmography in that the polish is countered by a measure of spontaneity, a trait that Kubrick would abolish entirely in later works. The film cuts away to gritty street details quite frequently, giving us a sense of place and liveliness that one could see influencing a young John Cassavettes.
Kubrick’s on-location depiction of New York stands as the most potent example of this dynamic—he makes great use of the dramatic skyline and looming architecture to add drama and grit, in the process capturing an authentic, lived-in cityscape.
Contrast these images with Kubrick’s last work, EYES WIDE SHUT (1999), with New York streets being recreated on a soundstage so Kubrick could exert complete control over his shot. This approach extends to the boxing sequences, where Kubrick opts for a handheld documentary look and expressionistic point of view angles that predate Martin Scorsese’s dreamlike fight scenes in RAGING BULL by twenty-five years.
The expressionism on display also extends to a short dream sequence in which the camera screams down a long urban corridor at breakneck speed, the black and white image flipped to its negative. Visually arresting on its own, the shot anticipates the famous space tunnel sequence in 1968’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and is one of the earliest instances of Kubrick’s fondness for one-point perspective in his compositions.
Much like FEAR AND DESIRE before it, Kubrick was forced to re-record the dialogue and sync it to picture in post-production due to the limitations of his production resources. As such, Kubrick relies heavily on the musical contributions of his FEAR AND DESIRE composer, Gerald Fried, to even out an otherwise-awkward sound mix.
Fried’s score is not unlike his previous work with Kubrick, utilizing an orchestral, romantic, and brassy sound. Kubrick and Fried also incorporate a lively mix of jazz and samba music that provides an urban edge and must have felt very contemporary and daring when the film was released.
KILLER’S KISS serves as a neat little distillation of Kubrick’s two main thematic fascinations, violence and sex. The boxing world is inherently violent, of course, but Kubrick’s story seems to merge the two acts—one an act of destruction and the other an act of creation—until their boundaries blur ambiguously.
In the world of KILLER’S KISS, sex is violent and violence is intimate. Nowhere is this blur more apparent than in the film’s climax, where the hero and the villain savagely duke it out against a backdrop of mannequins. Their cold, statuesque beauty echoes Gloria, and on a literal level, we’re visually reminded that the two men are fighting over her as the ultimate prize.
However, their presence underscores the intimate, feminine aspect of violence—the aspect that requires the two fighters to lose themselves in the moment and express their feelings up close with their bodies. The climactic chase sequence also serves as an exploration of dehumanization, with the characters framed in wide shots, dwarfed by monolithic structures and cold, unfeeling cityscapes.
Endless brick walls tower over them in an almost abstract fashion, heightening the hero’s need to escape the city because his relative insignificance within it threatens to consume him entirely. For the longest time, KILLER’S KISS was Kubrick’s first “official” feature, having taken the print of FEAR AND DESIRE out of circulation and burning the negative.
Despite it being shot very similarly, Kubrick did not seem as embarrassed aboutKILLER’S KISS’s roughness and lack of polish. The film itself was received modestly well, enough so that it generated significant momentum into the production of his third feature, THE KILLING (1956).
It’s not hard to see that KILLER’S KISS is a marked improvement over his earlier work, with his evolution very apparent in every frame. We can see that Kubrick’s direction is much more confident, having grasped concepts like pacing and geography while coming up with creative, bold compositions.
KILLER’S KISS shows us a gifted young man coming into his own and starting to find his aesthetic, solidifying tastes that would inform one of the richest and most compelling filmographies the art from would ever see.
THE KILLING (1956)
The release of 1955’s independently-produced KILLER’S KISS made a small splash in film circles, gaining its young director, Stanley Kubrick, a modest amount of attention in the process. An upcoming young television producer named James B. Harris found his own attention particularly captivated by this bold new voice in American cinema, and he felt compelled to help that voice grow louder.
Working together as a producing team, Harris and Kubrick pored through mountains of material in search of their next story—eventually finding it in Lionel White’s crime novel “Clean Break”. After successfully licensing the film rights, Kubrick crafted the story into a script he called THE KILLING, which Harris then took to his contacts at United Artists.
Only a year after the release of KILLER’S KISS, Kubrick found himself prepping his next big project with the support of a respectable studio— a development that Kubrick must have found was equal parts blessing and curse.
While the budget was barely enough for Kubrick to successfully realize his vision, he had access to the studio’s expansive resource pool and was able to inflate the production value using better cameras, lenses, and production design.
However, this also meant that Kubrick now had to deal with unions, permits, and all the other aggravating aspects of filmmaking that kill creativity. Despite these new challenges, Kubrick’s third feature proved the young auteur’s innate talent to a broader audience.
THE KILLING may not be Kubrick’s most famous film, but it serves as a high quality genre exercise told in a challenging, unconventional way. More importantly, it marks Kubrick’s emergence as a mature filmmaker and unparalleled storyteller.
Tied together with an omniscient narrator speaking in the third person, THE KILLING weaves a fractured narrative from multiple points of view. The centerpiece character is Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden), a seasoned criminal on the verge of retirement.
Before he settles down and marries his beloved Fay (Coleen Gray), there’s one last score to take down: a two million dollar payday at the horse track. He assembles a team of bent cops, ace shooters, musclebound bruisers, and compromised bookies to help him orchestrate and execute the elaborate heist.
It’s the perfect crime, both in conception and execution, and Kubrick’s take on the story plays like something of a procedural, detailing the actions of each team member down to the minute. Unbeknownst to Clay and his crew, however, one of his team members, George Peatty (played by Elisha Cook Jr), has leaked word of the heist to his adulterous wife, Sherry (Marie Windsor).
Thinking the promise of untold riches would finally make her love him, George doesn’t anticipate that Sherry will turn right around and inform her secret lover, Val Cannon (Vince Edwards), in a bid to intercept the crew’s big payday. Kubrick’s churning narrative builds to an explosive finale that’s capped by a twist of dark irony when Clay finds that all the meticulous planning in the world can’t account for the unpredictability of chance.
THE KILLING marks the first time in which Kubrick’s cast is comprised mainly of well-known, professional actors and actresses. While this is ostensibly an ensemble film, the story belongs to Hayden, who ably portrays handsome crook Johnny Clay as cool and confident.
As Johnny’s girl, Fay, Colleen Gray does a serviceable job but can’t rise above the limitations of her stereotypical “dependent, supportive love interest” archetype. Seasoned character actor Elisha Cook Jr proves just as captivating to watch as Hayden, injecting an anxious energy into his role as George Peatty, a beta male who lets his wife walk all over him.
Jay C Flippen lends a warm, paternal presence as Marvin Unger, a kindly old bookkeeper and the heist’s financier. Contentious character actor Timothy Carey, in the first of multiple performances under Kubrick’s direction, plays Nikki Arcane – an expert marksman with a wild, unpredictable element to his personality.
As George Peatty’s wife Sherry, Marie Windsor excels at taking advantage of her husband’s adoration and adopting a cynical, bored demeanor. The handsome, cocksure Vince Edwards rounds out the cast as Val Cannon—Sherry’s lover, a young hood, and the one development that Johnny Clay’s meticulous planning couldn’t anticipate.
THE KILLING is notable in the context of Kubrick’s early filmography by virtue of having personally shot everything that came before it. His background in photography provided him with the competency to expose film properly and his eye for visuals allowed for compelling, artistic images— essentially, he had all the hallmarks of a good DP.
With THE KILLING, however, its mere existence as a United Artists film meant that the production was a union job, which further meant that Kubrick had to hire an external director of photography for the first time in his career. His choice was Lucien Ballard, a veteran cinematographer whose work he greatly admired.
Their collaboration, however, was anything but harmonious. Director and cinematographer reportedly did not get along at all, with Kubrick’s pursuit of visual perfection frequently ruffling Ballard’s feathers. Despite this contentious relationship, THE KILLING’s black and white 35mm film visuals are a thing of beauty.
The first of Kubrick’s works to be shot in the widescreen format, THE KILLING’s 1.66:1 aspect ratio allows ample room for the young director’s striking, depth-filled compositions. A low-key, high contrast noir lighting approach gives the film a high-end pedigree, matched by elegantly complex camera moves.
In his essay “The Killing: Kubrick’s Clockwork” (included on Criterion’s 2011 Blu Ray release of the film), writer Haden Guest makes a clever observation about the hidden meaning behind the film’s fluid dolly work:
“Ballard’s gliding camera cuts a neat cross section through a series of connected rooms in its path, transforming the apartment interior into a type of controlled tunnel that exactly describes and limits the possibilities of movement—a striking illustration of entrapment that subtly parallels the camera’s and actor’s “tracks” with those of the horse race.”
Indeed, the interior sets of THE KILLING, artfully designed by Kubrick’s wife Ruth Sobotka as production designer, are reminiscent of a labyrinth—an idea that Kubrick would continue to revisit throughout his career.
The layout of the rooms seem to suggest a finite number of paths for the characters to take, dictating their movements and actions while assimilating them into a complex, cosmic machinery that ultimately renders these same characters insignificant to the grand sweep of fate (or just as potently: chance).
Kubrick routinely takes what would otherwise be several shots and strings them together into one fluid take, and in the process discovers a proclivity towards complicated, yet understated, camerawork that reinforces a story’s themes and that would fundamentally inform his future work.
A further innovation that THE KILLING makes potent use of is a fractured, nonlinear narrative. As assembled by editor Betty Steinberg under Kubrick’s supervision, we see the same scenes several times, but each revisit brings with it a new perspective from the vantage point of another character.
As the drama and tension mount, we see conflicting details and snippets of crucial information that had previously (and strategically) been withheld. The narrator even gets in on the fun, becoming increasingly unreliable and contradictory.
To their dismay, Kubrick and Steinberg were forced to go back and re-edit the film in chronological order after test audiences couldn’t follow their original edit. Thankfully for us, their “conventional” edit proved to be even more of a mess, and their nonlinear cut was reinstated and released to theatres.
THE KILLING’s radical story structure proved to be highly influential in the decades since its release, with Quentin Tarantino’s RESERVOIR DOGS (1992) in particular owing a huge debt to Kubrick’s trailblazing.
Kubrick’s career-long exploration into the psyche of violence and sex enjoys a brief respite in THE KILLING, with Kubrick toning down those fascinations to focus instead on delivering a taut genre picture. Kubrick’s film is most assuredly a crime thriller, but he frequently finds opportunities to color outside the lines and subvert our expectations.
This undermining of genre while simultaneously upholding it would be a trademark of Kubrick’s for the rest of his career, a tangible method by which he could elevate the subject matter and make salient psychological points about the human condition.
Additionally, Kubrick’s knack for regularly creating indelible, iconic imagery begins in earnest with THE KILLING—not so much in specific shots, but in visual ideas. One of the film’s most compelling images is the simple sight of the hauntingly-blank clown mask that Hayden wears during the heist, which one could easily see influencing Christopher Nolan’s bank heist introduction of The Joker in THE DARK KNIGHT (2008).
There’s also the image of a vast fortune of cash sucked up by a vortex of air and billowing away into nothing—a poetic and elegant visual metaphor for the film’s central conceit that chaos and chance will always be there to ruin our best-laid plans.
THE KILLING is revered as an indispensable classic today, but few remember that it was effectively dumped by United Artists when it made its original release on the second half of a double bill (the equivalent of today’s January/February release window).
For most filmmakers, this would be death by poor box office—but Kubrick was not most filmmakers. The film didn’t make much money, but those who saw it were blown away by the 28 year-old director’s undeniable talent, and word of mouth spread through the upper echelons of Hollywood until it reached Kirk Douglas, the man who would take Kubrick’s career to the next level.
Watching THE KILLING with the luxury of hindsight, it becomes immediately apparent that this is truly Kubrick’s first mature, fully realized film. More so than any other film in his canon, THE KILLING makes the case for Kubrick as the link between the old-school, consummate craftsmanship of Old Hollywood (a generation that influenced him immensely) and the radical innovation of New Hollywood (a generation that he would inspire directly).
PATHS OF GLORY (1957)
The war film has long been a staple of cinema, from 1930’s ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT to 1998’s SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Almost every major war in human history has been depicted in some form onscreen, yet the genre persists because the high-charged, ideological nature of warfare makes for compelling drama and action.
While most mainstream works in the genre are romantic glorifications of combat, the most potent stories have taken a distinct anti-war tack, arguing against warfare as a means to solve conflict.
The trend began in earnest during the widespread disillusionment that the Vietnam War engendered and gave us the likes of such classics as THE DEER HUNTER (1978), but one of the strongest anti-war films in cinematic history had already been made almost two decades prior by a rising wunderkind director named Stanley Kubrick.
1956’s THE KILLING put Kubrick on the radar of Hollywood movers and shakers. Kubrick and his producing partner, James B. Harris, needed to capitalize on their momentum and get another project into development, and in short order they acted on Kubrick’s desire to make another war film after the self-perceived failure of his last go at the genre (1953’s FEAR AND DESIRE).
He remembered a book he had read when he was fourteen, Humphrey Cobb’s seminal World War 1 novel “Paths Of Glory”, and subsequently enlisted Harris to license the film rights. The resulting screenplay, written by Kubrick, Calder Willingham, and THE KILLING’s Jim Thompson, aroused the fervent interest of Hollywood superstar Kirk Douglas, whose participation afforded the filmmakers a budget of one million dollars.
While it was the biggest budget Kubrick had worked with to date, it still wasn’t a huge amount of money (even by 1957 standards) with which to make a sweeping war film. Nevertheless, Kubrick and company found themselves in Germany shooting PATHS OF GLORY, a feature that performed modestly at the box office but would come to be heralded as an “important film” and solidify Kubrick’s reputation as a major new voice in the art form.
PATHS OF GLORY takes place in France during World War I. The two warring factions—France and Germany—have dug themselves into sprawling networks of trenches while enduring an agonizingly long stalemate.
A decorated French general, Paul Mireau (George Macready) is tasked by his superior general Broulard (Aldophe Menjou) to break the stalemate and organize a charge through No Man’s land to take The Anthill—a small, heavily fortified enemy encampment.
The land gain is only a few acres at best, but Mireau agrees that it is a worthy endeavor. He selects a promising young colonel named Dax (Kirk Douglas) to plan the offensive. Despite his initial misgivings about the mission’s futility and the likelihood of a staggering casualty rate, Dax accepts the assignment and leads his men up and over the top of the trenches towards certain death.
The charge fails spectacularly, the men falling back like a tidal wave—that is, if they even got out of the trench in the first place. In a bid to save himself from massive embarrassment, General Mireau orders the execution of three men from Dax’s battalion by firing squad for the crime of cowardice.
Dax volunteers to defend these men—who were chosen by lottery—at the mandatory court martial, but he soon realizes that the trial is more akin to a kangaroo court, and these men’s death warrants were signed long before their names were ever chosen.
As the prisoners languish in prison and await the final verdict, Dax races against the clock to exonerate them and deliver justice. When the story draws to a close, PATHS OF GLORY reveals itself as a hard-hitting examination into wartime ethics and the moral conundrums that arise when there is too much investment in an ideological struggle.
Kubrick’s cast for PATHS OF GLORY represents an impressive collection of cinematic heavyweights delivering career-best performances. Douglas takes every opportunity to chew scenery as the idealistic and virtuous Colonel Dax.
Principled and heroic, his former criminal defense lawyer is sharp as a tack and doesn’t let any injustice get past him without condemning it. His working relationship with Kubrick, while paying dividends for both men’s careers, was reportedly contentious at best.
They challenged each other in a way that only two men who truly shared a mutual respect could. Unlike a great deal of directors, Kubrick rarely worked with the same actors over multiple films, and when he did it was only during the first half of his career.
Yes, he collaborated with Sterling Hayden, Timothy Carey, Joe Turkel and Peter Sellers more than once, but their second efforts with the director were in supporting roles. Only Douglas has the distinction of headlining more than one Kubrick film, which speaks volumes as to the nature of their stormy, yet fruitful working relationship. Menjou and Macready form something of a two-faced antagonist, with Macready being the cold, pragmatic yin to Menjoy’s warm, grandfatherly yang.
Macready’s performance as the scarred, ruthlessly vindictive General Mireau is particularly notable for its’ dark, Kubrick-ian irony—that of a man who will dress himself up in the colors of honor and patriotism to justify his twisted agenda.
Kubrick’s supporting cast is well-assembled, with Ralph Meeker gaining the most screen time as Corporal Philippe Paris, a disgruntled idealist chosen for the firing squad. His uncompromising masculinity reminds me of a proto- Josh Brolin, and his is easily one of the most memorable performances in the film.
As the second doomed man—Private Pierre Arnaud— Joe Turkel brings an unconventional physicality to the role, one which would help him greatly when Kubrick called on him to play the ghostly bartender in 1980’s THE SHINING. THE KILLING’s Timothy Carey plays the third man—Private Ferol—a self-described “social undesirable”.
Something of an overgrown man-child, Ferol regresses to a simpering, childlike state when faced with the immediate prospect of death. Carey’s second performance for Kubrick would also be his last—his increasingly difficult behavior and bad habit of scene stealing and unpredictable performances led to Kubrick souring on him.
A run-in with the law during the shoot was the last straw for Kubrick and Harris, and they subsequently fired him before he had shot all of his scenes, requiring the use of a body double to finish his performance.
Finally, there’s Christiane Harlan, who plays the small role of the captive German girl singing a packed beer house of French soldiers during the film’s closing sequence. Her unsteady yet ethereal performance is captivating simply because she is the first female presence that we encounter in the film, and the story literally stops in its tracks to lose itself in her beauty.
This part of the film might’ve been no more than a footnote in Kubrick’s filmography had it not been for the fact that he ended up falling in love with this woman, and would divorce his wife, Ruth Sobotka, a year later in order to marry her instead. This time, the marriage would stick, with Christiane and Stanley remaining together until his death in 1999.
Kubrick’s filmography is littered with unforgettable images, but PATHS OF GLORY is the first instance in his canon where the cinematography is truly gorgeous. Shot by cinematographer George Krause, the black and white 35mm film image is artfully composed to fill the 1.66:1 widescreen frame.
The film’s camera movement is notable in that it is where Kubrick’s signature aesthetic truly coalesces and emerges. His use of the dolly, for instance, is compelling and purposeful, often letting such moves go on for a long time in order to establish scope and mood.
One instance is the Anthill charge, which unfolds almost entirely in one lateral-moving dolly that tracks parallel to the action. Another moment takes place shortly beforehand, with Douglas marching down the long trenches in an unbroken shot while a flank of soldiers look on and explosions rock the ground above him.
This shot in particular also shows off Kubrick’s affinity for one-point perspective compositions, employed as a way to lure the audience deeper into his meticulously-crafted world. Furthermore, Kubrick makes subtle use of zoom lenses during the charge sequence, which introduces an element of documentary to the proceedings while linking Kubrick to the directors of the New Hollywood school—a generation of filmmakers who made frequent use of zoom lenses in a bid to inject reality and immediacy into their work while rejecting the polished techniques of their Golden Age forebears.
In his fourth feature, Kubrick focuses quite acutely on music and its effect on storytelling, acting with a conviction and sense of purpose that was missing from his previous work. More than five decades removed from the film’s release, we know that Kubrick would become well known for his excellent ear for classical music and its placement in his work.
More often than not, such moments have become some of cinema’s most enduring combinations of sound and image. Later works would increasingly do without an original score entirely, with Kubrick himself publicly stating that nothing new could compare to the masterworks of the great classical composers, so why use anything else?
PATHS OF GLORY marks the earliest instance of this aspect of Kubrick’s aesthetic, with Kubrick opening the film with a rendition of the French national anthem, “Marseillaise”. He then goes on to include a small number of other classical cues, like Johann Strauss’ “Kunsterleben Op. 316” during an Officer’s Ball sequence.
This image in particular—aristocratic men and women waltzing to classical music in large, opulent spaces—would itself become a recurring motif throughout Kubrick’s career. For the most part, however,PATHS OF GLORY relies on Gerald Fried’s original score. Having scored all of Kubrick’s films up to this point, Fried drastically departs from his usual swelling, orchestral sound for the film. Instead, he opts for a minimalistic and militaristic snare drum/trumpet combo that keeps the energy up and the tension roiling.
PATHS OF GLORY ruminates quite heavily on the nature of war and violence, a topic that held Kubrick’s interest his entire life. The film looks at violence as an agent of discipline, as well as how conflict rooted in ideology causes us to dehumanize the opposition as “the other” and justify actions that would seem outright barbaric in the cold light of day (like sending three innocent men to their deaths so that a high-ranking officer can keep his reputation untarnished).
Interestingly enough,PATHS OF GLORY is the rare instance in Kubrick’s filmography where the perspective sides with the moral and virtuous character—in other words, the traditional “hero”. His later works would examine similar ideas about dehumanization and madness, but from the perspective of the afflicted, ultimately giving into the darkness within.
PATHS OF GLORY also sees the beginning of Kubrick’s on-screen fascination with baroque architecture, most notably in the choice of location for the French army’s chateau headquarters— eagle-eyed viewers might recognize the chateau location as the same one used for Alain Resnais’ fundamentally haunting LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961) .
Kubrick often frames his subjects in a wide shot during these scenes, allowing the ornate, gilded interiors and echoing marble halls to overwhelm them with insignificance (while also providing an ironic visual counterpoint to the officers’ admittedly barbaric, uncivilized judgment of three innocent men).
Kubrick also contrasts the spacious, royal nature of the chateau—home to the well-fed and well-dressed elite of the French leadership—with the gritty, mud-soaked trenches in which the rank and file grunts carry out their orders.
The soldier vs. officer/pawn vs king metaphor at play here is quite deliberate—Kubrick’s love of chess profoundly influences his sense of dramaturgy. PATHS OF GLORY is the first of Kubrick’s films to use baroque imagery to convey salient points about class conflict, but it wouldn’t be last—from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), to BARRY LYNDON (1975), all the way to EYES WIDE SHUT (1999), Kubrick’s filmography is dominated by this distinct architectural style and the cultural attitudes it engenders.
PATHS OF GLORY marks a huge step up in Kubrick’s development as an artist and a filmmaker. In terms of scale alone, Kubrick proves himself to be the real deal. The complex staging of the central charge sequence shows that Kubrick could handle a grand epic just as well as an intimate heist thriller—indeed his next movie gig came about precisely because he proved he could handle a large scale.
While it performed as expected at the box office (read: not well), PATHS OF GLORYnonetheless holds up today as one of the best war films ever made—an assertion backed up by the Library of Congress when it was added to the National Film Registry in 1992.
SPARTACUS (1960)
A filmmaker’s development happens gradually, over the course of a lifetime. His or her aesthetic is informed by a series of experiences, experiments, and ideas that coalesce through repeated trial and error. Once in a while, however, a singular event or experience can have such an impact that it can alter the course of a filmmaker’s development almost instantaneously. In the case of Stanley Kubrick, the events of the year 1960 proved to be such an experience.
Everything he had done up to that point had suggested an artist who ultimately aspired to large-scale, conventional Hollywood epics—each of his first four features had eclipsed the other in scope and ambition, and his successful rendering of World War I trench combat and collaboration with superstar Kirk Douglas in 1957’s PATHS OF GLORY suggested that he had the chops to successfully take on a big, old-fashioned Hollywood epic.
For all intents and purposes, he proved his bonafides and delivered a successful, Oscar-winning picture in the form of 1960’s SPARTACUS. The success of the film undoubtedly boosted Kubrick’s reputation and invaluably helped in solidifying the course of his career—but not in the way we might expect.
The seed of SPARTACUS was planted when screen icon Kirk Douglas lost the title role to Charlton Heston in William Wyler’s BEN-HUR (1959). The blow to his ego compelled Douglas to set up his own project to rival Wyler’s, one that would focus on the classic tale of a slave revolt led by slave-turned-gladiator Spartacus.
He would produce the film through his own production company and take the title role for his own. His choice for screenwriter proved highly controversial—blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, who by this point had been living in exile from the studio system after his outing as a Communist sympathizer during Joe McCarthy’s Red Scare hearings, sustaining himself by writing under a series of pseudonyms.
Douglas hoped to deal a fatal blow to the integrity of the anti-Communist movement by allowing Trumbo to use his real name, proving himself every bit as virtuous and idealistic as the screen heroes he regularly portrayed.
Trumbo and Douglas envisioned the biblical-era story of SPARTACUS as an allegory for modern-day concerns like the Civil Rights Movement and the McCarthy hearings (best epitomized during the film’s iconic “I Am Spartacus!” sequence), a tactic that undoubtedly gave the film some much-needed relevancy and immediacy.
Director Anthony Mann was originally hired to direct SPARTACUS, but after a week of clashing with Douglas and the film’s considerable scale, he was unceremoniously fired. Douglas remembered the fruitful, if contentious, working relationship that he had with Stanley Kubrick during the production of PATHS OF GLORY, and so he called on the young auteur to step in and save the film.
Kubrick’s subsequent realization of SPARTACUS is a peculiar albatross in his filmography, mainly because it is the only one that doesn’t feel like it bears his stamp. Admittedly, it doesn’t—for the first—and only— time in his career, Kubrick’s contract under Douglas severely limited his creative freedom and mandated the toning down of his aesthetic in favor of an old-school, Hollywood epic style.
While the film is absolutely stunning from a technical standpoint, the result of Kubrick’s muzzling is a film that lacks genuine heart and soul. SPARTACUS is set in ancient Rome during the year 70 B.C. A proud, stubborn slave named Spartacus is taken from the salt mines of Libya and sold to Batiatus (Peter Ustinov), a well-known gladiatorial trainer who runs a prominent school outside the Roman capital.
Forced into Batiatus’ fleet of burgeoning gladiators, Spartacus is disgusted by the idea of killing another man for the mere entertainment of others, but his talent for fighting and bravery is undeniable. His conviction and sense of morality makes him an admired figure amongst the other gladiators, and when a revolt unexpectedly flares up inside Batiatus’ compound, Spartacus becomes the slaves’ de facto leader, tasked with delivering them to freedom.
Spartacus and his charges ride toward the sea, freeing the slaves along every town and accumulating a devoted army of their own. Simultaneously, he finds love and happiness with Varinia (Jean Simmons), a slave girl from the gladiator school.
They take each other as man and wife, and begin dreaming of a world where their child will be born free. As word of Spartacus’ exploits reach the marble halls of the Roman Senate, a ruthlessly pragmatic politician named Crassus (Laurence Olivier) draws up plans to suppress Spartacus’ slave uprising before it ever begins.
With his back to the sea and the Roman armies closing in on him from all sides, Spartacus will have to fight for not only his freedom, but for the freedom of his family and his people. At first glance, Douglas and Kubrick’s second consecutive collaboration appears to be even more fruitful than their last— Douglas’ towering performance as the proud, virtuous Spartacus is one of the best of his career, after all.
However, their collaboration in SPARTACUS quickly fell prey to a collision of egos and stubbornness. Kubrick allegedly had a fundamental issue with the fact that the Spartacus character had no compelling faults or quirks, his ire further stoked by his complete lack of creative input on the script.
Douglas’ impression of Kubrick’s artistic integrity took a substantial hit when Kubrick was quick to volunteer his name to replace Trumbo’s if the script were to run into trouble with the blacklist gatekeepers. This war of opinions between the two men festered throughout the long, arduous shoot, ultimately ruining their working relationship, if not their friendship, for good.
Kubrick had no fear of spurning his collaborators for what he perceived as the greater good of the project, but in the case of Douglas—the man who had almost single-handedly turned Kubrick from a nobody into a major Hollywood director—perhaps Kubrick went too far. It’s a miracle that the film turned out as cohesive and confident as it did.
Kubrick’s collaboration with the rest of the cast was not as dramatic, thankfully. Master thespian Laurence Olivier plays the primary antagonist, Crassus, with a cool, smoldering demeanor. In the infamous “snails or oysters” deleted scene, Crassus is revealed to be a bisexual—perhaps one of the earliest instances of such a character in cinematic history.
Jean Simmons plays Spartacus’ love interest, Varinia, with a maternal, feminine air that’s perhaps a little too glamorous for a slave (but effective all the same). Rounding out the cast is Charles Laughton as the portly senator Gracchus, John Gavin as a young Julius Caesar, and Tony Curtis as Spartacus’ best male friend and fellow slave, Antoninus.
Last but not least, there’s Peter Ustinov as Batiatus— the slave trainer and unexpected benefactor in Spartacus’ quest— whose sweaty, breathy performance earned him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. As it stands, Ustinov would be the only actor to win the gold statue for performing in a Kubrick film—a fact that must have incensed Douglas to no end judging by the ambition that compelled him to make the film in the first place.
As befitting a grand Hollywood epic, SPARTACUS’ cinematography is sweeping and colorful. One might even mistake it for a David Lean film, which is ironic considering that Lean was initially approached to direct and turned down the opportunity.
The cinematographer, Russell Metty, was already in place when Kubrick came aboard, and the two men clashed almost instantly. Reportedly, Metty was infuriated by Kubrick’s demanding pursuit of visual perfection and lack of regard for the cinematographer’s creative input.
As a result, Kubrick personally shot most of the film himself, his brilliance with light and composition earning SPARTACUS an Oscar for Best Cinematography—ironically, it was Metty who took home the gold statue on awards night instead of Kubrick. Shooting for the first time in the anamorphic 2.35:1 aspect ratio, Kubrick (and Metty) use every available grain of the Technicolor 35mm frame to render a lush, expensive-looking image.
Kubrick’s first feature in color employs a copious amount of sweep crane and dolly shots to sell the film’s scale, but it doesn’t contain the same kind of alluring energy that similar shots have in his other, more personal work.
Indeed, the film appears to be the work of another director entirely. Many of Kubrick’s thematic explorations that have made his other works so rich and creatively potent are mostly discarded here in favor of a straightforward, un-ironic and earnest narrative.
Like the short THE SEAFARERS (1953) before it, SPARTACUS sees Kubrick working mainly as a director for hire, with little control over the script or the production. The film’s violent aspects allow Kubrick to indulge in his visual meditations of man’s inhumanity to man in the form of fighting to the death for sporting and entertainment’s sake.
Working solidly within the “swords and sandals” epic genre, Kubrick nonetheless manages to subvert it in the film’s climax, which sees Spartacus and Antoninus fighting to kill each other—not for the entertainment of others, however, but so as to save the other from an even-worse fate on the cross.
SPARTACUS was a monster success when it released, easily becoming Universal’s biggest moneymaker in history until it was dethroned by 1970’s AIRPORT. It received widespread critical praise and won four Oscars, but more importantly, it made history when Trumbo’s employment effectively ended the Blacklist and prominent politicians (including President John F. Kennedy) disregarded the cries of anti-Communist protesters as they stepped inside the theatre.
Despite the film’s success, Kubrick personally disowned the film (obviously to not as far a degree as he did with his first feature, FEAR AND DESIRE (1953)). However, SPARTACUS marks a crucial turning point in Kubrick’s development as an artist—whether he acknowledged it or not.
Had he been happy with the final product and his overall shooting experience, Kubrick quite easily could have made a career of making supersized epics and become a David Lean-type for a new generation of filmmakers. Instead, his need for directorial control—a need that trumped cooperation or compromise—would lead him down a very different path.
SPARTACUS marked the end of Kubrick’s “Old Hollywood” phase of conventional filmmaking techniques, with his disappointing experience on the film causing his attention to gaze towards the wave of experimental art films trickling out of Europe—films that would revolutionize Hollywood and place Kubrick himself at the cutting edge of an evolving art form.
LOLITA (1962)
The exhausting production experience of 1960’s SPARTACUS left its young director, Stanley Kubrick, in a state of profound disenchantment. He found that he could not peacefully work within the rigid demands and expectations of the American studio system, which understandably poses a fundamental problem to an artist who simultaneously values complete control while aspiring to direct large-scale Hollywood films.
After some deep reflection, Kubrick found that the answer to his malaise didn’t lie in his native United States whatsoever—it laid across the Atlantic in Europe, where a new wave of filmmakers were enjoying total artistic autonomy and creative freedom and, as a result, creating radical, groundbreaking films.
In looking for his next project, Kubrick and his producing partner James B. Harris settled on Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel “Lolita”, about a man’s torrid relationship with a barely-teenage girl. They hired Nabokov himself to adapt the novel into a screenplay, and set up their production camp in England, far from the watchful eye of the American studio system.
As Kubrick’s first outright stab at the comedy genre, LOLITA(1962) is laced with the kind of cheeky black humor that only a deviously mischievous man such as Kubrick could dream up. After the grandiosity of SPARTACUS’ production, Kubrick used LOLITA to scale down his aesthetic for a back-to-basics approach.
In tackling such extremely sensitive subject matter, Kubrick must’ve known that he was making a controversial film, but what he couldn’t have anticipated was just how much he would have to compromise his vision to even get it released. Whereas other directors might falter or back down in the face of controversy, Kubrick doubled down in his adaption of lurid LOLITA, thus establishing his reputation as one of the boldest, most controversial voices in cinema.
Though filmed entirely in England, LOLITA is set in the fictional town of Ramsdale, located somewhere within the state of New Hampshire. A sophisticated, well-read college professor named Humbert Humbert (James Mason) has just moved to town, having taken a teaching position at the local college.
He rents a little room in the upstairs of a home owned by one Charlotte Haze (Shelly Winters), an eccentric middle-aged widow. Almost immediately, Humbert finds himself intensely attracted to Charlotte’s nubile teenage daughter, Lolita (Sue Lyon). As he settles into his new home, he dances around the line of appropriateness with Lolita, who’s aware enough of her effect on men to use it to her advantage and tease Humbert’s yearnings.
To keep Charlotte’s suspicions at bay, Humbert marries her and takes Lolita as his stepdaughter—but it’s only a matter of time until Charlotte discovers Humbert’s true feelings about her daughter and, in her grief, throws herself headlong into the path of an oncoming car.
Humbert, who is now perhaps the happiest widower there ever was, sets off with Lolita on a cross-country road trip to find a new town to settle in. However, even a change of scenery isn’t enough to obscure their torrid affair from the prying eyes of neighbors and friends, especially those of one man in particular—Claire Quilty (Peter Sellers), an eccentric playwright and television writer with designs of his own to secure the affections of alluring young Lolita.
LOLITA is, admittedly, stuffed with truly reprehensible characters possessing significant moral shortcomings. It’s a credit to the cast’s talents and Kubrick’s eye for performance that they end up coming across as undeniably charismatic. James Mason confidently takes on the dangerous, potentially career-ending role of Professor Humbert Humbert.
His urbane, sophisticated sensibilities appeal to the audience in a reassuring, paternal fashion, making it easier to forgive his monstrous qualities while simultaneously making us complicit in them. Shelly Winters is inspired casting as the widow Charlotte Haze, a vain aging beauty who is so desperate for love and companionship that she flaunts her insecurities in loud, tacky clothing.
Sue Lyon imbues the titular role of Lolita with a bored, sultry affection and wisdom beyond her years. With her calculated manipulation of Humbert’s emotions, she’s every bit as deceitful and mischievous as her elders— if not more so. Legendary character actor Peter Sellers, who pioneered the idea of disguising oneself in multiple personas in a single project, plays avant-garde playwright Clare Quilty with a pretentious, anxious affection.
An aristocratic hedonist, Quilty reflects the shifting mores and liberal attitudes that shaped the counterculture of the 1960’s. Sellers is easily the most entertaining member of the cast, indulging in his love of disguise by having Quilty orchestrate various personas (most notably the proto-Dr. Strangelove German psychologist, Dr. Zempf) in a bid to steal Lolita out from under Humbert’s nose.
Sellers’ irreverent performance extends all the way to his peculiar dialect and manner of speech, which he reportedly modeled after Kubrick’s own. Shot by cinematographer Oswald Morris, LOLITA marks Kubrick’s return to the black and white 35mm film format.
Oswald and Kubrick enrich the image with a high contrast, polished look that belies the film’s independent pedigree. While the visual presentation itself is relatively minimalist and sedate, Kubrick’s impeccable eye for composition graces his composition with compelling depth and meaning.
The camerawork is low key and subtle, favoring graceful dolly and crane movements that don’t call attention to their inherent complexity. For instance, Kubrick built the Haze house set in such a way that he could dolly and crane through floors and walls to establish a sense of spatial continuity.
This technique can be seen in many modern films, especially in those of Kubrick acolyte David Fincher, who used his 2002 feature PANIC ROOMto build upon Kubrick’s foundations with similar, yet highly stylized and exaggerated, movements.
Funnily enough, this is not the only cue that Fincher took from LOLITA—the film’s poster tagline, “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” would be repurposed by Fincher for the 21st century in the advertising for THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010).
Kubrick completes the tone of his acerbic, pitch-black comedy by incorporating the music of Nelson Riddle, who trivializes (in a good way) the characters’ sordid actions with a lighthearted, bouncy jazz score that also incorporates a playful “cha-cha-cha” samba theme for Lolita—an apt musical reflection of Lolita’s dual nature as innocent and seductress.
The film’s winking tone is absolutely a product of its time—a necessity of its making under the oppressively restrictive Hays Code and the stern, watchful eye of the Catholic Legion of Decency. Even if the film were to be made again today, freed from the constraints that Kubrick personally felt neutered his vision, it could be argued that LOLITA wouldn’t be nearly as effective.
The playful skirting around of abject indecency with thinly-veiled double entendres and innuendo is directly responsible for LOLITA’s charm, and allows Kubrick to explore complicated sexual ideas from a space of relative social safety.
By highlighting sexual deviancy and quirkiness within otherwise well-adjusted people, LOLITA predicts the sexual revolution of the late 1960’s, incorporating barely-disguised references to swingers and pornography (it’s revealed toward the end that Quilty wanted Lolita to shoot an “art film”). At other times, Kubrick doesn’t even bother to hide the innuendo—the name of the summer camp that Lolita attends is Camp Climax, for god’s sake.
LOLITA affords ample opportunity for Kubrick to explore other thematic and aesthetic fascinations. His love for one-point-perspective images results in a recurring shot that follows Humbert’s car as it drives away from us en route to Quilty’s house, full of purposeful malice.
The climactic murder of Quilty is staged in an artful manner that stays consistent with Kubrick’s artful depictions of violence. Instead of directly showing Humbert shoot Quilty to death, Kubrick stages their actions so that Quilty first crawls behind the meager cover of a painting depicting Victorian-era woman, with the image bullet tearing a hole in her cheek and presumably continuing along its trajectory into Quilty’s body.
LOLITA’s baroque imagery, evident in both the Victorian portrait as well as the opulent mansion that surrounds it, calls to mind similar occurrences throughout Kubrick’s career—notably BARRY LYNDON (1975) and EYES WIDE SHUT (1999). Additionally, his usual depiction of the bourgeoisie—aristocrats waltzing in ballrooms to classical music—receives a modern American twist in LOLITA in the form of a high school dance.
Kubrick only made two outright comedies in his career—LOLITA and its 1964 follow-up, DR STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB—and its worth noting that both films are decidedly dark in their comic sensibilities.
As an artist, Kubrick valued pitch-black irony, and both LOLITA and DR. STRANGELOVE are absolutely dripping with them. Made close together, chronologically speaking, and under similar conditions, LOLITA and DR. STRANGELOVE exist as companion pieces, complementary to each other in surprising ways.
Kubrick’s artistic explorations throughout his career can be charted according to the opposing poles of sex and violence. LOLITA is ostensibly a film about sex, the ultimate act of creation, whereas DR. STRANGELOVE is a film about war, the ultimate act of destruction.
Their shared comic affections and visual style bind them together, giving us perhaps the most straightforward insight into Kubrick’s artistic profile before he would obscure it with the expressionistic, experimental works of his later career.
LOLITA found commercial and critical success when it was released in 1962, but more importantly it marked the beginning of Kubrick’s reputation as an auteur provocateur and subverter of genre. His expatriation to England gave him an artistic freedom and expanded worldview that he never could have had on American shores.
He was free to work as he saw fit, a development that allowed him to create one uncompromising masterpiece after the other.
DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)
The second half of the twentieth century was marked by a profound existential malaise brought about by the rise of the atomic bomb and its ability to throw the world into a nuclear holocaust at the drop of a hat. The Cold War transcended conventional notions of armed conflict and became a permanent state of tension and caution where the slightest miscommunication could set off the end of the world as we knew it.
When faced with such a morbid, seemingly hopeless existence, what can one do but simply laugh at the absurdity of it all? Enter director Stanly Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB, released during the height of nuclear escalation in 1964 and arguably one of the most defining films of the twentieth century.
After finishing 1962’s cheeky sex comedy, LOLITA, Kubrick grew fascinated with the idea of mankind’s demise by our own hands through nuclear warfare. Ever the dutiful researcher, Kubrick read everything he could find on the subject and found a story he wanted to tell in Peter George’s cautionary thriller novel, “Red Alert”.
In securing the film rights, Kubrick and his producing partner James B. Harris initially planned to create a straight adaption in the thriller genre. However, Harris was at this time beginning to aspire to a directing career of his own, and he amicably ended his partnership with Kubrick during preproduction.
Left to his own devices, Kubrick started toying with the idea of transforming the film into a black comedy, finding that the acknowledgement of the utter absurdity inherent in voluntary nuclear warfare actually enhanced the effectiveness of his message.
Towards this end, Kubrick brought in noted playwright Terry Southern to fashion his script into satire— in the process, creating the eccentric titular character of Dr. Strangelove and giving the film its absurdly long name. Half a century after the film’s release, DR. STRANGELOVE still holds it own as a relevant and entertaining piece of pop culture and makes a case as Kubrick’s first true masterpiece.
DR. STRANGELOVE details an utterly absurd—but no less plausible—scenario in which mankind might meet its end. At a nondescript Air Force base, General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) has gone rogue and ordered a full-scale nuclear strike on Russia without authorization from his superiors or the President.
A paranoid conspiracy theorist, Ripper’s motivation for the strike is crystal clear only to him— the Communists are out to steal our “precious bodily fluids” and will most certainly gain supremacy through them if they aren’t totally destroyed immediately.
He barricades himself in his office with a British RAF Captain named Mandrake (Peter Sellers), who attempts to avert crisis by tricking the stubborn Ripper into telling him the recall codes. Meanwhile, President Merkin Muffley (Sellers again) tries to regain control and diffuse the situation in the War Room.
His efforts are derailed by the over-aggressive warmongering of General “Buck” Turgidson (George C. Scott) as well as the wheelchair-bound nuclear scientist Dr. Strangelove (Sellers once more) who can’t quite shake his old Nazi convictions about genetic purity and welcomes the nuclear holocaust as an opportunity to create a new master race underground via prestigious breeding with sexually desirable and genetically perfect women.
As the masters of the universe seek to avert Armageddon on the ground, a lone B-52 manned by Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) takes a direct hit from an incoming Russian missile, which damages their communications systems.
Unable to receive the recall commands from the ground, Major Kong and his crew of bombardiers fly on into the heart of Russia to deliver their nuclear payload—a mission that Pickens will personally see to its completion. Kubrick’s message is clear—the slightest miscommunication can spell our doom, and in the case of DR. STRANGELOVE, that miscommunication results in a comedy of disastrous proportions.
DR. STRANGELOVE boasts one of the most eclectic and talented casts to ever assemble under Kubrick’s supervision. Peter Sellers headlines the film in multiple roles, a development caused by studio mandate. Columbia Pictures—rightly or wrongly— attributed the success of LOLITA to Seller playing multiple roles, and decreed Sellers do the same in DR. STRANGELOVEas a contingent of their financing the film.
Sellers arguably turns in the best work of his career here, giving Captain Mandrake the requisite fussy airs of a British serviceman while modeling his President Merkin Muffley off the self-serious affectations of Presidential aspirant Adlai Stevenson, and Dr. Strangelove off of the grand traditions of German Expressionist cinema (and in the process creating one of the most indelible and unique characters in film history).
Sellers hits it out of the park with every character he plays in DR. STRANGELOVE, and while he would never collaborate again with Kubrick, his work in the film serves as a fitting sendoff to their fruitful partnership.
To fill out the rest of his mostly-male ensemble, Kubrick turned to actors both old and new. After their successful collaboration in 1956’s THE KILLING, Kubrick was able to lead Sterling Hayden out of retirement to play General Jack Ripper, an all-around alpha male typical of the midcentury military-industrial complex.
Venerated character actor George C. Scott plays the ornery, blustering role of General Buck Turgidson. Turgidson has such a personal axe to grind against the Russians that he’s practically eager to initiate a nuclear war, dismissing the massive American casualties such an act would create as a small price to pay for ensuring his beloved country’s dominance.
The role of Major Kong was originally supposed to be also played by Sellers, but was ultimately filled by American actor Slim Pickens. Pickens essentially appears here as he was in real life—a flamboyant Texan and blindly loyal straight shooter. James Earl Jones also appears in the small role of Lt. Zogg, one of Kong’s bombardiers and the only man on the B-52 to question the validity of their command.
Kubrick’s films are normally praised more for their technical proficiency than their acting, but DR. STRANGELOVE’s cast more than holds it own against Kubrick’s considerable visual flair, bringing it all home with a manic energy unparalleled in even most screwball comedies.
The cinematography of DR. STRANGELOVE finds Kubrick in a transitory phase of his visual style. His aesthetic arguably serves as a bridge between the polished glamor of Old Hollywood filmmaking and the rough edges of the New Wave, withDR. STRANGELOVE in a sense becoming a bridge inside of that bridge.
While Kubrick and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor shoot DR. STRANGELOVE on black and white 35mm film and give it a relatively straightforward, polished presentation, the maverick director peppers the film with experimental, cutting edge touches— like rack zooms that highlight information inside the B-52 plane, or the chaotic, handheld cinema verite rendering of the Air Force base battle (which predated the style popularized by Steven Spielberg’s SAVING PRIVATE RYAN by nearly thirty four years).
When working inside a studio set environment, Kubrick favors high contrast, low-key lighting and compositions that favor depth and minimal camera movement. The striking visual presentation, however, owes less to the cinematography and more to the iconic set design by legendary production designer Ken Adam.
Famous for his larger-than-life supervillain lair sets on the JAMES BOND series, Adam proves to be an inspired choice to realize Kubrick’s outsized vision of absurd grandiosity. He echoes Kubrick’s propensity for depth, designing hard, angular sets like The War Room and General Ripper’s office with strong lines that converge onto a singular point.
The War Room in particular is an unassailable icon of set design, perfectly reinforcing the characters’ delusions of grandeur and in the process becoming one of the most recognizable sets in cinematic history. The idea of DR. STRANGELOVE as a transitory film in Kubrick’s filmography also extends to his treatment of music.
While Laurie Johnson is credited as the film’s composer, the majority of the music stems from either pre-recorded material or adaptations of preexisting material. What original score appears does so mainly during the B-52 bomber sequences, but even then it is an appropriation of preexisting material—the military hymn “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, rendered with snare drums, trumpets, and men humming in low unison that suggest the steady, unstoppable encroach of war.
Kubrick’s mischievous nature also results in bookending DR. STRANGELOVE with a pair of cheeky and cheery pop songs that make ironic counterpoints to the images they accompany.
An instrumental cover of “Try A Little Tenderness” opens the film under stock footage of jet fighters refueling in mid-air, further emphasizing the sexualized nature of the process while also foreshadowing one of the film’s key themes (sex as a fundamental motivator behind conflict).
Kubrick then closes DR. STRANGELOVE with the mother of all showstoppers—a cataclysmic nuclear war (again realized using stock footage of nuclear tests) set to Vera Lynn’s romantic ballad “We’ll Meet Again”. Only a sense of humor as perverse as Kubrick’s could’ve thought of this juxtaposition of sound and image, and he found it so effective that he would continue to break new ground with this technique for decades to come.
While Kubrick never really established a concrete visual style for himself like, say, David Fincher or Wes Anderson, he nonetheless managed to make his stamp on his work using recurring themes, camera techniques, and an overbearing sense of dark irony.
In that regard, DR. STRANGELOVE is the first point in Kubrick’s filmography where everything coalesces into what is unmistakably “a Kubrick film”. Certain storytelling techniques—the omniscient narrator speaking in the third person, or favoring one-point perspectives in his compositions—are present throughout DR. STRANGELOVE and point to Kubrick’s decidedly unique worldview.
However, it’s in the exploration of the duality of sex and violence that the director’s mark is made apparent. The film explores the idea of violence as a response that ultimately stems from sexual frustration. All the characters in DR. STRANGELOVE are sexually frustrated in one fashion or another—General Ripper equates the male orgasm in intercourse with losing his “essence” and denies his “precious bodily fluids” to those who seek it.
General Buck Turgidson is caught in a distracting, schoolboy-esque affair with his secretary. Dr. Strangelove is obsessed with the morbid idea of playing a central role in repopulating the earth with a bevy of beautiful women in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Even the pilots in the B-52 are seen ogling Playboy centerfolds as they fly towards their target.
The characters’ sexual dysfunction bleeds over into their professional lives as leaders of the free world, and the relatively easy access to nukes make for quick, convenient, and effective bluffs when their fragile egos are threatened.
Kubrick was well known for his brilliance at playing chess, and he draws the story of DR. STRANGELOVE as a game of chess writ large where we are the pawns, beholden to the whims of our kings and knights who are too involved in their petty affairs to realize that they are actually court jesters instead.
DR. STRANGELOVE was originally supposed to debut to test audiences on a very fateful day: November 22nd, 1963— the day that President John F. Kenney was assassinated in Dallas. Naturally, this had a profound effect on such a politically charged film.
The biggest casualty was Kubrick’s original ending, which would’ve seen an epic pie fight break out in the War Room and George C. Scott exclaiming that “The President has been struck down in his prime!” after Seller’s President Muffley took a pie to the face.
The film was also delayed until January of 1964, where it was released to critical and commercial acclaim, as well as a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. As the last black and white film that Kubrick ever made, DR. STRANGELOVE’s importance—not just to cinema but to twentieth century history— cannot be overstated.
The Library of Congress presumably felt the same way, selecting it as one of the first films to be inducted into the National Film Registry in 1989. No other film encapsulates the hopeless absurdity of the Cold War as perfectly as DR. STRANGELOVE, and as long as nuclear weapons continue to exist— squirreled away by the hundreds in hidden silos and ready to launch at the push of a button—Kubrick’s blackly comic, cautionary masterpiece will remain as relevant and important as ever.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
A few days ago we celebrated the forty-fifth anniversary of Apollo 11’s historic moon landing, an event that captured the imagination of the entire world and heralded the arrival of a Space Age that, regrettably, has yet to fully materialize.
We haven’t been back to the moon since 1972, and our collective dream of becoming a spacefaring civilization living amongst the heavens has gone essentially unrealized—bogged down firmly by the mud of warfare, urgent domestic issues, shuttle disasters, and budgetary neglect.
The dream of space is a dream delayed, a fact that was made painfully apparent at the dawning of the twenty first century. The year 2001 came and went, but we were nowhere near living on giant, spinning space stations and flying on commercialized commuter spaceships, let alone undertaking missions to Jupiter and beyond.
All of these things were promised to us in a film released the year before we stepped foot on the moon for real and discovered that it was, in fact, not made of cheese. That film was director Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), and its matter-of-fact, realistic (yet no less romantic) depiction of our spacefaring future captivated the imagination of millions.
It became one of the most influential films of all time, and even today it remains a benchmark of craft and design. It is a cultural touchstone, its enigmatic storyline and mysteries sparking an endless debate about our place among the cosmos in addition to smaller (but no less important) matters like the development of artificial intelligence.
Kubrick himself was fascinated by these ideas as well as the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life, and began a series of discussions with noted science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke in the mid-1960’s. Their conversations gave way to serious collaboration, with Clarke offering up several of his novels and short stories as source material for Kubrick to adapt.
Kubrick aspired to make, in his words, the “proverbial good science fiction film”, and fashioned his narrative from a combination of Clarke’s short stories, arranging them into an examination of mankind’s evolution as a process aided by extraterrestrial intelligence.
In making 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Kubrick acted as his own producer, and thus had no one that would object to his dropping of traditional story structures and dialogue conventions while rendering the film instead as an enigmatic audiovisual experience.
The financial and critical success of Kubrick’s previous film, DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), gave the visionary director a significant amount of momentum and leeway in getting his follow-up off the ground, and by the following year he was in back in England (where he had since relocated with his family full-time), rolling camera on the film that would cement his legacy as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY unfolds against the sprawling expanse of space, but at its core, tells a very concentrated story about mankind’s evolution and taking our rightful place amongst other intelligent civilizations in the stars.
Kubrick begins his examination with The Dawn Of Man— the point in which humanity branched off from the line of apes to become the dominant species on earth. Their evolution is kickstarted by the discovery of a massive black obelisk, which bestows superior intellect upon them.
Their rapid development is charted quickly and wordlessly— it’s not long until they are walking on their hind legs, and the first use of tools allows the apes to transcend their scavenging ways while empowering them with the means to create their own meals.
When a rival group of apes tries to push in on their territory, the newly-evolved apes turn their tools into weapons, and ensure their dominance through violence and murder. Kubrick then cuts to the year 2001, where space travel is commonplace and a similar black obelisk has been found buried underneath the moon’s surface.
After laying inert for millions of years, it emits a single piercing radio wave out towards Jupiter before falling silent once again. Excited by the first indisputable evidence of intelligent life outside the Earth, a research mission is organized and sent to Jupiter to see what might be waiting for us there.
Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) heads the five-man mission, assisted by his deputy Dr. Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) while the remaining three men hibernate in cryosleep. The ship is guided by a state-of-the-art, artificially intelligent computer named HAL 9000.
HAL 9000 is essentially self-aware, and is treated like a sixth member of the crew by the humans until the possibility of a flaw in its computations is suspected. The HAL 9000 series of computers were supposed to be perfect and utterly incapable of error, so the Jupiter mission’s HAL was given complete control of every single system on the ship.
Naturally, even the smallest of computational errors on HAL’s part could mean that the entire mission might be compromised. When Bowman and Poole attempt to re-assert manual control of the ship and shut HAL down, the self-aware computer uses the ship itself as a weapon against the humans in a defensive bid to keep itself operational.
What neither Bowman or the all-knowing HAL 9000 can predict is that they are on a crash course with the next stage of human evolution, a stage that lies outside the space-time continuum and within a different dimension entirely.
Kubrick’s films have always been noted more for their craft and style than their cast, and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY reinforces that notion almost to an extreme, scaling back the characterization to the barest of minimums. Dialogue is almost nonexistent, with the first spoken line not occurring until we’re already twenty-five minutes in.
What little dialogue there is serves either as exposition or as a means to move the story along in the simplest of strokes—anything else is banal and ordinary, emphasizing Kubrick’s thesis that space travel would be so commonplace by the year 2001 that any novelties would have worn off.
This idea is personified in the character of Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester), who is introduced to us early in the film as a travelling businessman en route to the moon, his lack of wonder at the whole enterprise suggesting he’s made this trip several times before.
He’s more attached to his life back home on earth, at one point even making a video call to his daughter on her birthday (played by Kubrick’s own daughter, Vivian). Keir Dullea plays the Jupiter mission commander Dr. Dave Bowman, who can be considered the film’s conventional protagonist.
However, his personality is downplayed considerably, achieving a blank, emotionless slate that tells us absolutely nothing about who he is as a person. The same can be said for the Gary Lockwood’s slightly more-aggressive deputy, Dr. Frank Poole.
Since this is a Kubrick film, we should know by know that his story choices will always skew towards what’s most poetically ironic. In that respect, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is a stroke of genius in its depiction of the self-aware, artificially intelligent supercomputer HAL 9000.
Voiced by Douglas Rain and represented only by a red light inside of a large glass lens, HAL 9000 is perhaps the most emotional, relatable character in the entire film, a strange claim considering that as a computer it can’t physically emote.
HAL 9000’s omniscience gives way to something resembling neuroses, and its ability to acknowledge its own existence leads to it actively protecting said existence at any cost. One would be hard pressed to find a villain in cinematic history that’s more fundamentally chilling and iconic than HAL 9000.
The sequence where HAL 9000 begs in its characteristic monotone for Dr. Bowman to not disconnect it is especially haunting, simply because its lack of a physical body renders it ultimately unable to defend itself against Dr. Bowman’s particularly monstrous determination.
The visual style of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY marks a radical shift in Kubrick’s aesthetic, not the least notable aspect of which is the director’s return to glorious color after 1960’s SPARTACUS. Shot by cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth in the staggeringly wide 2.20:1 Super Panavision aspect ratio, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is a film that demands to be seen on the largest screen possible.
My first experience with the film was on a regular consumer television, but shortly after I moved to Los Angeles, I caught a screening of a 70mm film print at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre and the experience was nothing less than a revelation.
Kubrick’s panoramic vistas are rendered in large swaths of vibrant, searing color (or, alternatively, inky blotches of black). He makes excellent use of the color red in particular, using it as a recurring visual motif to distinguish man from the colorless voids of space and technology.
Red, as we all know, is the color of blood—the essence of life, so to speak. In the film, it is a color that belongs firmly in the domain of the humans—it is the color of Bowman’s spacesuit, for instance, as well as the interior of the reconnaissance pods—the only part of the ship safe from the watchful eyes and ears of HAL 9000.
However, as HAL 9000 becomes more human-like in its expression of concern, the balance of red’s ownership tilts decidedly in the computer’s favor. It starts off with only the little red right in its “eye”, but much like the inside of the human body, Kubrick eventually reveals that HAL 9000’s interior memory mainframe is literally drenched in red.
Kubrick’s camerawork in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY echoes HAL 9000’s supposed infallibility in its compositional precision, deliberately set back from its subjects so that it may observe the action in a cold, clinical manner devoid of subjectivity.
Kubrick’s frame makes excellent use of depth, frequently incorporating one-point perspective compositions whose lines all converge towards a singular point in the distance. The pacing is glacial—at times unbearably so—but it also reinforces the endlessly patient, calculating nature of its antagonist.
Despite the plodding nature of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’s storytelling, Kubrick and editor Ray Lovejoy still infuse it with punches of New Wave expressionism, like jarring jump cuts that radically disrupt the visual continuity.
The most famous example of this is perhaps the most famous jump cut of all time, where Kubrick jumps forward four million years within a single frame by cross cutting from a bone in the air to a similarly-shaped satellite suspended in orbit above the Earth. Nearly fifty years after the film’s release, this cut in particular is still breathtaking in its sheer audacity.
Kubrick’s inventiveness extends to other aspects of the film, such as sound design. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was groundbreaking in its realistic depiction of the sonic aspects of space travel. Most science fiction films tend to value entertainment over realism, and thus blatantly disregard the well-known fact that space is a vacuum, and sound needs air in order to travel and be heard.
Recent films like Alfonso Cuaron’s GRAVITY (2013) have re-introduced us to the idea of the silent cosmos, but Kubrick’s realistic treatment of the phenomena in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY blazed the trail in using the lack of sound as an asset. Long stretches of the film are just simply the sounds of the astronauts’ breath inside their own helmets, and they are just as tense and exciting, if not more so, than they would be if accompanied by a richer soundtrack.
Kubrick approached the film’s visual effects from a similar standpoint. Whereas CGI-laden films from a few years ago now look dated and fake to our eyes, the effects of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY hold up, even looking arguably more realistic than the best that modern CGI can offer.
Kubrick was praised throughout his lifetime as not just a gifted storyteller, but also as a pioneer in filmmaking technology. His inherent knowledge of the film medium gave him the confidence to create 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’s striking effects in-camera, fully rendered onto the original negative so as to preserve the highest image quality.
Despite having a team of visual effects artists at his disposal, it was Kubrick himself who accepted the film’s sole Academy Award win (out of thirteen nominations) for its visual effects. The irony of the only Oscar Kubick ever won being the result of work he couldn’t fully claim as his own surely must not been lost on the master filmmaker.
As an artist who demanded complete control over his projects, Kubrick prized shooting his films in the manageable isolation of studio sets. This also allowed Kubrick to impose his own design aesthetic on the sets themselves. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY must have been a very appealing project to Kubrick in that the demands of the story dictated shooting entirely on soundstages.
After all, it’s not like they could exactly go up into space and shoot “on location”. This, combined with the need to create the various miscellanea of a futuristic existence results in what is perhaps one of the most meticulously designed films ever made.
I’m not exaggerating—Kubrick even placed detailed instructions on how to use the space station’s toilet on the front of the bathroom door even though it served absolutely no story purpose. Ernest Archer, Harry Lange, and Anthony Masters share the Production Designer credit under Kubrick’s vision, creating a distinctly-1960’s vision of the future.
Kubrick and his designers incorporate banks of pure white light into their sets as a recurring motif throughout the film, such as the walls of the briefing room on the moon, the floor of Bowman’s baroque-style apartment suite in the “stargate” sequence, and the entire interior of the earth-orbiting space station.
This has the effect of creating a cold, even light that eliminates all shadows and allows Kubrick to objectively examine his subjects like they were exhibits in a museum. The technology on display in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is remarkably prescient.
While full-scale space travel is not yet a reality, we do have several things (albeit about thirteen years late) that the movie predicted would be commonplace by the dawn of the twenty first century: portable computer tablets (iPads) and video calls (Facetime), for instance.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find the research and development facilities at Apple looking like they were straight out of this film. If anything, it just proves how highly influential 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY continues to be.
Of course, any projection as far into the future as 1968-era Kubrick made is bound to have missed a few marks. Kubrick rather accurately predicted that space travel in the twenty first century would give way to private corporations and commerce rather than remaining strictly government or military endeavors.
While this is now in the infancy of becoming a reality thanks to Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and SpaceX, Kubrick erroneously (yet logically) predicts that major airlines would have made the natural expansion into space—Dr. Floyd is seen flying to the moon in a Pan-Am branded spacecraft.
Since Pan-Am wouldn’t last as an operating company long enough to even see the year 2001, it’s easy to look back on Kubrick’s inclusion and laugh. However, that would be losing sight of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’s design as a valid historical document—an expression of our dreams and hopes for the future during the romantic era of space flight.
Given that we have been firmly grounded here on Earth ever since, that aspect becomes more poignant than ever. A dream unrealized. Kubrick’s reputation as a fuser of indelible image and inspired music really begins in earnest with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.
Whereas his previous films might have augmented an original score with adaptations of existing classical material, here Kubrick eschews a composer and a conventional score entirely. However, that was not always the intent.
Kubrick commissioned an original score from his SPARTACUS composer Alex North, but quickly dumped it when it didn’t meet with his satisfaction. Inspired perhaps by the graceful pirouetting motions of the space station, Kubrick yet again made film history by pairing the sequence introducing mankind’s technological advancements in the year 2001 to the dizzying waltz of Johan Strauss II’s “Blue Danube”.
This pairing had such a profound impact on our collective social psyche that I defy you to find someone who doesn’t think of spinning space stations when they hear it. Similarly, Kubrick uses Richard Strauss’ bombastic classical piece “Also sprach Zarathustra” throughout the film to symbolize the wonder of mankind’s evolution.
We hear it when the apes realize that bones make great tools, and we hear it again when Bowman re-enters our dimension and is reborn as a star child. Much like “Blue Danube”, this piece is also ingrained into us and paired with visions of space and the cosmos.
In addition to using classical music from romantic, Victorian eras, Kubrick turns to compositions from modern maestros like Gyorgy Ligeti, the man behind a fundamentally unnerving suite of cues that accompanies the terrifying appearances of the black obelisk.
Primal and dissonant, the piece features a building chorus of men’s voices seemingly scrambling over each other in a bid to escape some unseen evil emanating from the bowels of the earth. It’s the kind of music cue that makes one’s skin crawl, so of course Kubrick uses it as his beginning musical overture, filling the screen with an impenetrable blackness for several minutes before the story begins in earnest.
Just as radically as Kubrick deviates from the straightforward visual style of his previous films in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, so too does he loyally adhere to the same set of themes that have fascinated him as an artist. He uses the film’s storyline about evolution as a conduit into further explorations of violence, essentially stating that it is a natural byproduct of the evolutionary process.
If evolution can be described as “survival of the fittest”, then it stands to reason that those who can assert dominance over the ecosystem will prosper—and the only way to assert said dominance is by force. The apes’ discovery of tools allowed them to take charge of their own development, but it was only a short matter of time until they perverted the tool’s original purpose for warfare.
Mankind built its civilizations on the foundations of violence and war, and as such, it is an inextricable component of our humanity. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY filters its ideas about personhood and evolution through the lens of technology, another major theme in Kubrick’s body of work.
The character of HAL 9000 represents the countless ethical conundrums surrounding the concept of artificial intelligence, but most importantly raises the question: “at what point does an artificial intelligence achieve personhood?”.
The ship’s human inhabitants view HAL 9000 as another crewmate, and they entrust their lives to its stewardship. We know that the computer is as intelligent—if not more so—than humans because Kubrick shows it winning a game of chess against Dr. Bowman (a none-too-subtle nod towards Kubrick’s own dominance at the game).
As intelligent as it may be, HAL 9000 is still not a human, and cannot emote—yet it shows increasing signs of paranoia and neuroses as trouble mounts during the mission. It stands to reason that a self-aware entity would fight to defend its own existence, which the story of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY makes more than clear when HAL 9000 pleads with Bowman before being shut down.
Throughout history, man has fashioned technology in service to its needs, but it’s the tipping point in which technology itself emerges as a dominant species that captivates Kubrick’s interest. Just as we now bear little resemblance to the apes from which we descended, it stands to reason that the next link in the chain of evolution will appear quite dissimilar to humankind. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY raises many questions, but it is here that its core line of questioning becomes clear—will humanity’s successor come in the form of cold machines, or does our destiny instead lie out in the vast expanse of the cosmos?
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY also makes potent use of several of Kubrick’s signature storytelling conceits as a way to imprint his stamp despite the radical tonal departure from his previous work. While Kubrick formally dispenses with the omniscient voiceover narration that peppered throughout his previous films, he essentially achieves the same purpose here with the incorporation of the all-knowing, all-seeing HAL 9000 computer.
This is also the film in which Kubrick perfects his use of one-point perspectives compositions, hypnotically luring us deeper into his world by travelling down the length of claustrophobic tunnels. An extreme version of this is evident in the infamous “stargate” sequence in which Bowman travels to another dimension entirely.
Additionally, the rendering of Bowman’s enigmatic apartment suite in the gilded style of baroque décor points to Kubrick’s fascination with the era and serves as a link to a common thread that runs through his filmography and its disparate genres and styles.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is no doubt a massively influential work, but it didn’t achieve that status overnight. The film debuted in 1968 to severely mixed critical reception. Kubrick’s intentionally obtuse storytelling frustrated countless old-school critics, but more “enlightened” critics immediately recognized the film’s brilliance and importance.
The film also had something of a slow start at the box office until it caught on as a cult hit among young adults, who would come to late-night screenings—stoned out of their gourds no less—to lose themselves in the psychedelic “stargate” sequence.
The idea of the film as a cinematic milestone began catching on in earnest when the next generation of filmmakers—the generation that brought us STAR WARS—credited 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY as a key inspiration in their work. Over time, the film’s legacy has only grown stronger, and its induction into the National Film Registry in 1991 ensured its preservation for generations to come.
Perhaps his best known and most widely-viewed film, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY rocketed Kubrick to the top of his field, cementing him as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time. Though Kubrick would not live to see the year 2001 himself, his groundbreaking work here assured that his legacy would carry on well into the twenty first century and beyond.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)
The human race is inherently violent—one only needs to pull up CNN at any given moment to see the proof. The building blocks of society are laid on a foundation of violence—the land on which our cities sit was either taken by force or successfully defended against those who wished to take it by force.
Anger is a natural human emotion, and we can all cite a time when we wanted to inflict physical harm on another person. What matters is whether we actually follow through—a personal choice that we call “free will”, and its one of the principles that the definition of “personhood” is established upon.
So if we were to find one day that we could condition violent inclinations out of a person entirely— to the point that violent thoughts would make that person physically sick— would we consider such a development to be taking away a person’s free will, and by extension, their very humanity? It’s a potent question; one that director Stanley Kubrick tackled in brilliant fashion with his challenging, divisive 1971 masterpiece, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
After the success of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), Kubrick started working earnestly on a long-gestating passion project—NAPOLEON, an epic biopic starring Jack Nicholson as the infamous French emperor.
He had spent most of the 60’s conducting an exhausting amount of research for the project, and by the time he was finished he had an elaborate notecard system that detailed Napoleon’s exact movements—one notecard for every single waking day of his life.
However, right as cameras were preparing to roll in 1969, the project fell apart, and the failure of Sergey Bondarchuk’s similarly-themed Napoleon film WATERLOO a year later killed any chances Kubrick had at reviving the project. Even today, Kubrick’s unrealized NAPOLEON project still haunts the film community as one of the greatest films never made.
Kubrick was now faced with the task of finding a new project to develop in the wake of NAPOLEON’s failure, and he turned to a book that Terry Southern had recommended to him on the set of DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)—a book he had initially dismissed as incomprehensible.
That book was Anthony Burgess’ seminal novel, “A Clockwork Orange”. Looking at it with new eyes, he was drawn to the book’s dystopian setting and its examination into the psyche of a violent young man as a byproduct of his environment.
As he had done with2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Kubrick served as his own producer as well as his own screenwriter in adapting A CLOCKWORK ORANGE to the screen. The film is a curiosity within Kubrick’s body of work in that it is very faithful to its source novel, whereas Kubrick had a reputation for dramatically altering source material to fit whatever given movie he wanted to make.
This can be credited to the fact that Kubrick disregarded his own script and worked on set using the novel itself—an uncharacteristically haphazard approach for the notoriously disciplined director, but it fit with the lo-fi, improvisational nature of the shoot.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE tells the story of Alex (Malcolm McDowell), a young man living in a dystopian future Britain with one hell of an extracurricular activity: dressing up in menacing attire by night and terrorizing the town with his gang of like-minded buddies.
They beat hobos senseless, brawl with rival gangs, and break into the homes of decent, upstanding citizens for “a bit of the old ultraviolence”. Alex and his so-called “droogs” are seemingly unstoppable—that is, until a routine nocturnal break-in goes awry and Alex murders a woman he had intended to rape.
When his gang of droogs betrays him and enables his capture by the police, Alex is thrown into prison for his heinous crime. However, instead of languishing in a jail cell for the rest of his life, he’s given the opportunity to participate in an experimental new form of aversion therapy called the Ludovico Technique.
He is forced to watch several days’ worth of horrifying, gruesome footage as a way to condition him against his own violent impulses. In return for his participation, he is given an early release back out into society and hailed by the media as a cured man.
However, his transition back into society proves harder than he expected, and his inability to cope with his natural violent tendencies leaves him a broken shell of a person—and vulnerable to retribution by all those who he had previously harmed.
The story raises a salient question that cuts to the core of Kubrick’s message: Alex’s crimes were horrible yes, but by depriving him of his free will, could the government’s conditioning of his very identity be considered an even worse transgression?
Despite all the flash and theatrics, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is at its core a character study, which places a significant burden on the shoulders of young Malcolm McDowell. Under Kubrick’s steady hand, McDowell turns in a career-defining performance as Alex, the twisted, psychopathic antihero at the center of the story.
While his crimes are vile and reprehensible, it’s a testament to both Kubrick’s vision and McDowell’s boyish charms that we as an audience ultimately find him sympathetic, and—dare I say it—relatable. McDowell’s devious characterization of Alex results in one of the most influential and iconic film characters of all time—a status that still stands today judging by the cues Heath Ledger took from McDowell for his portrayal of The Joker in THE DARK KNIGHT (2008).
McDowell isn’t the only actor in the film, but his performance towers every other cast-member to the point that one would be forgiven for thinking otherwise. That’s not to say that the other cast members don’t pull their weight and help fill out Kubrick’s nightmarish, dystopian vision of the future (Patrick Magee and future Darth Vader, David Prowse, are notable standouts).
Working with cinematographer John Alcott, Kubrick trades the polish and gloss of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’s visuals for a decidedly lo-fi, indie aesthetic in bringing Burgess’ novel to life. Tonally, the visuals of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE play like a hybrid between Kubrick’s clinical, restrained classical style and a hyperactive Saturday morning cartoon.
For instance, Kubrick and Alcott exposed most of the 35mm film image using only natural light, resulting in a lifelike, down-to-earth look that features pops of color amid drab, neutral backgrounds. However, in those same shots he also uses wide-angle lenses to distort and exaggerate reality to unrealistic proportions.
This is also reflected in the camerawork, which alternates between static wide shots that observe the action dispassionately and up-close, handheld shots that bring the objective point of view firmly into the subjective.
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE’s reliance on natural light seems peculiar—if not entirely out of character— for Kubrick, whose reputation for controlling every aspect of his image was infamous. However, this development can be ascribed to two defining aspects of Kubrick’s artistic aesthetic. Kubrick was well aware of his superlative talents, and saw each project as the “definitive” film in its particular genre.
So when he saw the wave of scrappy, low-budget youth films streaming out of Europe and America during the late 1960’s—films like Dennis Hopper’s EASY RIDER (1969)—he decided that he would adopt the same affectations in an effort to deliver A CLOCKWORK ORANGE as the “ultimate” youth picture, much like he had done for the sci-fi genre in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.
Additionally, Kubrick’s interest in natural light didn’t stem from light itself, but rather in the technological advancement of lenses that required less and less of it to properly expose the film negative. This speaks to the pioneering aspect of Kubrick’s craft: his constant push to eliminate technical limitations on the realization of a filmmaker’s vision.
In later years, he would make significant strides in this regard, working directly with NASA to develop a lens that could expose a film image using only candlelight for 1975’s BARRY LYNDON.
This approach is mirrored in the edit, where Kubrick and editor Bill Butler brazenly cut from distant, observational setups to dynamic handheld shots that bring the action up close and personal. Kubrick uses the expressionistic nature of his edit to creatively portray the film’s most violent aspects, such as the murderous bludgeoning of the cat lady.
Instead of showing us the act itself, Kubrick cuts away to a series of rapid shots of the cat lady’s paintings, strung together in such a fashion as to suggest animation (specifically, those colorful flashes one would see in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon after dynamite explodes).
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE’s editing was highly influential, forecasting the rise of rapid music video-style editing popularized by films of the 90’s and 00’s, as well as the stylistic flourishes of filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone.
Like his previous three films, Kubrick shot A CLOCKWORK ORANGE in England—both in London and around his home in Elstree. He recruited John Barry as his production designer, who adapted existing locales to fit the needs of the story rather than build entirely new sets.
To convey the dystopian feel of Kubrick’s vision of a future Britain, Barry sought out socialist-style housing projects and municipal buildings built in the Brutalist school of architecture. The cold, uninviting concrete structures stand like oppressive symbols of the society that has allowed youths like Alex to run amok—a society that’s lost any interest in civic infrastructure or betterment.
Kubrick contrasts this with the interiors of Alex’s family flat, a garish mishmash of bright colors and patterns that suggests a counterculture struggling for its voice in the absence of a unifying message. The production design of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE suggests a very different future than the one Kubrick depicted in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY—indeed, this future is decidedly earthbound and considerably more cynical.
Wendy Carlos, credited here as Walter because the film was made before her sex change operation, fashions the score for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE as a blend between baroque classical compositions and computer-age instrumentation.
Alex’s love for classical music is reflected in the appropriation of works like Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, filtered through the inspired use of a Moog synthesizer and vocoder that makes it sound as if it was being sung by a computer.
This perversion of music’s inherent beauty extends to the inclusion of “Singin’ In The Rain”, which runs over the end credits in addition to being sung by Alex as he brutally rapes a woman during a home invasion. Kubrick’s filmography is littered with music that plays counter to the actual image it accompanies, but A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is really where he perfects his surprising, brilliant concoctions.
Our perception of “Singin’ In The Rain” has been permanently discolored, seared into our collective memory as the sound of impending doom. Kubrick peppers the soundscape of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE with this sort of audiovisual irony, giving a twisted elegance to the carnage on display.
The world of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE affords Kubrick several opportunities to develop his aesthetic. The frequent usage of narrative voiceover, one-point perspective compositions and extended tracking shots (sometimes even the combination of the two, such as the shot of Alex roaming his beloved record store) are the clearest visual indicators of Kubrick’s hand.
He also experiments with a few new techniques, like the breaking of the fourth wall, or filming from the floor up at someone leaning over a closed door—a very unconventional, somewhat disconcerting angle that Kubrick would later use to great effect in 1980’s THE SHINING.
Kubrick’s career-long meditation on sex and violence takes center stage in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, what with its depiction of a seemingly-lawless future society and explorations of conditioned behavior. The character of Alex is the result of a hypersexual culture—a culture that is implied through the pervasiveness of penis popsicles and pornographic pop art displayed in the homes of otherwise respectable, upstanding citizens.
Perhaps as a prediction of the nascent birth control movement, Kubrick’s vision of a future Britain is a world in which sex has been stripped of consequence, and thus exists merely for titillation and self-serving gratification. In other words, it is simply for entertainment.
Whereas bored teenagers of the 1970’s would find entertainment in hanging around drive-in movie theaters and cruising the main strips of their hometowns, the bored teenagers of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE get their kicks in the form of indiscriminate rape and torture.
Rape is a particularly salient theme for Kubrick to explore, precisely because it is the intersection of sex and violence—it perverts the act of love into an act of hate, and Kubrick’s somewhat-humorous (yet ultimately horrifying) depiction of it forces us to reckon with the darkest parts of our own humanity.
Man’s capability for inhumanity towards his fellow man (and woman) is reinforced by Kubrick’s exploration of the inhumanity capable of institutions—civilization’s invention to protect man against himself. The Brutalist architecture of the socialist housing blocks—cold, concrete structures with no personality or history reflective of their inhabitants—reinforces the purely utilitarian reasons for the existence of institutions.
In their efforts to create a stable civilization and strip man of his wild nature, they overreach and subsequently take away a man’s ability to govern his own behavior. This sacrifice on behalf of the individual for the greater good of the societal whole is a common theme that runs through Kubrick’s work— films like PATHS OF GLORY (1957), 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, andDR. STRANGELOVE all examined the inhumanity of institutions towards the individual (albeit DR. STRANGELOVE did so in an inverted way that saw the government sacrifice the masses for the few—themselves).
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE stills stands today as Kubrick’s most controversial film, by any standard of measure. The violence and carnage on display was shocking, and far exceeded anything that had been made up to that point.
In the wake of its release, public furor over its content and real-world copycat crimes prompted death threats on Kubrick and his family, leading to his voluntary withdrawal of the film from UK cinemas—an embargo that would last until his death in 1999.
In America, the film was a runaway hit, and secured a nomination for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. With the divisive success of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Kubrick’s reputation as a daring maverick auteur was assured. If he wasn’t already the figurehead of the new wave of radical filmmaking sweeping the world, he was now.
BARRY LYNDON (1975)
Director Stanley Kubrick made a career out of confounding expectations. Each work in his filmography belongs firmly within its genre, yet at the same time also acts as a blatant subversion of said genre. PATHS OF GLORY (1957) turned the romantic war epic into an ethics debate.
DR STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB(1964) twisted the conventions of the sex comedy by giving it cataclysmic, end-of-the-world stakes. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) traded the cheesy pulp tropes of midcentury science fiction for a sweeping sense of ominous wonder towards creation and the unknown.
After the highly-controversial, ultraviolent A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971), Kubrick again surprised the film community by swinging another 180 degrees in his choice for a follow up: a stuffy costume drama based on an obscure 1844 picaresque novel written by William Makepeace Thackery and titled “The Luck Of Barry Lyndon”.
Knowing what we do of Kubrick’s career up to this point, however, the selection of Thackery’s novel isn’t surprising at all. Kubrick had spent years exhaustively researching the life and times of French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte for an epic film that fell apart shortly before cameras could roll, forcing him to channel his energies instead into A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
A film adaption of “The Luck of Barry Lyndon” afforded Kubrick the opportunity to repurpose the mountains of research he had amassed for NAPOLEON, given the similar time era and cultures depicted in both works. Working from his own script and with his brother-in-law Jan Harlan as an executive producer, Kubrick set about making BARRY LYNDON (1975)—an oversized production that took two years to film and endured no less than two shutdowns as its budget swelled to $11 million.
Despite Kubrick’s great difficulty in getting the film made, BARRY LYNDON’s mixing of old school costume dramaturgy and the filmmaking techniques of the New Wave results in one of the best films of the 1970’s, and arguably the finest film of its illustrious director’s career.
BARRY LYNDON unfolds against the backdrop of the United Kingdom in the 18th century. Kubrick begins his three-hour story in Ireland, where a headstrong young peasant named Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) loses his cousin’s romantic love for him to a British officer stationed in their town.
Enraged, Barry challenges the officer to a duel and wins, necessitating his exile from the town for having killed a British officer. He hides away in Dublin for a bit before joining the British Army as an inspired means to keep a low profile.
When he sours on the hardscrabble military life and tries to desert, he’s found out and pressed once more into service by the Prussian Army. They assign him to monitor a wealthy aristocrat named Chevalier de Balibari (Patrick Magee), who they suspect to be an Irish spy.
Barry’s shared kinship with the Chevalier compels him to deceive the Prussians and form an alliance with his countryman that sees them roam the countryside and scam aristocrats out of their money in rigged games of cards and chance. Their adventures bring them into the social circle of Lord Lyndon, whose wife, Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), catches Barry’s eye.
Determined to live out the rest of his days as a wealthy gentleman of leisure, Barry begins a not-so-secret affair with Lady Lyndon that strategically positions him to benefit the most from her ailing husband’s impending death. Surely enough, Lord Lyndon kicks the bucket and Barry weds Lady Lyndon, assuming the new mantle of Barry Lyndon.
He commences living the leisurely life he aspires to, but his hedonistic pursuit of pleasure leads to domestic troubles and new enemies—the most formidable and underestimated of which is Lord Lyndon’s son, Lord Bullingdon, who seethes with hatred for Barry over the careless squandering of the family fortune and his inheritance.
In the 1970’s, Ryan O’Neal was at the peak of his career, and his performance as the titular Barry Lyndon remains perhaps the very tip of that peak. As Lyndon rises from rags to riches, only to fall back to rags once more, O’Neal applies a composed nuance to each stage of the journey.
Lyndon’s decades-long growth from stubborn, idealistic lad to disdainful, hedonistic adult is given a convincing sense of the passage of time by O’Neal, who excels at projecting a world-weary countenance onto his boyish face. For Lady Lyndon, Kubrick looked to model Maris Berenson, who isn’t required to do much besides standing around in a silent, statuesque fashion.
However, Berenson imbues the character with a layer of fundamental sadness masked by stoic composure that serves the story well as it draws to a close— when she signs off on an alimony check for her disgraced lout of a husband, she pauses and looks up for only the briefest of moments, but in that moment she lives a lifetime.
Supporting performers of note include Leon Vitali as Lord Bullingdon, who would later go on to become Kubrick’s personal assistant and casting director on his final two films, as well as two veteran Kubrick performers on their second tour of duty: Patrick Magee and Philip Stone.
Magee, who played the crippled political dissident in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, appears in BARRY LYNDON under an eye patch and a pound of white makeup as the aristocratic libertine and charlatan Chevalier de Balibari. Stone, who likewise appeared in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE as Malcolm McDowell’s father, plays Graham, a meek banker for Lady Lyndon and an unexpected conspirator against Barry.
BARRY LYNDON is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful films ever made, and for good reason. Working once again with cinematographer John Alcott, Kubrick puts his prior experiments with natural light to masterful use in rendering the pre-electric world of BARRY LYNDON.
Kubrick’s visual presentation differs radically from his previous works in that he presents scenes as carefully staged tableaus, expertly composed to provide staggering degrees of depth and resemble the paintings of 18th century artists like Thomas Gainsborough.
The romantic feel of Kubrick’s compositions are further emphasized by the use of soft focus, which diffuses the frame’s highlights and adds to the film’s sense of Victorian glamor. Kubrick’s subjects and locales, impeccably designed with a careful eye to authentic period detail by DR. STRANGELOVE’s production designer Ken Adam, are lit almost entirely with existing natural light— an aesthetic choice that really accentuates the red and blue pops of color from British and Prussian military uniforms (respectively) against the golden earth tones of pastoral England.
Kubrick was so intent on creating an authentic pre-industrial world that, in the process, he managed to pioneer an entirely new technology that would change filmmaking forever. Working with NASA, Kubrick developed a specialized lens that could capture a beautiful exposure using only a few candles.
Many nocturnal scenes in BARRY LYNDON are lit entirely by candlelight, and the organic feeling of these scenes would be highly influential in the continued development of low-light technology, while its groundbreaking use in BARRY LYNDON would become one of the cornerstones of the film’s legacy.
Kubrick’s supreme confidence in his mastery of visual language is on full, flagrant display in BARRY LYNDON—the fact that he presents his scenes almost entirely in masters while rarely cutting away to other coverage speaks to the sheer audaciousness of Kubrick’s vision and technical prowess.
The effect is staggering and stately, a reflection of the pompous rigidity of his subjects. In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, this approach would be endlessly boring, but Kubrick incorporates the unconventional filmmaking techniques of New Hollywood—techniques he himself helped to popularize—in order to breathe immediacy and energy into the proceedings.
While there are a few characteristic tracking shots (one scene in particular recalls Kirk Douglas’ trench run in PATHS OF GLORY) as well as several instances of handheld, documentary-style photography, BARRY LYNDON mostly plays out in the aforementioned master tableaus, aided by the frequent use of zoom lenses to zero in on a particular detail within the scene or vice versa.
Kubrick uses this conceit repeatedly; creating a hypnotic mood that pulls us deeper and deeper into his baroque vision. At this point in his career, Kubrick had fully embraced the use of classical music over an original score, and to this end he enlisted Leonard Rosenman to create new arrangements of famous works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Franc Schubert in addition to several Irish folk songs.
BARRY LYNDON’s most memorable piece of music—George Frideric Handel’s “Sarabande”—was re-appropriated as a theme song of sorts, thundering along as Barry’s fate unfolds. While on the surface, the musical character of Kubrick’s classical selections does not run counter to the images they accompany (indeed, classical music seems to be a very conventional and appropriate choice for a story about the European aristocracy circa the 18th century), he nonetheless uses it subversively.
The operatic “Sarabande” march in particular suggests the trials and tribulations of a great king—someone like, say, Napoleon Bonaparte. However, Kubrick bestows this theme not on a king or emperor, but on a peasant who lived large for a while and ultimately died as a penniless nobody who had contributed absolutely nothing to history.
The sense of history and importance that Sarabande conveys runs counter to Barry Lyndon’s actual life, reflecting only his supreme narcissism. Despite its regal, stuffy aesthetic, BARRY LYNDON contains all the visual hallmarks of its subversive maverick director.
The combination of one-point perspective compositions and an omniscient narrator places the audience at an observant remove from the action. The story’s examination of Victorian culture in its heyday allows for the indulgence of Kubrick’s fascinations with baroque architecture as well as the ineffectual pageantry and customs of the aristocracy.
Lyndon’s stint in the military also provides an opportunity for Kubrick to further explore violence in the circumstance of warfare, specifically the strangely self-sacrificial rituals of battle in the pre-Industrial era. In those days, antiquated notions of honor and valor were attached to leaving oneself open and exposed to enemy fire, as if taking cover to protect oneself was an act of cowardice.
This can be seen in the gorgeously colored and decorated (yet highly visible) uniforms worn by soldiers, which certainly made them appear as magnificent gentleman but had the unfortunate side effect of advertising their location to their enemies from a great distance.
The style of combat reflected this as well, with armies advancing on each other while politely taking turns in their exchange of fire—- effectively leaving the entire front line vulnerable and willingly exposed to a volley of musket balls. Under Kubrick’s hand, these notions of “civilized” warfare among gentlemen become highly curious and ironic.
This idea is echoed on a smaller scale in the sequences wherein Barry participates in turn-based duels. In the world of BARRY LYNDON, violence has been institutionalized by the civilized as a means to resolve disputes or inflict disciplinary punishment, but in the process has lost the emotion and intimacy that makes it meaningful. Instead of violence being a reflection of our inhumanity to our fellow man, it is violence itself that has become inhuman.
Kubrick’s body of work is held in such high regard today that it’s easy to forget the release of his films were regularly met with something of a mixed bag in terms of reception. They were, understandably, ahead of their time, and many people didn’t quite know what to make of them.
Many outright hated them, but nonetheless they knew they had to also respect them. This can certainly be said of BARRY LYNDON, whose release was met with modest box office success and mixed critical reception.
A three hour-plus non-epic about the 18th century European aristocracy may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but damned if they didn’t respect it—- and respect it they did, all the way to the Oscars (where the film took home golden statues for Alcott’s cinematography, Adam’s production design, Rosenman’s score, and costumes and Kubrick himself was nominated for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay).
Kubrick’s achievement here is nothing less than masterful, and while he would never get to make his long-gestating NAPOLEON film, he was able to channel that passion into making BARRY LYNDON a stone cold masterpiece—one that very well could have stood head and shoulders aboveNAPOLEON had he made it (and that’s not just because the French Emperor was a short man).
In a filmography composed almost entirely of masterpieces, BARRY LYNDON stands out as quite possibly the finest of the bunch.
THE SHINING (1980)
Many films lay claim to the title of “scariest movie of all time”, but only a select handful can truly call themselves as such. Of this elite group, you’ll find movies about demons, ghosts, serial killers, and zombies, but there is one film that defies easy explanation—whose horror derives from its very inability to articulate its evil in tangible form.
We fear the unknown, so if we are presented with a presence or force that we can’t ever hope to know, then it stands to reason that it will terrify us in endlessly fundamental ways. Stanley Kubrick’s blood-soaked masterpiece of horror, THE SHINING (1980), is just such a film, still talked about in hush whispers by those it terrified.
Kubrick’s film is a giant, labyrinthine puzzle where no two viewings are ever the same. Its secrets continue to present themselves, with these new revelations factoring into the continuing conversation about the film and continually reshaping our perceptions of its meaning.
The typical horror film by its nature is fleeting and ephemeral— for all intents and purposes, they are roller coaster rides. THE SHINING, however, has touched a nerve in the deepest part of the human psyche and endures in our collective unconscious. Much like the ghostly specters that haunt its halls, we have never quite left The Overlook Hotel.
Stanley Kubrick was unique among filmmakers in that he didn’t specialize in any one particular genre. Rather, he liked to sample from all of them—like one would a craft beer flight—and deliver a final product that would serve as the gold standard within its respective genre.
By the late 1970’s, the horror genre was phenomenally popular; a reflection of turbulent, uncertain times and a fundamental distrust of authority. Kubrick sensed his irrelevance within the horror genre and sought to rectify the situation while bringing artistic legitimacy to otherwise schlocky fare.
This meant finding subject matter that was completely different from the usual assortment of zombies, ghosts, and vampires. After poring through mountains of prospective material as per his custom, he found what he was looking for in “The Shining”, Stephen King’s seminal novel about a man driven mad by the spooks residing in an old Colorado hotel.
Kubrick was infamous for radically changing his films’ source material, and his treatment of King’s “The Shining” is perhaps the most egregious example of that. King’s initial screenplay draft was thrown out by Kubrick, who disagreed with the author’s supernatural-heavy take, and instead hired Diane Johnson to help him rework the story into a tale about malevolent energy and its effect on the human psyche.
Working once again with his brother-in-law Jan Harlan as executive producer, Kubrick set about making his version of “The Shining” in England—a production that would bog down cast and crew for over a year while the director battled his way through the shoot’s frequent and frustrating speed bumps.
The final film initially met with lukewarm critical reception and a scathing dismissal from King himself, but Kubrick’s hypnotic take on the horror genre would grow in esteem and notoriety until it became considered as one of the master filmmaker’s finest films and, quite possibly, the scariest film of all time.
THE SHINING begins when writer and unemployed family man Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) agrees to take on a caretaker job at the Overlook Hotel while it closes down for the winter. He uproots his family—wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and young son Danny (Danny Lloyd)—from their humdrum apartment in the suburbs and moves in to the grand old Overlook, looking forward to the promising amount of writing that several months’ worth of solitude will afford him.
He ignores warnings about the hotel’s supernatural phenomena- ghosts lurking in the corridors, the ancient Indian burial ground that sits below the foundation, and the very real tragedy of a previous caretaker who went mad with cabin fever and slaughtered his family with an axe.
For a while, the Torrances are happy in their new home, but all is not what it seems. Danny becomes acutely sensitive to the dark energies, and his ability to “shine”—that is, the ability to manifest said energies into visions of the past, present and future—results in increasingly disturbing hallucinations.
The Overlook’s ominous malevolence then begins to work its dark charms onto Jack, who finds himself losing his grasp on his sanity and seeing and hearing things that he shouldn’t, or having conversations with people who—by all rights—should not be there.
These evil entities succeed in tempting Jack back to the bottle after months of sobriety, further impressing upon him that his wife and son are to blame for his own state of internal torment and must be punished.
As a freak snowstorm descends on the mountain and strands the Torrances inside The Overlook without transport, telephones, or radio, Wendy and Danny must evade their murderous father while also dealing with the blood-soaked terrors that lurk deep in the hotel’s interior.
THE SHINING isn’t the first time that Jack Nicholson crossed Kubrick’s orbit—the director previously had Nicholson in mind to play the titular role in his failed passion project NAPOLEON. Instead, Nicholson makes his Kubrick debut here as Jack Torrance, the frustrated protagonist turned antagonist.
An actor well-known for his brilliantly unhinged performances, Nicholson turns in the work of his career by channeling a fundamental twitchiness, as if he’s uncomfortable in his own body. His spiraling psychosis is at once both riveting and terrifying to witness. Shelly Duvall is also effective as the ineffectual, meek, and needy wife to Nicholson—a woman whose mundane blandness is almost oppressively so.
Duvall famously had a rough time on the production, where Kubrick tormented her with constant verbal abuse. If it was all done to get a certain performance out of Duvall, it certainly worked—Duvall’s exhausted shakiness projects a hopeless demeanor that adds to the film’s overall tension.
As the young, innocent Danny Torrance, Danny Lloyd doesn’t fall prey to overacting—the bane of all child actors— and it is precisely this restraint which makes his “redrum” trance so bone-chilling and memorable.
Famously, Kubrick avoided the possibility of exposing such a young boy to the horrific subject matter of the film by convincing him it was a family drama, even going so far as substituting doubles or a dummy in scenes that would’ve shattered the illusion and revealed the true nature of the project. Kubrick even showed Lloyd a heavily edited version of the film when it was released—Lloyd reportedly did not see the real film until well into his teenage years.
For his supporting cast, Kubrick reunites with a couple familiar faces—Philip Stone and Joe Turkel. In his third consecutive appearance for Kubrick, Stone assumes the persona of Delbert Grady, the ghostly waiter of The Gold Room, whose distant politeness and manner is uncomfortably creepy.
Turkel, who last worked with Kubrick on 1957’s PATHS OF GLORY, plays Lloyd, the Gold Room’s bartender. Turkel is particularly inspired casting, as his gaunt visage already resembles that of a skull. Turkel adopts an emotionless, painted-on smile that sears itself into our retinas, like a morbid Cheshire Cat.
Scatman Crothers, who used his friendship with Nicholson to get into the casting room, plays The Overlook’s head chef, Dick Hallorann. Crothers’ role is an important one, as he shares Danny’s ability to “shine”, and explains the phenomenon to the young boy (and by extension, explains the title to the audience). Crothers plays Hallorran as a jovial, energetic middle-aged guy, but he also incorporates some minstrel overtones into his performance that date the film quite considerably.
THE SHINING marks Kubrick’s third consecutive collaboration with director of photography John Alcott, and their groundbreaking work together on 1975’s BARRY LYNDON translates here into a horror movie that looks unlike any other. Beginning with the sweeping, rock-steady helicopter shot that opens the film with the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, Kubrick and Alcott immediately signal to us that this won’t be just another cobwebs-and-candelabras creepshow.
THE SHINING, perhaps more so than any other Kubrick film, features the near-constant use of one point perspective compositions, which imbues the 35mm film frame with an evocative sense of depth. By setting up the Overlook Hotel as a three-dimensional space, Kubrick and Alcott then introduce the idea of exploring every nook and cranny via their camera.
While THE SHINING features lots of conventional dolly camerawork, its legacy lies in its introduction of Garrett Brown’s Steadicam rig to audiences. Kubrick was fascinated by the organic, yet serenely smooth, nature of Brown’s groundbreaking camera innovation, and he uses the technique here almost as if it were its own character.
Indeed, many of the shots in THE SHINING give us a distinct sense that a foreboding, unseen entity (or even the hotel itself) is alive and watching the Torrances’ every move. Instead of relying on the gothic imagery of horror films past, Kubrick employs the Steadicam to generate the film’s unnerving creepiness. His expertise with various lenses also helped him considerably as far as this new tech was concerned—by placing an extremely wide lens on the Steadicam, he could create an exaggerated sense of momentum, speed, and gravity, which served to better place the audience in the point of view of malevolent ethereal entities.
Kubrick and Alcott also utilize a host of camera techniques popularized by the New Wave in the service of amping up the horror and tension—flash cuts, rack zooms, the breaking of the fourth wall, and Kubrick’s own signature shot that looks up from the ground at a subject while he or she is at a door. All of this adds up to a highly stylized, yet naturalistic, visual presentation.
Also returning to the Kubrick fold is musician Wendy Carlos, who teams up with Rachel Elkind to deliver THE SHINING’s score. This being a Kubrick film, their work isn’t necessarily comprised of new, original cues—rather, Carlos and Elkind appropriate and manipulate dark, existing works from contemporary classical artists, weaving them into a foreboding tapestry that underlines and enhances Kubrick’s images.
Most of the film’s music is filtered through the prism of a Moog synthesizer, previously used to equally chilling effect in Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971). The electronic synths are worked into an ominous music bed, peppered with disembodied, chanting voices and the rhythm of a throbbing heartbeat.
Perhaps the most recognizable aspect of THE SHINING’s musical soundscape, however, is the use of the Ray Noble Orchestra’s vintage recording of a slow love ballad called “Midnight, The Stars And You”. Used in the background of the scene where Jack may or may not be hallucinating a 1920’s-era ball, it gives us a peek into the glamor of the Overlook’s heyday while underscoring the tragedies that doomed it to ruin.
Kubrick was a master of ironic song choices that served as counterpoints to the images they accompany, and his juxtaposition here of a glamorous old-fashioned love ballad echoing in the foreboding emptiness of the Overlook creates an irony that is distinctly chilling.
A significant reason why THE SHINING has endured over the decades within a genre that seeks to top itself with every new entry is Kubrick’s inclusion of heavily-coded visuals and clues. The Overlook Hotel is presented as a giant puzzle that requires multiple viewings to solve—a reflection of Kubrick’s own love for the intellectual stimulation provided by chess.
A documentary film released in 2013, ROOM 237, examines the various interpretations and hidden messages inherent in THE SHINING. These “conspiracy theories”, for lack of a better term, range from the reasonably sound (the film being a metaphor for the genocide of the Native Americans) to the utterly ridiculous (the film being Kubrick’s confession that he faked the moon landing for NASA). It’s a veritable master class in how to “read” a film.
The documentary itself is well worth watching to see all the various interpretations of meaning that THE SHINING has given birth to since its release, but two interpretations in particular bear legitimate explorations. Ever since Nicholson uttered the line, “White man’s burden, Llloyd.
White man’s burden.”, to the ghostly bartender in the Gold Room, academics and fans alike have drawn allusions from Kubrick’s film to the massacre of the Native Americans—a genocide upon which modern American is founded and barely acknowledges. The Overlook is stuffed with Native American imagery—from decorative quilts to the cans of Calumet baking powder that line the stock room.
This interpretation was first popularized in 1987 by former ABC reporter Bill Blakemore in an essay entitled “Kubrick’s ‘Shining Secret: Film’s Hidden Horror Is the Murder Of The Indian”, where he points to the closing image of Nicholson’s face among the revelers in a photograph of the Overlook’s 1921 July Fourth Ball. He writes:
“…most Americans overlook the fact that July Fourth was no ball, nor any kind of independence day for native Americans; that the weak American villain of the film is the re-embodiment of the American men who massacred the Indians in earlier years; that Kubrick is examining and reflecting on a problem that cuts through the decades and centuries”.
The second interpretation that suggests THE SHINING as a massive puzzle is the inconsistent and conflicting layout and geography of The Overlook itself. King famously modeled the novel’s version on the infamous Stanley Hotel in Colorado, a purported hive of paranormal activity and spectral spooks.
Like he did with King’s story, Kubrick rejected King’s suggestion to shoot at the Stanley in favor of his own design, basing it on the Timberline Lodge, situated at the peak of Oregon’s Mount Hood (a point of pride for us Portland-bred cinephiles). Kubrick shows us the Timberline in wide shot during bright daylight towards the beginning of the film, allowing us an unadulterated, extended glimpse of it.
This isn’t merely an establishing shot, however—it’s the setup of an extremely subtle deception on Kubrick’s part. For the rest of the exterior scenes, Kubrick built a condensed-scale version of the Timberlines’ façade outside a soundstage in England. The effect is a hotel exterior that looks the same upon first glance but under closer scrutiny reveals dramatic inconsistencies.
This approach extends to the interiors, all built on a soundstage in such a way that allows Kubrick to run a Steadicam through its grand halls, residential corridors, and industrial kitchen spaces seamlessly. What we don’t realize as an audience, however, is that if one were to map the layout of Kubrick’s Overlook on a sheet of paper (and many have done so), one would find an impossible geography pockmarked by dead-end corridors, windows where there should be walls, etc.
Kubrick’s Overlook is like one of those haunted house mazes where the door disappears behind you the moment you enter the room. Architectural design aesthetics vary wildly from room to room, creating a mishmash of jarring colors and styles from drastically different time periods. By rendering the Overlook in such a way, Kubrick is subtly suggesting that the hotel itself is a living, breathing entity of evil that exists outside of normal space-time.
THE SHINING, more so than any other film in his filmography, illustrates one aspect of Kubrick’s work that becomes clear only in retrospect—a recurring motif that incorporates imagery from the Greek myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinth. In Greek folklore, the Minotaur was a beast with the head of a bull and the body of a man, who dwelled in a massive maze-like labyrinth.
The labyrinth itself was designed to test the fortitude of those who would attempt to slay the Minotaur. Mazes, labyrinths, and tunnels play a huge role in shaping Kubrick’s aesthetic worldview. Ever since he sent a camera careening down a narrow New York city street in a dream sequence for KILLER’S KISS (1955), Kubrick has made potent use of “the tunnel” as a visual allegory.
There’s also another allusion to the Greek myth in KILLER’S KISS, in the form of an opening credit that reads: “A Minotaur Production”, or the name of Kubrick’s production company at the time. This could hardly be construed as coincidental, especially when such similar “tunnel” imagery reappears in PATHS OF GLORY’s embattled trenches or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY’s claustrophobic spaceship corridors.
Kubrick’s protagonists always seem to be descending into an underworld of sorts, where they will have to confront a supernatural enemy. THE SHINING is easily Kubrick’s most overt reference to the Greek myth, what with the long, languid takes that roam the Overlook’s countless nooks and crannies. He even places the climax inside a literal maze, just in case we were incapable of picking up on his earlier signals.
The horror genre serves Kubrick well in his explorations of sex and violence, allowing him to indulge in more lurid meditations of each—see Jack’s psychotic axe murder spree or the ghostly naked woman in Room 237 (or even the fundamentally unnerving shot of a ghost getting fellated by another ghost wearing a warthog costume for that matter).
THE SHINING is no doubt a film about a man’s swift downward spiral into madness, but Kubrick’s particular ideas about the fragility of the human psyche make for an utterly original film that bears his unmistakable stamp. He never quite tells us what exactly is causing the hotel’s unexplainable phenomena. Are these ghosts simply a manifestation of Jack’s growing psychosis, or are they authentically supernatural?
Michael Ciment, a leading Kubrick scholar, has pointed out in his writings that whenever Jack converses with the ghosts of the Overlook, he is always situated so that he is talking into a mirror. This would seem to definitely suggest that Lloyd the bartender and Grady the waiter are simply manifestations Jack’s psychological state, but then later on in the film Grady is depicted physically releasing Jack from the meat locker that Wendy has trapped him inside.
When this happens, we’re forced to admit that the real source of the Overlook’s evil is ultimately unknowable. This is where the true horror of Kubrick’s THE SHINING lies.
THE SHINING is held in such high regard today that it’s easy to forget that Kubrick’s first (and only) horror film was not well-received when it was initially released. Critical reviews were unfavorable, and box office receipts were lackluster before picking up steam quite some time afterward.
In setting out to conquer the horror genre, Kubrick created an enduring classic that continues to not only to chill us to the bone, but to awe us with its impeccable craftsmanship. Very few horror films can be rightfully called masterpieces, but THE SHINING is just that: a stunning, reference-grade work of cinema that dares to show us that true horror comes from within
FULL METAL JACKET (1987)
The experience of the Vietnam War had soured America on the prospect of warfare, mostly because the widespread adoption of television allowed the war to be broadcast into the homes of every family— punctuating their supper with gunfire, explosions and the anguished cries of wounded men.
Kubrick felt a desire to make a war film that reflected this new paradigm, and selected author Gustav Hasford’s 1979 novel “The Short-Timers” as the source material upon which he’d base the story for what would eventually become FULL METAL JACKET. Working once again with his brother-in-law and producing partner Jan Harlan, Kubrick recruited a novelist and Vietnam veteran named Michael Herr to help him craft the script.
The shoot audaciously (but not really convincingly) faked rural England for the humid jungles of Vietnam, with the production timetable ballooning longer than a tour of duty in the military. Where most actors and craftsmen would quit in anger over the prolonged schedule, this element of Kubrick’s shooting style had become so well known by this point that his collaborators willingly signed on knowing full well it would happen.
They placed their utmost faith and confidence in Kubrick, and that trust and passion shows through in the final product. FULL METAL JACKET may be a flawed, uneven film, but that can’t stop it from enduring as one of defining films in the war genre as well as Kubrick’s own body of work.
In an attempt to do away with conventional modes of cinematic structure, Kubrick employs a two-act structure in FULL METAL JACKET. The first half takes place at a military base in South Carolina, where a band of new recruits are being trained to become the latest wave of efficient killing machines.
They are under the command of Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), a relentlessly abusive disciplinarian who has placed a special focus on an overweight recruit he dubs Gomer Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio). He never misses an opportunity to remind Pyle that he is a worthless fat-ass and a disgrace to the Marine Corps. One of the other recruits, who Hartman has dubbed Private Joker (Matthew Modine) takes pity on Pyle and helps him shape up to Hartman’s superhuman standards.
Under Joker’s positive encouragement, Pyle shows remarkable growth—but that growth comes at a cost, and on the eve of their graduation, Pyle murders Hartman before firing a rifle round into his own skull. The film’s second half is set in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive, one of the defining moments of the war.
Joker is now a war correspondent for Stars and Stripes, the military-owned newspaper distributed to the troops. On a routine assignment, he runs into a buddy from his days in South Carolina, Cowboy (Arliss Howard), who is now running with a squadron making their way through Hue City. They eventually become lost and try to take refuge in the city’s abandoned ruins. They’re ambushed by relentless sniper fire, but there’s no retreat.
If they want to live, they must forge ahead by any means necessary. By film’s end, we are left only with one question—what is the cost of warfare? Kubrick’s thesis posits that the answer lies not in the form of dollars, but in our very souls.
Kubrick’s cast is comprised entirely of unknowns, and it’s a testament to their talents here that they all went on to respectable acting careers afterwards. Matthew Modine headlines the film as the gangly Joker— a mischievous subversive who pairs his military fatigues with a peace symbol decal, which makes his story arc of lost innocence all the more potent.
He carries a smug grin on his face throughout the entirety of the film, but you better believe by the end that Kubrick will have wiped it right off his face. Vincent D’Onofrio makes his film debut in FULL METAL JACKET as the fat, uncoordinated Gomer Pyle. He purportedly gained seventy pounds to play the role, offering a hint of those“dedicated thespian” affectations his career would later be known for.
Arliss Howard plays Cowboy, the squad’s flustered, short-lived leader. His performance is unremarkable in and of itself, but it took three screenings of the film for me to realize that he also plays the antagonistic role of John Hammond’s nephew in director Steven Spielberg’s THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK (1997).
Spielberg was, of course, a close friend of Kubrick’s and his casting of Howard for his dino sequel speaks to how much he admired Kubrick and his work. The real star of the show, however, is R. Lee Ermey, who plays the hardass drill sergeant Hartman. Prior to the film, Ermey was a real-life retired Marine drill sergeant, and was brought onto the project as a tech consultant.
His dedication to authenticity was so intense that he outright stole the role of Hartman from the guy who had been originally cast. His relentless abuse and creative grasp on insulting profanity approaches the level of performance art, and his particular showing in FULL METAL JACKET kickstarted a second career as an in-demand character actor that continues to this day.
By this point in his career, Kubrick had built up a strong working relationship with cinematographer John Alcott, who shot his previous three features. When Kubrick began to assemble his crew for FULL METAL JACKET, Alcott declined a fourth go-round with the maverick auteur. In hindsight, this would prove to be a serendipitous move for both parties, considering Alcott died during the middle of production.
Douglas Milsome, who had previously worked on Kubrick’s films as a focus puller, stepped up to assume the role of cinematographer on FULL METAL JACKET instead. Milsome and Kubrick craft a relatively straightforward visual presentation that’s high on style and low on flash. Kubrick’s compositions retain his signature one-point perspectives that emphasize depth and symmetry, while his camerawork builds on THE SHINING’s innovations with the Steadicam by incorporating it as often as possible.
Kubrick has always favored extended tracking shots as a way to convey mood, and the rise of the Steadicam allowed him much greater flexibility and versatility in that regard. No longer bound by dolly tracks, he could mount the camera on a Steadicam rig and follow his subjects right into the maelstrom without so much of a hint of handheld jitter.
Like BARRY LYNDON or THE SHINING before it, Kubrick counters the formalism of his camerawork with New Wave techniques like slow zooms and flash cuts. FULL METAL JACKET’s naturalistic aesthetic isn’t as lurid or evocative of other Vietnam classics like Oliver Stone’s PLATOON (1987) or Francis Ford Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), yet its visuals are just as (if not more) iconic due to Kubrick’s legendary eye for composition and considered movement.
The music of FULL METAL JACKET marks an abrupt departure for Kubrick, who was well known for using prominent classical works to accompany his visuals instead of original scores. Instead of baroque concertos, Kubrick opts for the iconic sound of the Vietnam War: rock and roll.
Beginning with Johnnie Wright’s crooning country ballad, “Hello Vietnam”, Kubrick uses an inspired selection of late 70’s-era rock music to reflect the dark, subversive and unpredictable nature of Vietnam’s combatants. A particular standout is the use of The Rolling Stone’s “Paint It Black” over the end credits—a musical echo of the darkness that Joker now dwells in after the completion of his character arc.
Despite the heavy presence of rock cues, Kubrick does make potent use of an original score written by his daughter, Vivian Kubrick (credited here as Abigail Mead). Vivian creates a suitably foreboding, industrial sound using electronic instruments that appropriately reflect Kubrick’s pitch-black portrait of institutionalized destruction.
While Kubrick’s films defy easy explanation, they can be distilled into the examination of two primal, opposing forces: violence and sex. His last two films—FULL METAL JACKET and EYES WIDE SHUT—would become companion pieces in that they each dealt with their respective theme (violence for the former, sex for the latter) in a singularly summative manner.
Kubrick was no stranger to war films, but whereas PATHS OF GLORY dealt with the ethical conundrums of warfare on a collective scale, FULL METAL JACKET is more concerned with the psychological consequences of warfare on the level of the individual.
The film focuses on the military as an institution not only capable of perpetuating man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man, but one that needs such devastation in order to thrive. Kubrick doesn’t depict the military so much as an institution, but as a machine—devouring countless scores of boys whole and spitting them out the other end as robotic killing machines devoid of compassion and empathy.
The machine is kept fed by a surrounding culture that commodifies and glorifies violence; Joker’s iconic line, “I wanted to be the first kid on my block with a confirmed kill”, is terrifying precisely because it hits so close to home.
Vietnam was more than just a war for the American public—it was an existential crisis that introduced the idea of cynicism and irony into warfare. It was, for lack of a better term, The Hipster War. Having peppered it throughout his filmography to extremely potent effect, Kubrick was no stranger to the concept of irony, and FULL METAL JACKET is stuffed to the brim with it.
Joker complements a peace symbol decal with a helmet that has the words “Born To Kill” scrawled across it. The big bad sniper of the film’s denouement is revealed to be a scared twelve-year old girl. Soldiers march against fiery scenes of devastation while cheerily singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song. A young recruit is trained into such an effective killing machine that he turns his rifle on the man who created him.
FULL METAL JACKET came out the same year that Oliver Stone’s PLATOON did, and while Kubrick’s final statement on war and violence would eventually lose out the Best Picture Oscar to Stone’s breakout film, it now overshadows its former rival due to the legacy of its genius creator. It may not be the definitive Vietnam film, but it is certainly one of the most definitive films of the war genre.
For Kubrick himself, FULL METAL JACKET serves as a fitting, yet, haunting conclusion to a topic that he spent a lifetime exploring.
EYES WIDE SHUT (1999)
After his permanent relocation to England in the mid-1960’s, director Stanley Kubrick began accumulating a reputation in the media as an eccentric recluse. He valued his privacy as well as time it took to perfect his vision on a given work, which the newspapers regularly embellished as the controlling nature of a megalomaniacal artist.
Because Kubrick didn’t do anything to dispel these rumors, this false reputation only grew until it attained the power of myth. It would take Kubrick twelve years to realize another project after 1987’s FULL METAL JACKET, and the long period of silence from the maverick auteur led the film world to wonder just what exactly he was up to all this time.
The hype machine kicked into overdrive when Kubrick announced his next project (and unbeknownst to him, his last) would be EYES WIDE SHUT, a cautionary tale about infidelity and sexuality set among the strata of the New York City’s elite.
Kubrick based the film on a novel by Arthur Schnitzler titled “Traumnovelle”, or “Dream Story”, which he had optioned way back in the 1960’s. Collaborating with writer Frederic Raphael and his producing partner/brother-in-law Jan Harlan, Kubrick began rolling film on his fourteenth and final feature in 1996. EYES WIDE SHUT, starring Hollywood’s superstar couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, found its high production profile both a blessing and a curse.
Kubrick’s shoots had a reputation for going absurdly overlong, but when the production of EYES WIDE SHUT broke Day 400 (and a new Guinness World Record for longest continuous shoot), many wondered whether Kubrick had finally gone too far. In 1999, three years after he had commenced principal photography, Kubrick handed in his final cut of EYES WIDE SHUT to Warner Brothers.
Before he could reap the fruits of his labor, he died of a massive heart attack in his sleep only a week later. With the successful release of EYES WIDE SHUT in cinemas, Kubrick left us with a complete set of masterworks and ensured his legacy as one of the greatest filmmakers to have ever lived.
EYES WIDE SHUT is set in contemporary New York City during the Christmas season. Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife, Alice (Nicole Kidman), are a wealthy couple living in an expansive New York penthouse with their young daughter and running in the social circles of Gotham’s elite class. We catch up to them as they attend a glamorous Christmas ball hosted by Harford’s colleague Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack).
Kubrick shows us that Bill and Alice are comfortable with each other, yet boredom is beginning to creep into their lives. Alice entertains an extended flirtation with the human equivalent of Pepe Le Pew, while Bill is called upstairs to help rejuvenate a nude hooker who has overdosed in Ziegler’s private bathroom. Back in the comfort of their own boudoir, Bill and Alice get high and have a truthful reckoning with each other.
Alice admits that while she has never cheated on him, she’s had unbearably strong fantasies about a young army man who she had only seen once in real life. Bill is unexpectedly called out to attend to a patient whose father has died, but Alice’s revelation has spooked him so much that afterwards he wanders Greenwich Village in a daze.
He meets an old medical school buddy for a drink, where he learns about an intriguing costume party that night at a mansion out in the country. Bill finds a costume and sneaks into the mansion (note that it is the same mansion that Kubrick acolyte Christopher Nolan used as Wayne Manor in 2005’s BATMAN BEGINS), but what Bill finds there is something he could never have predicted: a costumed orgy.
After Bill’s presence at the exclusive affair is made known, he is mercifully let go with a warning. However, Bill can’t quite let go of what he saw that night, and as he makes inquiries around town in an attempt to figure out just what happened, he becomes embroiled in a deepening mystery with far-reaching consequences. However, because this is a Kubrick film, nothing is quite what it seems and Bill begins to question his grasp on reality and wonder whether what he saw really happened, or if it was all just a terrible dream.
Kubrick had a habit throughout his career of picking leading men there were just left of center, in terms of popularity or stardom. The two biggest stars he had worked with up to that point had been Kirk Douglas and Jack Nicholson, and even then both men paled in comparison to the blinding luster of Cruise’s celebrity.
Cruise was already a superstar before he was cast in EYES WIDE SHUT, but he would lay down any affectations of vanity in full service to Kubrick’s harrowing vision. As wealthy Gothamite Dr. Bill Harford, Cruise explores the darker side of his charismatic psyche—his iconic toothy grin now becoming a hollow façade for the tortured soul behind it.
Kubrick’s canny harnessing of Cruise’s manic intensity and dedication results in one of the finest performances of Cruise’s career. The same can be said of Cruise’s then-wife, Nicole Kidman, who plays Alice Harford. The role of Alice is a particularly vulnerable one, as it requires her to be completely nude throughout a good deal of the film, but Kidman shuns any sense of modesty and flaunts her stuff confidently.
She’s perfectly believable as the glamorous wife of a wealthy doctor, but Kubrick has the good sense to give her a nuanced role all her own. Her pragmatic sensuality exerts an unspeakable power over Bill, and while Cruise and Kidman would not pan out as a couple in the long run, their charged chemistry in EYES WIDE SHUT is captivating.
For the supporting roles of Nick Nightingale and Victor Ziegler, Kubrick turned to two fellow directors: Todd Field and Sydney Pollack. Field, a Portland native, wasn’t exactly a director himself during the making of EYES WIDE SHUT, but he would prove his bona fides with his later award-winning works, IN THE BEDROOM (2001) and LITTLE CHILDREN(2006).
In EYES WIDE SHUT, Field plays Nick Nightingale, a med school buddy of Bill’s who dropped out to become a jazz piano player. Field doesn’t have much to do in the way of characterization, but the role is instrumental in pushing Bill headlong into his dark adventure.
By contrast, Pollack was already an Oscar-winning director at the time, having helmed 1985’s OUT OF AFRICA and 1982’s TOOTSIE, and had previously directed Cruise himself in THE FIRM (1993). As Victor Ziegler, Pollack proves that he’s equally adept in front of the camera, channeling a mild-mannered kind of antagonism towards Cruise as the good doctor threatens to expose his participation in the secret sex cult. Furthermore, cult character actor Alan Cumming appears in a brief cameo as a hotel concierge.
The visual style of EYES WIDE SHUT, besides being inherently Kubrick-ian in conception and execution, reads like a baroque, old world nightmare. In selecting his director of photography, Kubrick continues his tradition of pulling from John Alcott’s camera crew.
Just as he promoted focus puller Douglas Milsome to lens FULL METAL JACKET, Kubrick calls up Larry Smith, who served as the gaffer on BARRY LYNDON (1975) and THE SHINING (1980). After twelve years away from a film set, Kubrick manages to retain all the visual conceits he has made into his signature: alluring one point perspective compositions, the frequent use of Steadicam rigs, zooms (both slow and fast), extended tracking shots and elegant dolly work.
The camera floats dispassionately as it observes the action, creating the distinct impression of an omniscient observer. Indeed, the floating nature of the camera echoes the floating nature of dreams themselves, and Kubrick’s kinetic perfection here— when combined with a sumptuous blend of oranges, reds, purples, soft focus setups, and Christmas lights everywhere—generates a hazy, ethereal patina.
Kubrick’s production designer on THE SHINING, Roy Walker, returns to provide his exceptional set-building talents in collaboration with Leslie Tomkins. The director’s preference for controlling every single aspect of his shoots often meant that soundstages were the only option. The deception of theatricality is a major theme of EYES WIDE SHUT, which is reflected in the fact that the film was made entirely on soundstages—even the streets of New York City were recreated in painstaking detail.
At the same time, Kubrick doesn’t bother to hide the artifice of the process—instead he embraces it as an aesthetic conceit. The streets of New York in EYES WIDE SHUT feel like less of an actual place and more like someone’s memory of the city, recalled in a daydream. That same dreamlike approach extends to the intense, unnaturally blue moonlight that filters through windows, or the blatantly-fake taxicab sequences (or even that one very-noticeable walking shot) that employ rear projection to give the illusion of movement.
By 1996, rear project was already an obsolete technology, but Kubrick’s inspired use of it subtly reinforces our suspicions that all may quite not be what it appears.
Contemporary classical composer Jocelyn Pook is credited for the film’s music, but Kubrick once again uses a variety of pre-existing classical works. Some are appropriations of Pook’s existing work, like the creepy piano chord plunks that symbolize the ominous watch of the secretive sex cult. The orgy sequence itself is scored with a recording of an Orthodox Mass in Romanian played backwards, lending a spooky, Satanic vibe to the ritualistic nature of the party.
Kubrick also uses a piece by Dmiti Shostakovich—“Jazz Suite Waltz 2” as the de facto theme of the film, continuing his streak of forever linking underappreciated classical music with his indelible images. Quite simply, no one ever has (and perhaps ever will) use classical music as effectively as Kubrick. Finally, Chris Isaak’s brooding rock track “Baby Did A Bad, Bad Thing” is used during a brief sex scene between Cruise and Kidman, adding an edgy modernism to EYES WIDE SHUT’s musical landscape.
Just as FULL METAL JACKET devoted itself solely to the exploration of violence, so does EYES WIDE SHUT single-mindedly attack the other end of the totem pole: sex. Whereas previous films like LOLITA (1962) and DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964) danced around the subject of sexuality with winking innuendo, EYES WIDE SHUT confronts it head-on from the opening shot of Kidman’s nude backside and all the way up until the closing shot where she informs Cruise (in no uncertain terms) of their immediate need to make love.
EYES WIDE SHUT defines its exploration of sexuality through the prism of marriage and the institutions built around it. Kubrick makes a stark contrast between the lurid, rampant promiscuity of the mansion sex party and the quiet, comfortable intimacy of Alice and Bill’s bedroom. In the mansion, secrets are created, and in the bedroom, secrets are divulged.
The spectre of infidelity cleaves like a dagger through the Harfords’ marriage, setting them each off on a journey of self-exploration and discovery to ultimately arrive back at a stronger place than they were before. The nature of said journeys also reflects the differences in gender in terms of arousal—Alice’s fantasy dreams reflect the psychological, intangible aspects of attraction (a trait often described as feminine), while Tom’s close calls with the hooker played by Vinessa Shaw or his experience at the mansion party reflect impersonal, transactional attitudes towards sex that are often attributed to the masculine psyche.
The placing of Alice and Bill among the social circles of New York’s elite can be read as a distinctly Kubrick-ian move that affords him the opportunity to indulge in gilded, baroque production design and images of dancing aristocrats.
Like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY or THE SHINING before it, a supernatural mystique courses through EYES WIDE SHUT. The coded iconography of dreams allows Kubrick to cast a naturalistic eye on spooky images like the hedonistic ritualism of the mansion sex party or the ominous masks worn by its attendees. The masks themselves were based on those that one might see at the Carnival of Venice, which coincides quite nicely with the Old World supernaturalism that Kubrick is after here (along with the not-so-subtle allusions to the Illuminati).
Indeed, masks play a key role in the story of EYES WIDE SHUT—the film is a commentary on the masks that we wear: that of the loving wife, or the devoted father, or the principled member of society’s upper crust. These masks give us our identity—without them, we are anonymous, and our anonymity reveals us as we really are: mere animals vulnerable to our primitive instincts and desires.
EYES WIDE SHUT takes place on the city streets and in the sky-high apartments of New York City, but Kubrick’s fascination with the myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth still informs the film on a fundamental level. It’s no coincidence that Bill Harford is beckoned to “where the rainbow ends” by two drunken, seductive models during the film’s opening at the Christmas Ball, only for him to later wind up buying his costume for the mansion orgy at a shop literally called “Rainbows”.
He’s followed the rainbow to its end, only to find a rabbit hole that leads deeper and deeper into the labyrinth. As Harford meanders the cold city streets on his many head-clearing walks, Kubrick shows the streets themselves as something of a maze. Like the hedge mage in THE SHINING, Harford’s surroundings look the same at every turn, and he never quite understands that he’s walking in circles.
As long as he allows himself to be consumed by the mystery, he will never escape this labyrinth. Only, he’s not on a confrontation course with the Minotaur—Bill’s internal battles with his jealousy and suspicion means that HE is the Minotaur. Whereas Kubrick’s prior films have been about his protagonists entering the labyrinth to slay their Minotaurs, his final film allows the Minotaur to free himself from the tyranny of the labyrinth entirely.
Kubrick was immensely proud of EYES WIDE SHUT—he allegedly considered it to be his best film. It was a homecoming of sorts for the director, taking place in his native New York City despite him never shooting a single frame outside England (not counting the second unit footage). Sadly, he would not live to see the success of EYES WIDE SHUT firsthand.
On March 7th, 1999, Stanley Kubrick died of a massive heart attack in his sleep—only days after he had turned in his finished cut of the film to the studio. After its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, EYES WIDE SHUT opened to strong box office receipts and a mixed critical reaction. Some saw a profoundly flawed film while others saw an unfinished masterpiece.
The general perception at the time was that the infamous perfectionist had ultimately succumbed to that bittersweet brand of irony he spent his career exploring and closed out his life’s work with an incomplete, half-baked film. However, much like Kubrick’s other work, time and repeat viewings have eroded that notion and revealed a thoroughly considered and impeccably crafted work that ranks among the best of the director’s filmography.
With EYES WIDE SHUT, Kubrick’s life work was complete, and for all the innovation and excellence he had given the art form, he was rewarded with perhaps the best parting gift a filmmaker could hope for: a pitch-perfect finish.
A DEBRIEFING
In November of 2012, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art hosted the first ever exhibition of director Stanley Kubrick’s career. I went with a good friend of mine—a fellow aspiring director—to marvel at the artifacts of Kubrick’s work up close. We got to see models of the iconic war room set of 1964’s DR. STRANGELOVE: OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB.
The slightly decayed monkey outfits used in 1968’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. The giant NASA-designed lens used to capture a scene by candlelight in 1975’s BARRY LYNDON. We even saw the famed file cabinet that held a card for everyday of Napoleon Bonaparte’s life that Kubrick assembled in his research for the failed project on the French emperor.
However, the most powerful item for me to have seen with my own eyes was located right at the entrance to the exhibit: Kubrick’s directing chair—a weathered, battered canvas seat flanked on either side by a wooden box stamped with the word: “KUBRICK.” The director’s chair is perhaps the most iconic and clichéd image that comes to mind when one thinks of the profession, but I was captivated by this chair in particular and all the groundbreaking decisions that had been made on it.
Every living filmmaker today works under the shadow of Stanley Kubrick. When one first expresses an interest in pursuing a career in the art form, they are almost always pointed towards the work of Kubrick. He is the reference-grade gold standard in filmmaking, and even though many find his films unlikable, they admire and respect the total command of craft on display in every single one.
No other director, living or dead, can claim as many true masterpieces in their filmography. Okay, maybe Hitchcock. Even in my own early explorations of Kubrick’s work in college, I didn’t necessarily love them butdamn, did I admire them. I’ve grown to appreciate every single one, and every time I watch a Kubrick film, I discover something I never picked up on before. Kubrick’s legacy endures because no two viewings of a given film are ever the same. They’re always withholding a new secret, beckoning you deeper down the rabbit hole.
Kubrick’s roller coaster ride of a career lasted forty-five years and spanned two continents, leaving fourteen features and countless innovations in its wake. Even as a young boy growing up in New York City, Kubrick’s intimidating intellect was immediately apparent— despite the fact that he performed poorly in school.
His love for photography and chess would fundamentally shape his worldview as he grew into a young man. Indeed, he approached his life’s work like one big game of chess—every move must be thoroughly considered and planned for if one had any desire to beat his opponent.
The stark naturalism of his early black and white works—KILLER’S KISS (1955), THE KILLING (1956), and PATHS OF GLORY (1957) reflected his time as a documentary photographer for Look Magazine, where he honed his talents for evocative lighting and cinematic, depth-filled compositions. His fluid, graceful camerawork suggested the influence of director Max Ophuls, whom the young Kubrick admired for his tracking shots and eye for movement.
His love for film was all-consuming, and by the mid 50’s he had already burned through two marriages. His marriage to Christiane Harlan, who he met on the set of PATHS OF GLORY, would be the love that stuck and transformed him into a devoted family man. As the Kubrick family grew, they relocated from New York to Los Angeles for a brief time in the late 1950’s. Being located in the heart of Hollywood gave Kubrick his biggest career opportunity when Kirk Douglas recruited him to helm 1960’s SPARTACUS.
It was a crucial development in Kubrick’s life, but not for the obvious reasons—the unfavorable experience only served to push him away from Hollywood, solidifying his desire to work outside of the studio system as a means to exert total artistic control. He found this autonomy in England, where he shot LOLITA (1962) and DR. STRANGELOVE, eventually deciding that it would also be a good place to permanently relocate his family to.
Kubrick’s move to England was also a catalyst for a change in his filmmaking style—he became inspired by the innovations and transgressions of the New Wave coming out of Europe and incorporated them into his own work. As a result, his films increasingly took on a distinct sense of surrealism.
Kubrick’s considerable talent is immediately apparent to everyone who watches one of his films, and his power over the Hollywood studio system never has and never will be repeated. He had full artistic independence with his projects, in addition to the full backing of studios. It’s almost impossible to comprehend this scenario in today’s filmmaking environment.
This total autonomy turned Kubrick The Man into Kubrick The Myth, with legends of his demanding eccentricities spreading like wildfire in the media. They said he was a control freak. A secretive recluse. A mad scientist. They said he went to insane lengths in researching his projects and drove actors to the brinks of insanity themselves with the countless number of takes he would demand from them. In truth, these reports were gross embellishments, designed solely to sell newspapers.
The reality was that Kubrick was an intensely private person who prized his anonymity and cared deeply about his work because he knew would have to answer for it for the rest of his life. His voluntary withdrawal of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE from UK cinemas in the wake of a wave of copycat crimes inspired by the film wasn’t just a display of his astonishing directorial power, but a prime example of his sense of social responsibility and foresight. His life and his work was one big game of chess, and he was playing the long game. He was playing for keeps.
In making his films, Kubrick ultimately wanted to change the form of cinema itself. His exploration of alternative story structures and new forms of expression resulted in several groundbreaking contributions to the development of the craft itself. He pioneered realistic visual effects with 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, generating what director Steven Spielberg called “his generation’s Big Bang”, and inspiring a legion of upcoming filmmakers to push those boundaries even further.
Kubrick’s supreme command of his craft and knowledge of trick photography would result in the only Oscar he would ever win—for 2001’s groundbreaking visual effects. The gold statue for Directing or Picture would evade him for his entire life.
Other groundbreaking innovations that Kubrick popularized are well known: the specialized low light lenses on BARRY LYNDON, or the graceful gliding of the Steadicam on THE SHINING, to name just a few. Some of his innovations are less well-known—his endorsement of video assist, a technology that allowed filmmakers to view a take immediately after filming it, directly contributed to its quick adoption throughout the industry.
He also popularized the idea of shooting dozens of takes as a way for actors to let go of their preconceptions about “technique” and reach a deeper, fundamentally authentic style of performance—a practice that Kubrick acolyte David Fincher would claim as his own calling card. It’s important to remember, however, that accumulating mountains of footage wasn’t just a means to wear his actors down to raw nubs.
Kubrick often found the final form of his films in the editing room, sifting through the dozens of takes and various angles he had explored on set and stitching it together into a unified whole. In that sense, he was a perfectionist in the best way— making sure that he left no stone unturned in realizing the full potential of any given project.
Indeed, when he accepted the most prestigious directing award of his life from the DGA shortly before his death, he invoked the myth of Icarus in a videotaped speech that alluded to his perfectionism—Icarus may have failed in trying to touch the sun, but that only means that we must build better wings.
Kubrick is unique among other directors in that he had very few constant collaborators. Whereas some directors continue to work with one particular actor again and again (see Martin Scorsese and his string of films with Robert DeNiro—or Leonardo DiCaprio for that matter), the only leading man that Kubrick used more than once Kirk Douglas, and even then it was only because Kubrick had no say in the casting of their second collaboration together.
Kubrick’s regular confidantes stayed firmly behind the camera, with producing partners James B Harris and Jan Harlan being the most significant in terms of their contribution to Kubrick’s films, as well as cinematographer John Alcott who shot three consecutive films (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, BARRY LYNDON, and THE SHINING) for the maverick auteur.
Other craftsmen (and women) like production designers Ken Adam and Roy Walker or composer Wendy Carlos can only count two collaborations with Kubrick. Out of all the people who wandered on and off Kubrick’s sets over the decades, only one person could claim a lifelong collaboration with him—his wife, the love of his life, and the woman who inspired him on a daily basis: Christiane Kubrick.
In a video interview, Kubrick’s late-career executive producer (and brother-in-law) Jan Harlan states that Kubrick’s work is fundamentally about the conflict between emotion and intellect. His protagonists are often painted as men railing against the confines and impersonality of civilization’s institutions.
Kirk Douglas raged against the uncompromising imperialism of both France and ancient Rome in PATHS OF GLORY and SPARTACUS (1960), respectively. DR. STRANGELOVE and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY are both about mankind fighting to preserve itself from the cold objectivity of our own technological innovations. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE’s Malcolm McDowell manages to free himself from the institution of prison only to land firmly within the prison of his own mind and body.
FULL METAL JACKET and EYES WIDE SHUT each deal with the institutions of military and marriage, respectively—specifically the internal destruction that can be wrought upon the individual when the idea of moral ambiguity is introduced.
For Kubrick, storytelling was ultimately about the cycle of creation and destruction. He knew that people always have a visceral response to violence and sex, and he filtered his narratives through these two prisms as a way to challenge our own preconceptions and hang-ups. This is a brilliant tactic because while the content may turn us off, it actively engages us and forces us to confront the darkest, most base impulses of our humanity.
Another defining trait that can be seen in all of Kubrick’s works is his presentation of his films as puzzles. Kubrick’s background in photography was immensely helpful in this regard in that it trained him to get across his message in a single, static shot. Towards this end, he had to use every available tool to tell the story: lighting, composition, depth of field, etc.
His mise-en-scene is comprised of coded messages left open to interpretation, and it is Kubrick’s refusal to elaborate on the meaning of his films that bestows the air of mystery on his work. Kubrick’s films mean different things to different people and it’s because they see what they want to see. People watch THE SHINING and see an allegory for the genocide of the Native Americans, or they watch EYES WIDE SHUT and see nothing but references to masonry and the Illuminati.
This alluring ambiguity is the key to his work’s longevity and ensures that his films will be studied and dissected for decades, if not centuries, to come.
This idea of the puzzle, or the maze is crucial to our understanding of the dark, seductive power that Kubrick’s work holds over us. Kubrick was profoundly influenced by the Greek myth of The Minotaur and the Labyrinth, which saw brave men descend into a maze-like underworld to face the demon that was torturing their community.
He was so inspired by the myth that the imagery of tunnels or mazes makes it way into nearly every film. THE SHINING, with its labyrinthine tangle of halls and grand open spaces (as well as its literal hedge maze) is the most visible example, but the idea pops up in places one wouldn’t expect. In EYES WIDE SHUT, the grid-like streets of New York City become an underworld that Tom Cruise must navigate.
The confined spaces of the spaceship in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY render the crew unable to hide from an omniscient intelligence. The supernatural mystique that exudes from Kubrick’s work suggests the lurking Minotaur—a force that threatens to destroy Kubrick’s protagonists either physically or mentally.
In the nearly five-decade span of Kubrick’s career, he only completed fourteen features. That may seem like a lot, but pales in comparison to directors like Woody Allen, whom Kubrick admired for churning out a new film without fail every single year. Kubrick’s perfectionism meant that he had to spend long amounts of time on any given project, and he always regretted his slow pace.
Like most other filmmakers, Kubrick abandoned a few projects over the course of his career, but unlike those other filmmakers, his unrealized works are regarded as great gifts that we’ll never receive. Funnily enough, these films all involve his close friend and fellow director Steven Spielberg in some fashion. Kubrick’s lifelong ambition to make a film on Napoleon Bonaparte is well known, so much so that it widely called “The Greatest Film Never Made”.
In a way, it would have been the most autobiographical film that Kubrick ever made—both Kubrick and Napoleon were master strategists that were well aware of their brilliance. He no doubt would’ve drawn many parallels between the art of war and the art of filmmaking, seeing as both men approached their respective work with a totalitarian mentality.
Kubrick’s shooting script for NAPOLEONis now reportedly being developed by Spielberg as a television miniseries, so we may end up seeing The Greatest Film Never Made after all. Kubrick’s other big failed project was a planned film about the Holocaust called THE ARYAN PAPERS, based off Louis Begley’s book “Wartime Lies”. In a nod to his companionship with director Steven Spielberg, it would have starredJURASSIC PARK’s Joseph Mazzello as a young boy hiding from the Nazi regime as they persecuted Europe’s Jews.
Ironically, Kubrick abandoned the film after Spielberg released SCHINDLER’S LIST—perhaps the definitive narrative film about the Holocaust—in 1993. SCHINDLER’S LIST was a tough act to follow, and Kubrick wasn’t keen on reliving the disappointment he experienced when FULL METAL JACKET was eclipsed by Oliver Stone’s PLATOON that same year, so he abruptly stopped development on the ARYAN PAPERS and turned his attention to EYES WIDE SHUT.
And finally, there’sA.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE—- a long-gestating project that Kubrick sought to make himself but ultimately decided to pass on to Spielberg to direct. After Kubrick’s death in 1999, Spielberg was compelled to honor his old friend and made the film as closely as he could to Kubrick’s original vision.
Kubrick continues to be a highly influential filmmaker because his work continues to be extremely relevant, even today. His career holds countless lessons for both aspiring filmmakers and established ones. In watching Kubrick’s body of work in chronological order and charting the ebbs and flows of his career, I came away with several distinct observations that I intend to apply to my own work.
Kubrick was well-known for working out of his home, which served to bring him closer to his material and make it more personal for him. As an art form and a mode of self-expression, filmmaking should be an intensely personal endeavor. Kubrick always trusted his instincts, even when they veered off the beaten path and out into the deep end.
As a filmmaker, the courage of conviction is a necessity. A director must have the presence of mind to follow his or her vision, but not at the cost of rigidly adhering to it. Contrary to his authoritarian reputation, Kubrick would solicit advice from anyone who cared to give it, whether they were the lead actress or the set janitor.
He demanded many takes and took an inordinate amount of time during the shooting process because he wanted to explore every possible angle in a given scene. No stone must be left unturned lest it hides brilliance underneath. If we are to take away any lessons from Kubrick’s illustrious, controversial career, let it be this: a script isn’t a rigid document—it’s a blueprint for collaboration with performers and craftsmen, each one bringing their experience and technique to the project and enriching it to a degree that a director cannot achieve on his own, even if he is a genius.
As arguably the single most influential filmmaker of all time, Kubrick leaves behind a substantial number of heirs and acolytes, and he will continue to do so as long as cinema remains as viable art form. While Steven Spielberg was greatly influenced by Kubrick and even became a close friend later in life, it could be argued that Spielberg’s own distinct aesthetic disqualifies him as a true “heir” to Kubrick’s cinematic legacy.
Rather, he is more of an immediate beneficiary. Filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson have modeled core conceits of their careers and aesthetics on Kubrick’s example, but I, for one, would argue David Fincher as Kubrick’s most-direct successor. Yes, both men are infamous for their meticulous attention to detail and countless number of takes, but it’s really their shared thematic explorations of the fragile human psyche as well as their almost-clinical observations of mankind’s inherent darkness that bonds both artists to each other.
Fincher’s career simply wouldn’t be possible if not for the paths that Kubrick so bravely paved a generation earlier.
Like a large storm cloud, Kubrick’s shadow looms large over the cinematic landscape—he was a force of nature that permanently altered the art form, and while we may never get the gift of a new Kubrick film ever again, his legacy will continue to endure as long as there are uncompromising artists who are unafraid to gaze directly into the dark side of human nature.
Author Cameron Beyl is the creator of The Directors Series and an award-winning filmmaker of narrative features, shorts, and music videos. His work has screened at numerous film festivals and museums, in addition to being featured on tastemaking online media platforms like Vice Creators Project, Slate, Popular Mechanics and Indiewire. To see more of Cameron’s work – go to directorsseries.net.
THE DIRECTORS SERIES is an educational collection of video and text essays by filmmaker Cameron Beyl exploring the works of contemporary and classic film directors. ——>Watch the Directors Series Here <———
Spoiler
Welcoming Indie Film Hustlers to a very special episode of the indie film hustle podcast. I am your humble host Alex Ferrari. Now guys, you know I’m all about sharing information and trying to get as much information out there to the indie film world, and as if anybody has ever seen my site or seen the articles I write, or anything like that, or listened to the podcast, they know that I am a huge! And I cannot express enough how huge of a fan I am of the late great master, Stanley Kubrick. And the influences he had on my life and on my work as an artist, as a director and as a human being as well. And I did have the pleasure of going to the Stanley Kubrick exhibit at the LACMA here in Los Angeles a few years ago. I went like three or four times, I would literally just sit there for hours, just soaking it all in, soaking in, the man’s genius. And I know a lot of people might not like his film, some people like him, some people love him, he’s that kind of artist. Either you love him or hate him there is no middle ground with Stanley Kubrick but regardless, if you love him or hate him you can’t deny the man’s impact on cinema; and not only on cinema but probably if you are like a director or like a filmmaker, more likely than not, they have been influenced in one way, shape or form by Stanley Kubrick. He created amazing ripples in the film business and the film industry and he definitely moved, pushed and sometimes dragged the film medium forward; and he was always ahead of his time with every single one of his movies. It took people years to understand his movies. When I was young and I saw ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ for the first time when it came out in theaters, I was asked “what did you think?” I’m like oh, I didn’t understand it, but I’ll probably understand it in about 10 years, and it took a little longer for me to get it and now it’s actually one of my favorite Kubrick films. I know a lot of people disagree with me on that but I absolutely love love love love ‘Eyes Wide Shut’; and I think Scorsese has also said it’s one of his favorites as well but I wanted to bring this interview, this his extremely rare interview by Stanley Kubrick, because he was a very private man and he did not talk a lot about his process as an artist and as a filmmaker, and a reporter by the name of Jeremy Bernstein back in November 27 of 1966, got a 37 year old Stanley Kubrick to sit down for about an hour and 16 minutes or so (76 minutes) and It’s the one of the rarest interviews with Mr. Kubrick and he tells his entire story up to that date, how he got started, his troubles, struggles, the hustle that he had to do, how he was a chess hustler, and how he used to hustle people for money in the parks of New York; and that’s what he used to do to make a living for a while, actually supported himself hustling chess games, and a lot of other stuff. And I really found it’s so valuable that I really wanted to share it with the indie film hustle tribe, and I wanted to just bring it to you. So please, do me a favor and share this with as many people as you can; talk about it with as many people as you can, because I think it’s so important that masters like this who give rare insights to their story and their struggle is an inspiration to all of us. Because he was coming up in the 40s, 50s, 60s, he was already who he was in the 50s and the 60s but, he was coming up in the 40s and the 30s, and his struggle is sound. When you listen to the interview, you find out that his struggle as an artist and as filmmaker was not that much different than many of ours; you know. He was trying to get his movies made; he was trying to get his voice heard; he was trying to find financing for his movies. It’s all very unfortunately a little too dejavu for filmmakers to listen to, but I just wanted to bring this interview to you guys because, it was so impactful to me and I think it will be impactful to you. So, I really am so proud to present this amazing interview by Jeremy Bernstein of Mr. Stanley Kubrick.
TESTING 1234 – JEREMY BERNSTEIN’S TAPE, NOVEMBER 27, SIDE A.
Stanley Kubrick: Born July 26, 1928, New York City. My father was a doctor. One sister, Barbra; Married; two children; lives in New Jersey; six years younger; her husband is a lawyer.
I was taught to play chess at the age of 12, but did not play seriously until about age of 17 when I joined the martial chess club in New York; on west Elm Street between 5th and 6th and 7th and whatever came along.
Did you happen to pick your intellectual interests as a child or was it as an adult that you did all of that?
Stanley Kubrick: Ah, No. I had a few intellectual interests as a child. I was a school misfit and considered that you know, reading a book, schoolwork, and I don’t think I read a book for pleasure until after I graduated high school.
Well, what were you doing that you always did well?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I had that one thing I think that perhaps helped me get over being a misfit in school. It is that I became interested in photography about the same time, 12 or 13, and I think that, if you get involved in any kind of problem-solving and depth on almost anything, it is surprisingly similar to problem-solving of anything you know. I started by just you know, getting a camera and learning how to take pictures, and learning how to print pictures, and learning how to build a dark room, and learning how to do all the technical things; and so on and so on. And then, finally trying to find out how you could sell pictures and become a proper; you know, would it be possible to be a professional photographer and sophomore. So I think that photography, though it seemed like a hobby and up but, and ultimately led to a professional job – photography, might have been more valuable than you know doing the proper things in school
Were you sort of despaired of your family at that time, because of your schoolwork or did you?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, it wasn’t a real drama you know, I imagine so, but it was never completely apparent until I graduated from high school that I couldn’t go to college, because I graduated in 1945 when all the GI’s went outpouring back on the GI Bill, and I had a 67 average and it turned out, that there wasn’t any college in the United States, even of the lowest caliber that would take a student with less than a 75 average in that year. So I couldn’t get in. I failed to pre-get into college.
Did you take all the required classes, the aptitude tests and so on?
Stanley Kubrick: Yeah, there were but they wouldn’t consider you. In other words they wouldn’t even accept your application if you didn’t have a 75 average in that particular year.
Looking back and sort of retrospective is not going to college and its circumstances sort of an unfortunate thing all?
Stanley Kubrick: Tremendously because, what happened was that, well I had developed myself as a photographer and prior to graduating high school, I had sold two still-picture stories to LOOK.
What were they about?
Stanley Kubrick: One was about a teacher in high school named Mr. Traister, who taught English and he used to dramatize Shakespeare. He would read the parts and act it out. he made it very interesting you know, it was one of the few courses that were interesting, and you know most of the English courses that I had, consisted of the teacher saying, “you would read five pages of Silas Marner tonight”, and the next day the class was spent in sitting at the book like ‘arnold Channing’s in the blue angel’, Looking up over the book and saying “you know, Mr. Kubrick”, and then you’d stand up and I say “when Silas Marner walked out of the door what did he see?” and if you didn’t know what he saw, you got a zero. And that was it. And this is why I failed English once and had to make it up in summer school.
Did you show aptitude to things like mathematics and so on?
Stanley Kubrick: Actually, the only courses that I got good marks in were science courses. Yeah! I think I got, I can’t remember now but I think I got about an 87 in physics, and not in mathematics though but in science courses, I liked and did reasonably well. But anyway, ‘Traister’ was one, and I’ve forgotten what the other one was now. But they bought these two picture-stories. Oh and I also sold them a picture. I just told him to “put your stories and a photograph of a news dealer sitting on a 170 street on a grand concourse, right across two blocks away from Taft High School.
Was that when the headlines quoted you?
Stanley Kubrick: Yeah. With all the headlines saying Roosevelt dies, or FDR dead, yeah. And he was sitting there Looking depressed and they liked this picture and used it in a whole series about Roosevelt. You know, sort of the final picture of the series.
Were you interested in extracurricular activities apart from photography, that’s while you were still in school, you know. Did you do like sports and stuff like that?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I used to play but I mean, I wasn’t on any of the school team.
Football?
Stanley Kubrick: No. I used to play everything you know, but basketball in the concrete, you know, outdoor, what do they call them again? The playground, the city playground and the stickball in the street and the odd softball game in the Taft dirt – Jim yard. They had a very large dirt Jim yard, things like that.
Would you say that the fact that you didn’t go to college has given you a certain sense of performance over graduates, college graduates who don’t meet up to what you could say to be specific intellectual standards and thought process for guys who got a lot of degrees but doesn’t seem to relate to your thought process, have you?
Stanley Kubrick: No, I don’t think I look at it that way. You know, the reason I think it was an advantage for me is that I went back got into this, fantastically good job at the age of 17. I went, I can’t really remember where I was but I took some pictures down there. What happened is that I could not get into college, and all sorts of things. My father who was an alumni of NYU uptown, took me to see the Dean and said “this is my son” and I was the student here and sophomore and nothing worked. So I started going to City College at night under the hope that if I gotta be average for so many credits, I remember now, that I could then get into day school; a day college. but within about a few weeks of this, I was down at LOOK with some other pictures and there was an extremely nice picture editor then, his name was Helen O’Brien, and the managing editor at the time was Jack Gunter who was some time later killed in the Bryce Canyon Utah plane crash, and she asked me what I was doing and I told her “nothing”, and that I was gonna try whatever; and she said something about, that she thought she might be able to get me a job as an apprentice photographer. So I went up to see Jack Gunter and said to him “I got a job”.
And how long were you working for them, or did that relationship work?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I was the apprentice photographer for six months, and then I became a staff photographer, and I was there for four years.
I see you were actually there as it is?
Stanley Kubrick: Yeah. and of course that would have been the period I’d spent a college, and I think that the things, what I learned, and the practical experience in every respect including photography, what I learned in that period pretty exceeded what I could have learned in school. and also, getting out of school, I can’t remember what was the particular turning-point, but being out of school, I began to read and within a relatively short period of time, I would imagine caught up with where I probably should have been, had I had a monochrome of interest in things in the high school. Because I mean, after all you really only miss, I mean before you’re 12 or 13, how many serious books can you read? So I only really blew four years of part-time reading. How much time? You go to school all day, play a certain magic, you do your homework. So in retrospect, I don’t feel that I missed reading that many books and I felt that I caught up pretty quickly when I became interested in singing in general
Well, what first gave you the idea of actually going to the movies as opposed to work?
Stanley Kubrick: Like everybody else you know, I was always very interested in movies and I used to go to see films and I’d say probably every film and I used to see all the films at the museum of modern art and the failure and actually at that time. You know when I was a teenager the so-called art palace didn’t really exist to the extent it does now. It was the post-war Italian sort of the Mussolini pictures which brought the art houses into existence; so they weren’t that many good films that were played and the theaters around except the museum. Anyway I used to see all the films and I knew I’d seen them all a number of times at the museum.
A friend of mine who subsequently has become a phone directory Malik Singer was working as an office boy at the march of time and one day, he told me that it cost $40,000 to make a march of time and it was a one reeler and I said to him “geez! That’s a lot of money”. I said I can’t believe it cost that much to make eight or nine minutes of film”. So I called up basement Kodak and checked on the price of film, and then I called up the laboratory to know how much it costs to develop it, and I checked on how much it costs to rent 35-millimeter movie cameras, and then I check the cost of the other facilities sound and editing and score; and I forgot what it added up to, but it was something that I could do a documentary film with an original music score and everything for about $3,500 so I thought “geez! If they’re making these pictures of 40,000 I can make them for 3500, surely I must be able to sell them and at least get my money back and probably make a profit. So I think we thought that we could make a considerable profit because we assumed but if they were making them for $40,000 apiece, that they must be making a profit.
So I rented a 35-millimeter EYE-MO camera, which is a spring wound camera, produces a professional picture, and I did a documentary film about a boxer named Walter Cartier who I had previously done a picture story for LOOK about, on him and it was called ‘day of the fight’. And I got the whole thing, and I did everything, Alex helped me you know, sort of carried lights around and assisted me and I did the whole thing just myself and Alex and Walter and his people. And I cut it and another friend of mine who subsequently has become professional movie composer named Gerald Fried did a film score and got the whole thing finished with $39,000. And then when we began to take it around to the various companies to sell it. They all liked it, though they were offering things like $1,500 and $2,500 and self-worth.
This is about the time you were still aged 21 right?
Stanley Kubrick: Well less than that, but I did this about I’d say maybe 9 months before I quit LOOK about 20 or plus, and at one point I said to them “Christ! Why you want you offering us so little for this?” You know, one reel should get you more than $40,000 and they said “wait, you must be crazy” and I said “why do you think that?”, and so I told them about ‘the march of time’ and anyway, they said it was ridiculous and shortly after that, ‘the march in time’ got out of business (laughs) for the reason we’d later find out that they were spending approximately, I mean you know if ‘the march of time’ those me for this Ally just somehow found out when he was working there that that it was costing $40,000 plus to make one of their own reelers and that was not business.
Well anyway, I finally sold the film to RKO cafe who are no longer in business either. And I sold it for about a hundred dollars less than it cost me to make it. I knew it was a small loss, but I had the pleasure of seeing it shown and I remember I went to the paramount theatre where it was playing with some Robert gardener Robert vision picture and you know it was very exciting seeing it on the screen, and it got a nationwide and worldwide distribution. And so I thought everybody liked it and I thought it was good and I thought that this would be, I’d get millions of offers from which I got none to do anything. So I made another documentary, this time about a flying priest ‘Father Stock Muller’ or something in New Mexico, who flew a Piper Cub around to Indian parishes in arcadia. It was a colorful subject and so I went there and pretty much on my own again made this short, and still you know nothing was happening.
They would release of work through this?
Stanley Kubrick: No. they gave me a $1,500 and of which I had to pay for the film, the travel, and I made nothing. I think I lost money on that too. But I had been making a reasonably good salary at LOOK for 4 years, so I had a certain amount of money and I was still working. So then I quit LOOK because I decided that there obviously wasn’t any money in shots, but that I would find out how much feature films were being made for, and they were millions! And I had calculated that I could make a feature film for about $10,000.
I bet you got excited by that?
Stanley Kubrick: Going by, projecting the manner of film I’d shoot, figuring that I get actors to work for probably nothing, you know work with, I mean at this point I was the whole crew: cameraman, assistant cameraman, director, everything; so I had no cost. So a friend of mine in the village did a script.
You were living in the village at that time?
Stanley Kubrick: I was living on 16th Street, 56 avenue. And he needed a script which was a terrible kind of dull, undramatic, but very very serious allegorical story about four soldiers from an unnamed country lost behind enemy lines trying to find their way home again. It had the lines in it like we spend our lives running our fingers down the list of names and addresses, looking for our real. No running the fingers down the list of something-or-other, Looking for our real names are our real addresses. I came in line with this. It was that kind of a thing you know. and of course, I totally failed to recognize the, what I didn’t know about making films or anything you know, I just thought well these are the two things have turned out pretty well; but they were documentaries.
And the second thing that turned out pretty well?
Stanley Kubrick: Yeah. but I didn’t really know what I didn’t know and I thought well Christ there really wasn’t very much more to making a feature film and I certainly couldn’t make one worse than the films that I kept saying every day. But I wasn’t satisfied to just make an interesting film, I wanted it to be a very poetic and meaningful film. And it was a little bit like the favorite story about the midget who wouldn’t take the base on balls and decided to swing. So I got the film made, but it was a very very dull, and it got an art-house distribution; was called ‘Fear and Desire’, distributed by Joseph Bernstein, who was at one time, I think he was the distributor for first-brand and Russell pictures. It got a few reasonably good reviews. It got a nice blurb from Marc Van Doreen who was very kind about it. I had a few good moments in it, but with the exception of one or two of the actors they were all terrible actors and I knew nothing about directing and actors.
How did you go out to recognize the sort of?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I just, I don’t remember you know. It was really just actually from some of the so-called professional efforts I have subsequently seen people doing, I would say didn’t go that much differently than a lot of people do but I didn’t really know anything. But there were some good moments in it, and I said, it even got a few good reviews but it never returned a penny of its investment.
Was it your own money that you put up?
Stanley Kubrick: No, I raised the money privately and then while this picture was, it took a long time to edit the film and get all the, you know. I spent over a year on it all. It opened at the guild theater in New York and it was pretty apparent that it was terrible. while it was still playing, I decided well I better uh I’d better get another script very fast and try to promote some more money on the strength of just the fact that the thing was playing, because it wasn’t apparent to me how he’s going to earn a living I do anything you know, again. Not one single offer to do anything from anybody. So I in about two weeks, got together another script with somebody and this time it was sort of reaction to the other one. This was nothing but action sequences and mostly mechanically constructed of action-gangster plot.
Was this the time that you were hustling Chess?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I wasn’t hustling chess. But I was playing chess for quarters. I mean, I wasn’t a hustler but I pretended not to be a good player and beat people. I just was playing in the park you know for quarters, quarter again.
But were you actually doing this for the fun or?
Stanley Kubrick: No. I was doing for the fun of it but I also didn’t make about two or three dollars a day which really goes a long way if you’re not buying anything except food.
Well do you still retain a lot of acquaintances from that stage, growing-up?
Stanley Kubrick: What there’s only one person, one friend who I still see, a boy named David Miller who is an operations research analyst, and who I’ve remained friendly with. I still know all the people there, you know, like Arthur and Feldman and there’s a guy named Edmund Packover but the regulars at the park don’t change too much.
But were they in the category of people playing for money or not?
Stanley Kubrick: But yeah, I mean there were the regulars you know, like the real regulars used to be Arthur Feldman who was really the best player there.
You also pay for money?
Stanley Kubrick: Oh!! yeah, I mean, all the regulars play for money and it was Arthur Feldman who I’d say was the best player, then there was a guy named Joe Richmond, who was probably the next-best player, then there was a guy named Edmund Peckover, I would have put him say third and another regular was a guy named Amos Kaminski, who was a physicist, he would have been next, then I would say myself and David Miller, about equal and then it was descending, I mean, I was only interested in the people who were better than I was, you know, so those are the ones that I particularly remember because, they were enjoyable appeal and there was a whole lot of Potters and semi-potters, you know, and people who put up a fierce struggle but who invariably lost.
How many hours in a day were you putting in down there?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, when I was waiting for things to happen, you know, waiting to get an answer on something which went on for months, sometimes I would go there about twelve o’clock and stay there until you know midnight. I would say, look at 12 hours a day, with breaks for food
You were just playing with the lights?
Stanley Kubrick: Oh!!! yeah in the summer it was marvelous, you know.
Did they still have the concrete tables?
Stanley Kubrick: Yeah, in the daytime you get a table in the shade and at night you get a table by the light and if you made the switch the right way, you had a good table all the time but you know, there are those two end tables where the light is by the fountain, that have the best light at night and that was always the tables at night that you would try to get.
Did you have a regular clientele guys or you know, just sort of misguided pride and provide and?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I used to play of course a lot with the better players because, they give me odds and because, you know, they couldn’t get a game really. For instance, Feldman used to give me a pawn and move and with a point and move, I never really kept track but it was pretty even, I mean Feldman didn’t make his living off me, you know, but when there was no sort of real patches around, then the better players would play each other and with it would give you know fair odds so there would be a pretty good game, like there was some players that will just give you always white which was a small advantage but it was an advantage, point and move of course, is well, is the smallest advantage would be white, then the next advantage would be two moves, you know, and then the next one would be point and move.
How do you stack up in the Marshall Chess Club, how did you stack yourself up in the Marshall Chess Club?
Stanley Kubrick: I won the B- tournament and I played in one A-tournament and finished around in the middle.
Well, but did you think that…?
Stanley Kubrick: I would like to point out to you that the A tournament that is not the top 10, the top tournaments, that’s the club championship, so, you know that’s that, you can figure out where I stand.
But did you think you could get to do the point and move, was that a serious point appraisal?
Stanley Kubrick: Oh!!!, absolutely yeah.
That’s kind of impressing. When did you get launched afterthis point into the movie?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, as I say, when Feldman and I was still playing the gill fitter, I spent about two weeks lashing together this all action script and let’s say, you know.
What is the relation to the family?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, the guy’s name was Mo Boulcel and he has two drug stores in the Bronx. Mo Boulcel co-produced and put up the money to make killer’s kiss, his name is Morris Boulcel, M o r r i s B o u l c e l.
Now, it’s not a great financially thought…
Stanley Kubrick: That was at that time that I was playing chess for four quarters in the park, speaking of Jimmy Harris.
There was a guy in the village who was making films by himself, just doing everything together and then you thought that you and he should get together and reduced you and then I remember Jimmy suggested that, this is the impression I got, which may be wrong and he suggested that he could take the producing burden of the films, Is that right, the finance technologist?
Stanley Kubrick: Yeah, well, I had made killer’s kiss the second feature film and substantially that’s what happened well first you mean I made the killing and
You made that by yourself?
Stanley Kubrick: No, well, we formed the company which is called Harris Kubrick Pictures Corporation and after looking for a story we bought a book called The Clean Break by Lionel White and this was the story that we made into the killing for United Artists. The United Artists had bought killer’s kiss, well, first of all, United artists function was only to finance and distribute the film so, it was up to us to hire the people and make the film and I presume that generalized thought that, if the killer’s kiss could be made and I mean, on the semi-professional basis it was, that with an adequate amount of money which was fairly minimum anyway that, you know, we could make a film. Jimmy had to guarantee completion of the movie which means that, if the movie ran over the budget, he had to put up all the extra money, which is a great safeguard and especially since financially he was responsible to make this kind of a guarantee. It wasn’t that much of a risk on the part of an artist but we had a very good cast but none of the people were big stars in the sense that they were extremely choosy about what they were in and I would say that, all of them had probably been in worst films than they might have even at the beginning thought this one might turn out to be.
Wasn’t Marylyn Monroe…?
Stanley Kubrick: Keep the principal cast was Sterling Hayden, Colleen Gray, Marie Windsor, Elijah Cook jnr. John Sawyer, Techno Cassia, Vince Edwards.
I saw that film that…
Stanley Kubrick: who later became Dr. Kilda
So long ago that I’m just trying to remember, was it the one where Sterling Hayden dies in the end?
Stanley Kubrick: No, he gives up, the money blows away at the airport and he gives up.
I’m getting confused
Stanley Kubrick: You probably haven’t seen the person.
No, I remember Sterling Hayden very clearly but I can’t…
Stanley Kubrick: You’re thinking he’s the asphalt jungle, that’s why some element and rolls on it, he dies at the NPS world angle, in a field with a horse.
Oh!!! That’s right now.
Stanley Kubrick: you’re thinking about another person; you never saw the Killing.
Maybe that’s right
Stanley Kubrick: If you want to see it, there’s a part of the Museum of modern art, the artist could give you the painting. So, anyway we made the killing and the somehow, Durry Sherry saw it and he liked it and he was the first one who really showed any interest in us, you know, to the extent of offering us any sort of a deal to make another picture and so we went to MGM and look through, the deal was that we could look through all their backlog of story properties and if we found one that they liked, we could do it and I think I tell you this, it’s kind of with his burning secret by Stefan Wine and I did the screenplay with Colder Willingham, about which time Durry Sherry had not taken out of his job and the project came to an end I mean, just about the time script was finished.
It was at that point that you were run across with your war story?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, it was really sort of kin kind with us that I remembered reading Paths of Glory as one of the few books that I did read.
Is it a fair description of German descent, is it independently wealthy?
Stanley Kubrick: Yes, you have to have patience because, if you don’t, your own frustrations proved to be too much of a distraction, it is a slow, you know, it’s like those games we had to jiggle all the balls into place, sometimes, as more balls are jiggling than others but, it’s likely that and if you allow yourself to become irritated then it’s just another distraction.
Well, how do you keep yourself amused when we always admire the way sometimes breaks and girls sometimes…
Stanley Kubrick: Because, I keep thinking about the next things that I’m doing, I try to use all the time, that’s why I found Francis one all these people, there I found myself and slightly up in a year feeling luckily, this stuff was quite simple but then, I usually, I would imagine to anyone sort of looking at me, I have a sort of, they withdraw and look at my face because, what I’m just doing is thinking about what I’m about to do, what other scenes, when I just use the time to think a little, like sitting in the park playing chess.
You think about how to work, manipulate the actors and that sort of thing?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I think about whatever problems as problems, I mean, sometimes many of the actors aren’t the problem, so now, the problem is the story or the schedule or asset that isn’t completely designed something but whatever it is, I always have plenty to think about.
How close do you prove yourself to get to the actors as friends, you have to be traveling with guys working for you?
Stanley Kubrick: I mean, if you can, I mean in other words, it’s bad if you don’t like somebody, to have a bad social situation occur, like an attempt at friendliness which turns out to be sour or you know, his wife goes away saying how terrible you are, isn’t like that but I mean, if you like the people, it’s it helps to know the minutes enjoyable filming them.
Is not that offer quite disappointing or anything?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, it isn’t disappointing anyway because, unless the actor is, it’s so rare that you would ever get to the point where you said the actor; look this is my picture and you’re working for me and you do it the way I want or go home because, what you really want him to do is to feel confident and enjoy what he’s doing, otherwise, he’s not gonna do it very well. So, somehow, you have to be clever enough or be more persuasive enough, although persuasive isn’t even the right word because, I tend to believe that if you’re right, people realize it.
Are you usually right?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I try to be. I have found that when I am right, you know, when it went in retrospect it turned out to be always right and in doing it, it seemed always right. You do not usually find difficulties arising if you’re right unless the actor is incapable of doing what you’re asking him to do. To limitations of his talent, there is emotional range or something and he gets insecure and thinks of a lot of reasons why you’re wrong but really what you are trying to do is avoid failing but then really, you should try to figure out what the limitations of the actors are and put him in a spot like that. After leaving MGM and the burning secret trip pride of this to me and I had bought Paths of Glory, I did a screenplay with Jim Thompson and Colder Willingham and nobody wanted to do it, it was turned down by every company until our agent Ronnie Lubin interested Kirk Douglas on the project and through Kirk’s interest, United Artists put up the money on the basis of it being done for very low budget in Europe. The picture was a moderate success but it was nothing to create opportunities for us because of big grosses or profits. The reviews on it were very good, many reviews were supportive and from that point of view was an enormous success. The greatest virtue of the films that I met my wife, Christina, who was an actress. I was watching a television broadcast looking for an actress, was actually watching someone else and saw her and got in touch with her agent, she came over to the studio we met and I began dating her and we subsequently got married a year later. she is a marvelous actress, she had done a lot of work in Germany, I would like her to act but she has no interest in doing dull routine acting things in this march and painting. If I ever have a part, a decent part for women which for some reason I never seem to write into my films, she would certainly do it. This is followed by about six months been working on a script for Kirk Douglas which he didn’t like and was abandoned and some more months working on something which Gregory Peck was supposed to do for us, which was also abandoned because, it wasn’t liked and followed by the offer from Marlon Brando to direct his Western which resulted in six months of work again abandoned, as far as I was concerned because, I left the project two weeks before it started, this was followed by a script called The German Lieutenant, which again no one liked and followed by Kirk Douglas’ offer to take over Spartacus after weeks of shooting, which I did.
And you found yourself?
Stanley Kubrick: Yes, and my narrative criticisms which were at first so enthusiastically received, began to grow pale as time went on due to the counter pressures of the writer, Dalton Trumbo and co- producer Amy Lewis, who did not see eye-to-eye with me on the story work between the shooting and the editing of Spartacus. Two children were born to me, to Christina, Vivian and Renata, I was on the picture almost two years. Children’s names; Vivian Vanessa age five, Anya Renata age 6, Katherine Susana, Katherine spelled K, age 11. Only if about eight weeks were spent in Spain during the battles in the Big March Buys, the whole picture was done on the back lot of universal
Did you get any sense of intellectual satisfaction of those particles at all?
Stanley Kubrick: No but, it was, you know, again an opportunity to work and it was interesting to, from a purely, as an exercise, you know, to try to do scenes that you thought weren’t very good and to try to make them interesting. I thought the first 45 minutes of the film, of the life in a gladiatorial school which was simple, turned out quite well, as far as I’m concerned but then, the rest of the story from the slave rebellion onto the end, I thought seemed a bit silly.
That’s the event and then what happened?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, during the making of Spartacus, we bought Lolita, Jimmy and I and now nobody wanted to make Lolita, actually the history of all the film proudly that I’ve done is, no one ever wanted to particularly make them and we just sort of running out the clock, managed to put the picture together someplace, you know, well nobody particularly wanted to make Lolita and finally, Seven Arts, a company named Seven Arts, put up the money and we made it, it was made in one.
Did you yourself do the rewriting of the book?
Stanley Kubrick: Yes, well, Navicoff and I, well, I believe get along very well and I know he liked the film very much when he saw it.
Is there anything that is particularly striking about making that film that you remember?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, you mean, antidotes, not really. I think the only thing that is regrettable about the film is that, due to the incredible pressure against making the film and put on by the carload by all sorts of groups, although I think the film was faithful psychologically to all the characters and captured I think the sense of them, I think that the total lack of eroticism in the story, in this film presentation of it, spoil some of the pleasure of it, you know, you can apply all the eroticism you want but there’s nothing like delivering some to help understand a little more the enslavement, you know, that Humber Humber was under. I think that I would consider that a criticism of the film but one that was, you know, the film could not have been made and nobody would have met it at all and it would never have been distributed. There were some criticism by some people that said that she looked too old but I never thought that was a valid criticism because, it was one of those books where nobody bothered to really read the description that Humber Hummer gave of Lolita and they got this, somehow there is, it was a rare interesting example of sort of mass delusion because, it’s all inevitably, people imagine her as being about nine years old and looking about nine or ten years old and yet there’s a very clear description in the book of Annabelle, his childhood sweetheart and he says in the narrative that were not for Annabelle they would never know Lolita and then when he sees Lolita, he says that she was a perfect reincarnation of Annabelle and Annabelle is described as a, you know, a pretty sexy 12 and a half, I forgot, actually i don’t exactly remember Annabelle’s age but I know that Lolita was something like 12 years and three months when he meets her and then the story progresses through quite a few years will sue line was actually just 13 or mental picture and I thought this criticism was not valid. Many of the people who voted, I think, well, I know didn’t bother to really read how old he said she was and what she looked like and there was this peculiar example of a lot of people imagining her as being about 10 years old.
It was strange, it was the first film work which proceeded really from an intellectual, a great intellectual premise rather than from a story or from an intellectual situation rather than from a specific story curiosity about the possible outcomes of nuclear strategy, how did that that come about after the leaders…?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I was interested in whether or not I was going to get blown up by an H-bomb prior to Lolita but my interest intensified itself sort of concurrently with that, I believe that the Berlin crisis took place during Lolita and about that time I became keenly and started reading up on all the, you know, literature of which there’s a terrific extent, you know, tremendous a lot, am I getting fucked up on it, had a tremendous a lot and you know, I read, I would say, I pretty much read the spectrum, I began finding afterwards that I wasn’t reading anything new and I decided I knew the whole thing, you know and it was then that I began to, the thing that struck me most of all about it was that, at first when you read the brilliant analyses and the games theories and Herman Kahn, you’re very reassured because, you start off by thinking gee!!! you know, God!! there are these bumps and you get an image vaguely observe a world war two mentality and then when you read the literature in the field, your first reaction superficially is your very encouraged because you suddenly realize there’s this whole body of thought that’s going into the whole thing in it and you think, ahh!!!, yes, well, now I know and then as you read on and on, you become more involved than it began to realize that all these things lead to very paradoxical outcomes and reviewing the whole thing, every line and it leads to a paradoxical point and I suppose this was the most dramatically obvious thing about Dr. Strangelove was the paradoxical outcome of any particular line of thought.
If it really is true, in real world every line proves paradoxical outcome, what hope is that?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, personally I think that the hope is basically just luck, the situation is simply fist for just luck reasons, is never really put to getting particularly great strain, a lot of course had, you know, a lot has been done, a lot keeps being done about trying to prove the situation against accidental war and better command and control and more sophisticated threat technique of trying to graduate threat into as many steps as you can, to leave as many alternatives and back away points but the depressing thing is that at every period of history, the people always thought that they had, I mean, the power structure and the leaders always look back on the previous period of history and thought that they had learned something and I think that ,you know, the old thing about, the only thing you can learn about history is that, you can’t learn from history is it’s probably true and that this illusion that you get that you’re much more sophisticated and that it can never happen that way again maybe true, but the thing you don’t realize is, it will happen a different way, you know, I know that everybody’s very convincing don’t ever have another 1914-type situation, you know, they may have a 1985-type situation that they are not prepared for.
What’s up with a set of the pressure you’re perfectly prepared for the last?
Stanley Kubrick: Yeah, well, most armies are, you know, you’d find the occasional exception like Nazi Germany but inevitably, I think that as time goes on, the danger increases because, the thing becomes more and more remote, I mean the problem to begin with is that, people do not react to abstractions, you know, they only react to direct experience. Very few people are even interested in the abstractions and even fewer people can become emotionally involved or emotionally react to an abstract thing. The only reality that nuclear weapons have are a few movie shots of mushroom clouds and a few documentaries that occasionally showing our houses about the effects of Hiroshima but that the atomic bomb is much of an abstraction as you could possibly have. I mean, it’s as abstract as the fact that you know that someday you’ll die, it’s something that you know but you really do a very good job and you do an excellent job of denying it psychologically. To begin with, because of the very effective denial and the lack of any evidence, there’s almost no interest in the problem, I mean, I would say in the minds of most people, it’s less interesting even than city government, you know and the longer the time goes on without the thing happening, this illusion is created that somehow it’s like money in the bank or you’re building up security, in fact I think you’re just becoming more accustomed to it and more liable to think that at some point that you’ve been taking these wonderful precautions and that chances are minimized and so forth and finally you will get confronted with a situation that you couldn’t anticipate. For instance, even now I think that, it surprises me that the Russian and United States could do a lot to almost completely eliminate the possibility of accidental nuclear war without any real loss of security, both of them could allow observers and key places to instantly authenticate whether or not a nuclear war was in progress you know or it seemed to be in process of happening and that if there were some nuclear accident or a screwball, you know, nuclear psychotic, you know, the Mad Major or the missile it gets away, you can instantly authenticate this might be true. I know that United States seems anyway, geared not to respond to say a single nuclear explosion anyplace, at least that’s what they say, that they now have, they feel invulnerable retaliatory capabilities and that the single City taken out would not start a nuclear war but you know, again, you never know that panic that happens when suddenly all the lights go out like you described in New York City, you know, that indefinable something that might just make the senior decision-maker abandon all his previously beautifully worked out graduated steps of response, you never know and it depends on who he is and what his personal state of mind is, what information is available to him and so forth. The fact that a lot of effort has been going to try to work out possible accidents and I suspect that great precautions have been taken to protect against these accidents but whether the human imagination is capable of really devising the subtle permutations and psychological variance to all those things, I doubt the people who make up these war scenarios are not really as inventive say as a great writer or as reality. I think Herman Kahn is a genius and I think that he can envision certain situations but when you read the many of the sort of war scenario possibilities, they don’t strike you as being the work of a master novelist, they don’t really seem real, you know, their political possibilities but they don’t have the real trappings of reality that might, you know, confuse and panic the decision maker in the real circumstance.
Were you surprised that the reaction to Stranger on the fact that was so widely discussed and so widely reviewed and did you have any feelings of responsibility to it?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I mean all films are reviewed, the discussion went beyond reviews but it was quite obviously something that might become a controversial issue.
Well when you got finished with the digit, did you have some set, was a winner?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I was very pleased with it, I mean, when you say a winner, I mean I thought, I was very pleased with the film, it happens to also be a very successful film commercially.
How did Terry Southern get into the act?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, Terry came to interview me for Show Magazine shortly before I was leaving for London to make the picture and I became friendly with him. I had read the Magic Christian and Flesh and Filigree and I thought he was a terrific writer and I came to London and started the script.
Did you get along with the script pretty well?
Stanley Kubrick: The script was done and it was done in its black comedy form, a fact which a certain amount of confusion has been created about in certain areas. The script was done, Peter Sellers was cast and I was coming over here to prepare the film and you know, Southern Terry was very talented, I never stopped working on a script, I like to work with somebody else because we’re under the time pressure that you’re under you can’t afford these sort of laps of intensity that if you work by yourself you might suffer and then Terry seemed like an ideal person because, the style of the script was similar, you know, to his sense of humor and so, about six weeks before the picture started, I asked him if he wanted to come over here and work on it with me and do some more dialogue and revision and he came over, he worked for six weeks and that was it. I started the picture and he went off and did some other things.
Has any of the pictures been as intellectually complicated as the present one as in 2001 causes many intellectual problems, I mean, that’s a repeat, it’s terrific undertaking prime creating future?
Well, I don’t know, intellectually complicated isn’t really the right description for a thing, I mean trailer was more intellectually complicated picture and you know, it involved complex arguments and quite a few, you know, abstract ideas clearly or comically stated, this is not as complex a picture, it’s not as complicated a picture in terms of, you know, ideas represented. There are ideas actually spoken in praise of Arthur C Clarke, this true that, he is I think, the most poetic science-fiction writer.
He’s also really the best informed?
Stanley Kubrick: Right, he is scientifically the best informed, his narrative ideas I think from my tastes, the most appealing and he has this rather unique poetic sense of the sort of nostalgia for the, you know, the mountains that have eroded away over millions of years and the millions of years in the future and people looking back and forward and you’ll have to fix this up because, it sounds like crap but it’s very hard to, you know, define it nicely but it is true.
I’ve found out that every time I was reading some story like that Barker’s book, I always feel sad as I go, it’s either he made the venusaur, compounded venusaur, they all had a vision of something in the future which you’ll never ever see.
Stanley Kubrick: Or something in the past that you can never know about. Well, but I think that’s marvelous, you know, I think that somehow without trying to, without making it sound too pompous or precious, that he captures the hopeless but admirable human desire to know, you know, these things that they never will, you know, can never really know and to reach for things that they can never, you know, really reach back and you know, it’s very hard to say exactly but the sense of sadness and this poetic sense of time passing and this sort of loneliness of worlds, I mean, he manages, I tell you what he also manages to do, he can take a star, a Sun, say and in that one story, I’ve forgotten the name of it, where the sort of Sun creatures come towards mercury, he can take an inanimate object like a star or a world or even a galaxy and somehow make it into a very poignant thing which almost seems alive. He has a way of writing about mountains and planets and the world with the same point to which people write about the children or love affairs and also although you haven’t read the script and you should really try to refer to the story there is that without underlining it there was a contrast in the story between a giant orbiting bombs, which you might say is the negative use of nuclear energy and this particular spaceship which leads to great fantastic accomplishments which is also another good use of nuclear energy.
But I think one can talk about the Orion, it’s something I wanted to do for a long time and finally…
Stanley Kubrick: Have a standard way of pounding that, yeah
I have a set of notes somewhere which I wanted to put down for just writing a piece on the Orion, showing why, showing sort of logically speaking, why it’s the only propulsion system that’s worth considering if you talk really about the interplanetary missions, that doesn’t make any sense fundamentally because, its operating temperatures is that the escape velocity that’s really the crucial element in it and so, that would be very nice, I actually should talk about the part about the Orion and he’s absolutely magnificent, the paintings which the guys have been doing over there and because the other thing that strikes if you compare making such a fictional space mission with the real thing, the thing that amazes one is how fast everything is done, in the sense that, if you make a decision whether it’s on costume or on lettering or on all of that, you get the satisfaction of seeing it created in some form almost immediately, I mean, it is not sort of if you’d say
Stanley Kubrick: It doesn’t seem almost immediately to me but if I was used to another time
Yeah, compared to the scientific timescale
Stanley Kubrick: It must be seen very quick
Yeah, I mean, in a scientific project, you make any suggestion just like that and maybe it’s six months or more and take a typical experiment physics, that’s a good idea for an experiment, by the time you get an answer these days, typically, it’s a year-and-a-half, so, it’s a completely different order.
Stanley Kubrick: It’s interesting that you would feel that way because to the average person, the timescale of a movie seems like time has stopped. Most people are so bored and so astonished when they see the pace of things, somehow, they have an image in their mind that it’s all done in a week or something like that and most people that I found who don’t come from your side of the fence, think that everything works incredibly slowly, you know it just depends what you used to.
There’s this thing you know, when you shoot me over to watch a television thing of course but
Stanley Kubrick: That’s right, you tell too
But that’s a different side of it, that’s the side of making these sort of Quaffle sequences, which you would you work for three hours to extract 30 seconds of something, that was driving me off my head but the technological side of it, where you get an idea, say from propulsion system or Christ knows where and within three days, well, you’ve got a drawing there, you’ve got some guys making a model and you have a lot of thought on a different size, I mean, like what time scale these guys are using, the Eastern Standard Time or all sorts of stuff but all these goes fantastically fast, I mean, the number of problems that you deal with and solve in a half an hour is more than what you would deal with in a comparable scientific project in six months, because, of course, you’re just working in a different media in the sense that you don’t really have to worry say, in the case of a spaceship about the structural stability of these things, you might spend six months or a year computing something out of machines, well, you know it’s going to work, that it can be designed, so, you take that as a premise that you put something there which in principle is going to work, then you can stop at that point, that’s what really cause the difference in the, it’s very interesting, I find it extremely remarkable.
Stanley Kubrick: If these things do work that quickly, the thing that does take all the time is to abstract a 2 hours and 15 minutes of the story and really keep distilling and distilling and distilling and distilling and distilling, I would say that, if you count the time that spent during the shooting day, also working on the story in rehearsal and rewriting, so, I would say that an average of at least four hours a day has been spent on this story much more than of course, in the real solid writing period was like, you know what I mean but let’s just say average four hours a day for two years, that’s an average of six days a week, that’s 24 hours a week times maybe a hundred weeks, I’d say that’s a good 2400 hours spent on, call it two hours and 40 minutes of the story, so, that’s about a thousand to one on the story and that’s what a real crunch is put.
One doesn’t get the impression that film directors do think you’re great though.
Stanley Kubrick: You said that on purpose, you know, they’re supposed to. Let’s get this going, I think we running. The analogy of using the frustrating wasted time periods on the set with thinking on your opponent’s moving chips.
The tiring thing about the daily working with or without colors, which I didn’t completely understand, he said that when he directs, that he has a quarter of works every day and that you do not have a quarter of works every day and this is somehow a good thing.
Stanley Kubrick: With the exception of a few directors like David Lane and well, let’s not say who, with the exception of a few directors, most people have their film edited by film editors as they go along and then when the film is done, they look at the film and dictate the notes about it and the film editor tries to do what they say and maybe they look at it again and they do it again but basically, it’s like trying to, say, redesign a city by driving through it in a car, you can notice a few things and say, put that traffic light in the middle of the street or those buildings over there are like kind of shabby or something, but if you really want to do it right you must do it yourself, piece by piece, so, I think by now I have enough, sort of, ability to imagine the way a scene will come out, that I can tell without looking in the material if I have enough film coverage and you know, what I can do with it and then I edit the film with the editor myself, when the film is, when it’s all finished.
But you are back to editing after that, I didn’t know about that.
Stanley Kubrick: Just the thing, just linking together that thing, it’s all
Because I don’t see how you, I mean, you have these you know a couple of these few minutes sequences, now, I don’t see how you cook all of that, really.
Stanley Kubrick: Well, you haven’t seen them but that’s only a fraction of the material there is, anyways, what you’ve seen is only the comings and goings of other scenes to just show you what the set looks like, I mean, we’ve shot about 80,000 feet of film already.
What’s 8,000 feet in time?
Stanley Kubrick: It’s about, well, it’s 5,400 feet an hour, it’s 6 x 9, yeah, 54 in an hour.
How much film will you shoot before the all pictures?
Stanley Kubrick: By the way, that is a lot of film. People have shot a million feet actually.
You mean in our lives?
Stanley Kubrick: No, I mean in the film. Let’s just say a picture is three hours long, it would be 16,200 feet, so what ratio is that, that’s about the 50-1 or something, 50-something to 1.
It almost like a thousand to one.
Stanley Kubrick: No it isn’t, ninety percent to one, that if it’s up to. Film directing I think is a misnomer for anybody that seriously want to make films because, directing the film is only, you might say, one-third of the process, you know, writing the film, directing the film and then editing the film is, you might say, the whole job and it was really it’s only the old major studio sort of image of how film was made that the producer held in his hand on the palate, you know, the various people, the artist, the cameraman, the actors, the film editor, the director and director is really just sort of like a senior member of the crew and that he had no real integrating status and what happened, I mean, they were the few exceptional characters even in the great days of the Hollywood studios, who somehow exerted their authority of working on but and even today, you know, you talk about directors have the right, they call the first cut, which means, they must approve the first cut but they have to bend the producer can do it every once, virtually and it’s a right to try to persuade someone because, I mean, if you don’t even have the right of the first cut, you can’t even explain what you want but, I do the cutting this off.
You have a picture of yours at this stage, is your picture, has it always been like that or is that, you know?
Stanley Kubrick: Yeah, let’s say, it was like that Dr. Strange’s Love and Lovely night and I think there’s a, I don’t remember, subject to delivering the minimum censorship requirements to play in it and the way the way you make deals the way you make that arrangement as you say the picture will not be longer than a certain period of time and that you will be deliver the minimum required censorship so that’s picture can be played. I mean, if they’ll just say, give it to us any way you want and you deliver a picture that it’s legally unplayable, they have to protect themselves against that.
What do you feel like your pictures being shown on Television?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, I wish that they didn’t put the commercials and the worst thing that they sometimes do is cut the films.
You don’t retain the rights over that?
Stanley Kubrick: Well, in some of the films I know but then, it’s terribly difficult to police it because, unless you see the film yourself, there are very few people who are qualified to tell you what was cut from it, I mean even if a friend calls up and says, “you know, I saw your film and it looked cut”, you said, “what was cut out?”, they say, “well, I don’t know, but I think it was cut”. Well, it’s almost impossible to find out what was done that’s peculiar problem.
Roger just lost a court case over that.
Stanley Kubrick: I believe his case was against interruption of commercials, I don’t think it was the cutting issue, I don’t know.
Commercials are certainly the key thing huh but Ross got a piece about that case and Yorker, there she described the reason why he lost which is basically, he knows what he was doing when he signed the agreement.
Stanley Kubrick: Well, that’s it, I mean, they have the right to do what they’ve done.
Well, I really hope you guys enjoyed this real extra special edition of the Indie Hustle Podcast because, Stanley is one of my heroes, he’s up there with of course, Hitchcock, Scorsese and many other filmmakers as well but, Stanley stands at possibly the very top of my list but I really hope you enjoyed this interview. If you want to see a couple of great interviews, if you want to see anything, first of all, if you want to see what was, hear more about Stanley Kubrick, head over to Indiefilmhustle.com/Stanley–Kubrick and it will take you to an insane amount of documentaries, of breaking down of his style, everything like that and I just uploaded a new article about the Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes Documentary, which is also in that link, which is amazing, it’s about how he kept all of his work, he kept every piece of paper, everything since the beginning of his career, he had just amazing amount of information about his process but it’s all boxed up. So, it’s now in an archive and they did this amazing little documentary about the boxes and what’s in the boxes and how they became there, his process and all that stuff and that’s also at that link as well, and of course, if you want any more information about this episode you can go to indiefilmhustle. com/112, I’ve put a bunch of links there as well for more Stanley Kubrick stuff. I got some other cool Stanley Kubrick articles and stuff coming up in the coming weeks that I’m working on because, I’m again such a big fan, I really do believe that he has changed cinema, he’s one of those masters that change cinema and I do think that his work can benefit us, as in, indie filmmakers, if we even understand even a percent of a percent of a percent of what he was doing, it might be able to help us as filmmakers tell better storiesand definitely by studying the Masters you do so. So, this is just one of the many masters but he’s definitely high on that totem pole. So, thanks for listening guys and as always, keep that hustle going, keep that dream alive and I’ll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at indiefilmhustle.com, that’s, I n d i e f i l m h u s t l e .com
Stanley Kubrick – The Cinematic Experience
Born July 26,1928, New York City. My father was a doctor. I had few intellectual interests. As a child I was a school misfit and I don’t think I read a book for pleasure until after I graduated high school. I had one thing I think that perhaps helped me get over being a misfit…a school misfit, and that is that I became a student of photography, I mean at this point I was the whole crew, cameraman, assistant cameraman, director, everything.
You have to have patience because if you don’t your own frustrations prove to be too much of a distraction. It is a slow…you know it’s like those games where you jiggle all the balls into place, sometimes there’s more balls you’re jiggling than others but it’s largely that, and if you allow yourself to become irritated then it’s just another distraction.
Narrator: Your first experience with a Kubrick film will be a somewhat perplexing one. The distinguished approach to film making can make it difficult to comprehend let alone analyze what you’ve just seen. However if you do find yourself delving into this artist’s …then you’ll discover a filmography comprised not of accessibility but experimentation, headed by a director whose craft becomes established through a desire to reshape cinematic form itself defined by his constant need for continual change in technique where everything becomes centered around reinvention.
It’s a strenuous task to look at the works of Stanley Kubrick without coming across as panegyric, but I have to make that preference when discussing possibly the most celebrated visual artist of the 20th Century.
Speaker: You know everybody pretty much acknowledges he’s the man and I still feel that underrates him.
Narrator: So what is it about Kubrick’s films that escalate them to the highest tier of cinema? Well you’ll find that every project is received as an artistic revolution, not just in the context of his other work but in the domain of film itself. His filmmaking techniques are striking, but these salient approaches define the man as a director of extremes both in content and execution. His films don’t deal with intimate dramas, they examine the grandiose characteristics of life, exploring the deteriorating effects of war or the secrets kept by society so they may partake in their darkest fantasies. High concept subject matter and filmmaking techniques delivered with such ferocity that it redefines the cinematic experience. Redefine to such a degree that logic almost dissipates and pure experientiality takes over.
Few other filmmakers match Kubrick’s attention to detail in his work, and his process to think of work as ways to reshape lives could be seen as the origin of this because to think of art as having responsibilities other than just to be art elevates its importance in the mind of its creator. When it must convey a message it must have a purpose, this created a style of directing for Kubrick wherein every single element on screen was motivated, from character movement to costume design everything had a meaning. There’s an immeasurable degree of depth in Kubrick’s collection of work due to his refined conscientious filmmaking style because when every detail becomes a necessary intellectual component of a narrative it becomes simpler to understand its prestige in the medium.
Speaker: When I first saw 2001 I didn’t like it, three or four months later I was with some woman in California and I went to see it again and I liked it a lot more. A couple of years later I saw it again and I thought, “Gee this is really a sensational movie!” And it was one of the few times in my life that I realized that the artiste was much ahead of me.
Narrator: In order to research this project I decided to visit the Stanley Kubrick Archives in London. My time there was spent rummaging through boxes upon boxes of research material, script and story book, it’s a haven of everything from his films that you could possibly imagine. What I discovered was the procedure of how Kubrick would make a film, learning that every stage required a meticulous approach in the molding of them. Few rivaled his research and his work ethic bordered on the obsessed. This experience was how I imagined it is to see a great painter’s brushes, it was a way to gain a brief glimpse into the mind of a master at work.
Across all phases of Kubrick’s projects diligent attention to detail can be found, here was a man who even though he was financed by the studios, he gained a good enough reputation that meant he could maintain full creative control and he took this advantage into every area of every project.
Speaker: I remember one of the visits that I had with Stanley was at his home when he was working on Napoleon and he had a grid, a very detailed grid, and this covered the wall, he was counting the figures in each of these little squares that made up the grid.
Narrator: Pre-production may have meant location scouting an entire city just to find the perfect doorway. During filming it wasn’t unknown for one scene to have over 50 takes, and once the film was finished the editing may have been the most demanding task. Kubrick would have countless reaction shots and instead of setting simply with one that worked, he would go through every single take. The intense control even continued to Kubrick’s involvement with distribution, checking all the prints sent to cinemas and even visiting a few theatres himself.
Many may look upon his work ethic and find it extensive but this need to complete his vision and the determination he pursued it with is what gave Kubrick films such depth. But what exactly are people referring to when they refer to depth in a Kubrick film?
Speaker: Many artists when they put a canvas up which is blank, they start with very detailed pencil strokes, very small delicate pencil strokes. Stanley started conceptually in all of his movies, from my point of view, with large primary colored brush strokes and he would just like beat out these concepts.
Narrator: What was the culmination of this method? Well it’s one thing to have control, but to fuse this with Kubrick’s tendency for dynamic visual storytelling, granted every visual aspect of the frame an almost sacred quality. If there’s one thing Kubrick should be remembered for is that he changed the way visual stories were told.
By manipulating the…on sand in a way that hadn’t been done before, he was able to communicate through his own unique methods. Backgrounds and supporting areas of the main narrative contained some of the most vital information through its imagery. A majority of the film’s thematic presence thus became hidden in plain sight. This resulted in films with a multitude of narrative layers.
Kubrick’s narrative focus existed perpetually in a grey area. He would never sacrifice the main subject story; however his ostensible subject matter conceal the true messages within his film. With Kubrick a camera movement was more than just a camera movement and an action was more than just an action. This method of articulating ideas was one wherein everything seemed to contain a double meaning, one that serviced a narrative and another to deliver a symbolic connotation.
Speaker: He reaches over to shake Jack Nicholson’s hand and so step through that scene frame by frame and the minute that he and Jack Nicholson touch hands and right after the line which is “Nice to see you,” you can see a paper tray on the desk, turns into a very large straight on hard on coming out of Barry Nelson.
Narrator: For instance…character intentions were disguised in their actions. Victor’s two taps on the red table…matches the two taps of …staff on the red floor, and Kubrick carefully choreographed the sequence down to each step. Similarly in Clockwork, Alex’s enjoyment of …is demonstrated through his two kicks on the writer…matched with the two taps in the battle. And these are the less extreme examples
Because of Kubrick’s fascination with the visuals this transcended to their usage in his films to be implemented in a most abstract form, pure symbolism. Kubrick’s manner of filmmaking was to deliver all of the information to the audience, just not tell them that that information is there because he found that the least effective way to tackle ambitious themes was to do so directly, so instead subtle scenes had to be planted into the audience’s consciousness.
Kubrick raises the importance of the symbolic narratives to equal that of his main subject narrative, and in doing so his films blur the line of the conscious and the unconscious.
Kubrickian storytelling can be summed up by saying that it’s the audience’s job to discover meaning for themselves and it’s accomplished by complementing with those two opposing forces.
The most important part of watching a Kubrick film is how the experience feels, not the analysis of its reasoning. His films are puzzles that the viewer must assemble, reporting…and all things mysterious never explained.
Kubrick avoided offering answers in his work, each film is merely a hypothesis. Never abandoning the key subjects of his films, they always remained his main focus; however one of their duties was to be a vessel for the filmmaker to explore greater themes. His films are methods of expressing an idea without offering explanations for them because when an audience must create meaning for themselves it tests them to think on a higher plain of consciousness. Remember Kubrick wanted to reshape lives, we see this even in his subject matter. Writer Michele Simon said that Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining are opposite in intention, one is about the dangers of being pent up in family life whereas the other is about the dangers of straying too far from the family. These could be viewed as contradictory ideals but Kubrick doesn’t say that either is right, the themes don’t offer a conclusion, the filmmaker is holding a mirror to us and asking that we figure it out.
Many of Kubrick’s films can be viewed as allegories. His first film Fear and Desire is a very obvious example, the title itself is the themes of the film. But over the course of his career Kubrick learned that the key to his idea of cinematic experience is ambiguity, for instance take how transitions were used in his early work. (Insert)
And here they are later when pure experience was the priority.
Kubrick understood that exposition isn’t always necessary, first work on the content of the scene and then figure out how that message can be translated cinematically. For Kubrick this could be injected in the subtlest of ways because of his fastidious control. Character relationships surreptitiously conveyed through the art department and positioning displaying paradigm shifts or perhaps that things have remained the same. There’s a circularity of the film’s details throughout Kubrick’s work, techniques would re-emerge later in the piece so that scenes ought to be compared and contrasted with one another. This is how Kubrick dealt with his grand themes, by envisioning his films as self-contained ideas that grow and morph throughout their expression as ideas do in real life. Visuals were Kubrick’s biggest ally, he utilized the notion that all elements within an image had the capacity to convey something, something that the audience must figure out. They’re jigsaws where a piece is not so much missing as it is purposefully concealed. This is how cinema is done.
As an artiste is nothing without film, and filmmaking techniques are the trademarks of any director. So what was Kubrick known for?
I referred to Kubrick earlier as a director of extremes, and I used this definition because of the frequency as well as the intensity of his techniques. Kubrick’s films often feel very distant and that’s because they’re supposed to be, you can sense a certain barrier between the viewer and film’s universe, a barrier that’s strengthened by the film’s cinematic methods to disengage the viewer from personally identifying with the world. Techniques that stand out are essential because Kubrick was creating a unique perspective, this wasn’t our world, this world is exclusive at the movie.
Speaker: One of the things he said to me that I’ve always remembered was in movies you don’t try and photograph the reality, you try and photograph the photograph of the reality.
Narrator: First we need to examine the artistic decisions that Kubrick made, and we can categorize the purpose of many as methods to exaggerate and distract. The camera carried a frenzied need to amplify whatever was on screen, wide angels become extreme wide angles, low angles become extreme low angles.
The reason behind this penchant for the excessive was because Kubrick emphasizes a reality that presents a warped representation of humanity and the universe of the film replicates this. This is a metaphoric reality, a cinematic reality, his methods always reminded us of this fact therefore it was crucial that they be distinctive. Take a look at zooms for example, they’re an almost absent tool in cinema nowadays just because of how distracting they are, yet Kubrick used them religiously.
There are certain rules that filmmakers typically follow so that they can retain audience emersion but Kubrick sought to continually break these rules. He utilized the technique that were unique to cinema,, the camera movement, the editing, and heightened them so that he could distinguish his world as separate from our own. In turn they acknowledge and embrace a symbolic nature. This can be seen even further with the inhabitants of these worlds.
Because Kubrick’s focus revolved heavily around humanity, the acting was watched with heavy scrutiny. Kubrick typically let shots ride out with very little editing to not only build to a climax but to focus on an actor’s performance. Often during dialog scenes sometimes the only thing shown would be the reaction shots. Kubrick felt it more important to show people deal with their situations rather than the situations themselves. Focusing on the reaction gets this message across very well as you isolate the effect. Kubrick could even forgo what the character was looking at just to focus on their face, removing what would typically be a close-up, another example of reducing information delivered to the audience. But whenever possible action and reaction would be in the same shot.
But displaying the exaggerated depiction of humanity becomes evident in the performance itself. Kubrick once said that it can be very difficult not to have a cynical view of human relationships, and his pessimistic view can’t be ignored from his work as it becomes very visible in his characters’ expressions and performance.
We see the infamous Kubrick glare where faces contort into the most sinister forms imaginable and character interactions can feel stilted and cold, that’s because these characters are products of the environments they populate. The denizens of each universe simple exist in the most discernible part of the moral spectrum and their actions are intensified to match Kubrick’s extreme view of the darkest parts of the human spirit, the area he was so interested in exploring.
The methodology of Kubrick centered on developing a cinematic world whose self-awareness mimic the extreme tone that his characters lived in. It all serves us as creating an atmosphere that would make it believable that the situations we see could occur. The techniques of Kubrick weren’t just there to be obnoxious and show off, they were complementary of this belief, whether this meant the destabilization of the camera during the most thrilling moments or the action on screen practically choreographed to the music that’s played.
It’s important that the filmmaking of a movie matches its tone and Kubrick did just that as well as create a much deeper significance. He assembled films of tonal excellence because every possibility was exhausted in order to find the correct way to relay these messages. The multiple narratives were complemented by Kubrick’s filmmaking because every decision was galvanized by his desire for artistic expression.
Kubrick was once asked on how much he planned a scene, he responded, “As much as there are hours in a day and days in a week.” This pretty much sums up how Kubrick thought of movies. He was a known perfectionist, but how can you argue with the results? Nothing was out of the realm of possibility for Kubrick, if something seemed impossible, he’d simply work on propelling the technology of the medium forward so he could get it done because everything Kubrick did had a sufficient reason. Through his stylization of every filmic element he was able to communicate through all facets, through an audience that he treated with respect because in order to test the audience you must first test yourself.
Stanley Kubrick didn’t just make films, he defined the cinematic experience.
The first book I ever read about screenwriting. Syd Field is the forefather of the how-to for screenwriting. He cracked the code of the three-act structure and paved the way for all other screenwriting gurus that would follow. As far as I know, he created the terms like “turning points,” and “pinch”, and much of the language that screenwriters use to describe elements and devices used in their scripts. (FREE AUDIOBOOK VERSIONS HERE)
Immortalized by the film Adaptation, McKee delves deeply into the components necessary for making a great script. I find his principles of “controlling idea” (which closely resembles Lagos Egri’s concept of “premise” in The Art of Dramatic Writing) and “gap between expectation and result” incredibly useful. I always turn to McKee’s teachings for guidance. (FREE AUDIOBOOK VERSIONS HERE)
Vogler takes the workings of Joseph Campbell about myth and archetypes and breaks it down into easy to chew, bite-size portions. What makes Campbell so special? His writings about the universal appeal of mythological tales have inspired many other storytellers to create great pieces of work with timeless resonance — does George Lucas ring a bell? (FREE AUDIOBOOK VERSIONS HERE)
Seger’s book I found as a great companion piece to Syd Field’s Screenplay. What I particularly like from this book is her method of ramping up conflict by the use of “obstacles,” “compilations,” and “reversals.”
You can see echoes of all the other aforementioned writers in this book. What I like about Save The Cat is that it’s a stripped-down, fun read with a lot of helpful information. I especially appreciate Snyder’s Beat Sheet which shows with almost page number accuracy where to place those particular plot moments that help keep your story moving. Some might find it formulaic, but I think it functions very well and points to exactly the kind of scripts Hollywood has come to expect from writers. One of the best screenwriting books. (FREE AUDIOBOOK VERSIONS HERE)
Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out on how to write a screenplay along comes this book to point out where you may have gotten it wrong. Despite the length of the title, it’s a quick read and VERY illuminating. As I skimmed through the examples of what not to do, I discovered what I was doing right, and most importantly what I was getting wrong. They say you learn from your mistakes, and reading this book sure helped to show how. (FREE AUDIOBOOK VERSIONS HERE)
This book was a required textbook back when I was at film school. Some of the formatting suggestions may be a little outdated, especially if you have Final Draft or Movie Magic screenwriting software, but there’s still a ton of knowledge to be gained about proper formatting. The quickest way to spot a novice writer is by how unprofessional their script is formatted — this book shines a light on the Hollywood standard. (FREE AUDIOBOOK VERSIONS HERE)
Not only do I dig this guy’s first name, but I found his book to be more current as far as the conventions of formatting. It covers a lot of ground with how to write a screenplay and everything else that goes with being a screenwriter and Filmtrepreneur, like how to register your script and how to write a query letter to literary agents. It’s a broad overview, but one of the most informative screenwriting books. (FREE AUDIOBOOK VERSIONS HERE)
This is actually a book for the aspiring playwright, but most if not all the principles can apply to screenwriting. Egri gives examples of poorly constructed scenes and explains why they don’t work — then compares and contrasts against scenes that do. This is one of my favorite books, and one I strongly recommend. One of the best screenwriting books out there. (FREE AUDIOBOOK VERSIONS HERE)
(FREE AUDIOBOOK VERSIONS HERE)Have you ever wondered how successful writers do it? If you’ve reached this point on my top ten, I would say, “of course you do!” There are good work regimens and not so constructive methods. This book gives us a glimpse into how the top Hollywood writers work, how they fight writer’s block, as well as deal with the daily grind of writing. I found it very insightful and definitely worthwhile.
A must-read for any screenwriter. Tarantino…nuff said! These are our Top Ten Screenwriting Books You Need to Read. We hope they help you on your journey as a screenwriter. Remember just keep writing!
David R. Flores is a writer and artist (aka Sic Monkie) based in Los Angeles. He is the creator of the comic book series Dead Future King published by Alterna Comics and Golden Apple Books. Website: www.davidrflores.com & www.deadfutureking.com
Alex Ferrari 0:04
I'd like to welcome to the show, Robert McKee. How are you doing, Robert?
Robert McKee 0:08
Very well, very well. Thank you.
Alex Ferrari 0:10
Thank you so much for coming on the show. I am have been a fan of your work for quite some time. I've read your first two books, and I'm looking forward to reading your new one, which we'll talk about later character. But I was first introduced to your work in the film adaptation like so many. So many screenwriters and filmmakers were how, by the way, how, how was that whole process? I mean, it was a very odd request, I'm sure that you got when you got that call?
Robert McKee 0:40
Well, it certainly was, my phone rang one day and producer named Ed Saxon calling from New York and, and he said I am mightily embarrassed. This is a phone call I've dreaded. We've got this crazy screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and, and he has made you a character in his screenplay, and he has freely cribbed from your book and from your lectures, and he has no permission to do either. And, but we don't know what to do. So I said, well, send me a script, you know, I'll you know, see what's going on. So they sent me a script, and I read it. And I saw immediately that he really needed my character as a central to the film, because he wants me to, he wanted my character to represent the the imperatives of Hollywood. And that you have to do certain things certain ways, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, which is on one level nonsense. Such rules, they their principles, and there's genre convention, but anyway, but so I was a typical kind of need to slander Hollywood in favor of the artist. And, and they wanted me to do the slandering. So, but I realized that without my character there to provide some source of conflict. The story didn't work at all. So I said, and so I tell you what, I made two phone calls. I called William Goldman. And I said, Good, he was, you know, a student of mine. And I said, Bill, they there's a film and they want to use me as a character in it. What do you think? And he said, Don't do it. Don't do it. He said, it's Hollywood. And he said, they're out to get you don't do it. I said, Yeah, but I'm okay. But suppose I had casting rights. And he says, Okay, okay, who do you want? I said, Well, let's say Gene Hackman, is it? Okay. Okay. It'll be Gene Hackman, with a big pink bow around his neck. If they want to get you, Bob, they're gonna get you don't do it. So then I called my son. And I said, Paul, you know, and he said, do it. I said, Why isn't because Dad, it's a Hollywood film, you're gonna be a character in the Hollywood film. And he said, it'll be great. Do it. So I talked to Ed Sachs, and I said, Kenny, three things. One, I need a redeeming scene. I said, you know, you want to slander me fine. But then you can't leave it at that. You got he got to give me a redeeming scene. Right? To I have to have the controller the casting, I won't tell you exactly who to cast. But you got to give me a list because I ended need to know their philosophy. I mean, for all I knew this was the Danny DeVito Dan Ackroyd School of casting,
Alex Ferrari 4:28
you know, fair enough.
Robert McKee 4:31
I said, and very importantly, the third act sucks. And I cannot be a character in a bad movie. So we need meetings, they're going to have to be willing to rewrite. And, and those are my three conditions. And, and they agreed to them. And, and so they sent me a casting they gave me my redeeming scene and then they they they sent a list. Have the 10 best middle aged British actors alive? You know, everybody from Christopher Plummer to Alan Bates and I, and and I looked at the list. And I said, I want Brian Cox. And they said, Who's Brian Cox? And I said, He's the best British actor you don't know. Because Brian had been a student of mine up in Glasgow, and I'd seen him on stage in the West End of London and, and what I didn't want, see all those actors. They're all wonderful. But there's always actors have this Love me Love me thing, no matter what they want to be loved. And there's always this subtext like my heart's in the right place. And I really, you know, and I don't want to be loved. I really don't want to be respected, I want to be understood. And I want to inspire people and educate, but I do not want a bunch of people following me around like a guru. Right, loving me, right? And I knew that Brian would not do that. And, and then we had meetings and about the Act Three, and eventually got to a never got to a perfect accuracy. But it got to a point where I could sign off on so and it was, so they took my son to a screening at so at Sony and I said, you know, we think ball, and he said, Dad, he said, Brian Cox nailed you. Which I thought was great. So you know, and it was, it was, but that's not the, you know, I was I put myself in a funny date. So it's not just, but yeah, it was, um, it was a difficult choice. But I think William Goldman was wrong, that, you know, there was a way to you have your cake and eat it too. And I think an adaptation is loved. Oh, and millions and millions of people. So, so it certainly didn't hurt my brand.
Alex Ferrari 7:20
It didn't hurt your brand or business, I'd imagine. It's the term irony comes to play where you would be working with Charlie Kaufman, on a script, where your character is the establishment that he's trying to get away from and to give art but yet you are working with him to put the script together and finish the third act, which is amazing. Charlie,
Robert McKee 7:42
Charlie's one of those guys. He's got, you know, a great talent. But he's a bit delusional. What he wants to achieve is the commercial art movie. He wants it both ways. He wants to be known for making art movies, but they have to make money too. And a lot of it because he knows that, you know, his career. If he loses money, it's over. And so and, and so he wants to he wants to create the commercial art movie and a salsa dance understood, you know, things, the notion of the commercial art movie, you know, the, the, the English Patient and films like that. And I you know, in the meetings with a spike and and, and, Charlie, I, you know, I pointed out to Charlie, so you can't have it both ways. It's a you, you know, you if it's a true art movies have a very limited audience period. And art filmmakers understand this. And they budget accordingly. You want 30 million
Alex Ferrari 8:59
for an art film?
Robert McKee 9:03
Was 5 million we could, but Okay, so anyway, but it was. Yeah, the irony of it is wonderful.
Alex Ferrari 9:10
So, so you've worked with so many screenwriters and filmmakers over the course of your career, what is the biggest mistakes you see screenwriters, new screenwriters to the craft make?
Robert McKee 9:24
Well, it's not mistake so much. Yeah, I guess it is a mistake. But, uh, there's two problems. One is cliches. And they think that it that they want to be, you know, like an artist, they want to be original, but at the same time, they want. They want to be sure that it works. And so they recycle the things that everybody's always done. And they've tried to recycle them with it. difference and which is absolutely necessary, I mean, that's I get it, you're not going to reinvent the wheel, you have to just spin it yet another way. And, but then they get very easy once they sell their soul. It's hard to get it back. And, you know, you can pour on your soul for a while, but you've got to get the cash to get back. And, and so that's the war on cliches is not some, you know, it's not a fault, it's just a problem everybody faces. And, but there's a greater problem. And it's the willingness to lie. In an effort to tell their story to get it out, somehow they get it together. And they will write characters and scenes, and whatever that that lack credibility that they know perfectly well, in their heart of hearts is pure corn of some kind. And it's a it's, they're bending the truth. It's not it's, there's something false to some. And, and, and to, to, to get to something that is really profoundly honest. And it doesn't matter what the genre is, from action, to comedy. to, to a you know, as an education plan, something very interior doesn't matter what the genre is, there's truth, and then there's lie. And somehow they think that because it's fiction, that gives them a license to lie. But but they don't have that license, they have a an obligation to express the truth of what it is to be a human being and in whatever genre, they're they're writing, they have a, they have a an obligation, if they're writing comedy, to really stick a knife in some sacred cow and expose the bullshit of society. I mean, they, you know, it's not enough to be amusing. comedy is a is an angry art, that savages, all those things that, that that that are false in life, and starting with politics. Right. And, and so there's they, there's a willingness to, to fit and lie and in order to please that, okay, let me take a step back. I bulldozing cliches and truthfulness are all the byproduct of the young writer, especially the young writers desire to please they want to be loved, they want people to love what they do they want to please people. And so they write what they think, is pleasing for people, whether it's all the cards in fast and furious. Right, or the sentimentality or whatever they want to please people and and which is fine, but you can't please everybody and so you're going to write for a certain mind a certain audience a certain mentality and an educational level and taste and whatnot in a certain group of people that you know, are out there, they're like you pay and and you can't please everybody. And and so, a film like for example, Nomad land is certainly not trying to please there's an audience for it, that will get it and enjoy it and and recognize this as a deep truth about our society and about human nature.
But it's, it's not going to have a mass audience. And because it will turn off more people than it will turn out. And, but it's, it's a excellent film is an honest film. So that's the I think it's fishing around here. Because when you open the door and say, you know whether
Alex Ferrari 14:53
you're wrong, there's 1000s of things
Robert McKee 14:57
to bring up, but if I can do it down, it's that it's that the willingness to please results in recycling cliches, and basically not telling the the, the, the dark truth of things. And so you have to be it's tough, you have to be disciplined not to copy other people's success, but to, to write what you honestly believe to be the
errors in the central new genre.
And, and be rigorous about that.
Alex Ferrari 15:36
Now, one of the the hallmarks of a good story is conflict. How do you create conflict in a story?
Robert McKee 15:46
Well, depends on where you start. If you start with a choice of genre, let's say you're going to write a thriller. Right? You know, the source of conflict immediately by that choice. I need some kind of psychopathic villain. Right? I need Russell Crowe, in unhinged. Why? And so that's done for you. So that the genre sort of automatically tells you, right, on the other hand, if you're telling a family story, and that will be called domestic. Until the characters are a family and it's a family with problems, wow. The conflict could come from any direction. Who's with? Is it the mother? Is it the father? Is that rebellious children? Is it Whose is it? Some some, you know, older grandfather grandmother figure that's pulling people strings, and you know, whatever, given a family what's wrong with this family? And so you have to figure out what is it and is it social, or psychological? Is it instinctive is a deliberate you have to think your way through all that. And so you, you you start with a family and you create a little you know, a cast? And then and then you ask the question or what's wrong with this family. And a million different things can be wrong in human nature inside of a family. And that requires knowledge, you have to understand people, you have to understand that you know, the mother, daughter, mother, son, Father, daughter, Father, Son relationships, and, and you need to dig into your own experience. And ask yourself, you know, what was wrong in my family? What What do I believe, to be the truth about families? And, and, and that the genre doesn't give you that answer. And so, you have the answer will come from your depth of understanding of human nature, human relationships of a certain personal kind in this case. And, or if you're writing comedy, so as mentioned, the starting place of writing a comedy is to ask yourself what is pissing me off? What in this world is pissing me off? Is that relationships? Is it men women? Always it? Is that the is that the the the the social networks? Is it is it politics? Is it the military? Is it the church? Why what what is what what do I hate? What's pissing me off? Because the root of comedy is is anger. The comic mind is an angry idealist comic comics are idealists who want the world to be perfect or at least and when they look around the world they see where sorry, sick one place it is. And, and they realize that they're complicit, they're part of it too. And so what spacing me off then it points them in a direction to an institution or behavior in society. me like I think that great comedy series. Curb Your Enthusiasm. You know, and, and, and yes, you know, what is pissing me off and he will finds really egregious fault in, in, in people's lack of propriety. Or, or logic or clarity of thought, you know, why should there be a handicapped stall in toilets? Right that no one can use except the two times a year that a handicapped person comes into this particular toilet. Okay. Right. That is
Larry David, that is an egregious absurdity and it infuriates him. And so he goes into the handicap stall, and sure shit, this is the day
a guy in a wheelchair. So, um, so that, you know, that that's, those are the various things, you know, you, you look at yourself, as a writer, and you you have to understand your vision of life, you have to understand the genres. When you make a choice, there's certain conventions. And, and a, you can bend those conventions, what breaker if you want, but not without an awareness of what the audience expects. And so somehow, it'll between picking the setting and the cast, the genre, and then looking inside of yourself, like your comic wouldn't ask you what's pissing me off? You find your way. If I if you're in conflict, and the the most importantly, you know, it has it that you know that that conflict has to be something you deeply believe in. Now, or, or you will do what we were talking about earlier, you will fall prey to cliches because you'll you'll create false conflict, false antagonist empty, a cliched antagonisms. And like that. So it's a very important question. Now.
Alex Ferrari 22:28
So as far as one thing a lot of a lot of screenwriters try to get away from is structure, saying that structure and trying to fall into side of a structure is, it's like holding me back as an artist and I need to be free and I need to run free like a wild stallion, I personally find structure to be very freeing, because it gives me a place to go. How do you approach structure?
Robert McKee 22:55
Well, in this day, people have a course accused me of imposing structural rules in my teaching, and it's nonsense. When
I am opposed to structure, it's inhibiting my creativity do not know what the hell they're talking. They just don't they use the word structure. But they wouldn't understand or know story structure, if it fell from a height under their foot, okay, they just don't know what they're talking about. structure in every scene, ideally, is a turning point of some magnitude, the character's life, they go into a situation wanting something. And something in that moment, kind of prevents them from getting it. They struggle with that. And they either get what they want, or they don't get what they want. Or they get it at a price or they don't get it but learn something. Change takes place. And it's in a simple scene is minor. And then these changes per scene build sequences in which moderate deeper change wider change happens, these sequences build x in it. And then that climax is a major turning point that has greater depth or greater breadth or both have impact on a character's life. And so minor moderate major changes are building a story progressively to an absolute irreversible change at climax. Now, why would anyone object to what I just said? Why would anyone think that you can change Do concrete scenes in which nothing changes. And do that three scenes in a row and people will not be walking up. They come there, they come to the writer, they read a novel, kind of trying to have insight into life as to what forces in life positive and negative, bring about change outwardly or inwardly in characters lives. I mean, that's why we go to the storyteller. And so and so why would you not want change? Or why would you want repetitious change? Because the same change degree of change, that happens three times in a row, you know, we're bored. So because it's not giving us what we want, it's not giving us the insight that into character that we want. And so people who say they're opposed to structure don't understand what structure is it they don't understand, it's a dynamic and a progression of minor moderate major changes. And so I have no patience with that kind of ignorance. Hear the people who say that are the very naive, ignorant, really, people who think that if they just open up their imagination, emotion, picture will flow out of it.
Alex Ferrari 26:30
Very true.
Robert McKee 26:32
And, and they are childish in that way. I mean, you open up your imagination and see what flows out, then you have to go to work on it. And you have to step back from every, every time you you know, or let me put you this way. What in truth is it to write? What is writing actually, like, as an experience, you open up your imagination, and you have an idea for a character or two or three, and you write a page, things happen? Action reaction dialog, that when you write a page, that takes 20 minutes, then what do you do? You read that page? And you could take it does this work? would he say that? Would she act like that? would this happen with it? Is there a better way to do this? And is this repetitious? Is there a hole does it make sense, you constantly critique what you've written, and you go back, and you rewrite it. And then you read it, again, you critique it again. And this goes on all day long. And so you go inside to create, you go outside to critique, you create, your critique you curate, and the quality of your critique that guides your rewriting is absolutely dependent on your understanding to make judgments, when you ask the question, does this work? You have to know what works and what doesn't work. And, and so that on one level, everything you do is structure. Its structured to have a character say x and another character respond with y that structure action reaction, that the person who said x did not expect to hear why
Alex Ferrari 28:36
right exit Exactly.
Robert McKee 28:39
And that structure that beat of act reaction and human behavior, that structure. So is I said, People say this, say it out of out of emit amateur understanding of what the creativity, what the act of writing really is.
Alex Ferrari 29:07
And I, whenever I've come up against that, when I say no, every you know, every movie has some sort of structure. Most movies, especially popular movies have structure. And your definition of structure is wonderful. They always throw out Pulp Fiction, and I'm like, no Pulp Fiction is an extremely structured film. Do you agree?
Robert McKee 29:28
Yeah. I've when I was we were talking about when I was when they were doing adaptation, and I was working with Charlie Kaufman. Charlie had exactly that attitude. I said, the third act doesn't work. We have to restructure it. And in the end is his face went into a panic mode. He didn't want you know, scared the hell out. He said, I know. I know that. It needs some, you know, just it'll come to me it was a clo and whatnot. And it's as easy as I don't write with structure. He said that I don't write with structure. I said, Charlie, would you like me to lay out the three act design of being john malkovich as because it's a three act, play, want to hear them, act 123. And, and he almost ran out of the room. He didn't want to hear it. He wants to live in the delusion that it somehow flows, and there is no structure. And when in fact, subconsciously, at least being john malkovich is a three activist
Alex Ferrari 30:48
is a great, it's
Robert McKee 30:50
a model, it's a model, BJ Mack is a model three act design. But it's but to the romantic like, Charlie, he doesn't want to hear it. Because he thinks that that's going to constipate his creativity. And I have to agree with it. If he wants to write out of this notion that it's all a flow. And if he is aware that there's a, that there's a design happening, it would, it would inhibit him. So it's because he's a good writer, he's very talented. So it would be better for him to live in that delusion, and let it all pour out. And then he goes back, and his taste guides the rewriting and so forth. And, and, and so if you're talented, like Charlie and, and the idea of structure is frightening, then you should listen to those feelings. And not think about structure and just, you know, do what you do, and hope it works.
But
that's rare.
Alex Ferrari 32:10
Very, very, very rare. But yeah, but and so for everyone listening, you have to understand that someone like Jeff Hoffman is writing. And as he's writing, he's subconsciously working within the three act structure, honestly, on a subconscious level. And even the great writers is like, Oh, I never even think about outlining or plotting, is because they have such a grasp of the craft, that it's already pre wired in them. It's like me building a house, I wouldn't even think twice about how to pour a foundation, or how to how to how to lay out the walls, because I've done it a million times. I don't have to sit there and think about it, it's just done. But that is rare, and it takes sometimes years to get to that place or you're a prodigy, which happens once in a generation or twice in a generation.
Robert McKee 32:57
And and you're absolutely right. That's very, very well put and, and in fact, it goes beyond that you have been watching the stories on screen you have been reading them in novels, you've been to the theater, that form form is a better word than structure that form of action, contradictory reaction and reaction to that and a giant dynamic of action reaction building to change that is so built into you as a as a reader as an audience member from I don't know two three years old. Mother read your little you know, bunny rabbit stories, right? Your bunny rabbit goes out and something happens that not happy for the bunny rabbit and then you know of bunny rabbits mother comes along and pictures things whatever it takes, I mean that that form is ingrained in you from from the earliest. And so you do know it?
Alex Ferrari 34:08
Without question. Now you do more dialogue is something that is you've wrote an entire book dedicated to dialogue. Obviously, your first book is story. But your second book is dialogue. What are the three functions of dialogue in your opinion?
Robert McKee 34:25
Well, there's many of them and certainly one of them is is the obvious one of exposition by various means. So for examples simple in writing dialogue, a character has a certain vocabulary so for example, you you've done construction on houses, right? Some sure I And so how many different kinds of nails Do you know? From spiked to tact of,
let's say 10? Yeah. Okay. Now most people may know, to me one nail on a screw, basically, that's all they know.
Okay. So if if in there, if a character in their dialogue uses the, the carpenters terminology. And even metaphorically, you know, call something a five, many nail, right? The fact that he knows the difference between a temporary nail and pipe and whatever it is, his exposition is it tells us something about the life of this character, by the very word, the names of things that that this character uses in their vocabulary helps us understand the whole life of this character. So if somebody grew up, you know, around boats, and they use nautical terminology, right? And so that they the language inside of the dialogue, all that just the vocabulary alone gives us exposition, it tells us who is this character? What's their life been like? Etc. Okay, then, at the same time, the characters talking about things that are happening, or have happened. And when somebody says, you know, you're not going to leave me again, we are to instantly know, that's it, she's already left them once, at least before
Alex Ferrari 36:46
it says it says volumes with one word.
Robert McKee 36:49
Yeah, there's no word again. But so we have an insight into what their life has been like, in this relationship. And so that's number one is is, is exposition. And number two is action. When people speak, what they say, is an action they take in order to get what they need and want in the moment, but underneath that is what they're really doing. And it's what in the subtext, the action they take in the subtext is what's driving the scene? So when somebody says, Well, I didn't expect that. Right? What they're really doing, perhaps, depending, right, is attacking, criticizing the other person for doing something that's completely inappropriate. What they say is, well, I didn't expect you to say that I didn't expect you to do that. I didn't expect that. But what that is, is a way of attacking another person for inappropriate behavior. And so it's right. And so and so the dialogue is the text by which people carry out actions. But underneath the dialog, is the true action. And it that's based on a common sense, understanding that people do not say out loud and do out what they're really thinking and feeling. They cannot, no matter how they try, if they're when they're, when they're pouring their heart out and confessing to the worst things they've ever done. There's still another layer, where they're actually begging for forgiveness, let's say, right? So by confessing, actually, you're begging for forgiveness or whatever it is. And so dialogue is the outer vehicle for interaction. And, and the great mistaken dialogue is writing the the interaction into the dialogue. stead of having somebody confess, did they beg Please forgive me, please forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. Right. And, and if somebody is actually begging, there's got to be another level of what they're really doing underneath the baking. And, and so you have to, you know, the writer has to think to that by begging. What that dialogue is actually a mask for manipulating that person. Do what you have to do, right. And so, exposition, action. Okay. And then, you know, just beauty. Just Just wonderful dialogue, in character, and all that, but but a way of creating a surface that is that it draws us. Because, you know, we just love to see scenes where characters speak really well. in there. And even though even if we're using just gangster talk, good gangs, your dog, it's right to talk to each other and that kind of rap and that kind of unite. Right? That's, that's a form of beauty. It's wonderful, you know, it's pleasurable, right. The dialogue ultimately ought to be pleasing, and in his sense of kind of verbal spectacle. And so that's just, you know, that just three off the top of my head functions, but there's is there's much more right and I, I like I'm sure like you, we all love. Wonderful, memorable quotable dialogue.
Alex Ferrari 41:24
Yeah, very much like it's so obviously Tarantino and Sorkin and Shane Black and these kind of screenwriters, their dialogue is just, it's poetic in the way that they write something, certainly is, certainly, and the genius of them is they're able to do the first two things you said, within that poetry, as opposed to just poetry for poetry sake,
Robert McKee 41:46
which is, you know, that is that just decorative. They all happens all at once. You know, you're getting exposition, see who these characters are, whatever actions or reactions are driving the scene, and it's a pleasure to listen to.
Alex Ferrari 42:03
Now, one thing I've noticed in years and even in my own writing descriptions, in a screenplay, a lot of screenwriters, when they starting out, they feel like it's a novel. So, they will write a very detailed description about a scene or about something, where from my understanding, over the years, less is more and it becomes more of a of an exercise in Haiku is than it is in the novel writing. Can you kind of talk a little bit about the importance of of compacting your description?
Robert McKee 42:37
Well, it does need to be economical. Of course. On the other hand, it has to be vivid,
Alex Ferrari 42:44
right?
Robert McKee 42:46
And that's, you know, where does that balance strike you that the ambition is to project a film into the readers head. So that when they read their screenplay, they see a motion picture without camera directions without you know smash CUT TO for transitions and, you know, Dolly on and you know, and you know, pull focus, whatever nonsense, you got to use the language and description to create the effect of a motion picture, then you only use ideally, you only use the master shots, it you you only the the the shots, the angles, the setups, camera setups that are absolutely necessary. And no more you do not try to direct the film. And, and instead, you project a motion picture into the readers head. And, and, and so you need to it over, often in overriding and when, in fact, was not only overwritten, but it's not vivid. It's because writers rely on adjectives and adverbs. And what they need is to know the names of things. You know, he, he, he picks up what we're talking about before a big nail. Well, you know, big is an adjective. And so, put an image in the readers head, he picks up a spike. Spike is a vivid image. A he, he walks slowly across the room, will slowly is an adverb. Right? Right. And so you name the action of verb is the name of an action. He pads across the room he ambles, he strolls he saunters. He you know, Waltz's is an active verb without an adjective, adverb, concrete nouns without adjectives. And we see things and we see actions. And it becomes vivid. It reduces the word count. And, and here's here's something a good it's a good note for writers take your screenplay. And, and search the verb is or our urge is an are throughout your descriptions and eliminate every single one of them. know things are nothing is in a screenplay. Everything in a film is alive. And action. So you know, a name the thing. So a line like a big house, there, there is a big house on a hill.
Okay.
And what's a big house a mansion or a state? a villa? What's a, you know, a hill, a mountain. At add and add and turn it into a villa sits just that verb sits is more active than is a big house sits with a spectacular with this spectacular view. And so easy, a big house up high with a great view. And it's an image and it's active, it sits sprawls across, whatever. And so active verbs concrete nouns, and and make us see a movie. And every writer finds every good writer finds their own personal way to do that. And Paddy Chayefsky wrote elaborate descriptions. Harold Pentre described, nothing, nothing. He would just go interior kitchen dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, dialogue, describe nothing. And because his attitude was, we all know what a kitchen looks like. And they'll probably play it in the garage anyway. But if they mess if they mess with my beats of action reaction and you know, in dialogue, then they're in trouble. Okay, so every writer has to find their own way to accomplish the task of a vividly projecting emotion picture in the imagination, as you turn pages who make them see a movie.
Alex Ferrari 48:23
Now, your new book is called character. And I wanted to ask you a couple questions in regards to character because, arguably, I always like to ask the question, do you start with plot or you start with character I always say to people, you don't like Indiana Jones, his plots aren't nearly as memorable as Indiana Jones James Bond's plots aren't as memorable as James Bond. Like I don't you throw me the plot of thunder ball. I don't remember. I remember scenes, but I do remember James Bond. And that's what draws me back to his stories. So, can you talk a little bit about the difference between roles and character?
Robert McKee 48:58
Well, a role is a generic term. And so hero is a role villain is a role victim is a role. You know, sidekick is a roll. goon is a roll. shopkeeper his role in the role is as a position in a in a cast. as defined by its relationship to other characters, and or a profession. Like waiter, asked driver. And, and they're generic, they wrote something waiting to be filled by a character. And as a character comes into a story to fulfill a certain role but it's a it's a You know, it's it's a, it's a generic to that to that genre. And so if you have a family, the roles are mother, father, children guide, they're okay, those are roles, characters are our unique human beings, we inhabit those roles. And and there's a design of a cast, such that the protagonist, and the central character at role is the most complex character role. And they are they, they're, depending on the genre, they are the most dimensional character of all. And they are ideally, they, they are the center of good, there's a, there's a positive human quality, not every way certainly, but there's, there's some quality, within the complexity of that character, with which we recognize we empathize, we recognize a shared humanity, the character is then in orbit around that character that protagonists are less dimensional, but they can be dimensional as as well, then you go all the way out to the second third circles, where you have people only playing a role. cashier, restaurant cashier, okay. Now, even when you're writing a scene where your character goes up to the cashier in a restaurant, to pay a bill, and discovers that his credit card is cancelled, right, you have a clerk standing there, at the at the take, who takes the credit card and finds that it's, it's been rejected that clerk character, he be very useful to imagine that role, very specifically, what kind of human being, you know, is she or he, it because it does the, the way in which that clerk that roll says responds to your card is canceled. Your card didn't go through the, the, the way you write the words and gesture for that character gives her a trait. And so roles have traits and, and to make, even that moment, when there's a human being behind that, that trait. And so if she's sarcastic, if she's fed up with with the job itself or with with people whose cards never work, or she's sympathetic because her cards don't work.
Alex Ferrari 53:19
So,
Robert McKee 53:21
so, even in a in a simple role like that, you try to write it with a as a specific trait in the way in which he deals with that moment. And it creates a character for an actor. And so the actor come in there and realize, Oh, this is an antagonistic clerk or this is a sympathetic cleric, or an indifferent or bored or falling asleep, or glancing at her watch constantly, she just wants to get out of here, whatever it is, you give her a trait. And that makes her a character, she sends the GM to life and it gives the actor something to hang their performance on. And so dimensions the protagonists, the most dimensional of all dimensions are contradictions within the nature of the girl. And so you populate that with in my book on character, I look at characters everybody from from Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey has an eight dimensional character, all the way up to Tony Soprano, as a 12 dimensional character Walter White, as a 16 dimensional character. And so and so the complexity of character today given long form television, especially, is at is becoming your astronomical And then you have to give all the, that every one of these dimensions if a character is, is kind and cruel, okay? Sometimes they're crying, sometimes they're cruel. Therefore, you're going to need a cast of characters where the protagonist, when they meet character a, they treat them kindly character B, they treat with, with a slap with cruelty and, and so you need to design a cast around each other characters. So that when, whenever any two characters meet, they bring out sides of their dimensionality or traits of behavior that no one else brings out of them. And so, every single character is designed that whenever they encounter any other character, they bring out each other's qualities in ways that no other character does. And, and when you have a, you know, when you have that kind of cast, where every single character services, every other character, and no redundancies every relationship is unique. every relationship develops a different aspect or a different dimension. Then you have a fascinating group of people that creates a world that the audience can really
Alex Ferrari 56:38
dive into,
Robert McKee 56:39
dive into now, you know, when characters when and carrot one characters behave toward each other in the same way, no matter who it is. That, you know, that's it's a boring and do it's false. People do not treat other people, different people the same. Everybody behaves in a uniquely subtly but uniquely different way, depending upon the relationship. And it takes a lot of concentration and imagination in the writer to realize that every relationship brings out different sides of the character's nature.
Alex Ferrari 57:21
Now, I'm gonna ask you a few questions. Ask all my guests. Robert, what are three screenplays every screenwriter should read? You see? I don't answer that question. Okay. For this reason, I don't want people to copy anybody. Okay, fair enough.
Robert McKee 57:46
And so if I say, you know, if I named my, you know, my favorites, like, say, trying to tell people you know, then run to study Chinatown and emulate it. And that's a mistake. The really important question to ask people is, what's your favorite genre? Because they should be writing the kind of films they love.
Alex Ferrari 58:15
It's a good point, what
Robert McKee 58:16
I love, what are my favorites may have nothing to do with their favorites. And so the first question is, you know, what do you love? What kind of movies do you go to see what kind of things do you read? What do you love? And then seek out those? And the second thing is that if I name favorites, and, and that they, you know, they're in their pieces of perfection. Okay. What does that teach the writer? They got a model of perfection. Great. Okay, that's important, you should understand you should have an ideal, what you're trying to achieve. But one of the ways to achieve it, is to study bad movies. break them down and ask yourself, why is this film so boring? Why can't I believe a word of it? Why does this fail? and break it down and study it? To answer what this What does it lack what went wrong, etc. Okay, and then rewrite it.
Alex Ferrari 59:37
Just thing,
Robert McKee 59:39
rewrite it. fix that broken film. Because that's what you're going to do as a writer. Your first draft is going to suck. And you're going to go in and try to fix your broken script. Try to bring it to life. Try to cut edited shape and rewrite it reinvented, you're going to read it over and over again, right? Having fixed broken films, not just one, but many, many, many take bad movies, studying them and make them make them work is practice for what you're going to have to do with your own screenplay. Because it's not going to work in the beginning, it's going to need a lot of work to work. And so having rewritten bad films to make them work is, is a real learning experience. And so I say, study good films are of your genre, so that you have a an ideal that you achieve, rewrite the bad ones to teach yourself how to fix broken work. And so, and that's a personal choice. I can't say what that should be for those people. For every one of them, loves whatever they love, which may or may not be what I love.
Alex Ferrari 1:01:00
Now, where can people find out more about you? And where can they purchase your new book character? Amazon? It's pretty much it is pretty much it nowadays, isn't it? It's pretty much it nowadays, isn't it? Amazon.
Robert McKee 1:01:17
bookstores, I'm sure are opening up. And if you know if you love bookstores, as I do, you know, you can go to a bookstore and get it. But the most direct way that will be there in your budget for the next morning. It's incredible what they do, what Amazon does, and bash, you know that the other other Barnes and Noble stew or whatever it is, but yeah, it's very simple. You just go to amazon.com. Right? Just write the word McKee. And comes story, dialogue, character, in hardcover, in an audio and in Kindle,
Alex Ferrari 1:02:05
and everything else? And then how can people read it? And how can people learn more about you what you offer?
Robert McKee 1:02:13
Ah, the go to make peace story.com. The key story.com will take you to our website. And we have a upcoming. We've been doing webinars now for a year and a half since the plague hit us. And they've been very successful, very, very pleased with it. And in July, we're doing a series on action. Nice on the action genre. And so these, these are every Tuesday, three Tuesday's in a row. And they're two hour events, hour and a half worth of lecture and a half hour of q&a. Then on Thursday, I I give an additional two hours of q&a.
Alex Ferrari 1:03:01
Fantastic.
Robert McKee 1:03:03
And because I realized how important it is for people to get answers to things they're working on. So So Tuesdays and Thursdays for three weeks in a row. And there's you know, four hours of material each week. So and we will we will look at the action genre in depth with lots of illustrations and examples of an adage and I love giving these acts. webinars. And it's a favorite of mine. Actually,
Alex Ferrari 1:03:38
I love a good action movie is it's hard to come by nowadays. So I appreciate it. Robert, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to to my audience and I appreciate all the work that you have done over the years and help so many screenwriters as well. So thank you so much for everything you do.
Robert McKee 1:03:54
It was a lovely chat. Great chat. Nice talking to you.
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When you hear Stanley Kubrick, you think of images. One of the many reasons Kubrick was such a remarkable filmmaker was that he came to the film industry after years working as a professional photographer for publications like Look magazine. There he learned about composition, light and of course lenses.
Not many film directors worry about the latest camera tech–cinematographers usually take that job up–but Kubrick was no ordinary director. Even though he wasn’t the first filmmaker to use the Steadicam, on The Shining, he was the first to have the rig modified so it could hover close to the ground in those legendary shots of Danny on the big wheel.
In the video below, Joe Dunton, owner of one of the biggest camera rental facilities in the United Kingdom and worked extremely closely with Stanley, takes us on a guided tour of Kubrick’s lens collection. For those who went to the traveling Stanley Kubrick exhibit (see the videos below) two to three years ago, you might have seen this video playing in the exhibit.
Kubrick rarely rented film gear or lenses and preferred to own his own. Stanley lit mostly with natural light when he could–because of his photojournalism career. Sometimes the flicker of a candle is all the light he would have, which led to the use of the legendary Zeiss lens designed for NASA as a way shooting the deep darkness of space–Kubrick used it for the evening dining room scenes in Barry Lyndon in order to capture candlelight on the slower film stocks of the day.
One of the unsung heroes in all this, it’s a man named George Hill, who was Stanley Kubrick’s go-to-guy when he wanted to create a custom lens for a project. George was also the only guy he trusted to clean his lenses collection. Enjoy!
Stanley Kubrick’s Favorite Cameras & Lenses
I’ve always been fascinated with how some of the filmmaking masters got their start. How did they break into the business? What gear did they use on their first films? What events shaped them in the early days? As many of you know I have a love for Stanley Kubrick and his films. I always knew he got his start as a photographer for LOOK Magazine but I never could find out what cameras he shot on.
I did go into a pretty lengthy post on Kubrick Lenses but now, thanks to CinemaTyler’s ongoing “Kubrick Files” series on Youtube, we can now see what cameras and photo lenses help shape this master. If you are interested in Stanley Kubrick’s early days as a photographer I recommend two amazing books on the subject:
Stanley Kubrick: Drama and Shadows
Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine: Authorship and Genre in Photojournalism and Film
The video discusses 20 cameras and lenses including the famous Zeiss Planar 50mm F0.7, thelens Kubrick used to shoot the candlelight scenes in Barry Lyndon. We also discover Kubrick’s most beloved camera was the Arriflex 35 II, which he shot A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut.
Here are a list of the cameras and lenses discussed (via IndieWire)
1. Garflex Pacemaker Speed Graphic Camera 2. Kodak Monitor 620 3. Rolleiflex Automat 6×6 Model RF 111A 4. Rolleiflex K2 5. Rolleiflex Automat 6×6 Model K4 6. Rollei 35 7. Polaroid Pathfinder 110A 8. Leica IIIc 9. Pentax K 10. Hasselblad 11. Nikon F 12. Subminiature Minox 13. 35mm Widelux 14. Polaroid OneStep SX-70 15. Arriflex 35 IIC 16. Kinoptik Tegea 9.8mm 17. Novoflex 400mm f5.6 lens 18. Cooke Varotal 20-100mm T3 19. Cinepro 24-480mm in Arri Standard Mount 20. Zeiss Planar 50mm F0.7
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Indie Filmmaking Podcasts have been so important to me over the past few years. Indie Film Hustle entered into the podcast space in 2015 with the launch of its first original podcast series, The Indie Film Hustle Podcast.
The response to the podcast was so amazing that after a few short months the show became the #1 filmmaking podcast on Apple Podcasts & Spotify, and still maintain that honor. I’m truly humbled and thankful by the response.
The show is only as good as the indie filmmakers who listen to it. Thank you all for the support. I have put together the Top 15 Indie Filmmaking Podcasts from the IFH archives. This list will be updated every few months so keep checking back.
Today on the show I bring you one of the most influential and iconic writer/directors in the history of cinema, three-time Oscar® winner Oliver Stone. Throughout his legendary career, Stone has served as writer, director, and producer on a variety of films, documentaries, and television movies. His films have been nominated for forty two Oscars® and have won twelve.
It’s been a hell of a year so far. I’ve been blessed to have had the honor of speaking to some amazing filmmakers and man today’s guest is high on that list. On the show we have writer/director Joe Carnahan. Joe directed his first-feature length film Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane. which was screened at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, and won some acclaim.
We are joined by indie film icon and Oscar® nominated writer/director Richard Linklater. Richard was one of the filmmakers who helped to launch the independent film movement that we know today with his classic 1991 indie film Slacker. As a bonus, we will not only dive into the extraordinary career of Richard Linklater but also that of collaborator and longtime friend writer/director Katie Cokinos, the filmmaker behind the film I Dream Too Much.
In the house today is the iconic screenwriter and director, of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Shaun of the Dead and Blockbuster hit, Baby Driver, Edgar Wright. Edgar has been on the scene making and writing satirical genre films, while also acting for almost thirty years.
He’s here today to talk about his most recent and upcoming film, Last Night In Soho. It is set for release on October 29, 2021, and stars the Queen’s Gambit star, Anya Taylor-Joy. The “Last Night in Soho” title is taken from a song by those Tarantino soundtrack favorites Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich.
Today’s guest is a writer, director, producer, actor, and indie filmmaking legend, Edward Burns. Many of you might have heard of the Sundance Film Festival-winning film called The Brothers McMullen, his iconic first film that tells the story of three Irish Catholic brothers from Long Island who struggle to deal with love, marriage, and infidelity.
His Cinderella story of making the film, getting into Sundance, and launching his career is the stuff of legend. The Brothers McMullenwas sold to Fox Searchlight and went on to make over $10 million at the box office on a $27,000 budget, making it one of the most successful indie films of the decade.
I’m excited to talk to a fellow low-budget independent filmmaker today.
Granted, he does low-budget films on a completely different level than I or most people do at this point. But if we are going to talk about budget filmmaking, it is only fitting to have expert horror film and television producer, Jason Blumof Blumhouse Productions.
That is a testament to his company’s high-quality production. Blumhouse is known for pioneering a new model of studio filmmaking: producing high-quality micro-budget films and provocative television series. They have produced over 150 movies and television series with theatrical grosses amounting to over $4.8 billion.
We have been on a major roll lately on the podcast and this episode keep that going in a big way. Our guest on the show today is Oscar® Winning writer, producer, and director Edward Zwick. Edward made his big shift from his childhood passion of theater to filmmaking after working as a PA for Woody Allen in France on the set of Love and Death.
John Sayles is one of America’s best known independent filmmakers, receiving critical acclaim for films including Eight Men Out (1988), Lone Star (1996) and Men with Guns (1997). He’s also written screenplays for mainstream films such as Passion Fish (1992), Limbo (1999), The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) and did a draft of Jurassic Park (1993) for Steven Spielberg.
Ever since I saw District 9 and learned of all the mythical stories behind the short film becoming a feature, I have been a massive fan of today’s guest, Neill Blomkamp. Though Neill is here today to talk about his new sci-fi horror fiction film, Demonic, we also chatted up about his other films that have been successful over the years.
So many times we hear those mythical stories of a filmmaker who makes a short film and uploads it to Youtube in hopes of a big time film producer sees to and comes down from Mount Hollywood and offers him or her a deal to turn that short into a studio feature. Today’s guest had that happen to him and then some. On the show is writer/director David F. Sandberg.
David’s story is the “lottery ticket” moment I speak about so often on the show. His journey in Hollywood is remarkable, inspiring and scary all at the same time. He created a short film called Lights Out. That short was seen by famed filmmaker and producer James Wan (Furious 7, Aquaman, The Conjuring) who offered to produce a feature film version at New Line Cinema.
I can’t be more excited about the conversation I’m about to share with you. Today on the show we have filmmaker and indie film legend Albert Hughes. Albert, along with his brother Allen began making movies at age 12, but their formal film education began their freshman year of high school when Allen took a TV production class. They soon made the short film The Drive-By and people began to take notice.
After high school Albert began taking classes at LACC Film School: two shorts established the twins’ reputation as innovative filmmakers. Albert and his brother then began directing music videos for a little known rapper named Tupac Shakur.
These videos lead to directing their breakout hit Menace II Society (1993), which made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and grossed nearly 10 times as much as its $3 million budget.
Sitting down with one of the big names in this business this week was a really cool opportunity. I am honored to have on the show today, Oscar® winning director, producer, and screenwriter, Taylor Hackford.
Taylor’s has directed films like An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), White Nights (1985), Proof of Life (2000), Dolores Claiborne (1995), Against All Odds (1984), Parker (2013), the iconic Ray Charles biopic, Ray of 2004, and The Comedian (2016) just to name a few. He also has served as president of the Directors Guild of America and is married to the incomparable acting legend Helen Mirren.
I’m always looking for success stories in the film business to study and analyze.Edward Burns (The Brothers McMullan) Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi), Kevin Smith (Clerks), and Oren Peli (Paranormal Activity) come to mind. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the cult indie film classic The Boondock Saints but many of you might not know the crazy story of its writer and director Troy Duffy.
Well, prepare to get your mind BLOWN. I had an EXCLUSIVE discussion with Troy this week, and let’s say, he did not hold back. Nothing was off-limits – from his instant rise to fame to the brutal fate he met – getting blacklisted, all of it. He wanted to set the record straight because there is always another side to the story, and what better side to hear than that of the man who lived this brutal Hollywood adventure?
I can’t tell you how excited I am for today’s episode. I had the pleasure to speak to the legendary director Barry Sonnenfeld. We discuss his idiosyncratic upbringing in New York City, his breaking into film as a cinematographer with the Coen brothers, and his unexpected career as the director behind such huge film franchises as The Addams Family and Men in Black, and beloved work like Get Shorty, Pushing Daises, and A Series of Unfortunate Events.
We also chat about the time he shot nine porno films in nine days. That story alone is worth the price of admission.
I can’t be more excited to bring you this episode. On today’s show, we have the legendary writer/director Alex Proyas, the filmmaker behind The Crow, Dark City, The Knowing, Gods of Egypt, and I, Robot.
Alex Proyas had a huge influence on my filmmaking life. The Crow was one of those films I watch a thousand times, in the theater, when I was in film school. He began his filmmaking career working in music videos with the likes of Sting, INXS, and Fleetwood Mac before getting the opportunity to direct The Crow.
Sean Baker is a writer, director, producer and editor who has made seven independent feature films over the course of the past two decades. His most recent film was the award-winning The Florida Project (2017) which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and was released by A24 in the U.S. Among the many accolades the film received — including an Oscar nomination for Willem Dafoe for Best Supporting Actor — Sean was named Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle.
His previous film Tangerine (2015) premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won an Independent Spirit and two Gotham Awards. Starlet (2012) was the winner of the Robert Altman Independent Spirit Award and his previous two features, Take Out (2004) and Prince of Broadway (2008), were both nominated for the John Cassavetes Independent Spirit Award.
This week, I sat down with one of the most legendary and successful screenwriters/producers in Hollywood, Oscar® Winner Eric Roth. Over a 50+ years career, he’s well-known for writing or producing films like Forrest Gump, A Star is Born, Mank, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Munich, Ali, and the list goes on.
The legacy of the crime drama television series, The Sopranos remains a defining art of storytelling for mob TV shows. We have the genius behind this hit TV series, David Chase as our guest today.
As expected, Chase is a twenty-five-time Emmy Awards-winner, seven times Golden Globes winner, and highly acclaimed producer, writer, and director. His forty-year career in Hollywood has contributed immensely to the experience of quality TV.
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of Chase, let’s do a brief of the HBO 1999 hit show, The Sopranos: Produced by HBO, Chase Films, and Brad Grey Television, the story ran for six seasons, revolving around Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, a New Jersey-based Italian-American mobster, portraying the difficulties that he faces as he tries to balance his family life with his role as the leader of a criminal organization.
There are performers that impact your life without you even knowing it and today’s guest fits that bill. On the show, we have comedic genius, multi-award-winning actor, writer, producer, director, and television host, Billy Crystal. We’ve seen Billy’s versatile work across all areas in the entertainment world, stand-up, improv, Broadway, behind and in front of the camera, feature films, television, live stages like SNL, and animated movies.
If you want to be an indie filmmaker you should definitely study the work of the prolific film director Joe Swanberg.
Who is Joe Swanberg?
I just recently not only discovered his work but also started to study his unique filmmaking process.
I heard that Joe Swanberg has made over 20 feature films in the past 10 years, six of which were made in 2011 alone (Yes —that’s six feature films in one year.) So, to say the man likes to work is an understatement. He’s the definition of INDIE FILM HUSTLE!
Despite the fact that some filmmakers who have spent decades working in Hollywood are renowned for their continuous output, Joe Swanberg happens to be one of the most productive filmmakers of his age which suggests that is he is crazy or really unique or a perfect blend of both.
In order to really understand Joe Swanberg, it is critical to know that he has given total of 11 feature films at the being 31 years of age and out of which seven were finished in 2010 and have earned millions and earned many accolades.
Why would a filmmaker ever want to produce such a high volume of work in such a short amount of time? According to Joe Swanberg,
“It was mostly about getting my work noticed.”
He said that
“If everyone is going to ignore you, then you have to start producing film after film and eventually someone is going to notice what you are doing, even if the films are total crap.”
History of Joe Swanberg
On the 31st of August 1981, Joe Swanberg was born in Detroit, Michigan. He spent most of his growing up period in Alabama and Georgia. Swanberg graduated from the Naperville Central High School which was in the Chicago suburbs and earned his Bachelor’s degree from the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale as a film major.
Swanberg directed his first feature Kissing on the Mouth in 2005. The film featured real interviews with graduates fresh out of college and had a documentary-styled approach to conversations and graphic sex. It is valued as one of the original films of the Mumblecore movement.
Kissing on the Mouth was followed by LOL (2006). This was also an independent Mumblecore film that examined the impact technology had on social relations.
The plot revolved around three college graduates in Chicago named Chris, Tim and Alex. While making out with his girlfriend, Tim watches his laptop screen. Chris is carrying on relationships via cellphones and Alex’s fixation with chat rooms destroys a would-be direct relationship with a girl he interacts with at a party. This was the first time Swanberg had worked with actress Greta Gerwig. They both team up on the directing of the next two feature films Hannah Takes The Stairs (2007) and Nights and Weekends (2008).
Hannah Takes the Stairs, an ultimate anti-romantic comedy film is known as Swanberg’s best film to date and starred filmmakers Mark Duplass, Andrew Bujalski and Ry Rosso-Young it was also his first time with actor/animator Kent Osborne.
An effort of the whole Mumblecore team, the gang was asked to give additional material on the sound and feel of the dialogue and how they thought it should be.
The final product turned out to be naturally goofy with a taste of cringe and the awkwardness of Greta Gerwig’s character defined her career from there inspiring her later role of Frances Halladay.
Greta Gerwig shared directing credit with Swanberg in Night and Weekends (2008). The story follows a long-distance relationship and its aftermath between two people who live in New York City and Chicago respectively.
The first half of the film depicts their relationship and the second half centers on the closure and the prospective continuation which happens to occur after a year of events of the first half.
Directed by Swanberg and produced by Noah Baumbach, Alexander the Last came in 2009 and was about a married actress and her sister. Swanberg spent the whole of 2009 on Silver Bullets which starred Swanberg, Kate Lyn Sheil, Amy Seimets and Ti West and had its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011. According to Richard Brody of The New Yorker it was the 9th best film of the year 2011.
As an actor, he has had leading roles in several horror successes, most notably You’re Next, The Sacrament, andV/H/S. Through his production company, Forager Film Company, he has produced the work of other filmmakers, including Harrison Atkin, Alex Ross Perry, and Zach Clark.
He and his wife, Kris, also created the popular web series Young American Bodies which ran for four seasons on Nerve.com and IFC.com.
You can watch his new feature film Build the Wall, in its entirety below. Starring Kent Osborne, Jane Adams and Kevin Bewersdorf.
Thanks to Joe for uploading it for free.
His plans for a fun weekend with Sarah are upended when his friend Kev unexpectedly arrives to build him a wall.
Joe Swanberg Keynote | SXSW Film 2016
In the year 2010, Joe Swanberg finished seven features films Uncle Kent, Caitlin Plays Herself, The Zone, Art History, Silver Bullets, Privacy Setting, and Autoerotic.
Uncle Kent was written by Kent Osborne and was co-directed and co-written by Swanberg. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It starred Kent Osborne, Josephine Decker, Jennifer Prediger, Swanberg and Kevin Bewersdof.
The film was about a 40-year old animator Kent, who meets a New York Journalist, Kate. Kent invites her to L.A for the weekend and Kate accepts but upon arriving she discloses that her heart belongs to someone else and Kent tries to make sense of this whole mess.
Art History and Silver Bullets premiered at the Berlinale. The rest of the 2010 films after being screened at film festivals premiered theatrically in 2011. Out of these feature films, four were included in the Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011 later which was a DVD boxed set.
Joe Swanberg directed and wrote Drinking Buddies which starred Olivia Wilde, Anna Kendrick, Ron Livingston, and Jake M. Johnson. By far his largest budget to date (about $500,000, most of his film range from $5,000 – $50,000). The film is about two co-workers Kate (Olivia Wilde) and Luke (Jake Johnson) who work at a craft brewery Revolution Brewing and spend all the time having fun and drinking.
Supposedly perfect for each but both happen to be in relationships Luke with Jill (Anna Kendrick) and Kate with Chris (Ron Livingston). Jill asks Luke about marriage and he promises to talk about it sometime soon basically evading it. Drinking Buddies was premiered at the 2013 South by Southwest Film Festival and was also screened at Maryland Film Festival the same year.
Produced by Alicia Van Couvering and Andrea Roa and was shot by Ben Richardson, cinematographer of Beasts of the Southern Wild. Shortly after the SXSW Premiere, it was acquired by Magnolia Pictures.
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The following year brought Swanberg’s Happy Christmaswhich starred himself, Lena Dunham, Melanie Lynskey, and Anna Kendrick. The plot centers on Jenny (Kendrick) who is in her 20s and an irresponsible girl who has come to Chicago to live with her older brother Jeff (Swanberg) who is a young filmmaker living a happy married life with his novelist wife, Kelly (Lynskey) and a two-year-old son.
Jenny’s arrival upsets their quiet life as she and her friend Carson (Dunham) initiate development in Kelly’s life and career.
Happy Christmas is Swanberg’s first film to be shot on 16mm film. It premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. Some of his other films include:24 Exposures and All the Light in the Sky
Digging for Firewas his next film as a director and was premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival starring Jake Johnson. He is noted advocate of internet-based distribution for the independent films and he also made his 2011 feature Marriage Material available on his Vimeo page and that too for free. Check it out:
Swanberg uses improvisation extensively and his films usually focus on relationships, sex, technology and the process of filmmaking. He takes influence by Elaine May, Lars Von Trier, Marco Ferreri, Paul Mazursky and Eric Rohmer
Joe Swanberg’s keynote at this year’s SXSW Film Festival is a must-watch for any and all indie filmmakers. What I really loved about his speech is his frankness about the financial realities of being an indie filmmaker. I love this quote and it’s so true:
“The only way you’re ever going to make any money is if you invest in your own movies.”
Sometimes no money is better than some money
The above is one of the most interesting points from the keynote because almost every indie filmmaker I know would agree that it’s better to have some small budget than no cash at all. However, Joe Swanberg has a different take on it, as he puts it:
If you have “some money”, everybody is going to want some of that “some money.” If you have “no money”, everybody knows it — and then they’re just there to work. In a best case scenario — you sell a movie and then you’re able to pay people afterwards better than you could’ve paid them if you had “some money.”
This quote really sums up a lot of what I preach on Indie Film Hustle:
Well, I think that there is a notion that for artists to think about business is to corrupt the art process. As soon as you start considering market factors and numbers and all of that stuff, you’re not being a true artist, you’re not following your true vision. To some extent, maybe that’s true, but I think that by knowing the marketplace before I go into a movie, once I’m there, I’m completely free to do whatever I want because [there’s not that] giant question mark of whether there’s an audience for that thing.
Definitely put an hour and a half aside, sit down and soak it all in. He is truly spitting out gold in this keynote.
Spoiler
Title: Joe Swanberg Keynote | SXSW Film 2016
Speaker #1: I am thrilled to have him here to share with you; Joe Swanberg.
Speaker #2: Hey, what’s up guys? So I am going to talk about money which I think is a terrible subject right now and in general makes it really harder to be a film maker because nobody is talking to each other about it. But I think it’s useful. And also I am probably a pretty good example like, if I am standing here; any idiot could be up here. So maybe I’d talk to you about the movies I have made especially from a financial stand point and then I want to leave a lot of time for Q&A because I am just curious about the questions you have and hopefully really honest with the answers. I made my first feature in 2005 which was really a kind of different time and the first screening was here S*SW, the movie was called “Kissing on the Mouth” which I think out of print now, it’s impossible to find. When it was showed here S*SW it’s a really huge moment for me as a film maker and also this is really interesting moment for me at any point in general because I had Andrew Bujalski, Ry Russo-Young and Mark Duplass with major appreciation and I really left Austin with the feeling like something was going on and that it might be possible to release more movies and have people actually see them. And then that movie got rejected from every other festivals for 6 months and it was like “Oh, man maybe I was wrong or like those guys can do it but I can’t”. and my response to that was just to make another movie because I had such a good time here and I felt so strongly that whatever was going on, financially or carrier wise, the thing I wanted most was to be a part of that whatever the feeling was that I have like sharing my work, watching other people’s work and being connected to and be a part of that scene. So I started making my 2nd movie LOL in the midst of tons of festival rejections. I still live in Chicago as I was living in Chicago at that time and we just put our heads down and got back to work and then my first movie Kissing On The Mouth sort of kicked around for a while and then it got picked up by this DVD distributor called Heritage which is since gone out of business. You’ll notice a recurring theme of my first couple of movies which is that I worked with a lot of distributors which are now gone out of business. But that movie came out on DVD at a time DVD were a thing, maybe it’s like impossible to belief but the movie had some sex on it and was like had young people in scenes whatever in sale back in you could get a DVD of few movie like that. So this San Francisco Company “Harry take” put it out; Netflix was brand new at that time, there was no streaming aspect in Netflix. I remembered Netflix bought 600 copies of that [Indistinct 3:51] and that was enough to make that movie in DVD profitable. And so the first time I got a check in the email for a movie I have made and over the next 6 months, the movie accumulated a little bit more money; and it had only cost about $3000 to make, and I was like, “Alright, I am a working filmmaker great”. Then I made that movie LOL which also came here to South by South West. While I was here I met a producer named Johnny who asked me if I wanted to make another movie. So out of South by South West, I sat down with him during the festivals and preached him the idea for the movie that became Hannah Takes the Stairs. In the meantime LOL the movie that I was here with also got bought DVD rights by a brand new company. we were going to be the first movie they put out, they are called Ben Films, and they are also gone out of business but we got an MG. I am going to talk like some business talk, I don’t know if you guys know what MG is, but that’s a minimum guarantee. Essentially the distributor’s saying we think the movie going to make this much business, so we’ll guarantee it to you by writing you a check. It’s called an advance also and what is this is; this is a loan. They aren’t really paying you; they’re just paying you against future profits of your movie and they’re also collecting interest on that. So it’s a loan the same way a bank loan would be. So if you have a movie here that you’re trying to sell and you’re talking about advances and MGs; that’s just a loan. They are going to take that money back plus they are going to take interest on it. But anyway it’s nice to get a loan because typically you’re out of money. It’s just a quick way to take that money back. So they gave me an advance of $10,000 for my $5,000 movie which was just like at the time for me the most money I ever could dream of. Then the bottom dropped out on the DVD Market and so that company put a few more DVDs out before going out of business. And LOL as far as I know never made a penny; I mean I certainly never saw anything else. But Hannah Takes the Stairs coming of making two movies that were really low-budget; Hannah takes the stairs made for about $60,000 and it felt like the most luxurious big-budget; I felt like I was making Ben hurt or something like. “Oh, my god I’d do whatever I want with $6000”, what I did was got a bunch of actors together and rent an apartment in Chicago and we all lived together for month and made that movie. That movie also came in premiere to South by South West as did my next several features. In the meantime I was definitely being rejected by Sundance and live other festivals that I was submitting to. South by South West continued to be this champion of my work and it’s a nice home for my stuff. And Hannah Takes the Stairs sort of the first thing I made what I feel like people really saw it and took note of it. The thing I really continued to reinforce on you guys is the method like brilliant first feature that just like takes off and start your career is one way to go about it, then the other way to go about it is just like the so tenuous and make so much shit, that’s like people lose the resistance or will to fight against you and just start accepting that you’re going to be around and that they should watch your movies. Honestly I made this movie which is called Drinking Buddies which is my 15th feature, which most people think of the only movie I ever made; I’ll get to that barely so with my 3rd feature, we got bought by IFC which was really insane to me because they were real distributor not R.I.P labeled DVDs like Heritage and Ben Films. IFC films put on movies that I have seen before, they seemed real to me and they gave us an advance of $10000 which left us $50000 in the whole. We thought people are going to see our movies and they are going to release theatrical release for us which was like a big deal and honestly still this day it’s a big deal if any distributor’s going to put your movies in movie theatre. So we took that deal and as the bottom was dropping out on DVD market, VOD suddenly existed for the first time. Now streaming in VOD seems so common but at that time IFC had to sell that concept that you’d watch an independent film on, what I considered going on pay per view, which to me just like existed in hotel. So I was like, you know Hollywood movies like 7 months after they came out in movie theatres you can buy them pay per view. IFC really had this idea in vision that you could put any films up on peoples like [indistinct 9:33] platform that people would watch movies from home. And at that time they were only releasing five titles at a time and so this movie Hannah Takes the Stairs were adopted by people who were curious about that because this was one of the five choices they had on movies to watch on VOD. So we did pretty well; we did a lot of business, I think a lot of people hated that movie but they were like “It’s one of the 5 options that I have”, this one sounds alright. So it started a relationship with IFC films that I thank you for my neck started doing because I was credit cards with like any money I could scrounge together have something if I had a job I want to make my first two of you want to take those traveling on the festival circuit with a feature film do I keep the day job and serve half engage with this process of traveling festivals and being a filmmaker or do I quit the day job and fully engage with that process and just use to be broke or worse I just got to do that and so starting with Hannah takes the stairs I just didn’t have another job other than filmmaker for the job and I have to like figure out how to keep making money and one of the ways to so after the good relationship with I have seen the release of Hannah takes the stairs I made this other movie called nights and weekends and what I did was before it showed anywhere I just took it and I was like and he watched it and they said yeah and so for $15,000 I think $5,000 take another picture figure out and so then I made another movie somewhere that I was making was always just being financed by the sale of the movie right before it the idea of the other side of the first the idea they were even remember my dad calling me from a hotel in San Francisco tiniest movie ever famous actors in it but you really just have to I said in addition to those five specific movies and then there was also this Festival the IFC Center put together by rainbow and I changed into a different movies are now but at the time everybody hated that word and so they were trying to not call it done it’s just on this Festival if you can’t already tell I happens to start being a filmmaker at a time I just like the way of us that’s like not I didn’t do anything smart or better I just really honestly was in the right place at the right time for a lot of the stuff it made a big difference in this Festival in New York City is obnoxious as it is likely to happen to your teeth places not that many people saw those movies but the New York Times Sunday New York Times article you know there’s no press is bad press or no so you say so you have been told by people like congratulations on the great review of review that is awful that is just like calling my movies ever tweaking perception of Imperial allow me to like sneak to your people Alexander the last 8 years Halo 5 I mean that place was like really fast and I don’t know that too fast but I was especially for speed up because I was living off of the movies I really was quickly not having any other source of income I was doing his web series with my wife call the young American bodies 12 episodes shows brief period of time for people phone banana quickly realized I also side dishes with Series 2 news.com sex and dating sites even nervous Occupied stuff you could like meet people to have sex with her and so I was making a show with my wife and I think we did the first season of a $500 an episode Gravely asked for $1,000 an episode probably just like in Chicago independently decided that they like young American bodies and they would do it jointly with her and then they have more money and so I don’t like maybe $2,000 X Advent season for American body is acutely aware of the fact that people watching this show on the internet and ask for money now I know but you know if I know if we have been talking to each other Krishna episode and so you know the more we share information of the Arts and so you know this Webster it was kind of like keeping the bills paid little bit my wife Chris who is also from Baker City High School the time salary can I see I mean honestly like if you look at a marriage is like a Business Partnership in addition to all the other kinds of Partnerships it is something nice and help you out survive for a couple years like that and then the web series was like being movie Alexander the last that I made and so is also the first time that there was like some kind of industry recognition that I existed and no producing a movie and so I mean not only that I just learned so much from that guy and grow as a filmmaker a ton but name attached to that project something just so you know now we have 2000 have a version of independent film where he exists but the way that I was going was still like a really small that Days of Our Lives the next Frontier was earth like and the thing that I had realized cuz you know I mean living off of these movies I was forced to pay attention to the business aspects of them and one thing that I’ve noticed like nights and weekends for instance was it when we showed the movie at South by Southwest it generated a lot of attention but by the time we try to put that movie out 6 months later seven months later nobody cared I mean there’s already heard about it and I just attention spans were straight and that’s the way people are paying attention to Small Change Mountain High sandwich Co conversation that she had with IFC I like different ways to work with the festival and different ways to release movies and I was like we just go ahead and release American independence made the movie available if she answers already been thinking along those lines and so we sold them Alexander the last and we sold it to them in advance it when the movie premiered here at South by Southwest Festival it was available and daily Interlake putting forward another news review tomorrow and that they had advertising dollars to again push the model which then which meant that my movie got pushed along with the model there was like a real desire to establish VOD as legitimate one thing the IFC film was like taking a big step forward in terms of legitimizing a VOD release that guy’s a super good filmmaker and an Oscar nominee and stuff like he wouldn’t be involved with some piece of crap right now and was just going to let him on my brain and I have Sprint so everybody was excited about that and then we were going to try to sleep Festival day and date release with them and they all remember this exercise she was with the New York Times which only reviews movies that are playing for week in New York City and it was another not only another step in life my own career kind of like piggybacking off of this new technology and existing in the midst of a lot of change going on but also another step forward in life I’m looking at anything other than really at the time it was so hot necessarily and you know it’s the dream of theatrical history died for all of us thousand they’re sort of like inching our way towards Valentino alkalizing on the amount of attention we were going to get out of South by Southwest it also meant that the movie was making its money right away in the first three months we didn’t have to wait Gypsy my $3,000 I mean we put that out and then I then world’s poorest is like keep seeing you even though it was happening to me my solution to that was just to me and so I entered this period of productivity and I know that sounds crazy but it wasn’t that crazy Birmingham Alabama diverse any came up to me and was like hey man my movies playing in the festival is in school and I feel weird and then you know like maybe 2 years later I was back in Birmingham what’s up I’m just leaving him and making movies review just the motion sensors at night was just weird nike.com Chicago Birmingham in action I’m making about date rape is like what is this project send it to you as I find it I’ll look at it and I was like there’s no way I’m doing this movie and I got the DVD in the mail and they were good I mean honestly within 30 seconds I was already writing him back on this thing is amazing I was like how long do I need to come to music cuter it turned out really good and I just watched that and I was like oh my God series and we shot him and we probably did the movie in 6 days I just like it was not as fast as I can but I did my best I did a movie for $15,000 and sold for $75,000 the first time I ever actually made some money off of the movie some like seven movies in the right now I just finally for the first time hard and depressing and a long long road towards feel like you treat any money that was the first time when I ever actually made some money of selling a movie. So keep in mind I’m like 7 movies in my career and just finally made money for the first time. it’s worth noting I mean it can be really hard and practicing and a long road towards feeling like you exist in the industries feeling like you making any money but hang in there it can be happen like it really can and like I said it would be seven more movies before made dreamy but it which most people come up to me and you know like cool man I liked your first movie, did you made anything else. I was working for ten years before I made that movie. Those guys was released how did we don’t know you exist. But nobody knows this exist. So or do ironic exist it in this pocket you know what I mean also up to man where did I make those year. I made this movie called uncle can’t, which also IFC put out and that was the first time some else programmed my movies which is like movie number sixth. And I made a movie called Uncle Kent that’s more than seven but I am cheating a little bit because I think I had made those movies in a kind of like 14 month’s window. But the thing that was realized it wasn’t ever going to make much money of any of these movies so I just have to make a lot of movies because one of them was not support me but may be seven of them could support me and also because I was so high on this idea that you could make work that fast. Because I made this improvised movies and a lot of the script of those movies are attempting to capture moments of people’s lives and this kind of like specificity that I fault was really enriched by this speedy process you know it’s like a month is a long time to keep somebody in their head you know in sort of like keep the performer self-conscious and committed to the role. Lot of things happened in a month, people’s live change. People get into interested in to another projects. If we could keep condenses window down to like five or six days. We really could just like leave the movie and a away there was finding was getting like really interesting performances out of the actors and for me as a film maker really keep in me on my toes and keeping me like really sharp and focused. And I was editing these videos shooting these things. And so you know typically the way those like five to six days movies all the like seven features and me that we are all done in last in the week I think. the way those we are going which we shoot five or six hours in a day and I was go edit for the rest of the night. Because I was can react of the blow we shoot. And so I needed to see what was there to know whether we had to reshoot some stuff to next day to know whether the story was making senses and so there can’t be written live along with the shooting. Well none of those movies made any money and did not get any kind of distribution and again the world was changing and so I had turned off like gotten into the system where I was making those movies and selling into IFC kind of living off to them and then finally IFC was like listen we are not doing, we are not putting out small movies like that anymore. I was like oh, shit that was not of my plan, like I was just going to work for you guys for the rest of my lives and they short of like we structured they moved into putting out bigger movies and so I was left with all this stuff. You know movies that I really love but that were really small and we are just like not really come out so I started putting some the stuff on the internet. I did DVD package with factory 25 of bunches of those movies so I can put them together and release some kind of boxes and you know just kind of like took stuck of the fact that I was going to have to figure something else out of I wanted to keep making movies with that thing I have been doing for like seven years of that point just was over. So I got an agent which was something that I had been really resisting doing for a long time when hand takes to stairs came out I got calls and emails from bunch of different agents and I was like you guys I got it mail now I’m just like in Chicago making movies with my friends I don’t need an agent for that no thank you. And then only one guy of that short of initial bunch kept email on me and calling me this guy David couple is my agent now every like six month in a year he write me or call me it was like just how is it going, have you changed your mind? Having an agent, are you interested in that? I was just always like nice from you David. I’m still now not interested well around year 2011 I had a kid. That year that I made those seven movies also my wife was pregnant and which probably has some fucked up complicated thing to do while I was making somebody’s movie but I don’t what it means yet so I would tell you guys if knew I’m sure in fact is in there somehow. But I had a kid now and I have seen which not going to buy anymore my little movies and so I in a LA and three of those movies several bullets art history in the zone sort of like existed together as a bit of triology and then AFI festival in LA was showing all three of them together. So this is a really good time with all of those LA times right up and despite of the bleak carrier prospects at that moment; I looked kind of good because I looked like I have these three movies out that people are paying attention to. In fact they were not. But anyway I set down for breakfast with David couple and I was like LA times nice. And he was like what do you want to do? I was like David I just need to make money man like I already had figured out how make many of own personal projects I won’t need help to doing that. Get me jobs, I don’t care with that I literally just need my wife and I bought a house too which was like really kind of irresponsible now if I ever going to do it, now I wanted to do it. So from the cell of ‘uncle can’t I think it’s like the only time I ever have 20 thousand dollars in a bank account. I was like that’s not a down payment on a house to never going to buy a house. And so we took that money buy house and very quickly we run out of money. Are you here Alex? What’s up man? Right around this time Alex and I meet on the first of certain in 2007. Set taxes on gorge like great. But if he could hit this trash hole spending a certain amount of money then you can get this money back and essentially his company was a little bit shy to the trash hole so if we could spend that amount of money to hit the trash hole which eventually come back in the tax repay and the movie will be for free basically. And it sounds great to. I not only was into like whole graft of like stealing money from the David gorger taxes kind of thing. But also it has another chance to go make quickly movie. And so I went down to Alana how long we shoot down those movies, for ten days or some like that. Yeah, really quick again and also you know I had a kid this point I don’t want to be away from home for all that long. So we just did it really fast and cheap and that was the last movie of mine that I have see bought. That was sort of very talent of that window, that movie is called ‘24s explosion’ and then actually Adam win guard was stars at that movie. And we still like really like had in the mean time from being just like weird Birmingham he kind afraid of had become my cinematographer basically and then he made next which was the other kind of like momentous shift how I was looking about looking and going about movie so I you know, Adam winggurd was and still this the poorest film maker just in terms of money that I ever had known in my life. I mean I think that guy lived of his six dollars in month and then you know like after a few years knowing working with him I found myself I acted in the movie next. I founded myself in the next which you know I think was like seven hundred and fifty thousand dollar movie and that amount of money seen insane to me like one of my friends could make could get that amount of money to make a movie. And the biggest thing that I learnt from Adam was I just watched him work is ass off. I mean that dude I had never seen him so focused and so on his game and it was just so inspiring to be on set with him as a guy who would like you know lived on my couch in Chicago for three months and just was like never had any money to suddenly be making this real movies. And so came away from that and I sort of like I came away from the idea with the; I had see thing was over and I had this conversation David couple and I said just how me make money. And David says what I think you could do your movies but on a slightly bigger scale and we could go about that. I was just like I don’t want to do that David just how I make money man. I like I already know do I make my movies I don’t want to make my movies more than 50 thousand dollars that about as much all ever need just like give me a job directing TV or something man. Help me make dome money. And he was really in to it about warning into like support and champions my carrier and he is a CIA which is the aged. This is a scary real aggency.and he was like who is the actors you are working with how I can help if you are here to have a research to do. And I was like really getting in the home bring at that time and the beer at that time I had the idea there would be fun to make a movie with in the like Chicago. Bear scene and so over the course of several months just started meeting with actors and CIA kind of like by default became the you know finance, their finance department set about attempting to raise money to make this movie which became ‘drinking bodies’
And so you know we put that together from like the spring to the summer 2012 but the thing about drinking bodies I have trying to make drinking bodies is that are not right script for my movies and if I’m like putting the movie on my credit card who cares. I’m just like paying for myself. But trying to raise six hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a movie with no script is impossible. People looked in just like that we fucking crazy and they were like chose me who had make 14 movies you got to trusted you know what you are doing in people I’m like I don’t trust that, I’m not going to give that guy half a million dollars and so I had to like figure out how did do something. I need to make some money and drinking bodies was looking that was not going to happen. So my producer really she had been covering just like talking to literally every person in the world who may be had some money to finance and in the film they all are saying them and Jade Johnson who was going to be in the movie and a TV show new girl and he had to go back to new girl by august 1st and so we had this window from July 7th to August 1st when we had to shoot drinking bodies what I want to do it and I kept you know in the mean time from the thing I was most afraid of like I can’t through all my eggs to basket because at the end I’m not getting the money, I’m fucked man. I have to pay my team; I have to make some money. I can’t just like sit around hoping drinking bodies happen. So I was like started to develop this other movie and Mathews group of Chicago finance here’s this guy who produced in charge in hoped dreams so on my all times favorite movies and a neighbor of his Adie Linker and I was like alright guys I may or may not make this movie called drinking bodies this summer. If I don’t I want make something else could we surround together between you guys and your neighbors you know hundred thousand dollars are something like that to do this like back up plan movie. And they were like yeah and so I called Elisha and I was like alright I don’t think I mean now looking for drinking bodies is not happening I think I’m just going to go do this other movie because I have to make some money. And she was like please just hang in man I have talked to everybody I still think there is a way to make drinking bodies in the summer. I was like I don’t know I can risk it. Because if we missed this window I also may not to make the backup plan movie and now I would have nothing and she was like this is how it goes to work in this level it’s just never going to be easy what need to do committee to this and you know she kind of like talked to me that all right fine. We would try to make drinking bodies and you know I just kept giving this days they were like my outdates. I was like if we don’t have the money well I may first we come around and Elisha was like give me two more weeks, I know I can find the money. I was like alright fine you have two more weeks but if the two weeks past there will be no way of doing. I’m going to do this other thing and the two week were past of course there was no money and finally one group of finance here’s this guys called burn layer still working and making great movies step forward with half of the money, once half of the money was there this is short of how it works that slightly bigger level. Once somebody has said out to give you money suddenly everybody else is like yeah we will give money too. It’s like nobody wants to give the first person and which is terrific. Now you want to give us money? What about three weeks ago? And they were like aw, aw!
Feel scary then. Now these other guys trust you may be we will trust you and so at the last dropped moment we got the financing for drinking bodies and went make that movie. That was just entirely carrier changing, life changing and what was most interesting about is I didn’t do anything different then what I had been doing on all of the other movies. It’s just there was famous people in it and this is like a weird thing about humanity are like the way when you see famous people doing something its look better to you and you just liked and trusted more. And there was a gay keeper quality to famous people especially like what’s crazy about drinking bodies is like looking back on it now. You would be now who the fuck wouldn’t want to finance the movie. But when we finally did it, and the movie came out it was really interesting to observe the changed response to my work and like who I was and I was like finally, I had tried a long time man and then it’s like really interesting thing happened were then everybody wanted to give money because I had made a movie that seen made money and what I chose to do instead was taking that plan B movie that I have been developing incase drinking bodies not happen and just go make that next. and my everybody was like what are you doing because they were like you just made half million dollars movie with these great actors that’s going to come out and sure everybody going to like it, don’t make another movie. We can get some money and like whatever you want like see people watch drinking body. And I was just yeah I liked to work, I already have this Chicago guys who want to give me money to make another movie and I just want to do that. And against every bodies advice we shoot drinking bodies in July and in December I was back at a movies that became happy Christmas and you know its like really interesting. Enna candrick is just a fucking best actor ever. She is so good and working with her drinking bodies I was just blown away and I was like I just want work with her for the rest of my life, she is so good. So I just texted her, do you want to come back to Chicago try this again and you know it’s like really interesting because Enna is super famous now. And even at the time I would say happiness is money too and so the thing I would say to you guys in terms of like taking jobs or in your efforts to make money you have two factor in your time you also you also have to factor in your happiness I think a lot of people forget that .It’s not worth the money to take a city job on something that you hate and what you do occasionally is poison the well for themselves because they take some money on some job that they don’t like or don’t want to do they’ll hate it I mean anytime I found myself in the position of making money off of something that I don’t like I fight with my wife lot more I’m just like snippy with my kid like I’m just in general agitated and upset and at the end of the day I look back and it wasn’t worth the money .I shouldn’t just done nothing rather than do that thing which I hate it and think of that you can figure out how to navigate that where you’re only working on staff you love It’s actually a better way towards the goals of making worth the people see and the goals of making money because what happens is nobody likes a bad movie and honestly I don’t know any scenery almost I’ve seen a filmmaker hate the thing they’re making and have that movie turn out good and so you may think that you’re like taking a paycheck or making some money but in fact I think you’re making the next person who wants to invest in your work or work with you less likely to do it .Making a bad movie that you don’t like scares away potential investors on the next project its scares away actors on the next project and it just makes it that much harder for you in the long run .So I would encourage you to just really see if you can navigate a career in which you’re just always doing things you love and I think if you can do that you will have a really successful career .Thanks for listening to me and I want to like answer questions ,so ask me anything and I’ll try to be as honest as I can.
Oh I think you got to go to that microphone.
You can just cut in line, you can go for it, and we all know you asked the first question.
Questioner #1: when you kind of had a much more substantial than drinking buddies had that kind of effect to your nuts and bolts started working with the fact that was everything.
Speaker #1: Yeah, it was really kind of annoying to me.
I wanted to move a lot faster than we were able to move. So I spent the first week just wrapping my head around that but you know eventually I relaxed into I just like always helps to be working with people you trust and I really trusted my cinematographer and if we needed time to light stuff with my sound guys needed time to bring something up. My initial response was to be frustrated and I liked weed too I was like alright, do what u need to do and you know the hustle and bustle actually like what I discovered was that’s really good time to just hang out with the actors. You know it’s something easy to forget one of the nice things about the early small movies, I was doing is it was really communal feeling and everybody was just like ideas being constantly generated and I think what happens on a bigger movie is you should have seen and then everybody just kind of like goes back to their trailers to each other and nobody’s talking to each other and they come back out and shoot another scene. I think a director is always been really important for me to just like make sure in between setups were still hanging out that I am not letting people just like go often disappear into their more, they were like living in generating new material.
Yah…
Let’s go over there and then over there.
[Indistinct 01:04:04]
Questioner #2: ok, I’m … hi, I’m actually from Chicago as well I said digging for fire at the music box and I just was really like the actors in that film and who you have been working with have service like natural improvisation just literally built into them and is that something that like you started working with those people because of their improvisational background or did you like shooting some sort of adapt to the people you’re working with?
[Indistinct 01:04:31]
Speaker: It adapts, yeah, on digging for fire especially I did not know a lot of those people, I just knew that I didn’t know them personally and so it was really a big question mark with who would be most into that. Style or not, you know I knew Jake and I knew Rosemary a little bit cause she’s married to Ron Livingston who I work with on drinking buddies and you know and I can [indistinct 1:04:53] and some other people who I’d worked with before in that movie but a lot of those people were new to me and we were just like really figuring it out. And you know my… my you like approach to improve like I saw Mike Birbiglia’s movie last night was really about improve I don’t think that I do that kind of improve in my movies, I’m sort of like using improvisation as a story telling like medium and really what I’m encouraging people to do via the improve is just not act, right? So it’s like if I give you the lines ahead of time you’re going to figure out a performance and I don’t want you to do that I want… I want you to be forced to just exist in the moment they were filming and I’m casting you because I want you to be you, I like you, I like how you talk, I like that kinds of jokes you make, do those in my movie don’t let go, create a character that’s something else and so… so in a way it’s like the lack of script is just, just like forced… forced presence ideally and so it’s like much more about that and so I talked to actors lot of times through like I don’t know I don’t improvise like I don’t know how to do that, and I’m like it’s not about that like we’re sitting here having a conversation if you can do this with me you can be one of my movies. That’s all I am asking you to do.
Questioner #2: Thank you.
Speaker #1: yeah.
[Indistinct 1:06:19]
Questioner #3: First I want say thanks to be so honest, it’s really refreshing.
Speaker #1: yeah, my pleasure man! I mean it’s honestly the easiest thing in the world to be. I’m glad you like it.
Questioner #3: yeah, it’s really nice especially in [indistinct 1:06:31] because we love it. Can you talk for a second about what? I mean you said that clearly there is no secret you’ve got some sort of material what your treatment looks like 30 pages a hundred [indistinct 1:06:41]. What it is?
Speaker #1: Yeah, different every time honestly like a I’ve done movies with nothing written. And I have done movies with a full on an 80-something page script basically. It just depends. You know I’m writing more now than I used to but I’m also working with actors who schedules a more complicated than they used to be, I’m honestly personally really desiring to do another movie like Hannah takes the stairs where I’m just like living with people for a month. But you know it’s hard with somebody actors who I have now fallen in love working with like Jake Johnson Anna Kendrick people like that it’s hard to get those guys for a month I mean they are really busy, they also have their own personal lives and I’m still doing release small movies and so. So one thing for me to want to have fun with them in line with them for a month and make this like tiny movie where we all sleep on couches but for them it’s like yeah I don’t know man. I just worked for nine month on TV show; I want to go with my family. And so. you know it’s really forced me into this rhythm of having to work faster in work more in a like sorts of structure scheduled way which buy necessity requires more writing. And so I would say that like the consistent thing with all of those outline is a sense of just like talking about there often in like paragraph form and then not really in like, you know script dialogue form though I also I have also written like sample dialogue sometimes just to give people an idea of how I think it goes. But it’s for me action and an increasingly it’s for the people I’m working with like to schedule budget you know costume design it really just like if the information is only in my head nobody else can do anything so the outline just becomes a kind of rudimental away from you just like take some of it from here and put it here so that other people can do their jobs.
Questioner #4: I really inspired and I really curious to know what afford a feature film should looks like and so how do you start the day like where do you begin I know you touched on it in lot of different ways but how do you prepare for that?
Speaker #1: I don’t do a lot of preparation I mean what it looks like is that actually like not that complicated because once you have said about the goal of shooting a lot of stuff in a day use got to move and so you know you are doing one take usually and you if something goes horribly wrong a second take or you are like all right we are not using that take
So some times its easier to say and let them deal with the headache of putting your movie out, I would just say that like in those circumstances fight for good terms and fight for sure term windows you are getting your movie back before too long and also make sure that’s is in your contract that if they got their business right for good back to you not for sale to somebody else, and then you like pretty well covered deck, it’s better to have a movie out I’ve been sitting around you know so you never want to make something with just like doesn’t exist in the world. but yeah it’s like you know these days I mean honestly with a lot of my movies what I would have done if it existed was just put them up on LOL you know paper view whatever and just like see what happens. And nice about that is the moment you want to pull it off of there you can do you know if the situation were to change you always could just do whatever you wanted with them.
Questioner 4: thanks a lot.
Speaker #1: Yeah, alright I guess that’s all the time thanks guys.
Make a feature film for $1000? Sounds crazy right? Well if you don’t know Mark Duplass you should get to know him. Mark and his brother Jay Duplass are most widely known for making the indie film hits The Puffy Chair and Safety Not Guaranteed. Mark Duplass has gone on to be a very successful writer, producer, and director.
Mark Duplass is an extremely talented film director, producer, musician, actor, and screenwriter. He along with his brother, Lawrence Jay Duplass, have created film industry waves in a very short time period. Be it filmmaking or successful TV series, everyone loves the work of Duplass Brothers.
Being Filmtrepreneurs they have initiated their own production company Duplass Brothers Productions and have been into the directing business since then. Widely known for their films The Puffy Chair (2005), Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011), and also The Do-Deca-Pentathlon (2012).
Jay and Mark Duplass have also co-created the renowned HBO TV series Togetherness.
Both of these talented brothers grew up in a suburb of New Orleans. They fell in love with film at a young age and they started making videos on their father’s Panasonic when the brothers were 6 and 9 respectively.
They would shoot versions of The Lone Ranger as well as The Sermon on the Mount. According to the Duplass brothers, when they look back over this period and the activities which extended to their teenage, they seem to recall an inner self of experimentation.
Things got focused and serious once Jay made this self-realization that he did not want to go on with his filed after spending four years as psychology majors which he was studying at the University of Texas, Austin. Mark Duplass was a singer-songwriter which he had to eventually give up because of increased condition of tendinitis.
Jay remained an extra year in the school so that he could study film and also got his brother Mark Duplass enrolled there so that he could act in his projects. Which was usually extremely cute bits of valuable silliness pretty much inspired by their obsession with the Coen Brothers. Mark has himself admitted that we were trying to be them but it was not going well.
After some time, Jay got his hands on a profitable and worthwhile commission to film a documentary about gardening which was some sponsored material on the behalf of an Austin startup, gardening.com.
The company crumpled before the film was finished even but luckily for the Duplass brothers, not before paying for their efforts. With that money, they bought a Canon GL1, got themselves a camera operator, and a photography editor so that they could begin on their second scripted feature film which was a rip-off of Rocky but in running shoes called Vince Del Rio.
And before they had even finished its edited, the duo decided that I was simply unreleasable which Mark Duplass has often referred to a steaming pile of dog diarrhea.
The Duplasses had no money, no ideas, and a terrible period of lack of faith in their filmmaking skills. So in desperation, Mark thought of making a movie which was part of their childhood. Fast and affordable and off-the-cuff. Mark Duplass went out to buy a $3 MiniDV tape which is the entire production cost of the movie and also improvised the total of what was to become the This is Johnof 2003.
It was a seven-minute short that started as an exercise, which results in triggering a psychological collapse because John rejects his numerous attempts as being too conscious or too formal. This was the course that so well summarized the creative journey of Duplasses’.
Though This is John might have sounded and looked like a home movie, it had a hint of life to it and that is why it was accepted into the shorts program when the Duplasses’ submitted to the Sundance and guess what? It was addressed as one of the five short films to see.
Right after two years, these brothers returned to the Sundance with The Puffy Chair which was an endeavor which they drew from their own lives. Starring Mark Duplass and his girlfriend (now wife) Katie Aselton this film concerns the relationships between men, women, fathers, mothers, and friends. Mark finds a replica of a lounge chair on eBay which his father used ages ago. The road trip that was taken to deliver that chair to him in Atlanta took very interesting twists and turns.
To some of the viewers, the movie touched something deep and affected them with its spooky familiarity. Making something so amazing with so little money sent a huge shockwave through the film industry which made it possible to think that anyone could step up to make a movie.
Although the traditional distributors kept their distance from the not-too-fine cheating after the film had spent a year’s time on the festival circuit, Netflix’s budding film distribution arm, Red Envelope Entertainment made its first acquisition. It is said by Sarandos of Netflix who was running Red Envelope, that he was drawn to the film for the wonderful home-viewing potential it possessed.
The follow-up feature of Duplass brothers in 2008 Baghead, was a mellow horror whose story revolved around a quartet of struggling filmmakers who head back to the woods for the weekend as a last try to pen down a feature film which would give them a head start to their careers. And they found the plot of pretty clichéd stories which gave the actors a set of guidelines to explore human interaction.
The Mumblecore Movement
A new movement called Mumblecore had the Duplass brothers working with directors like Joe Swanbergand Andrew Bujaski. But still, the boys had potential and momentum which soon gave them the chance to take up the traditional first step thing that all directors do to boost up their career i.e. making their first-ever studio film.
Willing to work for less, they cast all of the Puffy Chair fans in the production of Fox Searchlight Cyrus. With a $7 million budget and storyline of a creepy mother-son relationship, it was certainly an out of the box thing. The Duplass spent three years working on Cyrus. The movie revolved around a depressed man in his 40s, which was problem for Fox Searchlight who were suspicious of estranging the viewership. They wanted to portray him as down but not too much of it.
The film grossed $7.4 million which happens to be the most successful Duplass venture to date.
It soon became quite apparent that the movies these brothers were interested in making were aimed at a smaller audience with limited box-office appeal. But yet, if they underperformed in theaters a large audience was enjoying the work of Duplass brothers on the small screen and their movies surely were having a profitable afterlife.
Since The Puffy Chair came out, the Duplass brothers had been toying with the idea of HBO and now seemed the perfect time to actually take the chance. Jay came up with the idea of series which would star Steve Zissis who has Mark’s senior in high school and had had a stall in his acting career after Baghead and Do-Deca-Pentathlon.
So that is how the idea of Alexander the Great took birth which happened to be a pilot about an actor who was struggling with his career with mental health issues. HBO loved it and asked to add more characters making it a relationship show and that is what they did.
Before the premiere of A Teacher at Sundance, Fidell had sent the Duplass brothers her feature making them her fan. That is why she was their first choice when Mark Duplass got an idea for a movie of a young reboot of Days of Wine and Roses which has physical abuse instead of alcohol. Graciously accepted by Fidell, by the end of the day, she was officially signed up both for the writing and direction of what was to formulate into Six Years. And in March at SXSW it was bought by Netflix.
The most astonishing development in an already amazing career apart from the movies and TV shows that this dynamic duo made, the Duplasses have grown into a royalty which helps like-minded filmmakers gain benefit from the business model which they seem to have created.
The Duplass brothers helped a friend in giving life to his film and this revelation that they could actually save the struggling career of a filmmaker with some time and money blew their minds away and always grateful for the emotional as well as financial support by their parents they saw this way to put it back in the world.
Producing multiple films per year, which
Strictly follow the line of low costs.
Protecting the vision of the filmmaker.
Eventually giving the final product to the audiences as fast as possible.
The Duplass Brothers have signed a four-picture deal with Netflix. And they are taking a similar approach to TV. The first film from that deal is Blue Jaystarring Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson and directed byAlexandre Lehmann (check out his interview here). Meeting by chance when they return to their tiny California hometown, two former high-school sweethearts reflect on their shared past. Check out the trailer below:
They helped few filmmakers in making 10 episodes of the show of an animated series Animals and much to their surprise, not only HBO bought them but signed them for the second season right away. And four months later, the Duplass brothers got a two-year deal.
These brothers have the magic beans to turn any idea, no matter how trivial it may be, into a profitable TV show or movie.
Can you really make a feature film for $1000 bucks?
Mark Duplass had a packed house for his amazing SXSW Keynote Speech. He was spitting out Indie Film GOLD though out his talk.
If you didn’t get a chance to hear his talk, here are some topics he covered:
Learn your craft by making short films every weekend for $3
Write a Feature Film for less than $1,000
Have a strong day job (whatever you can get) while working towards your goal
Put money away to travel to Film Festivals and future films
Coming from the “Mumblecore” indie film movement, a style of low-budget film typically characterized by the use of nonprofessional actors and naturalistic or improvised performances, he had some great advice for independent filmmakers:
“You should design the aesthetic of the movie so that it doesn’t feel like less than a $200,000 movie but it feels squarely like a $1,000 movie.”
I’ve seen so many filmmakers attempt to make The Avengers on the budget for craft services for one day on a Marvel set. You are setting yourself up to fail. When starting out work within your limitations. It worked for Robert Rodriguez on his indie film classic El Mariachi.
Mark Duplass stated that $1000 is in NO WAY a budget a feature film should be made for. Here is what Duplass says:
“It’s not an empirical number, it depends of the city you live in and the scope of your story. But when I think about that movie, it’s doing a couple of things.
Borrowing recycled hard drive from people. Getting the Ultrakam uncompressed app on your iPhone. Most of it is food and you really want someone who can cook.
I recommend having your editor be the ‘DIT’ person who takes the Media in – and they have a lot of downtime, so you have them help you light, and you have them cook.
And you should be having a crew that’s really, really small. So that money should be mostly spent on food and then you are going to spend that on festival applications.”
Mark Duplass dishes out some amazing advice to independent filmmakers in this keynote speech and awesome Q&A. To see the entire SXSW Keynote check out the video below, DO IT!
“Instinct is very, very important, and we believe in it through every part of the process… When it’s time to create and get that stuff down, we believe in the gut.” – Mark Duplass
Spoiler
Starting my stopwatch now.
Welcome everybody, thank you for coming out this morning.
I would like to start, if everyone would just go around the room, if you could stand up and introduce yourselves I think it would be great. And I’m serious guys, I’m really serious.
So we’re going talk a lot about movie say I hope that’s what you’re here to talk about. We’re going to talk about the bad news and the good news of independent film and you know if you’re at all like me and you read the trades and you’re involved in film conversations, it’s mostly bad news. I think that what we hear about is the death of the middle class of independent films you know where are those cool five million dollar movies that used to break out of Sundance in 1998 and why are they not buying those or making those or even when they do why are they not promoting them and and why is nobody going to see them?
People talking about what V.O.D. means for the death of the theatrical experience, is it hurting? is it this glut of material in the marketplace keeping people from going to see things in the theaters?. We’re going to talk about the migration to T.V. and are all the great indie filmmakers going to T.V. not that I did it, maybe a little bit and what that means. And these are all issues that we’re definitely going to talk about.
But for me there’s one thing that keeps coming up over and over in my career I want to put this up so I don’t have to have hunch shoulders and that one thing that keeps coming to me is this very simple phrase and I’m going to take a note from Tony Robbins motivational speaker here for a second, and we’re going to have something that we’re going to really focusing on, and that is these simple words ‘the cavalry isn’t coming ‘and I’m looking around like Tony and I let it sit, and then Tony repeats it ‘The cavalry is not coming’ and I say this because we’ve all heard these amazing tales of how that 21 year old kid had a script and his cousin worked in the mailroom at Warner Brothers and he gave it to him and his script got up to the head of Warner Brothers and they loved it and they bought it for a million dollars and got it made. That’s an exciting story but a super dangerous one because, I don’t know anyone that’s happened to, maybe that’s happened once, but I had a very different career trajectory. I was here in Austin in college living in shitty apartments all around town, the brownstone on 51st on Lamar where they don’t allow you to work on your car and cinder blocks in the apartment complex, in a rat infested duplex on haw turf and I was sitting there thinking I’m inspired, I’m excited, I want to be a filmmaker, I have no connections. If I keep saying just pick up a camera and do it like even if I do, how am I going to get there? and I think that’s where most people are and I feel like I have a place to be useful and that’s what I want to speak to is, what can you do when you are absolutely nowhere and feeling you are full of magic and ideas?.
So we’re going to go through some step by step Tony Robbins processes here guys and see if we can get practical and I can leave you with something useful.
The first step is the $3 dollar short film. I can definitely speak to this we’re in a place now obviously where technology is so cheap. There’s no excuse for you not to be making short films on the weekends with your friends, shot on your iPhone. We had a feature film at Sundance last year called tangerine that was a hot shot entirely in an iPhone and did really well sold to Magnolia and so no excuses not to be doing that. I bring this up because a lot of people think ‘even if I make like a decent movie on this phone like who’s going to watch it what is this all about’ and I’ll just share one personal story with you which is that my brother and I lived in Austin for a long time we were just editors trying to get our day jobs and our money go. And we saved up enough money by doing this corporate documentary to make our first feature film. Film was called Vince De Rio; it starred me as a runner from the South Texas border trying to get a spot at the Olympic trials. You can see why this didn’t work out so well already (crowd laughs). We spent 65,000 dollars on this movie and it was a steaming pile of dog diarrhea (crowd laughs) and we almost gave up making movies and we were sitting on Jay’s couch in south Austin and I remember looking at him and he was depressed and I was just slightly less depressed enough to say ‘we should get up, we should make a movie like we did when we were kid’ ‘but all we had was our parents video camera which we knew had a dead pixel in the middle of it. And I said I’m going to get a tape, you come up with a movie idea and like we’re shooting as soon as I come back. So I was back in twenty minutes and Jay said ‘something weird happened to me yesterday I was trying to like get the outgoing greeting of my answer machine going and I like couldn’t get it right and I kind of had a nervous breakdown, I recorded it about 157 times’ and I was like ‘that’s great! This feels like us, this is like funny but kind of tragic, just like us’. And so I said ‘OK put the Camera on, I’m going out the door and just filming and he’s like we don’t have lighting kit, the microphone is the one on the camera, you can’t hear anything. I was like ‘I don’t care we’re doing this’. So we shot 122 minutes improvised take we edited it down to about 7 minutes and we watched it with our friends and they were like there’s something interesting here. It’s a shame there’s a dead pixel in it and it looks and sounds like shit. But our friend David Zellner was like ‘I think you should just submit this around to some festivals just to see’.
And that $3 movie was our first movie that got into Sundance and it played at South by Southwest here at 12 years ago and it changed really everything for us because we realized that it really doesn’t matter what your movie looks like if you have a voice, if you have something interesting to say they will like you and they will program you. So step one, if you are nowhere like I was is the $3 short film. I recommend making one of these every weekend with your smartest group of friends who want to be filmmakers, they don’t have to be film savvy, you want to group of like four or five people, someone who’s ideally charismatic to be your lead actor and then just smart kind of interesting people to help you curate this thing. It should be a one scene, five minutes ideally it’s comedic because those program while at film festivals. And short films also program well like short shorts that’s really key. And your first ones are going to suck. Mine did, I mean I don’t know maybe I’ll make a great one for some people to do that, I hate those people. And they’ll be like a little nugget when you show your friends and they’ll be like ‘this is four minutes and fifty eight seconds of garbage but that little giggle you guys had right there was interesting’. So then you expand on that you cut everything else out, you start honing in on it and somewhere you’re going to discover that you have something unique to offer and it usually lies in those weird conversations you’re having with your friends, your loved ones, your siblings between like midnight and 3 in the morning when everybody’s loopy and or drunk or stoned and you are laughing uncontrollably because you share this unique sense of humor about something that one of your friends did or you did. And at the risk of saying you should make a self-indulgent film for your first movie, you should absolutely make a self-indulgent film for your first movie because that’s your special stuff that’s like you’re a judge. And when you tap into that, you show it to your friends, they’ll be honest with you and it might be two weeks later, it might be two months later, it might be two years of doing this that you have something unique to offer and this is going to be the start of your career. So this whole time you should be having a really strong day job to take care of yourself and you should be saving a little bit of money, this is a hard career so don’t eat out don’t buy clothes like save up your money because now you going to travel to film festivals. You’re going to submit this to every film festivals you can and you’re going to go and you’re going to start meeting other filmmakers that you like and other actors that you like and you going to start building your community and the programmers there are going to like you and they’re going to wonder ‘oh, I want to program a feature from this kid, that would be great’. And the whole time you’re going around this festival, there is a small chance that an agent is going to sign you and say ‘I love your movie, I want to pitch you to direct a movie the cavalry’s coming it’s coming’. Cavalry is probably not coming; I’m just going to be honest with you. What’s probably going to happen is you’re going to be writing a script this whole time, a feature script that’s based upon the look and the feel of your $5 movie. OK. That can be made for less than a thousand dollars. And this is going to be the next step in your career. OK the way you’re going to do this is you know go into temp work, this is brutal; these next two years are going to suck. OK ideally if you are in college and hearing this, don’t major in film, minor in film study, Spanish or Mandarin because then you can get jobs translating for $25 an hour wherever you want to go, that’s the best thing any film student can do. Or if you don’t do that, just wait tables, that’s a reason why artists wait tables, its flexible, you can get your shifts covered. You can spend a year making this movie; you’re going to write this script based upon what I call the available material school of filmmaking which is not. It takes place in a space ship because you can’t do that on a thousand dollars but what you can do is take a meeting with everyone who loves you and who want to support you and say What do you have that you can lend to me at my disposal to make a film?. When Jay and I made ‘The Puffy Chair’ it was very clear, we had my apartment in Brooklyn, my wife Kate’s apartment in Brooklyn, my street was really quiet, I knew we could shoot on that, I had a van because I was playing in bands. So I was like road movie that’s good for a van. There was a furniture store and main that was going out of business and we had two identical chairs we could get for like $300 sounds like great, I’ll burn one of them that will be our big stunt in the movie it will be awesome. And we reverse engineer the movie that fit inside of these things so that we knew we wouldn’t have to wait to make it, we knew we could make this movie at a cheap price and you gather up that group of friends you made your shots with and you guys going to go out with a crew of 5 to 8 people and the way you’re going to do this (please don’t print this this is just for the room).
You’re going to go to some box stores that might rhyme with like clone repo and you’re going to buy lights and extension cords and all these things and they have a thirty day return policy where they give all your money back. You’re going to shoot your movie within thirty days and everything’s going to be free. You’re going to go to another store that rhymes with rest sly and they have cameras that you can buy with only like a ten percent restocking fee. So you’re going to buy those cameras and you’re going to return them or if you want you can just shoot them still on compressed on your iPhone if you like that look might make you more unique, either way. These are the things you’re going to do to keep it cheap OK. And if you have an agent at this point they might be saying ‘don’t go do this, I can get you some money to make this’. If you allow them to do that you will end up in development for five years and you will not get your movie made because you’re just a short film maker with nothing behind you. Go make this movie on your own ‘the cavalry is not coming’
So with this movie you make there is a chance of them movies going to Sundance and get a million dollars. It might happen, probably not. Probably what’s going to happen is you made something really interesting that’s a little bit flawed because you’re a new filmmaker and it’s your first feature and that’s OK but it’s unique and it has a voice and you’re still doing temp work and you’re running around to every single festival that you develop relationships with through your short film. OK. They want you back, they’re excited to program you and this is where the capital of Film Festival starts to come in. You’re definitely going to get an agent at this point because you made a feature that works. That’s good. We’ll talk about that in a second.
But there are movie stars at these film festivals, every film festival has like three to five movie stars out of that come and get the sponsors and to do it. OK And what you want to do is get your movie in front of these people. And when you have this agent, they’re going to say ‘Should I bring you scripts to direct’? ‘Should I bring you this’?. No no no, I want you to do one thing for me; I want you to send my thousand dollar movie that’s inspired but kind of flawed to every single actor in this agency that means something and I want to set screenings every other week so I can get actors to fall in love with my work and then build another movie with them. And this is going to be where you start to climb a lot of these movie stars are going to be like fuck that I want to make a movie on an iPhone with this dude he does not know what he’s doing. But one of them within two weeks, two months is going to respond and he was let’s call him Randy Hercules. OK. Randy Hercules was on like a C.B.S. show that ran for like six years, he’s super rich and he’s super depressed because he hates his show and he is dying to do something creative. And you’re going to meet with Randy Hercules and you’re going to say Randy, I saw your show you’re really good in it but I know you’re better than this and you have done your research and you have watched Randy in interviews and you said ‘I might be able to use this darkness of Randy to do something interesting’. And you say I’m going to build you a role Randy, what is the role you absolutely want to play in that no one has offered you and Randy is going to fall in love with you and follow you to the ends of the earth. So as much as your agent is going to tell ‘you you’ve already made your thousand dollar movie, it’s time to go pitch you for big directing jobs’ which you’ll never get by the way and even if you get them you won’t want them because all the directing jobs out there that are open are terrible. You are going to do the unthinkable, you’re going to make another thousand dollar movie but this one has Randy Hercules in it and this one is going to be the one that’s starts to monetize your career because even if you make a stinker with Randy Hercules and it is no way you’re selling this movie for less than fifty thousand dollars and all your friends who worked on your cheap movie with you you’re going to give them big points in the movie because you are a communist. You’re developing a group of friends and you’re all in this shit together and you’re going to say ‘all right, because I’ve been a temp in my Mandarin or I’ve been serving serviche, I’ve saved up some money here. We’re going to spend another thousand dollars on this movie but this time when it sells you my beloved sound person/lighting person/assistant editor are going to get ten percent of the movie because you’ve been working so hard. And Randy Hercules you’re going to get twenty percent of the movie’. And then you go to Randy and say ‘You’re so rich would you just give me those points back and give it some of the crew?’ and he’ll do it because he’s in love with you and he’s rich and sad. And you get to share all of this, and you make this movie and it’s going to be a little better than your last movie because you learn something from your mistakes and you dug in on Randy Hercules and you found something great and this time rather than be at those B tier festivals, you’re probably going to land at a high B or a low A tier festival. You might go to Sundance and sell it for a million dollars, it might happen; probably not going to happen, it’s just the way it. But that’s OK, because now you have a movie that has extreme value on V O D. because of Randy Hercules is six years on his C.B.S. show. And this is where I say God bless V.O.D. this is a great thing for an event film, please do not reject V.O.D. please do not be afraid of it; please do not be attached to your early movies playing in movie theaters. It’s very important that you don’t blow all your money promoting in a theater that’s going to lose that money and you will have no more money to make movies, it’s important that you own this ready Hercules movie someone’s going to buy it from you, let them put it out on V.O.D. and a place like Netflix or H.B.O. and you will probably make anywhere from fifty to five hundred thousand dollars on this movie by the very presence of Randy Hercules and that the movie doesn’t suck. That’s just an empirical value for that movie. OK And this is great, you got some money, your friends have some money, you’re sharing things and more importantly the industry is starting to take notice of you, you’ve definitely got your agent beaten down your door now saying ‘OK. Remember last time when I said the cavalry was coming, I was wrong that time, but this time the cavalry is really fucking coming. I can take you out and get you directing jobs, I can get you rewrite jobs. You’ve got to go take a bunch of general meetings’ and if you do that you will take meetings for a year and nothing will happen and I’m telling you this from experience. It is very hard to turn this down because it’s so tempting, but this is where you want to make your move into T.V. because as the death of the middle class a film has happened, it has been in rebirth in television. The way you used to make really awesome five million dollars movies that didn’t have movie stars in them and had great cool original content, that’s happening in cable T.V. right now and that’s where you want to go. And if you have made a good thousand dollar movie with Randy Hercules, you’re going to sell a pitch hands down and you make some money off of that which is really good. So you’re going to be thinking ‘oh my God this is incredible, I’m going to become the next big show-runner, I sold this pitch they’re excited about it’. You might get to make that show, probably not because that’s just the way it is, it’s probably going to put in a turnaround. But you made some money which is good and you learn something and you said ‘uhmm they don’t want to make this because it cost two million dollars an episode for them to make and they don’t want to risk that much. But using my principles of indie filmmaking, I could probably take Randy Hercules or one of Randy Hercules’s friends who now likes me because they’ve seen the movie and they want to be like Randy Hercules and a little project. And I could probably make some episodes of a T.V. show independently and license them back to these companies at like a quarter or a fifth of the price and I would own everything and I would almost be like a T.V. studio’.
So you’re going to take out Randy Hercules and his friend Dingleberry Jones. And Randy and Dingleberry are going to play in a small two hander that’s shot mostly in apartments just like you did your first micro budget movie, and you to make two episodes and outline the rest. And I guarantee you; you will sell that show to a young and hungry place that wants T.V. content from a vetted cool independent filmmaker like yourself. And now you’re going to start to make some actual money and all your friends around you have been working for years are going to be like ‘you’re the first one of us to make some money, this is exciting! I have an idea. I want to make my first thousand dollars movie with Randy Hercules’ And you’re going to be like, ‘this is great’ I have some money now and you’re going to have the opportunity to do what you didn’t get for yourself is to raise some people up and throw a thousand dollars at them and say go for it if, you shit the bed I don’t care it’s a write off. If you win I want like fifteen percent of your profits but take eighty five percent of it and share it with your crew because you guys are doing all the work because you’re a communist and this is good, Communism is good here guys.
And so now you’re kind of at this like weird crossroads in your life where you’re thinking ‘OK made these short films, made these two micro budget features one with Randy, got my T.V. show going, I’m making money, I’m not rich, I’m sustainable, I’m helping my friends and your agents going to call you and say ‘I know the first time I called you said the Calvary was coming I was wrong on the second time I said the Calvary was coming and when I was wrong but this time the cavalry is fucking beating down your door. And she’s kind of right because you are of value now and you do have a chance to let the cavalry in. Good chance you’ll open it up and they aren’t there any way, another chance you open it up they come in and you don’t want to make a movie with the cavalry because they’ll make the kind of movies you like and they’re going to try and tell you exactly how to make the movie and you’re going to be at this crossroads this is like you know the places you go when you get to the waiting place like people what am I going to do and you’re going to look at your career and you’re going to feel like ‘I’m a little tired because every single project I have made, I’ve had to self generate and it’s getting fucking exhausting and I kind of want the cavalry to come in just offer me some jobs and it would be really amazing not to work that hard’. And this is the really hard truth and the truth is still when you’re at this place when I am at this place I am at, the cavalry is not coming, it sucks! But this is where the good news starts to come in. OK. Because you’re going to look back at your career and say OK I made a critically acclaimed short films, I ran around and made some friends at a festival, I made two micro budget features one with Randy Hercules, I got a T.V. show license with Randy and Dingleberry, I’m making some money, I’m producing films from my friends. How is it possible that the cavalry is not coming anymore? I’ve done so much. And the good news of this is, who gives a fuck about the cavalry?. Because now you are the cavalry. I’m at Tony Robbins you for a second, you are the cavalry and you do not need them. You have a group of friends who you support and has your support and in the peaks and valleys of our career as they get more successful and you start to burn out and make a shitty movie, they will lift you up because you lifted them up and when you’re up and they’re down you will lift them up and this will equalize you and not only sustain you through your career but sustain you with people you like being around. You have a bevy of work behind you and not one of those pieces of art are you embarrassed to show your children later on because you made them exactly the way you wanted to make them. And while they didn’t make a ton of money for you, you can look your kids in the eye and say ‘I’m proud of this, I made this’. And most importantly, you’re now in a corner of the sandbox that is completely your own, you have all the skills to make exactly the kind of things you want to make, you have enough money to put them in production in a micro budget way. Admittedly it’s a bit of a limit and no one can stop you from doing exactly what you want to do.
So this to me is only my experience but I wanted to share this with you because I feel that if you can accept that the cavalry won’t come and just make yourself into the cavalry, it has your best chance of maintaining success but more importantly which we don’t talk a lot about in this industry, it gives you a chance to be happy!
That’s all I have to say. (Crowd Cheers and claps)
So, that being said, I know I made a lot of grandiose statements and other some specifics left out. I would also love to be challenged on any of these ideas if some of you were like ‘oh that’s bullshit, doesn’t play that way for me because I’m still trying to dial this model in myself’ So I would like to open this up to questions or if you’re interested just like really awesome complements those are cool too.
And I’ll open the floor to you guys.
I can’t see very well back there. So if someone has when you just like shout it.
There you are OK good. There’s a mike and you just walk up to the mike. That’s what happens.
Question 1
Melanie: I’m Melody broke and I’m a filmmaker. And our first feature film is in post-production right now. We have a couple of minor stars in it and of course now we’re looking to try to figure out how to do the distribution side. So any advice or direction that you can get around that would be great.
Mark: Yeah I mean you want to head for the LS festivals first and you want to really like signed at South by Southwest tribe back L.A, F.F, A.F.I, Toronto, Venice. These places that you might be able to sell your movies and I know I’m talking a lot about business here but it’s very important you understand business to serve your creative it’s just a part of the game, so go for those. If you get in there fucking good and you’re good to go, if not start looking at more of those second tier festivals that aren’t necessarily sales markets but are going to be building tools a lot and sometimes you can win awards at those festivals which will bring more attention to it. Most importantly go to the festivals and meet the other actors, and the other filmmakers that you want to work with and start thinking towards your next movie, always start thinking towards that.
Melanie: already straight writing it
Mark: Great! Good for you. Have that at the festival so that when people see your movie and say ‘I don’t want to buy this one, what’s next? That’s great. And then I would say most importantly, try to get yourself to a V.O.D. service, even some places like Vimeo that are like trying to brand themselves and might push you a little bit. Film buff, even iTunes themselves are great friendly platform that supports young movies and it’ll help place you on the front page a little bit and don’t be afraid to self-distribute that movie and there’s just a small a just cool detail. If you have a company that’s offering you no money and you don’t like the guy and who’s running it, I actually would recommend self-distributing instead of selling it to them because this movie which is not valuable now and nine years when you are really successful if you own that whole thing you haven’t sold it, that’s going to be your Blood Simple of Coen Brothers and you’re going to have to sell that for a lot of money and maintain that value of like ‘oh look what Melanie made back here’ and you know Sundance Channel will want to buy it or somebody, so hang onto it unless you find a good one.
Question 2
Ross: Hey I’m Ross, I have a question for you on the dynamic of you know we’re in this age of we all do it all kind of thing. So you’re an actor you’re director and I think that dynamic, I just want to know how you deal with the dynamic of when you say I’m an actor or you’re in your own films. How do you deal with kind of the egoty signature of saying like ‘oh I direct it but I also acted in it, but the reality is that I wrote it because I’m perfect for this.
Mark: Yeah with the gross nature of creating roles for yourself and how to not be ashamed of yourself as you maneuver through the world. No easy answer for that therapy really goes for that, but I would say you know to my earlier point, there’s a way to address that in my mind that is like ‘look, as a lot of great literature that says no one under the age of thirty makes a good piece of art that is not autobiographical, I have zero access to all other actors, what I do have is access to myself who understands the material. So while I might not be the greatest actor in the world, it’s nice having a filmmaker inside of the scene as if I feel if it’s not working, I can improvise around it and maneuver it so until I find a better actor who’s willing to work with me I will do’. And I think that that will hopefully make them respect you twenty percent more.
Question 3
Hi Mark, after talking a little bit about indie filmmakers going into T.V. I was wondering how your feeling about the web series world.
Mark: I have a little experience in the web series world, I made a series called wedlock independently and we took that out and sold it and between you and me it was definitely like we made our money back and like a little bit more but it wasn’t like a windfall financially, but it was good because I think this is a really good place to get that stuff out there, their revenue shares are ninety percent to the artists and ten percent of him and they don’t promote a lot but it’s worth what you get out of them, so I really recommend making them independently and taking them out. You can make a web series if you design it cheaply. Again according to the models I’ve talked about, that sort of available material school. So my advice would be like try to make it for ten grand or less, you can probably feel comfortable to credit card that because any decent web series that’s like funny if you drive your ass off with all your social media and stuff will’ll make that back and you’ll be OK to make another one.
Question 4
I’m a really big fan. Sometimes I feel like Alex from your togetherness and just the way that like ‘I’m an actor in L.A. and what if one day I’m going to end up like him’ and the other part of me is like shows like yours give me hope as an actor because I want to be part of projects like that and in terms of what is your advice for the struggling actors in L.A. And yes I know I make my material know that you know really getting in like my first T.V. credit seems like this inbred game that I just can’t get into
Mark: Yeah. There’s no short answer for that you know everything. I talked about in the last half hour applies to you as well as an actor because I think that the actor producer and the actor writer role are the best ways to get yourself moving forward. There’s a little bit of a thing (and I’m just speaking super candidly) a lot of filmmakers when an actor approaches them they feel like they take a step back because they’re worried they want something from them and they’re worried that that friendship is tainted with this desire to just be in their movies. But if you have acted in a movie that you wrote and produced a five minute short and you’re at the film festival circuit, then you are one with the filmmakers and you’re not coming to them for a job and you guys will be buddies together and you go to that free party with a beer and you’ll stay up late and you’ll tell this really funny story about the time you got. In the car accident and accidentally ran off and got arrested for a hit and run and that film maker will hear it and he’ll be like ‘she’s so dynamic and so interesting, I want to work with her’. (Audience laughs). And that’s how this shit happens, I mean you need to make yourself a member of this community as opposed to trying to burrow your way into the community because that’s really in my experience. I cast and call from my group of friends and the way into that and the way that community is created is mostly through traveling to film festivals with a decent piece of art. So think about what you’re really good at doing you know what you kill that right. OK we’ve got to figure out how to figure out you’re probably being falsely modest but like you gotta figure out like I’m so good at doing this kind of thing. And write a five minute piece for that and produce it which is really only means just like finding a friend with a camera who kind of knows how to shoot and start making shorts like that and get that into a festival and then it will start to grow from there.
Question 5
Elisa: Hi Mike my name’s Elise. I’m a fellow UTRT, I really enjoyed togetherness and the party episode, my friend and I watched that and also enjoyed some similar tea and it was a wonderful episode.
Mark: Are you drinking that right now?.
Elisa: No I’m not, I’m just really nervous and excited to talk to you. So I was wondering if there was a specific personal experience that inspired that episode and also is Linda going to be coming back for season two?.
Mark: Good question. I can’t talk about the Season Two stuff here; we’re in the middle of writing it. But as to the personal experiences for one of our protagonists drinking hallucinogenic beverages, I haven’t had an experience like that necessarily before, but you know Jay and I are really close and I remember when and I think… we grew up in New Orleans so take this with a grain of salt we grew up pretty fast. I got a hold of some mushrooms in high school and Jay came back from college and I was like ‘we’re going to do these together and because we spend so much time apart I want to like want us to expand together and like get you know like be like we were as brothers and so we took mushrooms and walked around the streets of New Orleans together for maybe like five or six hours, and I do remember something in that and we didn’t have any great crazy experiences or hyperbolic ones like happened in the episode but I do remember feeling like. We were pretty like wound up kids who are nervous about like are we going to be able to have careers like we were thinking about this stuff in high school already. And I remember it kind of like opening us a little bit and I was like oh that would be really great for tightwad Bret to let the T. let him loose.
Question 6
Hey Mark my name’s Calvin I’m seventeen I’m filmmaker from Dallas Texas.
(Mark cuts in): Right away, I know you’re going to be successful. The whole professional delivery that you’re seventeen and you call yourself a filmmaker, you are good you don’t need me. Sit around it, I’m serious give somebody else a fuckin chance (laughs).
(Calvin continues): so definitely in that same boat of not having a lot of budget like good number like a thousand dollars and I’m blessed to come from a school where I have cameras and like lights that I can check out. So what do you spend that money on because I like that’s like my worst budget in like I go out my budget for a movie and I spend all my money on water by going out shit with the money. (Audience laughs)
What are some good investments that you actually took that money out and you spent it on?
Mark: Yeah I mean when I when I quote The thousand dollar movie it’s certainly not an empirical number, it changes on the City Year and it changes you know depending on the scope of your movie you know but when I think about that movie it’s doing a couple of things. It’s borrowing recycled hard drives from people so you’re not buying those things, it’s getting the uncompressed app on your iPhone which you have your equipment already most of it is food and you really want someone who can cook. I recommend having your editor be the deep person who takes the media and they have a lot of down time, so you have them help you light and you have them cook and if they cook and you know you should be having a crew that’s really really small and you should have designed in a static of the movie that can be rough film so it doesn’t feel less than a two hundred thousand dollars movie, it feels squarely a one thousand dollars movie whether what that is I.E. handheld I.E. you know. Rough lighting for a reason you know. So yeah that money should be mostly spent on food and then you’re going to spend a little bit of that on film festival applications.
Question 7
Calvin: Hey Mark, My name is Calvin too. I’m an editor and I cook but not on set (Crowd laughs). I’m an editor and I’m a film editor by day filmmaker any time in between.
(Mark cuts in): Yeah I did that for a long time. I know that’s also a great way to make money just to be clear if you are a filmmaker who knows how to edit getting in editing like infomercials and things like that. I edited out a church in Austin, a church television show for twenty dollars an hour at night. That was great for me, so it’s a nice source.
(Calvin continues) I totally agree. And the episode togetherness when you really find the coyote noise and put the coyote noise I’ve had that experience plenty of times. I’m a big fan of The Puffy Chair kind of going through right now and I have noticed that Red Envelope Productions was one of the production companies that helped start the brand and I want to congratulate you on your deal with Netflix,that’s really cool. And I was just wondering if there’s any correlation between that.
Mark: Yeah we developed a relation with Netflix in 2005 when we sold them The Puffy Chair; their originals department was called Red Envelope at the time, that’s just been folded into the Netflix brand since. And Ted Serranos who runs that company and is now like a multi-gazillionaire massive media mogul is one of us. He’s a guy who came from independent film and he feels like us and he still takes my phone calls and we text each other and talk about movies and that brings to a good point of like we’re now in this fortunate position where we’re seeing the advent of venture capitalists conglomerations showing up in to independent film. Amazon, Netflix to a certain degree H.B.O. and that’s why I brought up that idea in my tirade earlier about sort of making independent television and licensing it to T.V. because there is… Netflix, Amazon there minting money right now and there’s you know all of us who are kind of like not making a lot of money and so there’s this wonderful marriage to be had where you make the movie for this or they buy the movie for half of what they normally buy it for you’ve made it for a tenth of what they normally write for and then everybody is winning you’re profiting, they’re profiting you know I mean to be perfectly honest with you, the budgets that I am making my Netflix movies for all four of those movies equal to basically one fart bubble for Netflix and their grand scheme of money so but for me it’s a time. So that’s a good thing.
Question 8
A quick question. OK So a big fan of the show by the way.
From a filmmaker standpoint, how do you feel about location and the need to be in L.A.?
Mark: Really strong opinions about that. There is a moment when it is helpful to be in L.A, it is so much better for you to keep making your stuff and a small town while you’re finding out who you are because your rent is going to be $265 a month you’re going to get support from the pharmacist when you want to shoot the pharmacy because your dad knows him. When we shot The Puffy Chair We shot it mostly in my wife’s home town she grew up in where her dad was a doctor and so we could shoot in the motel for free, we could shoot in the doctor’s office for free. I really think it’s very tough to make independent films in L.A. unless you kind of have a name or something to offer them. They will just be like ‘get out of my face basically’. So to use my speech, up until the point in which you have made your thousand dollar movie with Randy Hercules, that is the moment when you can consider moving to L.A. to get jobs. But Ceon brothers still live in Austin, making their movies, doing their thing; it’s a great way to do it.
I would only add it’s important if you’re an actor. If you’re like if you want to get that portion of your career going. That’s important for you.
Question 9
I’m Jeremy Burgess, writer producer out of Birmingham Alabama. I’ve been doing shots for a few years and been going OK I’ve also been working on my first and only feature length script, it’s brilliant but it’s going to be expensive and that’s always been in the back of my mind anytime I’m underwriting it. Should I throw that in a closet and let the brilliance burn into my soul or should I keep working at that instead of shorts?
Mark: How do you do with multitasking?
Jeremy: Fairly OK, like four jobs.
Mark: Yeah I mean and have your short films been going around to festivals?
Jeremy: I’m writing one up in about a week and I’ll tell you next year.
Mark: OK Got it. Yeah. So I would I would stay on the shorts train, making shorts until you get those shorts into the festivals and really where you’re at. I would finish that super passion project of yours that’s brilliant and expensive and have that ready to go because again there is that chance that if you make this short and Janet falls in love with it and she premieres at a South by Southwest and it’s also in the same shorts program as Randy Hercules, his friend who made it. Randy might see your movie your short and say I want to make it and then you can get your big movie made. But don’t wait on that do not count on that the chances are very slim. So I would highly recommend whatever that first short is that you make that lands at a festival and you really see people connecting to it, try to make that micro budget feature that mimics that and that will be a great gateway to get your more expensive movie made.
Question 10
Hey Mark, my name is Marshall, I’m finishing UTRTS studies and every contact I’ve made in the industry is try to find a writing partner, try to find a producing partner. How has Jay helped your process out emotionally and like in the business?
Mark: It’s huge. I mean it is really huge and I do agree with that advice and I would take it further that not just a partner but a true community. I showed up at Southpaw, Southwest in 2003 for the first time and started meeting guys like Joe Swanberg, Andrew Brijeski, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden and we are all friends to this day and we call each other through the years and say ‘can I borrow a camera’? And we mail each other cameras and we mail each other cards and ‘look can I use your old drives from this movie’? I mean that community element is almost as important as that direct partner, very hard to find that direct partner; you know I mean it’s like being in a band where you have to suck up all the conflict that happens whether for the greater good of the music that you’re making together, it doesn’t work for everybody. Just talking to you right now like seem like a pretty gentle sweet person the fact that you’re aware that it could be helpful means you’re probably going to be emotionally evolved enough to handle that kind of situation. So yeah really hard to find but certainly scope it out I will say that I mean I’m in two positions. I have my main partner with Jay, but Jay and I also have affairs on each other where he goes off and makes like transparent and he went and acted in this movie the Manson family vacation that’s premiering here tomorrow and I kind of shepherd a little bit and guide but like I stay away because he needs to have those other partners and I do that with like Lynn Shelton and these other people and so you can also have one off creative relationships that work really well too. Just good sex basically, that is what I supposed.
Question 11
Hey Mark, I’m a producer, writer actually. And I just wanted to thank you personally, because I honestly didn’t know who you were before I walked in here but I did out here on my list of things to watch and been there for a while so I would have known in the future, so that’s exciting.
MARK DUPLASS: It’s an incredible statement (crowd laughs) ‘I would have known in the future’. You make that the title of your first movie; somebody is going to watch it actually (all laughs).
(Eric continues): I just wanted to thank you personally because you have just confirmed everything that I personally have kind of said as far as my career and what I’m going to be doing in the next few years and I wanted to kind of on this level say thank you and say remember me. I’m Eric with an A and one day we’ll be on that level together and I’ll talk with you shake your hand and say ‘I appreciate everything and I’m here because of you, so thanks a lot’.
MARK DUPLASS: You’re going to raise me up? You’re going to hook me up?
Eric: Yeah! One day we’ll hold each other up.
Mark: I’m keen on that, I like the confidence.
Let me be clear. I will be totally burned out and worthless in ten years so I’m going to need that.
Eric: Well I’m here in Austin at some point. Have a great day.
MARK DUPLASS: Thank you.
Question 12
Hey Mark, I’m also a film maker in high school. Next year I’m going to be a senior and I’m kind of moving forward into this level in education of choosing what to do, college way and I also don’t want to dig my mom into a hole and get her somewhere super expensive. So I was wondering if you have any suggestions as to how I should move forward into going to college basically.
MARK DUPLASS: I don’t want to be irresponsible here because this is like a four hour conversation but I will throw out a couple of questions for you to think about. Do you believe that you thrive better in a structured educational environment? Or do you function better as a renegade in your basement with your three buddies?. What makes you more excited and inspired?.
(Man continues) Both; On the inside I have this nagging suspicion that I’m irresponsible and I can’t handle responsibility (crowd laughs) but at the same time I feel like having that lack of responsibility and allows me to be…
(Mark cuts in) so there’s a combination here. There are these trade schools like New York Film Academy. They’re not the greatest things in the world to be honest with you, but they’re like nine months and what they do is they teach you that the empirical tools of filmmaking. OK So you and your mom won’t go broke, you won’t waste four years and you’ll be like nineteen when you get out and you’ll know everything you need to know about making movies. So even if you run for two years trying to make movies and you decide ‘you know what this isn’t for me I’m not sure I’m this as you mentioned’ you’re still only going to be twenty one and you’ve got plenty of time to get all that up. So for college, I generally recommend you go in and get just the necessary things that you absolutely need to make the movie. Granted! If you came to me and said ‘dude I’ve already read all the textbooks, I know what the one hundred eighty degree axis is of shooting, I know how to shoot underbrush on an iPhone’, I would be like one hundred percent do not go to film school, you are ready for this, go out and do it.
(Man continues) So you’re saying if I already have that experience which I think I kind of do, just do something else?
MARK DUPLASS: I would save the money and skip it and think about the money that would have been that and say ‘mum, give me a tenth of that so I can go make my movie one movie’. Yeah.
(Man) All right thanks Mark.
Question 13
Hi Mark, I’m Sisi. I took a Buzz Feed quiz on which league character of you. And I did not get your character but I got Kevin so I think that we’re inherently linked.
MARK DUPLASS: Absolutely!
(Sisi continues) I’m not a filmmaker but I’m like a curious individual. Yesterday I saw David James speak on food co and what’s going on in the future of food and something he said that was interesting was about how today’s chefs anyone can kind of have all these access, have all these tools from the Internet and it’s sort of hard for a young chef because they’re expected to be good right away. In your perspective for the future of film and future filmmakers, do these tools would you say they seem to have a lot of benefits to a filmmaker early and starting your career much earlier than you ought to do. What do you think about the downside of that?
MARK DUPLASS: I’m a big fan of the cheap technology and the tools and I would never wish that they were not here. I do agree there are some downsides, one is that we’re creating a lot of material in the marketplace so it’s much harder to sift through things. And also that in 1995, if you put out an independent film that was decent you were only one of seven independent films so everybody would come see it. Now there are thousands. So it makes you less quote unquote special in that way but the major upside of it which I will trump to the dead eye is that because this stuff is so cheap now. In 1995, a kid from Ohio in the suburbs who was fourteen years old couldn’t turn a camera on himself and make one of the most explosive movies that we’ve seen come out of Sundance and that could happen now with the technology and so I want to take all the bad stuff for that sort of like juggernaut potential.
Sisi: Awesome, thank you.
Question 14
Hi Mark, F.A Greenheart, I’m a freelance TP and I’ve been on transition into moving more in the direction of taking filmmaking seriously, doing writing and directing, and I feel like I can learn a lot from you know on set with an established director and approach and process. What’s the best way to approach somebody you really respect, you love their style and you want to learn something from them by working behind the scenes on that minute break and sort of like insulated bubble?
Mark: I’m going to give you a pretty specific piece of advice; you don’t necessarily have to follow it. I would erase that from your memory because you will maybe learn some things but it will probably be really hard to get to that point if you don’t have connections and you spend a lot of time and energy trying to find a connection to a filmmaker that is good enough that you want to emulate and it might not even be healthy for you to learn and emulate from them. And I would take all those cumulative hours and I would gather up three or four of your friends and start making movies and then what’s going to happen is you’re going to start making movies that are like you and that are totally unique and honestly if you start emulating things that might beat something original out of you that you never could have known. For instance, if you don’t know what the 1800 axis is right now and how to shoot films, you might shoot it in this ignorant way that’s totally original and interesting and that’s kind of cool too, that happened to me a little bit earlier. So at the risk of sounding a little cavalier about it, I would really spend more of your time finding out who you are as opposed to shadowing someone else.
Question 15
Hi my name’s Stephanie. I love all your stuff and just wanted to tell you that first of all. I’m not a filmmaker, just kind of a creative person, I read a food blog and I do know today there’s so many people out there that want to do something creative and so many different markets and I was just kind of wondering like is there enough room like how do you make yourself stand out?
Mike: I mean it’s a really tough question, there’s a glut. You know, like these tons and tons of stuff to look at and it’s much harder to make room and I can be certainly a bummer sometimes, you just feel like I’m just putting stuff out there and nobody cares. I truly believe at the end of the day like everybody’s unique and if you dig it hard enough about that special stuff about you again. Those conversations you’re having with your friends, there’s very specific things that make you, that’s going to be inherently fascinating at least to me, you know if I got a chance to like see and feel what it’s like in your life at those moments and if you can find a way to put that in your stuff, I believe it can break through you know. But it’s definitely harder now with the glut. Easier to make, harder to get people to watch it.
Question 16
Hi Mark, I’m Gelbin; I am an actress, writer and producer. I was just in Chris Warner’s unexpected. I have a good question How is it because you do multiple things, when you coming off unexpected, people automatically see actress and I don’t really know how about how saying I’m an actress, writer and producer like toning down the sound of that, what is your advice?.
Mark: I mean you just have to actively combat that and just say like ‘yeah I mean I was in the movie because I’m a friend of Chris but really I’m a filmmaker first’. And that’s that standard response you keep doing that over six months that’s what’s going to happen and that being said, it’s not bad that people are looking at you to be an actress and if they like you, that’s good. You know and you should say great interesting. I’m not just an actress, I am an actress and a writer producer and I have this script that I have written for myself and it can be made cheaply and we’re going to get involved. You know I mean you just got to take control that conversation.
Geblin: OK, and then my second question would be. So coming off of that when you are approached about other projects like you said the coverage not coming, when it does come it could be like a bunch of crap that you don’t want to do
Mark: Yes. Most of the time it is.
(Geblin continues): How do you say NO?
Mark: Well a lot of times it’s easy because it’s not an offer to you, it’s an offer to fight for it. That’s the key. It sounds like you’re taking from me and say ‘we want you to direct this movie’, but what they don’t tell you is that they’re talking to twenty five other people and you’re going to go pitch to them and spend a month getting your boards ready and getting your story pitched together and you’re not going to get it and you will do that over and over again and I can’t tell you how many friends I have who have done that for three years straight because the temptation of getting that million dollar gig is there and they end up doing absolutely nothing. And that’s really the balmer of The Cavalry is Coming as it sounds like it is but it really isn’t.
Question 17
Hey, I’m an actor, writer and I work for the start up too and I guess the question is how do you or can you ever get rid of like this is no good voice that is in your head? Because I have a million ideas.
Mark: Yeah. The this is no good voice is great and it’s one of your great assets because it will help you from making something bad. You know if you have the bliss gene and you’re like ‘this is awesome’, and you’re never going to know that it sucks. So that’s a good thing, accept it, and go to some therapy you work through that I’m still doing that. A couple of tricks when you’re writing, I find it’s very bad to write in final draft or on a document because you can see what you’re writing and you’re thinking to yourself ‘oh God it’s garbage it’s garbage’ and you lose all your confidence. So try this trick where you take a little dictaphone or a handheld recorder and you speak out your scripts into it. You can’t see the words. Also you can’t turn back it’s linear, and so what you actually have to do is it forces you to just get a vomit draft out. And you accept because this is a vomit draft it’s going to be stinky that’s fine, no big deal. So your dialogue will all sound the same because you’re talking that way. And your scene descriptions will not be eloquent because you talk them out but you’re going to get impeccable pacing because your body knows how to pace a movie because you sat in front of so many movies and so then you can click into that other side of your brain. This is no good brain and start empirically editing that thing. And that’s a nice little trick for me also involving your friends and your peers in every way shape and form in the process to take the voice off of you for this is no good and put it on to them and let them help you, you’ll stop beating yourself up as much as everyone else is voicing and helping you guide this thing people don’t do that enough. I find a lot of people they get caught up in this auto or bullshit of like this is my vision I’m making my way it’s just like you know making a movie is impossible, you need help, you need people you know and love and trust to help you guide this stuff. So a community would really help you with that. Thank you guys so much. I’ll stop talking now. Thank you.
INTERVIEW WITH THE DUPLASS BROTHERS
CONVERSATION WITH THE DUPLASS BROTHERS
AARON: By the way I don’t appreciate the snickering over the owning of video store. Hi Boys.
BROTHERS: Hi Aaron
AARON: Thanks so much for coming out here we are going to be able to give you guys a chance to ask the brothers questions, I believe we have a microphone right there in the isle so when we get to that we will let you know.
As far as South by South West is concerned you know a lot of people associate you know your early days with the puppy charity 2005, but really Austin and film comes earlier than that I was wondering if you could talk about those early funny years.
MARK DUPLASS: We moved here in a wagon in 1917 actually.
JAY DUPLASS: It was a gravy train with biscuit wheels.
MARK DUPLASS: And you know all those pictures of the capital where there was a dirt road JAY DUPLASS and I actually paved that road ourselves.
JAY DUPLASS: We paved it with TV tape.
MARK DUPLASS: Yes we did, we did, JAY DUPLASS moved herein ninety one to go to college and I came soon after in 95 and I mean for those of you who have been here for that long even not that long, it was a very different town but the spirit as always been the same just like, oh there is Rodriquez and there is Richard Linklater (1:24) and like these guys are just like wearing T Shirts and jeans and sneakers and they are normal guys making art and that was so inspiring to us because we grow up in New Orleans.
The artists there were all 50 year old black men and older jazz musicians and we were like we are probably not going to beat that.
JAY DUPLASS: But we tried super hard
MARK DUPLASS: We tried really hard.
JAY DUPLASS: To be 55 year old black musician.
MARK DUPLASS: But the Duplass brothers are just not the Neville brothers it just that not going to happen.
JAY DUPLASS: We will forever live under that cloud.
MARK DUPLASS: Exactly, I don’t look good in a tight fish net shirt it just doesn’t work.
JAY DUPLASS: And a thick gold chain.
MARK DUPLASS: But yea it really was so exciting to us that just like normal people who are making art about normal stuff and so that’s really like I think we kind of figure out who we were by watching guys like Rick and Rodriquez and then we lived here for a long time just making a shit ton of bad short films really, that’s what we did for the next 10 years.
AARON: So what, now a days you guys are doing so much it’s just incredible, JAY DUPLASS with transparent, you guy with togetherness, you have 2 films here that you produced the documentary Asperger’s Are Us as well as Phillips Rainbow Times, go see those guys.
You produce you write you direct you act, where did all of it come from like and originally as far as what was actually inspiring you. I mean you wanted to make things but did you have lofty goals upfront of what you wanted to do or did all this or did you stumble into all of this.
MARK DUPLASS: It’s just money you know really is what it comes down to, we want to be.
JAY DUPLASS: Just getting paid, just getting paid you know because those 12 years in Austin just making art and distributing on our front lawn we got so rich, so frigging rich.
MARK DUPLASS: These haircuts don’t come cheap, you all.
JAY DUPLASS: I don’t know if you all notice but, I am wearing a blazer.
MARK DUPLASS: That’s right.
JAY DUPLASS: So it’s like just deal with it, we honestly we grew up in New Orleans like MARK DUPLASS said the only model you know of being an artist was like to be a musician so that’s what we were doing for a long time we did that here as well, but we were probably, we definitely were more obsess with movies that were coming across our front lawn and cable came to our neighbourhood in 1983, and you know we never had. We never like thought we would actually be able to make movies and make movies and make money.
Like MARK DUPLASS was saying like when we first saw Rick on the street we were like that’s a person who made a movie, oh, right, people made movies it not just pumped over a pipe line, you know.
MARK DUPLASS: And more importantly he is not wearing like a beret he is like a normal guy, like could we possible do this.
JAY DUPLASS: And his last name is not Cobla basically (4:16), so you know honestly it was we graduated from UT and we were kind of in bands together and we were making movies with our friends in town which at the time we were like you know the Zona brothers and like Brian Poiser and John Bryant and all these great film makers now.
We are just having fun and I think in the back of our minds we were like it would be so great if something happens one day but we just didn’t really expect it and it really does come from what you were saying, you just making stuff which is what we have always done together as brothers, just always just wanting to make something creative and see if we can do something that’s good and it took us a long time before we could do anything good, and then I would say probably the biggest moment.
I mean we had big moments along the way we got our first shot in the Sundance all that stuff happens but we were still making stuff but, I think when we were making our first studio feature Cyrus we were on our way to a ward robe fitting with Marisa Tome and we were sitting in the parking lot and we were like oh my God we are going to tell Marisa Tome what to wear, this is weird.
MARK DUPLASS: I have dreamed about, this I have dreamed about this and it went really well too, it was so exciting.
JAY DUPLASS: And we got a call on our cell phone from Brian Poiser who was about to make LOVERS OF HATE and I think this where we were at, the economics where he had twenty thousand dollars and he need twenty five and that five had dropped out and he basically was like going to shoot like the next day and he was like I need five thousand dollars to make this movie and it was the first time MARK DUPLASS and I were in a position where we had five thousand dollars and it was so easy for us to be like, of course and we gave him five thousand dollars his movie happened.
It got into competition at Sundance, but also we did what we always did with our friends we watch cuts with them we gave them advice on what we thought, I mean that’s just what we were doing in the film making community but we became executive producers on that movie and we thought nothing of it at all.
MARK DUPLASS: It really just being a friend more than a produce is what it felt like in the moment.
JAY DUPLASS: And now we produce a lot of stuff.
MARK DUPLASS: That process really continued we really like to tribe up as we call it we find this industry very difficult and JAY DUPLASS and I are fairly vulnerable anxious and depressive at times and so we like to band up with all of our friends and kind of lean on each other and so a lot of the producing we do is really like you know Lynnis Phillips is a friend of ours and he says I got this movie idea.
So we said okay we got some money lets help you out and we go do it and Asperger’s Are Us a dot is playing here is directed by the camera man that I worked with on the LEAF for like 5 years and I was friends with him and I you know he showed us this movie and we were like yes, we will watch the movie and we like oh fuck, we are going to have to watch Alex’s shitty movie and tell him how bad it is and it was good and we were like great.
So let’s go help him make this movie so that has been like an organic process to becoming quote and quote producers which is something that we are really liking more and more of lately.
AARON: But beyond working with friends and you know colleagues you guys have been so prolific producing, I mean I feel like every year here you had like at least 2 or 3 films. Is there something that you can see like a common through line of something about these projects that really like excites you, or if there is any guiding philosophies whether it may be you know conscious or you thinking about it for the first time right now?
MARK DUPLASS: Yes it is weird it is always hard for us to see that it is almost always easier for audience to see that kind of stuff and then they point it out to us and then we are kind of like yeah, that’s what we are doing that’s our theme, but something came up lately that keep hitting us over and over again that when people talk about our show togetherness.
They talk about how unique relationship is between my character and Steve’s character, between Alex’s and Bret and they say they are just so loving and sweet and supportive of each other I never seen guys interact that way.
How do you even conceive to make a relationship that is so unique, and we are like oh that’s different, we like because that’s just how JAY DUPLASS and I are like with each other.
JAY DUPLASS: What other guys do, they just like punch each other in the nuts?
MARK DUPLASS: Yeah, like not stop. like JAY DUPLASS fucking love you! Punching bag, punching bag in the balls and so I think if there is anything that we have seen that as tied us to what we are looking for and you will see it in the RAINBOW TIME, you will see it in ASPERGER’S ARE US is like that ability to be very, very honest with your comedy and with your story telling but, that honest normally comes with a certain kind of acerbic pin pointing darkness and often kind of trashing the characters and if there is anything that we make it an honest approach but also an inheritance sweetness to it that we tend to be attracted to over and over again, so I think that might be one I don’t know that might be a common theme that might be something.
JAY DUPLASS: Another thing I think is just personal connections which we just tend to let things like ooze in sideways a little, I mean like when it was Lyniss Phillips’s movie we are really good friends with him, just he had this idea it was really special and he also was kind of in a place in his life where he was like I am going to die if I don’t make this movie.
MARK DUPLASS: That’s how you get people to finance your movie, you just go it is not a big deal no pressure, I am going to die if I don’t get a chance to make this, no biggie.
JAY DUPLASS: Yeah, feeling that personal connection I don’t know it’s more of an organic, I mean people are always like oh dude are you developing are you reading scripts and stuff, and it’s like we don’t have a ton of time to read scripts it is something that has to happen through osmoses.
MARK DUPLASS: I think that’s a good point, we don’t waste time on traditional development, people ask us how you so prolific, how you make so much stuff and the thing is everything that we attempt to make we make so it is not like oh, it is 19 movies we talking we only going to make one of them and the way we do that is people come to us with either a solid project that are at various phase.
They got a script and they are ready to go and it is cheap to make and we always tell people like look we aren’t going to give you a lot of money, we will give you enough to make it if it hits you will share a ton of the profits but you going to live and die by your work.
Or it is something that JAY DUPLASS and I have an idea about for instance like movies about THE ONE I LOVE or YOUR SISTER’S SISTER were movies that we kind of started off as a company and they were ideas that we had and we went and pitched them to a film maker and we said would you like to run with this idea you know we will produce it, one of us will be in it.
That’s another form that we work with but, to the point of that I think it is important that you try not to spend a lot of time taking meeting bull shiting about movies that you may eventually make one day, we try to spend a lot of time saying like do you have a dream movie that you can make for under a hundred thousand dollars that we can help you with that’s practical, like those are the kind of things we really respond to.
JAY DUPLASS: I think that answers the question because everyone is constantly asked us how do we do all the stuff that we do, part of it is that we just don’t socialize ever, that’s something we just have young kid we given that up for the time being.
MARK DUPLASS: Part of it is we are handsome too, you know we are pretty fucking cool, we are incredible, you that move the Incredible that was written about us, have you seen that?
AARON: I have always admired your humility.
JAY DUPLASS: But the idea that if you know anything about Hollywood you know at most like one and twenty that are being considered get maid and for us it is like 19 of the 20 movies get made so we really don’t take anything on unless it is like very obvious to us and personal and it is just like, I don’t know we need it to really matter and mean something on so many levels for us to take it on.
We also have like develop models like even from the very beginning after we did our first movie the PUPPY CHAIR we are going to make BAG HEAD and we were talking about it in the studios about making BAG HEAD big but, we kind of figure this thing out that maid it okay for us to be pitching the movie and to not like die if like people wouldn’t green light it or whatever.
We realize we can make the movie for fifty thousand dollars in Austin if people didn’t want to do it our way and being too difficult and reject it and so or whatever it would be and so we kind of went into these pitch meetings with this idea that like, we are making this movie in August in Austin.
It’s happening if you would like to be a part of it and give us a lot of money that would be great but if not we are still making the movie and that’s what ended up happening, you know we made it for little more than fifty thousand dollars, we have been making some money writing movies and we sold it for a hell of a lot more at Sundance and so we constantly employed that tactic that this movie is going to get made and we often think of lots of levels that it could exist at but it almost always happens at that bottom level and that has turned out to be a great thing actually.
AARON: One more follow up and then I want to turn it over to you guys for questions, you know you mentioned Hollywood and then you guys live in Los Angeles and like what you doing is so antithetical to how Hollywood works I mean even as all these models have just kind of busted in the post internet whatever age, do you guys feel like I mean even you have done studio work before do you feel like outsiders in Los Angles, do you feel you are bucking the system from within.
MARK DUPLASS: We don’t feel necessarily that we are you know diametrically opposed to Hollywood as a whole, we definitely sort of have one foot in the system and one foot out the system and I think that you know there is a healthy way to sort of approach making stuff when you are at like our level which I would describe as like, nobody is going to give us a hundred million dollars to make a movie and just let us do whatever we want to do.
We are not that they might give us a smaller amount of money and give us some creative autonomy that’s cool but our whole approach is always been we will never make a movie for more money than we think that we can make it back even if the movie ends up being not great, that’s like the key for us it’s like mitigate your risk.
So it is like even if we totally fuck this movie up and it sucks just because this person is in it and the script is about this and this genre at least we will make that money back and there is an immense creative freedom when you walk into a project thinking like even if we shift the bed w are going to be okay and it frees you up to just go nuts a little bit and that has been a real key to our process and it is the way that we started because we had not connections and nobody was going to give us any money.
And then we got to the phase where everybody wants to give us money and we have this crazy realization we are like we have achieved the goal of like Hollywood would give us money to make our stuff and we look at each other and we are like it is kind of better if we do it on our own and that’s really what we continued to do.
AARON: Hey gang you want to ask the Duplass some questions? If you want to line up over the microphone there, I can see you with your white shirt there sir.
Q: I am one of the lightning bolts so you know deal with that anyway.
MARK DUPLASS: We can’t deal with it, next question.
Q: I live in Wellington New Zealand now and we are working on building a screen co opt and what you guys were talking about is like when you say you keep your budgets down low under a hundred grand, how you guys deal with keeping the crew and everybody certain level do you give the crew a back end as well to work at a lower level.
MARK DUPLASS: We have a lot of different models and not to bore the shit out of everybody with the semantics but the ethos is the lower you make, the lower budget you make the movie for the more equity you can afford to hand out to your cast and crew, so when we are making an independently funded movie everyone who shows up on our set whether it is the fourth PA has at least some equity stake in the movie and we like that family environment of doing things.
One model in particular that I can advice on a little bit which I think is good is any movie that you make under two hundred thousand dollars there is a necessary sag agreement that is you have to pay those actors at least a $100 a day there is a minimum there, so a lot of time when we are making movies at that budget level.
What we will do is we will pay everybody on set whether you are an actor a director a PA a caterer whatever, everybody makes a $100 a day so it is creative communism thing and then depending on what you bring to the movie and how much time you spend on the movie you get much bigger waited backend so for instance if you happen to have a movie star that comes into the movie you really have to have like give them some backend because they are doing that and your editor is going to spend 3 months versus your PA who is only there for three weeks should get more vice versa.
Q: And now would you guys would want to come to New Zealand and do some projects because that is kind of why we are here to bring.
JAY DUPLASS: Absolutely not.
MARK DUPLASS: I mean the way that JAY DUPLASS is joking but he is not joking, the way that we make stuff is so different from the way everybody makes stuff, like there are big movies that go to New Zealand and they save so much money by doing that.
For us as soon as we fly down our crew members we have already blown our budget so for us we kind of have to say around here.
Q: You guys stick with the same crew project after project or you willing to work with other crew over there.
MARK DUPLASS: How hard are you going to pitch us?
Q: Just a question anyway thank you guys for your time.
Q: Hi I was curious when you guys started realizing that it was like a partnership that you guys had rather than you both pursuing like your own tracks with film making.
JAY DUPLASS: I was about 7 MARK DUPLASS was about 4, I mean we genuinely have always been two brothers just trying to make something good and it took us a long time to make something good both movies and music and honestly I still feel like we are two brothers trying to make something good.
It is very, very hard to make a great movie or a great TV show, it takes every ounce of our being and that’s just how we kind of still see it we have to have titles now for studious and for union purposes but that’s just really how we see it.
MARK DUPLASS: Yea and I would say to that end I mean it is a very complex process needless to say working so closely with someone, you know and JAY DUPLASS and I have our own marriage with each other and our marriages with our wives and we are literally writing a book about the complexity of what it is like with us for the last 30 years but at the end of the day for us it is just feels very hard.
We know guys who put on their baseball hats and chew gum and just blaze through their directing movies with ultimate confidence and sometimes they make incredible movies doing that, we just don’t know how to do that we need people to lean on so it’s really not a question of whether we like it or not, we need it.
AARON: Before you go sir I just want to ask you know.
MARK DUPLASS: What you doing you hogging the whole thing.
AARON: Dude! You know you guys are like the only ones I have heard of like siblings who just I always hear you talk about you don’t really fight but I don’t think I ever heard you guys talk about how you guys work as far as, do you know of any like strengths or weakness that you have that automatically it just make sense while you guys are a team.
MARK DUPLASS: Yeah and these are variable things too they are not empirical you know we talk about this a lot of like for instance all togetherness where we write all the episodes we direct all the episodes I am in the show where JAY DUPLASS is prepping like crazy while I am acting like we are just exhausted and overwhelmed.
So we show up on set like an 8 a.m. call and we look at each other and within a few seconds we immediately know who has it today and who kind of doesn’t and that person tends to step forward a little bit and take the lead so they may be like doing more the marching orders and organizing with the cast and the other person kind of laying back and watching and something great happens.
Which is that leadership person is using his positive energy and you know and good sleep to make the thing move forward but the person laying back will catch all these things that the one with the marching orders won’t catch because he is just too busy and there is too much energy taking care of people.
So that little yeng and yang happens quite a bit and really over the years we have kind of developed the skills to be in either position depending on how fussy we are that day.
JAY DUPLASS: But in general I would say that MARK DUPLASS is better at getting stuff up and going like getting things moving and I am probably a little better at closing.
MARK DUPLASS: Yea like the runner who goes to the Olympics and runs the first lap really fast to pace everybody and then he starts sweating and crying and trails off that’s me around noon on set.
AARON: We now return to our regular schedule programming.
Q: Thanks guys, my question is on behalf of my wife who only has an interactive pass and can’t get into the film panel.
MARK DUPLASS: It is terrible, where is she?
A: She is sitting watching it simulcast down the lobby.
MARK DUPLASS: That’s awful, hi what’s her name?
A: It’s Dianna Dickenson from Demoing Iowa.
MARK DUPLASS: Dianna Dickenson from Demoing Iowa come on down.
Bring her in let’s see what she has won, so in 1998 she was a write for a start up called garden.com Doc Jemison Lisa Cliftsharples (22:49) she claims you made a documentary.
MARK DUPLASS: She is full of shit.
JAY DUPLASS: Lies.
MARK DUPLASS: Dianna do not come on down stay right where you are.
Q: So there is no documentary?
MARK DUPLASS: There is.
JAY DUPLASS: We make a documentary about gardening in 1998.
MARK DUPLASS: We were editors in Austin in the mid nineties this is how we kind of made our living we edit like all the cheap Indie movies we wouldn’t make money doing that then we would edit like corporate kids like we would edit at a church television show for a while and JAY DUPLASS secured us this amazing job for doing this documentary for gardening.com where they, I mean no offence Dianna grossly overpaid us.
JAY DUPLASS: In retrospect very under paid at the time.
MARK DUPLASS: At the time we were like this is more money than we have ever seen.
JAY DUPLASS: We are going to take all this money and make a terrible movie with it.
MARK DUPLASS: And that’s what we did we paid all our friends really well and then JAY DUPLASS and I walked away with sixty grand of profit or something and we said lets go make our dream feature film and we shot a movie called VINCE DELRIO about a runner from South Texas that was kind of model after Rocky and we edit it together and it was a steaming pile of shit.
JAY DUPLASS: I just want to reference though that like after a year of nonstop work on a featured documentary you and I both cleared sixty thousand dollars and thought we were like, we killed it.
MARK DUPLASS: And then we blew all that money and then we went back and made a $3 short film and that was the movie that got into Sundance and this is life so.
Q: So how does one get to view the documentary?
JAY DUPLASS: I have no idea.
MARK DUPLASS: You know what I think it exist on a beta tape at my parents house basement right now.
Q: I will give you my card.
MARK DUPLASS: Good fair enough.
Q: Hi there I was just wondering, how did you guys decided to originally cast yourselves in your movies and then you decided to keep casting yourselves as you create more movies.
MARK DUPLASS: Why do you ask?
A: Well I am just wondering, I just made a movie with my brother and so he acted and we are both kind of interest acting and directing at the same time so.
MARK DUPLASS: Do you think we maybe should have made a different choice or something I just want to know if there is something beneath the question that you want to talk to about.
A: Just like more involved in the creative process.
MARK DUPLASS: I understand it was functional at first.
JAY DUPLASS: I mean it started when our dad bought a Panasonic VHS camera with the separate VTR in 1981, I was older and I could work it and MARK DUPLASS would do whatever I say.
MARK DUPLASS: I was young dumb and full of com I was a hot leading man JAY DUPLASS put me in front of that camera and we never looked back bro.
JAY DUPLASS: I said show me the magic baby and he put on that karate gee inspired by that karate Kid one, kicked the cigarette out of the neighbours hand protected his house and finished off by lifting weights.
MARK DUPLASS: That’s a real movie by the way.
JAY DUPLASS: That’s a real movie.
MARK DUPLASS: I wish he was kidding.
JAY DUPLASS: Honestly is that simple that I started shooting MARK DUPLASS and that’s the first movie we got into Sundance a $3 short film on 311 West Mary in South Austin.
MARK DUPLASS: 311A it was a duplex.
JAY DUPLASS: 311A it was the bottom floor duplex and we got into Sundance and you know we just didn’t have the resources to hire the people and by the time we really started making featured films MARK DUPLASS was a dam good actor and I became a pretty good camera operator and that’s really where it was.
MARK DUPLASS: We were a fan of that approach just functionally as you getting started out because you know while you might have access to a great actor and can hire them great, but if you have access to someone who might that be that much of a better actor than you are as a film maker the added value of you being in it is that if the scene itself is not working you have the ability to improvise, shuck and drive move things around because you are probably the film maker screen writer director editor everything.
So having that autonomy under your control inside of the scene can be very helpful particularly like we didn’t know what we were doing enough in the early stage so JAY DUPLASS would like talk to me in the middle of the scene and like that’s not working that feels really spot on and expositional shake that around and try it a different way and it’s nice to just be your own tool on the side of it.
JAY DUPLASS: I mean we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing, so a lot of people think you don’t know what you doing, well just hire like the best DP I can get and the best actors I can get and we actually, that did not work for us and we have seen a lot of people go down that road and you just everyone had that experience where the DP is way above your pedigree and the guy is just like thinks that you are a doofus the whole time, you know and so we knew.
I guess subconsciously that we were going to have to figure this out along the way and having MARK DUPLASS be there and having MARK DUPLASS’s girlfriend Katie at the time be there and puffy chair who is like patient with us and could help allow us to find our way was a huge part of the process.
MARK DUPLASS: You don’t want to do that in front of Marisa Tome that won’t go well.
Q: What’s up MARK DUPLASS? My name is Calvin I am a film maker from Dallas.
JAY DUPLASS: What about me?
MARK DUPLASS: My brother is sitting right here dude.
A: Oh hey man, MARK DUPLASS JAY DUPLASS both of you guys.
MARK DUPLASS: Dude Aaron is sitting right here.
A: You just cut me off you didn’t give me time.
AARON: No offence.
MARK DUPLASS: There is a whole belly of people back here working their ass off for your.
A: Hello MARK DUPLASS JAY DUPLASS Aaron you didn’t let me finish, I am a film maker from Dallas and you talked earlier about you guys were at that point where you making a bunch of really shitty short films and then you eventually got to the point where people wanted to pay you for your ideas and then you expanded pass that, but I am at that point where I am making a bunch of shitty short films and I am trying to figure out.
JAY DUPLASS: God bless you for writing it.
Q: Like what’s the process to get to that next level because I mean.
JAY DUPLASS: Keep making shitty short films until one of them doesn’t suck one day that is it and don’t decide yourself whether you think they suck or not, let other people who are not your mom decide that for you because even when MARK DUPLASS and I made the first film look TINY HINT, it is the first film that we made that was really good.
Happen to be something that happened to me the day before we made it and we as brothers giggle about it, we were like cringed about it and then giggled about it privately, special things that we share our sense of humour, what is unique about us that was what made the breakthrough possible I think so just mining what is special about you and your friends and your love ones is certainly is going to be quicker leading you there.
I think it is hard for people to decide what they are going to be as an artist, I think when people have really strong ideas like we want to be the Coen brothers in the nineties and it didn’t work out. You know to decide that is it doesn’t really happen that’s when you side track yourself constantly, so just try tons of stuff make it really, really cheap and hopefully one day it won’t suck.
I was 29 years old when I made that first movie and I was about to lose my mind the reason why we made it I was like I got to move on and MARK DUPLASS was like no, we are going to make something today, come up with something.
I was like we don’t have a 16 millimetre film camera we don’t have a crew I was stuck in that mind set and MARK DUPLASS was like we have mom and dad’s video camera let us just shoot it so we just came up with the idea right then and there what we could create with the materials we had available.
MARK DUPLASS: I was very inspiring to JAY DUPLASS at the time and I had zero idea too which is the best part about that, I was like we are making a movie today, I was like you got to figure out what that is about because you are the older one you are smart.
JAY DUPLASS: See he is good at starting shit up.
MARK DUPLASS: You know in fairness I was here last year at South West South West and I gave this key note speech that was like an hour long very specifically walking through the minutia of the steps to go from nowhere making shitty short films and how to build like a little empire.
It ends up turning way more Tony Robins than I wanted it to be but it is very preachy and deductive if you want to see the process it is all in there it is all on you tube you can look it up.
Q: Sort of building on that last question I am film festival programmer and my question for you guys is, how do you tell somebody they made a shitty short film but not tell them that to quit, you know what I mean? like what is the best way to give really honest feed back to film maker about what you see in the work that is genuine and interesting and fresh and what isn’t working,
JAY DUPLASS: I mean I think you got to get personal you can’t do it in a one liner and an email or anything like that, I mean I just literally yesterday some kid that worked with us made a short film and it’s not good because it is real hard to make a good short film but it had the nugget of greatness in there.
So I just spent an hour with him and I watched the film with him and I basically just talked him through what I thought could make things better you know and shared as much of my cognition of like, you know because you have this very specific example now about how this could moved towards something else and he is going to reshoot it and he probably would have to reshoot that too as well.
And people are resistant to doing that because I think we all have this like myth that we are going to wake up and take a shit and a great movie is going to come out, there is like a weird myth about it.
MARK DUPLASS: It happened to me once actually.
JAY DUPLASS: It did, what movie is that?
MARK DUPLASS: It is on Netflix.
JAY DUPLASS: But yes I think it has to.
MARK DUPLASS: You are in a tough spot because you can’t respond to 3000 submissions obviously so.
JAY DUPLASS: You could just say keep going.
A: Thank you, keep going everybody.
Q: Hey JAY DUPLASS hey MARK DUPLASS, my name is Phard I hope you are, I wonder if you are talking about CREEP because that was one of my favourites that you have done.
MARK DUPLASS: The take a shit movie?
A: No, no that was my favourite my first movie I have watched of yours.
MARK DUPLASS: Glad you liked it thank you.
JAY DUPLASS: Just for your information you can’t take a shit and it turns into a movie it’s not possible.
MARK DUPLASS: I have only done it once so it is not. Yeah.
A: So I was going to ask, how much have you, I know you guys improvised a lot, how much of your comedy is actually written on a script and how much of it is improvised you know completely on the set.
MARK DUPLASS: Every movie we make is wildly different so CREEP was a 5 page outline that we started shooting with we shot for 6 days, the movie was terrible we then went back and we reshot like 70% of it that movie was terrible. So we reshot that movie over and over again and just a raw outline.
JAY DUPLASS: It is so easy you guys.
MARK DUPLASS: Yes so easy you know on a different kind of movie like CYRUS and JEFFALUS at home its 100% airtight full lock down script that is gone through the studio system and the development process, when we get on set we encourage our actors to loosen up the lines that they are saying but still stay within the narrative structure.
Here is where we are starting A, we are going to B to C to D so that improvisation is not going on rant is it actually staying well within the narrative confines of the scene, just trying to find ways for them to re say the lines so it can feel more natural and organic so that’s the kind of a swing of how things go, but every movie is different.
The movie we made The One I Love which has a lot of scenes and a lot of technical details was actually shuffleman (35:17) out line but it was a detailed 40 page outline, every script point was nailed down except for the dialogue so it varies.
A: Thank you guys so much.
Q: Hey there, you guys are amazing, I watched.
MARK DUPLASS: Great question please, thank you I just want to stop.
I watched the PUPPY CHAIR 3 times before I embarked upon a 7 days film making experience making a film from New York to Iowa for $3,000 and I just have to say that that film gave me the confidence to feel like that could actually happen making a film with my friends on that scale.
My question is getting to the point you have I mean you know you having a show like Togetherness on HBO have you found a away to harness and keep that kind of independent film making mentality that you are able to have making a film $3,000 with your friends at that level and what is it then like working with actors on the scale that you are now.
JAY DUPLASS: It’s definitely different when you making you know when you have $20m on your shoulders and you are making a movie, it is hard to have that unbridled freeness about it but you know we still hire a lot of our friends and MARK DUPLASS and I still two dudes making stuff, and we I think the short answer to that question is, the question that we always ask ourselves and have since the very beginning is what do you want to see next.
And that comes in the receiving phase writing shooting editing everything, even on big studio stuff if something doesn’t feel right we question it and that’s something that most people don’t do, it’s not comfortable to tell 75 people on your crew sorry guys we got to go for a walk because something is not right and we don’t know what it is.
This whole industry is built around this absoluteness of vision which is bull shit for us and for a lot of people and I think the Coen Brothers have absoluteness of vision they are unique in that way.
MARK DUPLASS: There are a lot of people that have absoluteness of vision it’s just that you really don’t want to see that vision.
JAY DUPLASS: So we have a very fluid way of creating things and that for us keeps it very fresh and real because we know we are not just going on set to execute what was written, we are trying to capture the most exciting version of that spirit and we encourage out actors to find that as well and if we are not capturing something special we will question it and we will re rig it and we will rewrite it.
We will throw wrench into the scene and that kind of keeps us fresh all the time and it is scary as shit to work that way too, but I think you know I don’t know that’s what we are obsessed with is realness and feeling like anything could happen you know that’s probably maybe what we were doing that’s somewhat unique is people feel that anything could happen in this moment and the truth is because that’s how our sets are anything really can happen and that’s the only way we know how to create that feeling. So when you living in that chaos it’s uncomfortable but it is definitely is new all the time.
MARK DUPLASS: And the only thing logistically I would add to that is there is some little tricks you can do on big budget sets to kind of make it flow more smoothly make it feel smaller like when you yell “cut” on a big set every department head rushes in to make sure that there particular interest in that scene is taken care of so that they don’t lose their job when the studio sees the dailies.
So you going to have people coming in to fix the flowers and fix the carpet and fix the actors hair even though she might be crying in the middle of a huge moment they are going to come in and do that unless you say nobody comes into this room unless we say it is okay and when the time is okay so we have a no running in the room policy.
We don’t yell “cut” between tapes a lot of times we just say hault and then it keeps everybody out of the room and everybody is quite respectful and then we reset everybody to make sure that the mood is right move things around so a lot of times we will run 5.6.7 takes in a row without cutting and that helps keep that flow together.
We try to use that big support team a lot in pre production to get thing rolling a head of time pre light as many rooms as possible so when we walk in it is ready to go but there are not there lightning in between takes and things like that, so there is a lot of little tricks you learn throughout the way to make it feel kind of intimate.
Q:I do have one quick follow up if I am allowed, with that freedom that you found how you work within your actors does that ever cause a problem in the editing room and do you guys work with two cameras a lot when it comes to shooting.
JAY DUPLASS: We almost always have two cameras sometimes we have 3 cameras and it would be a problem in the editing room if MARK DUPLASS and I were not totally obsessive about continuity and story, I mean we are building, if we are redoing a scene in the moment we are building it in our own heads and making sure that we have anything, in general.
MARK DUPLASS: We work as editors for a long time so our brains kind of work that way and we usually track it.
A: Thank you guys.
Q: Hi I am huge, huge fans of your work on both TOGETHERNESS and on your PERFORMANCE and Transparent and that’s amazing.
MARK DUPLASS: Thank you very much, next question.
Q: I mean I am also part of a sibling director team my sister and I work together and my question is how much of your own life and personal experiences do you bring into your work I guess particularly in TOGETHERNESS and also how do you kind of do that in a way where you are able to bring your own personal experience whether it is super specific but then also expanding it to just create this obviously fictional character.
MARK DUPLASS: Yes I mean obviously the two most deeply personal pieces of film making or TV that we made would be the PUPPYCHAIR and TOGETHERNESS I think. PUPPY CHAIR was very reflective of what we were going through in our twenties and being in the dating game and figuring out are we getting married or are we breaking up, what is this and the whole epidemic that seems to be happening to people in our age group and then TOGETHERNESS is very reflective of the soup of our lives and that sort of approaching forty phase of you are either parents and not married and you are locked into your life and you miss your freedom or you haven’t locked into your and you are like Jesus Christ how is this going to happen for me.
I am half way done and that being said a lot of the plot in TOGETHERNESS thank God we never had to deal with, so a lot of that stuff is sort of like made up on the plotting front but the ideas and the core of what that show is, which is we want to be so close to people and we want to be as close as we can and then as soon as we start to get too close we are like get me the fuck out of here I need my freedom and that is very much how we feel and how we live and that kind of colours the whole thing.
Q: Hey JAY DUPLASS and MARK DUPLASS, you guys have made a lot of stuff I don’t know if you realize that or not but you made a lot and lot of cool stuff.
MARK DUPLASS: I am going to check my MDB.
JAY DUPLASS: Again after you checked it 15 minutes ago.
Q: I am sure a lot of film makers here are juggling multiple project as well doing projects on their own with their friends and all that stuff, so I guess do you have any advice on how to prioritize those projects because I know you guys juggle a lot.
JAY DUPLASS: I think the biggest thing that we realize by running multiple projects is that it stopped us from getting too precious a big journey in like us becoming artist that you could just move through, a piece of art is like not being too brainy and precious about it we would over analyze things and get conceptive about things and the more than we can just force ourselves to just make stuff and go with our instincts has been better I think.
I always encourage people when they are writing play to please have another screen play so that you can cheat on the screen play with and it is always the case when you are working on your master piece and you doing this little side project it just seems really easy that’s the one.
The other one would be just this idea that would be annoying to all of your friends, so yea I mean I think having a lot of projects is great as long as you not like overwhelmed and you know that way you can also do what I was talking about before which is you can allow them to breath and have their own life and listen to your friends and listen to their notes when they give them to you like go let the ones lead that get the most traction not the one that you are necessarily most fixated on.
MARK DUPLASS: I would also say know yourself a little bit too not everybody is a multitasker you know and that doesn’t mean that you are not good at making stuff if you can’t do 4 things at a time. A lot of the film makers we work with are just very singular you know they have to have their thing.
If you find yourself being singular I would say try to give yourself a limit of making that singular thing something practical that can be made from a budgetary standpoint, something people miss a lot you know I am passionate about this, it is a period piece zombies on mars it is a $150 million movie and I just have to have write, I am like God bless you.
Write that movie that’s fine but find that beating heart of that story and what it is about and go write another one that cost twenty grand to make with that core theme because you will have a little easier time getting that made.
AARON: Can you think of any specific examples of an idea that was in one project of yours that ended up in another one.
MARK DUPLASS: I don’t know if it works so much that way, one thing is that it’s like this is embarrassing to admit but, like when we were setting about making the ONE I LOVE I was like I love Star Man so much, I love like how Jeff Bridges is like one person and then another person and there you are dealing with person who is the shadow that you love and maybe they are all that and maybe they are not that.
That movie is so expensive I am not going to be able to make anything like that, is there a smaller version I started thinking oh, what if it just a house movie where you got multiple versions and because that’s cheep to make and then we brought that to a film maker.
That was literally my pitch to Charlie McDowell I was like I love what Star Man was there are multiples in a house it’s got to be cheap it’s got to be romantic and kind of weird. Want to write it and he did.
Awesome thanks guys.
Q: Hey, I feel like I should have met anonymous inspiring film maker but.
MARK DUPLASS: You get out of here right now you.
I am interested in the way you engage with projects and you said you did 19 out of 20 maybe to ford with in some capacity and you guys obviously studied in relationships and personal relationship, my questions is more about dating and relationships. Is that how you approach relationship you know when you were dating I think the culture now is you go on a million shitty dates and don’t give anybody a chance.
I am curious the ratio of 95% moving forward should I be giving everybody more of a chance.
MARK DUPLASS: Just to be clear you would like to have sex on 95% of your dates.
A: I think sex is easy relationships aren’t.
MARK DUPLASS: I am kidding, we unfortunately don’t know anything about dating because we have been married for like 13/14 years.
JAY DUPLASS: I have had like 5 girlfriends and one of them is my wife.
MARK DUPLASS: I mean I love your question I love the thoughtfulness and the heart behind it, I have zero idea how to answer it for you unfortunately I wish I could be more helpful because you got a great spirit.
Q: Hi, so you guys talked about your background in music what are three songs that would be on your dream sound track money and right are no object.
MARK DUPLASS: The interesting thing is when you are doing a show for HBO rights to songs are a little bit cheaper because they don’t have to go into theatres so we actually realize that like we can kind of get big songs now and like one of the first ones we went to was Fleetwood Mack, that’s like a big band for us not only just because we just love the music and like grew up listening to it.
Like the weirdly polish vinyl back seats of our parents car growing up but the spirit of that band and how they needed each other so badly, despite the conflicts fight any of those 5 members could have led their own band and be good at it but they were like made the ultimate 5 person transformer and made the great band you know.
It always appeals to us and we always think about that when we are thinking about going off and making our solo projects, we are like people want what Fleetwood Mack dude do they don’t want weird Lindsay Buckingham solo record nobody gives a shit about that so that’s one for me.
JAY DUPLASS: Steven Nix did pretty good.
MARK DUPLASS: Steven Nix did alright, that’s a good point.
A: Holiday Road is a great song track song.
MARK DUPLASS: There you go.
JAY DUPLASS: Dam deep cut, I don’t know I am listening to Fleet Fox right now, but it is weird because a lot of time what you, similar to questions I have answered are that you get really obsessed with songs and you try and force a song into a movie and everyone watching and everyone is like what the fuck you doing man, this makes no sense whatsoever. We are not very bullish about jamming our stuff, and every once in a while it works out great but.
MARK DUPLASS: For instance while we were writing our script the (49:26) the doe dock of thealon, we listened to John Parr’s men in motion the theme song from St Elmo’s Fire over and over to inspire us on the sporting Montague/montage the song didn’t fit so well in the movie.
AARON: You guys don’t make music anymore.
MARK DUPLASS: Just around the house with our kids that’s what we do.
JAY DUPLASS: I thought I should say something about the relationship thing and I think you would probably get this from our stuff, but I think relationships are really hard and that’s the point that’s what I would like to say about that, okay.
Q: Would you both please share your most memorable moments from the last I guess the last 15 years or wherever your career as span.
MARK DUPLASS: Our most memorable moment from however long our career as spand, there is definitely some stuff. I remember specifically being in the Elmo draft house in 2005 with PUPPY CHAIR here and you know we grew up in Austin trying to get our short films in South West South West, we have so many rejection letters and we would go see some of our old favourite Indi films over and over again all around town at the Dobie and at the Alamo and that’s where we got our film education.
It was here and then we were sitting in that theatre we were just busy and stressed out because it was our first feature and we weren’t really thinking about the monumental nature of what was happening and the lights went down and then like our move came up on the screen.
It’s like I am sitting in the seat in which we watched Buffalo 66 in which we watched all of our favourite movies and our movie is playing on the screen, and it was very.
JAY DUPLASS: And a quarter of it was being projected on the ceiling.
MARK DUPLASS: That all part of it, that’s Indi cinema bro.
JAY DUPLASS: That was pretty good, mine was probably when we sat down at the library theatre at Sundance to watch PUPPY CHAIR screened the first time at Sundance, because that was truly, we never dreamed we would get a short film into Sundance much less a feature but we had exceeded all of our wildest dreams in that moment and the screening was like incredible well $15,000 move and there were four five twelve million dollar movies screening at that festival and it was a movie made you know with just family and friends.
And MARK DUPLASS said it’s probably never going to get better than this and he was right, it has gotten as good in different ways but it has never been better than that moment.
MARK DUPLASS: We have blazers but we don’t have our youth, its hard guys.
AARON: Unfortunately these two are going to be our last questions, don’t worry you are already standing there you good.
Q: Hi, my question is pretty much for every movie pitch you guys were saying we keep it cheap we make it quick that kind of thing and back to your Star Man point where you were like it’s going to be like Star Man but it’s this, has there ever been an idea that you guys have had kicked around for a long time and you never really had to sparse down but you still keep I guess seeking it out like you know your version of doomed kind of thing.
MARK DUPLASS: We do have ideas and they are not, we can’t get them because they are too expensive, we can’t get them because we are creatively not capable of cracking them so they. We have the document for over one hundred different movie ideas, so like this would be so great why can’t we figure out how to make this work.
We have so many of those little things and sometimes they come around and we mature as artist and figure them out, sometimes they come as sub plots in another movie, but yes we have so many ideas of things that we feel like God this would be so great if we just figure out how to crack it and we just not there yet.
JAY DUPLASS: We did have the script for Jeff Lewis at home for about 6 years before we made it and we knew that we could not afford it because of the bridge scene with children in the water and the car going down off the bridge and all that stuff and but instead of like pursuing it relentlessly and becoming fund raisers for 6 years.
We just let it sit on the shelf which turned out to be the best thing possible because 7 years later we had I guess whatever the approval to make the $10m movie and I would recommend that as well, don’t try to make a movie that is almost impossible for you to make where you are at because then you would become a fund raiser and not a film maker.
MARK DUPLASS: It’s a good point to bring up there is a misconception about it which JAY DUPLASS and I do, so many people they hear we make movies cheaply and they are like great, so here is my script and it’s like a $50m movie and I would love to make this for $15 million grand and like you guys do it you want to do it.
We are like you can’t take like that big movie and make it small you have to engineer a movie correctly to be made cheaply and on a small level and what we think is a terrible idea is taking that 30 day movie and try to jam it in 18 days that’s awful.
What we actually recommend is taking an 8 day movie and making it over the course of 11 so that you can should 8 to 10 hour days, have to breath to mess up let your crew get some sleep and you can drive them hard core and so we tried to have actually short but gently shoots that are 20% longer than you would normally do but it has been designed so small that you have that luxury.
AARON: Can I give you guys a pre be so you are self proclaimed shitty rocky ass movie.
MARK DUPLASS: Yes.
AARON: How about a create style reboot, that’s a baby.
MARK DUPLASS: No.
AARON: Last question that would be a good one.
Q: Lots of pressure, I don’t know if it is but MARK DUPLASS I first saw you on the league and I know you don’t really talked about it much so I was wondering if you could speak to how you got involved in that because it is so separate from the rest of your work which is more scribal but it actually took me awhile to connect you were the same.
MARK DUPLASS: It is kind of separate from what we do and it is kind of like a thing that I did that liked help me quite honestly like buy my house and take care of my family and I am really, really appreciative of it. let’s have another question that is about us, let’s do something different that includes all of us.
You don’t have to do that because you came up with the league but let’s do one more.
AARON: I want to make it one of you guys I have been enjoying enough up here.
MARK DUPLASS: And you done even have to get up to the mike you can throw your hand up.
AARON: What’s next for you two?
MARK DUPLASS: We are making a bunch of original movies for Netflix right now and we really like that company they are good to us they did PUPPY CHAIR with us a long time ago and then we are making a bunch of TV shows for HBO we have TOGETHERNESS there we have a show called AnimalWe just started airing that it is really fun it is a show that is made independently and something that we really interested in JAY DUPLASS has got in the middle of shooting Transparent right now and we mentioned that earlier we writing a book for the first time about kind of who we are what we have gone through which is great because we kind of don’t know what we are doing and kind of feel like a 13 year old kid picking up a guitar for the first time and just messing up all over the place and the learning curve is huge and that’s really I mean we are getting our asses handed to us but it’s really fun and inspiring.
JAY DUPLASS: In the immediate future we are trying not to puke from too much queso consumption.
MARK DUPLASS: Yes.
AARON: I know it’s like some of you are torn in some many directions but if you get a chance make sure you MARK DUPLASS down on your schedule Asperger’s Are Us and Rainbow Time, thanks so much for coming out.
MARK DUPLASS: Thank you guys thank you Aaron Ellis.
A look inside the creative process from today’s leading writers and directors. This week’s on story, a conversation with Jay Duplass Duplass, talent by the Quirky films, The Puffy Chair and the HBO series togetherness.
Jay Duplass: We all watch movies and I watch so many movies that I think it’s very easy to think that we can all make movies you know but the truth is like it’s an incredibly complex form and craft and art where you’re synthesizing a good story that is well told. And is told in a visual way and where it’s the people that you’re telling the story to are like two years away. That’s a weird thing.
In this episode. Jay Duplass Duplass discusses the challenges of bringing DIY Indie filmmaking to Hollywood.
Jay Duplass: The name New Orleans it was culturally bereft. You know just living in a little suburb, hanging out, making weird little art in our own way we had a kind of a hippie godmother who came and helped us like cook in the oven and makes weird stained glass and then in 1982 it was announced that cable was coming to our neighborhood. What is cable? Is the giant cable laid out on the front lawn or something. We didn’t know what it was so when all of our friends were into Empire Strikes Back. We were watching Hard hitting relationship dramas. With nudity and divorce like Kramer vs Kramer I’ve seen like seventeen times between 1982 and 1984. We didn’t really like the Star Wars movies that much. I mean they were kind of cool but that’s not what Mark Duplass and I were talking about. You know we were talking about the heavy hitting stuff. I mean we were watching and watching a lot of Woody Allen. Well you know I came here in 1991 and it was a magical time in film and Austin Slacker and everyone was talking about film and I was like you mean cable. You mean that thing on the front lawn. And I started to wake up a little bit to the fact that film is an art. Movies didn’t just get pumped in over a cable like human beings made movies very specifically Rick Linklater, I just probably my sophomore year I started taking a class and I started taking more classes and then I ended up. Almost getting another major in RTF and just I started writing and making films and you know we were cutting out. We’re making movies on sixteen millimeter and cutting them with razor blades super old school and you know in true form they were terrible. Early in film school I was trying to emulate the Coen brothers as was half of our film class. Honestly Mark Duplass would like come visit me from high school and I was in UT and I would make a movie and I put a minute and we just kept doing it and they were bad and every once in a while one of them would be so bad and we’d be like what was it so bad about that movie. And you know it really was more of just like feeling around in the dark process but I think all those influences are there always in you, in your try and you know we were always trying to make something that was like deep and funny.
You know if you’re a painter. No one really expects to like sell a painting for a decent amount of money until they’ve made like hundreds of paintings but everyone has this weird subconscious thing in their mind that they’re going to wake up one morning and just write something and then make it and it’s going to be the best thing ever. And I really feel like that just doesn’t happen. So, all this is just to say that I think it’s incredibly difficult thing to make something that doesn’t suck and it took me ten years of making things. I hadn’t made any thing great and I look back on my editing stuff too. And I was like I don’t really edited. I edited like two things that I was proud of. And I was just pushing thirty and getting that point where it’s like how much longer can I do this to myself and to my family and you know my brother said OK we’re going to make a movie today. And I said well how are we going to do that and he said I don’t care. We have mom and dad’s video camera. Low one chip mini DV and he said come up with something. And so my idea was OK this thing happen to me yesterday where I tried to like record the greeting of my answering machine. Yes it was an answering machine at the time. Press the button B. And I kept repeating it. I couldn’t get it right. I kept it up and I had a nervous breakdown. The whole areas right. And you know his eyes just wide and so big when I told him that story which is now the basis of how we create stories, we tell each other stories and when you don’t have to ask if he likes it or not, you see it. And he was just like that’s everything. I had a one button down shirt and some pants with pleats that I had used when I worked for the Kelly people and he went and got it and he looked at the back of the shirt and it was called the John Ashford shirt and that became his character name and he walked in the door and I filmed a twenty minute one take of him doing this and he was in a similar place to me and he tried to get it right and got it wrong.
This is four one six nine seven five four. I am sorry I missed your call But if you could
Jay Duplass: We submitted it to Sundance and the head of the festival called me a month later and said this is my favorite short that I’ve seen in a very very very long time. You know the next movie we made was Tiny bit bigger. It cost fifty bucks and it was involved Marc and his girlfriend in a kitchen that moved to a living room. We had one room and they were playing Scrabble and they ended up having a huge fight and that was the second short film that we got in Sundance.
Well we had made two short films that went to Sundance and we were terrified of making a feature because we had made a couple of really cheap features here in Austin in our mid twenty’s that didn’t work out and we were just terrified to get up again. But we knew that we were really good short filmmakers not because we thought it but because the whole world was telling us. So, we were like OK terrified of feature filmmaking but we were good at shorts. Why don’t we do this? Why don’t we make a feature film that’s basically like thirteen five minute shorts in a row and so that’s what we did and we used all the materials that we had available to us at the time. We had just moved to Brooklyn for dumb reasons basically because all the filmmakers in Sundance were in Brooklyn like we have to move to Brooklyn. I don’t know. So we just moved to Brooklyn apartment. Mark Duplass’s girlfriend Katie had was from a small town in Maine that was not only going to allow us to shoot there but would like beg us to shoot there and like can we come out and be extras in your movie for free and we’re like yeah that’s great. And Mark Duplass had a van for touring with his band at the time and those were the materials that we needed to make that movie that and a DVX100.
Like shoot Mark Duplass for like a few takes and feel like I got it and then I would turn around and maybe shoot Katie on The Puffy Chair for instance but the whole thing is we’re doing the scene from the very beginning to the very end. So if I need a bathroom portion that move in a thicket into the bedroom. I’ll wait in the bathroom for the beginning and once she leaves I’ll ride out into the bedroom and see what I can catch of that and it just kind of puts them in the mindset of like this is something that is happening. And their job is not to give it to the camera, their job is to like do something real and the camera and I think that there’s some special about that in retrospect. I mean the time it was just like this is the fastest way we can shoot this you know or this is the only way we can shoot this because we don’t have crew. But now I realize that it’s a revolutionary to the studio system of filmmaking because essentially in a studio system the actors are brought to the apparatus of the filmmaking apparatus which in a studio system is a massive massive apparatus with like tons of trucks and a percentage of like fifty to sixty to one hundred people and when you change that and you say OK the actors are first now and the filmmaking apparatus which in the case of Puffy Chairs like me and a boom operator is brought to the actors. There’s a feeling that is completely different and I think audiences feel that. I think I know now there’s not a lot of people who do smart comedy well, I mean there’s like crazy balls out comedy like Dumb and Dumber 2 and then there’s drama. But there is a pocket of really smart comedies that I don’t know there’s not a lot of them out there you know and I think people want that and studio heads really want that. So, that they were very interested and in their mind they were irrationally thinking if these guys look what they can do with fifteen thousand dollars. What if we gave him fifteen million dollars the movie would literally be like a thousand times better.
We started you know writing scripts for different people and we have been surprisingly successful in getting famous people to come into a room and bare everything in an audition realm which is rare and then we don’t really rehearse on set because I would say thirty percent of what is in our movies is a first take that is such a big surprise that no one could have predicted it and everyone in the room is like it’s alive.
Jay Duplass: Mark Duplass and I were just you know caveman, we would come out of the cave and grunt and move lights and people around and just like OK go you press the button. You know and then required we had a minimum, we got the crew down as small as we could to like sixty people but it was unionized and you know we had to explain to everyone over and over and over again what we were doing and it was very painful to us because our process is, you know we use a lot of improvisation and it’s all about discovery and trying to create an environment where like lightning can strike and then doesn’t really matter what that lightning looks like we will shape it up later and that is hard to do in the studio environment.
Togetherness came about in a really stupid way my brother’s on the state T.V. show called The League and he goes away for three or four months every fall and I was like I want to do something in the fall. So, like wrote this like pilot that I was going to shoot with my friend Steve this is who’s in Baghead. He’s my best friend that I was just going to have fun. Maybe acting or maybe just makes a web series or something and once it was written all of our friends were like No this is not a web series. Do yourself a favor pitch this to HBO and we pitched it and they loved it and it was the type of story that just could go on forever and ever. It’s about being forty and having kids and trying to make your dreams come true and how both of those things is almost impossible and how it’s like you’re this close to drowning in every second and I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I would say the main thing that’s different about this kind of T.V. in particular which is serial long form storytelling is that you are living in an open universe. You know and I’ve had, HBO has been amazing. It kind of helping me get go through that. It’s weird because when I pitched it to HBO they said yes but I know they didn’t want it to be about one character and three peripheral characters. They wanted to be about four characters that were equal and it. I couldn’t get my head around it because I’m a feature filmmaker and there’s so many things about feature filmmaking that it is Nate natural to the form so this is not a negative comment but there’s a lot of artifice that goes into feature film writing in particular like when you’re writing your first twenty pages everything that all the little nuggets you’re setting up, you’re literally already thinking about how you’re going to pay those off in like one hundred minutes which usually causes weird humane and emotional compromises. Hence,
I’m not speaking. I am gibberish but you know when you’re in a movie and you’re like yeah I can see where this is going. They’ve got to get together and you know the things have to happens, all the things have to go. TV doesn’t have that and that is incredibly powerful and I don’t think it’s just TV’s in everybody’s houses and home theaters that is making this kind of HBO storytelling so powerful. It has something to do with the fact it is an open universe. And I think what I’ve been learning is that you have to do your plotty payoffs in every episode but the big big emotional that’s going on with your characters just keeps expanding and growing and there’s something incredibly natural about it. That is so freeing that I was so excited about it. I can’t even deal with it right now because that’s one of the biggest things that Mark Duplass and I have had trouble with in our features is like finding that perfect sweet spot of how to give people the closure that they need but to keep it real. You know I mean like with Puffy Chair we didn’t really give people. Everyone wanted that couple to get together even though they were fighting their off the whole movie and when we showed it at Sundance. The premiere we didn’t think it was that big a deal because you know we were going through that at the time being in your mid twenty’s and trying to figure out if you’re going to get married or break up and either option seems totally viable. You’re out of your mind you know and the movie ended and they broke up and the movie went to Black. And a dude in the back of the audience went ‘NO’ in an angry way. As a person who makes a full blown living making movies and has been offered fifty million plus dollar movies. All it really is about is expressing the things that are inside of you and sharing them with other people. That’s really all that matters.
[You’ve been watching the conversation with Jay Duplass Duplass on On Story.]
[Next up filmmaker Ramin Serry and a short film Future Hero.]
Ramin: Future Hero is a tongue in cheek sci-fi comedy spoof of a few films. I got the idea from having a newborn baby and the new born baby is actually in the film, my son Henry and wanting to see what my baby would look like when he’s grown up because we’re stuck. You know with in the diapers stage and it felt like I was taking forever and I thought gosh I wish I could just fast forward in time and see what my baby’s going to be like as it grown up and then I thought well what if I see him as a grown up and he meets me and he doesn’t like me so much. It was important for me to tell the story because it was even though it’s a silly comedy it’s about fatherhood and family and it’s about a father and son working out their issues as they battle time traveling killer Android.
