Do audiences want auteurs?
June 4th 2008 23:46
This week, Geoff Egan posted a comment on the 'need' for a director on a given movie. He wonders what classic movies might look like if directed by someone else.
"But how much better or worse would say the Godfathers have been if Scorsese directed them? Or if Jackson had directed Star Wars? What if James Cameron did Jaws or Speilberg [sic] did Aliens? "
I believe that there'd be a massive difference... almost to the point where these classics would do very poorly with critics and audiences.
The French Cahier du cinema critics, Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut, put forward the 'auteur theory', an idea that the director was the artist, much like a writer or a painter. Where the writer had his pen, and the painter has his brush and oils, the director uses the cast, crew and equipment as his tools.
For us today, this doesn't sound like anything special... after all, we've all been weaned on directors, almost to the point of failure.
Back in those days, though, Truffaut and the boys noticed that studios were using the director as a simple gear in a vast clockwork, churning out films like Spacely put out Sprockets. Truffaut's debut feature, "The 400 Blows", is a deeply personal, passionate example of filmmaking, a testament to the idea of an auteur.
M. Night Shyamalan desperately wants to be an auteur. In fact, his actions seem to imply that he wants to rise above mere auteurship and elevate himself to the pantheon of demigods. People that meet him call him arrogant and self-centered, quick to anger, and, worst of all, deluded with the idea that people should treat him as a superstar.
This would be tolerable if Shyamalan's body of work was well-received, but the truth is indicative of a director whose skills are waning. His latest movie, "Lady in the Water", cast himself as a writer that creates prophetic works of fiction. There's a water nymph in there, somewhere, but the audiences can't help but glare at the director's love of himself.
Here's an interview with him, watch at 3:55 to hear him talk about his desire to act, and how he cut himself out of a movie:
Hollywood desperately wants directors like Shyamalan, directors who step up to front their work, putting their sticky stamp on the work. They want this because it adds another factor of stability to the box office returns.
Big stars bring in big money. Can't big directors attract the same?
The New York Times published an interesting article about M. Night and the Hollywood faith, noting that his films have made successively less money, casting soot all over his brightly burning air of self-satisfaction.
"After “Signs” grossed more than $400 million worldwide, “The Village” took in only $255 million. “Lady in the Water,” which opened in 2006, had a budget of about $75 million and made less than $70 million."
This gives studio execs sweaty palms - Shyamalan has traded successfully on his name, and now audiences were deserting him?
Directors are, indeed, a powerful entity in the creation of a film, but Hollywood is much too fickle to take advantage of their auteurship. Big-budgets make the studios rightfully nervous, so pressure is put on the director from the producers to make the film more accessible, more family-friendly, more conforming to market research.
The end result is that the director, who may very well be an auteur, has his vision clouded by the factory workings of the Hollywood machine. Even the mighty giants, like Steven Spielberg, are able to be toppled with misfires.
Auteurs still exist, but they need to exist in an isolated bubble, free from the probing hands of studios. Directors like Jia Zhangke carry their own personal vision and he has a dedicated following - but the truth is, most people wouldn't sit through a Jia Zhangke film. I had to convince myself to sit through "Unknown Pleasures", only seeing the devastating beauty of it when the end credits rolled.
*this image is from The Hindu
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