“Blood Simple” was the first film I bought a ticket for at a film festival. It was screening at the NYFF and I soon came to recognize that the films accepted to that fest were of a exceedingly high quality. The curatorial taste behind that festival choices was something I had confidence in. They gained my trust precisely because they have never tried to be all things for all people, and for that I have always been willing to pay a premium for. The NYFF was, and is, a trusted filter.
Too many festivals these days program too many films without revealing, or reveling in, their curatorial hands, diminishing the power of their brand in the process. If festivals are going to become the new curators, that will have to change. Festivals must emphasize their unique taste, if not overall, then within sidebars at the festival.
Today’s guest post is from Louise Smith, the producer of Nash Edgerton’s THE SQUARE (out now in theaters in the US and highly recommended).
I’ve just returned from a trip to New York & LA for the release of my film THE SQUARE.
In the lead up to the opening weekend, I was part of some Q & A sessions with Nash Edgerton (the director), and we were asked a couple of questions that I thought I’d share with you:
Had we ever thought to subtitle our movie (the lady who asked the question said she couldn’t understand our accents)
Does everyone in Australia have a mullet
Hmmm… no and… um, no.
The cultural gap between Australia & America is always bigger than we Aussies anticipate – especially from the eyes of an American looking toward Australia. We however, consume American movies and TV all the time, so there’s no language or cultural things for us to learn about your characters when we watch them… we know them already because we’ve grown up on them.
Today’s guest post from producer Cotty Chubb concludes his post on recognizing audiences.
“Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.”
But here’s what we do have to do. We have to know who needs what we make. The days of a generalized appetite are likely past. The great magazines of my childhood are gone: The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look.
In their place a multiplicity of niches… Bass-fishing, trout-fishing, salt-water-flat fishing, each with its own devotees, each with its own audience and its own media that satisfies with fact and fantasy.
When Beverly Hills was awash with money in 2006 I was talking to a successful independent producer friend who’d amassed a stash of cash, hedge fund money looking for a non-correlated asset paired with a compliant bank selling leverage. [No disrespect to my friend, none; I couldn’t have raised that money.] About a picture he was intending I asked, “Who’s the audience?” With the calm that comes from a full wallet, he said “If it’s a good movie, people will come to it.” Except that he’s since entirely lost his equity, tapped out. And he made some good movies.
Really, it’s only sensible. If your job is gratifying the unspoken needs of a group of people, shouldn’t you have some idea who those people are?
Today’s guest post continues yesterday’s from producer Cotty Chubb.
A memorable dream
Two years ago in the middle of the night I woke up heart hammering. I’d been having an argument in a dream. Actually, I’d been screaming. Screaming at a director, I don’t know who. We were standing alone in the front row of an empty movie theater. “You think,” I ranted, gesturing up at the blank white screen, “you think that what’s up there is the movie, and you think that it’s your movie, you made it, it’s yours. But you’re fucking wrong [I told you I was screaming, right?]. That’s not the movie. The movie… the movie… the movie is what happens in the air between up there and down here. That’s the movie, you moron.” And then I woke up.
Maybe I’d eaten too much supper, like the boy in Winsor McKay’s Dreams of A Rarebit Fiend. Or maybe I was sick of narcissist auteurs. 2008 was a bad year for that.
Kubrick’s advice
In the mid-eighties Stanley Kubrick went to Michael Herr, one of the great writers of the Viet Nam War (Dispatches, check it out) who also wrote the Martin Sheen monologue in Apocalypse Now. Kubrick said “I want to do a Viet Nam movie and I want you to write it.” And Herr said, “I don’t know how to write a screenplay and I’m not about to learn how to write a screenplay writing for the best film-maker in the world.”
I find it very rare that I end up telling stories of movies, particularly short films. That is what happened when I first saw Nash Edgerton’s SPIDER, perhaps my favorite short of recent history. I found myself doing it again when he started making videos for Bob Dylan. This is his most recent video and it, like Dylan’s Christmas tunes, has a good sense of goofy fun — although I miss Nash’s signature mayhem.
I am relieved that Mr. Edgerton’s finally made a feature, because there’s too much story inside it for me to ever tell well. You just have to see it. With no stars, no fancy VFX, just talent in craft, he spins an excellent yarn. Discipline, the avoidance of the unnecessary, the commitment to the declared agenda, has long been one of my favorite attributes in cinema, and this man’s got it. The NY Times agrees (“Mr. Edgerton, with crack timing in the editing room and a sure hand on the Steadicam, is a coldblooded professional. His craft is frightening.”) so hopefully this film will prove that people do care for good movies, even without the hype and star trappings.
As some of you might know from my tweets when I first saw it, I dug this movie. Someone once complimented me for making many films that captured the awkwardness in sex on film as it is real life. Film history is filled with the fluff in both sex and violence. Nash stages fights as the mess they are and it does wonders for bringing us in to the movie and keeping us there. It’s just one in a number of approaches that makes this film work. He makes it look easy — and is not. Still, it makes me wonder why we can’t get noir right. This is good pulpy fun played for real without winks and nods.
Check out the trailer below, and please see it soon, as we have to vote for the work we want with our dollars.
Film-makers talk a lot about film-makers and distributors. There’s a lot of the former and not half enough of the latter. But what about the third leg of the stool, the independent film audience? Who are they? What do they want? Where the hell did they go? And how do we get them to come back?
When I was coming up, in the mid-eighties, working for Ed Pressman, independent films were hard to make, but at least the infrastructure was there.
Fueled by the roll-out of the video-cassette, a healthy eco-system developed of audience, distributor and film-maker, with a business model that relied on well-capitalized foreign sales companies, healthy home entertainment divisions, specialty theatrical distributors and a banking system that translated contracts into cash for production. Over twenty-five years, that’s all eroded.
Easy access to capital led to a glut of product. The immutable truth of Gresham’s Law prevailed. Bad movies drove out good. Distributors and financiers vanished. The audience, overwhelmed by mediocre pictures, lost its taste for the new.
