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Can The Indie Kids Save The Tired Hollywood Blockbuster?
Josh Whedon, Sam Mendes and Kenneth Branagh have been given the chance to put a fresh spin on the blockbuster and it's worked. But the industry needs to mine the indie world further to give Hollywood a much needed kick in the arse...
Do you ever get the feeling that maybe Hollywood has stagnated in recent years? Aside from the odd gem – The Dark Knight, The Avengers, the Bourne series, Inception – recent tent-pole action movies have been massively underwhelming. Endless comic book movies – remember The Green Lantern? Me neither – and sequels, franchise upon franchise, risk draining the enthusiasm of cinemagoers. If your choice is between getting ripped off to watch yet another Spiderman reboot, or sit at home watching Die Hard on Netflix for the millionth time, what are you going to do? It’s cheaper, more comfortable and less hassle to just stream movies, or watch DVDs, at home. So why bother?
Spectacle isn’t enough. Blowing shit up on a huge screen for two hours becomes incredibly boring after the twentieth CGI explosion. There’s only so much debris you can propel at the screen before viewers just switch off. Even The Dark Knight Rises, a film I enjoyed immensely, was guilty of that. It has a numbing effect, especially when it’s all clearly done in post production and the actors are leaping away from nothing at all. And if the story isn’t up to scratch, if the script is poor or full of holes, then dazzling effects won’t make up for it (see Prometheus).
Blowing shit up on a huge screen for two hours becomes incredibly boring after the twentieth CGI explosion
What Hollywood needs, then, is new ideas. Fresh blood. New writers and directors to add some substance and imagination to the mix. What the films mentioned at the top have in common is they were all made by directors not normally known for big, blockbusting movies. Christopher Nolan, director of the Batman trilogy and Inception, started out with the bare-bones thriller Following, then made Memento, another low-budget effort, before someone noticed he had the skills to helm a bigger movie. Someone gave him money, and look what he did. Similarly, Paul Greengrass was a documentary and TV filmmaker before some clever producer figured out he could translate those techniques to an action movie. That action movie was The Bourne Supremacy, a taut and beautifully choreographed movie that clearly takes huge influence from Greengrass’s documentary past.
The director of the first Bourne movie, Doug Liman, is a more standard Hollywood director, following up The Bourne Identity with Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Jumper. He’s currently working on Jumper 2, if that’s any indication of the level Hollywood has plunged to in an effort to make money. Who even saw Jumper 1? What was it about? It made over $220 million at the box office, so someone must have seen it, thus giving studio execs permission to make a second one, but for the life of me I have no recollection of ever seeing it reviewed or advertised.
My idea, crazy as it might sound, is to give a big expensive summer blockbuster to a promising indie filmmaker, or an imaginative foreign director, and see what he can do
My idea, crazy as it might sound, is to give a big expensive summer blockbuster to a promising indie filmmaker, or an imaginative foreign director, and see what he can do. Take Nicholas Winding Refn, director of Drive and Bronson. He clearly has the skills and the vision to pull off a blockbuster. Why not give him a franchise to play with? Well, actually, according to IMDb, they already have. He’s attached as the director of the remake of Logan’s Run. Okay it’s a remake, and they’ve apparently dropped the maximum age people can live to from 30 to 21, but I can safely say that it will be better than if someone like Tony Scott had signed on. At least it’ll have some energy and wit. But Refn isn’t quite left field enough. I want the Green Lantern sequel – and there will inevitably be one, as the original made $222 million worldwide – to be given to Harmony Korine. He’s definitely not a box office draw – he’s made films about a colony of celebrity impersonators on an island in Scotland, and Trash Humpers, a movie shot on VHS about trash-humping retirees – but who cares? The film’s going to make money anyway. People will go see it based solely on the fact that it’s a comic book movie. Don’t you want to see what would happen if a person as crazy as Harmony Korine was given hundreds of millions of dollars and told to make a movie about a man with super powers? It would be insane and frightening, but it would also be thrilling, and at the very least it would be different.
Thankfully this is happening already, albeit in slightly less risky form, with the release of Skyfall, the latest Bond movie, directed by Sam Mendes. Now, American Beauty, Mendes’ most famous film, isn’t exactly a thriller, and he is known for his slow, meditative, bleakly funny dramas (Jarhead, an action movie with no action springs to mind). So why give the reigns of a multi-million pound action colossus like Skyfall to the man behind Revolutionary Road? It must be because he can offer something a mercenary filmmaker like Rob Cohen, director of such hits as xXx and Stealth, can’t.
But the point is, a little bit of risk, a bit of belief and a bit of creative freedom, and Hollywood could actually become worth paying attention to again
A visionary director, backed by a world-class screenwriter (Cormac McCarthy’s gone into film, can’t more fiction writers follow him?) and funded by a big studio to do whatever they wanted would give the world an utterly unique, and probably quite bizarre, movie. Imagine David Lynch or Kelly Reichardt with $100 million and a franchise behind them – the possibilities are endless. Yes it might tank, but any movie can fail, no matter how safe the choices. At least with an alternative-type director, it’ll be an interesting watch.
Look what Kenneth Branagh did with Thor. A middle-of-the-road superhero, definitely a level below Superman et al, gets taken on by a Shakespearean actor/director not much known for his action movies, with a studio paying the tab, and the result is one of the best comic book movies yet made. Joss Whedon, a man more known for his television writing than anything, managed something similar with The Avengers. Some imagination and the trust of the higher-ups is all it would take for some weird and wonderful films to start appearing. This is of course assuming that someone like Gaspar Noé or Werner Herzog would want a superhero franchise or the next Transformers movie or whatever. But the point is, a little bit of risk, a bit of belief and a bit of creative freedom, and Hollywood could actually become worth paying attention to again. The multiplex might be a place worth visiting again. It probably wouldn’t work, but why not try? What’s the worst that could happen?
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COMMENTS
Interesting article. The challenge will be to find indie directors who don't think that making a commercial feature would somehow involve sacrificing their artistic integrity. Love it or hate it, the studios are in this for one reason only - to make money. They're not going to gamble $250 million on an obscure choice just to keep indie fans happy. Remember how Richard Donner panicked on the set of Superman when Marlon Brando suggested that he play Jor-El as a bagel, or a giant green suitcase. Art-house and Hollywood play by different rules, and that's not always a bad thing. By the way - Doug Liman may be a standard Hollywood director now, but he started out as an indie director of some distinction with the great Swingers and Go.
I think Indie has its place, even smaller hollywood films - like Gareth says, leave Hollywood to do their moneymaking - it hasnt harmed smaller films too much, people still enjoy films without explosions and car chases and plenty of films gain cult status and sell way more DVDs than cinema tickets. Granted, more money could be spent on different stories and directors but i think Hollywood will always be about the blockbuster so that'll set apart all the other films, which is a good thing
Of course Hollywood is all about money, I'm not disputing that. But they do gamble – every film is a gamble; when you get right down to it you never know if it's going to fail or break records. I think they're heading in the right direction with Mendes, Branagh et al. I would argue that giving Mendes your shiny new Bond movie is a pretty huge gamble. And why do you think Mendes agreed to do Bond? He must have been given some assurances as to his role and creative freedom. So it is possible. I agree that Hollywood and the more “indie” world should be kept separate, but nowadays that separation is less and less visible – being truly indie is almost impossible anymore. Unless you're financing and distributing your films yourself, you're always going to run into that machine.
I agree, Hollywood has stagnated for at least a decade now and it does need a boost, but there are if I may be bold some flaws in your argument; Nolan was given the green light after Insomnia, a dull US remake of a Scandinavian gem and, with this chops and money, he got to helm a trilogy of revamped Batman movies. Greengrass got to show his potential by helming a sequel of a franchise people were bound to flock to. I guess what I'm saying is the problem, the real problem with Hollywood is that there are no original ideas. The studios steal, revamp and crib from other people's projects or set in place endless franchises and occasionally they'll strike gold with a gifted director and allow them to make an 'Inception' or a 'The Prestige' - the real gems. What Hollywood won't do, is risk money on a new arty creative director with an original idea and that's why Hollywood is stagnating and the golden age of 70s US cinema is but a distant fond memory.
@Markxist - in the kindest way possible I think you may have missed my main point, which is that people are going to go see these franchises regardless so it can't hurt to experiment a bit with the choice of director. The tickets sell themselves, so giving a more radical or unconventional filmmaker a chance to play with a pile of money isn't a completely unrealistic gamble. I also make the argument for hiring more fiction writers - I'd love to see a film written by Jonathan Safran Foer, for instance, or Jeffrey Eugenides or Sadie Frost. They'd be (relatively) cheap, they'd probably be thrilled to try their hand at a new medium, and you'd get a properly structured and well-written script. Fresh ideas are, as you say, in extremely short supply these days, and getting a few more novelists to write screenplays would definitely be a start.
@Fionn, no I appreciate what you're saying and the point you're making, but for me the real gems are beyond the franchises or unoriginal ideas-the remakes and the sequels. Nolan's best work, for me, was The Prestige and Inception. Films that probably wouldn't have been greenlit where he not to have made or signed up for the franchise films. So in the respect yes, it will be of great benefit to experiment with a choice of director as your article posits, but for me, the salvation of Hollywood would come if more gambles were made full stop - away from the franchises allowing innovative auters to make their original vision for a budget studios would happily part with for the blockbusters. The real flaw of Hollywood is the over reliance on a certain type of movie, regardless of a seemingly rejuvenated choice of directors. It's also worth considering that not every novel choice director worked for a franchise; look at Ang Lee's Hulk or Marc Foster's Quantum Of Solace, Lee Tamahori's Die Another Day *shivers at the memory*
The Dark Knight Rises was a travesty.
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