Why Hollywood needs mavericks, not franchises
The outrage in Venice is a lot like the coffee in Venice: potent, addictive, and there always seems to be some brewing. Last Tuesday morning, I was in the Palazzo del Cinema for the first screening of Mother!, which was playing in competition at the Venice Film Festival. Directed by Darren Aronofsky, of Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan fame, it stars Jennifer Lawrence as a meek young housewife wrangling a run of increasingly strange guests.
The opening half, in which the callers are all members of the same tartly dysfunctional family, is unnerving enough. But in act two, when her husband’s adoring fans turn up, it’s as if the bottom of the film suddenly drops out, and everything in it goes hurtling towards hell. What ensues is a kind of grotesque funhouse reflection of a planet in crisis – and exactly the kind of mad departure that riles up a festival crowd. Sure enough, as the credits rolled, the cheers and boos mushroomed. No one could agree on whether the film was good or not – personally, I thought it was sensational – but all conceded they hadn’t seen anything quite like it.
When you’re watching three or more films a day at a festival, something as brazenly original as Mother! cuts through the haze and becomes an event. That’s one reason festivals nurture relationships with filmmakers who regularly show you things you haven’t seen before: be it Aronofsky, Jonathan Glazer and Takeshi Kitano at Venice, or Michael Haneke, Nicolas Winding Refn, Park Chan-wook and others at Cannes. Yet elsewhere in the industry, showing people something they’ve never seen before is a business model to be avoided at all costs.
Over at Lucasfilm last week, Star Wars: Episode IX lost its director. The studio later announced that they and Colin Trevorrow had made the mutual decision to part ways after concluding their “visions for the project differ”.
Extraordinarily, Trevorrow is the third director to have been removed from a Star Wars project by Lucasfilm in as many months. In late June, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller departed the forthcoming standalone Han Solo adventure, with “different creative visions” again the officially cited cause of death. The Lego Movie duo were summarily replaced by Ron Howard
– a proficient, dependable, experienced filmmaker who, God love him, doesn’t seem to have had a creative vision in his life.
Here’s the Star Destroyer-sized irony: without a maverick director being handed creative carte blanche by a studio, Star Wars wouldn’t exist in the first place. United Artists, Universal and even Disney all turned down Lucas’s swashbuckling sciencefiction script: Fox agreed to make it for $8million, mainly because they saw the then-29-year-old director as a talent worth cultivating. (His previous film, American Graffiti, had been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.) No one but Lucas thought Star Wars would work until it did. In a letter to a friend shortly after he was cast as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Alec Guinness called it “fairy-tale rubbish”.
Yet over the past few months, it’s become clear we need more big films capable of provoking a little Guinnessean scepticism. At the end of August, American cinemas had their lowest weekend of takings since September 2001: things haven’t been quite as bad over here, but the supposed sure things have been struggling. The fifth entries in both the Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean series – one-time blockbuster behemoths – each took less than half of their immediate predecessors.
A report in Thursday’s New York Times revealed that many studio executives have decided to blame Rotten Tomatoes, a website that assigns percentage scores to each film, then rates them “fresh” or “rotten”, based on what proportion of its reviews were positive.
It’s a flawed metric – and some critics (me, anyway) wince at their carefully written words being reduced to just another cheer or boo from the mob. But, like Venice’s wild response to Mother!, it does give a vivid sense of which way the wind’s blowing on any given release.
The Times’ piece noted studios’ horror that Rotten Tomatoes scores were now so prevalent, they appeared at the top of internet searches, and could dissuade even casual cinemagoers from buying a ticket to a film that had been subject to a critical pile-on. Compare the low Rotten Tomatoes scores of notable summer flops like Baywatch (19 per cent) and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (27 per cent) to surprise hits like Dunkirk and Baby Driver (both 93 per cent), and you could just about argue that what critics think actually matters these days… up to a point.
Dunkirk, especially, blindsided everyone. Warner Bros expected Christopher Nolan’s exceptional war to plateau at around £25million in the UK. It’s taken more than twice that to date, and continues to stun and startle cinemagoers en masse.
Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, a terrific, idiosyncratic car-chase caper, took £12.5million: again, far above expectations, and a handy million-anda-half more than Cars 3. These are films with no franchise to sustain – so like Mother!, they hit you with everything they’ve got.
Of course I want to see more Star Wars: I’ve loved the new films as much as anyone else. But I want to see the next Star Wars too. And to find it, the movies have to remember how to behave like they’ve got nothing to lose.