Poachers turned gamekeepers: when film critics get behind the camera
It was at the London premiere of Shakespeare in Love in 1999 that Henry Fitzherbert decided to seize his chance and make the leap from film reviewer of the Sunday Express to Hollywood screenwriter. Buttonholing the movie’s producer, Harvey Weinstein, he pitched him an adaptation he had written of Stephen Benatar’s amnesia thriller Recovery. “He told me to get it to his hotel suite by 6am and he’d read it on the plane home,” Fitzherbert recalls. “Then I got a call from his New York office saying he loved it and I thought: ‘I’m going to be an overnight success!’ I was summoned to a meeting with his senior exec in London, given ‘notes’, which I worked on for months – and never heard from any of them again. As people say, it’s not the rejections that kill you, it’s the hope.”
Nearly two decades later, Fitzherbert finally moved decisively from reviewing to screenwriting when two of his scripts – the historical drama Born a King and the horror-comedy Slaughterhouse Rulez, co-written with the former Kula Shaker frontman Crispian Mills – went into production in 2017. Though, as he points out, the career change was “not by choice but design: the paper had let me go”. Rather satisfyingly, the first day of principal photography on Born a King happened to coincide with his final one as a reviewer. “I left the screening room in Soho, drove to Hatfield House and walked on to the set of my debut film where a cast and crew of 200 were bringing my screenplay to life on an extraordinary scale. I couldn’t have dreamed up a better ‘fuck you’ to the paper.”
If a time machine were to transport passengers back to the Soho screening rooms of the 90s, they would find sitting in the dark alongside Fitzherbert some of the figures who now make the films we watch. There would be Lizzie Francke, the former Sight & Sound critic who is a senior development and production executive at BFI Film Fund, where she has helped shepherd to the screen titles including The Souvenir, Cold War and You Were Never Really Here. With her would be her Sight & Sound colleague John Wrathall, whose screenwriting credits include the Holocaust drama Good, starring Viggo Mortensen and Jodie Whittaker, and the forthcoming Dickens update Twist with Michael Caine as Fagin.
Quentin Curtis, the Telegraph critic who went on to produce Legend, with
Tom Hardy as the Kray twins, as well as Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World, would be in attendance. So too would the late Gilbert Adair, whose novel Love and Death on Long Island had already been adapted for cinema when he became film critic of the Independent on Sunday; several years later, he scripted The Dreamers (based on his novel The Holy Innocents) for Bernardo Bertolucci. Mark Cousins would be present, too, in the days before he directed ambitious, passio
nate documentaries such as The Story of Film. Edward Lawrenson, deputy editor of Sight & Sound and later film critic at The Big Issue, was also a regular attendee, and continued reviewing even once Abandoned Goods, the documentary he co-directed with Pia Borg, won the Golden Leopard prize at Locarno in 2014.
“I probably became a worse critic around that time,” laughs Lawrenson. “I’m sure if you looked back at the reviews I did while we were making Abandoned Goods, you’d find they got a lot more sympathetic. Flaws in a film became understandable to me rather than a reason to get upset. In a way, that’s partly why I had to stop. I wasn’t providing a very good service. I was just liking everything.” Fitzherbert has a different reason for lamenting his reviews: “I found some of them the other day and was shocked at what a smart-arse I sounded like. As a critic, I used to think I knew it all, but as a screenwriter I’m learning every day.” But Francke has less cause for embarrassment. “In the last few years Sight & Sound has republished some of the reviews I was proud of, such as The Silence of the Lambs and The Piano, so perhaps that showed some younger film-makers: ‘Oh, she does know what she’s talking about.’”
It is in this capacity that she feels her previous career makes her especially helpful to directors. “One of my first industry jobs was looking at first features and I still do a lot of that. At the end of meetings, I’ll feel like a doctor handing out prescriptions: ‘Take two Renoirs and come back in a fortnight.’ My knowledge is useful, not as oneupmanship but to share a delight in the possibilities of film language. I say to people: ‘Think about whether your work is having a dialogue with film history.’ It’s like being a young tennis player and having a go with Andy Murray. You can look at these great pieces of cinema and think: ‘What muscles can I work on to improve my own skills as a filmmaker?’”
The Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose films include the deranged new western Bacurau, is another former critic who believes his original profession has stood him in good stead behind the camera. “My tendency is never to separate the ‘critic’ and ‘film-maker’ parts of myself,” he explains. “They are all part of the same sensitivity. Sometimes I’ll be on festival juries talking with someone who is exclusively an actor or screenwriter, and on those occasions I feel my training as a critic gives me a different kind of openness and understanding. Whereas other people are more pragmatic about their reactions: ‘This is terrible, I hate it.’ I never really enjoyed the power that was put in my hands as a critic. It was never about that. And I could never be negative about critics now. Reading reviews of my films is an interesting emotional and intellectual exercise – even the bad ones.”
Receiving criticism rather than dishing it out, though, can be one of the less enjoyable aspects for the poacher turned gamekeeper. “It’s like pushing a pram around so critics can comment on your baby,” says Fitzherbert. “Some coo, others say: ‘What the hell is that?’” Francke remembers the world premiere of the first movie she worked on, the psychological horror Trauma starring
Colin Firth, at the Sundance film festival. “You could feel it not connecting with the audience. I felt sick. Then it got mixed reviews. But whether a review is good or bad, I just want something wellargued. Sometimes I’ll even read a critic and think: ‘You’ve said all the things I tried to say to the film-maker!’”
The path from writing about movies to making them is a well-trodden one. Some critics, notably the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, including Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, have even had a profound effect on cinema history. Prior to spearheading the French New Wave, they bestowed hallowed auteur status on Alfred Hitchcock among others; this may sound like a no-brainer today, but it was only a few years earlier that Lindsay Anderson, also poised to switch from criticism to directing, had cast aspersions on him. “Hitchcock has never been a ‘serious’ director,” he wrote in Sequence magazine in 1949. “His films are interesting neither for their ideas nor for their characters.”
In some cases, a critic’s bad reviews have led unexpectedly to a new career path. In his capacity as film critic at the Spectator in the 1930s, Graham Greene put the boot into several pictures produced by Alexander Korda. Rather magnanimously, Korda asked Greene whether he had any stories that might make a suitable film; the result was the 1937 revenge thriller The Green Cockatoo. An olive branch was also responsible for starting the screenwriting career of Frank S Nugent, film critic at the New York Times during the same period. Nugent’s mockery of the actor Tyrone Power prompted 20th Century Fox to withdraw its advertising from the paper, although this didn’t prevent Darryl F Zanuck, the vice-president in charge of production at the studio, from hiring him as a script doctor. “Zanuck told me he didn’t want me to write, he just thought the studio would save money if I criticised the pictures before they were made,” said Nugent, who ended up writing or cowriting 11 movies for John Ford, including Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Searchers.
It was Paul Schrader, another esteemed critic turned screenwriter, who was responsible for giving The Searchers a 70s makeover in Taxi Driver. Schrader had reviewed movies for the LA Free Press, where his take-down of Easy Rider got him fired, and had written Transcendental Style in Film, a highly regarded book about Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer. He had then incurred the wrath of his powerful mentor, Pauline Kael, by declining a reviewing job she had wangled for him in favour of focusing on screenwriting.
Kael’s own brush with film-making was less fulfilling than that of her protege. At the invitation of Warren Beatty, she relinquished her post at the New Yorker in 1979 to develop projects for Paramount. “My thinking was influenced by the Cahiers du Cinéma guys,” Beatty said. “To me, it seemed like a natural progression, film criticism to film production.” Some have seen it as an attempt to muzzle and neutralise Kael. “Warren is the master of patient seduction,” noted Schrader. “He is also the master of patient revenge. In manipulating Pauline, the critical bete noire of commercial Hollywood, he accomplished both.” A year after arriving on the Paramount lot, she was back at the New Yorker.
The traffic from page to screen hasn’t abated, with Jay Cocks (the Time critic who co-wrote three Scorsese movies, including Silence, and did uncredited work on Titanic) and Olivier Assayas (the Cahiers contributor who directed Irma Vep and Personal Shopper) among those making the journey. Return trips are unheard of, although Francke says she still experiences the impulse to be a cheerleader for outstanding work. “Sometimes I see a film, like Garrett Bradley’s Time, which was at Sundance this year, or Kitty Green’s The Assistant, and I think: ‘That would be such a delight to champion!’” She has a new perspective on her old job, and feels that critics should exercise their judgments responsibly. “It’s very easy to be clever and witty and snide, as I’m sure I was in my 20s. And it’s open season to be rude about a Michael Bay film. But if it’s a first-time director, you just think: ‘Why?’”
Fitzherbert believes his old colleagues could spare a bit more thought about the film-making process. “This is no fault of critics, but they simply never know what went on behind thescenes – the compromises, the craziness, the drastic last-minute budget cuts – which means they frequently misapportion blame, usually to the poor olddirector. They write simmering with exasperation and indignation, as Ifrequently did, and you just want to scream: ‘It’s not that simple!’”
Bacurau is available now on Mubi