https://vimeo.com/65060864. Duration, 40mins.
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Afewmonthsago, I was on this JetBlueflight fromNewYork[City] toBurbank[CA]. And
I like JetBlue, not just because of the prices. They have this terminal atJFK
that I think is really nice. I think it might be thenicest terminal in the
country although, if you want to see some good airports, you’ve got to go to a
major city in another part of the world like Europe or Asia. They’re amazing
airports. They’re incredible and quiet. You’re not
being assaulted by all this music. I don’t know when it was decided we all need
a soundtrack everywhere we go. I was just in the bathroom upstairs and there
was a soundtrack accompanying me at the urinal, I don’t understand. So
I’m getting comfortable in my seat. I spent the extra sixtyUSD to get the extra
legroom, so I’m trying to get comfortable and we ["]make altitude["].
And there’s a guy on the other side of the aisle in front of me and he pulls
out his iPad to start watching stuff. I’m curious to see what he’s going to
watch, he’s a whiteguy in his mid30s. And I begin to realize what he’s done is
he’s loaded in half a dozen action sort of extravaganzas and he’s watching each
of the action sequences, he’s skipping over all the dialogue and the narrative.
This guy’s flight is going to be fiveandahalfhours of just ["]mayhemporn["].
I get this wave of, not panic, it’s not like my heart started fluttering, but I had this sense of, am I going insane, or is the world going
insane, or both? Now I start with the circular thinking again. Maybe
it’s me. Maybe it’s generational and I’m getting old, I’m in the back nine professionally.
And maybe my twentytwoyearold daughter doesn’t feel this way at all. I should
ask her. But then I think, no, Something is going on, something that can be
measured is happening, and there has to be. When people are more outraged by
the ambiguous ending ofTheSopranos than some young girl being stoned to death,
then there’s something wrong. We have people walking around who think the Government
stages these terroristattacks. And anybody with a brain bigger than a walnut
knows that our Government is not nearly competent enough to stage a terroristattack
and then keep it a secret because, as we know, in this day and age, you cannot
keep a secret. So I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm
and sometimes it’s fast and sometimes it’s slower, and maybe what’s happening
is this drumbeat is just accelerating and it’s gotten to the point where I
can’t hear between the beats anymore and it’s just a hum. Again, I thought
maybe that’s my generation, every generation feels that way, maybe I should ask
my daughter. But then I remember somebody did this experiment where if you’re
in a car, and you’re going more than 20 miles an hour, it becomes impossible to
distinguish individual features on a humanbeing’sface. I thought that’s another
good analogy for this sensation. It’s a veryweird experiment for someone to come
up with. [conduct]. So, that was my JetBlueflight. But the circular
thinking didn’t really stop and I got my hands on a book by a guy named DouglasRushkoff
and I realized I’m suffering from something called Present Shock which is the
name of his book. This quote made me feel a little less insane: “When there’s
no linear tie, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s
no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way things are. Previously
distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between
doing something and seeing the result. Instead the results begin accumulating
and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much
information coming in at once from so many different sources that there’s
simply no way to trace the plot over time”. That’s the hum I’m talking about.
And I mention this because I think it’s having an effect on all of us. I think
it’s having an effect on our culture, and I think it’s having an effect on Movies.
How they’re made, how they’re sold, how they perform. But before we talk about
movies, we should talk about Art in general if that’s possible. Given all the
incredible suffering in the world, I wonder, what is Art for, really? If
thecollectedworksofShakespeare can’t prevent genocide, then really, what is it
for? Shouldn’t we be spending the time and resources alleviating suffering and
helping other people instead of going to the Movies and Plays and Art installations?
When we did Ocean’sThirteen, the casino set used sixtythousandUSD of
electricity everyweek. How do you justify that? Do you justify that by saying,
the people who could’ve had that electricity are going to watch the movie for
twohours and be entertained, except they probably can’t, because they don’t
have any electricity, because we used it. Then I think, what about all the
resources spent on all the pieces of Entertainment? What about the carbon["]footprint["]
of getting me here? Then I think, why are you even thinking that way and
worrying about how many milespergallon my car gets, when we have NASCAR, and
monstertruckpulls onTV? So, what I finally decided was, Art is simply inevitable.
It was on the wall of a cave inFrance thirtythousandyears ago, and it’s because
we are a species that’s driven by narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need
to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try and make sense
out of all this ["]chaos["]. And sometimes, when you get a really
good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that thing that’s
impossible which is entering the consciousness of another human being, literally
seeing the world the way they see it. Then, if you have a really good piece of Art
and a really good artist, you are altered in some way, and so the experience is
transformative and, in the minute, you’re experiencing that piece of Art,
you’re not alone. You’re connected to theArts. So I feel like that can’t be too
bad. Art is also about problemsolving, and it’s obvious from the news, we have
a little bit of a problem with problemsolving. In my experience, the main
obstacle to problemsolving is an entrenchedIdeology. The great thing about
making a movie or a piece of Art is that that never comes into play. All the
ideas are on the table. All the ideas and everything is ["]open["]
for discussion, and it turns out everybody succeeds by submitting to what the
thing needs to be. Art, in my view, is a veryelegant problemsolvingmodel. Now,
we finally arrive at the subject of this rant, which is the state of Cinema.
First of all, is there a difference between Cinema and Movies? Yeah. If I were
onTeamAmerica, I’d say, Fuck yeah! The simplest way that I can describe it is
that a movie is something you see, and Cinema is something that’s made. It has
nothing to do with the captured medium, it doesn’t have anything to do with
where the screen is, if it’s in your bedroom, your iPad, it doesn’t even really
have to be a movie. It could be a commercial, it could be something onYouTube.
Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything
matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as
unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it
isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that, if
this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t
exist in anything like this form. So, that means you can take a perfectly
solid, successful and acclaimed movie, and it may not qualify as Cinema. It
also means you can take a piece of Cinema and it may not qualify as a Movie,
and it may actually be an unwatchable pieceofshit. But as long as you have
filmmakers out there who have that specific point of view, then Cinema is never
going to disappear completely. Because it’s not about money, it’s about good
ideas followed up by a welldevelopedÆsthetic. I love all this newTechnology,
it’s great. It’s smaller, lighter, faster. You can make a reallygoodlooking
movie for not a lot of money, and when people start to get weepy about celluloid,
I think of this quote byOrsonWelles when somebody was talking to him about newTechnology,
which he tended to embrace, and he said, “I don’t want to wait on the tool, I
want the tool to wait for me”, which I thought was a good way to put it. But the problem is that Cinema as I define it, and as something
that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell,
with the full support of the audience. The reasons for this, in my
opinion, are more economic than philosophical, but when you add an ample amount
of fear and a lack of vision, and a lack of leadership, you’ve got a trajectory
that I think is prettydifficult to reverse. Now, of course, it’s very
subjective, there are going to be exceptions to everything I’m going to say,
and I’m just saying that so no one thinks I’m talking about them. I want to be
clear, The idea of Cinema as I’m defining it is not ["]on the radar["]
in the studios. This is not a conversation anybody’s having, it’s not a word
you would ever want to use in a meeting. Speaking of meetings, the meetings
have gotten pretty["]weird["]. There are
fewerandfewer executives who are in the business because they love Movies.
There are fewer and fewer executives that know [connaître] Movies. So it
can become a verystrange situation. I mean, I know how
to drive a car, but I wouldn’t presume to sit in a meeting with an engineer and
tell him how to build one, and that’s kind of what you feel like when you’re in
these meetings. You’ve got people who don’t know
movies and don’t watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you’re going to
be allowed to make. That’s one reason studio movies aren’t better than they are,
and that’s one reason that Cinema, as I’m defining it, is shrinking. Well,
how does a studio decide what movies get made? One thing they take into
consideration is the foreignmarket, obviously.
It’s become verybig. So that means, you know, things that ["]travel["]
best are going to be actionadventure, sciencefiction, fantasy, spectacle, some
animation thrown in there. Obviously the bigger the budget, the more people
this thing is going to have to appeal to, the more homogenised it’s got to be,
the more simplified it’s got to be. So things like
cultural specificity and narrative complexity, and, god forbid, ambiguity,
those become real obstacles to the success of the film here and abroad. Speaking
of ambiguity, we had a test screening of Contagion once and a guy in the focus
group stood up and he said, I really hate the Jude Law character. I don’t know
if he’s a hero or an asshole. And I thought, Well, here we go. There’s another
thing, a process known as running the numbers, and for a filmmaker, this is kind of the equivalent of a doctor
showing you a chest x-ray and saying there’s a shadow on it. It’s a kind of [excuse] ["]fungibleAlgorithm["]
that’s used when they want say, No, without really saying, No.
I could tell you a reallygood story of how I got [fired from] pushed off
a movie because of the way the ["]numbers ran["], but if I did, I’d
probably get shot in the street, and I really like my cats. So then there’s the
expense of putting a movie out, which is a big problem. Point of entry for a
mainstream, [nation]widerelease movie, thirtymillionUSD. That’s where you
start. Now you add another thirtymillionUSD for overseas. Now you’ve got to remember,
the exhibitors pay halfofthegross, so to make that sixtymillionUSD back you
need to gross onehundredandtwentyUSD. So you don’t even know what your movie is
yet, and you’re already looking at onehundredandtwentyUSD. That ended up being
part of the reason why theLiberacemovie didn’t happen at a studio. We only
needed fivemillionUSD from a domestic partner, but, when you add the cost of ["]putting["]
a movie out, now you’ve got to gross seventyfivemillionUSD to get that thirtyfivemillionUSD
back, and the feeling amongst the studios was that this material was too
“special” to gross seventymillionUSD. So the obstacle here isn’t just that
special subjectmatter, but that nobody has figured out how to reduce the cost
of ["]putting["] a movie out. There have been some attempts to
analyze it, but one of the mysteries is that this analysis doesn’t really
reveal any kind of linear predictive behavior, it’s still mysterious the
process whereby people decide, if they’re either going to go to a movie or not
go to a movie. Sometimes you don’t even know how you reach them. Like onMagicMike,
for instance, the movie opened to thirtyeightmillionUSD, and ["]the
tracking["] said, We were going to open to nineteenmillionUSD. So the
tracking was onehundredpercent wrong. It’s really nice when the surprise goes
in that direction, but it’s hard not to sit there and go, How did we miss that?
If this is our tracking, how do you miss by that much? I know oneperson who
works in-marketing at a studio suggested, on a modestlybudgeted film that had
some sort of ["]brandidentity["] and some["]AListtalent["]
attached, she suggested, Look, why don’t we not do any tracking at all, and
just spend 15 and we’ll just put it out. They wouldn’t do it. They were afraid it would fail, when they fail doing the
other thing all the time. Maybe they were afraid it was going to work.
The other thing that mystifies me is that you would think, in terms of
spending, if you have one of these big franchisesequels that you would say, Oh,
we don’t have to spend as much money because is there anyone in the galaxy that
doesn’t know IronMan’s opening onFriday? So you would think, Oh, we can stop ["]carpetbombing["]
withTVcommercials. It’s exactly the opposite. They
spend more, they spend more. Their attitude is, You know, it’s a sequel, and
it’s thethirdone, and we really want to make sure people really want to go. We
want to make sure that openingnightnumber is big, so there’s the perception of
the movie is that it’s a huge success. There’s that, and, if you’ve ever wondered why everyposter and everytrailer and
everyTVspot looks exactly the same, it’s because of testing. It’s because
anything interesting scores poorly and [are discarded]. gets kicked
out. Now I’ve tried to argue that the methodology of this testing doesn’t
work. If you take a poster or a trailer, and you show it to somebody in
isolation, that’s not really an accurate reflection of whether it’s working,
because we don’t see them in isolation, we see them in groups. We see a trailer
in the middle of fiveothertrailers, we see a poster in the middle of eightotherposters,
and I’ve tried to argue that maybe the thing that’s making it distinctive and
score poorly actually would stick out if you presented it to these people the
way the real world presents it. And I’ve never won that argument. You know, we
had a trailer forSideEffects that we did inLondon and the filmmakingteam
really, really liked it. But the problem was that it was not testing well, and
it was really not testing as well as this domestic trailer that we had. The
point spread was so significant that I really couldn’t justify trying to ["]jam
this thing down["] distributor’s throats, so we had to abandon it. Now
look, not all testing is bad. Sometimes you have to, especially on a comedy.
There’s nothing like fourhundredpersons who are not your friends to tell you
when something’s wrong. I just don’t think you can use it as thelastword on a
movie’s ["]playability["], or its quality. MagicMike tested poorly.,
reallypoorly. And fortunately, WarnerBrothers just ignored the testscores, and
stuck with their plan to open the movie [nation]wide duringthesummer. But,
let’s go back to SideEffects for a second. This is a movie that didn’t perform
as well as any of us wanted it to. So, why? What happened? It can’t be the
campaign because all the materials that we had, thetrailers, theposters, theTVspots,
all that stuff tested well above average. February8th, maybe it was the date,
was that a bad day? As it turns out that was the Friday after theOscarnominations
are announced, and thisyear, there was an atypically large ["]bump["]
to all the films that got nominated, so that was a factor. Then there was a
storm in theNortheast, which is sort of our core audience. Nemo came in, so
God, obviously, is getting me back for my comments about monotheism. Was it the
concept? There was a veryactive decision early on to sell the movie as kind of a pure thriller
and kind of disconnect it from this larger social issue of everybody taking
pills. Did that make the movie seem more commercial, or did it make it seem
more ["]generic["]? We don’t know. What about the cast? Fourwhitepersons
attractives, this is usually not an obstacle. Theexitpolls were verygood, the
reviews were good. How do we figure out what went wrong? The answer is, We
don’t. Because everybody’s already moved on to the next movie they have to
release. Now, I’m going to attempt to show how a certain kind of rodent might
be smarter than a studio when it comes to picking projects. If you give a
certain kind of rodent the option of hitting two buttons, and one of the
buttons, when you touch it, dispenses food fortypercent of the time, and one of
the buttons when you touch it dispenses food sixtyperecent of the time, this
certain kind of rodent veryquickly [realises] figures out never to touch
the fortypercentbutton ever again. So, when a studio is attempting to determine
[by-project] on a project-by-project basis what will work, instead of
backing a talented filmmaker over ["]the long haul["], they’re
actually increasing their chances of choosing wrong. Because, in my view, in
this business which is totally talentdriven, it’s about horses, not races. I
think, if I were going to run a studio, I’d just be gathering thebest
filmmakers I could find and sort of let them do their thing within certain
Economicparameters. So I would call ShaneCarruth, or BarryJenkins, or AmySeimetz,
and I’d bring them in and go, OK, what do you want to do? What are the things
you’re interested in doing? What do we have here that you might be interested
in doing? If there was some sort of point of intersection I’d go, OK, look, I’m
going to let you make threemovies over fiveyears, I’m going to give you
thismuchmoney in productioncosts, I’m going to dedicate thismuchmoney on
marketing. You can sort of proportion it how you want, you can spend it all on
one and none on the other two, but go make something. Now, that only
works if you are veryverygood at identifying talent. Real talent, the kind of
talent that sustains. And you can’t be judging strictly on commercial
performance, or ["]hype["], or ["]hip-ness["], but I don’t
think it’s unreasonable to expect someone running a multibilliondollarbusiness
to be able to identify talent. I get it, it’s the studio, you need all kinds of
movies. You need comedies, you need horrorfilms, you need actionfilms, you need
animatedfilms, I get it. But the point is, can’t some of these be Cinema also?
This is kind of what we tried to do with SectionEight is we tried to bring
interesting filmmakers into the studiosystem and protect them. But
unfortunately, the only way a studio is going to allow that kind of freedom to
a young filmmaker is if the budgets are low. And unfortunately, themostprofitable
movies for the studios are going to be the big movies, ["]thehomeruns["].
They don’t look at the singles or the doubles as being worth themoney or themanhours.
Psychologically, it’s more comforting to spend $60 million promoting a movie
that costs 100, than it does to spend $60 million for a movie that costs 10. I
know what you’re thinking: If it costs 10 you’re going to be in profit sooner.
Maybe not. Here’s why. OK, $10 million movie, 60 million to promote it, that’s
70, so you’ve got to gross 140 to get out. Now you’ve got $100 million movie,
you’re going spend 60 to promote it. You’ve got to get 320 to get out. How many
$10 million movies make 140 million dollars? Not many. How many $100 million
movies make 320? A prettygood number, and there’s this sort of ["]dominoeffect["]
that happens too. Bigger homevideosales, bigger TVsales, so you can see the
forces that are sort of draining in one direction in the business. So, here’s a
thought. Maybe nothing’s wrong. Maybe I’m a clown. Maybe the audiences are
happy, and the studio is happy, and look at this from Variety: “Shrinking
release slates that focus on ["]tentpoles["] and the emergence of a
new normal in the homevidmarket has allowed thelargest [mediaconglomerates] mediacongloms
to boost the financial performance of their moviedivisions, according
toNomuraEquity researchanalyst, MichaelNathanson”. So, according toMr.Nathanson,
the studios are successfully cutting costs, the decline in homevideos have
plateaued, and theinternationalboxoffice, which used to be fiftyperecent of
revenue is now seventyperecent. With one exception in that all the stockprices
of all the companies that own these studios are up. It would appear that all
these companies are flush. So maybe nothing’s wrong, and I’ve got to tell you,
this is the only arena inHistory in which ["]trickledownEconomics["]
actually works, because when a studio is ["]flush["], they spend
moremoney to make moremoney, because their stockprice is all about marketshare.
And you know, there’s no other business that’s this big, that’s actually this
financially transparent. You have a situation here in which there is an
objective economic value given to an asset. It’s not like that
derivativesmortgagebullshit that [greatlyharmed worldEconomy], just brought
the world to its knees, you can’t say a movie made more money than it
actually made, and internally, you can’t say that you didn’t spend what you
spent on it. It’s contractual that you have to make these numbers available. Now,
don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of waste. I think there are too many layers
of executives, I don’t know why you should be having a lot of phonecalls with people
that can’t actually make decisions. They’ll violate
their own rules on a whim, while they make you adhere to them.
They get simple things wrong sometimes, like remakes. I mean, why are you
always remaking the famous movies? Why aren’t you looking back into your
catalog and finding some sort of programmer that was made fiftyyears ago that
has a really good idea in it, that if you put some fresh talent on it, it could
be really great. Of course, in order to do that, you need to have someone at the studio that
actually knows those movies. Even if you don’t have that person, you could hire
one. The sort of executiveecosystem is distorted, because executives
don’t get punished for making ["]bombs["] the way that filmmakers do,
and the result is there’s no turnover of new ideas, there’s no new ideas about
how to approach the business or how to deal with talent or material. But, again,
economically, it’s a prettystraightforward business. Hell, it’s thethirdbiggest
export that we have. It’s one of the few things that we do that the world
actually likes. I’ve stopped being embarrassed about being in thefilmbusiness,
I really have. I’m not spending my days trying to make a weapon that kills
people more efficiently. It’s an interesting business. But again, taking the thirtythousandfootview,
maybe nothing’s wrong, and maybe my feeling that the studios are kind of likeDetroit
before the bailout is totally insupportable. I mean, I’m wrong a lot. I’m wrong
so much, it doesn’t even raise my bloodpressure anymore. Maybe everything is
just fine. But, admissions, this is the number of bodies that go through the
turnstile, tenyearsago: onepointfivetwobillion. Lastyear, onepointthreesixbillion.
That’s atenandahalfpercent drop. Why are admissions dropping? Nobody knows, not
even NateSilver. Probably a combination of things: Ticketprices, maybe, a lot
of competition. for eyeballs.
There’s a lot of good TV out there. Theft is a big problem. I know this is a
reallycontroversial subject, but, for people who think everything on the
internet should just be totallyfree all I can say is, Good luck. When you try
to have a life and raise a family living off something you create. There’s a
great quote fromSteveJobs: “From the earliest days of Apple, I realized that we
thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our
software, we’d be out of business. If it weren’t protected, there’d be noincentive
for us to make new software or productdesigns. If protection of intellectual
property begins to disappear creative companies will disappear or never get
started. But there’s a simpler reason, It’s wrong to steal, it hurts other
people, and it hurts your own character”. I agree with him. I think that what
people go to the movies for has changed since SeptemberElevenAttack. I still
think the country is in someformofPTSD about that event, and that we haven’t
really healed in any sort of complete way, and that people are, as a result,
looking more toward escapistentertainment. And look, I get it. There’s a verygood argument to be made that only somebody who
["]has it really good["] would want to make a movie that makes you
feel really bad. People are working longer hours for less money these days, and
maybe, when they get in a movie, they want a ["]break["]. I
get it. But let’s ["]sex this up["] with some more numbers. In2003,
fourhundredfiftyfivefilms were released. Twohundredseventyfive of those were
independent, onehundredandeighty were studio films. Last year, sixhundredandseventysevenfilms
were released. So you’re not imagining things, there are a lot of movies that
open everyweekend. Fivehundredfourtynine of those were independent, onehundredandtwentyeight
were studio films. So, a onehundredpercentincrease in independent films, and a twentyeightpercentdrop
in studio films, and yet, ten years ago, Studio market share sixtyninepercent,
last year seventysixpercent. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a
bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films
scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That’s hard. That’s reallyhard. When
I was coming up, making an independent film and trying to reach an audience I
thought was like, trying to hit a thrown baseball. This is like trying to hit a
thrown baseball, but with another thrown baseball. That’s why I’m spending so much
time talking to you about the Business and the Money, because this is the force
that is pushing Cinema out of mainstreammovies. I’ve
been in meetings where I can feel it ["]slipping away["], where I can
feel that the ideas I’m ["]tossing out["], they’re too scary or too ["]weird["],
and I can feel the thing. I can tell: It’s not going to happen, I’m not going
to be able to convince them to do this the way I think it should be done.
I want to jump up on the table and scream, “Do you know how lucky we are to be
doing this? Do you understand that the only way to repay that karmic debt is to
make something good, is to make something ambitious, something beautiful,
something memorable?” But I didn’t do that. I just sat there, and I smiled. Maybe
the ideas I had don’t work, and the only way they’ll find out is that someone’s
got to give me half a billion dollars, to see if it’ll work. That seems like a
lot of money, but actually in point of fact there are a couple movies coming
down the pike that represent, in terms of their budgets and their marketing
campaigns, individually, a half a billion dollars. Just one movie. Just give me
one of these big movies. No? Kickstarter. I don’t want to bring this to
a conclusion on a down note. Afewyears back, I got a call from an agent and he
said, Will you come see this film? It’s a small, independent film a client
made. It’s been making thefestivalcircuit and it’s getting a reallygood
response but nodistributor will ["]pick it up["], and I really want
you to take a look at it and tell me what you think.” The film was called
Memento. So, the lights come up and I think, It’s over. It’s over. Nobody will
buy this film? This is just insane. Themoviebusiness is over. It was really
upsetting. Well, fortunately, the people who financed the movie loved the movie
so much that they formed their own distributioncompany and put the movie out
and made twentyfivemillionUSD. So, whenever I despair, I think, OK, somebody
out there somewhere, while we’re sitting right here, somebody out there
somewhere is making something cool that we’re going to love, and that keeps me
going. The other thing I tell young filmmakers is, When you get going and you
try to get money, when you’re going into one of those rooms to try and convince
somebody to make it, I don’t care who you’re pitching, I don’t care what you’re
pitching, it can be about genocide, it can be about childkillers, it can be
about the worst kind of criminal Injustice that you can imagine, but as you’re
sort of in the process of telling this story, stop yourself in the middle of a
sentence and act like you’re having an epiphany, and say, You know what, at the
end of this day, this is a movie about hope. Thank you.
