Monday 28 May 2007
Monday
I said something the other day that I feel needs explaining. When I'm watching a bad film I often ask myself how it got made. How many people actually thought it was a good idea? Because I am sometimes absolutist in my thinking, I ask myself if every single person that went into making the movie agreed creatively with what was being made. Did, for instance, the man who makes coffee on-set decide that it was a project he wanted to be involved with, or did he just do it because it was work? Perhaps this is an extreme example. I could reduce it to everyone who had read the script beforehand. Did they all read it and say 'yes I want to work on this'? Or did they say 'how much is it paying?'. Sadly, I think in most cases it was the latter. The amount of people who creatively say 'yes' to a film is very few - writer, director, and producer only perhaps? Everyone else is either hired, or agrees to work on it, regardless of such considerations - which can include up to several hundred people. This of course is what is great, but also what is hard, about film-making being a business as well as an art. There are compromises. It is the movie 'industry', not 'charity'.
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2 comments:
What about the actors. Actors are increasingly important to getting a film made. The number of times you hear, "so and so was attached to the project from an early stage". I think many producers don't read scripts properly, but simply wait for somebody to walk through their door saying, "I've got the new Michael Douglas film" or whatever.
Yes, indeed, that's an interesting point that perhaps deserves a full post. Big actors can choose creatively, and indeed influence the direction a movie will take. But then at the same time you get small actors who will just act in anything because it's work. I think there are more of the latter than the former type.
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