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Not For the Artist
Many years ago I eagerly listened to director Francis Ford Coppola’s DVD commentary for The Godfather. Coppola was always very open and articulate about the filmmaking process and I was all ready for his insights on his masterpiece. Or at least I thought I was. Much of the film’s runtime Coppola criticized it and himself, at one point calling The Godfather “sloppy filmmaking.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was I foolish to love and admire the film as much as I did if the man behind it seemed to, at best, have mixed feeling about his creation? Coppola was not alone in dissing his seminal works. At a press conference a few years ago, Woody Allen stated that, “When I begin a film, I always think that I’m going to make The Bicycle Thief or Grand Illusion or Citizen Kane, and I’m convinced that it’s going to be the greatest thing to ever hit celluloid. Then, when I see what I’ve done afterward, I’m praying that it’s not an embarrassment to me. So I’ve never been satisfied or even pleased with a film that I’ve done. I make them, I’m finished, I’ve never looked at one after. I made my first film in 1968, and I’ve never seen it since. I just cringe when I see them. I don’t like them because there’s a big gap between what you conceive in your mind when you’re writing and you don’t have to meet the test of reality.” A follow-up questioner asked Allen about Annie Hall. Surely he had to be happy with a film that won a Best Picture Oscar and garnered Allen his only win for Best Director. Nope: “[T]hat film was not supposed to be what I wound up with. The film was supposed to be what happens in a guy’s mind, and you were supposed to see a stream of consciousness in his mind and I did the film and it was completely incoherent. Nobody understood anything that went on and the relationship between myself and Diane Keaton was all anyone cared about. That was not what I cared about. That was one small part of another big canvas that I had. In the end, I had to reduce the film to just me and Diane Keaton and that relationship, so I was quite disappointed in the end of that movie, as I was with other films of mine that were very popular.” Still, the all-time champion for film self-flagellation has to be George Lucas. When he released the digitally-enhanced special editions for the first Star Wars trilogy in 1997, he took the original prints out of circulation. He explained that “To me, the special edition ones are the films I wanted to make. Anybody that makes films knows the film is never finished. It’s abandoned or it’s ripped out of your hands, and it’s thrown into the marketplace, never finished ... At the beginning, people went, ‘Don’t you like it?’ I said, ‘Well, the film only came out to be 25 or 30 percent of what I wanted it to be.’ They said, ‘What are you talking about?’ So finally, I stopped saying that, but if you read any interviews for about an eight- or nine-year period there, it was all about how disappointed I was and how unhappy I was and what a dismal experience it was.” When questioned about not having both versions of the films available, he replied that “It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be. I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. I’m the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they’re going to throw rocks at me, they’re going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.” Lucas has every right to view the original films as “not finished,” and it’s perfectly normal to keep tweaking the film after release. Many directors do this. In fact, I lost track of the different versions of Blade Runner. Much of the Star Wars special edition changes worked (all except the Jabba the Hut scene). But Lucas goes a step too far with “I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it.” Millions of fans saw “half a completed” Star Wars and fell in love with it, myself included. We fans not only saw the film repeatedly, we bought toys and other merchandise for each film. The fans and their money (and their parents’ money) helped make Lucas a billionaire, and that would not have happened had they not loved the film. So I would have hoped that Lucas would have taken the fans’ appreciation a little more seriously, even if it wasn’t for the version of Star Wars he wanted to make. Then again Coppola, Allen and Lucas all seem to be focusing on the process. On the aforementioned DVD commentary, Coppola described how much pressure he was under during the filming. The studio questioned many of his casting choices, along with Coppola’s decision to make the film a period piece, as it was in the source novel, rather than a (much cheaper) present day story. Coppola was paranoid that he might be fired, and later found out that he almost was. Allen and Lucas clearly went into filming with a specific vision in mind, and through the process ended up with something much different. Frank Darabont, director of The Shawshank Redemption, said that Robert Benton, who directed films such as Kramer vs. Kramer and Places in the Heart once told him that “Every day of filmmaking feels like a failure, because you had to give up something.” Does any of this matter from the moviegoers’ perspective? We weren’t on set for the filming. We can’t see into the directors’ minds and watch the film they may have wanted to make. We know what’s on the screen and what reactions that provokes in us. A key scene in last year’s Juliet, Naked, based on the Nick Hornby novel, hit a nerve with me. Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), a superfan of underground rocker Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), finally meets his idol. When Duncan gushes over one particular album Tucker tells him it was a “piece of sh-t.” The argument escalates from there, and ends with Duncan telling Tucker that “I value that album more than maybe anything I've ever heard. Not because it’s perfect, but because of what it means to me. Ultimately, I don’t give a sh-t what it means to you. Art isn’t for the artist no more than water is for the bloody plumber.” Duncan is a very flawed character, but in that scene I felt like he was speaking for me and every fan. Who really owns a film? I’m not talking legal ownership, or who has certain rights and percentages. I mean in the social, cultural and personal world, where the best films live and breathe for long after their release. In that world, we the fans own the film. If a film’s director dumps on that film, so what? I have yet to see any of these directors give the money back. They made their films and then it’s up to us. It doesn’t matter if the shoot was difficult. It doesn’t matter if the finished product doesn’t match the film they made in their heads. Have you ever left a film you didn’t like and thought “Well at least the movie’s shoot went smoothly and it was everything the director wanted”? Don’t get me wrong, I still admire and respect Coppola’s, Allen’s and Lucas’s storytelling, skill and artistry. But I’m not going to let anyone change what I love about their films. Not even them. Adam Spector October 1, 2019 Contact us: |
