Every movie contains a lesson in filmmaking, I think. And from Unstoppable I learned that a director should be relentless on an action script. Tony Scott wasn't precious about a single dramatic moment in that film (or at least he shot enough coverage to let others be relentless.) The film had plenty of melodrama. But it complimented the action, without competing for attention.
Because I love food metaphors, the emotional beats in the script were like butter on a steak. They added flavor, made the rich meal richer and gave the whole experience a touch of decadence (Denzel Washington's daughters work at Hooters? Oh my!) But a steak with butter is still a steak. A more precious director would have taken the melodrama in Unstoppable and turned it into a cream sauce. And while plenty of fine restaurants offer heavy sauces for their steaks, we question the judgment of those use take them. And by "we" I mean myself, the restaurant waiter, the chefs and steak-lovers everywhere.
Thank you Tony Scott for not slathering Unstoppable with hollandaise. But a slab of butter on top? Yes please.
Bullitt dates itself in the soundtrack, the zooming lens, the costume design and the editing. It feels like a great 70's movie, which it is (okay, 1968.) But what dated it most for me was the hero himself. Steve McQueen is a mask, immovable and unreachable. He speaks only when he has to, and sometimes not even then. He's a cop doing a job and any need you have to understand him is your problem.
While watching it I thought of George Clooney's performance in The American. The American, like Bullitt, has strong formalistic frames and patient editing. Clooney, like McQueen, is meticulous, self-controlled and calculating. And yet, in the end of The American, Clooney cracks his callous shell. He says "I love you" to his girlfriend/prostitute. He acknowledges that life is precious, and that he has squandered it.
In both films, the audience knows that the main character lives in a self-created emotional prison. We like the strong, silent type as much now as we did 40 years ago. But these days it's not enough for us to know that the hero is emotionally doomed. We need the hero to know it, too.
Move it up.
My first screenwriting teacher said “your main character wants something and spends the whole movie trying to get it.” Most movies follow that pattern, in hindsight. The hero wants to win the contest, or to take revenge, or to escape from Jason. The justification for this formula comes from none other than Aristotle's Poetics. Aristotle uses Oedipus as the archetypal tragic hero, and everyone knows that Oedipus wants to sleep with his mother and kill his father.
Except Oedipus does not intentionally sleep with his mother or kill his father. Oedipus wants to be king. And it doesnt take Oedipus the whole play to get what he wants. He gets it in the first act, and then spends two acts dealing with the implications of that desire.
The same is true of Macbeth. What does Macbeth want? He wants to be king. When does that happen? The end of the first act. Then what happens? The implications and consequences. It’s as if to say “You want something so badly? Here. Now what?”
It takes guts to give a hero his or her excruciating desire early on in the story. Because then both the hero and the writer are in uncharted territory. It’s the opposite of being delicate or precious with plot. And that’s what was so enjoyable about Solitary Man. Early on Michael Douglas's character has a desire that is licentious, stressful and therefore delicious. A timid script would have spread that dynamic over ninety minutes. But Brian Koppelman and David Levien take the more tragic, and therefore more heroic route by moving the third-act climax (ahem) up to the first act.
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Story feeling, not story telling.
There is a presumption that the goal of filmmaking is to tell a story. It is not a
particularly discriminating term, because the title “story teller,” like poet, or writer, is fair game for all who claim it. Instead, I like the term “story feeling.” A filmmaker tries to elicit romantic
feelings, sad feelings, sexual feelings, etc. And sometimes, a filmmaker will transcend
observational emotions to create a visceral experience, so that the audience,
watching, feels the way that the characters themselves feel.
From the opening credits, Shutter Island is that kind of visceral. The main character Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is trapped in an unreal reality. His world looks normal, but it isn't. He can't reconcile the difference between what he sees and what he perceives. What's remarkable about the film is that, from the opening credits, the audience is made to feel the same way. The titles come up over black, but they cut out fast (around two seconds per title, vs. the standard three seconds.) The resulting sequence looks normal, but something feels wrong.
We
meet DiCaprio and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) on a boat. As
they talk, we do not cut back-and-forth between over-the-shoulder shots. Instead, the two men are positioned at 90
degrees. Both men
are dressed in similar clothes, and the sky behind them is a dark neutral
blue. So when the camera cuts from
one to another, we still see both faces, both fedoras, both tan jackets. It feels as though the two men are flipping places
in-frame, which looks simultaneously real and unnatural.
Once on the island, the master shots don’t flesh out the location. When
actors are shown in single shots, the long lenses obscure the background and
frustrate any concrete orientation.
Even in the establishing shot of Dr. Cawley’s house (Ben
Kingsley) the pan-down is nipped before the camera comes to rest. What we see looks normal. And yet we know, in our bones, that something is wrong. And so does the main character.
I don’t suggest Martin Scorsese and the editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, calculated this effect down
to the title sequence (although they may have.) Film is arguably a blend of acumen and accidents. Even so, Shutter Island is unique in that the story told is the story, felt.
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Don't correct his grammar.
They say "if you meet a talking dog, you don't correct his grammar." If I am seeing something which is impossible, I tend to hold back the fine-point criticism.
So many people have to risk time, money and reputation to make a movie. The odds of failure are much higher than the chances of success. At every step people try to mitigate risk. Even the most established directors have films they can't get made. How Wes Anderson collected the infinite list of actor, agent, producer, manager and financier blessings to make an adult-oriented cartoon is beyond me.
Fantastic Mr. Fox is a great film, in part because it exists at all.
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A meditation on violence.
Gomorrah (or Gomorra) is crushing, because it does not need to crush. From the opening scene in the tanning salon to the last shot of a backhoe carrying bodies aloft, this film is a languid meditation on the power, and powerlessness, of violence.
It is this meditative quality which is so difficult to analyze. There is a scene in the airport where two principal characters, a corporate criminal and his protege, meet the protege's father. The father is overwhelmed with pride in his son's success. The two principal characters leave the father, but the camera doesn't follow. It lingers on the father as he wrangles his emotions. It one of many beautiful and a counter-intuitive framing decisions in the film. One expects that kind of work from a director/cinematographer. But the director of Gomorrah was Matteo Garrone, and the cinematographer was Marco Onorato. What could the director have said to the cinematographer to produce this luxurious, non plot-driven camera work? I couldn't figure it out. I brought Giles Nuttgens, the cinematographer for Water, Swimfan and my film Saint John of Las Vegas, to see Gomorrah. He couldn't figure it out, either.
We found our answer buried in the end credits. The director was listed as the A camera operator. So the film's look and feel benefited from the collaborative director-cinematographer relationship. But the instantaneous choice of frame was instinctively the director's.
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