Directors Who Took Risks – Part 2

August 21, 2020

Welcome back to The Second Half, where this week I’ll be sharing part two of my thoughts on directors who took risks.  If you missed part one, you can read it here.  Last week we focused on three examples from the 1990s.  This week, we’ll have a little more variety.  Let’s jump in.

The Daring Filmmaking Choice – Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater cut his teeth as an indie film director, gaining fame in the early 1990s with the 70s high-school comedy Dazed and Confused (which helped put Matthew McConaughey and “Alright, alright, alright” on the map) and Before Sunrise, the quiet love story with Ethan Hawke and July Delpy that spawned two sequels.  With critical success, Linklater got his shot at bigger films (as is often the case when a director gains some fame), directing Jack Black in the musical-comedy School of Rock and the remake of Bad News Bears with Billy Bob Thornton.  While he was in the midst of these bigger films, he started work on a 12 year odyssey called Boyhood. 

It’s not exactly breaking new ground to tell the story of a boy’s life and interactions with family and friends over the course of more than a decade.  When you see this type of film, you’ll see two or three actors play the relevant characters, but Linklater made the bold choice of filming Boyhood over the course of twelve years, bringing the main actors together once a year to shoot some scenes.  He started production without a finished script and each year, he would write the next year’s scenes based on what was just filmed.  Some interesting tidbits I learned while researching the film – first, there are laws that restrict actors from being signed for contracts longer than seven years, so the main actors couldn’t sign a twelve-year contract; second – Linklater asked Ethan Hawke (who played the boy’s father) to finish the film if Linklater died during filming.

It blows my mind to think of how someone could conceive setting out to do this project, and then sticking to it each year.  The studio gave him $200,000 per year to film.  He had to manage on a shoestring each year to complete the film, he needed the buy-in and commitment from his actors, which included Hawke, Patricia Arquette (who would win a Best Actress Oscar for her role as the boy’s mom), Ellar Coltrane (as the boy, Mason), and Linklater’s daughter Lorelei as the boy’s older sister.  Even when you know the filmmaking choice (which I wouldn’t call a gimmick), it’s still fascinating to watch all of the actors actually change throughout the film, and it feels so much more authentic than other films, because it feels like the actors are bringing the changes in their own lives to the character’s lives.  What a wonderful film. 

Just when you think you couldn’t make a bolder choice than what Linklater did with Boyhood, want to know about his next project?  He’s filming an adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Go Along, which tells the story of a composer who decides to become a Hollywood producer.  The musical is presented in reverse chronological order over twenty years.  And yes, you guessed it, Linklater will film Merrily We Go Along over twenty years.  We’ll see if I’m young enough to remember that I wrote about this movie when it comes out in 2040 when I’m 68!

The Last Minute Change – Ridley Scott 

What do you do when you have a massive public relations crisis less than two months before your Oscar hopeful movie comes out?  If you’re Ridley Scott, you call in an Oscar-winning legend to help you out.  In October 2017, Scott was putting the finishing touches on All the Money in the World, a true-crime thriller about the kidnapping of oil tycoon J Paul Getty’s grandson in 1973.  The movie starred Michelle Williams as the boy’s mother, Mark Wahlberg as a former CIA agent hired by Getty to help get the boy back.  Getty was originally played by Kevin Spacey who was accused of sexual assault a mere two months before the film’s release.  Getty’s part was a major component of the story, so there was no side-stepping Spacey’s role, nor could the part be cut out of the movie. 

Faced with a difficult choice, director Ridley Scott made the decision to remove Spacey from the movie and re-film the scenes with Christopher Plummer, the 87-year old acting legend who had been acting for 60 years.  They reshot the scenes over 10 days in late November and Scott was able to still meet his late-December release date.  It was a smart decision by Scott, considering that Spacey’s career was ruined and it wouldn’t help his film to have him associated with it.  Scott fortunately had the experience and clout to ask for (and receive) permission to spend an additional $10 million to reshoot the scenes.  Scott is a legend in Hollywood, going back to his early days with Alien and Blade Runner, all the way up to his Oscar-winning Gladiator.

So, it was a bold decision – did it work?  The film received pretty good critical reviews and was nominated for a few awards (including Plummer as Supporting Actor at the Oscars, but he didn’t win).  The box office results weren’t great, but it wasn’t a disaster.  I thought the film was really good.  Michelle Williams was excellent (as she is in most of her films), Mark Wahlberg was…….well……he was Mark Wahlberg (as he is in most of his films).  Plummer was perfect, playing an evil tycoon who refuses to pay the ransom, emotionally torturing his daughter-in-law over her son’s rescue. 

One positive outcome from Scott’s decision was unintended – it highlighted the continued gender pay gaps in Hollywood.  Wahlberg was paid an additional $1.5 million to reshoot his scenes with Plummer, because his original contract didn’t include a provision for reshoots; whereas Williams was only paid per diems because her contract didn’t have the same stipulation.  Other reports stated that Wahlberg had the right to approve co-stars in the film and only agreed to Plummer’s addition if he was paid more money.  When all of this was exposed in the press (and it was ugly), Wahlberg agreed to donate his additional salary to the Time’s Up foundation to fight pay discrepancy in Hollywood.  While it was good that behavior like this was exposed so there can be positive changes going forward, it’s still ridiculous that Wahlberg was paid so much more than Williams (who is by far a better actor).  An interesting Hollywood story, to say the least.

The Zag Film – Martin Scorsese

I mentioned in last week’s post that when taking a risk as a long-time director, sometimes when everyone expects you to zig, you zag.  Some of my favorite filmmakers haven’t really done this – for instance, Quentin Tarantino (known for bloody gangster films) and Christopher Nolan (stylistic films with clever narrative choices).  In fact, getting known for doing the same thing over and over again can be tough to come back from (M. Night Shyamalan’s dependency on the twist ending, for instance).  But taking a right turn and trying a completely different style and genre of movie?  That’s a perfect description of what Martin Scorsese did on two occasions, about twenty years apart. 

Let’s start with the first example.  Here is Scorsese’s run from 1990 to 1995: Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, Casino.  Wait, what?  A gangster movie, a film about a violent ex-con exacting revenge on the attorney who put him in jail, a period piece about forbidden love in 1870s New York City based on a novel by Edith Wharton, and then another gangster movie?  Yes, that’s exactly what he did.  The Age of Innocence is certainly a tale from another time, about the wealthy elite and how a newly engaged attorney (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) falls in love with his fiancée’s cousin (played by Michelle Pfeiffer).  It’s not your typical Scorsese film – there is no blood shed in The Age of Innocence, but it has a few of his filmmaking hallmarks – long tracking shots and cameras zooming in on a character with a “spotlight” effect.  Most importantly it has rich characters bringing the realism of love, heartbreak, and pain to the screen.  The film was a critical success, including an Oscar win for Best Costume Design and a nomination for Winona Ryder (who played the fiancée) for Best Supporting Actress.  Ryder lost in a huge upset to 11 year-old Anna Paquin in The Piano.

Now, let’s look at Scorsese’s run from 2002 to 2013 – Gangs of New York (a violent immigrant crime story set in 1860s New York), The Aviator (biopic of the eccentric Howard Hughes), The Departed (Boston mob drama loosely based on Whitey Bulger), Shutter Island (psychological thriller about a U.S. Marshall searching for a missing patient from a psychiatric hospital), Hugo (children’s fantasy about a boy working in a train station), and The Wolf of Wall Street (biopic about Wall Street criminal Jordon Belfort).  Before we ask which one of these things is not like the other, it’s worth pausing to note that this run is the height of Scorsese’s partnership with Leonardo DiCaprio, who starred in five of these six films.  OK, back on topic:  In the middle of a string of movies heavy on violence, suspense and / or pretty rough language, he chose to make a film geared towards families.  Hugo is a delightful story of a boy who, while secretly working in a Paris train station keeping the clocks on time, becomes friends with a girl, leading them on a journey to discover the history of a long-forgotten filmmaker, played by Ben Kingsley.  It’s a nice story with some impressive special effects and good acting performances.  Commercially, the film was a failure at the box office, but received favorable critical reviews and 11 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.  So, it’s hard to say if this risk paid off, but at this stage in his career, Scorsese doesn’t need a commercial hit every time – it’s primarily about telling the stories he wants to tell with the people he wants to work with.  It’s always fun to watch what he’ll do next.  Speaking of which, it was just announced that his new film, The Killers of the Flower Moon, will begin filming in early 2021.

The “Split Personality Year” – Steven Spielberg

It’s hard to find a year when a filmmaker made two movies that are more diametrically opposed than what Steven Spielberg released in 1993: a summer blockbuster about the return of dinosaurs (Jurassic Park) and a harrowing story about the Holocaust (Schindler’s List).  That being said, as impressive as it was, Spielberg’s year is a close second in my mind to the year a different director had in 2000, which I will cover next week. 

We all know Spielberg’s work – he started an incredible run in the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s with Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T., balancing stories of action adventure and science fiction, with movies geared towards families.  He branched way outside of his “summer blockbuster” comfort zone in 1985, directing The Color Purple, the story of African-American women in the 1930s South.  It was a critical success, earnings him 11 Oscar nominations, but winning none (tying the record for most nominations without a win).  It started a narrative that despite Spielberg’s large commercial success, he wasn’t respected by the Academy.  He shifted his focus for the next few films, going back to what he did best – the third Indiana Jones film, and Hook, a family film about Peter Pan.  But in 1992, he set out on a very ambitious goal as he developed his next two films.

First up was Jurassic Park, the film adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel about a scientist who creates a theme part using dinosaurs brought back to life using newly-found DNA.  We all know what happens next – dinosaurs escape, chaos ensues.  The ambition in this film was the ground-breaking special effects used to create the dinosaurs.  Do you remember the first time you saw the film in the theater and how amazing it was to see the dinosaurs on the big screen and hear their enormous roar?  It was an impressive feat, especially for the movie technology that existed at the time. 

As filming on Jurassic Park wrapped up in late 1992, he shifted focus to his next project, the Holocaust story Schindler’s List.  He acquired the rights to the novel that the film is based on in the early 1980s, but waited a decade before he began production.  As a member of the Jewish faith, Spielberg had long been circling the topic of the Holocaust for a movie someday, but felt he need to wait until he had enough experience and maturity as a filmmaker to tackle the subject.  Product began in late 1992, with filming lasting until mid-1993 on location in Poland.  In interviews many years later, Spielberg spoke of the extreme contrast of the exhausting filming of Schindler’s List during the day, followed by evenings reviewing scenes of Jurassic Park that was going through the final editing process at the time.  June saw the release of Jurassic Park to great commercial and critical success.  It would go on to be the largest-grossing film of all-time, a record it would hold until Titanic was released four years later.  He finished Schindler’s List in time for its release in December of 1993 and the film would go on to be one of the best reviewed films of the century, winning his long-awaited Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director, and seven awards in total.  An amazing back to back feat by one of the best directors we will ever see.  If you are a fan of Spielberg (well, c’mon – who isn’t?), I highly recommend a 2017 documentary about him (called simply, Spielberg) that is available on HBO.

That’s all for this week.  Thanks again for reading and taking this (long) journey through some interesting filmmaking choices by some of our greatest directors.  Next week, we go back twenty years to look at the year 2000 in film.  If you would like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe here.