Thoughts on being an artist

[matril]

Well, I'm at my parents' house, here for a week. One of my friends was married last Saturday and another will be married this Saturday, and no sense going home in between, right? Except that my husband has to, because he can't miss a week of his job. :weeps piteously: We haven't been apart this long since the summer of 2001. Somehow we'll get by. A side effect of this separation is that I won't be able to see the Indiana Jones movie till next week, because there's no way we're seeing it without each other. So I'm assiduously avoiding spoilers. Meanwhile, I've been having some George Lucas-related thoughts. ;)


You know, I really feel for Lucas. He loves making films, clearly. It's his preferred medium. And come on, he's pretty good at it. No matter how you try to argue it, he is the dirivng force (ha ha) behind two hugely popular movie franchises. Film is his art. But the trouble with film is that it's fundamentally collaborative. Sure, you can stick a camera on a tripod and direct yourself acting out a script you wrote, but to make anything of real quality, you need to have lots of people involved. (And money, which means there must be some catering to popular opinion rather than real quality, but that's a whole other matter.)

Because of this, it's expected that you'll be a team player. It's only fair, right? Let everyone have a say in it and all that. But I don't know...my preferred medium is writing, and something I love about it is that I get do things entirely my way. Sure, people can disagree - strongly, to the point of being scary - about the choices an author makes (that's when I'll know I've achieved true success in writing - when the things I do to fictitous characters makes my readers personally hate me) but one thing they won't argue, unless they're stupid, is that the author shouldn't be so greedy about controlling their work. Because, um, it's their work. They can control it as they please. But filmmakers, not quite so much. It's a double standard. I understand where the double standard comes from, I understand that there must and ought to be a give and take in the filmmaking process, but if you have a vision of a movie and you really want to try it, imagine how hard it must be to be stopped in your tracks by accusations of egotism and over-controlling. And of course, Lucas gets hit harder than anyone else, because he's the media's favorite whipping boy, but it really is inherent to the field of filmmaking. I don't know that there's any easy solution - collaboration is certainly something that lends a richness to film. But it just makes me very glad that I like writing best and don't have to worry about collaborating with anyone. :)

On a tangent, I read an annoying article about how relieved the writer was to learn that Indy IV wouldn't be full of CGI like those pesky SW movies. Well, of course not! The CGI is in SW to create exotic environments that simply can't be approximated on Earth. With the OT, they used it all - desert, ice planet, forest world, swamp - and they had to find something utterly new. Meanwhile, seeing as how Indy is set on this planet, the CGI isn't necessary. Is that so hard to grasp?

I personally found the CGI in the prequels, in spite of its omnipresence, to be properly subdued as mere backdrops rather than in the flashy forefront. It was only there to serve in the telling of a fanciful story. And if it required the actors to use their imaginations a bit more, well....isn't that what acting is supposed to require anyway? Not an actor, so I guess I'm not qualified to say, but still.

Comments

[lazypadawan.livejournal.com]

The best filmmakers surround themselves with the best collaborators they can find. It's poisonous to a production if people don't get along and can't get unified behind a vision of how the film should turn out (see: Alien III).

What burns my biscuits is how CGI is bad, bad, bad in SW but somehow not a problem in other movies. There are people who complain about CGI in general but they're the modern versions of people who complained about "special effects" 25 years ago.

[matril.livejournal.com]

Yes, no matter what people might think, it sounds like Lucas generally gets along with his collaborators. (Then, of course, they accuse him of surrounding himself with "yes-men." You just can't win.)

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder if the "anti-CGI brigade" has a very negative view of actors, assuming that they just stand around lost without a full film set surrounding them... although at other times, I do worry that they intend their criticism as an attack on the director. Of course, one thought that's come to me is that those who criticize "bluescreen backgrounds" in the new Star Wars movies never seem to accuse the acting quality in the old movies of dropping whenever there's a scene looking out from the Millennium Falcon's cockpit...

When you briefly mentioned "solo filmmaking," though, I found myself thinking that one unaided person could conceivably make a short animated film by themselves. Of course, this might still only appeal to a limited audience.

[matril.livejournal.com]

Carrie Fisher has always talked about the oddness of reacting to the destruction of her home world as portrayed by a big dot and someone saying "Bang!" Yet the scene seems to work pretty well.

Indie films are probably the closest we come to solo filmmaking in widespread cinema. And they tend to get smaller releases because of the money issue. Not that I think indie films are automatically superior, but I kind of like the idea of fewer cooks messing with the soup.

[ladyaeryn.livejournal.com]

The CGI is in SW to create exotic environments that simply can't be approximated on Earth. With the OT, they used it all - desert, ice planet, forest world, swamp - and they had to find something utterly new. Meanwhile, seeing as how Indy is set on this planet, the CGI isn't necessary.

That's a very true and excellent point. And you could bet your paycheck that if Lucas had shunned CGI with the PT, many of these people would be complaining that he was "cheap," "lazy," or "hopelessly outdated." I also find it interesting that a number of the PT scenes these fanboys do drool over would've been utterly impossible without modern CGI: the Yoda/Dooku fight in AotC, the Senate duel in RotS. Didn't hear them complaining so much about the CGI then. ;)

But I have to admit, in some cases the presence of RL sets/props as opposed to CGI does lend a certain tangible quality that helps the atmosphere of a film. (As good as modern CGI is, often you can still tell that it's CGI.) Especially films that are meant to be direct homages an older, less sleek era of filmmaking, like the Indy movies. That said, I agree that I don't think that the bulk of the PT's CGI was there purely for the sake of looking cool: the environments were just as much a part of the story as any "natural" environments in the OT were. (And, just to further prove how contrary I am, probably my favorite OT locale was one of the most "unnatural:" Bespin!)

one thing they won't argue, unless they're stupid, is that the author shouldn't be so greedy about controlling their work. Because, um, it's their work.

Lucky you - you've apparently managed to avoid HP fandom this past year! ;)

It's interesting how it's only recently people have seem to have developed problems with Lucas being "greedy" with control over his films: didn't he all but sleep with the reel with his original cut of ANH in his arms just so the studio execs wouldn't chop it to bits? It's Lucas' protectiveness that gave us the ANH we first fell in love with.

if it required the actors to use their imaginations a bit more...isn't that what acting is supposed to require anyway?

Indeed. That reminds me of an old interview I read with Daniel Radcliffe where he was asked how difficult it was to interact with totally CGI characters like Dobby... and he said it really wasn't, because he didn't mind having to use his imagination!

And it's not like the actors in the OT didn't have to use their imagination either: how many times have we heard Carrie's story of how when they were filming Leia's reaction to the destruction of Alderaan, she was looking at nothing but a big blue dot and a guy that went "POW"? Not exactly like they had a lot of real footage of exploding planets to use as a reference. ;)

[matril.livejournal.com]

Lucky you - you've apparently managed to avoid HP fandom this past year! ;)

Heh - actually, I was obliquely referring to HP fandom when I was talking about people personally hating an author for doing things to fictitous characters. ;) As for the other matter with the encyclopedia....well, that's a mess, but it's not about an attempt to take over creative control of her books. They've already been written and no one's trying to rewrite them. It's more of a money thing.


It's interesting how it's only recently people have seem to have developed problems with Lucas being "greedy" with control over his films: didn't he all but sleep with the reel with his original cut of ANH in his arms just so the studio execs wouldn't chop it to bits? It's Lucas' protectiveness that gave us the ANH we first fell in love with.

Seriously! If Lucas hadn't kept firm hand on his movie's production, it would have had everything good and innovative sucked out of it by idiotic executives. (And if the fanboys had gotten their hands on the prequels, we probably would have gotten the galaxy far, far away version of The Matrix. :P)

I agree; I don't think CGI is wonderful just for its own sake; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It's all about serving the storytelling, something that all too often gets shoved to the side in moviemakinng nowadays.

[ladyaeryn.livejournal.com]

we probably would have gotten the galaxy far, far away version of The Matrix. :P

Hmm, yes, because of course there was absolutely no gratuitous FX in that movie. *g* Even the lovely imagined visual of Hayden/Anakin in leather pants and sweeping trench coat is not incentive enough for me to wish for that.