Thoughts on being an artist
May. 27th, 2008 05:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matrilWell, 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.
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.
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Date: 2008-05-29 06:30 pm (UTC)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.
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Date: 2008-05-29 08:16 pm (UTC)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.