NEW YORK--It sounds awful to say it, but after a day of watching movies I would have been happy to skip Foxcatcher and Capote director Bennett Miller's interview of Christopher Nolan at this year's Tribeca Film Festival.
I'm always skeptical of such stage-managed availabilities; the subjects involved usually have a specific motive for appearing and it doesn't involve the sharing of trade secrets or irresistible revelations. Those looking for edification might be better off watching Nolan's or Miller's movies instead of listening to them chat. It's not that the artists wouldn't tell you how to be like them if they could, it's just that they can't.
What they do is mysterious even unto themselves; you can prepare and study and practice all you want and it means nothing if you haven't talent or if the opportunity never presents itself. There was an Onion headline once that read "97-Year-Old Dies Unaware Of Being Violin Prodigy," and, like most things that human beings find funny, there's something true and sad in the notion of fallow potential. What we yearn to do and what we are good at are often very different things, and the best word for someone whose capabilities match their interests is--as Nolan acknowledged early on--"lucky."
As in, "Be a lucky man," which, Nolan reported, was what one of his would-be mentors, the formidable Stephen Frears, offered him when asked for advice on how to become a film director.
When Miller--who turned out to be a much better public interviewer than a lot of "professionals" I've seen attempt the chore--asked for a show of hands, more than half the crowd gathered in the spacious auditorium at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in Tribeca admitted to filmmaking aspirations. By attending, they were implicitly asking the same sorts of questions of Nolan and Miller, and were likely as crestfallen as Nolan to hear the truth. And so the director of The Dark Knight trilogy added, not unkindly, that his job was "such a curious profession, because there's no prescription."
And it's not something you can really pursue on your own either. Film directors are more like symphony conductors or general contractors or military generals than writers or painters, which means it's more difficult to say exactly what their talent comprises--a gift for organizing efforts and symbols into stories? For midwiving the minor miracles we know as movies?
"If you're lucky enough to tell a story with a camera, at whatever scale you're doing it, appreciate that as filmmaking," Nolan said. "Don't always be waiting for the 'real' film to come along, because you may be making the real film."
And that's it, really--the idea that whatever you are doing is the real thing, worthy of your attention and concentration. Nolan is probably the most successful commercial film director of recent years when you consider the money his films have earned alongside the size of his audience and the level of critical acclaim. But one gets the sense that he applied the same focus to Following, the movie he made for $6,000, as he did to Memento, Inception or Interstellar. At some point the work has to be its own reward--if not, no matter how lucrative the contract, it's just a job.
Not that there's anything wrong with having a job in the sense of making yourself useful. All of us should make enough money that we don't impose a burden on anyone else, and relatively few of us are fortunate enough to genuinely love the tasks we perform for money. (Most of us do things we don't want to do--and I'm a little ashamed that sometimes the thing I don't want to do is to listen to a couple of Hollywood directors talk about their jobs on stage.)
Nolan said that he'd be happy making movies "on a tabletop" if that's what it came down to, that ultimately everything outside the frame falls away, and all that matters is the work itself. I suspect everyone who pursues creative activity knows what he means; sometimes one's private engagement with work does feel more important than satisfying any Maslovian need. Artists tend to neglect themselves and their families in favor of their work, to the point that anyone who feels they can avoid the game probably ought to. For as Clayton DeLaney said to Tom T. Hall, "there ain't no money in it; it'll lead you to an early grave."
Unless you're lucky enough to be Christopher Nolan or Bennett Miller--who mildly demurred, saying he thought luck has less to do with it than Nolan did.
Which is also a valid point. There are plenty of people who love to paint but just aren't any good at it. There's nothing wrong with being bad at something you enjoy, of using art for therapeutic purposes. In the end, it probably doesn't matter so much whether anyone cares or understands what you're trying to do with your private obsessions--it's just good to get lost in the effort. We all deserve the arrested moments of self-unconsciousness that making something can bring.
What's problematic is when substandard product is offered for public consumption, or, worse than that, when work is performed to cynical specification in accordance with formula to fulfill some perceived commercial standard. Hack work is not incompetent, it's merely mediocre and representative of an indifferent, disrespectful or compromised mindset. It's also unavoidable given the limited resources allotted most people who have to make a living. Most movies that are brought to market are hack work, and a lot of what gets published in a newspaper fits the definition as well. (My private note cards carry the legend "hack writer & plagiarist," a job description I stole from Scott Fitzgerald.)
My point is we try to do better. Most of us, anyway.
There's no getting around the essential selfishness of what Nolan and Miller (and I) do for money; I suspect that despite the discrepancies in our paychecks we're all lucky to be working for those little moments of self-forgetting our jobs allow. At the same time we have to keep in mind the expectations of our audience and we have to allow--as Miller says--our bosses the opportunity to feel smart while still managing to subvert convention and formulae.
But all that tight-roping is finally incidental to what's going on in the holy frame, as you're making your real movie.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 04/26/2015