Dark Knight has already had near universal praise (Denby of the New Yorker one of the few who missed the point) and is approaching the $400m mark, so it hardly needs me to add to it, but there’s been a strange note emerging consistently in the British broadsheet reviews which goes something like ‘good though it is, we wish Nolan would do something more important with his talent’.

That tragically misguided sentiment needs speaking to.
In TDK, Chris Nolan and his brother and co-writer Jonathan take one of modern culture’s greatest myths, and with the help of seven of our finest actors (now sadly, six) and an army of collaborators, re-invent it as a parable for our sad and troubled times.

Telling unvarnished and difficult truths about what America has become in its war against terror, and the corrosive consequences for all of us to have the dream of our superpower so tarnished, The Dark Knight has succeeded where a dozen more ‘worthy’ attempts have failed. In what Randy Pausch would call a ‘head fake’ it wraps a hard moral and political message about Iraq, Terror and our wars in a mythical wrapper and takes that message to a mass audience who are, in astonishing numbers, embracing it: because - not despite - of this layering, this mixing of the mythical and the specifically urgent, TDK is on the way to becoming the biggest movie of all time.

If there is more important work than this for a story teller to do, I don’t know what it is. The Nolans make me proud to be a filmmaker.

Is the depressing marketing tag on the UK posters of CASSANDRAS DREAM, the current Woody Allen movie.

It then goes on to clarify, that this is of course, ‘a Woody Allen Movie’. The depressing thing is that it needed clarification, and that clarification wasn’t:’From the Director of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Deconstructing Harry, Bullets over Broadway, and about 40 other movies, of which at least 10 are works of genius and classics of cinema (and which number would NOT include Match Point), but instead ‘From the Director of Match Point’ - a mediocre thriller with average performances and a completely bullshit understanding of London and England’s social milieu.

Now just to be clear this isn’t a rant about Woody Allen. In my book the man’s allowed the odd off decade. He’s  73 for christ sake and has already given us so much (and early reviews suggest that VICKI CHRISTINA BARCELONA is a return to form) my problem is with a movie marketing industry so craven, and a film audience so ignorant and woefully short on memory, that ‘From the Director of Match Point’ is a considered, no doubt on some good evidence, a better marketing tag line than ‘From Woody Allen’.

I’m reminded of a comment I overheard in the cinema at a screening of ‘MEET THE FOCKERS’ - a young woman, probably in her early 20s asked her boyfriend - who’s that actor, you know the one playing the father with the fake breasts. I paused, captivated and horrified to hear what his answer would be: ‘You know him’  came the quick rejoinder in a tone of disbelief (phew at least the boyfriend knows who Robert De Niro is, I breathed to myself), ‘He’s that funny guy from ANALYZE THAT’

I’m off on Holiday for a week today. NY, NY for some much needed R&R. In my absence, I leave you with the first trailer that’s moved me to wonder since some little Hobbits took to the silver screen

I’ve loved this story in book, on stage, in script - and I’m so looking forward to seeing it on screen. Don’t disappoint me brothers Weitz.
Trailer here

We are going to run a screen-writers competition with some partners later this year. You know the sort of thing, we’ll set a brief of some sort, have submissions and then winnow the field, the winner gets optioned and comes along on our development track with a shot of making their film.
The question we are knocking about, is what sort of brief for spec scripts is most helpful?

Before everyone rushes to answer, I think its worth abstracting the problem a level, the key question in this sort of thing is:

• What sort of constraints in a brief encourage creativity and interesting outcomes and which sorts inhibit it?

In my experience both as a writer and having run competitions like this before, there are certain types of criteria that are freeing and others that are limiting.

I think the difference between them is a conceptual one: the distinction (not mine but Guillemo del Toro’s, and Aristotle’s before him, but its useful so I’m nicking it) between the core genesis, the heart, the controlling idea of a story and the syntax that is then utilized to tell the story.

The former is the inviolate idea that comes from a writers psyche / muse. It doesn’t arrive ready formed, they come out of long invisible and unfathomable gestation processes in writers heads. They come from forgotten nightmares, buried neuroses, long abiding passions and pre-occupations. Orson Welles’ obsession with fame; Aaron Sorkin’s issues with displaced fathers and the love that can exist between groups of colleagues; Joss Whedon’s fascination with the underestimated power of women; Almodovar’s love of mothers; del Toro’s fascination with the distinction between being and becoming. These are the ideas that inform all these film-makers films, no matter how different their ultimate expression in different types of films.

This is the bit that I think we can’t and shouldn’t prescribe, because it would encourage false or forced entries. We want people to write about what’s inside them, not what we think people should write about. So I would beware of prescribing the themes we want people to write about. We don’t want to puppet writers.

The SYNTAX of a story, however, that is something that is more about audience / market / style then it is about guts and internal process. Orson Wells talks about fame and power as eloquently in KANE as he does in OTHELLO; Almodovar has explored the power of women in melodrama (TODOS SOBRE MI MADRE) and in sex comedy (TIE ME UP TIE ME DOWN); Wheedon deals with women’s power and the politics of it in both teenage vampire fantasy and in Sci-Fi Western (FIREFLY/SERENITY). Sorkin is exploring the same type of philia today on the set of Studio 60 as he did for 4 years in the White House. The tensions between Fascist political ideology and the freedom of fantasy that everyone loved in PANS LABYRINTH were already being explored in HELL BOY. (and apparently in its sequel!)

By Syntax, therefore, I mean choices of: GENRE, LOCATION, SETTING, MILIEU, TONE, FORMAT and PHYSICAL or CONCEPTUAL Limitations. I think this is where we should focus our criteria.

In as sense, there is nothing terribly radical in this thinking of mine. Its just the difference between a teacher who asks his class to write a sonnet about anything they want, but making sure they respect the form of the sonnet, and a teacher who asks everybody to write a poem about a frog who became a prince. The results of the former exercise tend to be more interesting, more varied, and have a greater chance of uncovering a real poet.
At least that’s what I think. What do other people think?

Back in London and unexpectedly the sun is shining. Good weather these days provokes a rather complex emotional response in most of us. It goes a bit like this.

1. First, the natural human reaction is to go “how nice, its sunny”. In the old days, we’d stop there.
2. But now, because so often the weather is not as we would expect, we follow up with a “but how odd” reaction: how odd - its not supposed to be sunny in January in London. There wasn’t supposed to be freak flooding in Malaysia over new year where I spent Christmas with my family; but they continue unabated (and the citizenship there needs volunteers to help, so if you can do anything, please do).
3. And that’s when the third reaction hits: it’s global warming. Thankfully this reaction has also finally hit the mind of George W. Bush
4. And then, at the moment we realise (3) we feel guilt for feeling (1). (Do we think Dubbaya is feeling guilt?)

Like I said, complex.

So what does any of this have to do with the slingblog, slingshot studios or the making of movies? Well more than you might think.

One reason is a decision I came to over Christmas: that the blog is going to start to be more multi-purpose. I’ll continue to chronicle developments here at slingshot, and I’ll continue to debate and posit on issues that effect the movie industry. But I’m going to start talking about other stuff to. I often have other issues I would like to post on, but have held of on the grounds of relevance. But since I clearly don’t have a particularly good work / life divide, and since it seems silly to divide the readership between two blogs, you can, for better or worse, start to expect to see my musings on subjects beyond the movie industry here.

But this particular rant is, in fact, linked to movies after all. Because its about complexity. Global warming and its effects is one of the most important, but by no means the only, example of how complexity shapes our modern world. On how cause and effect are not linear, but endlessly iterating and interconnected. And how not appreciating that subtlety, leads to all sorts of problems. See Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent piece in this week’s New Yorker for the difference between Mysteries and Puzzles for an illustration of this. Another interesting, perhaps even seminal and populist writer on the relevance of complexity to everyday life is Steven Johnson, who is a pretty active blogger. As of course is my friend, the no less active, and every bit as brilliant (if somewhat less intelligible) Simon Hill
So we live in a complex world. And to understand the world we need to understand complexity. And one of the chief ways we come to understand our world, is through the media, and king of media is movies. So movies, to continue to be relevant, should help us understand complexity. Right?

Except conventional wisdom says that movies should be simple. They should be simple in plot: 3 acts. They should be simple in characters: one protagonist. They should be simple in themes: one controlling idea. These principals have become the guide for screenwriters everywhere, and are codified in endless books, starting with McKee’s STORY, but now in many more besides, Movies have rules. Seven principles, five laws, three acts, 1 idea.

Depart from this conventional wisdom, try and make a movie as complex as the world, and , even if you get your movie made, you will loose your audience. And so often, it is true. We have been finding this in the edit of Sugarhouse Lane - every time we tried something to make the movie more multi-layered, and took it away from its core premise of 3 men, 1 gun; then audience got bored. We have been finding this in finalising the script for our next movie, FRENCH FILM, the latest draft is the strongest by far, and in part because it hews more closely and clearly to its through line: a movie about how relationships begin.Even though its writer, Ash Ditta, is one of the most complex men I know.

Most of the greatest and most successful movies ever made, are also the simplest, with the core idea easily reducible to a single line, without diminishing the movie: JAWS (Shark eats people, man hunts shark), LORD OF THE RINGS (Hobbits return ring), ROCKY (loser boxer learns to win). Not a lot of complexity there.

But yet, but yet. For each of those examples, there is a great counter-example. How would one reduce the complexity of CITIZEN KANE, or CHINATOWN or SHORT CUTS without also diminishing them. Or more recently, the unusual, and almost great SYRIANA and BABEL?

What is interesting, is the latter two are movies very explicitly about the complex, inter-connected modern world we live in. Movies for an age of global warming, for an age of the Internet. And I think we need more of those movies.
So I’m increasingly interested in the idea of making a movie that is not just complex, but that is somehow ABOUT complexity. My holiday reading suggested some avenues to explore (on which watch this space) but in the meantime, I’d welcome thoughts and suggestions.