1. Directors Are The Auteurs Of cinema
To rephrase, directors are not exclusively the auteurs of cinema. I don't mean to slag directors; I spend as much time as you do talking about the work of Ridley Scott and Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and Uwe Boll. Their work as directors is auteured in as much that you could recognise a frame of theirs as having been manufactured by their director (yes, I do mean to include Uwe Boll in this). But there is a tendency to undervalue the work of other important players in the filmmaking process, specifically concerning the importance of screenwriters with regard to any finished cinematic product. Here are two examples to illustrate my point that screenwriters can be as influential if not more so upon a film than the director(s): 1. The Wachowskis I consider the Wachowskis to be among the very greatest writer/directors of our time. While the critics were divided by Cloud Atlas, it has, in my mind, earned a place in the pantheon of cinema. But the film I wish to focus on specifically here is V For Vendetta, adapted from the Alan Moore graphic novel by the Wachowskis and directed by James McTiegue. V for Vendetta was McTiegue's debut, and having seen McTiegue's consequent effort sans Wachowskis, The Raven, it became apparent to me just how much V For Vendetta was a Wachowskis film. While some of the visual flare is maintained between V and The Raven, the latter contains nothing of the gold mine of thematic content present in V. There is the concern with totalitarianism and state/personal control which is present in The Matrix, Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas; for goodness sake, the Wachowskis first film was even called Bound! There is the concern for LGBT characters which carries on through the Wachowskis' work; Bound centred around a lesbian relationship; one of the main strands of Cloud Atlas features Robert Frobisher, a man whose career is effectively ruined by his homosexuality; and, for video game fans, there is a famous lesbian kiss between Persephone and Niobe in Enter the Matrix. And then, of course, is the central theme of interconnection between all events and beings. Consider, in V For Vendetta, this speech as delivered by Stephen Rea: "I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected." This mirrors the entire thematic message of Cloud Atlas (look up the featurette "Everything is Connected" on Youtube). And this idea of connection is, arguably, made literal in The Matrix with humanity's joined connection to the system. Being part of the system and setting oneself free from it is the foundation of the entire Wachowski oeuvre, and these are concerns are not to be found in any of McTiegue's other work; indeed, his films are barely united by their visual language without reference to thematic content, and this being the case, I think that it is more than acceptable to consider the Wachowskis the auteurs of V For Vendetta. Which does not sit well with the directorial auteur theory. 2. David Ayer This argument relies heavily upon Ayer's most famous work and his most recent work, Training Day and End of Watch, the former being directed by Antoine Fuqua, the latter being directed by Ayer himself. Visually, we find very little connecting the two films; Fuqua's signature style being a Tony Scott derivative "style over substance" approach, with lots of movement and lots of high shutter speed work. There is a lot movement in End of Watch, but this is largely due to the found footage nature of most of the camerawork. It is, again, in looking at the writing that one finds the connections. Both films are connected by their concern with the everyday reality of police work in Los Angeles. The two movies are also notable for their snappy dialogue and well-written realistic characters; Denzel Washington's portrayal of Alonzo Harris is, while gutsy and sometimes Shakespearean, always realistic; this realism is the technical objective of End of Watch, and Ayer achieves this excellently. This emphasis upon realism is not found anywhere else in Fuqua's work, all of which has been spectacularly poor since Training Day; his latest offering, Olympus Has Fallen, features the spectacularly soapless Gerard Butler playing the part of an action hero in a film. Sorry for the spoilers there. The poor quality of Fuqua's subsequent work and the excellence of Ayer's forces one to the conclusion that Training day owes what plaudits it earned to David Ayer rather than to the film's director. And this does not sit well with the casual tendency to always lay the credit for a film at the director's door. I am not seeking to discredit the auteur theory; there are many genius directors working today. But, as these and other examples show, directors are not always solely responsible for all the good auteured films in the world. 4523 words later, there we have it, the urban myths about movies you probably believe. Or perhaps, now, believed? Have I changed your mind on any of these? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Spread the word, and let me know. Meantime, I'll leave you with Denzel's big speech at the end of Training Day. My favourite line: "You know what the gas chamber smells like? Pine oil!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwnP7jhTrlQ