Unleashing the Power of the Image (with the films of Vincent Ward)
Making the Transformational Moment In Film
Dan Fleming
CONTENTS Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6 .6 PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Two Styles of Imagining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 14 INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
How to Read This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22 Why Read This Book? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22 A Crisis in “How To” Film Books? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23 The Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 . 26 PART 1 STAGING THE MOMENT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Identifying th the Tr Transformational Moment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 31 What the Sp Spectator Br Brings to to th the Mo Moment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22 Wha W hatt th thee Tra rans nsfo form rmat atio iona nall Mom omen entt Co Conn nnec ects ts Wi With th . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 .388 Looking for Vincent Ward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 41 The Perkins Cobb Theor y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 45 Auteurs an and Co Coppola’s Pr Prediction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Wha Whatt Fi Film lmma maki king ng Is — Fr From om Mo Move veme ment nt to Kn Know owab abililitityy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4 .488 Staging Rooms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Staging the Gaze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67 Transforming the Gaze . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 73 Staging the “Elsewhen”? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 77 The Vogler Memo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7 . 79 Stories and Loglines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 . 83 E xercise #1 # 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 . 85
PART 2 COMPOSING THE MOMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
The Meta- Co Compositional Moment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 111 The “Universal Human Being” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 117 Summar y # 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 E xercise #2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 121 Narrative and the Moment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 123 The Transformation Rule in Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 125 Light, Color, Music and the Moment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 143 Thee Dr Th Drea eam m Wo Work rk of Ch Char arac acte terr (o (orr th thee Sh Shee eets ts of Ti Time me)) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 .173 73 E xercise #3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 . 19 0 213 PART 3 WHAT IT IS LIKE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 E xercise #4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 213 The Manifest and the Latent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 215 . 2 25 CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2 Summar y #2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228 After word: A Conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Filmography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 About th the Au Author an and IlIllustrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
P A R T
1
STAGING THE MOMENT
IDENTIFYING THE T RANSFORMATIONA RANSFORMATIONAL L MOMENT
“Go on Robin, tread on my ace” (Werner Herzog to Robin Williams on the set o What Dreams May Come) Come)
W
hat exactly is a transormational moment in ilm? The two cinematic moments on the right are not “transormational” in the sense intended here. But the moment explained in detail on the next our pages is. Top right is a moment rom What Dreams May Come, the Hollywood lm directed by Vincent Ward. A man searches heaven and hell or his dead amily, encountering along the way, among other extraordinary things, a eld o aces that he must walk precariously through. Among the aces is this one — a bespectacled stranger who thinks his son may have come looking or him. Bottom right is a moment rom Rescue Dawn, Dawn, a Hollywood lm directed by Werner Herzog. A German-American U.S. Navy pilot is shot down over Laos in the early secretive months o the Vietnam War. Ater being tortured, he is imprisoned in the jungle but eventually escapes with a companion. The companion (squatting on the right here) is brutally killed as they try to make their way out o the unorgiving jungle, but here he has come back to his riend that night as a “ghost” — in act an illusion conjured up by a everish mind. Herzog told this story once beore — as a documentary originally made or a German TV series called Voyages to Hell . And that bespectacled ace rom another voyage to hell is Werner Herzog himsel, in a cameo role at the invitation o Vincent Ward, whom a distinguished English lm critic once called “an antipodean Werner Herzog,” a Herzog rom the other side o the world. Now the point about the two scenes opposite (apart rom the coincidence around Herzog) is that while both are rom Hollywood-avored “hero’s journey” stories and both are arresting, memorable and powerully suggestive o the two very dierent lms’ larger themes — attachment and loss — neither on its own is really sucient to be what we mean by a transormational moment in lm. For
What Dreams May Come (1998)
Rescue Dawn (2006)
one o these we need to wind back Rescue Dawn to an earlier moment (we will come back to What Dreams May Come shortly). Dieter — the lost and imprisoned pilot in 1966 — is explaining to his riend Duane how he came to be a fier. It is a story that goes back to his childhood in Hitler’s Germany, scourged by war. As written by Herzog, the story recounted by Dieter (Christian Bale) draws heavily on the real Dieter Dengler’s own account rom Herzog’s earlier documentary. Duane and Dieter sit side by side, perched on a giant stone jar in their prison compound in a rare moment o comparative ease amidst the habitual struggles or ood, or sanity, or sel-preservation, or some vestige o dignity. Beyond the compound is the dense jungle o Laos, itsel in reality a larger prison and ultimately just as great a threat to sanity as the actual prison conditions they endure. Several elements come together here: an expertly crated (casually proound) dialog by Herzog, Christian Bale’s utterly persuasive perormance as Dieter (he had just done a supporting role in Terence Malick’s The New World ), ), Steve Zahn’s edgy, intense and highly complementary perormance as Duane (bringing a mercurial quality to his growing riendship with the more single-minded Dieter). Duane (seated on the let) has been a prisoner much longer by this point and one quickly eels that he is already on an emotional precipice. Later it will be Duane’s death — beheaded by machete — that will bring Dieter to that edge too. Unobtrusively convincing art direction by Arin “Aoi” Pinijvararak keeps the background ambiance, the look and eel o prison compound and jungle, always there in our peripheral consciousness even as our ocal consciousness gets concentrated in scenes like this one. Cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger’s naturalistic use o light lets the changing moods o the “Laotian” jungle and skies (actually Thailand) express themselves vividly. But it is Zeitlinger’s camera that we want to pay particular attention to. What Zeitlinger and Herzog do with the camera here is the element that really triggers the moment’s transormational potential: the scene becomes more than the sum o the parts alluded to. It transorms those parts. The moment begins with the camera at position 1 (rame 1). As Dieter and Duane talk, the camera
drits slowly on the path marked. Frames 1 and 2 are not separate shots, but the beginning and end o this camera movement and o a single shot. There is then a shot-reverse-shot conversational exchange between camera positions 2 and 3 (rame 3 being the reverse). But next the camera re-traces its initial movement by backing slowly away rom position 2 along its original line as ar as position 4 (rame 4), again in a continuous shot. All o this is unobtrusive as camera movement but at the same time it creates a very particular kind o space around the two characters, a space quite dierent than i it had been produced by a classical stand-osh master shot ollowed only by cutting between over-the-shoulder shots. Instead, by the time we reach camera position 4 (rame 4) we have been drawn in around a semi-circle, the ulcrum o which is Dieter’s story about his childhood, and then we have slowly withdrawn again. As we pull back, the two characters go immobile, caught in their own thoughts. Immobility is not an especially easy thing or actors to do, accustomed as they are to delivering something more active,
more busy in response to the camera’s attention. Here, however, the immobility (rame 4) is prooundly suggestive. The lines that actor Christian Bale has just delivered are closely based on what the real Dieter Dengler says in Herzog’s documentary. They have gone back to his childhood home in Germany and Dieter is remembering his village being attacked by low-fying American aircrat when he was nine years old, during World War Two. He was watching rom the window with a brother. Dieter (in documentary): One of the airplanes came diving at our house, and it was so unusual because the cockpit was open. The pilot had black goggles that were sitting on his forehead. He was looking — he’d actually turned around — he was looking in at the window ... it was like a vision for me ... from that moment on little Dieter needed to fy.
In the ctionalized re-telling o this, Herzog sticks closely to the original but introduces an instant o eyecontact between the American pilot and the German child. Dieter: It Dieter: It was eet away rom the house ... and the canopy was open. And this pilot, he had his goggles up on his helmet and I could see his eyes. And he was looking at me, right at me. He’s looking right at me and as he turns to go ... he’s looking right at me still. And the thing is, rom that moment on, little Dieter he needed to fy. (They both laugh) Duane: You’re a strange bird Dieter. Guy tries to kill you and you want his job. In the earlier documentary version, Herzog illustrates this moment o reversed gaze by inserting an old photograph o two children at a window. But in the
eature lm we do not “see” this memory in the same way. Instead the camera moves slowly back on its path rom 2 to 4 and while it does so the two men’s extended instant o immobility suggests an “elsewhen” that they seem momentarily conscious o (opposite). This “elsewhen” may be something like the scene in the old photograph (we can imagine something very like it as Dieter talks), but it is more generally to do with not being here and now, in this imprisonment, where needing to fy has an awul poignancy. Combining the dialog and perormances with that camera movement denes a space which is both literal — the space marked out by the camera — and imagined. The camera’s movement aords space and time or this moment to happen. The camera’s movement transorms the other contributing elements, assisting the whole to become more than the sum o the parts. When it does so, the camera movement is no longer something separate — it becomes integral to the moment. And o course a viewer does not actively notice much o this underlying construction as it goes on. Instead it is the lmic moment that is experienced. This is what a transormational moment in lm depends on. It will not always be a camera movement that is so indispensable to achieving this kind o transormation o course. There will be many other possibilities, which is what this book is about. Indeed in this example there is one urther element that adds an additional transormational layer. As the camera settles back towards position 4 (below), where the re-raming reminds us again that we are in a bleak prison compound, a ragment o music is briefy introduced. It is an end punctuation or the moment. Herzog had available to him a striking
cue by composer Klaus Badelt called “Hope.” You can see even rom the title why it might have been appropriate here. The cue is richly emotional — it builds towards a ullness o sound (the orchestral version on the Rescue Dawn soundtrack album is the best way to hear this) but retains a plaintiveness that is quite striking. However, rather like the old photograph, i used here it would have been trying to “illustrate” something about the moment rom the outside rather than staying inside the moment. Instead Herzog uses a brie ragment played on a khene, a Laotian wooden mouth organ. It gives the moment its end punctuation but it has a strangeness and sorrowulness and ragility that belong inside the moment in a way that an intruding orchestral score could not have done. The orchestral “Hope” cue is used later, during the prisoners’ escape and behind the action. So the ragile, strange sound o the khene here is much more powerully evocative o a still unrealized hope. The transormational moment is complete: what have been
transormed are the constituent elements that together become more than their separate parts. Or almost complete — because it is always possible with moments like these to nd other “perect” details that contribute to the whole. Just beore the camera settles back at position 4 to complete the moment, we glimpse in the background the gaunt gure o one o the other prisoners, whom we have seen here in rame 1 as well, a man teetering into madness whose paradoxical ear o leaving obstructs the escape attempt. As the camera completes its slow semi-circling movement and return, the background image o this emaciated gure passes in eect between Duane and Dieter in mute visual testimony to what they might become. In act the ragment o music played on the khene begins just as this rather spectral gure appears in the background, rendered out o ocus by the shallow depth o eld. The khene playing is an example o non-diegetic music (not being played in the scene) and yet is very much o the moment.
(Original score by Klaus Badelt. Extract transcribed by David Archer, transcription copyright Soundstone Music 2010.)
WHAT THE SPECTATOR BRINGS TO THE MOMENT
S
omething vital does seem to enter this kind o moment rom “outside.” The spectator has to contribute something to it as well. We can approach the general question o what this is by “triggering” it artiicially here. I we think about the scene on the let (rom What Dreams May Come ), we may readily ind ourselves thinking about it as a representation o hell. We may have other images in mind, rom religious books, rom art (we will come back to some o these later). What Dreams May Come won a visual eects Oscar or its sometimes astonishing imagery, and its depiction o “hell” is nothing i not visually arresting. Chris (Robin Williams) has lost his amily — his two children to a road accident, later his wie (Annabella Sciorra) to suicide. In between these tragedies, he is involved in a vehicle pile-up in a road tunnel and inds himsel … well, we will come back to where he inds himsel. But at this point in the ilm he appears to be on a voyage to hell in search o his wie, guided by the mysterious igure o The Tracker (just visible here in the background, at the edge o the ield o heads). Horribly, Chris spots his wie’s ace amidst all the others, he runs towards her, but beore reaching her he crashes suddenly through the crusty surace into a sea o bodies. Beore recognizing his wie’s ace, he has paused to exchange a ew words with the bespectacled man, played by Werner Herzog. But what could the spectator be contributing here? We can experiment with this by telling you about the women’s voices the man hears as he picks his way clumsily through the aces, trying not to tread on too many. All around him the ragments o voices evoke past lives, traces o guilt, shards o identity. “I never took more than thirty percent rom any client” pleads one woman’s voice. In act all the women’s voices we hear in this scene were done by the talented voiceover actress Mary Kay Bergman, the “ocial” voice o Snow White or Disney since 1989. Mary Kay Bergman committed suicide in 1999, not much more than a year ater she did this scene or What Dreams May Come. Come .
Now that you know this “external” act, it is probably impossible to watch and listen to this scene without feeling something . You may even be a little uncomortable with our mentioning it in his context. What you are now bringing to the scene is affect (á,ekt with the stress on the rst syllable): an initial disposition o eeling that may not yet have been representationally captured and turned into a selconsciously expressible emotion or thought (like empathy, sorrow, or an idea about whether “guilt” should attach to suicide). We have artifcially injected aect into this moment, in relation to the images on the let, by pulling something in rom outside. But aect can be brought to the transormational moment rom “inside,” not as something extraneous. We will come back in more detail later in the book (in a section called “What It Is Like”) to how this is managed. We are likely to care every time we hear Mary Kay Bergman’s voice, now that we have imported something extraneous into the scene in order to trigger the presence o aect. This aective response is unquestionably there in the Rescue the Rescue Dawn scene we have just analyzed. Aect materializes in the space described by that camera movement we looked at, is drawn into that space by the combination o elements and because a place is being made available where it can attach itsel. But Robin Williams’ conversation with the be spectacled man (they briefy mistake each other or ather and son) belongs to that part o What
Dreams May Come which is dominated by soupy, mawkish dialogue by Ron Bass that tries to tell the viewer what to eel, in the context o the screenplay’s determinedly classical Hollywood narrative orm. The third image opposite, on the other hand, an image o bodies glimpsed as the man plummets through them, belongs to the same scene but to the post-classical dimension o the lm, where aect just materializes spontaneously and breathtakingly in the image and where the moment oers itsel irresistibly or aective attachment. In a later
section on color, we will emphasize this other side o What Dreams May Come, Come , because that is where its transormational moments are concentrated. Aect’s abundant availability to be materialized in lm is clear rom how important some lms can be to people. It is March 1999 in Utah, ve months ater the release o What Dreams May Come. Come. A gay Mormon boy writes this in his diary: After sacra ment, wait — during sacrament meeting yesterday, I began to feel guilty for the night before. I left in the middle o someone’s talk. I drove to the top o Flat Iron Mesa, and I thought. I thought of what happened between [boy’s name removed] and me. I drove home and stared at my our bottles o medicine. Would it be enough? Do I have the guts? I thought o the movie What movie What Dreams May Come . Come . It saved my lie ... It’s hard to be Mormon. It’s hard to be gay. It’s Hell being both. We don’t know by what individualized connections the boy on the edge o the mesa came to care about — to invest aect so signicantly in — this lm (perhaps its “heaven” seemed like a Mormon one to him, perhaps its “hell” rightened him, or perhaps something about the images helped him to imagine a better escape rom imprisoning and reproachul ways o thinking). We do not really need to know. The point is simply that people are willing and want to connect aectively with lms. The transormational moment in lm respects this act. http://gaymoboy.blogspot.com/ (journal entry 3/15/99 posted 8/18/05)
WHAT THE TRANSFORMATIONAL MOMENT CONNECTS WITH
O
course the kinds o moment we are interested in here do not sit in isolation within the ilms that carry them. Quite the contrary. All successul cinematic scenes relate closely to the scene beore and the scene ater, sometimes in terms o continuity, sometimes through juxtapositions that are less reliant on continuity and more on surprise. But these particular moments tend to be especially embedded in deeper structures o interconnection within a ilm. The “maps” on the right are not meant to be detailed depictions o these interconnections, merely to suggest the sorts o connection that are at work here. In the case o Rescue Dawn, the moment we have looked at connects back to the prior scenes o abuse and imprisonment (the gaunt prisoner in the background providing a strong visual reminder). It also, very powerully, turns out to connect orward to the “ghost” scene where the slain Duane re-appears to Dieter, deep into the escape attempt and with hope all but gone. And it connects with another “elsewhen” — not quite so literally as shown in the old photograph rom the earlier documentary version but nonetheless a place o childhood and history that gives the moment its particular resonance, as two boys look through a window at the uture, which gazes back at them. What Dreams May Come is especially interesting when we start to consider the deep interconnections around that moment when the man alls through the crust o heads and glimpses those bodies. On the previous page we used an early storyboard visualization o the lm’s central narrative image — the gure alone, on mountain’s edge, contemplating the hero’s mission. That image absolutely dominates the lm’s narrative and orward momentum — and it is that journey which the screenplay’s dialogue insists on spelling out in terms o some regrettably maudlin story ideas. So there is an arrow heading straight on here (gure right), continuing that journey with determined i misplaced conviction. But the moment’s deep interconnections loop back into the lm. In act an extraordinary thing about What Dreams May Come is that all o its transormational moments
connect backwards rather than orwards, as i giving the orward movement over, surrendering it, to Hollywood’s much worshiped Homeric hero’s journey. Meanwhile it also adopts a skewed, post-classical inner structure that bends time back on itsel; another (largely silent and visually stunning) lm that runs in the opposite direction rom the hero’s mission and carries viewers’ aective attachments into dierent times. So the ragmentary but unorgettable moment o glimpsed bodies belongs to this other geometry and connects back through several other moments in just that way; or example to the dead woman plunging naked and rapturous into an icy lake in the “heaven” section o the lm, or to a cutout paper toytheater gure o an acrobat tucked into the edge o a picture rame containing a photo o one o the dead children. These pathways o interconnection also blur gender distinctions intriguingly, where the hero’s journey remains very much caught up in gender stereotypes, oten to the point o exaggerated parody except that the dialogue plays it so straight. By contrast, these other interconnections o moments are ultimately more associated with the children in the lm (especially Marie), who are themselves unexpectedly androgynous gures. Without pursuing the “puzzle” o these specic connections any urther just yet, the point to be made here is that the transormational moment may connect as time-oriented images in ways that are relatively independent o the connections made by the orward narrative movement o the lm, where our two diagrammed “loops” on the gures indicate these time-oriented images at work, albeit in the case o Herzog’s lm an “image” rom another lm. It must also be said quite clearly that what we are suggesting does not reer to “hidden meanings” in the lm or some sort o coded secret, but rather to a map o aective attachments as a characteristic o post-classical lmic orm, though here still contained by the classical Hollywood narrative orm o the screenplay.
What Dreams May Come as a crash on the Hollywood Freeway Actually, the car crash that “kills” Robin Williams at the start o What Dreams May Come happens in San Francisco’s Broadway Tunnel, but the real “crash” here is the lm itsel, and that denitely happened in Hollywood. The intuitively post-classical lmmaker and Hollywood impacted loudly at this point. What this means or the book will become clearer as we proceed, but it comes down to this in summary. That impact sent the character played by Robin Williams o on his hero’s mission into a “heaven” and a “hell” ostensibly both o his own making — they consist o things rom his lie, words said, memories clung to, regrets. Not perhaps entirely unpromising material but what classical “Hollywood” orm, as channeled through the screenplay, does to this is a combination o three things: (1) the mythic structure o the Homeric journey with its recognizable stages mapped onto a three-act structure; (2) what we can call Capra’s Error — thinking that drama happens when the actors cry (American director Frank Capra once said, “I made some mistakes in drama. I thought the drama was when the actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries”) (3) ailing to heed what we can call Minghella’s Warning about speaking not being the basis o the “lm sentence.” These three characteristics characteristics reinorce the classical Hollywood narrative orm o the lm. But where the lm’s ex traordinary post-classical material — channeled by Vincent Ward — in act came rom and why it is so revealing about these transormational moments in lm are questions that will have been answered by the end o the book.
LOOKING FOR VINCENT WARD
T
he page on the right is rom a documentary script called Holy Boy , or a still uninished ilm by Perkins Cobb. Perkins conjured himsel up unexpectedly where I was sitting at a sidewalk caé opposite the Palais Croisette in Cannes during the 2009 ilm estival, a moment that I would later recall as not unlike another Cobb’s conversation at another such caé in Inception Inception.. Extracts rom our conversation appear in the ollowing pages and we will use material rom Holy Boy throughout Boy throughout the book as it represents one o the best sources about the creative process o Vincent Ward. Cobb was irst attracted to this project when he heard that Vincent had let Hollywood, ater developing an unused concept or Alien 3 (on which Vincent retained a story credit) and a project that would become The Last Samurai under Samurai under another director. In 2005 Vincent was ired o a ilm he had written and was shooting in New Zealand, then was promptly rehired to put it back together again in postproduction in London. But when Cobb went looking or Vincent Ward all o that was still unolding. When Perkins Cobb arrived unannounced at the River Queen location in the heart o New Zealand’s remote Whanganui National Park, he could not shake o the recollections o Bahr and Hickenlooper’s Hearts o Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse or Les Blank’s Burden Blank’s Burden o Dreams. Dreams . Behind-the-scenes documentaries chronicling troubled troubled productions have become something o a genre in themselves. In addition to those about the making o Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in the Philippines and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo in Brazil and Peru, the genre’s highlights now include Fulton and Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha (about Terry Gilliam’s ill-ated attempt at Don Quixote) and Jon Gustasson’s Wrath of Gods, a considerably more interesting lm than the one Gustasson was documenting (a version o the Beowul and Grendel story lmed in Iceland). The market or DVD “extras” encourages continuing interest in the genre but ew can match that quartet or sheer nerve-jangling exposure o the stresses that can lie behind the screen. “This is the movie business — there is no truth — it’s all lies” proclaims the DVD
Holy Boy script Boy script page courtesy o Clue Productions (dir. Perkins Cobb)
Don Lawrence’s “Trigan Empire” images rom Look rom Look & Learn (bottom row o rames) courtesy o IPC Media
cover or Gustasson’s lm. Cobb was not looking or the truth that wintery day in the bush (as New Zealand’s jungle-like native orest is known). In the rst instance he was simply looking or Vincent Ward, whom he says he had met only once, twenty years beore, at the Cannes Film Festival. Cobb (right) was going to ask Vincent to let him make a behind-the-scenes documentary. The project, unnished at the time o writing, would quickly expand under the title Holy Boy , and the weight o Cobb’s own directorial ambition, into an intended exploration o what it means to be an “auteur” lm director today. Perkins Cobb himsel was well placed to do this. A boy wonder at lm school in L.A. in the early 1970s, Cobb had done uncredited screenplay polishes or several wellknown directors. Invisible “xers” with real talent soon develop semi-legendary status in the lm industry, especially Hollywood, so there was an early buzz around Cobb. His 1977 directing debut was a lm loved by the handul o critics who saw it but it had no distribution outside a ew lm estivals and European art-house cinemas (Polish estival organizer and distributor Roman Gutek was a particular champion) and the original negative would nally be destroyed in a 2008 re at Universal Studios. Ironically, Cobb’s riend, the writer David Thomson, had remarked in 1991 that Cobb by then “was a cheerul vagrant with but one cause let” — he wanted to get into the studio vaults to destroy Thomson (1991), 54
archetype. He saw Vincent Ward in those terms and when he started to hear rumors that Vincent was nally losing himsel up-river at the edge o the earth, Cobb’s antennae started to twitch with interest. DF: So what did you nd that day in the Whanganui when you rst went looking or Vincent Ward? PC: No sign o Vincent. The director o photography in charge. A lot o burning huts. I ran into the actor Tem Morrison a couple o nights later in a place called Raetihi I think. Nearly didn’t recognize him as the guy who played Jango Fett the bounty hunter in the Star Wars movies. Anyway, he said “none o us really knew what going to the limit meant until River Queen. ” But when the director was red, according to Tem, the cast and crew were determined to “nish the movie or Vincent.”
the negative o his only eature lm. Obsessed with the idea that the best lmmakers should make their one great lm and then walk away, leaving the lm itsel as a physical object to decay and ade, Cobb (who never made another eature) was obsessively drawn to stories o talented lmmakers who had what Hollywood directing coach Judith Weston calls “beginner’s mind” — that state o innocently intuitive condence about lmmaking or which Cobb sees Orson Welles and Citizen Kane as an
DF: Did you get a sense o that on location the day you watched them shoot?
PC: To some extent. I only watched them do this one setup between a nineteenth-cen nineteenth-century tury colonial ocer and a native scout on horseback, with troops clearing a village. They were struggling with the winter conditions and especially the lack o light. What was interesting, though, was the way that the DoP (who was walking stify — I think he’d hurt himsel) got his camera setups into the circle o action and kept things moving and fuid. But he was
also pulling in on the actors rom a distance with long lenses and using a very edgy mobile camera, all o which looked pretty distinctive.
DF: By the way, I thought you were dead. PC: (chuckling) You mean those two April Fool articles o David’s in Movieline ? Yeah, a lot o people were taken in by those. I wanted out o Hollywood, so David said “Let’s just kill you o.” So he writes this piece or Movieline magazine where I drive o a blu and end in a reball. David did a ollow-up a year later in the same magazine. Some people, when they spotted it was the April issues, thought the whole thing was one big lie — that I don’t exist at all.
DF: So why the documentary about Vincent? PC: Why Holy Boy ? He’s a living incarnation o that great phrase “beginner’s mind.” That’s what I saw in Cannes in 1984. Others have come close, but Vincent really had that extraordinary early condence and vision. I he’d then just gone on to make a string o bad lms it would have been a boring little tragedy. But that’s not what he did. He took two more lms to Cannes, in the ocial selection, in 1988 and 1992 — three lms in a row — how interesting is that?. He just held on to that beginner’s mind longer than most people can — and then
to have him twenty years later up some ar-fung river, plunging headrst into some kind o craziness in this remote location and taking other people with him — there just has to be a story there. DF: You haven’t mentioned his big Hollywood lm. PC: What Dreams May Come ? Well, it nearly disappeared dis appeared orever in the Universal re, until someone some one ound a negative in Europe. DF: Hard to read your tone o voice there. [pause] Let’s talk about Cannes. What were you doing there in 1984? PC: I was ollowing up on something I’d been involved in the year beore. Something very symbolic went down at Cannes in 1983. You had Orson
Welles, Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky on the stage together. Welles was presenting awards. Bresson and Tarkovsky shared the Grand Prix de Création that year. I remember one o the organizers on stage saying “A nice gathering isn’t it?”, which ranks as an all-time understatement. What you had there were three o the absolutely greatest examples o the three main ways o making “auteur” lms — o existing as that kind o lm director — the commercial system that Welles came rom in Hollywood, the European system o lowprot-margin support or lm as an art orm that Bresson worked in — you know, Argos Films and all that — and the state-unded system that originally created Tarkovsky, even though he ought to get out o it. The bills have to be paid somehow and those three got them paid in three very dierent ways — three dierent systems. DF: So that was 1983? PC: That’s right. In 1983 there were two Dutch lmmakers, Leo De Boer and Jurriën Rood, trying to make a documentary about Bresson — another lm hoping to get at this question, what does it mean to be a lm director? They took their nished documentary The Road to Bresson back to Cannes the next year so I went along to see it. And that was the year Vincent “arrived”....
THE PERKINS COBB THEORY
W
ere one to daydream the lie o a ilm director, in that place o the imagination where we can picture ourselves living such a lie, it might go something like this. You roll up to work in Hollywood in a convertible with the top down, turning in to the gates o a studio where the ghosts o past stars still seem to linger. The guard on the barrier nods you through with instant recognition. Just another day at the oice but what an oice — one with the biggest electric train set a boy [sic] ever had! And i you are having this daydream you probably already know who said that. Here at your beck and call is an army o producers, cratspeople, technicians and actors, all under contract to the studio. The whole setup seems to be geared towards one thing — helping you to realize your vision. In act to keep the studio running it is necessary to keep all these people employed, to roll everything over rom one production to the next. It is a actory assembly line in that respect. But you know that some great “auteurs” — ilmmakers with personal vision — have entered this gate daily in the past and done great work in this actory, their artistry lourishing in the security and resources that the studio system provided. Except that all o this is gone now. The ront gates o Hollywood General Studios (right) saw directors like Alexander Korda and Howard Hughes re-enact the scene just described time
and time again, Korda on his way in to direct Lawrence Olivier and Vivian Leigh, Hughes to direct twenty-eight cameramen on just one picture, with Jean Harlow in her screen debut. Legendary French director Jean Renoir, the painter’s son, was driven through these gates to work. Eventually TV mostly took over here ( Beverly Hillbillies, The Lone Ranger , The Rockord Files). Files). Hal Ashby, Robert Towne, Warren Beatty, Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn drove through these gates to make Shampoo , the last eature ilm to be made here beore an unusual new owner took over in 1980, but Shampoo but Shampoo was not using the old studio assembly-line services, merely renting the space. The studio system had vanished by then. In act Orson Welles’ career within that system (at various studios) coincided with its slow atrophying and Welles, thanks to the raught travails that became his modus operandi, almost single-handedly gave rise to the idea that artistic vision and the studio had become incompatible (in this myth the auteur is always trying to put one
over on the studio, the studio always betraying his or her vision in the interests o commerce). What has come to be known as Cobb’s Theory (since lm writer David Thomson’s original article about Cobb in Movieline magazine) holds that, in a post-Wellesian Hollywood where every lm is a one-o “package,” the best that any aspiring auteur can really hope is to make the one great lm they may have in them and leave it at that. David Thomson quotes Cobb saying to him, “Who has the heart to do it more than once?” but, o course, this does not stop people trying, their usually overblown attempts, according to Cobb’s theory, seldom much more than attempts to repeat The One. Thomson (1991), 54
AUTEURS AND COPPOLA’S PREDICTION
C
obb’s theory is o course an exaggeration, and yet it seems to haunt his generation o auteur directors, such as Vincent Ward, as a hal-truth illed with ear and conidence-crushing anxiety. Beore Vincent got to Hollywood, with Cannes’ accolades still ringing in his ears, there had been one attempt to recreate a studio system in Hollywood that would support the auteur ilmmaker. But Coppola’s attempt had ailed. The notion o the auteur lm director is something o a myth in its own right. In the Hollywood context several things ed the myth, including an infuential article in Film Culture magazine by critic Andrew Sarris, Orson Welles’ personal myth-making which built up the idea o the artist struggling with the Hollywood “system,” and eventually also the emergence o Francis Ford Coppola as, or a while, Hollywood’s latter-day home-grown auteur par excellence. The word auteur came to imply a distinction between directors with a personal vision and those hired to do a cratsman’s job on a lm, but this distinction was always complicated by the retrospective re-discovery o directors such as Howard Hawks or Nicholas Ray as auteurs — directors who had very much been studio system cratsmen, and indeed were products o that system in a way that Welles and Coppola were not. The infuence o the term itsel largely derives
rom an article in the French lm magazine Cahiers du Cinéma by the critic/director François Truaut and rom Andrew Sarris’s subsequent championing o it in the U.S. So thinking o the director as “author” o a lm is a concept with a particular history and not something to be taken as sel-evident at all. In act, what is especially interesting about the notion o the auteur, whether useul or not, is the way it had become available or adoption around the time that young lmmakers like Vincent Ward came on the international scene and were being lured to Hollywood. Coppola bought the venerable Hollywood General Studios in 1980 in order to re-create an old-style studio system but one oriented towards supporting the auteur in a way that, Coppola elt, a changing Hollywood could not. Hollywood General seemed a symbolically apt choice, as it had long unctioned as a “services” studio rather than the edom o the “moguls” or the power-wielding producers and executives who ran things at the major studios. However, Coppola’s re-named Zoetrope Studio went out o business there less than our years later, mismatched with the new blockbuster-chasing economic realities o Hollywood lm production and being too much Coppola’s own personal edom in the end. So in act the signs were not auspicious or any directors arriving in Hollywood in the subsequent decade with an auteur label attached to their shirttails, especially i they were tending to take that label seriously
Interview vol. xix, no.3, March 1989.
themselves; which is exactly how Vincent Ward arrived in Hollywood (see Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine let). Producer-director George Lucas o Star Wars ame was especially prescient about these circumstances at the time o Coppola’s Hollywood “auteurist” studio experiment when he said “Being down there in Hollywood, you’re just asking or trouble, because you’re trying to change a system that will never change.” He was talking about the latest “new” Hollywood that had replaced the old studio system with its contracted armies o production personnel and assembly-line methods. Now everything was run by multinational media conglomerates, the Hollywood studio back-lots were being turned into tourist attractions as production moved away, higher interest rates were driving budgets up, and middlemen who put together deals and one-o packages around lms were becoming the real power brokers. Coppola briefy tried to carve out the kind o space that a Vincent Ward might have beneted rom (directors Wim Wenders, Nic Roeg and Paul Schrader were among those drawn to Zoetrope) but by the time Vincent got to Los Angeles it was gone. Coppola himsel has described what was let or the aspiring Hollywood based auteur. This is what we can call Coppola’s Prediction. So despite the huge talent he brought to making lms, a young director like Vincent Ward was
“What happens is the director embarks on an adventure, and he’s basically frightened of the so-called studio because he knows the people he’s dealing with are not the kind of people with whom he wants to sit and discuss what he’s really going for.... Realizing his life life is going to be affected with one throw of the dice, the director starts protecting himself by trying to make it beautiful, spectacular, and one of a kind....” (Francis Ford Coppola)
heading or a trap when he moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s ater a string o successes outside the “system” as Lucas calls it. Cobb’s Theory suggests that one “auteurist” shot was all he might get in those circumstances and Coppola’s Prediction suggests what the nature o that one shot was likely to be. Rather than merely seeing Vincent’s subsequent lmmaking career as evidence or this, the question we want to ask is what happened to the intuitive post-classical lmmaking sensibility that he undoubtedly brought to Hollywood. The answer to this question will clariy or us the nature o the tension between classical Hollywood lm orm and the post-classical
tendencies that still have the capacity to renew mainstream cinema. We will be coming back to What Dreams May Come but rst we will take a detailed look at lmmaking in practice in Vincent Ward’s River Queen, his next lm ater leaving Hollywood. Hollywood.
Lucas quoted in Lewis (1995), 40. Coppola quoted in Gay Talese (1981) “The Conversation,” Esquire Conversation,” Esquire (July), 80
