A couple of months ago I did a round table discussion for Channel THIRTEEN with three other directors who have made short films. The inevitable question was asked: are you hoping to make feature films? Without exception the answer was yes. One young director elaborated, “Yeah, but I wouldn’t even try without the right names attached. It’s sad, but that’s the world we live in.” (I’m paraphrasing.) Two other young directors nodded in agreement and I, a not so young director, grimaced. I thought of this several times while watching Thomas McCarthy’s excellent film, The Visitor.
Everyone probably has an understanding of Hollywood as Product Machine; it’s kind of like the queen mother in the Alien films. It exists to make a product that will make the machine money. Some of that money is used to make more product that makes more money, and so on. Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee that any of the products will make money; the closest thing to a guarantee is a star’s “bankability.” No bankable star attached to your script, no greenlight. It’s a simple code, and one propagated by the people who are fed by the machine.
However, sometimes films with bankable stars lose money (Gigli) and sometimes films without bankable stars make money (Little Miss Sunshine); despite this, the machine lives by the code. I don’t blame the machine, it’s doing what it thinks it has to do to survive.
But I become distressed when young filmmakers buy into the code, spend all their time and energy tailoring their work for its salability and courting anyone and everyone who can get their treatment or script into the powerful, coddled, and child-like hands of bankability, and not doing what they do best, which is make risky, exuberant, personal, challenging work. It seems to me that in buying into the code they are going against their nature; it’s like being a teenager and a Republican. It just doesn't make sense.
The Visitor is an important film, it’s a portrait of where this country is at this moment politically, but it does this by telling a personal story without bombast and without one bankable actor. I am trying to imagine writer-director Thomas McCarthy pitching this film to one of the cogs in the machine:
Cog: Who’s in it?
McCarthy: Haaz Sleiman, Daina Gurira, and Hiam Abbass are on
board. And, are you sitting down, it’s in Richard Jenkins’ peoples’
hands and they tell my people they’re interested in talking. On the
phone.
I don’t know how much The Vistor has grossed, don’t care either. (When did these numbers become worthy of headlines, anyway?) I’m just glad that Groundswell Productions, Participant Productions, Next Wednesday Productions, and distributor Overture Films believed in this film, and extremely thankful that Thomas McCarthy remained true to his vision.