The Oscar-winning experiments that might change the future of film
Birdman and Boyhood became the toast of the Oscars not just because of their merits as movies, but the extraordinary ways they were made. Together, they have upended the form of mainstream cinema: Boyhood was put together in 12 years, while Birdman appears to have been shot in one seamless take, with no cuts (a feature of the same length usually has around 3,000). The technical and logistical challenges of these films aren’t just dry footnotes but key selling points, much milked by each film’s marketing campaign.
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Structural innovation can translate into box office – and awards season – glory. So might the success of these films, as well as the self-consciously constructed Grand Budapest Hotel, mean studios become more amenable to narrative ambition?
Typically, movies looking to get made with studio money don’t have much room for improv as the system is resistent to the introduction of unpredictable elements. For investors, prevailing logic dictates that the more you can pin down what a movie will look like before it is actually filmed, the more confident you can be of seeing your money again. So in Hollywood, scenes are generally planned down to the last degree. Alfred Hitchcock’s quip about how, once the screenplay was finished, he found directing boring because there weren’t any more creative decisions to make wasn’t just a quip.
Compare this state of affairs to the production of Boyhood, financed by the indie company IFC films, where a troublesome state law prohibiting contracts over seven years long made it illegal for the actors to sign one. Any of them could have just walked out. Birdman, too, looked into the unknown as cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki wasn’t able to use the visual techniques of any other feature as a template. Although the pioneering film Russian Ark was shot in one take back in 2002, it was done in a wide open space and ran for only 96 minutes, whereas Birdman is set mostly in cramped environments and lasts two hours.
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Is it a coincidence that these two films, with all their logistical challenges and structural gymnastics, both gained so much traction? Since roughly the turn of the century film-making has been been undergoing an internal revolution and the engine behind it is digital technology: with more portable, inexpensive and high-quality cameras, as well as non-linear editing software, almost anyone can make a low-budget film that still looks filmic. Jean-Luc Godard shot most of his most recent film, Goodbye to Language, on a Canon 5D – essentially a non-professional camera. The internet has also played its part, allowing money to be raised from crowdsourcing sites and sometimes enabling a decent level of distribution as well. On the other side of the coin, it has also meant we are exposed to many, many more films, for less: a month’s Netflix subscription costs about the same amount as a single DVD.
In this context, where visual storytelling is so prevalent, it seems to be the films that are technically intriguing and structurally daring that are making the biggest impression. This doesn’t mean that storytelling in film is valued any less: quite the opposite, it may now increasingly be taken for granted, as it surrounds us. The home of storytelling in the 21st century is the HBO-style TV series: even acclaimed novelists such as Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith say that TV can be as natural an environment for telling stories as the novel. TV shows’ greater length allows writers and producers to develop a far more meandering, complex plot than is possible for a single film. So as the internet provides a saturation of visual content, and TV-style programmes set the bar for storytelling, film is potentially becoming a place where we look for something that is both ambitious and ambitiously made. In the past it was only critics and film buffs, people who spent the best part of their lives staring at a large screen, who would get excited by the “making of” but now, as everyone seems to live the critic’s lifestyle, perhaps we have come to expect more than just a great story from movies.
Innovative films don’t always translate into better ones. As well as being untested, novel methods of film-making are difficult to pull off, meaning logistical concerns may be prioritised over creative ones. In Birdman, there are moments when it seems as if the director is scrambling around just to uphold a concept and you do wonder whether all of it needed to look like one epic take. This kind of film-making can feel as if it were cooked up for the Guinness Book of Records or worse, construed as window-dressing, or PR.
Yet some directors have chosen to embrace risk almost as a philosophy. The most famous example is a young Werner Herzog, who, while making Fitzcarraldo in a remote part of Peru, opted to literally drag a large steam boat over a hill with a 40-degree gradient, instead of using special effects. For the same film, Herzog took the drastic step of bringing his actors and crew 1,500 miles into the jungle, away from their base, as he thought the location would “bring out special qualities” in them.
In the digital age, sci-fi creeper Under the Skin took a similar approach. Many scenes featured Scarlet Johansson in disguise, alongside unsuspecting non-actors going about their daily business, so there could be no script. This approach also required the invention of new surveillance-style cameras which could be strategically hidden from view. Given the entire film took 13 years and roughly £8m to make, this was an extraordinary gamble but there was no back-up plan.
Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin. Photograph: CA24/Everett Collection/Rex
Both Jonathan Glazer, the director of Under the Skin, and Herzog seem to have thought risk was necessary to bring out a rawer quality in the actors’ performances. Their films, in a way, function more like documentaries than fictional features, in that the story had to be discovered in production, rather than just made. Herzog had no way of knowing whether they would in fact manage to haul a steamboat up a hill. Likewise for Boyhood, where the story was developed in tandem with the trajectory of Ellar Coltrane’s life.
For Hollywood, this philosophy doesn’t just go against the received wisdom of how to turn a profit; 100 years since the first studio was established, it’s also set in its ways. Studios were built on the model of a Ford car factory assembly line, with a strict division of labour and final creative control in the hands of the producer, who managed the money, rather than the director. Although there have always been innovators working in Hollywood, they have often had tense relationships with their paymasters. David Lynch, after the experience of having his feature, Dune, chewed up by executives, decided he no longer wanted to make films if he didn’t have final cut.
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Factories are excellent at churning out products, but once established they struggle to cope with new ones, and so in Hollywood, films continue to be made in genres well past their sell-by dates. Enter American Sniper, a modern war film re-packaged as a western under Clint Eastwood’s direction, where the drama pivots around a one-on-one sharpshooting contest. As well as gaining five Oscar nominations, it’s also been one of the highest-grossing films of recent months, making $306m.
Throughout its history Hollywood has been able to rework old genres: in the 1970s the hugely successful Godfather films were made in the spirit of gangster movies from the 1930s. Will all this come to an end in the age of the internet and digital technology? One of the strongest rebukes to the happy-go-lucky Herzogian method of film-making has come from the legendary cinematographer behind the first two Godfather movies, Gordon Willis:
“Some film-makers … thought that if you play a scene in an airplane, the plane should be in the air, because the essence of the scene will be different. That’s nonsense. The essence of the scene is not going to be different; the adversity will certainly be different. I mean, it is make-believe. It is a business about re-creating reality.”
While films such as American Sniper, which conform to the tried and tested Hollywood conventions, keep pulling punters in to the box office, we can continue to expect more of the old and less of the new, for now.