The pre-eminent writer-director
It’s coming off this week that I hate French cinema. Not true. I couldn’t blanketly hate every movie that came out of a country. Like I said, I liked The Intouchables. I liked Amelie. But I do think the majority of French films are pretentious, directionless, and badly written. One commenter had the audacity to say that it’s widely known that French cinema is the best in the world. Uhhh, what?? According to who, the French?
Part of the problem is that France doesn’t seem to think it has a problem. Since it doesn’t acknowledge it has a problem, it can’t fix the problem. So what is the problem? France doesn’t have a screenwriting industry. They don’t have a culture, like the United States, where writers can move up a system. Why? Because in France, it’s all abut the WRITER-DIRECTOR. The people directing the films there are typically the same people writing them. And those people don’t have to listen to anyone (and usually don’t).
Yeah yeah, I know. America’s not perfect either. Any system that can produce a movie like Smurfs 2 probably has some issues. But what Hollyood does right is they have a vetting system. A script must win over a series of people, starting with an agent, then a reader, then a small producer, a bigger producer, a studio exec, and so on up the ladder. Even after the script has been sold, it’s constantly being read during development by people who are trying to make it better. Because the script must constantly stand up to scrutiny, it keeps improving (unless you have a moron calling the shots, which is a different discussion).
In France, the director-writer has all the power, and I’m told will be offended if it’s even implied that the script needs work. There’s no filter. Only the filter within the director’s own sensibilities. Obviously, some directors’ sensibilities will be better than others, which is why some movies are better than others. But overall, because the writing never has to stand up to any outside scrutiny, bad storytelling is always finding its way into the films.
Take a look at a movie like A Prophet, one of the more celebrated films to come out of France in awhile (I know there were other writers on this but the director seemed to be the primary one). I watched this film and about forty minutes in, I was thinking, “Wow, this is pretty good!” It felt real. It felt gritty. Like an honest look at prison life in France. Then, around an hour and a half into the movie, our main character is released and the approach of the movie shifts to a traditional drug/crime film. Wait. Huh? I thought this was a film about prison. What just happened?? It would be like if an hour and a half into The Shawshank Redemption, Andy was released. It felt sloppy and confusing. I didn’t know where I was anymore.
This is one of the primary differences between American and French films. Things can just “happen” in French films that take them in a different direction than was promised, and we’re expected to simply go with it. I suppose we could debate whether this choice was that big of a departure for the story, but to me it was pretty glaring. I was actually watching the film with my brother, who isn’t in the business at all and simply likes watching movies. He has no preferences, no biases. He just likes a good story. I remember looking over at him 20 minutes after this change and seeing that glared over look in his eyes. He was done with the film. He didn’t know what it was about anymore.
To me, a good screenwriter could’ve helped here. This was a structural issue. You don’t just change your movie 2/3 of the way through. But people who haven’t studied the art of storytelling don’t think about that stuff. Which is why that separation between writing and directing is needed. You need someone who can tell you when your script has wandered off into the woods, who understands structure and pacing. Not just character, tone, and style, the strengths of A Prophet.
This writer-director business isn’t just a French thing. It’s present here in the U.S. as well, mostly in the indie scene, and increasingly to disastrous results. Drinking Buddies, Only God Forgives, Somewhere, Monsters, Blue Valentine, To The Wonder, Upstream Color. These are all movies that have some aesthetically pleasing things about them. Some even have moments of genius. But for the most part, they’re all terribly written. There’s no story to back things up. Many are lost in a universe of themes and abstract thoughts, the result of a director not recognizing the importance of having a dedicated writer on the job.
As you can probably tell, the writer-director thing has been bothering me as of late. I’ve stumbled across a handful of really bad movies over the last few weeks, movies that seem to have no focus, no point, that rambled. And it just so happened that in every one of those cases, I checked the credits and, sure enough, it was a writer-director. Again, because the writer-director scenario allows the production to bypass the vetting of a screenplay’s problems, the screenplays in that situation almost always have problems!
Yeah, yeah, I know. This isn’t always the case. There are notable exceptions from geniuses like Tarantino and Woody Allen and, on the big-budget end, James Cameron. But even the best of the writer-directors seem to lose their screenwriting mojo as their careers go on. M. Night is the most classic example of this. Wes Anderson’s films have gotten consistently worse. Robert Rodriquez. Cameron Crowe. Mike Judge. Oliver Stone. Spike Lee. Richard Kelly. The Wachowski Brothers. Even Christopher Nolan began to recognize his writing was suffering and started bringing in his brother to take care of screenwriting duties (thank God there are directors who can still put their ego aside).
I just have too much respect for screenwriting to relegate it to half of someone’s time (and in most of these cases, much less time than that). I think that’s why Tarantino is one of the few writer-directors who consistently delivers. He knows that the script is everything. He knows not a single captivating image will matter unless the audience is invested in the characters and the story. So he hunkers down, often for a year or more, and gets the damn script right. I don’t see the same amount of dedication from most writer-directors out there. Shit, Joe Swanberg, writer-director of the film Drinking Buddies, decided not to write a single line of dialogue in his script and just let the actors improvise them. And the finished product shows exactly what happens when you make a ridiculous choice like that. Would a true screenwriter ever make that mistake? Of course not.
So does that mean the writer-director is dead? Am I advocating that no one should direct AND write their film? No. I think that dual-role is a valuable tool at the beginning of one’s career, a necessity even. Young directors trying to get their name out there don’t have the money to hire good screenwriters and probably don’t even know where to find them (It’s hard for me to find them and I’m as plugged into the screenwriting scene as it gets). So they really have no choice but to write the script themselves. The result will be narratively clumsy (something like Monsters) but the result is a calling-card movie that gets you started in the business.
Ditto for writers. The spec market is a grueling literary rat race that, even when you have something good, can be tricky to navigate. Why not bypass it, then, and direct your own movie? You won’t be the best director in the world. But at least you’ll have a movie to your name, something that should start your career.
My problem comes more from the ego-centered “artists” who, even when they have access to the greatest writers in the world, shun them in favor of doing it themselves. Not recognizing the flaws in one’s own abilities is one of the biggest faults one can have. Coming back to French films, that’s where I have an issue. I mean how can you expect to write good stories if you haven’t even set up a proper system in your country where screenwriters can flourish? Jeez, you thought the screenwriter gets stepped on in Hollywood. It appears that over there, they don’t even have a voice.
In the end, it’s about understanding, respecting, and learning your craft. Screenwriting is its own thing. And it’s one of the trickier forms of storytelling out there. It needs people dedicated to figuring it out. I’m sure all of you who have struggled with the unique challenges of this craft can agree with that. Whether France ever makes that leap, we’ll have to see. But at least for the sake of this article, I’m glad they haven’t yet. It’s allowed me to see screenwriting from a different perspective, and learn to appreciate it even more.
