THB #93: The Batman (no spoilers)
| March 6, 2022
Olivier Assayas: “Like anyone else I have feelings about modern politics. I don’t really want to impose them on my audience ever [laughs] and it doesn’t exactly fuel my inspiration. If you gave me two hours I could rant to you about what I think of American politics today, President Trump, and how much I think it’s a nightmare, but who cares? The newspapers are full of that and everybody feels sort of the same way, so you don’t need me to overstate that. But also, when you have very strong beliefs, you think, once in a while, “I should be a militant.” I don’t think I’d be a good politician. I don’t think I’d be a good militant. All I know how to do is movies. Once in a while, I may do a movie that’s infused with some of my ideas. I’m less interested in my own ideas than in the chaos of the world. I insist on the world of chaos. I think we live in a world where we are not unified. I grew up in a world where things were more clear cut. You had young radicals, I was one of them, and you had a very repressive, conventional, conservative society. We were struggling against that and things were simple, extremely simple. Now it’s become much more complicated. We live in a world of discordant ideas where individuals have much more conflicted and complex relationships with society and each other. It’s because the world of images and communication has changed so much. People are trying to make sense of the confusion of the world. I don’t try to make sense of it, I try to represent it.”
-30-
May 1, 2022
"Netflix, the great disrupter whose algorithms and direct-to-consumer platform have forced powerful media incumbents to rethink their economic models, now seems to need a big strategy change itself. It got me thinking about the simple idea that my film and TV production company Blumhouse is built on: If you give artists a lot of creative freedom and a little money upfront but a big stake in the movie’s or TV show’s commercial success, more often than not the result will be both commercial (the filmmakers are incentivized to make films that will resonate with audiences) and artistically interesting (creative freedom!). This approach has yielded movies as varied as Get Out (made for $4.5 million, with worldwide box office receipts of more than $250 million), Whiplash (made for $3.3 million, winner of three Academy Awards), The Invisible Man (made for $7 million, earned more than $140 million) and Paranormal Activity (made for $15,000, grossed more than $190 million).From the beginning, the most important strategy I used to persuade artists to work with me was to make radically transparent deals: We usually paid the artists (“participants” in Hollywood lingo) the absolute minimum allowable by union contracts upfront, with the promise of healthy bonuses based on actual box office results—instead of the opaque 'percentage points' that artists are usually offered. Anyone can see box office results immediately, so creators don’t quarrel with the payouts. In fact, when it comes time for an artist to collect a bonus based on box office receipts, I email a video clip of myself dropping the check off at FedEx to the recipient."
Jason Blum Sees Room For "Scrappier" Netflix
| April 30, 2022
"As a critic Gavin was entertaining, wry, questioning, sensitive, perceptive"
Critic-Filmmaker Gavin Millar Was 84; Films Include Cream In My Coffee, Dreamchild
April 29, 2022
| January 24, 2022
DP/30 Audio: Bombshell, Jay Roach
| December 13, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Jonathan Majors
| December 4, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Mustang, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
| December 4, 2019
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