Christopher Nolan and Bennett Miller talk studio politics in big budget filmmaking, and Miller's own particular battle on Moneyball.
Undeniably, one of the most popular filmmakers in the world at the moment is Christopher Nolan. Having six consecutive hits that have collectively earned over $3 billion worldwide tends to earn that sort of recognition. However, what makes the Dark Knight director an even more rare personality in the current Hollywood landscape is his reputation as an artist only increases concurrently with his box office success—casting him as one of the few filmmakers to seemingly find the sweet spot between art and commerce.
Indeed, it is a fairly unique position that became one of the main topics during a “Directors Talk” lecture Monday evening between Nolan and fellow writer-director Bennett Miller at the Tribeca Film Festival. Miller, who has had some mainstream success himself with pictures like Moneyball, seemed genuinely impressed with how Nolan has navigated studio and filmmaking politics, which he pressed the Interstellar director to open up about throughout the night.
Nolan credited learning how to talk to studios about committee notes from Stephen Soderbergh, who championed Nolan early in his career when he became executive producer on his first studio film, Insomnia.
“He [supported] Memento and asked the studio to take a look at it, and then he came on Insomnia as executive producer,” Nolan said. “When you get into the studio environment, there’s a hierarchy with people whose job it is to give you notes. [Soderbergh] had developed such a reasonable attitude to it that in no way compromised what he was trying to do creatively that it was very helpful—it was all about respect for the other person’s point of view. It was all about saying, ‘Okay, the note might be wrong, or the suggestion of how to fix it might be wrong, but it’s only [suggested] for a reason.’ And you have to figure out what that reason is. Inevitably, in any organization sometimes the reason is ego or trying to prove something to somebody, but very often there’s a creative reason.”
Nolan continued that the best way to form an affective collaboration is to make everyone in the studio conference room to feel smart and enfranchised, because there will always be compromise, and he has seen varying degrees of success to the filmmakers who fight executive meddling every step of the way. The director instead recommended to young filmmakers that one of the better ways to choose your battles is to always come in on time and on or under budget, insisting that going over either measurement is one of the “two key ways” to immediately force direct interference.
Miller agreed with Nolan’s statement, but suggested that it is a sophisticated and delicate “science” when it comes to negotiating with studio interests. Miller also suggested that since the economic crash in 2008, the industry has increasingly wrested power away from directors and transferred it to committees of “non-filmmakers” and marketing departments.
In such a vein, Miller confessed an luminous story about studio realpolitik for when he was rewriting and directing Moneyball for Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2010.
“I was in a meeting for Moneyball with a version of the script,” Miller recalled. “And I went into the studio for the meeting with Amy Pascal and a group, and everybody had gone through this version of the script and taken pages of notes. And we just went around in a circle, and everybody shared their notes. I thought I was reasonably rejecting them—I thought it was a very productive meeting, because we all got our therapy I thought [Laughs]. But I wasn’t five minutes off the lot when Amy called and said, ‘I’m only going to explain this once: we all know collectively at the studio, as a studio, that under the best circumstances, we will only exercise four and a half percent influence over you, because you’re a director. But when we have these meetings, you have to make everyone feel smart and good.’”
With a hesitant smile, Miller concluded that from that point forward, studio committees continued to “torture” him.
Nolan later agreed with Miller that the industry has changed since the recession and that increasingly it is more difficult to create challenging movies.
Says Nolan, “I do think everything is cyclical in this business. Right now, it’s difficult for original films to get made. It’s hard to base a film simply around casting…So, it is hard right now, but at the same time I’m thinking, ‘It’s always a struggle.”
Intriguingly, the director of The Dark Knight Trilogy seemed wistful about the rise of “brand names,” and how that it’s much easier to get a budget or a greenlight based on that. He’s seen both sides of the paradox, but it obviously helps original films when the brands are as well received as his Batman films. It also probably helps when they’re this good and above the competition in the realm of blockbuster filmmaking, which is seen when an audience in Lower Manhattan applauds as loudly for the summer tentpole like Inception as it does the indie benchmark Memento.
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