quid pro quo
I was reading an interview (from this month’s Interview) with Wes Anderson this afternoon. In it, he discusses various directorial influences, including Hitchcock and Spielberg, but settles on Stanley Kubrick as “the director I think about in terms of just living my life.” Among the reasons he gives is one you might expect: “And he only did the movies he liked to do. He didn’t do one movie for the money, so he could do the next one because he liked it. He only did the ones he wanted to do.”
An artist praising, and perhaps pining for, another artist’s creative control is not uncommon; no artist wants to work on an undesirable project just to make some money. What caught my attention, though the concept is not new to me, is Anderson’s reference to making one movie for money so another movie, a “pet project,” would be produced in turn. This is an interesting concept for many reasons. In a world where artistic authenticity is sometimes questioned at length, is an artist justified in creating a work for purely financial reasons if that means that he can then produce a work without having to factor in the profitability of the project? Can an artist, in this case an auteur perhaps, infuse his own sensibility into a project meant solely to make money?
The filmmaker that sprang immediately to mind was Steven Soderbergh. Few directors have followed so idiosyncratic a path through their career. After grabbing the public’s attention at Sundance in 1989 with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a definitively independent feature, he proceeded to what some might consider a career peak just over a decade later, directing back-to-back films, Erin Brockovich and Traffic, to Academy Award nominations for Best Picture. Next up, in 2001, came what might not be an out-of-the-ordinary project for a director coming off of two Academy Award nominations: Ocean’s Eleven, a summer blockbuster featuring George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts (star of Erin Brockovich), and Matt Damon, among others. A sequel of sorts to Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Full Frontal, came next followed by Solaris, a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Soviet film Solyaris starring George Clooney that many predicted would follow Erin Brockovich and Traffic to another Oscar nomination: instead, it alienated audiences and did little business. What came after Soderbergh’s sequel to his little seen but influential movie and a coldly received science fiction experiment? Ocean’s Twelve, which reunited the gang and threw in Catherine Zeta-Jones for good measure. As you probably know, Soderbergh et. al. went back to the well one last time in 2007 with Ocean’s Thirteen in what could be seen as money-grubbing at its finest. It seems that for Soderbergh, however, the three films acted as collateral so he could direct far less populist fare such as Bubble (a film made with nonprofessional actors and released in theaters and on DVD and On Demand simultaneously), The Good German (a black and white film set in postwar Germany and filmed using only technology and techniques available in 1945), Che (a 4 1/2-hour biopic of revolutionary Che Guavara’s life, divided in two halves for release), and The Girlfriend Experience (a film about a call girl played by an actress who had previously performed in X-rated films). This pattern seems to display, quintessentially, the Hollywood quid pro quo practice of producing a hit for the masses so a more personal project, almost guaranteed not to make money, can be pursued.
Soderbergh is one of the most respected filmmakers in the business, so this practice clearly has not hurt his reputation. I wonder, though, how someone is such a situation can so confidently promise a hit product. If the artist knows just how to manipulate his work to fit public tastes, how can we trust that the rest of his work is sincere, and not subject to manipulations of different kinds? Would it matter if it was manipulated in different ways? Is all art manipulated to suit some audience in some way to some extent?
And, is there an equivalent in music?
