Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I can’t say the films I’ve been seeing at the Santa Barbara Film Festival this year have been top notch, but I’ve been hearing good things about the flicks I didn’t choose to see, so I’ll assume I’ve just made some poor choices in my cinema pickings.
However, the directors panel that was held yesterday was one of the most entertaining, fun panels I’ve ever seen. Here’s the rundown:
(from left to right)
Adam Shankman – Director Hairspray
Julian Schnabel – Director The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jason Reitman – Director Juno
Brad Bird – Director Ratatouille
Judd Apatow – Director Knocked Up (Producer of Superbad and Walk Hard)
Craig Gillespie – Director Lars and the Real Girl
The best way to cover these kinds of things, in my experience, is to give a bullet-hits of the panel, slugs of funny or interesting stories. So let’s do that.
- Moderator Peter Bart opened up asking about 3-D as a format and Brad Bird was quick to come in and say that 3-D is great and the technology has jumped very far (meaning fewer headaches), but that he doesn’t think that’s that draw for the cinema. He said what’s missing is the huge theater communal experience. There’s nothing like seeing a movie in a 1500 seater and because of laws stating that every 300 seats of a theater has to be handicapped accessible theater owners have stopped building those huge houses and just have theaters that seat 300 or under so they don’t have to invest in ramps and elevators. Reitman jumped in saying that he can’t believe how explosive this is… Brad Bird hates cripples! Bird turned red, but laughed saying that he certainly doesn’t. Reitman then said, “Those damned handicapped people are screwing up our theatrical experience!”
Everybody had a laugh, but Bird was quick to say that it should be both handicap accessible and huge auditoriums. That’s fair and that’s what’d bring back the communal experience of going to the theater.
- Bart then turned to Judd Apatow and said he loved WALK HARD, but said that it was the most satirical of the films Apatow has been involved with. “Did we learn a lesson with Walk Hard that satire doesn’t work?” Apatow grabbed the mic and growled, “What the fuck are you talking about!?!” After the first round of laughter he says, “4.1 million opening weekend is a lot of money!” He rambled then for a minute then just stopped and stared Bart in the eye and said, “Why are you humiliating me, Peter? I came here to get my ass kissed hard! Two out of three is fine!” then he leaned back and waited for the crowd’s laughter to subside.
- Sean Young… Before the panel Kraken and I were daring each other to yell out “Get On With It!” the first time Julian Schnabel paused, but neither one of us had the guts to do it and we both knew that. So we secretly hoped someone else in the theater had the balls to do it. However, we needn’t have hoped because it was brought up on the panel and Schnabel said he loved Sean Young. “She gave me more press than the Coen Bros. I wish she was here right now.” He said he really didn’t have anything interesting to say, so when she so rudely interrupted him at that awards ceremony she just made what would have been an uninteresting fumbling speech into headline news.
- Schnabel then pleaded to those on the panel that have influence of the youth of today (I’m assuming that’d be Brad Bird, Jason Reitman and Judd Apatow) to stop the usage of the word “awesome.” “I’m serious.” That spawned a conversation of what was wrong with the word (Schnabel thought it was overused to the point that it lost all meaning) and what could replace it. Bird’s suggestion was “Schnabelicious.” I quite like that.
- Bart asked Adam Shankman if he related to Tracy in HAIRSPRAY. Shankman blurted out: “What gay Jew isn’t like a fat girl who just wants to dance?” and that was his entire answer.
- Apatow shared a story about getting a note from Bill Clinton requesting to watch KNOCKED UP on a plane ride. Apatow sent over a copy of the movie and as a thank you got a note back from Bill that included a cheaply made pair of presidential cufflinks. But he noticed nowhere in the note did Clinton ever mention the name of the movie and Apatow has a theory that Clinton didn’t want a paper trail with KNOCKED UP appearing anywhere on it.
- Schnabel said he won the Golden Globe for Best Director while standing in the baggage claim area at JFK, watching the TV monitors there as they read off his name.
- Schnabel also wanted to make PERFUME and recounted a story about getting an email from one of the producers of that film while doing a round-table interview. He had developed the movie for a while and then was forced out and the email said that even though they had creative differences the producer begged him to stop calling him an idiot in the press. So, Schnabel read the letter to the reporters at the roundtable. Then, at the panel, he also said the producer wasn’t just an idiot, but a nazi. This guy is awesome.
- The question of why animation was always aimed at children (citing the great adult use of it in PERSEPOLIS recently) came up and Brad Bird answered that there’s a line determining how realistic the movement in animation can be. Once you go for a good realistic movement then the budget grows at an alarming rate and in order to make your money back from that you have to aim it at the most profitable (ie family) demographic.
- A WGA member in the audience asked about the strike and specifically what the directors on the panel thought of the deal the DGA struck with the Producers. Apatow said, as a producer, that “the studios, for want of a better word, want to rape the writers.” He then said that TV writers, who are lucky to get to write 2 episodes of a show every season, get a percentage of reruns that equals to about $18000. What the studios are trying to do is move reruns to online completely and the deal they offered was zero money unless it ran for a certain amount of time, then they’d get a flat fee of $1200, which is taking $16,800 from their pockets, if not the full $18000 if they decide to pull the episode out of rotation a day before they hit that wall.
He said that bottom line the studios are just trying to use this as a way to take money away from the writers, not just deny them future revenues. His words were: “studios are just trying to shuffle the money back from the writers to their pockets.”
- Reitman was asked about working in comedy and he said that he felt he could say more about teenage pregnancy and the tobacco lobby in his comedic films than he could have in a dramatic version. He said that comedy allows you to push more political buttons without coming off as being preachy.
- One of my favorite bits for the panel was something Brad Bird said about the industry. He said that in the time he’s been in Hollywood he’s noticed a disturbing rise in the fatty middle of the studio system. There are only a small percentage that actually make things happen, only a very small percentage that can say Yes. When he started he said he loved Yes and Maybe, but hated No. Now he loves No and Yes and hates Maybe. “They’ll kill you with Maybe,” he said. And it’s because most people working in Hollywood don’t have the authority to say “Yes” so “Maybe” is what you always get and that’s dangerous because it keeps you from actually making your film happen.
This panel was one of the highlights of the festival for me. Seeing these guys, all exciting talents in the game, pal around and crack some nice off-color jokes with each other was electric and almost like a good stand-up routine.
I still have a few more reviews from SB and more Sundance catch-up. Plus a big set visit… Lots in the works! Stay tuned.
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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