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I don’t know if you know, but England didn’t make the World Cup Final. Alotta debate swirling as to whether its a leadership thing or team thing or a mentality thing, etc. Also, yesterday was our Prime Minister’s last day at work. Sir Keir, (not to be confused with Kier of Severance fame) has been given the boot by his own party (Labour), probably worried about the lack of popularity with other fringe parties on the rise (Reform).
LET’S NOT GET INTO POLITICS OR ANYTHING - but this got me musing on leadership. Yesterday, The Odyssey was released a summer blockbuster in the traditional sense. Now, I haven’t worked with Chris Nolan but understand his sets are things of beauty, well oiled machines running like clockwork, projects delivered ahead of schedule and under budget. His vision driving the whole darn thing forward, ably helped by the best Head of Departments he knows/money can buy. And any talent he wants. All very helpful for a filmmaker.
The movie is vast and testament to Nolan’s pull. With outstanding reviews, critics have become fans, or were likely already fans! And so those of us enamoured with his work (most people) are open to leaning into whatever tale he wants to tell next. Stars complement the momentum. The industry craves cinema hits because the industry makes cinema. The machine turns, money is made, this is what Hollywood was designed for. And with Nolan’s catalogue entertaining the world for years - his consistency is testament to his skill. And that’s fine, encouraged indeed!
But this is filmmaking and its never really that easy, is it? It takes time to build up a reputation and that reputation is built on delivering quality output despite the odds. So how do we get to grips with leadership within the creative arts? How does one understand what it takes to become the ultimate problem solver for you and your team, and still deliver the best, most exciting, visual feat?
For answers, let’s look to the movies. Today’s recommendations are documentaries that throw you right in to the heart of these questions. For anyone cares about the craft, the can do attitude, I terrific highs and the very lows of making films, I thoroughly thoroughly recommend these three pairings…
OUR PICKS OF THE WEEK
Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse
Make sure you watch Apocalypse Now first
Perhaps the finest example of what happens when filmmaking begins to mimic the story of catastrophe it desires to tell on screen. This documentary is less a how-to, and more a what-on-earth-happened. It is testament to will power and audacity in the face of Francis Ford Coppola fired his original lead (Harvey Keitel) on the first day, to replace him with Charlie Sheen, himself nearly breaking down in a hotel and almost having a heart attack. The crew had to fight heat, monsoons and borrowed government helicopters that were, in fact, needed to fight a civil war, just some of the many mad obstacles that were overcome.
Testament to Ford Coppola’s never-say-die view on making sure this tale was told the way he intended. A lot of the doc was filmed by his wife Eleanor from the set itself, and then edited in the 90s with interviews, a kind of post-mortem, which uncovered the quite unbelievable view of how on earth Apocalypse Now came to be, against all the outstanding odds.
My Best Fiend
Recommended watching: Fitzcarraldo & Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Werner Herzog made five films with Klaus Kinski and nobody else ever cast the man twice. This doc picks over that wreckage a decade after Kinski's death, a rare filmmaker-on-actor, with (as you would expect from Herzog) no interest in flattery.
The pairing was mad. Herzog reckons he decided his fate at twelve, glimpsing Kinski cross a Munich courtyard and knowing on the spot he'd direct and this stranger would be his lead. The stories are bizarre: a shared flat where Kinski barricaded himself in the bathroom for two days, howling, grinding the fittings to powder; local crew on Fitzcarraldo offering to bump the actor off, an offer Herzog says he only declined because he still needed a few shots.
Their five films: Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu, Woyzeck, Cobra Verde, brim with images no one else could conjure, and Aguirre holds one of the great screen performances, perhaps because the character was as unhinged as the man. As a study of two men who loved and loathed each other in equal measure, you couldn’t ask for much more.
Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner
Essential viewing: Blade Runner
Charles de Lauzirika's documentary is three and a half hours, around 80 interviews plus never-before-seen outtakes and lost footage, released in 2007 to sit alongside The Final Cut for the film's 25th birthday. If you've wanted to know how a commercial flop turned into the most influential science-fiction film ever, it's all in here.
Troubled undersells it. De Lauzirika works through the whole ordeal in order: the fraught screenwriting, the hunt for a director and for money, the casting, the notorious clashes on set. Ridley Scott's dictatorial attention to detail gets a proper airing, as does the friction between a British director and a mutinous American crew. What's bracing is how little of the usual showbiz backslapping survives, the talking heads, Scott and Harrison Ford among them, are candid about what they loved and loathed.
The insight is remarkable Nobody who mattered is missing from the doc.
It's not flawless. The vehicles and the architecture etc, can drag if you're not a devotee. But that thoroughness is also the point: this is less a film than a complete archive of one production's near-death experience.
For Blade Runner obsessives it's essential, and for anyone curious about how films actually get dragged into being, it's one of the finest documents of its kind.
Alrighty thats it this week.
Good luck to all you leaders out there and your endeavours, creative, new & old. And good luck to everyone else too.
See you soon.
Ed
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