Making the Transformational Moment in Film

by Dan Fleming

  LOOKING FOR VINCENT WARD

  The page on the right is from a documentary script called Holy Boy, for a still unfinished film by Perkins Cobb. Perkins conjured himself up unexpectedly where I was sitting at a sidewalk cafe opposite the Palais Croisette in Cannes during the 2009 film festival, a moment that I would later recall as not unlike another Cobb's conversation at another such cafe in Inception. Extracts from our conversation appear in the following pages and we will use material from Holy Boy throughout the book as it represents one of the best sources about the creative process of Vincent Ward. Cobb was first attracted to this project when he heard that Vincent had left Hollywood, after developing an unused concept for Alien3 (on which Vincent retained a story credit) and a project that would become The Last Samurai under another director. In 2005 Vincent was fired off a film he had written and was shooting in New Zealand, then was promptly rehired to put it back together again in postproduction in London. But when Cobb went looking for Vincent Ward all of that was still unfolding.

  When Perkins Cobb arrived unannounced at the River Queen location in the heart of New Zealand's remote Whanganui National Park, he could not shake off the recollections of Bahr and Hickenlooper's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse or Les Blank's Burden of Dreams. Behind-the-scenes documentaries chronicling troubled productions have become something of a genre in themselves. In addition to those about the making of Coppola's Apocalypse Now in the Philippines and Herzog's Fitzcarraldo in Brazil and Peru, the genre's highlights now include Fulton and Pepe's Lost in La Mancha (about Terry Gilliam's ill-fated attempt at Don Quixote) and Jon Gustafsson's Wrath of Cods, a considerably more interesting film than the one Gustafsson was documenting (a version of the Beowulf and Grendel story filmed in Iceland). The market for DVD “extras” encourages continuing interest in the genre but few can match that quartet for sheer nerve-jangling exposure of the stresses that can lie behind the screen. “This is the movie business – there is no truth – it's all lies” proclaims the DVD cover for Gustafsson's film. Cobb was not looking for the truth that wintery day in the bush (as New Zealand's jungle-like native forest is known). In the first instance he was simply looking for Vincent Ward, whom he says he had met only once, twenty years before, at the Cannes Film Festival.

  Cobb(right) was going to ask Vincent to let him make a behind-the-scenes documentary. The project, unfinished at the time of writing, would quickly expand under the title Holy Boy, and the weight of Cobb's own directorial ambition, into an intended exploration of what it means to be an “auteur” film director today. Perkins Cobb himself was well placed to do this. A boy wonder at film school in L.A. in the early 1970s, Cobb had done uncredited screenplay polishes for several well known directors. Invisible “fixers” with real talent soon develop semi-legendary status in the film industry, especially Hollywood, so there was an early buzz around Cobb. His 1977 directing debut was a film loved by the handful of critics who saw it but it had no distribution outside a few film festivals and European art-house cinemas (Polish festival organizer and distributor Roman Gutek was a particular champion) and the original negative would finally be destroyed in a 2008 fire at Universal Studios. Ironically, Cobb's friend, the writer David Thomson, had remarked in 1991 that Cobb by then “was a cheerful vagrant with but one cause left” – he wanted to get into the studio vaults to destroy the negative of his only feature film. Obsessed with the idea that the best filmmakers should make their one great film and then walk away, leaving the film itself as a physical object to decay and fade, Cobb (who never made another feature) was obsessively drawn to stories of talented filmmakers who had what Hollywood directing coach Judith Weston calls “beginner's mind” – that state of innocently intuitive confidence about filmmaking for which Cobb sees Orson Welles and Citizen Kane as an archetype. He saw Vincent Ward in those terms and when he started to hear rumors that Vincent was finally losing himself up-river at the edge of the earth, Cobb's antennae started to twitch with interest.

  DF: So what did you find that day in the Whan ganui when you first went looking for Vincent Ward?

  PC: No sign of Vincent. The director of photography in charge. A lot of burning huts. I ran into the actor Tem Morrison a couple of nights later in a place called Raetihi I think. Nearly didn't recognize him as the guy who played Jango Fett the bounty hunter in the Star Wars movies. Anyway, he said “none of us really knew what going to the limit meant until River Queen.” But when the director was fired, according to Tem, the cast and crew were determined to “finish the movie for Vincent.”

  DF: Did you get a sense of that on location the day you watched them shoot?

  PC: To some extent. I only watched them do this one setup between a nineteenth-century colonial officer and a native scout on horseback, with troops clearing a village. They were struggling with the winter conditions and especially the lack of light. What was interesting, though, was the way that the DoP (who was walking stiffly – I think he'd hurt himself) got his camera setups into the circle of action and kept things moving and fluid. But he was also pulling in on the actors from a distance with long lenses and using a very edgy mobile camera, all of which looked pretty distinctive.

  DF: By the way, I thought you were dead.

  PC: (chuckling) You mean those two April Fool articles of David's in Movieline? Yeah, a lot of people were taken in by those. I wanted out of Hollywood, so David said “Let's just kill you off.” So he writes this piece for Movieline magazine where I drive off a bluff and end in a fireball. David did a follow-up a year later in the same magazine. Some people, when they spotted it was the April issues, thought the whole thing was one big lie – that I don't exist at all.

  PC: (chuckling) You mean those two April Fool articles of David's in Movieline? Yeah, a lot of people were taken in by those. I wanted out of Hollywood, so David said “Let's just kill you off.” So he writes this piece for Movieline magazine where I drive off a bluff and end in a fireball. David did a follow-up a year later in the same magazine. Some people, when they spotted it was the April issues, thought the whole thing was one big lie – that I don't exist at all.

  DF: So why the documentary about Vincent?

  PC: Why Holy Boy? He's a living incarnation of that great phrase “beginner's mind.” That's what I saw in Cannes in 1984. Others have come close, but Vincent really had that extraordinary early confidence and vision. If he'd then just gone on to make a string of bad films it would have been a boring little tragedy. But that's not what he did. He took two more films to Cannes, in the official selection, in 1988 and 1992 – three films in a row – how interesting is that?. He just held on to that beginner's mind longer than most people can – and then to have him twenty years later up some far-flung river, plunging headfirst into some kind of craziness in this remote location and taking other people with him – there just has to be a story there.

  DF: You haven't mentioned his big Hollywood film.

  PC: What Dreams May Come? Well, it nearly disappeared forever in the Universal fire, until someone found a negative in Europe.

  DF: Hard to read your tone of voice there. [pause] Let's talk about Cannes. What were you doing there in 1984?

  PC: I was following up on something I'd been involved in the year before. Something very symbolic went down at Cannes in 1983. You had Orson Welles, Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky on the stage together. Welles was presenting awards. Bresson and Tarkovsky shared the Grand Prix de Creation that year. I remember one of the organizers on stage saying “A nice gathering isn't it?”, which ranks as an all-time understatement. What you had there were three of the absolutely greatest examples of the three main ways of making “auteur” films – of existing as that kind of film director – the commercial system that Welles came from in Hollywood, the European system of low-profit-margin support for film as an art form that Bresson worked in – you know, Argos Films and all that – and the state-funded system that originally created Tarkovsky, even though he fought to get out of it. The bil
ls have to be paid somehow and those three got them paid in three very different ways – three different systems.

  DF: So that was 1983?

  PC: That's right. In 1983 there were two Dutch filmmakers, Leo De Boer and Jurrien Rood, trying to make a documentary about Bresson – another film hoping to get at this question, what does it mean to be a film director? They took their finished documentary The Road to Bresson back to Cannes the next year so I went along to see it. And that was the year Vincent “arrived”.…

  * * *

  Thomson (1991), 54

  THE PERKINS COBB THEORY

  Were one to daydream the life of a film director, in that place of the imagination where we can picture ourselves living such a life, it might go something like this. You roll up to work in Hollywood in a convertible with the top down, turning in to the gates of a studio where the ghosts of past stars still seem to linger. The guard on the barrier nods you through with instant recognition. Just another day at the office but what an office – one with the biggest electric train set a boy [sic] ever had! And if you are having this daydream you probably already know who said that. Here at your beck and call is an army of producers, craftspeople, technicians and actors, all under contract to the studio. The whole setup seems to be geared towards one thing – helping you to realize your vision. In fact to keep the studio running it is necessary to keep all these people employed, to roll everything over from one production to the next. It is a factory assembly line in that respect. But you know that some great “auteurs” – filmmakers with personal vision – have entered this gate daily in the past and done great work in this factory, their artistry flourishing in the security and resources that the studio system provided.

  Except that all of this is gone now. The front gates of Hollywood General Studios (right) saw directors like Alexander Korda and Howard Hughes re-enact the scene just described time and time again, Korda on his way in to direct Lawrence Olivier and Vivian Leigh, Hughes to direct twenty-eight cameramen on just one picture, with Jean Harlow in her screen debut. Legendary French director Jean Renoir, the painter's son, was driven through these gates to work. Eventually TV mostly took over here (Beverly Hillbillies, The Lone Ranger, The Rockford Files). Hal Ashby, Robert Towne, Warren Beatty, Julie Christie and Goldie Hawn drove through these gates to make Shampoo, the last feature film to be made here before an unusual new owner took over in 1980, but Shampoo was not using the old studio assembly-line services, merely renting the space.

  The studio system had vanished by then. In fact Orson Welles’ career within that system (at various studios) coincided with its slow atrophying and Welles, thanks to the fraught travails that became his modus operandi, almost single-handedly gave rise to the idea that artistic vision and the studio had become incompatible (in this myth the auteur is always trying to put one over on the studio, the studio always betraying his or her vision in the interests of commerce).

  What has come to be known as Cobb's Theory (since film writer David Thomson's original article about Cobb in Movieline magazine) holds that, in a post-Wellesian Hollywood where every film is a one-off “package,” the best that any aspiring auteur can really hope is to make the one great film they may have in them and leave it at that. David Thomson quotes Cobb saying to him, “Who has the heart to do it more than once?” but, of course, this does not stop people trying, their usually overblown attempts, according to Cobb's theory, seldom much more than attempts to repeat The One.

  * * *

  Thomson (1991), 54

  AUTEURS AND COPPOLA'S PREDICTION

  Cobb's theory is of course an exaggeration, and yet it seems to haunt his generation of auteur directors, such as Vincent Ward, as a half-truth filled with fear and confidence-crushing anxiety. Before Vincent got to Hollywood, with Cannes’ accolades still ringing in his ears, there had been one attempt to recreate a studio system in Hollywood that would support the auteur filmmaker. But Coppola's attempt had failed.

  The notion of the auteur film director is something of a myth in its own right. In the Hollywood context several things fed the myth, including an influential article in Film Culture magazine by critic Andrew Sarris, Orson Welles’ personal myth-making which built up the idea of the artist struggling with the Hollywood “system,” and eventually also the emergence of Francis Ford Coppola as, for a while, Hollywood's latter-day home-grown auteur par excellence. The word auteur came to imply a distinction between directors with a personal vision and those hired to do a craftsman's job on a film, but this distinction was always complicated by the retrospective re-discovery of directors such as Howard Hawks or Nicholas Ray as auteurs – directors who had very much been studio system craftsmen, and indeed were products of that system in a way that Welles and Coppola were not.

  The influence of the term itself largely derives from an article in the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema by the critic/director Francois Truffaut and from Andrew Sarris's subsequent championing of it in the U.S. So thinking of the director as “author” of a film is a concept with a particular history and not something to be taken as self-evident at all. In fact, what is especially interesting about the notion of the auteur, whether useful or not, is the way it had become available for adoption around the time that young filmmakers like Vincent Ward came on the international scene and were being lured to Hollywood.

  Coppola bought the venerable Hollywood General Studios in 1980 in order to re-create an old-style studio system but one oriented towards supporting the auteur in a way that, Coppola felt, a changing Hollywood could not. Hollywood General seemed a symbolically apt choice, as it had long functioned as a “services” studio rather than the fiefdom of the “moguls” or the power-wielding producers and executives who ran things at the major studios. However, Coppola's re-named Zoetrope Studio went out of business there less than four years later, mismatched with the new blockbuster-chasing economic realities of Hollywood film production and being too much Coppola's own personal fiefdom in the end. So in fact the signs were not auspicious for any directors arriving in Hollywood in the subsequent decade with an auteur label attached to their shirttails, especially if they were tending to take that label seriously themselves; which is exactly how Vincent Ward arrived in Hollywood (see Andy Warhol's Interview magazine left).

  Producer-director George Lucas of Star Wars fame was especially prescient about these circumstances at the time of Coppola's Hollywood “auteurist” studio experiment when he said “Being down there in Hollywood, you're just asking for trouble, because you're trying to change a system that will never change.” He was talking about the latest “new” Hollywood that had replaced the old studio system with its contracted armies of production personnel and assembly-line methods. Now everything was run by multinational media conglomerates, the Hollywood studio back-lots were being turned into tourist attractions as production moved away, higher interest rates were driving budgets up, and middlemen who put together deals and one-off packages around films were becoming the real power brokers. Coppola briefly tried to carve out the kind of space that a Vincent Ward might have benefited from (directors Wim Wenders, Nic Roeg and Paul Schrader were among those drawn to Zoetrope) but by the time Vincent got to Los Angeles it was gone.

  Coppola himself has described what was left for the aspiring Hollywood based auteur. This is what we can call Coppola's Prediction.

  So despite the huge talent he brought to making films, a young director like Vincent Ward was heading for a trap when he moved to Los Angeles in the 1990s after a string of successes outside the “system” as Lucas calls it.

  “What happens is the director embarks on an adventure, and

  he's basically frightened of the so-called studio because he

  knows the people he's dealing with are not the kind of people

  with whom he wants to sit and discuss what he's really going

  for…. Realizing his life is going to be affected with one throw of

  the dice the director starts protecting himse
lf by trying to make

  it beautiful, spectacular, and one of a kind.…”

  (Francis Ford Coppola)

  Cobb's Theory suggests that one “auteurist” shot was all he might get in those circumstances and Coppola's Prediction suggests what the nature of that one shot was likely to be. Rather than merely seeing Vincent's subsequent filmmaking career as evidence for this, the question we want to ask is what happened to the intuitive post-classical filmmaking sensibility that he undoubtedly brought to Hollywood. The answer to this question will clarify for us the nature of the tension between classical Hollywood film form and the post-classical tendencies that still have the capacity to renew mainstream cinema.