Steven Maras explores the approaches accademia and the film industry have to screenwriting and directors in 'Screenwriting: History, Theory and Practise (2009) and questions whether the coining of the term 'Auteur' is, or ever was, poignant.
Mara's first chapter, ostensibly, seeks to install order among the various warring voices that surround the 'auteur theory' yet, in my mind, ends up exposing the childishness and futility of the debate. Having worked on film productions (good and bad), I can assure those who have not; that each and every cast and crew member can potentially affect the end result dramatically. The effect of one can also have a knock on effect on others; a lighting cameraperson, for instance, on one production, managed to illuminate a set, in such a manner, so as to make it impossible to get a boom mike in without causing multiple shadows. To make matters worse, the actors were clad in noisy tinfoil spacesuits and encourages to move around, making it impossible to use radio mikes. The dialogue heavy scene ended up looking fantastic and sounding like it had been shot by small children. As a result, the actors' deliveries were ruined and came across as amateur even though they were spot on.
On another occasion, I had the wonderful experience of working with, possibly, the world's worst director and despite the presence of an experienced cast and crew, the final cut was a painful and cringe-worthy attempt at emulating Tarantino. It so happens, that, in this case, the director was also the writer but had, as you can imagine, excelled in neither of his tasks.
There can be no doubt, in an art form that involves the efforts of hundreds of professionals, no one individual can take the full credit for its outcome. A director is important and might even be fundamental but they are not the 'Author' of the film as Sarris asserts. In the same way, a screen writer is not the author of a diamesic adaptation from a novel to a screenplay.
However, society has a common tendency to over simplify processes and often it is the simplism that remains over time. The old masters often stretched their own canvases and ground their own colours while many others had their students complete art works which would bear the name of the master and not the executor.
Like these old masters, directors will often have their signature flair which is often recognisable by a viewing audience, this too, however, can be said of an art director like Nathan Crowley or a writer like Aaron Sorkin whose strengths and weaknesses will always take them in a certain artistic direction. The market too will decide whether they repeat something or abandon it, whatever proves successful will undoubtedly goad an artist on to replication notwithstanding their personal opinion. It would, therefore, be reductive to attribute authorship based solely on this observation.
Yet, some anti-auteur theories promote the idea of the screenwriter as creator and all others contributors as interpreters. As pleasing as it may be for us writers to immerse ourselves in this godly aura we might turn our attention, for a moment, to films that came about without a script and think about how every interpreter, for better or for worse, adds something of their own.
Leaving aside its dubious take on Northern Ireland's violent troubles, The devil's own offers a valuable insight into what happens when a scripts is simply not there. Not that one hadn't previously existed but constant squabbling and demands for rewrites from Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford meant that they were left without a workable draft. The result was a mix of budget overages to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and forced on the fly rewrites and improvisations that angered many and delayed the shooting of TDO and subsequent projects. In the end, the film more or less broke even but could certainly have been better with a workable script.
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