Films About Making Films
Hollywood has never been above navel gazing. Classics like A Star is Born (1937); Sullivan’s Travels (1942); In a Lonely Place (1950); All About Eve (1950; Sunset Boulevard (1950); Bad and The Beautiful (1952); and The Big Knife (1953) take on various aspects of the movie business. More recent Tinseltown related flicks include The Player (1992); Barton Fink; (1991); Swimming With Sharks (1994); Get Shorty (1995); Wag the Dog (1997); Bowfinger (1999); Adaptation (2002); The Deal (2007); and What Just Happened? (2008)
The idea of directors making films about their profession and/or their creative process automatically enters into some interesting meta areas, allowing filmmakers to explore an array of ideas associated with real life versus the make believe world of movies. Certain directors - Jean-Luc Godard; Frederico Fellini; Rainier Fassbinder; Atom Egoyan (who is not included here); the Iranians Mohsen Malkhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami, to name as few, seem especially obsessed with the differences between, and overlapping nature of, their own lives and the fictional art they create. Auteur directors are (perhaps by nature) often interested in stories arising out of their own experience, and the actual machinations of the creative process are very much a part of the real life they are leading.
All over the globe, directors have made films about various aspects of the filmmaking process. The following list, however, focuses on some quality films that are, at least in large part, concentrated on the actual making of a single movie. The list includes several documentaries, several auto-biographical films made by iconic directors, and number of films melding fact, fiction, and various forms of innovative self-reflexiveness that defy simple categorization.
Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story(BRIT) (2005) Directed by Michael Winterbottom. Post-modernism pushed to its limits in this multi-layered story about the making of what has traditionally thought to be an unfilmable novel.
Lost in La Mancha (DOC) (2002) Directed by Keith Fulton. The documenting of Terry Gilliam’s (eventually aborted) attempt to make Don Quixote.
Sex is Comedy(FR) (2001) Catherine Breillat. Anne Parrillaud is the stand-in for Breillat in this film about the difficulty a female director on location has in dealing with young, self-involved actors, coaxing performances out of them in moments that include a difficult nude love scene.
State and Main (USA) (2000) Directed by David Mamet. The story of neophyte screenwriter, playwright Joseph White (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), and his attempts to remain pure during a film shoot in small town Vermont.
Close-Up(IRAN) (1990) Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. Mixing reenactments with the actual participants and documentary footage, Kiarostami tells the story of Hussain Sabazian, a simple man who used a slight resemblance to Iranian director Mohsen Makhbalaf to impersonate him. Sabazian was later brought to trial for the fraud.
Real Life (1979) Directed by Albert Brooks. Brooks plays a version of himself, directing a documentary about a suburban Phoenix family who are chosen as the subjects of the PBS series An American Family.
Sweet Liberty (USA) (1986) Directed by Alan Alda. Alda stars as South Carolina novelist Michael Burgess, who is overwhelmed when a film production comes to his town to make the movie based on his book about The Revolutionary War. Michael Caine is actor Elliott James and Michelle Pfeiffer plays lead actress Faith.
Day For Night(FR) (1973) Directed by Francois Truffuat. Truffuat plays director Ferrand, in charge of the film Je Vous Presente Pamela (May I Present Pamela), starring troubled actress Julie (Jacqueline Bisset). Truffuat’s long time stand-in Jean-Pierre Leaud this time plays a self-centered actor.
Beware of the Holy Whore (GE) (1970) Directed by Rainier Fassbinder. A German film crew drinks and sleeps with one another at a Spanish seaside hotel while awaiting additional financing so their film can begin shooting. Fassbinder appears as production manager Sasha.
8 1/2(IT) (1963) Directed by Frederico Fellini. One of the Italian maestro’s greatest. A surreal look at the movie-making circus starring Fellini’s alter ego Marcello Mastriani as director Guido Anselmo, a man facing “director’s block”.
Contempt(FR) (1963) Directed by Jean Luc Godard. Godard’s cynical look at the business of film-making. Stars Brigette Bardot as Camille, wife of writer Paul Javal, who contemplates doing re-writes for a crass film based on The Odyssey. Godard appears as the assistant to the director, Fritz Lang, played by Lang himself.
August 16th, 2009 at 7:12 am
HI C.G.,
I thought “American Movie” was hilarious. It reminded me of one of Christopher Guest’s mockumentary’s except it was a real documentary. I haven’t seen the film in years but I remember liking the main charachter despite the fact he was a complete disaster…. or maybe the reason I did like him was because he was a complete disaster. I am not quite sure but I admire the fact that he persevered and had some grit and went after what he wanted no matter how pathetic the attempt may have been.
Trav
August 18th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I probably identify with the lead character Marc more than I’d like to admit. There’s something smacking at nobility in his unadorned desire simply to make a film. The documentary definitely walks a fine line as clearly Marc is an object of ridicule (his alcoholism doesn’t exactly help his efforts at credibility), but I’d like to think that at the same time director Chris Smith also has a degree of respect for Marc and his dreams. Like all artists or aspiring artists his desire falls somewhere in the realm of wanting to be heard and I suppose in a way this documentary allowed that to some degree.
October 23rd, 2009 at 8:43 am
This is a good list, and it includes several films I have never seen. Thanks for it and your observations as well. Among other films not listed here there is “Barton Fink.” The Coens are truly equal-opportunity cynics. In their brilliant riff on the movie business, they lampoon serious writing and studio dreck, and the people responsible for both, with the same artful abandon. Employing a story line that, by the last half of the movie, is itself a Hollywood period piece, circa 1941, they pile irony atop irony, torque twist around twist. The result is always entertaining, if frequently cerebral, and laugh-out-loud funny. I enjoyed counting the many MacGuffins that alluded to other MacGuffins of the period. See that box? It functions here just like the word “Rosebud” in “Citizen Kane” (1941) or the statuette in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941). See that inebriated Southern writer, here the author of “Nebuchadnezzar,” working, when he is capable of working, as a Hollywood hack? He’s just like Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner, the author of “Absolom, Absolom!” (1936), who in fact intermittently wrote screenplays — “To Have and Have Not” (1944) and “The Big Sleep” (1946) — for Warner Brothers in the 1940’s. See Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), at the end of the film, grip the bars of Barton Fink’s (John Turturro) flophouse bed? The scene alludes, ironically, to the end of “The Maltese Falcon,” where Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), being hauled off to jail, is framed behind the bars of an old-time elevator door. See that over-the-top studio boss in a military uniform from wardrobe, here appropriately named Lipnick? Of course, he’s a take-off on Jack Warner, whose studio produced the staunchly pro-war “Sergeant York” (1941). “Barton Fink” took a half dozen executive producers to find the money to make a movie about making a movie about big men in tights, and it’s a great film.
October 23rd, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Mr. Olsen,
Thank you for the wonderful post. As I noted in the first paragraph of the post, leaving off Barton Fink was more a matter of it not being a film about the actual filming process, which is what the list was mainly about. There are literally hundreds of films about the moviemaking process, but the list presented was an attempt to focus on films that commented on the act of production (or lack thereof) as opoosed to pre-production/developement/post production. Barton Fink also happens to be a personal favorite of mine as well, and I believe it might now stand as the brothers Coen’s most underrated work. Thank you for listing some of the many allusions to American cinema and literature contained in the film. The Coens somehow manage to pay homage to genre films of many types, as well as actual history, while inventing new genre melds and playing footloose and fancy free with period costuming, geography, etc. to suit their needs. What results more often than not is a kind of Coen netherworld, a place you can’t find anywhere else but in that particular film.
The Cinema Guy