 Starring: Clive Owen, Claire Hope-Ashitey, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Caine, Julianne Moore,
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Year Of Release: 2006
Plot: For 18 years, no children have been born anywhere on the planet. The result has been social collapse, with civilisation decaying and huge immigration problems. Theo Faron has more or less given up on life, but is drawn into an increasingly dangerous situation when he becomes the protector of a woman, Kee, who is miraculously pregnant. He needs to get her safety, which in the dangerous world of 2027, where a pregnant woman is huge political capital, is virtually impossible. |
I love Children Of Men. If it were my job to hand out the Oscars (which, to be honest, I ought to lobby the Academy to do, because like everyone else on the planet, I reckon I’d do a better job than they do), I’d have handed Alfonso Cuaron’s film that year’s Best Picture gong.
It is that rarest of movies where absolutely everything comes together to form a true gem. The way it’s filmed, the performances, the creation of its decaying future, the cinematography, sound design, editing, script and just about everything else works together in an incredibly cohesive way. There is virtually nothing you see or hear in the film that isn’t there for a very specific reason, ensuring that it isn’t just jaw-dropping on a technical level, but also very philosophical and thought provoking. However more than that, it’s incredibly action-packed and entertaining. While rather disturbing and sometimes horrifically tense, it’s both mainstream entertainment and art.
It’s also one of the very few dystopian futures ever created on screen, where it’s 100% convincing that in 20 years time that’s what the world might genuinely look like (although preferably without the bombings and concentration camps).
However I can’t help wondering (and I warn you, I'm going to start ranting now), why aren’t there more films like Children Of Men? Hollywood spends hundreds of millions of dollars making its movies, and so many of them are ill thought out, sloppily directed, pedestrian and boring. It’s difficult to think of many other industries that would routinely spend tens of millions of dollars on product where most people reading the script could have told them before they shot a foot of film that it was going to be crap and nobody would want to watch it.
Hollywood can afford the best directors, the top screenwriting talent and everything else to create movies that are entertaining, commercial and exciting as pieces of filmmaking, but so much of the time, interesting scripts seem to be blanded into oblivion and the directors chosen are the safe ones who’ll do what the studio wants and largely just point a camera at the action without doing anything innovative or unusual. It’s surprising how rare it is to find a Hollywood film where it really seems all the members of the crew, from all departments, have come together to really think about the very best way to make a fully cohesive film and how each element effects everything else and feeds back on it.
Part of the problem is that Hollywood is so risk-averse, and it’s rare for a director to get the freedom Alfonso Cuaron had on Children Of Men. The movie is famous for its incredibly clever, long tracking shots, which are amazing technical achievements. However they’re not just there for show, they serve the story and are incredibly exciting. Yet it’s almost a miracle Cuaron was allowed to do them.
They took months of planning, were incredibly expensive, and involved hundreds of people working in absolute synchronicity to pull them off. For a studio, it would be very difficult to know whether they’d work until they were completed, but for Cuaron to do them, he’d have needed the budget approved purely with Universal trusting that he could not only pull them off, but that the risk of taking this approach was necessary to the film. On most movies, a director would be laughed out of the room for suggesting something so risky (unless he was prepared to do it all in CG, as studio execs tend to feel safer with that, because it’s so controllable).
In fact it sometimes seems that unless you’re a well established director or producer who the studio trusts to have control over a movie, pre-production on a film is largely about executives telling filmmakers what they’re not allowed to do because it’s too risky, expensive, or because the executives aren’t certain about it.
The real problem is that with so much money riding on every film, too many decisions end up being made in order to offset the risk of a flop, rather than to try and make the movie better. I don’t just mean that Hollywood films tend to be aimed at the lowest common denominator, but that some people behind the scenes want to ensure there’s nothing they can be blamed for. Huge flops risk people’s jobs – and as many people in Hollywood are in insecure positions and risk losing massive amounts of money if they get fired – there’s often a lot of pressure to create films where nobody can be blamed if they fail, which often means make safe and pedestrian films where there’s nothing anyone can point to as the specific reason for it flopping (it does indeed flop).
If you make a movie like Children Of Men, which doesn’t fit the generic mould of what a movie should look like and how it should be filmed, if it flops the consensus is likely to be that it was the unusual filmmaking that was the reason for the failure (whether that’s true or not, because it stands out, it’s what’s going to be blamed). At that point, if you’re the moneyman who approved the ‘risky’ strategy, it’s your head on the line. However if it’s a safe, bland film, where nobody can say for sure why it didn’t succeed, your job’s a lot safer (until those flops start piling up and no one can ignore it anymore).
It’s perhaps unsurprising that with so much money at stake and so many people’s jobs on the line, that safe, pedestrian, boring filmmaking tends to be what Hollywood wants. They won’t say that. They’ll tell people they want new approaches and interesting ideas – and they probably genuinely believe that themselves – but when it comes time to sign the cheques and worry about the future of their careers, they’re likely to go for a point-and-shoot director, working from a script that doesn’t rock any boats and with well-known but safe actors. Anything outside the norm is seen as risky, and so it’s unlikely to get approved.
And just so I’m not loading all the blame on the studio moneymen, it should also be pointed out what massive productions Hollywood films are. With hundreds of people involved and often months of planning needed to get to the point of being able to put a camera in front of an actor and shoot a single scene, it’s not an inconsiderable achievement just to do that. If you wanna do anything more unusual, it takes the level of co-ordination, planning, arguing and dedication to even more ridiculous levels. Alfonso Cuaron has said that he was told for months that he’d never be able to pull off his tracking shots because they were so technically demanding and involved almost perverse levels of co-ordination. Apparently it even got to the point where some people were actually willing him to fail, because they thought the idea of even trying something so demanding was ridiculous. You can understand why a lot of directors simply wouldn’t want the headache, because it’s difficult enough just to make a normal movie.
Movies likes Children Of Men are the exception when they ought to be the rule, as there really is no genuine reason why more movies couldn’t feel as smart, fresh and alive, if Hollywood was prepared to take a few more risks. Occasionally movies that try to do something a little different creep out, often via powerful directors or because of smart producers the studio trusts to make the right commercial decisions (such as David Heyman with Harry Potter, who’s been allowed to take the franchise in a direction that’s been very successful, but also highly unusual and against the grain for what normally happens with important studio assets). However, most of the time the studio executives don’t trust that the talent might know better than they do what will work and what won’t, and so it’s point-and-shoot time.
Just think of the number of directors who’ve made their name making low-budget, innovative, stylish films, who’ve headed off to Hollywood and started making movies that are completely indistinguishable from anyone else’s. The reason the studios came knocking was because they loved the style of what the director was doing and wanted some of it to rub off on their films, but when push comes to shove, they’re not prepared to allow the director to show off their talent to its fullest.
With millions of dollars and executives’ jobs at risk, studios say they’re champing at the bit to do something unusual and special (while still being commercial), but when it comes to handing over the cash, they get cold feet and we just get the same old, same old. The rewards may be higher from taking a few risks, but so are the potential penalties, and so most the time Hollywood just stays where it feels safe, which is normally with the generic and mediocre.
TIM ISAAC
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