What Makes A Great Film? Or, What Am I Doing!

What makes a great film? The simple answer is an equal combination of intelligence and showmanship. My favorite films all have this in common, be it 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is an effects heavy near-experimental work, or Altman’s Nashville, a subtle character drama and musical in one. An artist always has to keep their exhibitors in mind, just as a filmmaker must create an audience experience. If they are making art just for themselves, that is fine. It is also masturbation. In any film I make, I want to create an encompassing experience for the viewer. I can use the format o express any complex idea I want, but if it does no strike a chord in the viewer, if it fails on an emotional level, it fails no matter what.

My favorite art form is the cinema. No other form uses as many of the viewers senses, and no other form has a more direct access to the viewers’ emotions. If someone can see and hear something, they give themselves easier to the work than if they use their imagination. Kubrick’s view on cinema is that it should play like music, a series of moods and tones; what is behind the emotion, the meaning, comes later. The most extreme and effective use of this emotional manipulation is horror, which is my film’s genre.

The horror genre has always dealt with the manipulation of sound and image to create fear and dread in an audience. Using the cinematic form to instill fear in an audience requires the filmmaker, and, in a sense, the film itself to disappear. The audience cannot be made aware of the illusion, and as much as one can, must lose themselves in the experience. Most of the terror one feels during a horror film is fear for characters within and what will happen to them. With my feature film, I hope to explore the fear of film itself.

The recorded image used to be evidentiary, a solid confirmation of how events occurred. Even through the use of editing, the ultimate manipulation, the image remained intact, entombed in a frame. It is only through the last couple decades that the image itself could be manipulated with such stark realism, through the use of computers. In a culture where no image can be trusted, is the moving image open to as much interpretation as memory?

I want to explore these ideas for the sole reason that cinema is a dominant part of my life. But ultimately, none of these themes make any difference if the film fails on a base emotional level. If my film does not instill fear and dread in an audience, the film has failed no matter how true I am to the intellectual process. Intelligence and showmanship in equal parts; that is how I plan to make a great film. Boo-yah.