As artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality processes, not to mention virtual productions, increasingly become the norm, what is happening to the epic physical location shoot?
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue 44 (July 2023)
There’s a lot of chatter these days about cinema having lost its magic. At the time of writing this, on TV the devastatingly effective Succession finale has resulted in clever think-pieces sprouting up to claim the final dethroning of the cinematic character study. Forget cinema giving us Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle or Black Swan’s Nina Sayers; these days it’s the small screen, long-form character arcs of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, Mad Men’s Don Draper or the warring sibs of Succession that have cornered the market in exploring interesting characters full of damage and darkness.
Indeed, that small screen is a big problem for cinemas, the spectre at the feast that just won’t be shooed away, no matter how many extra screens cinemas bolt onto the one that has served us just fine since 1895. With regards to other technological ‘evolutions’ of the theatrical experience, I’m yet to be convinced that ‘The 4DX Era’ has added anything to the cinematic experience apart from the occasional post-viewing trip to the local GP (thanks for nothing, Black Adam).
Plus, thanks to the likes of Universal and Disney, ludicrously short theatrical exclusivity windows have further eroded cinema’s magic. In a distant past, films would disappear after their cinematic run for months, sometimes years, building anticipation for their triumphant return like that bit in The Lord Of The Rings when the old wizard comes back and the characters all celebrate with gleeful cuddles, even though the world is still in peril. These days, the world still feels like it’s in peril, but now films arriving on streaming platforms – sometimes whilst they’re still in cinemas – can divest them of their magic.
Go Ti
Still, whilst filmmakers might despair, they have to shoulder some blame too. If cinema is to retain the crown of most influential art form far into this century, it needs to do something that TV never, ever does. Take a few huge swings that spiral out of control. This is the key rule of all great art: Wordsworth spent decades writing The Prelude and still never even published it before his death. However you look at it, that’s a serious flex. Look at Michelangelo too: he spent four years painting a single ceiling. Four years! Compare that to cinema where Ti West took just half that time to shoot three entire horror films comprising X, Pearl and MaXXXine. In fairness to West, while the first two are pretty great films – with the third one yet to be released – they may never be mentioned in the same breath as the Sistine Chapel again.
Admittedly, that’s a ridiculous comparison to make, but the point remains: if the supremely talented West or any of his other horribly efficient collaborators wish to be remembered on the same level as Michelangelo and Wordsworth, we’d humbly suggest that they need to remember a moviemaking maxim that seems to have been forgotten if we truly want to save cinema…
‘Shit needs to get well out of hand’
This never used to be a problem in moviemaking. Go back into the late days of the 20th century and there were all kinds of bonkers directors embellishing the mythology of cinema by losing themselves in the midst of sprawling productions that seemed to be spinning wildly out of control. The 1970s had Apocalypse Now, which took multiple productions spanning 238 days to get the final negative in the can. Not to be outdone, the 1980s had Dune and Heaven’s Gate to name but two. David Lynch’s Dune took somewhere between six to nine months to shoot, whilst Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate would take the best part of a year, pretty much bricking United Artists as a legitimate Hollywood force in the process.
The longest Cruise
Even in the late ’90s, when Hollywood studios once again had things under a tighter rein, Stanley Kubrick would spend 400 days shooting Eyes Wide Shut. It was a process so unassailably epic that not only would it earn the film a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest ever consecutive film shoot, it’s pretty much the only thing in the last quarter-century to visibly age Tom Cruise.
Sure, there are long productions to speak of since the turn of the millennium, but like so much of cinema since the dawn of this century, it’s all become cleverly deconstructed and arch. Richard Linklater may have shot Boyhood over 12 years, but each annual get-together with cast and crew only lasted for three or four days before everybody went back to their lives. It’s clever yes, and the final product is a uniquely watchable experience, but it’s not the same as keeping a crew and cast on a production for so long that they’ll develop stress ulcers like Cruise did during the never-ending production of Eyes Wide Shut, or even resort to mutiny as was reportedly the case during the torturous Apocalypse Now shoot.
It’s not like modern productions don’t take wild swings, it just seems that the combination of technology and newer filmmakers being depressingly efficient means the sprawling epic having been consigned to history. Look at Damien Chazelle’s Babylon – a film that had the potential for ‘legendary sprawling production’ written all over it. Ambitious sequences requiring hundreds of extras? Check. On-screen opulence, excess and substance abuse at every turn? Check. Needing an elephant to defecate on demand for your opening scene? Check!
In times past, a film like Babylon would have been the perfect recipe for chaos and carnage, becoming drawn out into a never-ending production that would cause the Hollywood trades to sharpen their knives and build a huge groundswell of feverish anticipation for the film as audiences pile in with the ‘car-crash mentality’ of seeing tens of millions of dollars (not to mention a career or two) torched on screen for their entertainment.
But that didn’t happen. Like Jordan Peele, Greta Gerwig and Ari Aster, Chazelle is a part of that new breed of filmmakers who, along with possessing individual creativity and flair, might also have been partly cloned from Spielbergian DNA, being ‘always on time, always on budget’, no matter how grand their ambition is. Despite its on-screen excess, Babylon was a modest 93-day shoot, with not even the pooping elephant managing to inject a dash of mayhem into the proceedings; he was a creation of Industrial Light & Magic.
I can’t help but wonder if a dash of troubled production gossip might have benefited Babylon at the box office. It certainly worked for Titanic in the late 1990s. That was one of James Cameron’s trademark wild swings. It took nine months to film and had its fair share of problems, which were widely reported at the time. As a result, plenty of people turned up brimming with Schadenfreude, yet instead found themselves marshalled into James Cameron’s PR brigade, spreading the positive word of mouth that would go on to make the film the highest-grossing movie ever at the time.
Getting messy
We’re not trying to tell you that Babylon should have earned similar accolades, but it deserved better than it got and a bit of on-set mayhem might have drummed up a bit more interest in the film. If you still don’t believe me, just go look at the gangbusters financial success of Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde’s damp squib of a thriller. The production gossip on that film proved to be a tractor beam that audiences couldn’t resist, despite the movie’s limp critical reception.
Still, we suppose it seems at least somewhat churlish to pin the downfall of cinema and the failure of modern movies to ‘cut through’ the noise on Chazelle and his contemporaries, just because they happen to be exceedingly efficient and very, very good at their jobs. Sadly (in the context of myth-making at least), here in 2023 efficiency seems to be catching and infecting even the most chaotic of filmmakers. Take Francis Ford Coppola, the undisputed Master of Disaster when it comes to protracted and messy film shoots. Putting the aforementioned Apocalypse Now shoot and the heart attack it gave Coppola aside, the mob have allegedly got involved with several of his productions including 1972’s The Godfather and 1984’s The Cotton Club as both films ran up production schedules that far eclipse the brisk 90‑day shoots that are ubiquitous these days.
In his senior years though, even Coppola has become pretty efficient, with his recently shot decades-long passion project Megalopolis clocking in at just over 90 days. The Hollywood press even tried to engineer stories of on-set mayhem with Megalopolis, probably because they’re as bored as we are with just how anodyne and depressingly efficient modern filmmaking has become.
Driving force
Coppola was having none of these accusations of mayhem, though, and duly wheeled out star Adam Driver to publicly deny all accusations and explain away the mass firings that had so intrigued the trades with a rather banal explanation that was as uninteresting as it was plausible, especially when sprouting from the lips of America’s favourite ‘thinking man’s action hero’. Thus, strangely hypnotised by the sheer force of his Driverian charisma, the press simply dropped the story and moved on to something else.
So, why is shit not getting out of hand any more? Why, technology, of course. Although Coppola blamed the Megalopolis firings on problems with the virtual production approach to filmmaking, this technology increasingly has a lot to answer for when it comes to explaining why studios won’t give maverick filmmakers stacks of cash to go and cause carnage on sprawling location shoots, far from watchful eyes of the financiers.
In an era where you can reproduce a set within the controlled (and closely monitored) confines of a studio for a fraction of the cost, why send your filmmakers out into the world to sow chaos and risk Sir Ranulph Fiennes trying to blow up your film set? Fiennes, then a member of the SAS, famously came up with the plans to explode a dam built for the filming of 1967’s Dr Dolittle because it was ticking off residents of Castle Combe, Wiltshire. His plot was foiled by police and he was fined and kicked out of the SAS, but would go on to become the world’s greatest living explorer, a textbook example of the kind of legend-forming that happens when… yep, shit gets out of hand.
Virtual insanity?
The use of virtual productions is set to grow throughout 2024 and beyond, but don’t ring the death knell for epic on-set productions just yet. Francis Ford Coppola clearly wasn’t a fan of the emerging technology on Megalopolis, eventually binning it in favour of the technically ‘inferior’ greenscreen process, whilst a recent industry survey of 771 LA-based professionals (by virtual production firm Showrunner) suggests that scepticism and dissatisfaction with the technology is actually on the rise.
Does this growing scepticism mean we’ll see a move back towards never-ending location shoots that spawn legendary tales, the kind that built Hollywood as a mythical land of dreams and wonder? Of course not. Virtual production technology will continue to improve as will other means of making productions more efficient. Artificial intelligence and both augmented reality and virtual reality processes will slowly replace current practical processes, and the days of the epic practical film shoot will continue to dwindle. Longer shoots may still happen, but in the service of developing technological processes, as we’ve recently seen with Avatar: The Way Of Water, rather than huge, practical location shoots in exotic parts of the world.
Sure, studios are fattening their bottom lines here, but there’s a case to be made that something is being lost, something that can’t be measured in dollars and cents, and we’re not just talking about the growth of so-called ‘globe-trotting’ movies like Red Notice and The Fast & Furious films, where the production buys a bit of roaming drone-cam footage of exotic cities for its establishing shots, then films the rest of the movie in a single-location studio, leaving us with a film where the actors feel increasingly unmoored from their location.
Feel the disconnect
That in itself is a growing problem, but there’s a wider issue of disconnection at stake too: we’re living in a decade where creator-made TikTok videos have become the most-watched form of entertainment on the planet. Meanwhile, screenwriters in America are having to strike to fight for enough wages just to pay their bills. As this goes on, there’s a growing sense that the concepts of ‘content’ and artistry are becoming increasingly disconnected from one another, with greater value being placed on the former rather than the latter. Since early man started painting stuff on cave walls, content and art have been one and the same, but the technological revolution of 21st-century production is changing that, perhaps forever.
Think of it this way: often, the making of a masterpiece is the making of that masterpiece. Would the Sistine Chapel be as renowned if Michelangelo had created it in an hour using an AI app like Midjourney? What about if he’d created it first in virtual reality using Lucasfilm’s xLabs technology? It simply wouldn’t, would it? Would Wordsworth’s Prelude be an immortal epic poem without a lifetime’s worth of experiences poured into it? The answer of course is no, and as sprawling, epic film productions increasingly become a thing of the past, the tortured geniuses and wayward madmen who embarked upon them recede into legend too and with them, the unhinged brilliance and inimitable artistry that they possess.
Cinema has always been special. Not just because of the films, but because of the stories surrounding the creation of those films. From the years-long legendary Cleopatra production of the early 1960s to the decades-long saga for the soul of Blade Runner, the epic stories of filmmakers battling the elements, disasters and other human beings to assert their artistic intent has gilded cinema with a mythicism that no other medium possesses. However, eclipse that artistic process with productions that become ever more efficiently designed, with processes where the calculations of computers hold more sway than humans, then what do you have? The answer is purely ‘content’ and you may as well pop it on TikTok next to memes of breakdancing cats for all the artistic merit it will possess. So here’s hoping that soon we hear of another wildly ambitious, out-of-control production straight out of the days of Hollywood legend, just to remind us of the joyous wonders and perfect imperfections that are inextricably part of being human.
