Quotes of Quotes (XXXI) – James Mangold Thinks Canon Sucks and You’re Part of the Problem

Listening to a recent episode of Jeff Goldsmith’s Podcast The Q&A with Logan-director James Mangold, I came across this exchange. Host Jeff Goldsmith can’t help himself as he asks about continuity issues between Logan and the other X-Men-Movies and thereby prompts Mangold to go on a juicy rant about the superhero movie industrial complex.

Jeff Goldsmith: Obviously there was a timeline reset in Days of Future Past which Simon Kinberg wrote, and he’s the producer of this film as well. I’m just curious: How does this fit in the timeline? Because in X-Men: Apocalypse, there was a different Caliban and I’m just curious if this an offshoot, a different timeline …

James Mangold: I have no idea. As you can tell by the way I’m sparring with you on these questions, I don’t care. Meaning that I think that stuff is in the way of making good movies, not in support of it. It would be as if I’m making movies for the Catholic church and I have to pass some kind of papal approval for what happens to Jesus in this episode. It’s just ludicrous …

I’m just curious where it fits in.

I know, but your’re part of the industry, when you ask those questions, of maintaining the sense of ‘Did you break canon or stick with canon?’. In fact, I think canon sucks.

I was just trying to find out, where it was in the canon.

Nowhere. The reality as a marketeer would be that we very carefully positioned it beyond all the existing movies, so it’s up to you. My feeling is: I want to have a relationship with the audience, not with internet crazy factcheckers with a hundred episodes of shit accusing me of getting something wrong. It’s the actual audience that I am most concerned with and that they exist in the immediate, taking in the movie. And unless it’s wildly contradicting something that they just saw in another movie, it’s not of concern to me. (…) My own arrogance or spiciness with you about these questions is partly about how you get the movie made. The gravitational pull between the kind of internet industry of superhero movie worship, the actual industry itself of selling these things, the merchandising machine, the toy manufacturer, the comic books, the rival companies, the summer dating, all of it is not a friend to movie making. It’s a friend to corporate money making. And part of my own defense to making a movie and not just a commodity, is to have a lot of hostility towards a lot of the value systems, some of which fans bring to the material, where they’re actually serving corporations and not themselves, in my opinion. They’re actually demanding the movies work as a box set. They all can then be bought and sold so that the action figures will work consistently from one movie to another, the animated Saturday morning one can match the — they’re actually demanding something that helps the companies sell and ram all these products at the same time. It’s much harder for the companies to make money off eight different visions of what Batman could be, but for me that’s phenomenally more interesting.

Listen to the whole episode here. The quoted passage starts about 46 minutes in.

Das lange Interview – Zwei Ansätze

Den ersten Podcast, den je gehört habe, habe ich wegen eines Interviews gehört. Jason Solomons hatte bei “Guardian Film Weekly” (inzwischen tot) meinen Lieblingsregisseur Danny Boyle zu Gast, der über Sunshine sprach (das Internet vergisst nichts). Das war im April 2007. Es dauerte nicht lange, bis Podcasts ein wichtiger Teil meines Medienkonsums wurden und Hörbücher als akustische Unterhaltung ablösten. Und obwohl ich nach einiger Zeit auch journalistische Storytelling-Formate entdeckte und lieben lernte, Interview-Podcasts sind bis heute ein wichtiger Teil meines Podcast-Menüs.

Das lange, ungeschnittene Gespräch gehört zu den wenigen journalistischen Formen, die dem Nutzer tatsächlich manchmal einen gewissen “echten” Einblick in die Weltsicht anderer Menschen erlauben. Ungefiltert durch das Auge eines Reporters und unbedrängt durch Formatierungen wie Einspieler und Zeitfenster kännen diese Personen mehr oder weniger erzählen, was sie wollen. Ähnlich wie bei Audiokommentaren gibt es natürlich auch in Interviews große Bandbreiten, wie authentisch Menschen sich präsentieren oder präsentieren dürfen. Manche reden wirklich relativ frei von der Leber weg, andere flüchten sich bei jeder Frage schnell in zurechtgelegte Anekdoten und sichere PR-Phrasen.

Immer die gleichen Fragen

Interessant finde ich als Meta-Beobachtung aber vor allem auch, wie unterschiedlich man Interviews führen kann. Zu meinen ersten Podcasts gehörten die langen Gespräche mit Drehbuchautoren von Jeff Goldsmith, die zunächst unter dem Titel “Creative Screenwriting” und seit einigen Jahren als “The Q&A” existieren. Goldsmith hat bereits hunderte Autoren interviewt und er stellt ihnen allen mit leichten Abwandlungen die gleichen Fragen. “What’s your breaking-in story?” “Do you get writer’s block, and if so, how do you battle it?” “What was your toughest scene to write, the one you kept going back to, and how did you creatively solve it?” Er nutzt sogar die gleichen Überleitungen. Ich weiß nicht, wie oft ich Goldsmith schon “Obviously, theme is important” habe sagen hören, um anschließend eine Frage über die Themen des Films zu stellen. Jedes Gespräch endet mit “You’ve been very generous with your time. Give it up again for …”. Goldsmith behandelt seine Gäste, meistens eben Drehbuchautoren, wie sehr wichtige Menschen. Er ist fast schon untertänig in seinen Fragen, hakt nie wirklich nach, winkt sofort ab, wenn jemand mit einer Frage ringt. Er ergreift immer die Seite seiner Partner und er findet grundsätzlich jeden Film “fantastic”.

Chris Hardwick ist da ganz anders. Der “Nerdist Podcast”, den ich seit deutlich kürzerer Zeit höre, besteht ebenfalls meist aus etwa 60- bis 90-minütigen Interviews, folgt aber einem Muster, das vom “Q&A” gar nicht weiter entfernt sein könnte. Wo es Goldsmith vor allem darum geht, sehr systematisch bestimmte Prozesse des Filmemachers abzufragen, folgt Hardwick der sehr viel klassischeren Form, es seinen Gesprächspartnern so gemütlich zu machen, dass sie irgendwann von selbst ins Plaudern kommen. Gegen Goldsmiths zurechtgelegte, oft etwas bemüht locker klingende Sprüche setzt Comedian Hardwick seinen natürlichen Witz und eine Bereitschaft, sich über sich selbst lustig zu machen.

The Ebb and Flow of Conversation

Dass dahinter durchaus System steckt, konnte man vor kurzem im Nerdist Podcast mit Bill Gates beobachten, wo ein argwöhnischer Pressemensch Hardwick nach kurzer Zeit ermahnen musste, dass es in dem Interview doch bitte um die Arbeit der Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gehen soll und nicht um Gates’ nerdige Anfänge in den 70er und 80er Jahren. Hardwick entgegnet: “I know, but this is how the podcast works. It’s just the ebb and flow of a conversation.” Und tatsächlich kreiselt das Interview nach einigen Fragen über “Zork” und die Anfänge der Tech-Szene zurück in Gates’ heutiges humanitäres Engagement. Eine Mischung aus natürlichem Gesprächsverlauf und gezielten Steuerbewegungen, die im besten Fall dazu führen, dass die interviewte Person gar nicht merkt, dass sie interviewt wird. Genauso machen das gute Interviewer_innen seit Jahrzehnten.

Hardwick setzt noch eine weitere interessante Taktik ein. Er zieht gelegentlich die Karte seines eigenen Promilebens als Comedian, Moderator bei “The Talking Dead” und “@midnight” und Vorzeige-Nerd, um den Interviewten klarzumachen: “Ich bin einer von euch, ihr könnt mir alles erzählen, weil ich weiß, wie ihr euch fühlt.” Es ist erstaunlich, wie sehr das manche Gesprächspartner lockert und es ist eine Waffe, die kaum ein Journalist nutzen kann, abgesehen vielleicht von großen Late Show-Moderator_innen. Hardwick spielt es auch insofern in die Hände, als dass er vor allem herausfinden möchte, wie sein Gegenüber die Welt sieht und erlebt. Mit Paul McCartney spricht er kaum über Musik, weil er weiß, dass andere das längst gefragt haben. Stattdessen versucht er zu ergründen, wie das eigentlich ist, wenn man eine lebende Legende ist. Das Ergebnis ist oft so erhellend wie entlarvend.

Wie viele Antworten kann man geben?

Beide Ansätze, Hardwicks wie Goldsmiths, sind auf ihre Art erfolgreich. Interviewpartner_innen mögen Jeff Goldsmith, weil sie wissen, was sie zu erwarten haben und weil er ihre Eitelkeit akzeptiert. Sie kommen gerne in seine Screenings und lassen sich hinterher ausfragen, schenken ihm auch mal mehr als die 60 angesetzten Minuten Q&A-Zeit. Hörer_innen können das gleiche, faszinierende Gefühl erleben, wie wenn sie zu sehen bekommt, wie dutzende Menschen die exakt gleich geschnittene Hochhauswohnung unterschiedlich einrichten. Dadurch dass die Fragen immer ähnlich sind, spürt man erst richtig, wie viele unterschiedliche Antworten man auf eine Frage – etwa die nach der Schreibblockade – überhaupt geben kann.

Hardwicks Gäste sprechen gerne mit ihm, weil sie das Gefühl haben, ein Gespräch auf Augenhöhe führen zu können. Das ist nicht so effizient wie Goldsmiths Methode, weil in einem Gespräch auf Augenhöhe manchmal halt auch nichts entsteht, was für Personen außerhalb des Gesprächs von Interesse ist. Im besten Fall, und selbst in manchen schlechteren Fällen, führt es aber zu einem echten Einblick in ihre Welt und Persönlichkeit. Und dafür gibt es nach wie vor kaum eine bessere Form als das lange, aufgezeichnete Interview.

Bild: Chris Hardwick by Gage Skidmore. CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Navel Gazing – Part Two: The Web

Image: Katharina Matzkeit

When I planned this series of reflections upon my personal media diet, I decided that I would write one episode about “everything that’s online, but that’s not blogs or social networks”. Today, when I sketched out in my head, what exactly I would write about, I noticed that when you take away blogs and social networks, there isn’t really that much more that I do online. So maybe this episode will be a short one, but let’s leave it like that as a case in point.

Netvibes

The hub around which all my media activity on the web revolves, is a nifty feed reader called Netvibes which I call my “Everywhere Office”. It allows you to subscribe to feeds of all kinds and sort them neatly in tabs and widgets. I have tabs for “News”, “Film”, “Media”, “Music”, “Culture” and “Entertainment”. The number of unread articles on top of each tab gives me an overall feeling of how much has happened. Most of the feeds I follow are blogs (more on that in the next episode), but there is some other stuff as well and I guess that is everything that qualifies for this episode.

News Sites

I had just published the first episode of “Navel Gazing” when I noticed that others think about the same things. And I promptly stumbled upon a sentence by Daniel Erk that perfectly reflects my opinion:

Die deutschen Nachrichtenseiten im Netz finde ich alle recht austauschbar. Es erscheint mir vor allem eine Designfrage, ob man nun auf Spiegel Online, Zeit Online oder FAZ.net die neuesten Meldungen von dpa und Reuters liest.

I find German news sites on nthe web quite interchangeable. It seems to be formerly a design question, whether you read your news wire stories on Spiegel Online, Zeit Online or FAZ.net.

I have personally opted for tagesschau.de for my news needs, which is the website of Germany’s first public service television channel. I find their blue design quite soothing, they seem relatively unbiased and because they are integrated with a network of radio and tv stations, they always offer multimedia content. When I have a general feeling of uninformedness, I like to watch their News in 100 seconds to bring me up to date on the latest headlines in a very short time period.

My college years spent in mass media studies (“Publizistik”) have generally convinced me of the belief that much of what we call “news” is completely irrelevant for me. So I like to keep informed about the trends of what is “viral” in the world right now, for which, I noticed, it suffices to check a news site every few days. Otherwise, I have adapted the strategy of that apocryphal high school intern and let the news come to me, which works surprisingly well (more on that soon). And whenever there is a topic that concerns me or that I feel I should be able to have an informed opinion about (most current example: ACTA), I generally start on a news site for some background and then take to the blogs and columnists to get a wider variety of opinions.

For my film news, I follow /film. While they are, by outer form and also by the tone of their coverage, a blog, most of what they do is reporting news and then adding some personal comment or question with not much journalistic research involved. I simply ignore the personal comments and read the news, which they mostly present in an aggregator-like fashion, by linking to the site that broke the story. Hey, look, a segway to the next section.

Aggregators

I follow the opinion of some bloggers in thinking that aggregating will be an ever more important important part of online journalism in the future. It’s the new form of the very gatekeeping that journalists have always used. I like the fact that there is both algorithms and people that “read” the web for me so I don’t have to. And with the power of the link, that still doesn’t mean that I am dependent on second-hand-news. I can just read it where it originates.

Apart from “/film” mentioned above, I follow the amazing German Blog- and Twitter-Aggregator Rivva, which automatically gives me the topics that Germany’s web opinion leaders are thinking about. For topics that are on the mind of the Chattering Classes in the US, I have found the “Links for the Day” feature of “Slant” Magazines “The House Next Door” very helpful.

Podcasts

I am a big fan of podcasts ever since I discovered that I like it when people talk to me while I run or exercise. So with about four to five hours of physical activity each week, I get through a wide range of podcasts. I always listen to the “Guardian’s” Film Weekly (which might or might not be scrapped soon) and Music Weekly for interviews and opinions on current trends in those areas. In addition, I pick and mix single episodes that seem interesting from the following podcasts: The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith (for in-depth interviews with film professionals), the /filmcast (for discussions about trends in American cinema), Zündfunk Generator (for current trends in German society), Was mit Medien (for media news) and Media Talk (for media news in Britain). A good friend also regularly tries to turn me on to This American Life and I think she may have almost succeeded.

Entertainment

Almost an afterthought: Netvibes also provides me with my very own Funny Pages independently of Facebook Memes. I follow the webcomics XKCD, Multiplex, Girls With Slingshots, Nichtlustig and Partially Clips – and I still follow what’s going on at Lamebook (a good way, by the way, of keeping an eye on general trends of current American [teenage] humour).

Navel Gazing is a multi-part blog series about my personal media consumption habits, meant as a case study and a moment of self-reflection on account of Real Virtuality’s third birthday.

Another Earth: How to shoot a car crash for $200

I continue to be a big fan of Jeff Goldsmith’s Q&A Podcast series. Not only because Jeff takes the time to talk so extensively with filmmakers about their breaking-in-stories and work habits (after you have listened to dozens of podcasts like I have, it’s interesting to compare them all), but also because every now and again, in addition, the conversations contain these little nuggets worth sharing on their own.

Way back in July, Jeff talked to Mike Cahill, Brit Marling and William Mapother about Another Earth. I only got around to listening to the podcast last week, but it contains an interesting tidbit. Director Mike Cahill explains, how he staged and shot the (impressive) car crash that gets the movie’s narrative rolling, for something around $ 200 (the shot is seen briefly in the trailer).

Sound Clip © Unlikely Films. All rights reserved.

If you don’t want to listen to the whole clip, here is the gist:
– He got a cop friend to close off the highway (for free).
– He borrowed two smashed cars whose damage fit the scenes from a scrapyard (for free).
– He rented the exact same models for the driving scenes.
– He rented a cherry picker to substitute for a camera crane.
– He craned up and then locked off the shot with only Mapother’s car.
– He filmed a clean plate, a plate with Marling’s car driving through and a plate where the two cars almost touch, as a lighting reference.
– After Effects did the rest of the work.

Proves once again that you don’t need a lot of money to make a film these days, if you’re creative enough.

Download the whole podcast for more info on the process behind Another Earth.

Kevin Feige’s Masterplan

The most recent episode of Jeff Goldsmith’s excellent podcast series The Q&A featured a recording of Jeff’s Panel The Art of Adapting Comics to the Screen at Comic-Con. In it, he interviewed two screenwriting duos, who have written for films set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) – Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (Captain America) and Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby (Iron Man). Among other things, Jeff asked them about Marvel Studios’ president of production Kevin Feige’s overall vision for the MCU. This is what they had to say:

Hawk Ostby: Kevin, first of all, is amazingly smart. He also loves these characters and he knows this universe so well, you’re not gonna put one over on him. It was just very clever, the way he planned – just sitting around, listening to how this all was going to gel with all the other storylines and planting things in the movie. It was fascinating. (…) The big idea was really when he said: “At the end of Iron Man, he’s gonna say ‘I am Iron Man.'” And we thought: “Wow, that’s crazy – then what happens?” And he says: “We’ll figure it out”. That was the really big one and we thought: “Wow, this is really cool.” Because nobody had done that.

Mark Fergus: He wore everybody down. Everyone kept saying: “We’ll come back to that, we’ll come back to that.” And by the end of the movie, he had everyone going “Yeah, that is awesome.” (…) [He said :] “Let’s paint ourselves into a corner and then next time figure out an awesome way out of it.” And this teaser at the end with Sam [Jackson]. Kevin did the greatest thing. He previewed the movie all over the place and left that out. And at the first day of theatrical, it was there. That [meant] that Iron Man was just the beginning of something bigger. (…) This was now going to branch off into all these other movies. (…) It was really just a punch in the face going: “Yeah, here we go. Marvel Universe!”

(…) Chris Markus: When we went into our first meeting, the bulletin boards all around the room were all Ryan Meinerding’s concept art and at least one of them had Red Skull, Cosmic Cube in his hand, and a picture of Asgard shooting out of it, so we were like, “Okay, Thor.” And then, they knew they wanted Howard Stark in it – it was amazing to walk into this thing that’s already interconnected with all these tentacles to all the other movies.

Listen to the whole Podcast on The Q&A.