Cooper: Hi you guys. I'm here with my friend Henry, in London, who we're talking to today. Now, Henry is a writer and he's also a wine connoisseur. So, we're going to ask him about writing movies and we're asking, we're going to ask him, also, about wine.
Cooper: So, my first question is about movies.
Henry: Yeah.
Cooper: Okay. So, I have a friend who was just, who's writing a movie that a lot of people would like to write because it's one of these big blockbuster things. And I've watched a lot of these big blockbuster movies, and it doesn't seem like it takes a lot of talent to write them. I feel sorry for him.
Cooper: And I was wondering, when you think about writing a movie, would you rather write, if you could write, if you could do whatever you wanted and had whatever budget you wanted, would you prefer to try to write something like Chinatown from the 70's, knowing that, probably, it wouldn't get a good audience these days because people have different tastes, or, would you prefer to go big and sort of maybe sell-out a little and write a big blockbuster?
Henry: And do a blockbuster.
Cooper: And write a blockbuster.
Henry: Yeah. Yeah, I think the difficulty with blockbusters, from the perspective of a writer, is that they often go through many, many stages. There are so many people involved in the making of a film. You have the producer, the director, the editor. And sometimes on the big movies they will have not just one writer, but many writers. Sometimes even a writer's room, where they have five or six or seven writers all trying together on the same story.
Henry: And also, sometimes you will be the first writer on a film, but then they will take you off. They'll take you away from the film and then they'll put somebody else on. So, I think blockbusters are quite difficult, from the perspective of a writer.
Henry: I think I would prefer to do something that feels a little bit like my own, complete work.
Cooper: What, two things there I thought of. The first thing was, sometimes when I see these blockbusters, the Hollywood movies, they're real American, and sometimes, I think, sometimes, when I watch them, I feel like there's a sort of jingoistic quality.
Henry: Okay.
Cooper: If not jingoistic, at least sort of alienating, because all of the characters speak in this modern, American humor American style.
Henry: Uh-huh. Cooper: Now that you say it, I'm wondering, a writer's, a seven person writer's room probably all-American people who have never left America, maybe that's what contributes to that sort of dynamic in these blockbuster movies.
Henry: Yeah. I think Hollywood, at the moment, it's, it was the Oscar's, not this year, but the year before, wasn't there, there was a big amount of conversation about the lack of diversity in Hollywood. It was all white, it was all male. I think that's still true, but I think they're waking up a little bit to the importance of diversity, whether it's race, or sex or anything else.
Henry: The Black Panther film I think showed that, as well. Because that was a very, very diverse cast, but it was also a blockbuster smash.
Cooper: Did you like that movie? Was that a good movie?
Henry: I didn't love it because I'm quite focused on story. As a writer, I really find if a film doesn't have a great story, I find it hard to engage with and I thought it was visually very good, very interesting and the acting was fine, but I think it lacked a really strong story at the bottom. I thought it was a very interesting film, culturally, but not necessarily, I wouldn't go and see it again.
Cooper: Right.
Henry: The story didn't move me.
Cooper: For you, is one way to judge a movie, how good a movie is, if you want to see it a second time?
Henry: Yeah, absolutely. Some films are really good, a good test is, would I want to see this film outside of the cinema?
Cooper: Yeah.
Henry: So, a film like Dunkirk, I thought was an amazing film cinematographically, but I wouldn't really be interested in seeing it on a small screen. The story's okay, but I think it's more a director's film, a cinematographer's film. It's very visual film, but not too strong from the story perspective.
Cooper: Good point. Yeah, I agree completely with that. I was just thinking though, in terms of a story and visuals, a story in general. Writer's rooms. So, you have the, some blockbusters back, let's say, the last big blockbuster I saw from a different era that I really liked was the first Alien movie.
Henry: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Cooper: And, I don't know, to me, I have to feel that that wasn't a writer's room. That that was the product of, I know it had a great director- Henry: Yeah, yeah.
Cooper: But it was a product. And, I feel like if you have a writer's room, well, aren't you, seven people working it out together, aren't you taking out the possibility of an artistic vision for the film?
Henry: Yeah, absolutely. And Alien is a really interesting example, because if you read the script from Aliens, it looks almost like a minimal poem on the page. The way it's written is very, very distinctive and it's not how people write scripts nowadays. It has a very distinctive tone and a very distinctive feel about it. And that was written in, I think 1978, so it was very, very far ahead of it's time. It doesn't really feel like an 80's movie, it feels, to me, more like a 90's movie almost and it was written at the end of the 70's. Very compelling. Early films have a very strong female protagonist. So I think, yeah, this was the vision of a writer and a director, not of a committee of people working a writer's room.
Henry: I think the last James Bond film was an example of a film that had too many, there's the expression, "Too many cooks spoil the broth", which means that lots of people give bad results, sometimes.
Cooper: I remember that, can you say that again, 'cause they might want to-
Henry: Yeah. It's a little expression in English. It's, "Too many cooks spoil the broth". A broth is like a soup, but it just means the recipe, I guess, and it means if you have too many people in the kitchen, it sometimes doesn't deliver the right results. You get a mixture of things. It's not so strong.
Cooper: So, to get back to this idea of story, 'cause I think this is an idea that a lot of people I deal with, a lot of my audience, and my audience, a lot of my students, don't get. I find it a little bit scary.
Henry: Yeah.
Cooper: Because I think that even the stories written around Oscar time are a bit weak, comparitively, if you compare them to films from, even from one decade ago, but especially from more.
Cooper: Is there a movie, story-wise, that really, that you'd like, that sorts of inspires you, that's something you would like to do something similar to?
Henry: Yeah. I quite like, I like films which entertain you on the surface, but then also give you a nice, deeper experience as the film ends, or almost because of the story, not just because of the events inside the story.
Henry: Examples of that might be like Jaws, you know, the film Jaws?
Cooper: Yeah. Henry: So, of course, it's a film about a giant shark, okay? But also, the protagonist in Jaws, if you study the movie a little bit, he has a fear of water. So, in a way, it's this kind of horror movie, which is, the energy in the story, I think, comes from the fact that the main character is scared of water. So, at the end of the film, actually the last scene in the film, is him, with a scientist guy, Hooper, not Cooper, Hooper.
Cooper: Which one? That's not the guy who was telling the story of the Japanese-
Henry: Yes. No, no, no. He dies. He's the one who gets eaten by the shark.
Cooper: Is it the Dreyfuss character?
Henry: It's the guy with glasses.
Cooper: Or the Scheider character?
Henry: Not Scheider. It's the other one. Yeah. The one with curly hair and glasses. He's the marine biologist on the boat. And the final scene is those two swimming, they're just holding onto a piece of wood in the water and swimming back to shore and it's like his fear of the water is gone. He's just swimming normally.
Henry: So, it's almost like the shark is this kind of representation of his inner fears. This is going a bit deep, but-
Cooper: No, but it's so interesting, 'cause you're taking me back to the movie.
Henry: Yeah.
Cooper: And I'm thinking of two things. By the way, you guys, we are going to be launching a film series, and, I know most of my students don't care about films, but I know some of you guys do. I think it's going to be really interesting if we could have these sorts of conversations in class.
Cooper: But anyway, so two things it made me think of. First, Roy Scheider. I thought of this other film he did, which was a remake of The Wages of Fear, you must know it. If you don't know it, you would be really interested in this movie.
Henry: Is it an 80's one?
Cooper: It's a 70's one.
Henry: A 70's one.
Cooper: And, The Sorcerer, The Sorcerer.
Henry: Okay. Cooper: You should see it.
Henry: Okay. Cool.
Cooper: Definitely. And I'm thinking of Roy Scheider, and then, I'm also thinking of Jaws. So, first I'll go with the more obvious thing. So, Jaws was a huge, it was one of the biggest movies of the 70's, right?
Henry: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It was huge. It was one of Spielberg's, one of his breakthrough moments. It has that, some very famous cinematography in it. I don't know if you remember that moment when Police Chief Brody, the Scheider character, he's watching the water and he sees, I think it's a fin, in the water. There's this very aggressive camera zoom, and it's almost like the camera rushes up into his face. This is kind of [crosstalk 00:10:49]
Cooper: I sort of do remember that.
Henry: Yeah. It's kind of a famous technique. I think Spielberg developed a special, a special trolley for the camera and things like that, to get the shot.
Cooper: I think I, I think, now that you say it, [inaudible 00:11:03], and, I think, this is a very interesting question I wanted to ask you about, actually. So, this was a very, a very big Hollywood movie. It probably was a summer movie, I'm guessing.
Henry: Yeah.
Cooper: And yet, it was deep. The way you explained in the end. And I can remember, too, even Rocky, the first Rocky was deep compared to the movies these days.
Henry: Yeah.
Cooper: I didn't even see, I haven't seen all of Rocky, but I've seen a few scenes and I said, well, that's too slow for today's movies. I want, to me, it's scary. It's scary that a huge, a big audience of people, all over, from all different classes of society, not going to the art cinema today, but going to the big multiplex, and loving a movie, where they have to think and follow a story. I really feel, and you might not get this feeling, and you can tell me I'm wrong. I really feel like there's something wrong. Because these days, I think people would get bored. And maybe that says something about the way society is going.
Henry: Attention spans and things, yeah. I think one of the problems that causes this is that all of the money, there's a very narrow pyramid, where all of the money goes into Hollywood. It's a bit like pop music. What happens is that all of the money goes into a few, just a very small number of very big films, which means that lots of the films in the middle, the mid-size budget films, don't get made any more. Henry: It's not necessarily that the films are worse, but I think it's just that the priority or the emphasis is on these huge, international blockbusters, which means that there's less money or it's harder to get films made in the middle category.
Cooper: The films may not be worse, but the audience may be, or the way people think, may be different now.
Henry: Yeah, yeah. So, an interesting, talk about shark movies, there's a big blockbuster, I don't know if you've seen the trailer for a film called The Meg?
Cooper: No.
Henry: This is based on this idea of, there was a prehistoric shark, called the Megalodon, which was huge. It was whatever, 100 meters long. And it's this big, international blockbuster. It's a co-production between Warner Brothers, in America, and a big Chinese film studio. So, it's about this huge, prehistoric shark off the coast of China. It's got Jason Statham in the lead role, and then a Chinese actress in the second role.
Henry: It's designed to appeal to this huge, international audience. It actually looks quite fun, so I think I'm gonna go and see it. It's coming out in August, I think. I predict it's gonna make a lot of money because it's gonna have a huge audience, I think. We'll see. Will it be as good as Jaws? I don't know.
Cooper: I doubt it.
Henry: Yeah.
Cooper: But, what did you say there about the film, that I was going to respond to. About the big budget movies.
Henry: Yeah. It's a smaller number-
Cooper: I just think that, so there are still big, big names, like Nolan, attached to Dunkirk. There's Spielberg. And they're now making movies that are, that don't, it seems to be a little bit scary. In other words, it seems to be that these talents get really drained very quickly.
Cooper: Like Spielberg maybe took time to get drained, and now make fairly ordinary movies, but it seems like, because, when they're, they might make a movie like Memento, or something, and then, eventually, get wooed into making these more gigantic films. But, the bigger the movie is, the more they have to deal with all these financial issues rather than artistic issues. And I think a lot of them just get, from my experience, it seems like a lot of them just give in and stop caring about being artists anymore.
Henry: Yeah.
Cooper: It's sort of sad. I don't know if you ever- Henry: Yeah. The interesting, so Spielberg, he basically adapts all of his films. They all come from books or other works. So his next film is coming out soon. I don't know of you've seen the adverts, Ready Player One?
Cooper: No.
Henry: So it's about, it's based on a young adult novel set in the future when people play this video game called Ready Player One. It's a virtual reality experience and the creator of this game has hidden, it's called an Easter egg, so it's like a thing hidden in the game, which is worth 100 trillion pounds, or something. So, it's about good and evil forces trying to find the game. That's coming out very soon.
Henry: I don't know, because these directors have always adapted things, so I wonder if maybe they're not getting such interesting works to adapt. Maybe they've got too big-
Cooper: I think that Spielberg may be an exception, because he's great, but I think they've gotten too big.
Henry: Yeah. It gets too slow, I think.
Cooper: I think they've gotten greedy.
Henry: Yeah, maybe. Also, the process of making a film now takes so much longer, there's so many more people involved and you know, back in the 80's, when Spielberg was starting, you could make a movie very quickly and much more simply, I think.
Cooper: Yes. I think that's, that might be part of it.
Henry: It's maybe just making it difficult for artistic films to come about.
Cooper: So, last thing. I want to go back to Roy Scheider.
Henry: Okay, yeah.
Cooper: I, about three or four, or maybe five years ago, I started to get interested in the new Hollywood movies because, well they were just, for American movies, there's never been a period where there are so many, great, artistic movies coming out.
Henry: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Cooper: And also counter culture, is that the right word? Anti-authoritarian and-
Henry: Yeah.
Cooper: Even though they're mainstream. I liked that. But when you watch the movies, like Roy Scheider, and you see Roy Scheider, and man, that guy is a fairly ordinary looking person and there are lots of fairly ordinary looking people, who are leading men. Even when they're good looking, they're good looking in a sort of human way.
Henry: Sort of every man. Yeah.
Cooper: Yeah. And, I just think it's interesting that Roy Scheider was a really, one of the biggest Hollywood leading men in the 70's. People, he's not the only one.
Henry: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-
Cooper: I think it's indicative of the super, something superficial about Hollywood these days.
Henry: Now it's Jason Statham.
Cooper: Now Jason Statham, yeah.
Henry: You have to be an action hero with big muscles.
Cooper: Yeah.
Henry: Yeah, yeah. Well, let's hope, anyway. I'm looking forward to The Megalodon, The Meg, and, Ready Player One I'm not sure about, but it might be good fun. We'll see.
Cooper: I'm looking forward to the movies, this movie that Joaquin Phoenix is going to, probably not with Joaquin Phoenix, and, is it, there's another interesting western film coming out. I don't know if it's interesting, but it has some big name in it. Big actor. I can't remember who. You haven't heard of these?
Henry: No. I haven't been watching many trailers recently. I need to go and watch, you on YouTube and watch some new film trailers.
Cooper: I just need to find something I'm going to be interested in seeing.
Henry: For the summer. Yeah.
Cooper: Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Henry. That was a really nice Podcast. We will be talking to you, if you don't mind, another time, about wine.
Henry: Yeah. Let's do wine next time. That would be great.
Cooper: I think the audience will be more interested in wine.
Henry: Okay. Movies, then wine. That's a good combination. Thank you.