M. Night Shyamalan has done well to return to a smaller landscape. His new film The Visit opened in theaters today, and the big twist is (as the joke goes) that’s it’s actually a rather good film. In previous years, he has tried to make larger, epic-ish fantasy tales, all of which were rejected by the public at large. Between The Happening, After Earth, and The Last Airbender, Shyamalan became the anti-darling of young internet users everywhere. By narrowing his focus – and hence by increasing hid required level of creativity – the director seems to have finally hit a stride.
Check Out: The Happening RULES!
Shyamalan isn’t, of course, the first director to gain creative traction by shrinking the size of his production. Many famed auteurs and Hollywood directors have deliberately taken on much smaller projects as a way of stretching and breathing. The great Hollywood irony is at work: when there is less at stake, you are freer to move. Huge productions are going to necessarily be co-created by financiers and executives. Tiny productions can finally rest in the hands of the author.
Here are several notable instances when creativity trumped finance.
Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing
Lionsgate
Although he had only directed two feature films in 2012, cult TV guru and geek deity Joss Whedon’s most immediately recent film was The Avengers, a film you may have heard of, as it is, to date, the third highest-grossing film of all time. At that point, Whedon likely had the creative freedom to make whatever film he wanted, and would likely be allowed to command whatever budget he wanted, but opted instead to skew microscopic. Gathering a group of his actor friends together in his own house, he shot a hasty production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing over the course of a few days. The result is hardly perfect, but it proves that Whedon has interests beyond spaceships and laser beams.
Jon Favreau’s Chef
Open Road Films
Jon Favreau started his directorial career with humorous and soulful indie romances like Swingers and Made. He eventually made his way onto the Hollywood A-list with two ultra-successful Iron Man films, and he can be directly credited for indirectly creating the world’s current largest film franchise. But after the drubbing that his Cowboys & Aliens received from fans and critics, Favreau retreated from A productions. He came out with Chef, a small indie about, well, a chef who discovered that small independent business was more satisfying than commercial work. Metaphor? Perhaps.
Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth
Sony Pictures Classics
The famed director of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and The Conversation is often hailed as one of the world’s greatest directors for those triumphs alone. In recent years, however, Coppola has found it increasingly difficult to get his productions made. Back in the 1990s, Coppola made a few moderately notable, mainstream Hollywood films with Jack and The Rainmaker, both slick, well-moneyed productions. It was perhaps his work on the ill-fated Supernova that drove him away from Hollywood, but he eventually returned in 2007 with an independently made epic called Youth Without Youth, a bizarre romance about a man who ages in reverse.
Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain
Paramount
Michael Bay, the infamous director of the successful-yet-hated Transformers movies, was getting a little tired of the series himself at one point. He has always been interested in making a smaller crime drama, and talked for years about taking a break of giant productions so that he could work on what amounted to, in his mind, a heist movie. In 2013, Bay finally got his chance with Pain & Gain, a film about a trio of bodybuilding meatheads who kidnap a rich man and steal all his possessions. The film may, if looked at correctly, pay as a satire of Bay’s common cinematic trademarks of overblown masculinity and glorious testosterone-soaked action.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho
Universal
Psycho may be Hitchcock’s best-known film, but it deserve repetition that it was intended to be something of a B production. Hitchcock was just coming off of the success of the huge actioner North By Northwest, a boldly commercial thriller that featured a climax set on the faces of Mt. Rushmore, and wanted to do something edgier. Enter Psycho, a controversially violent novel that Hitchcock would adapt using a TV crew, TV cameras, and a relatively low-fi set. The result is, well, history.
Gus Van Sant’s Gerry
THINKFilm
Like Favreau, Gus Van Sant started his film career in the indie world with well-regarded art films like Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho. Throughout the ’90s, Van Sant would continue to grow in commercial viability, eventually directing mainstream weepies like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester. He was powerful enough at one point to remake Psycho, a bizarre experiment that critics enjoy discussing. In 2002, however. Van Sant discovered a new niche back in the indie world, and directed Gerry, a nearly silent meditation on a real life murder that took place in the remote desert. The film is largely shots of its two stars, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, walking through the sands. That’s it. It’s great, in an odd way.
Michel Gondry’s The We and the I
Partizan films
Michel Gondry has always wildly spun all over the aesthetic spectrum, rather deliberately. He loves shoddy, homemade tales of lost love and weird dreams, and had proven himself beloved with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He was eventually tapped to direct a big budget spoof version of The Green Hornet, based on the beloved cult 1960s TV show. The film was panned and rejected, and is considered one of the worse of the superhero films. In 2012, he bounced right back with the unexpected The We and the I, a theatrical film about a group of high school students in New York riding the bus home on the last day of school. It’s a sweet little love letter, and bears none of Gondry’s usual tricks. He found something new by going small.
Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
