The Men Responsible

We film critics love to interview the stars but not the movers and shakers of the  industry. This is part of the celebrity culture where supposedly readers prefer the inanities of a luvvie to hearing about how a successful or more often unsuccessful film is made.

Yesterday I had a drink with an old Venetian friend,  who is a senior executive in the film industry. Amongst many interesting points about the future of films, he said the cost of marketing a movie was equal to making it. Now it’s much cheaper to make a TV pilot, so a shift has occurred from the big film companies to the TV networks. HBO showcased the groundbreaking Sopranos followed by West Wing, Homeland and now House of Cards. We have had the explosive success of Nordic Noir. Money rules and TV popular series are far less speculative. For the same commercial rationale, saving of costs, sequels are far more acceptable than a new film.

One film which Fox are producing which I am looking forward to is Gone Girl starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, directed by the highly-rated David Fincher. Rosamund Pike beat Emily Blunt, Olivia Wilde and Charlie Theron to the role, but she may still be  unfamiliar to the British and certainly American audience. She is a fine actress who has already starred in An Education and Dagenham. Her parents are professional musicians and she achieved a 2.1 at Wadham College Oxford. Gone Girl was a bestseller and, reading it before it became so, I thought it would make a fine film and even enquired about the film rights, which has already been sold. One difficulty for a film is the story is told by two dishonest narrators one in diary form. David Fincher has a track record, so all the ingredients are there for a box office and critical success, but in this business you never know.