Winners: 53rd London Film Festival

COMMENTS (2)

• I’m gonna kvetch a little but Nikki can you PLEASE not refer to movies with the director’s name as the possessive.

  It is not Jacques Audiard’s A PROPHET or John Hillcoat’s THE ROAD. It it A PROPHET directed by Jacques Audiard and THE ROAD directed by John Hillcoat.

  A PROPHET has a whole slew of screenwriters, an editor, actors, and a whole crew of people who helped make it. Jaques Audiard is not the author of the film. There is no such thing. That is a concept for lazy film critics and a way for directors to make more money than their creative peers.

  THE ROAD is based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel, so it seems especially obnoxious to say it is John Hillcoat’s THE ROAD. It is John Hillcoat’s direction of a screenplay adaption by Joe Panhall of the novel written by Cormac McCarthy with hundreds of other people making contributions in bringing it to the screen. Or simply a film directed by John Hillcoat, but not John Hillcoat’s THE ROAD.

  A film has no author. It is a collaboration. Yes, that makes it tough on film critics and might lead to directors getting less credit in the end, but if a director wants that kind of credit (authorship), go write a novel.

  A movie trailer that starts with “DIRECTED BY STEVEN SPIELBERG” will bring in as many people as “A STEVEN SPIELBERG FILM” but won’t take away the contributions of all those who helped make it.

  Comment by Frankie Raye — Wednesday October 28, 2009 @ 8:56pm PDT  Reply to this post

  • Knowing the writer of A Prophet, he’d have no problem giving the credit to Audiard. There’s nothing wrong with the director getting this credit. It is their film. They take the blame when it sucks too!

    Anyway, what’s the big deal? Most people don’t even know what a director does. They think the actors make up the lines as they go along.

    Comment by GS — Thursday October 29, 2009 @ 5:57am PDT  Reply to this post