Catherine Hardwicke hit one out of the park for female directors this past weekend, but she had a lot of help. Not only was she working with a pre-sold property, she also had a very manageable budget of $37 million. Quite different from the $2 million she had to work with on Thirteen a few years back. Of course, she had similar budgets on Lords of Dogtown ($25 million) and The Nativity Story ($35 million), and both were box office disappointments. Still, she’s going to keep on being trusted with more money — if Summit is smart they’ll keep her on for at least the first Twilight sequel, which will surely come with a higher price tag — and as long as she continues with genre films, she’s sure to remain a profitable director.
Not every talented filmmaker does well with more money. Danny Boyle, for instance, typically bombs with bigger budgets. And a lot of foreign auteurs strike out when handed costly studio-produced genre or franchise pics (Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection is a favorite example). But there’s the occasional filmmaker who, like Steven Soderbergh or Christopher Nolan, can make something worthwhile out of any budget they’re allotted. And then there are the many indie filmmakers who quickly find themselves at home with modestly priced broad comedies, such as the case with Seth Gordon easily transitioning from the Slamdance doc The King of Kong to the star-studded Hollywood holiday pic Four Christmases, out this week.
Who will be the next small-scale filmmaker to successfully rise up and prove him or herself worthy of bigger budgets? SpoutBlog has selected five directors we’d like to see given an economic boost, each because he or she would likely deliver something more interesting and popular than the usual Hollywood product.
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Prior to seeing Then She Found Me, I heedlessly referred to it as “that Helen Hunt movie” and cynically prejudged it as yet another celebrity pet project that was sure to be a misguided and perhaps freewheeling bore. Well, I stand corrected: I absolutely love the film, which was written and directed by the Oscar-winning actress (yeah, I forgot she won one, too), adapted quite loosely from Elinor Lipman’s novel of the same name.
And hopefully you won’t hold it against me, especially if you haven’t seen it. The strange thing about seeing a film like Then She Found Me at SXSW is that it doesn’t seem hip enough for the festival, despite the ironic fact that many movies screening this year were about nerds, geeks and other sorts of outcast. Nobody wants to hear you say, “hey, that Helen Hunt movie is actually really good.” Between that and telling people that I love Bette Midler again (not randomly; she’s in the film), I felt like a stranger in a strange world the rest of my time in Austin.
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