Why Are You Copying That Big Hit Movie?
I remember when Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs first exploded into the minds of thousands of young, aspiring indie filmmakers. I especially remember because I was one of them.
This one movie caused a shockwave through the industry. But it also had a disturbing effect on all of us who were into shooting our own films. There were a number of other films around at the same time which got our attention too. However, it was Reservoir Dogs which was to launch a thousand copies.
Well, just counting screenplays, probably more than 1000…
My 2nd screenplay was a short about gangsters hiding out in IKEA, after a job that went wrong left one gang member fatally wounded. He was also dressed in a big bunny suit. I even used that script as part of my application to the NFTS.
I also wrote an update of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The Scottish nobles were transformed into modern gangsters passed through a heavy filter of quirky dialogue and dark humour. Tarantino-esque, you ask?
A deluge of Tarantinos
It was around this time that a Film 4 development executive let it be known that since Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction had been released, they’d been receiving an awful lot of scripts with gangsters, dark humour and lengthy dialogue, “So please don’t send us anything like that.”
The fact that Guy Richie then made a British success with his own Tarantino-esque movie can’t have helped. Mind you, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was more like Tarantino mixed with Ealing comedy.
It’s over 25 years since the release of Reservoir Dogs, but I bet you there are still young (and old) aspiring filmmakers writing Tarantino-esque gangster scripts. It’s a film which inspired 1000s of us to dream about making our own hit movie on a shoestring. And still inspires, all these years later.
Thing is the film had a budget of over $1m and had a host of name actors, out of the reach of most of us.
Big budget ideas on a small budget
Many aspiring filmmakers are motivated by these big hit films to do something similar. If you had your mind blown by Star Wars films as a kid, you grow up wanting to make one yourself. I worked briefly with some filmmakers who wanted to make an I Am Legend style movie, with a fraction of the budget.
Borrowing from successful creators is all part of any artist’s journey. For example, you can see John Cassavetes’ Shadows in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. You can also see it in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. So, two filmmakers you would not associate together (probably) got inspiration from the same source.
But they came out very differently. Nobody would confuse a Scorsese film with an Allen. So, being influenced by something is a healthy part of our development as creatives.
In filmmaking, the problem arises when we get inspired by a film out of our current reach. I’m thinking less films like Reservoir Dogs and more films with large amounts of CGI. Films which were blockbusters in their day. Trying to emulate one of these, the best you can possibly achieve is to end up with a film which is a cheap version of a big hit.
Copy the filmmaker not the film
My tip to aspiring filmmakers is not to copy your favourite filmmaker’s best films, but instead be inspired by his path to making that film.
How did George Lucas end up making Star Wars?
Like Francis Ford Coppola, I’m more a fan of his early films. As a 13 year old, I couldn’t get enough of American Graffiti. Having captured it on our new VHS recorder from the TV, I watched it far more times than I watched any Star Wars film.
But American Graffiti still had a budget of $700k (back in 1973). The film was a huge hit, making over $140m at the box office. And anyway, Lucas had already made a mark as a filmmaker before with THX 1138.
That film also cost over $700k to shoot and was based on a short he had made at film school. Lucas had had an idea for the short for a long time “based on the concept that we live in the future and that you could make a futuristic film using existing stuff“.
So you see, he was thinking about making a sci-fi film, but already at that early stage (in his early 20s) he was thinking like a low budget filmmaker.
Christopher Nolan
Like most of us, I heard about this director after Memento was his breakout hit. But when I shot Third Contact, I didn’t model the production on that film. Instead I looked at his first feature, Following. This was a film made for almost nothing, shot at weekends, under the principle that the whole kit and crew had to fit into a London cab.
If you are a fan of Martin Scorsese films like Taxi Driver or Goodfellas, you might be tempted to try to emulate those films. But Scorsese didn’t start with them. These famous films were the result of his development as a filmmaker over decades.
So rather than think like Scorsese making Goodfellas, as a filmmaker starting out, it would be better to think like Scorsese making this…
If you watch this short, you can already see the imagination which ended up making Goodfellas. But it’s done on a much smaller scale. Still photos are used a lot (easy and cheap) and even some “rotoscoping” (well, a photo crudely cut with scissors and filmed).
The important thing in this film is not a 35mm cine camera with lens flares, smooth dolly shots, blurry backgrounds, cool gunfights and the rest of it. This is all about the story, the creativity. It’s all about a young filmmaker developing his voice.
I think I know why we don’t though
As a film lover, we can watch Scorsese’s early shorts and find them fascinating. But perhaps they don’t exactly inspire us to get filmmaking like the big hit films do.
When we start out, we are often impatient. And the idea of going through this early development phase doesn’t appeal so much as jumping ahead to some unrealistic hope of instant masterpiece.
But if a director as talented as Scorsese had to go through this phase, it’s a little bit of a delusion to believe we can skip it.
So, when it comes to choosing a direction as a filmmaker, get inspired by the path of other filmmakers you love (and maybe even ones you don’t), and not their films.
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