Through a series of complicated events I ended up going to Sundance film festival this year, and saw a panel Catherine Hardwicke was speaking at about indie film makers doing block busters. The other two panelists were Taika Waititi, for Ragnarok, and Justin Lin for Star Trek Beyond and Fast and the Furious.
One of the things I remember most about the panel was the stark difference between how the studios gave these directors funding.
Lin and Waititi talked about how surprisingly easy it was to ask for multi-million dollar additions to the budget for things like flipping over a bus (Fast and Furious), and about using film equipment they’d never even knew existed to get aerial shots (Ragnarok). Unless it was something absolutely outrageous (Taika apparently pitched having the whole thing with 80′s-style everything as a bargaining tactic)
Hardwicke was a different story. She said the studio thought Twilight was going to be a flop, because they thought its target audience (teenage girls) was too small/wouldn’t pay to see it. So they fought her on everything. She said there were scenes she couldn’t film because they refused to give her the budget for it. Scenes she really thought should’ve been in the movie. She also said that the one good thing about them thinking it’d flop was that they let her cast whoever she wanted, instead of big name stars. Which is nice…but still.
Part of this could’ve been the time difference: movies like Harry Potter and Twilight helped pave the way for fantasy films becoming mainstream blockbusters, and Ragnarok and Star Trek/Fast and Furious were part of popular pre-existing franchises. But I’m not naive enough to believe that’s the only reason.
Wait, im confused. Are you telling me that Taika literally had to appease these old ppl with that unfitting archaic baby boomer music, or are you saying it was super easy for him to get his way and that was one of the things he wanted?
If I remember right, he wanted the music, along with a few other story elements. So he pitched doing the entire as a flashback to the 80s–like, the literal 80s–and having Thor and Loki look like they’d just popped out of that time period. The studio told him no, and then he happily came back with the things he actually wanted, and they said yes, because he was being “reasonable.” He claimed Guillermo del Toro did the same thing with Shape of Water: but in that case, the man insisted he wanted the movie to be in black and white, which made his other ideas about the creature seem to be common sense in comparison.
