By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Fingered: When Toback met Jacques
In LA Weekly, James Toback interviews Jacques Audiard about The Beat My Heart Skipped, his remake of Toback’s Fingers. Audiard: When I approached the idea of remaking “Fingers,” there was a literal sense in which it appealed to me—the themes of inheritance, of being somebody’s son, of creating your own identity. But there’s also a sense in which the film belongs to certain cinematic territory—the American films of the 1970s—that nourished my own filmmaking… I’m wondering if today, in the American independent cinema, there is territory that has the same qualities as those films of the ’70s—that energy, that independence of spirit and also that view of society? Could there be a new form of filmmaking in America—a New Wave or a New New Wave? Is that still possible today? I don’t think so. I think that the independent movement today is a glorified audition to be co-opted by corporate benediction. It really started with Paramount and my dear, late friend Don Simpson—this idea that the poster is the movie, the concept is the movie. That thinking has had—and I say this with due respect to Don, whom I loved—a devastating effect. It created a world in which every movie must be viewed in terms of how it will be marketed and what the distribution concept will be…. [To get a film] distributed and to get any attention is extremely hard—the seduction, the idea of directing a $100 million movie, is too strong for most young filmmakers to resist. I don’t think the power of conglomerate corporate distribution stops movies of originality from being made altogether, but what it does is stop careers of real originality from being noticed and developed… We’re now in a corporate culture where the idea of money and a materialistic notion of life are so widely taken for granted that you’re considered naive if you don’t genuflect beneath it. Whereas, in the ’70s it was the reverse. It was the idea of subverting those values that, if you had any self-respect, you took for granted. That was your price of admission.”
