Auteur Theory

Some directors have common threads running through their films. Spielberg's characters are often distanced from their fathers, for example, ET, AI, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, etc.. James Cameron likes to introduce his characters by a close up of their feet, T2, the Abyss, Titanic. David Lynch likes to have kinky sex in his movies, Mulholland Drive, Blue Velvet, The Straight Story .

Can you think of any others?

Oh thought of another one. Cameron Crowe. Say Anything has the father (John Mahoney) singing along to the radio in his car. Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire ditto. And the whole bus sings along in Almost Famous.

I think you call these running themes by the same director auteur theory so that's what I christened the post.

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I couldn't believe that she knew my name. Some of my best friends didn't know my name.

Cool thread val. Basically, the subtle things that you don't really notice.

I have no idea's for any though. This is the kinda thing where I would have to watch a few movies by the same director.

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"I was walking down the street with my friend and he said, "I hear music", as if there is any other way you can take it in. You're not special, that's how I receive it too. I tried to taste it but it did not work." - Mitch Hedberg

M. Night Shyamalan: finding meaning...purpose. Finding your place.

In Vanilla Sky, Cruise is singing 'What if God Was One of Us' out loud while he was being pushed into the examination room.

How about David Lean. He liked to make big budget pictures, usually involving some kind of train or vehicle.

Deep stuff like that is cool. But in simpler terms. M. Night Shymalan always seems to want to have a twist at the end that makes you want to watch it again. I mean, there must have been thousands of second watches for Stuart Little. Who suspected that the little guy would have reunited with, get this, his human family????

There's some deep meaning into Kubrick as well. I know there is. My brain is just not big enough to decipher it. For one thing, the man is pretty much sex obsessed. Lolita (paedophilia), A Clockwork Orange (rape), Eyes Wide Shut (erotic dreams and voyeurism), The Shining (the fact that men go crazy if they have to put up with women for too long).

Scorsese has the gangster theme running through a lot of his movies. John Ford has got the whole western thing going on. Some directors like to stick to the one genre where they're comfortable and from here they can explore many other issues. I respect that.

Oh Spike Lee. Racism. It's always got something to do with racism.

What's Tarintino's running theme?

Kevin Smith has the whole generation X thing going on. With a good helping of masturbation jokes in all his movies.

Tarantino has the let's-see-how-many-people-we-can-kill-or-piss-off theme going.

I think Tarantino's is the pop culture references, ensemble casts, and great dialogue.

Kubrick's films deal with the dark side of human nature. Hitchcock always deals with murder and mysteries. Stone's films deal with politics.

Another thing is Burton uses the whole alienation theme. All his characters are a bit off and 'away' from society (Pee Wee Herman, Beetlejuice, Batman, Ichabob Crane, the martians, Mark Wahlberg, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood). Has Burton ever directed a film where the main character is completely normal? LOL

Speilberg:
"Orphan"; Distance from Family; The Shooting Star


Kubrick:
Flaws in Humanity; Self/Society Destruction; The Kubrick Stare; The Kubrick Tunnel


Tarantino:
Honor; Loyalty



They're some there. I'll try some more later.
I think we're getting a bit general in the thread now.


Every director deals with themes and genres, the thing is how they can cross genres and platforms and when deconstructed the film always can come back to the same basic message, often being able to be summed up in a few words, as I have tried to do above. Sure, Tarantino swears and kills and has great casts and pop-culture references, but that's not his thing. His thing is honor and loyalty and redemption. Think about it.

Just because Scorcese makes gangster films doesn't make that his thing, there's something more to it, the farther you get down into it.

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www.esotericrabbit.com

what's up with those shooting stars in JAWS i've always wondered hhhhmmmmmmmmm




Peace

It's just like how a painter signs a painting, a little trademark signature, a shooting star.

It's in almost everyone of his films.
I definatly noticed it in E.T and A.I.

Not sure about Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan, though I would assume they're in there, just well hidden.

Do the Coen Brothers have a certain thread running through their movies?

It seems to me that their hero is usually an incompetent. Is this the Coen brothers way of saying that all men are stupid? Their female lead is often a tough aggressor, a man in everything but their sex. What does this mean? Is it just that they like aggressive women, or is it a satire on female liberation? Also, I don't know whether the boys are religious or not but there are constant references to the devil (Barton Fink, O Brother...) and they even have angels (Hudsucker Proxy).

The brothers are pretty hard to categorise because their movies are usually so very different. The only constant in their movies is a kidnapping theme. But the Coens never concentrate on the person that's kidnapped. It's how their families react to the loss or gain. Usually, both will suffer. I don't know how you could apply that to anything any deeper.

i think these examples you guys are exploring are a tangent to auteur theory (author/self recreated in film) but that theory seemed to be more about every single detail of creation, the literal recreation of the director's being/ideas/who he is in the film he makes. Sometimes we'd sit in class and literally break down every aspect of a film and read and read all the articles written by the film maker or about the film maker or with an interview with the filmmaker, i'm talking, why he used X camera with X lens for X shot and why he does it in every film. Terribly boring, usually. So analytical my eyes would tear and I'd fall sleep in my dorm room. But it was a philosophy and sense of self on film and not mainstream at all. Like an expressionist painter who only paints body parts at a close up, because it fits some very particular vision of his and what he's trying to say. He serves only himself, and expresses only himself, and that's all that matters, hence "author" (of his own image, his own ideas), and the arty french turn, "auteur." Very haughty egotistical sense, like any fufu artist.

So, what happens when you apply this to Hollywood? I think it's just not the same. SO MUCH is involved it's not just about the creator at all. I'd say Kubrick counts, to a certain degree. He seems to have managed to bend Hollywood to his will, like in with Eyes Wide Shut. And he knew people would run to see it cuz he was usuing two famous people in a sexy movie. And maybe Woody Allen counts, cuz in the end everything's about him. But he sells no real message so maybe he's not really an auteur either.

But I'm definitely not thinking Cameron or Spielberg. Yeah, they make a movie with something new and shocking (ET, Schindler's list, etc) but i mean, these are main stream film makers. A main stream film by definition, cranked out of hollywood, is using the Hollywood system and the film's meaning and creation as a whole is NOT entirely derived from the director alone. It's got producers, 30 writers, a studio with rules and demands, and a mainstream audience who wants certain things. All these things affecting the final output in the end do not make something like AI an "auteur" film, even if it's got Spielberg's personal theme of "searching for meaning in something beyond the self."

So those details - starting with someone's feet, alienation, or kinky sex - those are just personal quirks of the director, I'd say.

whew.

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life without movies is like cereal without milk. possible, but disgusting. but not nearly as bad as cereal with water. don't lie. I know you've done it.

I think you're right thmmie. With the exception of Burton. I really do think he takes on projects with a certian theme in his mind's eye. Like Val said," Are any of his charactors normal people?" I think Kubrick and Allen are exaples of it, too. Especially Woody Allen. Nobody directs a film like he does, and showcase themselves the way he does. I think the message he is selling, in almost every one of his films, is: Look at me; look how interesting I am; look at these gorgeous women who do what I want.

I think if you are to break down the majority of filsm you'll find that you reach a word word emotion behind the entire film. Aristotle once said that there are only three types of stories, but I beg to differ and say that there is only one, and it is fear.

I think the farther you go down through any peice of work, or any peice of art, especially in film, you're going to find that the driving emotion will be fear. Fear of something. I think it is how deep it goes, that makes someone an auter. Speilberg has a fear of rejection, very easy to see. I think it's people like Allen and Kubrick (the two that have been mentioned) that are able to hide it so well that a peice of work needs a lot of deconstruction to be able to find the source of the fear (I personally think that Kubrick's fear was of humanity, and to a more specific extent how falliable it is). I do have my own personal views that fear is the over-riding emotion and that ever other emotion is derived from a fear or something. The most pure next to fear is of course enlightenment, or happiness or whatever you want to call it, and sure we have plenty of happy films, but happiness is basically a way we can supress fear. But that's my own views.

So, what makes an auter? It's not the shooting stars and the Kubrickian stare (which I prefer to think of as signatures, my own personal signature is the character most like me speaking the words "***** almighty" at some stage, but anyway...) but the depth you have to go before being able to say what fear drove the director to make the film. Director's are all auters.

Some are simply moreso because of the skill in which they are able to hide their fear with their craft.

My two cents, anyhow.

Humm... now my reply sounds out of line, but tough! I'm replying to the earlier posts, before the really smart film people got here (no offence to the rest of us!)...

John Woo... more of a signature, but those damn doves!

Yeah, you're right. Woo's signature is the dove.

Sam Raimi always includes his old car.

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"Man, I don't know what the f*** you just said little kid...but you special man. You reached out and touched a brothers heart"

OK this wasn't worth starting it's own thread but it kind of follows on the same topic matter:

Rather than Directors, these are two actors who seem to insist on some fairly bizarre inclusions:

For Tom Cruise - there's always the obligatory sccene where he has his shirt off with his arms clenched in front, thereby enhancing his six pack. See: Eyes Wide Shut, Top Gun, Days of Thunder, both Mission:Impossibles and Vanilla Sky (is that enough evidence?)

Brad Pitt: there's the scene where he's beaten to a pulp. See: Fight Club, Spy Game, The Mexican (everyone has a go in this, including Julia Roberts!) Snatch, Se7en...and as a bonus in Meet Joe Black, he's run over by a couple of cars, while in Intrview with a Vampire, he's concreted intoa wall for all eternity.

It's reassuraing that, unlike Tom, Brad's prepared to mangle his face for the cause.

Would also like to point out Bruce Willis' do doubt contractual insistence on pursing his lips at least 50 times in each movie, and Harrison Ford's running-while-frowning-worriedly scenes....

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Another high quality post by Fez Wizardo

That reminds me of some local DJs...hilarious guys. Going on and on about how, with Harrison Ford, there's always "something wrong with his wife." Check it (some spoilers below):

• Regarding Henry (can't remember his wife)
• Mosquito Coast (his wife is mad with his obsession)
• What Lies Beneath (his wife thinks she's going crazy)
• Six Days, Seven Nights (his fiance cheats on him while he's shipwrecked)
• Patriot Games (his wife is involved in a car crash and ends up in the hospital)
• The Fugitive (his wife is murdered)
• Frantic (his wife is missing)

Coincidence?

lmao!

Some quality observations in this thread... maybe we can soon start predicting whose going to be cast for what scripts.