Marc Forster: getting away with it

Three stinkers in a row and two of them ludicrously expensive and troubled productions. (Quantum of Solace and World War Z.) How has Forster's career survived? 

Shouldn't he be taking Michael Cimino's seat in Fuck Up City?

Must be screwing the right people.

Next project: a remake of HEAVEN'S GATE.

MACHINE GUN PREACHER
Budget: $30 million
Worldwide Gross: $1,104,633  
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=machinegunpreacher.htm

WORLD WAR Z looks like it's following Spielberg's Hollywood disaster film formula by casting a big-name, A-list actor to play an average dad (like WAR OF THE WORLDS with Cruise).

Sharky's blow job theory may have some merit. Cimino hasn't made a film in nearly 20 years, but he made four good films in his brief career and I'll take Thunderbolt and Lightfoot over The Big Lebowski any day of the week. 

And who can forget Isabelle Huppert's brief affair with a Winchester in Heaven's Gate? Even if it did finish her Hollywood chances before she'd started...

Never quite understood why he was brought in for QoS.
Why hire a director who has no regard for the material?

To be fair, neither of Quantum's or WWZ's script problems can be attributed to Forster. His productions are expensive, yes, but I think he got bad luck with these two films. Quantum nearly matched CR's box office earnings though and WWZ is doing very well right now. I don't know why Machine Gun Preacher wasn't a wide release (haven't seen the film), but Quantum and WWZ aren't exactly flops.

Box office take is not the same as profit. I'd like to see a breakdown of Quantum's financial performance as I suspect it was marginal.

In that case, QOS was probably more of a modest success when you get down to profit. Only other films I've seen of his were STRANGER THAN FICTION and THE KITE RUNNER. They were merely okay. I don't think he's the worst director to do a Bond film, but I am not crazy about his choices in editing and that corny parallels with the horse race and stage play. No need for that shit in Bond.

Salomé wrote:

Never quite understood why he was brought in for QoS.

Forster was Craig's second choice. Roger Michell (who directed Craig on THE MOTHER and ENDURING LOVE) was originally signed in 2007, but jumped out because of the quality of the script.

Eek, maybe that original Purvis & Wade script wasn't as good as what we ended up with. Too bad we'll never know. Apparently after the CR draft leaks happened, EON began a policy where writers would have to destroy any draft that wasn't going to be used, via deletion or a paper shredder. That's why nothing out of that original draft ever surfaced online.

Either way, at least Craig made a good choice out of Mendes.

Foster's experiences with QUANTUM and WORLD WAR Z are less of a reflection on him as a director and more of a reminder why it's not wise to start shooting a movie without a finished script.  See also: TOMORROW NEVER DIES and ALIEN 3.

You don't think that making the same mistake twice, resulting in cost overruns of more than a hundred million dollars, is a reflection on Forster's abilities as a director? He would have made a good investment banker.

Erica Ambler wrote:

You don't think that making the same mistake twice, resulting in cost overruns of more than a hundred million dollars, is a reflection on Forster's abilities as a director? He would have made a good investment banker.

Given the ridiculous budgets of Quantum and WWZ, and the amount of that money that winds up on screen, I suspect he's embezzling. A very good investment banker.

Erica Ambler wrote:

Three stinkers in a row and two of them ludicrously expensive and troubled productions. (Quantum of Solace and World War Z.) How has Forster's career survived?

The box office takings might have been a little low, but the critical reactions to WORLD WAR Z have been fairly positive.

Prisoner Monkeys wrote:

The box office takings might have been a little low, but the critical reactions to WORLD WAR Z have been fairly positive.

If box office is spectacular then the film might break even. However, Forster has come out fighting and blames the producers for the problems:

“No one came to me and said, ‘You are fucking up here,’” the director said. “So if there are any budgetary issues, they are not my issues.” He said producers hid problems from him to boot. “You don’t know the shit going on behind closed doors,” he said. “You are having a meltdown while working. So I don’t usually know what is going on. Of course, I know what is on set, If you look at directors, they are always protected -- the producers only let you know so much.”

Apparently that's from the June Vanity Fair though I haven't seen the issue in question. However, there's a précis at

http://fussyeye.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/vanity-fair-exclusive-making-of-brad.html

Sounds like a fiasco, though this quote reminded me of the British public sector:

'While closing down the production in Malta, for instance, the wrap-up crew found a stack of purchase orders related to the cast and extras that had been casually tossed into a desk drawer and forgotten; the amount totaled in the millions of dollars. Marc Evans, president of production at Paramount, was shocked. He calls the overages an “unthinkable action” which needed to be addressed immediately. “It was literally insane. Adam [Goodman, president of the Paramount Film Group] and I believed we’d gotten out of Malta good, and I found out we weren’t. That is a nightmare.”'

Well, that sounds like the film's problems stem from producers being producers and fucking with everything because they think they know best - they did, after all, recruit Damon Lindelhof to do rewrites - rather than the director just being incompetent.

Hmmm, maybe the same could be said for Quantum of Solace though it wouldn't excuse the frenetic editing.

I think the editing in QOS takes a lot of undue flak. It's not perfect, but there is a pattern to it. For instance, people criticised the use of steadicam dring the opening chase, but if you watch carefully, the steadicam is only truly noticeable when the Aston Martin takes a hit from a car or truck nearby. The frentic editing is obviously intended to immerse the viewer in the action by deliberately showing only about 90% of the action in the frame. This creates a sense of actually being there, because if we really were in a car chase, then we'd probably only be aware of about 90% of what was going on. Whether or not it worked is open to debate, but the theory is a good idea.

If there is anyone who truly deserves criticism for QOS, it's Paul Haggis.

Always hard to know who's responsible for a film, but given directors are keen to take the credit it seems reasonable for them to take the flak as well. Besides, I think a lot of QoS' action sequences were shot by the second unit. Was that the case with Skyfall?

Incidentally, I seem to recall forum member trevanian saying there were a lot of fine shots in QoS that got lost in the quest for Forster's 'speeding bullet' idea.

Apparently QOS's opening chase, there was another Alfa Romeo 159 that got edited out in post, along with a climax involving the Aston Martin crashing into a quarry wall.



Roberto Shaeffer did some nice cinematography in the film, inspired a lot by Gordon Willis's work with anamorphic on THE PARALLAX VIEW - but it suffers from the editing, along with orange and teal digital grading and having to shoot with spherical rather than anamorphic lenses, due to the huge amount of VFX shots and limited post-production time.

Roberto Shaeffer ASC wrote:

The only thing we couldn’t do was shoot anamorphic due to a very constrained post schedule with a release date already in place 4 1/2 months from picture wrap!

http://www.pushing-pixels.org/2012/01/16/the-cinematography-of-quantum-of-solace-interview-with-roberto-schaefer-asc.html

Also see:

Quote :

Another of the filmmakers’ ideas was to deliberately compose partially obscured frames, in the spirit of Roman Polanski’s famous shot of Ruth Gordon sitting half-concealed by a door in Rosemary’s Baby (1968). “I think those sorts of obscurities increase tension, because everything you don’t see is left to the imagination of the audience,” explains Forster. “It applies not just to framing, but also to characters and the things they reveal or don’t reveal. That’s what makes Bond so interesting: he is hidden from us.” Schaefer encouraged various departments to let things be obscured occasionally, but found “it sort of goes against everyone’s instincts, so we had to fight to let things stack up in the frame without people moving them out of the way. We probably didn’t get quite as much of that as we hoped to, but we also didn’t want the first-unit material to stand out from the second-unit footage.”

Quote :

As is typical on a Bond film, the second unit’s work was extensive, and this influenced the filmmakers’ decision to shoot Super 35mm. (The second unit was led by director Dan Bradley and director of photography Shaun O’Dell, collaborators on The Bourne Ultimatum.) Schaefer initially considered 2-perf, which was ruled out because of the unforgiving lack of space between frames, and anamorphic, a favorite on previous Bond films. “Marc and I really wanted anamorphic, and the effects team could have worked with it, but in the end, we went with spherical because the post schedule was so tight we knew they’d be delivering effects up to the last day of my final grade,” says the cinematographer. “We didn’t want to be a week away from the film being shown and still getting effects shots delivered that we weren’t happy with yet.

On the other hand, my difficulty with spherical and specifically the digital-intermediate [DI] process is that anybody can go in and change everything — editors can reframe to make an edit work without paying sufficient attention to composition,” he continues. “If you shoot anamorphic, you’ve got the top and bottom of the frame, and that’s it. Spherical was a double-edged sword; certain things worked to my advantage, but I was also fighting to protect my compositions.”

http://www.ascmag.com/ac_magazine/November2008/QuantumofSolace/page1.php

A lot of good ideas, but most of them wasted in the final cut.

Am thinking a similar thread could be made about M. Night Shamalamadingdong, what with him now having crapped out Lady In The Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender and After Earth one after another. I can only assume that they made enough money regardless for him to still get work.

SIGNS was awful. Self-righteous, fake, pseudo-Spielberg shite. Good score though.

I enjoyed some early M Knight stuff including Signs but even when they are ok (often buoyed by being unintentionally funny) there is something very peculiar about the way he makes actors...act, so many of the performances leave you thinking they weren't directed at all, or worse they were directed in direct contradiction to their most comfortable approaches.....

With QOS I generally agree with PM that the editing takes a lot of flak when other elements, mostly around the script are bigger issues. Bond editing has often been tight and quick, the opening car chase would be OK in isolation, but the rapid segue into the foot chase (which is the worse sequence by far imo) really taints everything that comes next so you tend not to give it a chance. The ambition behind the editing is fine, the execution less so and you have to also consider that this design decision rests on a pretension that can and does, imo, undermine much of the great work the actors and stunt people are doing.

As to who is to blame for the script problems well the writers strike is first and foremost imo, but Haggis and P&W have to take some 'credit' (P&W's consistently awful dialogue does seem the consistent part of every film post TWINE) and don't we also hear that Foster and Craig had a hand in the final product? Ultimately the producers needed to call time till a fully reviewed script was ready, then allow the other professionals their input to make the best of it.

Erica Ambler wrote:

You don't think that making the same mistake twice, resulting in cost overruns of more than a hundred million dollars, is a reflection on Forster's abilities as a director? He would have made a good investment banker.

WWZ's overruns are more a matter of the production corruption (see post near bottom of page 1 in thread) and the studio decision (no doubt influenced by Pitt) to throw so much money at reshooting the last act, plus the costs of holding the thing up from release to do all that stuff (interest KILLS.) I sure wish Paramount had agreed to hold STAR TREK 5 back 6 months and given Shatner a chance to take the VFX someplace that could deliver satisfactory work, instead of cutting its losses ... with less competition at the box office and opticals that didn't look pre-Harryhausen, even the failings of the story wouldn't have hurt the film's reception the way it wound up getting trashed.  

As for QoS, I don't think you can blame Forster for the money on that one at all. (You can blame him for the editing as much as you want.) You've got 900+ vfx shots to do in a very short time frame, so that is very similar to what made T2's costs spike enormously, and that was with a director who was tremendously VFX-savvy. These shows where the post period is truncated are often - though not always - just pouring money away on overtime and also getting diminishing returns because the guys doing the work are so overtaxed ... plus you have the issue of not having enough creative time to finesse.

I just don't get why Forster is so attracted to big shows. He says it is because of the different challenges, having so many decisions to make and getting to play with all the camera toys, but that sounds a little too surface. I mean, would Preston Sturges have been excited to make, say, THE ALAMO and follow it up with something like TORA TORA TORA? Flexing different creative muscles, sure, but so far out of comfort zone.

Interesting you mention Preston Sturges. I've heard some compare Forster to Richard Fleischer.