Hollywood Road

? "I have obtained special survey statistics from several professional companies before."

In this period of time, Murphy was not blind in choosing such a film, just like the six major Hollywood companies would do a certain amount of market research before advancing each project, and he also had certain data to support it, "From the end of the 1960s From the early 1970s to the present, the divorce rate in American society has exceeded 40%. These people who have been hurt by marriage, as well as the grown-up children who have been hurt by broken marriages and broken families, will become our potential audience."

In fact, everyone knows that it is one thing to promote some values, but it is another matter whether ordinary people accept them or not. Even if these people agree with the so-called mainstream Hollywood-style values, they will not reject the views on marriage in the film.

Carla Firth fell into deep thought, and after a while, said, "According to what you said, marriage is too scary, and it's wise for me to choose to be single."

Murphy shrugged, "Maybe it won't be long before you meet someone who wants to marry and thinks my words are nonsense."

Curling her lips, Kara Firth didn't say anything else.

"Let's talk about movies." Murphy brought back the topic of offset, "I also got another statistic, the divorce rate in Hollywood movies is even more astonishing, the divorce rate on the screen is as high as 90% Fives."

"It's so high?" Kara Feith was a little surprised.

"It's only high but not low. This is also caused by another trend in Hollywood movies." Murphy explained in detail, "There is also a selling point in Hollywood movies that is anti-family and anti-emotion."

Kara Firth asked, "Like our film?"

Murphy nodded, "In addition to playing the warm family card, Hollywood screenwriters are also good at writing marriage and family as 'horror movies'. While a large number of screenwriters rely on their families to earn tears, there are also many screenwriters who tear things apart. They said This kind of 'family tragedy' is for the 'post-70s', 'post-80s' and '90s'."

He reminded, "This group of people is now the main force in the film market, and nearly half of them have experienced the breakdown of their families and marriages."

Kara Firth found that Murphy's work was done too carefully, almost more than the market research department of Twentieth Century Fox, and it was no wonder that he could always get high returns at a small cost.

"It's getting late." Murphy looked at his watch, "Let's go."

The two continued to talk about these topics about the movie, walked out of the gate of the warehouse studio together, got into their respective cars, and left the small city of Venice.

On the way back, Murphy was still thinking about the conversation he had with Kara Firth. In fact, there was another extremely important point in choosing "Gone Girl". He had only watched most of the Oscar-winning films, not like Academically, I have studied it carefully, and seeing it and treating it as academic research are completely two concepts.

The former will definitely be forgotten after a long time. How many people can remember the specific scenes of the movie they watched a few years ago? The latter was far more impressive.

Because of personal preferences, Murphy has studied the most and deepest films with a distinctive noir style. This is also the film route he is taking now, and it is also the style he is best at.

It is impossible for him to let go of the things he is good at, and run to get those Oscar works that come off the industrial assembly line.

There is also a difference between the Oscar for Best Director and the Oscar for Best Director,

Some directors who deliberately apply the Oscar model with ulterior motives to shoot and produce films and win awards, undoubtedly have limited influence and can improve themselves.

Since he did not grow up in this country, Murphy does not have a high degree of recognition for the things advocated by the Oscar model, and he has not studied this type of film much. Instead, he has a deeper understanding of the few films that have been nominated or won awards for their strong black style films. Research.

Frankly speaking, these noir films are more likely to become classics than those produced by Oscar's industrial assembly line.

This is not Murphy's own opinion, but later recognized.

Since the end of the 1990s, not only Hollywood commercial films have completely entered the assembly line production mode, but also Oscar-winning films.

In the past two years, every October in the North American film market, if you go to see all kinds of movies released, you will see more convergence than differences. A new type of film has been born, which can be called For "Oscar entries".

A few years ago, the Thanksgiving to Christmas file in North America was a very good term. It can cheer up fans who like independent movies and professional media, and gear up to look forward to some different movies. After the intensive film festivals in early autumn, those from Venice The film festival went through the Toronto Film Festival and finally returned to the independent production of the New York Film Festival, allowing Hollywood to temporarily put down commercial visual blockbusters in the summer and adjust them to another channel, allowing people to see another ecology of Hollywood movies.

However, driven by the great glory and benefits that the Oscars can bring, the long screening cycle from late autumn to the beginning of next spring has evolved into a big schedule that is evenly divided between the "awards file" and the summer file, and even covers the traditional gratitude of North America. Holidays and Christmas.

A new stereotyped film format also emerged. The biggest feature of these films is that they are produced according to the appetite and preferences of the elderly white Oscar judges. The subject matter and protagonist will always be controversial, and the seemingly outrageous posture In the end, it will return to a framework acceptable to the public, maintain mainstream values, give actors enough room to play, and emphasize quality performances. The actors' performance methods must be trained in the method.

Also, if you want to act in a serious drama, you are not allowed to laugh.

The most representative of these are undoubtedly biographical films. The popularity of biographical films is due to the very real "safety" considerations of Hollywood filmmakers, because most of the judges want to see familiar faces playing familiar roles.

Except for a few of these Oscar entries with a strong personal style, if you analyze them carefully, they are not fundamentally different from the visual blockbusters in the summer. They are all industrial assembly line products that cater to the appetite of some people. Just like plain water.

As Murphy said, in most Oscar awards, the right one is chosen first, and then others are considered.

This directly leads to the fact that the participating films must be stable, and stable often means flat.

How could someone like Murphy like mediocre movies? If he didn't like them, how could he talk about research?

Similar to summer movies that always like to shock the audience with visual effects, most of the Oscar entries are always produced in the taste of middle-aged and elderly white judges in the academy. Not only are they as smooth as stereotyped essays, but they also bring another consequence , that is, like the summer file, the differences between films are disappearing.

Oscar has gradually become a proposition composition, no one will deny this.

Of course, there are no exceptions to the Oscar competition, but most films, especially those that please the judges, are becoming more and more homogeneous.

In fact, after the new century, if you go to the three most important film festivals in North America, Telluride, Toronto and New York before the Oscars, when you look back at these film festivals, what you think of is not how different the participating films are. , but on the contrary, most movies are similar, and it is much easier to summarize trends than to find differences.

When big commercial productions and teen movies are moving closer to cliché themes such as comic book adaptations and heroes saving the world, the films that originally competed in the awards season are a kind of resistance to clichés, but after years of hard work by the Oscar judges, This resistance eventually turned into another cliché.

Likewise, there are a host of leading and supporting actors vying for acting awards.

On the road to becoming an actor and actress, men either act as geniuses or as patients, in short, they are not normal people. The women are suffering, all of them are unlucky, painful, and passive, and each of them needs to be rescued or self-saved.

These also form a template from which clauses can be referred.

Such as Julia - Roberts and Charlize - Theron award-winning roles, such as Leonardo - DiCaprio self-destruct image and so on.

In fact, there has long been a consensus in the North American showbiz circle. In the selection system of Oscar and the entire Hollywood, the measurement of acting skills is limited to a narrow field of vision. The method performances of the 1960s are still the gold standard for judging acting skills.

On the road to becoming an actor and actress, you have to play a role that looks very different from yourself, you have to change your appearance beyond recognition, and you have to play a character who is not so normal and has deviant behavior.

It is really difficult to play a normal person to win an award, or to win a statuette for an acting freak like James Franco.

To be honest, Murphy would rather see a movie like "No Country for Old Men" than some propositional composition.

Especially for female characters, do they need to be rescued or self-saved? In the direction of running towards awards, he thinks that films like "The Gone Girl" that can make some noise are rarer and more interesting.

Perhaps after the film is released, some people think that the film that puts the inner darkness and madness of women under the microscope is probably going against the trend of history in the current context of Hollywood advocating "the Virgin" and "heroines".

However, Murphy wanted to see the noise in the cinema more than those award-winning films with the same appearance and stability.

This is his Oscar philosophy.

Whether it's because he hasn't studied it before or because of his personal hobbies, he prefers to use films with extreme style to attack the little golden man, rather than writing stereotyped propositions.

For the rest of December, Murphy hid in the studio in Venice, quietly filming the scenes in the studio. After the Christmas holiday and New Year holidays, the studio needed to re-set the scene, and he brought the crew to the A small town in Orange County, ready to shoot exterior scenes.

There will definitely be crowds of onlookers when filming exterior scenes, but Murphy did not expect that the residents of this town were so curious about the filming that almost half of the town's people gathered around the crew to watch, which brought quite a lot of trouble to the filming. (To be continued.)