Yesterday, I published my 100th essay on Substack since I started in March.

Initially, I was going to do it in 100 days. But I decided to take the weekends off to research and write. Basically, I worked seven days a week.

The number of essays and the time frame were deliberate. Substack, like any other social media platform, uses an algorithm to determine what gets seen, and what doesn’t. By that reasoning, I figured that if I wrote and published five days a week versus once a week, the algorithm might notice and push my work out more to people.

Mind, I didn’t try to game the algorithm— I just wrote a lot about stuff that I found interesting. I doubt the algorithm rewards writing a gigantic three-part series about how George Miller made the original Mad Max film. But I did think that maybe somebody out there would find it interesting, too.

And even if it didn’t, I’d at least have a solid body of work in a short amount of time.

I wouldn’t use AI. No, this would be 100% AI-free, 100% human-organic. I don’t use it for writing or creating images; I don’t even use it for researching potential topics. Besides, I don’t trust AI when it gives me incorrect data for simple search queries with all the confidence of a Flat Earther1.

I did use AI in the early days for writing the SEO titles and SEO descriptions for posts in the Settings options, but I soon realized that even that was mediocre, so I stopped.

Yep, I put myself through the grind of churning out word after word for over three months, the old-fashioned way.

I’m not sure why I thought this challenge would be a good idea. But then again, I have a bad habit of doing things that don’t always make sense.

The Bible has a saying: Give and you shall receive.2

Often, though, we get this backward: We want to receive first before we give.

We want to receive love before we love others.

We want to receive money before we give money.

What the Bible, and the poets, philosophers, and writers realized long ago, however, was that that was not how it worked.

You have to give love first before you can receive love.

You have to give money first before you can receive money.

This is especially true when there’s a risk of not getting love or money back in return. Still you do it. Because nine out of ten times, that investment will be rewarded handsomely.

I started this newsletter because I wanted to launch a film production company. But there were a few problems:

1. The film industry was not in poor shape;

2. The film industry is a high-risk field;

3. Being inactive on social media, I had zero followers or audience beyond a small circle of friends and family;

4. I had no industry connections or contacts.

Basically, I was starting from zero. So if I made anything, I didn’t have a way to get it in front of people. And I certainly did not want to put it out into the digital ether, praying it’d magically find an audience.

If I wanted a small network of fellow film fans or filmmakers to show my work, I had to give them something of value first before asking for any back.

In other words, I couldn’t simply ask for something without giving something first.

Which gave me Problem No. 5: WHAT in the world could I offer in the first place and how do I go about it?

I considered the situation.

1. Having read many books on entrepreneurship, I learned that the best, least expensive way to start any venture was to test out the idea with a minimum viable product (MVP) at a low cost.

2. I knew a lot about movies.

3. Substack had a growing and thriving Film & TV community.

4. I was a fairly decent writer.3

Ergo: I could write a newsletter studying how certain movies were made, analyzing film history, and doing scene breakdowns. The newsletter could be my minimum viable product.

But above all, it could allow me to give value before asking for any.

All this occurred towards the beginning of 2026. I gave myself a year to make it work, out of which I’d dedicate four months for this challenge.

This was the game plan!

… or rather, the inkling of a game plan. The rest was basically me praying to all the fates and Gods out there— the New Gods, the Old Gods, Jesus Christ, Anubis, Zeus, and just to hedge my bets, Minerva4— that something— anything!— came out of this.

When all else fails, pray to whoever might be out there listening. It’s all you can do.

Besides, I figured this challenge would be manageable.

If each essay was around 700-800 words, then I’d only have to write 70,000-80,000 words in total. To put that in perspective, if I printed and bound all that I’d written, I’d have a book somewhere between the size of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Not easy, but manageable.

That’s what I expected. Until I wrote over 300,000 words in total.

To put THAT in perspective, in printed form, that would roughly be around the size of a Game of Thrones novel or the entire Hunger Games trilogy compiled into one book.

All in FOUR months!

Looking back, I think it’s safe to say: I may have bitten off more than I could chew…

“What’s the story behind Three Left Feet?”

When contemplating names for the company—and the newsletter— that was what a friend asked me.

I guess this is a good time to tell it.

Two years ago, I took part in an amateur theatre production of Fiddler on the Roof. Which was funny because I can neither sing nor dance without it violating some decree in the Geneva Convention. Also, I wasn’t a fan of musicals.

I was a heretic on a pilgrimage with devoted theatre kids. Oh boy.

I’d originally volunteered to work backstage. But somehow, I let myself get convinced to participate in some workshops, until the next thing I knew, I was part of the ensemble.

Now, I have to admit: I’d acted in a few school plays before, I’d done public speaking, so I wasn’t exactly stage-shy; it’s just not something I chase. Still, that experience proved to be immensely valuable in learning how to work with actors and ways to direct them. I didn’t audition for any role, so I was really in the background. That was fine, I was content to be there.

One day, as we were preparing to run through a dance number again, the director— who was standing nearby— suddenly turned to me and said:

“You have three left feet. But don’t worry, we’ll find a way to make it two.”

And you know something? I wasn’t insulted. In fact, I laughed because it was true. Besides, the director had said it more in good humor than out of malicious intent. I didn’t mind. Being small fry in this cast, all I needed to do was not be too bad by opening night.

That was before I got unexpectedly cast as a minor supporting character… six weeks before the show opened.

Since it was an amateur production, rehearsals took place on the weekends. If we were unable to make it, our director strictly mandated that we give our reasons in writing. He was keeping tabs on everyone to see who turned up. The actor playing the Rabbi lived close to where I did, asked if I could hand over his excuse letter in advance because he had to go away for that weekend and couldn’t attend the rehearsal.

Sure, I said.

Which was why I got a shock when I gave the letter to the director and he told me to step in as the Rabbi for that rehearsal. Despite my weak protests, I couldn’t get out of it. Oh well. I figured I might as well get as much fun out of the part while I temporarily had it. Who knows, maybe there was still an opportunity to quit the cast entirely and join the backstage crew.

That… did not happen.

I’m not sure what I did, but whatever it was, my temporary performance that weekend got laughs out of everyone— including the director. The following week, I was asked to do it again. And again. Until the next thing I knew, my temporary substitution was made official, and I was playing the part of the Rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof for eight out of the twelve nights… including opening and closing nights.

I was pleasantly surprised— my family more so!— but I felt so bad for the actor! He wanted the part whereas I never did, and now it seemed like I had stolen his thunder. Which was doubly ironic because— and I swear I’m not making this up— I was initially rejected for that exact role when the director was earlier testing us!

I couldn’t dance, I couldn’t sing—yet there I was: A guy with three left feet, performing eight nights for mostly full-house audiences and somehow getting laughs each and every time.

What was supposed to be a humorous dig came to symbolize something more meaningful: ‘Three left feet’ meant knowing your limitations and still choosing to push yourself beyond your comfort zone, to discover the creative potential inside you that you may not be aware exists, but can never found out until you tried.

What better way to describe what I was trying to achieve with this little venture?

Before I started, I taped a note above my desk where I could see it.

It might seem like the opposite of encouragement… until you understand a few fundamental things about the underlying power laws governing creative industries.

Think about the most significant events in your life. The best friends you made; the spouse or significant other you met; a job offer; a major illness that forces a lifestyle change. Did they occur on schedule? You go to a party hoping for some decent booze; and instead, you meet the person with whom you’ll spend the rest of your life with.

It’s all random. And creative industries, like life, are also random, making it impossible to predict what projects will succeed or fail beforehand. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

In such an environment, success come from the outliers or unpredictable events with outsized effects— what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “black swans”— not the predictable.

And in such a world, the environment obeys a power law called the Pareto principle; you may know it as the 80/20 rule. Originating from Vilfredo Pareto’s observation that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people, it simply means that roughly speaking, 80% of results come from 20% of causes.

• In companies, 80% of revenue comes from 20% of clients;

• In offices, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the staff;

• In book sales, 80% of the market is captured by 20% of the authors5;

• In box-office sales, 80% of receipts go to films from one or two studios.

For example, look at the top 10 films in 2025’s global box-office tally:

• Disney made about $4.4 billion from its collective slate;

• Warner Bros. Discovery made half of what Disney earned ($2.2 billion);

• Universal made half of what Warner Bros. Discovery did ($1.5 billion);

And one film— Ne Zha 2— made more than Universal’s total box-office receipts and as much as Warner Bros. Discovery’s entire slate!

The 80/20 rule can also explain the distressingly terrible state of the world today: Over 80% of the world’s resources are held by 20% of the world’s richest people dickheads.

That’s the world we live in.

And in a creative industry, that makes it impossible to know beforehand what project will be a success.

We are already seeing this play out at the 2026 box office: Seemingly “safe” bets6 such as a Star Wars film, a Steven Spielberg film (Disclosure Day), a Disney live-action remake (Moana), and a superhero film (Supergirl) are being beaten by, with almost ferociously Darwinian brutality, a controversial Michael Jackson biopic (Michael), a 20-year-old sequel catering largely to a female audience (The Devil Wears Prada 2), two low-budget horror films made by directors still in their 20s (Obsession, Backrooms), and a big-budgeted adaptation of a 3000-year-old Greek poem (The Odyssey).7

And social media platforms like Substack? They also obey the same power law. Which means:

• You cannot predict beforehand which essay or Note is going to go viral— a random unpredictable world.

• You can be certain that one essay or Note will earn more views, likes, or subscribers than all the others combined— the 80/20 rule.

Therefore, if I wanted to have any chance at succeeding, I had to account for this randomness and unpredictability, and apply the 80/20 rule in my favor. Not knowing which essay could go viral, there was only one way to find out: write a lot, and do it fast.

For the 80/20 rule works best at scale. This is how many essays would be likely to break out— and how many would not— depending on the total number of published essays:

• 10 essays = 8 failures, 2 successes

• 20 essays = 16 failures, 4 successes

• 50 essays = 40 failures, 10 successes

• 100 essays = 80 failures, 20 successes

• 500 essays = 400 failures, 100 successes

• 1000 essays = 800 failures, 200 successes

Think about that for a moment. Even if I got to 1000 essays someday, only 200 essays would really hit it big.

That’s why I decided to write 100 essays. Out of that number, there was a stronger chance that 20 essays would perform well; at a macro level, the 80/20 rule against those 20 essays meant only 4 essays would really be successful. And even if I did write 100 essays, there was no guarantee that any of them would ever break out in that first batch.8

But that meant I had to fortify myself to fail many times before I saw results. Why fortify myself? Because failure SUCKS.

It’s DISCOURAGING.

And I had to prepare to fail not once… not twice.. but at least eighty times.

Maybe even more.

I had to be ready for the possibility that I could reach Essay Number 100… and still see no results.

It meant I had to be ready to slave away for hours on an essay— like this one— only to see it land with a thud; it meant swallowing the bitter taste of disappointment, and then doing it again, only to achieve the same result again.

And again.

And again.

Until maybe one day, one essay or Note lands differently and spreads.

But you can never tell when it will happen, which means you need an especially thick skin to willingly put yourself through this emotionally turbulent ordeal. To be a serious artist requires a serious degree of masochism.

This is why most writers quit too soon. It has nothing to do with talent; they simply get discouraged by these early disappointments and abandon their efforts.

As Nassim Taleb writes in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:

Many people labour in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. They need a capacity for continuously adjourned gratification to survive a steady diet of peer cruelty without being demoralised. They look like idiots to their cousins, they look like idiots to their peers, they need courage to continue. No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no fawning students, no Nobel, no Shnobel. “How was your year?“ brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bag, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come.

“Or it may never come.”

John Kennedy Toole killed himself in 1961 before A Confederacy of Dunces finally got published and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.

Vincent van Gogh never lived to see the acclaim and money that his paintings would bring him long after his death.

Emily Brontë’s only one novel Wuthering Heights received mixed reviews during her lifetime, only to be reevaluated less than a hundred years later to become a staple of English literature.

These are the odds.

And I, not having a thick skin, taped the note where I could see it on the bad days; when my dashboard showed that reader activity was pitiful.

Believe me when I say that I lost count of how days I thought that I was stupid to have even attempted this, that I should stop wasting my time, my life, and my health, and get a real job instead. At least I’d earn some money to alleviate the misery of wasting my time, my life, and my health.

And then there was the other reason.

I have a certain fondness and affinity for silent comedian Harold Lloyd.

A contemporary of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton—and most famous for the silent film Safety Last! (1923)— Lloyd’s films outgrossed both Chaplin’s and Keaton’s, making him the most successful of the silent comedy trio in the 1920s. But, Walter Kerr noted in his 1975 book The Silent Clowns, Lloyd had to work harder to pull off the kind of comedy that Chaplin and Keaton seemed preternaturally gifted at doing. Kerr wrote that Lloyd “knew that he didn’t know what he was doing, and detested himself for it”, and even when he did succeed, he felt that what he’d learned were “acquired skills. He got no gift from the gods.”

I can relate.

I’ve been writing since I was nine, but like Lloyd, I didn’t posses any natural writing talents; unlike people I’ve met and read who can actual craft the kind of sentence that pierces right through your soul. In fact, the only reason I got into writing when I was nine was because I thought one could make good money after learning about J.K. Rowling’s success from the Harry Potter9 books.

But like Lloyd, I could work hard enough to be a decent writer. Maybe 0.1% better than the average writer.

And I did possess, for lack of a better word, a certain tenacity to apply my mind to a problem when I really wanted to… it was just getting me to apply my mind to anything was often the real problem! But for years, I’d wake up early mornings to write for 2-3 hours daily, often when it was still dark outside and the world still asleep. When studying for my undergrad degree in psychology, I would sometimes wake up around 3am to work on a novel10 before heading off for lectures in the day.

If I had any talent, it was the willingness to do the work. Discipline might not lead me to genius; but maybe it could give me a small-enough edge against the gifted writers.

“Talent is insignificant,” James Baldwin once said. “I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”

Or as Nassim Taleb wrote in Fooled By Randomness:

… reality rarely gives us the privilege of a satisfying linear positive progression: You may study for a year and learn nothing, then, unless you are disheartened by the empty results and give up, something will come to you in a flash. My partner Mark Spitznagel summarizes it as follows: Imagine yourself practicing the piano every day for a long time, barely being able to perform ‘Chopsticks’, then suddenly finding yourself capable of playing Rachmaninov.

If I converted the hours I spent on this challenge into time spent at the gym, I’d be as built as Chris Hemsworth or Hugh Jackman by now.

Having opted to focus on this venture full-time for a year, I wrote as if a slave master wielded a whip over me at all times. I wrote all the time, anywhere from 1-5 hours daily; on weekends, this could reach as high as 6 hours. I know because I track my writing hours; I can actually put a number on how much time I’ve put into the writing part of this challenge alone.

Approximately 23,000 minutes. Or 383 hours.

That excludes the time spent researching, sourcing images, doing SEO, writing Notes, and interacting with people on Substack.

In other words: I devoted a LOT of time to this. Case in point: For this essay alone, I’ve devoted about 15 hours writing.

Oh, and for a good portion of the challenge in the first few months, I also did some freelance work to earn some money. Which involved—surprise!— more writing!

This would be a good time to mention that I still live with my parents. Rent costs are absurd where I live, so living at home allows me to save on expenses or doing any of the stuff required to keep a household running. Or, you know, stay alive. I could spend this time studying and writing. When you’re serious about making it work as an artist of any kind, especially without expecting it to pay off in the beginning, you try to save costs wherever you can.

For years, though, I admit: I felt like a failure for still living with my folks. As if I’d missed some developmental milestone. Until I discovered that Peter Jackson, Robert Tapert, and Byron Kennedy and George Miller all did the same thing (actually, Miller lived with Kennedy’s family before the success of Mad Max).

So now, it doesn’t bother me. At least, not too much. Besides, it does mean I can try to enjoy the time I have with my parents while they are still alive, since there will come a day when they will no longer be around, or when I move out on my own.

I will say this, though: This experience completely reshaped the way I look at famous artists now.

When I read about someone who devoted hours to their craft— especially men, because they’re usually men— I’m convinced there was always someone in the background supporting them financially, materially, or both. A significant other or spouse; a parent; a sibling, as van Gogh’s brother Theo did, sending money for paint supplies; or in the case of Anthony Trollope, “an old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 a year extra for the duty” to help him stick to his writing routine.

Art, of any sort, is never created in a vacuum; if anything comes out of this challenge, it’ll largely be because my parents decided to quietly support me by allowing me to put all my time into this.

The good thing about this challenge was that I wrote plenty in a short time. I’d been writing for over a decade, but never at this volume or pace. Incredibly, I even saw my writing improve practically in real time.

But this kind of effort always has a price.

For one, it took a toll on my health. On my back, because I was seated all day; on my eyes, for looking at screens so much.

Whenever I could, I’d try to go for walks or the gym. Whenever I couldn’t, I’d exercise at home.

Then there was the other opportunity cost: time.

It meant missing dinners and hangouts because of the long working hours, especially since I was writer, editor, marketer, and researcher rolled into one.

It meant declining going on trips because I was too focused on the work to be able to relax and enjoy the break.

It meant missing time with friends, even over the phone, because I was too brain-dead to handle a basic conversation.

Most days, I worked for 12 to 14 hours, have my meals, then crash out only to wake up about 5-6 hours later, and repeat the process.

To be clear: I’m not glorifying the hustle in way at all. I’d have happily preferred to spend my time curled up with a book or watching a film instead of writing so much. But it’s important to understand: this kind of challenge really pushes you in ways you may not expect or like.

Because, for me anyway, writing is hard! It has never been easy for me. As Dorothy Parker once said: “I hate writing. I love having written.”

Same, Dorothy Parker, same…

By the time the finish line was in sight, I was burned out long ago.

That’s because the daily publishing schedule really hit me hard.

On a weekly schedule, writing five essays a week gives me an entire month’s stockpile of articles. That buys me time to research topics, edit more, and also do other non-writing stuff… like having a personal life.

But on a daily schedule? Five essays a week only bought me a week’s time.

And the weeks, mind, had a habit of swooshing by rather quickly.

I felt as if I was trapped running on a treadmill that I could never stop without causing disaster. If I wrote two articles in a day, for instance, then losing even a single day’s work meant I lost two days’ worth of potential articles.

Some days, I was so mentally and physically worn down that I swear if someone touched me, I would’ve burst into tears (and promptly freaked out the other person, no doubt!).

Some days, I just wanted to fling myself on the ground and throw a tantrum: NO I DON’T WANT TO WRITE TODAY! I didn’t, of course. I simply sighed, sat down, and got to work.

Some days, my first thought upon waking up would either be, “What do I have to work on today?” or “What year is this?”11 I swear time broke— I mean, it had already broken with COVID-19, but now any distinction between days disappeared. There were no more weekdays or weekends; there was only the work.

And somehow, in the middle of all this madness, I even made my second short film!12

Most of the time, I was beyond irritable. Writers can be terribly precious and protective about their time, like Gollum with the One Ring; I was always near-ready to blow up over the slightest inconvenience or provocation that interrupted my writing time.

Yeah, I was NOT pleasant to be around. Then I’d feel guilty for the way I reacted, only for the cycle to inevitably repeat since I did nothing to stop it.

Before long, my days blurred into a routine of chugging three cups of instant black coffee daily, sitting in front of the computer for hours and furiously tap-tap-tapping away at the keyboard, trying to ignore my stiff neck and not dwell on what this was doing to my back and posture.

Soon, I even dreaded waking up. When I did, the prospect of another long day of writing to look forward to loomed in front of me like some hallway to hell. The newsletter bent all my thoughts and will towards it, like the One Ring did with Sauron,

See, completing this challenge had become a point of honor. I knew that if I succeeded, I could take on bigger and more challenging projects. But if I slipped up, I’d never completely forgive myself.

Even I’ll admit: from the outside, that sounds silly. It’s not as if I was writing for millions or that the fate of the world depended on this newsletter’s outcome.

But it mattered to me. And to the subscribers who’d signed up. Honestly, I wish I’d just stuck to my original plan of short 800-word essays and not the 2000-6000-word monsters they mutated into.

That would’ve made it much more manageable

If I could go back and start this challenge all over, my first order of business would be to write a stockpile of at least 30 completed essays before launching. I did have a stockpile, but it was only for about two weeks; it was incredible how quickly you can burn through a reserve when you’re posting every day.

As it was, by the time I got to Essay Number #100, it was only 14 days before it was scheduled to publish.

Fourteen days. That’s how much time I’d bought myself by working ahead.

And even then, it didn’t end up being the article I’d originally intended to go out yesterday! I replaced it with something unplanned and different.

I’d also set aside more time to research, and to also carve in time to spend on the platform interacting with other writers. Most times, I was just too exhausted to do much.

The most important document in this challenge was an Excel spreadsheet. I’m serious.

This spreadsheet was my progress tracker, I created columns marking the month, days, dates, essay number, and title; along with a separate set of columns marking what stage my essay was at: in the research phase; first draft or final draft; uploaded and scheduled, or not; and most importantly, whether or not it had been published.

Is Excel old-fashioned? Yes. Could I have done this with some fancy app like Notion? Sure. But I knew Excel, and that meant I didn’t have to waste time learning a new app. Plus, I got a kick of dopamine every time I converted a cross into a tick.

Sometimes, the most basic tools are the most effective for being productive. The Excel sheet allowed me to work fast with minimum trouble and above all, keep me on track. That was the only thing that mattered.

I also used Scrivener (the Windows version) to collect and organize my research and first drafts. Honestly, this software is dead useful. I edited all my final drafts on Substack—somehow, it felt like a filter that allowed me to reshape my essays the way that I wanted it to.

To keep me going, I also maintained two calendars. Both were physical.

One was a yearly calendar, the kind where you could satisfyingly tear off each sheet every new month. I hung it over my desk because I wanted to cross off every day that I wrote with a big fat ‘X’ in red marker, to see how long I could keep the chain of red ‘X’ marks going— I borrowed this trick from Jerry Seinfeld.

As much as I could, I tried not to break the chain13.

The second calendar was one I specially printed. It only covered the first half of the year, and I used to cross each day off to remind me how many days and weeks I had left before I ran out of time.

As goes the saying: Go big or go home.

On April 29 711, the Arab commander Tarek crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco and landed in Spain with a small army. Tarek set his ships on fire, then turned to his men and said: “Behind you is the sea, before you, the enemy. You are vastly outnumbered. All you have is sword and courage.”

Tarek and his army took control of Spain.

This anecdote crops up throughout history, attributed to different people. Eight hundred years earlier, it was Agathocles of Syracuse; eight hundred years after, it was Hernán Cortés.

The lesson, though, is timelessly potent. Sometimes, betting everything with nothing to lose is the only way to be desperate enough to make it succeed at any cost.

I bet my future on this newsletter. Which, you know, stupid much? There was no guarantee that anything would work, even after all that effort, to validate launching an actual production company. With actual capital and money.

Sometimes, I wish I’d just studied dentistry instead. The world needs more good dentists than it does artists, and dentistry provides a good steady income.

Like Tarek, however, I decided to (metaphorically) set my ships on fire. That meant no backup jobs lined up if this experiment failed. My only option was NOT fail, and hope that something would come out of all this.

I do believe that every person on this planet has a book, film, painting, or song inside them. What happens most of the time is that it dies before it ever has the chance to be born, because people don’t even give it a try. Some may start but abandon the effort out of discouragement. Fewer still might finish a first draft or rough version, but never progress beyond that. Only a fraction ultimately willingly work away at it until they have something to show the world.

I have to believe I have stories worth telling, and be willing to go all the way to the end to get them out there.

Having finally finished and posted my 100th essay: Did it work out like I hoped it would?

Depends on what my goals were in the first place.

On the one hand, none of the 100 essays I wrote exactly exploded and brought in hundreds of subscribers. I wasn’t delusional to believe I’d end up with thousands of subscribers by the end, so it didn’t sting too much. Would’ve been nice, though, I won’t lie.

On the other hand, I came across other wonderful Substack writers— a bunch of incredible people writing excellent, articulate, and thoughtful pieces (with excellent taste). Many times, being on Substack feels like walking into a cool party while standing in the corner with a drink in my hand, bobbing my head a little awkwardly to the music and hoping not to get kicked out.14

It is the one social media platform where you actually feel more energized than drained or angry, like the other mainstream platforms. Maybe it’s because it’s all words?

And, if you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, then spending a lot of time on Substack has gotten me fired up to be more creative and make stuff! I’ve learned so much more in the last four months than I have in the last ten years. I’ve also been applying what I’ve discovered in my own research and writing in my own creative life, and hope to share updates sooner than later.

The 80/20 rule did work, but to a minor degree, where some posts and Notes did better than the others.

But that means the work is far from over. The question is: Now that the challenge is over… what next?

Honestly, I don’t know. I’m relieved to be done with it. I’m also a little lost— for all its grueling nature, the challenge gave me both structure and direction. I need to just reconfigure it moving forward.

I’m also a little proud of myself for getting through this? It’s hard to know what you’re capable of doing until you do it, and this is one of those instances.

I started this newsletter to talk about how movies were made and that will continue to be a major feature. After all, learning never ends. But the next phase will also— with luck— involve making my own stuff, which means future posts will cover my own short films and movies. I’m excited and terrified at the same time: It’s one thing to talk about other films but talking about my own? That’s a whole other level of scary.

Before that, though, I have to make my biggest announcement: From next week, I will be switching from a daily publishing schedule to a weekly schedule instead.

I’ve yet to decide on what day and at what time I’ll be releasing new posts. For now, I’m taking the rest of this week off to recharge my batteries and also figure out the steps for the next phase of things. Which means that tomorrow will be the first day since I started that I won’t have a new post ready to publish.

I already feel weird about it.

But I’ll definitely be back next week with a new post every Tuesday!

Apart from that, little else will change. Essays will continue to be free, partly because I don’t have Stripe available where I will, but mostly because when I do decide to turn on paid subscription, I want to have something even more valuable to offer.

Give and you shall receive.

Whether you’ve stuck around from the early days or whether you subscribed only recently, I want to say thank you.

Thank you for letting me spam and bombard your poor inboxes with 100 emails for so many weeks.

Thank you for taking the time to read it. For liking it, for taking the time to comment.

To the Substackers I’ve met on the platform: thank you for subscribing and for taking the time to connect. Thank you for making me feel welcome, for being encouraging, and kind. Thank you for the essays that you write and share, work that keeps expanding my horizons and world.

I hope that I have been able to repay the favor in kind.

Until next week…

Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, you can sign up here for more issues. If you’d like to support Three Left Feet Media, share this newsletter with a fellow film lover you think would appreciate it.

Even Marvel Studios, your rival, has been struggling to get people interested enough to turn out for its last three releases— Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts*, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps— the way they used to do.

It’s not you, it’s us! It seems that we, the general global populace, have reached a true nadir of superhero fatigue at last.

Sure, people helped Deadpool & Wolverine claw its way to $1 billion for Marvel (I, however, was not one of them). The same will probably happen with Spider-Man: Brand New Day when it releases later this Friday.

But I think, by and large, the sun is setting on superheroes unless they’re known quantities or have something to offer. Spider-Man is, well, Spider-Man; Deadpool & Wolverine had Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in their first MCU outing; and we were all curious to see what a James Gunn-Superman looked like (absolute fun, that’s what). Even Marvel Studios is so desperate for a true hit that it shelled out $400-plus million to bring back Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Fox’s X-Men for Avengers: Doomsday.

All of this is to say: Supergirl flopping at the box office isn’t your fault1!

In fact, audiences seem disinterested in anything the major studios have to offer these days.

They passed on Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu— unthinkable a decade earlier.

Same with Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day— the man who helped invent the blockbuster!

They even gave a hard pass on Disney’s live-action Moana remake. I won’t lie, that one shocked me, too— people have been so happily deep-throating these mostly forgettable photorealistic remakes to easy box-office hits purely out of nostalgia that I thought they’d do the same with Moana (whoever greenlit this certainly thought so, too).

Even Minions & Monsters and Jackass: Best and Last, the newest installments in their respective dependable franchises, have underperformed despite good reviews.

What I’m trying to say is: You are not alone.

But if it’s true that the era of superhero movies is at end, that’s not good news, is it? Given that your entire thing is…

… well…

_{… superheroes.}

Do you think this is how Atari felt in 1982 after the debacle of the Atari E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial game, with the 1983 video game crash close behind it?

But that’s why I’m writing this. I don’t want you to go the way of Atari! I want you guys to finish your ‘Chapter One: Gods and Monsters’ phase before market economics kills it in its infancy.

I’m rooting for you. So to help you out, I’ve culled some strategies and tips from case studies that I think could help bring audiences into the cinemas despite superhero fatigue.

Especially if your aim is to highlight lesser known characters not named Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

1. Keep the budgets low for non-A-tier superheroes

People say that it’s not possible to launch entire franchises on the back of B- or C-tier superheroes.

Except… that’s exactly what Marvel Studio did in the beginning.

Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor weren’t known names. Not like Spider-Man or the X-Men.

But Marvel Studios didn’t have a choice. Those were the only characters they had available! So they had to convince audiences that these B- and C-tier characters could be as good as— if not better— than A-tier characters.

And they succeeded.

How?

For one, they only had a small war chest to make all the movies— a $525-million credit line from Merrill Lynch2. Kevin Feige once called Iron Man an “independent movie” because they had to raise money for the film by pre-selling it to foreign territories and also get a completion bond company.

An expensive independent movie. But I bet no Marvel film has had to go through that ever since.

Iron Man was made for an estimated $150 million. Which sounds like a lot until you factor in that a good chunk went to film it in California, which was more expensive than shooting elsewhere with tax credits. The money was so limited that when director Jon Favreau and his team realized that the final battle wasn’t working, they had to reuse existing VFX plates and footage to add one scene in which Iron Man tricks his nemesis Iron Monger to fly high and get his suit frozen. It cost $6 million, and Favreau agonized over the decision.

What seems like a clever callback was really an invention of necessity and desperation.

Oh, and it’s on record that Iron Man went into production WITHOUT a completed script.

So what’s this about The Hollywood Reporter saying that creative differences ultimately led to *checks notes* a “nine-day shoot of additional photography” to reconfigure the climactic fight, and a “bakeoff by creating two cuts, one by [director Craig] Gillespie and one by the studio”?

All this sounds costly!

If Ike Perlmutter was your boss, he’d be screaming “NO NO NO!”

I’m just kidding— if Ike Perlmutter was your boss, he wouldn’t have let you make Supergirl in the first place.

But I think that his frugality with money is something worth emulating on future budgets.

Especially for characters not involving the DC Trinity of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

Keep the budget as reasonably low as possible, and work within those constraints.

And another thing: no major disagreements between producers and director. That’s a big no-no especially on a lesser known property.

Which brings us to…

2. Constraints are the friends of creativity

Iron Man has a lot to teach us, so I’ll be citing it quite a bit.

A lean budget forces everyone involved to be mindful about the limitations. These limitations forces everyone to be thoughtful about the story.

And with a superhero movie, constrained funding means that only a few action sequences can be shot before running out of money. ‘Cause, you know… VFX costs money.

That’s why if you look at Iron Man, it only has FOUR major action sequences:

1. The convoy attack at the beginning;

2. Tony Stark breaking out of the cave in a prototype suit;

3. Iron Man battling the Ten Rings in the fictional village of Gulmira and flight chase between Iron Man and the U.S. Air Force;

4. The Iron Man vs Iron Monger showdown.

That’s it. No, really. A lot of the money went into the third act— which is really the weakest part of the film since its basically two robots hitting each other.

But the film shines as a result of these constraints because the rest of the runtime consists of scenes with:

• Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) experimenting in his garage;

• Tony Stark flirting with a reporter (Leslie Bibb);

• Tony Stark flirting with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow);

• Tony Stark bantering with best friend James Rhodey (Terrence Howard);

• Tony Stark discussing matters with mentor-turned-villain Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges);

• Tony Stark bonding with fellow captive Ho Yinsen (Shaun Toulb) in the cave.

Feige wasn’t lying: Iron Man really is an independent film in spirit.

And it is precisely those scenes that won audiences over.

The biggest special effect wasn’t the Iron Man suit: It was Robert Downey Jr.’s charm.

I’ll come back to this point later. But the biggest takeaway is that limiting VFX scenes means being thoughtful about what you can shoot, and to focus on story instead.

This goes for any film, but with a lesser known DC character, this is extremely crucial.

3. Keep your primary story to film without dividing it across both film and TV!

This is straight out of the Walt Disney playbook. I’m referring to the founder, not the studio.

Let’s look at Mickey Mouse.

After the explosive success of Steamboat Willie (1928), Walt Disney discovered, almost accidentally, that so long as he did not cannibalize the core IP in its primary delivery vehicle— i.e. Mickey Mouse short films— people would happily consume all things Mickey Mouse in secondary delivery vehicles.

Basically:

• If Walt Disney released a new Mickey Mouse short film every day or week, audiences would quickly grow tired;

• But if Mickey Mouse appeared in a daily comic strip, magazines, or merchandise, it didn’t matter.

So Walt Disney used the short films (the primary delivery vehicle) to create scarcity, releasing only 10-12 Mickey Mouse short films every year. That’s because he used the short films to introduce new characters such as Minnie Mouse and Pluto, and test out new animation techniques such switching from black-and-white to color.

In other words: the primary delivery vehicle of the short films were SPECIAL; the secondary delivery vehicles— comics, books, magazines— not so much3.

That’s why it’s a bad idea to divide the overarching story for ‘Chapter One: Gods and Monsters’ between film and TV shows. The films should be special and have the main story; the TV shows should be separate.

I say this because Marvel tried it as far back with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. The show suffered trying to stick with what was happening in the movies until it pulled away from the movies and became its own thing; meanwhile, it was always strange that the movies never addressed the fact that Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) was alive in the TV universe.

Fans unconsciously expect a level of continuity between the mediums if they’re in the same universe. For some reason, the comics can get away with it; not with film and TV.

Now I saw in an interview that the events of Peacemaker season 2— namely the Checkmate organization and the interplanetary prison Salvation— will have an important part in the upcoming Superman follow-up film, Man of Tomorrow. I read that you aren’t expecting people to watch the TV shows to understand what’s happening in the films… but it really is a dangerous gamble.

Especially now that people are burned out by Marvel’s attempt to weave everything through both mediums— remember how WandaVision led directly to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness… and how confusing it must have been if you didn’t watch WandaVision?

Let the films and TV shows be their own thing.

4. It’s okay not to have everything planned out completely

I find it hilarious that all of Marvel Studios’ Phase Two and Phase Three films were re-oriented around Joss Whedon’s almost throwaway post-credits reveal of Thanos in The Avengers. What was supposed to be a bone for comic book fans became the entire spine of Marvel’s films after 2012.

In contrast, trying to engineer the story from the top-down with Kang the Conqueror post-Endgame really backfired. The same thing happened with your predecessor, DC Films. The more you try to plan it from a top-down approach, the worse the results. Just look at what happened to Edgar Wright’s attempt to make Ant-Man.

Don’t be afraid to let things unfold naturally versus being yet another piece in some grand plan. In fact, letting the films narratively stand alone actually helps the story; forcing it to fit a plan makes it very unnatural.

If you’ve read this far, I hope that if you only ever decide to apply one of these strategies, it’s the one I’m about to talk about next.

Here it is…

5. MAKE THE FILMS SPECIAL!

Especially with non-marquee comic book superheroes.

Too many big-budget films today look like they exist simply because a corporate executive mandated them.

But audiences want a GENUINE reason to watch a movie. You think that The Odyssey is currently making bank because there’s a huge contingency of Homer fans? Of course not! They are there to see what Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s poem looks like… and what a film shot entirely on IMAX looks like.

A DC Studios film needs to feel like an event. It needs to feel special.

And there are many ways to do this.

Several paragraphs earlier, I mentioned how Robert Downey Jr.’s charm was the real special effect for Iron Man. That’s because superhero films at that time did NOT have an offbeat irreverent quipster as a superhero; they were either nerdy (Spider-Man), moody (Batman, Wolverine, Hulk), or serious (Superman).

Something similar happened in 1998, when people flocked to watch Blade (1998) starring Wesley Snipes as a vampire hunter. He was the real draw, and it wasn’t everyday you saw both Black superheroes AND vampires in the same movie4.

Take Black Panther. Chadwick Boseman was the star and draw. At the same time, nothing like Black Panther had ever been seen on the big screen at that point.

Sometimes, it’s groundbreaking new technology to tell the story that draws people in.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day and its early CGI effects to bring the villainous liquid-robot T-1000 to life.

Jurassic Park pushing CGI further to create realistic dinosaurs.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy using motion-capture to bring Gollum to life, building realistic sets, and shooting on location to create a Middle-Earth you bought into at once.

The Avatar movies took decades to make because James Cameron had to literally invent the technology to create what he had in mind.

Look over at the Spider-Verse movies. Miles Morales was a new character, which was a draw, but the animation was the real attraction: it was absolutely stunning!

And did I mention how every Christopher Nolan film is an excuse to see how he uses IMAX cameras and practical effects to tell stories on a gigantic scale?

On that note…

Sometimes, the secret sauce that brings people out is the filmmaker themselves.

I already mentioned Christopher Nolan, so let’s look at Ryan Coogler.

People turned Sinners into a hit partly because it was Ryan Coogler’s take on a Southern Gothic vampire period film.

People turned Barbie into a blockbuster hit because it was Greta Gerwig’s take on the character, not the Barbie brand itself.

In all these instances, it’s the filmmaker’s uniqueness that is the draw.

The filmmaker doesn’t need to always be famous to make a film unique. Nolan wasn’t a household name before he made Batman Begins or The Dark Knight so different from anything we’d ever seen. Same goes with— surprise!— Guardians of the Galaxy, which brought a pop song-infused sensibility to the superhero genre that George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino, and Martin Scorsese did with their films. Now every other film is trying to ape it.

Of course, story matters too, but great stories don’t always lead to box-office results— or else many art-house films would be lucrative.

The point is this:

A character alone is NOT ENOUGH. A brand alone is NOT ENOUGH.

A DC Comics film needs to be SOMETHING MORE to get audiences excited. It needs to feel like an EVENT.

It can do this in one or more ways:

1. Have a charming and compelling lead actor/actress. I’m talking Robert Downey Jr.-levels of charisma that makes it the film’s secret sauce.

2. Create a powerful role for the supporting actor/actress. Sure, Nolan tipped an entire fricking truck for real on a Chicago street, but the real draw of The Dark Knight was Heath Ledger as the Joker. Morbidly, his untimely death only built buzz for the film5; but that doesn’t mean you have to kill off performers to generate publicity! Something similar happened with Weapons as Amy Madigan boosted the film with an award-winning performance as the antagonist Gladys. For me, that was the standout feature.

3. The technology. Nolan uses IMAX cameras. James Cameron literally pushes to create the technology for breathtaking visual effects. Superhero films are the best vehicles for testing out new technology. In the case of Spider-Verse, the animation style was something wholly new. Have DC Studios films be vehicles for testing new technology, whether in VFX or cameras.

4. The director. Filmmakers like Nolan, Ryan Coogler, Greta Gerwig, Jordan Peele, Denis Villeneuve, and James Gunn are the new brands. Audiences want to see a specific filmmaker’s unique take on a movie. Not just Barbie— Gerwig’s Barbie. Not just Sinners— Coogler’s Sinners. Not just Superman— Gunn’s Superman. The director is the event.

If you want DC Studios to survive, every DC Studios film has to be special in some way.

I see this happening already with Clayface— a small budget ($40 million est.), Mike Flanagan’s name attached to it, and a HORROR film. I did hear that Hossein Amini (Drive) did reshape much of what Flanagan wrote after he turned to adapt Stephen King’s Carrie for TV, but it’s still more INTRIGUING than any regular superhero film.

And that’s what the other DC superhero films need to be: intriguing.

What happened to Supergirl is a real shame, but it is the canary in the coalmine to say: the time for playing it safe is over. If superhero fatigue is real, then the only way to keep audiences coming back is to give them a compelling reason to return.

Keep the budget low. Use constraints to get creative. Make it special.

No half-measures.

All the best, especially with the pesky Paramount-Warner Bros. merger temporarily stalled!

D.L. Holmes

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, you can sign up here for more issues. If you’d like to support Three Left Feet Media, share this newsletter with a fellow film lover you think would appreciate it.

Long live the movies!

(Note: Wherever possible, I will try to attach a clip of the opening for your viewing pleasure. If it’s not available and you haven’t watched, I highly recommend you get a copy of the movie and check it out. Also, this goes without saying: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS, SO PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!)

Paths of Glory (1957)

Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
Written by: Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham, Jim Thompson
Based on: Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb

Stanley Kubrick is a master of endings, but one of his finest happens to be in the film that launched his career. Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) finds his soldiers at an inn, hooting and jeering at a captive German girl (Christiane Kubrick) brought out to perform for them. But the catcalling subsides as the girl launches into a German folk song (‘The Faithful Hussar’), her voice moving the men to tears. Though they don’t know the words, they hum along to the tune. In a rare moment, the music severs the divide between nations and people, bringing them to together in a moment of solidarity and humanity. It’s a brief beautiful moment, and Kubrick never lets it tip into melodrama by adding music on the soundtrack. The actress’s voice alone does the job, as do the shots of the men’s reactions. Alas, that moment is then punctured when the staff sergeant informs Dax that they have to return to the trenches. Dax accepts this, but tells the sergeant to let the men stay just a little longer before breaking the news to them. Moments of beauty can be found even amid the gloom of war, but the machinery of war still marches on.

(Christiane Kubrick was credited on the film as Susanne Christian. Shortly after filming was over, she and Stanley Kubrick got married. They remained together until Kubrick’s death in 1999).

Some Like It Hot (1959)

Directed by: Billy Wilder
Written by: Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond
Story by: Robert Thoeren, Michael Logan
Based on: Fanfare of Love (1935)

By this point, the chaos resulting from two musicians disguising themselves as women to join an all-female band to escape a Chicago mob boss has reached its peak. The mob boss taken care of, Jerry (Jack Lemmon) and Joe (Tony Curtis) decide it’s time to move on. Sugar (Marilyn Monroe) chases after to be with Joe, who tries to change his ways by persuading her to be with someone better than him, but it doesn’t work. Meanwhile, Jerry tries to get out of his engagement to millionaire Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), who thinks he’s a woman named Daphne. Nothing works, finally forcing an exasperated Jerry to come clean and admit he’s not a woman. Osgood, unfazed, says, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

The funniest thing is that the last line— “nobody’s perfect”— was meant to be a placeholder until Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond came up with a better punchline. Except… they couldn’t think of one better. And it really is the best note to end a film about two men who conned their way into the lives of different people just to survive. Nobody’s perfect. Plus, Jack Lemmon’s wordless reaction and Joe E. Brown’s happy smile seals the deal.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

Directed by: Peter R. Hunt
Written by: Richard Maibaum (Additional dialogue by Simon Raven)
Based on: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming

The last five James Bond films until this point ended with Bond in the arms of a beautiful woman while triumphant music played— often the Bond theme. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service flipped the formula upside down for the franchise’s most devastating ending, ripped more or less straight from the pages of the novel: James Bond cradling his dead wife’s body in his lap, trying to convince himself that she’s just “having a rest” and that they have “all the time in the world”. Is it at an offender of the ‘fridging’ trope (the term used to describe the tendency of female characters being maimed, assaulted, or killed as plot devices to motivate male characters)? Yes… but unlike worse offenders (half of Marvel Studios’ output, for instance), the death of Tracy di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg) a.k.a. Mrs. Bond actually has an emotional impact because it’s the end of the story and is more of a tragic ending. The final image of the cracked windshield where the bullet hit Tracy, and John Barry’s mournful music as the end credits play (though the Bond theme does kick in a while later), must have jolted audiences expecting a happy ending. Even today, it hits hard.

Black Christmas (1974)

Directed by: Bob Clark
Written by: Roy Moore

Black Christmas ends on one of the most frightening realizations: the real killer is still at large— and inside the house. The final girl Jess (Olivia Hussey) is sleeping off the shock she has endured throughout the night, but Billy the killer is in the attic, and it is hinted that he has climbed down. A police officer stands guard outside but Jess is in danger. The phone rings— is it the killer? And as the camera holds on the house, the credits roll up. The lack of music amplifies the scariness, leaving you in shock over all that has transpired and is still not over! But the most daring choice of all is to leave the big question unanswered: Who is Billy?

Director Bob Clark actually had come up with a whole backstory where the killer was abused by his parents until he killed them, and then locked up his sister for years. But in the end, he chose to leave all of that out. What’s left is something more sinister: an evil without explanation or face. We’re robbed of answers in the same way that some survivors or loved ones of murdered victims may be left without knowing why or who did something so horrible.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

Written and directed by: Isao Takahata
Based on: Grave of the Fireflies by Akiyuki Nosaka

The film gives away the ending right from the start: the main character Seita dies. We see his spirit watching his body expire. And then we realize that his younger sister, Setsuko, also died because she can see his spirit. All in the first five minutes.

It ends with Seita burning Setsuko’s body, and recounting how he put his sister’s ashes into the tin. The shot match-dissolves to Seita’s ghost hearing Setsuko calling out to him, bringing us back to the film’s opening, while she clambers up next to him. The music delivers the killing blow, though, with its violins and finally the flutes as the camera rises on the siblings seated on a bench, from behind. And we see what they’re looking at: present-day Japan, the modern city sprawled out before them. Had they survived, they would have been middle-aged or a little older. But they’re not. The entire film has been about two kids trying and failing fail to survive on their own while World War 2 rages on in Japan. Two kids against the world… and the world beats them. And yet, in death, they find each other again. reunite and goddamn, it hurts just thinking about this film. The red color of the hill and the ghosts, contrasting against the blues of the city— and the fireflies rising into the frame— makes for a haunting final image. Damn, it hurts just thinking about this film.

Running on Empty (1988)

Directed by: Sidney Lumet
Written by: Naomi Foner

The Pope family has been on the run for over a decade, moving from town to town under false identities to evade authorities trying to arrest the parents for a napalm lab they blew up years ago as young activists, accidentally injuring a janitor who wasn’t supposed to be there. The eldest son, Danny (River Phoenix) yearns for a normal life and his own dreams of being a musician, which is only complicated when he falls in love with the music teacher’s daughter. When the parents realize that it is too much to ask Danny to give up living his own life to keep the family together, they leave him behind, trusting that certain arrangements they’ve made will keep him in good care until he can be on his own. This ending is foreshadowed at the start when the Popes leave behind their dog before moving on to the next town and next identity, suggesting this is normal for them. This time, however, it’s their own son. Try not to get emotional as Arthur Pope (Judd Hirsch) cups Danny’s face and tells him: “We all love you. Now go out there and make a difference. Your mother and I tried. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.” When the film’s last shot is a profile of Danny watching his parents and brother drive away, you’re reminded of River Phoenix’s immense talent… and how he was taken from the world too soon.

P.S.: Running on Empty was a big influence on One Battle After Another, also about a former activist keeping a low-profile from the law and his child struggling to make a life of her own.

Titanic (1997)

Written and directed by: James Cameron

Is Rose dead or is she dreaming? James Cameron deliberately leaves it ambiguous— even in the script. Maybe she did die and return to her idea of the afterlife— which happens to be the Titanic of all places. Or maybe she is dreaming about the man who saved her, both from the sinking ship and the life she was trying to escape. Either way, I think the point is moot. The poignancy in the ending is that Rose is 17 again, and reunited with Jack. The camera poetically pans across all the photos of Rose having lived a full life as she promised Jack that she would, doing all the things they said they’d do; then pans off the Old Rose— who is either sleeping or dead— into the darkness of the cabin that then dissolves into an unbroken shot moving to the shipwreck, passing through, and suddenly seeing it transformed back into its magnificent self… the added touch is the choral in the music suddenly swelling. The camera moves to the door of the Grand Staircase area and it is filled with all the people that perished that night. It is the only time that everyone, irrespective of class, is congregated together. The band, the stewards, Fabrizio, Mr. Andrews, Captain Smith, and of course, Jack waiting at the top of the stairs. And as the camera pulls around, we realize that we’ve been seeing a first-person POV shot— Rose’s POV, to be exact. And as James Horner’s music rises, and the people applaud, the camera drifts up into the bright ceiling, and the frame blooms, leaving us with the last strains of Rose’s theme as the screen fades to black. If you hated the movie, you’ll be thanking the gods it’s over. But if you enjoyed it, you’ll feel a bit wrecked— to put it mildly.

Y tu mamá también (2001)

Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón
Written by: Alfonso Cuarón, Carlos Cuarón

The final scene is devastating all the more due to its almost clinical documentary-like way that the camera watches protagonists and former best friends Julio (Gael García Bernal) and Tenoch (Diego Luna) catch up a year after their fateful trip, after growing distant upon their return. Tenoch discloses that the third passenger on their trip, Luisa (Maribel Verdu) died a month after the trip; she’d known the entire time that her cancer would kill her soon. Although the two agree to meet again, the narrator dispassionately states that they never did. In keeping with the documentary French New Wave-influenced style, nothing about the scene is staged dramatically or overtly. There’s no music, no fancy camera flourishes, which only heightens the emotions at work. Alfonso Cuarón captures something truthful here: friendships, especially teenage friendships which are always more intense during that turbulent hormonal period of adolescence, doesn’t last forever, even among the best of friends. There are signs that the friendship may not endure into adulthood, between their different social classes— Tenoch is upper-class, Julio is working-class— and, well, after what happened on the trip. The friendship ends undramatically, slowly then all at once. Sometimes, that’s just the way it is. People grow up and drift. Even best friends like Julio and Tenoch.

La La Land (2016)

Written and directed by: Damien Chazelle

La La Land is a good movie with a great ending. It sneaks up on you because it subverts the expectation of a happy ending, according to the convention of the musical. The thing is that in the end, Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) do get their happy ending… just not with each other. From the moment Mia recognizes her hand-drawn logo of Sebastian’s jazz club on the door, Chazelle creates anxiety over how Sebastian will react to seeing Mia in the audience… with her husband. So he plays her their song, and only they know it’s for them. And then Chazelle turns the knife deeper— he shows us a re-imagining of how their story could have turned out. When it cuts to the two watching a “home video” of their life together, in which they have a kid and raise a family, it breaks your heart because who hasn’t, at least once, imagined how a story with someone could’ve ended differently?

Chazelle is a romantic, but perhaps he understands better than anyone that careers and relationships don’t necessarily always succeed together— and there’s a poignancy to this ending, coincidental or otherwise, considering that he got divorced a year before La La Land went into filming… which became one of the highlights of his career. The La La Land ending is both realistic, moving, and devastating all at the same time. Especially, as I said, you recognize that these two got what they wanted in the end. Just without each other. Because that’s how life works sometimes.

What are your favorite film endings? Please share your answers in the comments.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this essay, you can sign up here for more issues. If you’d like to support Three Left Feet Media, share this newsletter with a fellow film lover you think would appreciate it.

Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

When David Heyman first picked up the manuscript for The Philosopher’s Stone by a then-unknown author named J.K. Rowling in 1996, he thought it might make a “good, modestly-sized British film” for Warner Bros. with whom he had a first-look deal. Despite the American studio’s hesitation— fantasy films had been in decline at the time— they eventually agreed to take a gamble on it. By the time cameras were ready to roll on the first film with Chris Columbus as director, it was 2000. The world was in a new century, and the books had become a phenomenon. When Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released on 16 November 2001, the Harry Potter became the biggest British global export since Beatlemania2.

I didn’t know about the film at the time. I knew there was a book called Harry Potter, though, because a year earlier, I’d seen a school boy— around my brother’s age— reading a fat paperback book with a dragon and a boy on a broomstick— a year or so later, I’d realize it was The Goblet of Fire book. I thought it looked ridiculous. Harry Potter, I scoffed. What a ridiculous name.

On Christmas 2001, my parents gifted the Harry Potter books to my brother and me. It was Books #2-4; there hadn’t been a copy of Philosopher’s Stone available at the time, and my father had actually bought them from London. I recognized the title and the book cover of Goblet of Fire and I’m pretty sure seven-year-old-me was dismayed. Surely my parents didn’t expect me to read these books, did they?3

My older brother gave it a chance, picking Chamber of Secrets. One day, I picked up Prisoner of Azkaban. While I found it intriguing, it also confused me a bit. When I mentioned this, my brother told me to try Chamber of Secrets first— after he was done, obviously. Sure enough, Chamber was easier to follow. I practically devoured it. The next two books followed; and soon enough, my father got us a copy of Philosopher’s Stone.

Then in 2002, for my birthday, he got me the PS1 video game of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. A couple of months later, I saw the movie.

At this point, I was a true Potterhead. I even got my school friends hooked on it. But the impact of Harry Potter on my life went beyond just being a fan, and if you’ll bear with the following preamble, I’ll explain why.

The age of eight and above tends to be that terrible time when well-meaning but infuriating teachers and other adults ask you that dreaded question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” How do I know, man?! I’m just eight, let me be!

But Harry Potter was the first time that I became aware that writing could be a serious occupation— that being an author was an actual job, for lack of a better word, and that you could make money out of writing words. I loved to read, I liked to tell stories; and if I could get paid to write stories of my own, that would be fantastic4. Better yet, the blurb on the dusk jacket of the Order of the Phoenix book said that J.K. Rowling her first story at the age of six.

I thought to myself, if she could start writing that young, I can, too.

So I sat down at the family computer, which was tucked away in a nook in my parents’ bedroom, opened Microsoft Word, and started typing down my first story. When I finished a chapter, I’d save the document on to a floppy disk5. I don’t remember what it was, except it was terrible, but I kept at it. Not just that day, but for years. When adults asked what I wanted to be, now I had an answer: I wanted to become an author!

I must’ve been 9 years old.

A year later, I watched The Lord of the Rings trilogy and decided that I wanted to become a film director6. Having no idea how to make films or get to Hollywood, I studied the bonus features on the Lord of the Rings DVDs, and noticed that Peter Jackson also co-wrote the script. Aha! That would be my entry: Since I already wanted to be an author, I would simply learn to write the scripts of films that I wanted to make. And the first script that I found online— sometime around 2005-2007— was Steve Kloves’s adaptation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

The point of all of this preamble is a long-winded of saying: without Harry Potter, I would never have wanted to be a writer. Without which I’d never have gotten to reading Prisoner of Azkaban to learn how to read and write scripts. Without which I’d never have eventually gotten on Substack, without which this article wouldn’t exist.

When writing about the Potter film series, I’ve approached it from many perspectives: as a fan of the books, the films, an aspiring filmmaker, an analyst, and a curious learner. What I’ve learned has also changed the way I see them— for nearly 20 years, I believed Order of the Phoenix was the worst of the lot, only to now see Half-Blood Prince as the weaker film.

And now that we’ve come to the last one of the lot. Though Deathly Hallows was adapted as two films, I’ve chosen to write about them as one. Because they are ostensibly one story, broken over two parts, no different to Back to the Future Part 2 and Back to the Future Part 3, or The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.

With all that I know now, the first question that I must ask is: Does the franchise succeed in ending as good as it began?

On the surface, that’s a pretty stupid question to ask, isn’t it?

Combined, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1 and Part 2 raked in an approximately $2.3 billion at the box office. Lord only knows— or at least, the Warner Bros. accountants know— how much the movies pulled in through merchandising. The critical reception between the two is a slightly different story— Part 1 has some of the lowest aggregate reviews in the franchise (77% on Rotten Tomatoes and 65 on Metacritic) while Part 2 scored the highest (96% on Rotten Tomatoes and 85 on Metacritic). Financially, Part 1 is the third-highest grossing film in the series and Part 2 is the highest of them all.

Unsurprising, really. The knowledge that a story is coming to a close can actually lead to its most successful commercial results, most of the time7.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The Dark Knight Rises.

Avengers: Endgame.

It’s not rocket science: If a story is ending, and if it is done well, people will turn up in droves to say goodbye to characters they love.

Endings are also notoriously hard. And the Harry Potter films had one flaw that really showed in these last two films. Not knowing how the story was going to end when they started, the franchise could never set up everything it needed to pay off as it did in the books.

But push a little deeper and the question of whether the franchise ends successfully becomes murkier.

When discussing the Half-Blood Prince, I wrote that the measure of a successful adaptation is that the film can stand on its own without requiring the viewer to have read the book. The sixth film, in my opinion, does poorly in that regard. The seventh and eighth films, on the other hand, fails the test badly. If a viewer has only seen the films, lots of things will leave them flummoxed. If you’ve never watched any of the films— good luck, you’ll be lost. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, both Part 1 and Part 2, is a film that is truly for the fans— in that ONLY the fans will actually get what’s happening.

It’s not entirely the filmmakers’ fault— J.K. Rowling didn’t tell them exactly how it was going to play out, so they only had Film Six to actually line up everything important to pay off what happens in the last story.

Which was also why the decision was made to split the last book in two. It was then-studio executive Lionel Wigram’s suggestion when the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows book came out. Producer David Heyman was not in favor but even he saw that there really wasn’t much choice. To fit everything in the book in one film would lead to a runtime of 5-6 hours; and a 3-hour runtime meant leaving out so much.

As Heyman noted:

It’s seven books that form one long story over seven years. There is so much information in the last book, so much resolved emotionally and practically that we would have had to leave out, it would have meant that resolution would be unsatisfactory.

This wasn’t the first time that the question of splitting a book into two movies came up; that happened with Goblet of Fire. In fact, Warner Bros. had been the ones to veto the decision. But this time, they left the decision up to the producers. Then-President of Warner Bros., Alan Horn, was a big Potter fan and did want to compromise the creative integrity of the series. Heyman noted:

He wanted to end the series in the right way. He’s been very generous in the resources they’ve given us, but also in the freedom they’ve given us on each of the films. He very clearly said that Steve Kloves, myself, David Yates should make the decision and he would support that.

David Yates was tapped to finish the franchise when production was halfway through on Half-Blood Prince. It seems that for the first time in the franchise’s history, no other director was formally approached. Guillermo del Toro had expressed an interest in Deathly Hallows— though Heyman said that del Toro was never in the running due to his busy schedule8. Chris Columbus and Alfonso Cuarón had shown interest in returning, but in the end, it was Yates tasked with the job of ending the franchise on a high note. And after much discussion, they decided to break Deathly Hallows into two films9. But that meant both films would have to be shot simultaneously— resulting in a shooting schedule of nearly eighteen months. Producer David Barron explains it was the only way to get the entire cast:

It’s a tough thing to get everybody on board for a schedule that long, but I think it would have been impossible if we said, ‘Okay, we’ll shoot a movie, we’ll release it, then we’ll come back and shoot another one.’10

The big question was: Where to end Part 1?

Heyman explains that the ending kept changing throughout production. It originally ended with the death of Dobby— as it ultimately did in the finished film— but then at one point it moved around and ended on a cliff-hanger with Harry, disguised by the Stinging Jinx, being taken to Malfoy Manor. Funnily enough, the script of Deathly Hallows – Part 1 online actually does end with the cliffhanger that was planned.

Heyman says:

We were aware that movies four, five, and six had ended with a death—and we didn’t want to repeat ourselves. When David Yates saw the first cut, he felt that the ending was good, but it didn’t feel as if there was any emotional resolution. You were in the middle of something, and we wanted the film to still have an ‘ending,’ even though it’s Part 1 of a longer story. David Yates decided to end it with the burial of Dobby and with Harry’s resolve to carry on and defeat the Dark Lord, no matter what.

In other words, it ended with another death.

Heyman also makes a good point about why having Dobby die early in Part 2 would have thrown the film’s pacing off:

The audience really liked Dobby, but although he’d appeared several times in the books at this point, it had been a while since we’d spent any time with him in the films. We wanted to make sure the audience was invested in him, and that his death would resonate. So, unlike in the book, Dobby accompanies Kreacher in bringing back Mundungus Fletcher to Grimmauld Place. We also added a bit more of him to the rescue at Malfoy Manor, just before we see the knife being thrown by Bellatrix Lestrange. Having Dobby die in the beginning of Deathly Hallows — Part 2 would have diminished that moment’s emotional weight— as we would have been separated by eight months from having seen him.

You know what? I accept this logic. But this is really where the upcoming HBO series has the upper hand— not just because it’s got more runtime to flesh out everything, but because it knows the ending from the beginning, and can work their way backwards from it. That is a huge advantage.

It was Yates who came up with the “beat” that ends Part 1 and opens Part 2, which was “an image of Voldemort desecrating Dumbledore’s tomb and grabbing hold of the Elder Wand.” Heyman continues:

This added the cliffhanger, in the sense that you feel, ‘He’s got the most powerful wand in the wizarding world. They’re in trouble. What’s going to happen?’ But it also enables us to resolve Dobby’s involvement in the story.

In my piece about Chamber of Secrets, I wrote that the Harry Potter stories were essentially mystery novels but with wizards, and Harry Potter as a child detective. For six stories, there was a formula.

1. Harry is stuck with the Dursleys for the summer holidays and miserable

2. Harry cuts short his stay with the Dursleys and goes away, usually with the Weasleys— Hermione often joins

3. Harry returns to Hogwarts

4. New Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher— sus or not?

5. School stuff

6. New mystery afoot

7. Christmas and Easter holidays

8. Final exams

9. Mystery reaches crisis around the time of final exams

10. Harry uncovers the truth behind mystery, and it’s connected to his past and arch-nemesis Voldemort

11. Harry saves the day

12. Gryffindor wins the House Cup

13. Harry goes back home to the Dursleys for the summer holidays (in the case of the films, it ends in Hogwarts but still at the end of the school year)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the first book to utterly break the formula, casting Harry, Ron, and Hermione into the world with the bad guys after them. However, what J.K. Rowling does not forget is that this is still a mystery story, and gives Harry a new problem to puzzle over: the titular Deathly Hallows, the key to defeating Voldemort.

Yet once again— ONCE AGAIN— the film adaptations FORGET THIS. And I’m honestly mad because they had TWO FILMS to get it right, with a 276-minute runtime to spare. Just as the Horcruxes were given the bare minimum in Half-Blood Prince, the Deathly Hallows are given the barest attention, which is what adds to the incomprehensibility of the films.

One creative decision I did like is using a different two for each film to tell one story, as Yates saw Part 1 as a “road movie” and Part 2 as “an all-out war movie”. He elaborates:

Each film feels different. By that I mean [in] shooting the first film, we used a lot of handheld, vérité-style camera work, and overall it’s much more naturalistic, because the kids are out in the real world. They’re away from the safety and the ‘island’ of Hogwarts, so they’re far more vulnerable and, in a way, innocent, which is interesting. The second film feels more operatic, because there are big battles and big, dramatic climaxes. We’re also back at Hogwarts, which always gives you scale… One’s more epic, and the other’s a little bit more nuanced, as it looks at the human detail of the trio’s relationship.

Since the previous films failed to set up certain plots and characters that pay off big time here, there’s a real awkwardness in the film contorting itself to address this— the biggest one being Dobby, who has a bit of an unconvincing spiel to explain why he’s there. Zero context is given about how Harry comes into possession of the mirror shard that allows Dumbledore’s brother to send Dobby to Malfoy Manor— it’s just there. As for the Horcruxes, their significance of their connection to the Hogwarts founders is given some lip-service then forgotten.

One of the biggest changes to the book is the way the final showdown between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort plays out. In the book, the entire thing is set in the Great Hall, with Harry and Voldemort staring each other down like gunslingers at a high noon duel in a Western with everyone watching. Quickest draw wins.

Yates wanted the duel to be a more “visually memorable experience”, explaining:

It worked beautifully there in the book, but I wanted to develop it into a very big battle, because I figured we had waited quite a long time to see this.

That also meant that the film continued to further break a lot of the universe’s rules in favor of spectacle. Voldemort gets to appear and vanish within the castle, something that couldn’t be done; and perhaps more offensively, it breaks the canon rule in which the unblockable Killing Curse is blocked several times by Harry.

This also led to Yates extending the battle by having Harry and Voldemort race through the school while dueling, “then falling off a high balustrade together so they twisted into each other. They became each other for a moment.”

Yates elaborates why he interpreted this as a definitive visual representation of what was in the books:

I wanted this moment where Harry just pulls Voldemort off the stairway because he knows Voldemort is terrified of dying. So he grabs Voldemort by the neck and says, ‘Come on, let’s just end this together.’ That’s their greatest difference. Harry is not afraid to die.

I don’t expect adaptations of books to be word-for-word replicated on a big screen, but a good filmmaker honors the spirit of the book and if they’re changing the story, tries to make it work for the film. Children of Men does this beautifully— but then Alfonso Cuarón is a genius filmmaker.

Let me give both films this much credit: The films are handsomely made. Stuart Craig’s production design and visual effects, plus the revolving cabinet of British actors popping up— often in moments little more than glorified cameos— is both fun and emotional. As for Radcliffe, Grint, Watson, and some of the other child actors who grew up on the show, to see them as adults, few years older than some of us, it was like saying goodbye to the friends you grew up with.

But I don’t think David Yates is ideal for these kinds of movies. Over the course of four films, his vision for conveying the encroaching darkness in the story is to make it literally dark to the point where you have to squint to see what is happening; and to treat everything with über-solemnity. It’s so awfully SERIOUS with a capital ‘S’ that, frankly, it verges on pretentious.

Consider another film in which things look bleak for the protagonists and the bad guys have the upper hand constantly. I’m talking about Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back. Despite being a darker story, Irvin Kershner doesn’t make it literally dark— in fact, the fact that things are lit brightly or have color only juxtaposes the darkness in the story.

Or take Apocalypse Now, a film that is about a soldier who travels to the heart of darkness where Colonel Kurtz reigns like a mad god— note how cinematographer Vittorio Storaro uses light and shadow to create the rich darkness without making everything dark.

Frustratingly, I’m divided over the way Harry Potter ends, in that I don’t hate it, but I don’t think it does the best job, either. The misunderstanding of the franchise’s appeal got magnified when Yates was tasked with the Fantastic Beasts spin-off which started off okay and then devolved into a dull mess (though J.K. Rowling is really to blame there for trying to shoehorn a Dumbledore-Grindelwald story into Fantastic Beasts, a franchise where the pitch should’ve been meets Jurassic Park meets Planet Earth).

June 12, 2010. The last day of principal photography, not just for Deathly Hallows but the entire Harry Potter franchise as a whole. That day’s call sheet was described as “the end of an era.”

The final shot was filmed on Leavesden’s H & I stage— a relatively unspectacular moment when Harry, Ron, and Hermione are fleeing the Ministry of Magic, staged with Radcliffe, Grint, and Watson leaping onto a pile of crash mats against a green-screen back-drop.

And that was it. A final wrap. Tears from cast and crew gathered on that day. It was scheduled to end at lunchtime, followed by a barbecue and entertainment provided by a mariachi band. Oh, and ice cream supplied by Rupert Grint from his Mr. Whippy ice cream truck; it was one of the first things he purchased with his earnings.

Once the last shot was done, everyone gathered around a bank of monitors to watch a trailer for Deathly Hallows - Part 1, followed by a secret short film that had been discreetly done featuring a shot of every single day on the lengthy production of the last Potter film. Each day’s clapper board, with a different member of the cast, crew, or visitor to set holding it. It ran for less than three minutes but it reminded all those gathered of the memories. There were plenty of cheers, laughs, and tears.

It was time for a few speeches. David Heyman, the man who’d spearheaded the adaptations and guided the films from beginning to end, stepped up onto a chair to address the gathering:

Thank you all, for all the times you’ve been away from your families and for everything that’s gone into these films. It’s a really remarkable achievement, and we should all be very, very proud of what we’ve achieved together. It started on the twenty-ninth of September 2000. And now here we are, on day 261 of the last one. It’s been an amazing journey for all of us, whether it was on one film, two films, or eight films. It’s been a privilege for me, I can tell you, and I think a privilege for all of us to have known each other and grown together over this period. It’s been a privilege working with you. It’s been a privilege getting to know you. Thank you for everything. Thank you for your support. Thank you for the way you looked after each other. Thank you for the way you’ve worked together and thank you for the sacrifices you’ve all made. And thank you, above all, for your friendship.

David Barron and David Yates also spoke briefly. Finally, it was time for the film’s star, the number one on the call sheet, to say a few words. Daniel Radcliffe— the boy whom Chris Columbus had fought hard to cast— climbed onto the chair and looked around at the studio he’d called a second home for a decade, and the people that had become a second family to him.

I’m going to say I love this place. I know it’s decrepit, and it’s falling apart, from the shrapnel marks still in the flight heads from World War II, to the bizarre annual attempts to grow Leavesden Studio sunflowers. I love every inch of it. It has been my life. It’s going to be very odd for all of us, I think, because I don’t know what my day-to-day life will consist of without you, all of you. It’s been wonderful, and I just want to say that I’ve loved every bloody minute of it. I thank you all very, very much.

On the last day of shooting, David Heyman— who’d been on the journey longer than anyone— surveyed the studio.

“It’s bittersweet,” he said. “For the last ten years, whenever we said good-bye, we knew we were coming back one more time. We knew we’d come back and we’d see everybody again. This time we’re not. It’s come to an end.

This series of essays on the Harry Potter films exist because of the upcoming HBO series that is about to introduce the Boy Who Lived to a new generation.

Needless to say, the internet has… opinions. Not necessarily positive— some positively racist. But the biggest complaint has been: Why? Why remake the books when the films aren’t even three decades old and still fresh for most people?

I mean, money…?

I think that’s the wrong question.

The correct question is: Can the show replicate the good stuff about the movies, and improve on what didn’t work?

The first part of that question is tough to answer, and we’ll only know once the first season airs on December 25, 2026.

The second part of that question, I can answer: yeah. I think they can.

Probably not a whole lot in seasons 1-3— HBO is adapting each book per season— but you never know. If the films stuck to Harry’s emotional journey as the North Star in adapting the books, there are hints that the show will explore multiple characters’ perspectives, especially Ron and Hermione; rumor has it that there will be scenes where we see Hermione get her letter and have a Hogwarts rep— presumably Professor McGonagall (Janet McTeer).

Now that will be new; the best comparison would be Game of Thrones, in which multiple characters got screentime. But it will have the hardest time in the first three years because the first three Potter films truly are iconic. I also wonder how they’ll deal with some of the visual effects, such as the underwater lake Second Task in Goblet of Fire. They’re huge undertakings for a TV show.

But I do think that the HBO series has a good chance of upstaging the latter half of the film series if they focus on the core components— namely, the mystery genre component and the lore over spectacle.

Because that’s actually my gripe with the last bunch of films: there’s lots of spectacle, lots of razzle-dazzle, but it’s never completely satisfactory.

However, this much I can say: There has never been anything quite like the Harry Potter films that we will probably see again on a big screen anytime soon. It’s an even bigger miracle that they managed not to completely mess it up so badly that it tanked the series— no matter what my gripes with the films are, they aren’t horrible.

That, my friends, is some kind of real magic.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this essay, you can sign up here for more issues. If you’d like to support Three Left Feet Media, share this newsletter with a fellow film lover you think would appreciate it.

Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

Say “visual effects”, and your mind immediately jumps to large-scale spectacle. Avatar. Star Wars. The entire superhero movie industry complex. Ex Machina, a story about a programmer, a tech titan, and a robot in a house in the middle of nowhere, is none of that. What it is is proof that visual effects can be used at a small scale to tell a small story that makes it feel like its on a large scale.

So how did Ex Machina go about incorporating visual effects into the film, what can we learn from it, and how can we incorporate it into our own work?

Four visual effects supervisors were involved in Ex Machina: Andrew Whitehurst (who led the team with Double Negative), Paul Norris (Double Negative), the late Mark Ardington (Double Negative), and Sara Bennett (co-founder of Milk).

One of the more startling revelations about the visual effects in Alex Garland’s directorial debut2 comes from Andrew Whitehurst (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), who said that the film did not use any green screens.

Two reasons:

1. The film is predominantly a drama, with lots of conversation instead of spectacle;

2. The film takes place indoors for 99% of the runtime, so it wasn’t as if backgrounds needed to be inserted, stuff removed, or characters added into different environments.

This was crucial because in Whitehurst’s experience, having a green screen changed people’s behavior. “They just have this effect on cast and crew,” he explains, “so [to] keep the mood on set, we did away with green screen.”

Instead, he and the VFX team took a careful thought-out approach to the shoot. He told Alex Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy to shoot scenes however they liked, “as they would shoot any dialogue scene with two actors sitting there, and that’s what was on set.” After they finished a set-up and scene, the VFX team would request the actors and everyone else to step out and, using “HDR lighting reference with bracketed stills”, they would shoot clean plates with the main unit camera, asking the camera operator to mimic as closely as possible the movement that she’d done for the scene.

Once they’d done that, Whitehurst explains how they used it in post-production:

We could track both versions of the shot — the one where [Ava the robot] is in there, and the one where she isn’t — and then paint her out and restore the background behind her, which was a very painstaking process. And then we could begin to body-track her performance, so we could capture as closely as we possibly could exactly what she was doing on set. Then we used that animation data to drive our robot. So the physical movement of her is all Alicia [Vikander, the actress], and the face, the hands, the feet are photographic in 99 percent of the shots.

For a small film, that was still a lot of work, at least in terms of “painting clean plates”. But Whitehurst explains why he thinks that this approach benefited the film:

… you got that sense of the drama played out, and we were able to shoot at speed which was absolutely crucial.

As for Alicia Vikander’s costume when playing the robot Ava— yeah, that was a costume, not VFX. Or rather, not entirely VFX. It was a “kind of catsuit” with a “grey mesh” for the shoulders and upper torso area, made by costumer Sammy Sheldon Differ out of a “stretchy polyurethane with metal powder poured onto it”. Working with Double Negative, they figured out where to “place lines on the body for the portions where the suit would be removed digitally” and then “replaced with CG mechanics with the look of the suit applied back over that”.

That was partly because Alex Garland want to shoot close shots with the head and shoulders in-camera so viewers “could see the undulations of the mesh.”

Double Negative also had Sammy Sheldon incorporate little brass studs into the rubber o-rings around Alicia Vikander’s arms, ankles, and wrists to use as “discreet points” to track her performance in post. Whitehurst points out that the little brass studs are visible on screen, but it was done in such a way that it became a part of the look.

“But the scenes had to be shot as if they were a regular dialogue scene, mostly because you needed to have that interaction between the actors,” he explains. “So you couldn’t use motion capture, for example.”

The lack of time was another big reason for avoiding green screens or motion capture, since that would have required more time for set-ups— time that they just did not have. “You have to be fast, and you have to be very flexible,” explains Whitehurst. On a big-budget film like James Bond, principal photography runs for about six or seven months. On Ex Machina, principal photography lasted six weeks, averaging between 15-25 set-ups a day. For a film, that’s a lot!3

The lack of time meant that no pre-viz was done, either. Instead, Double Negative used rotoscoping and body tracking to trace the parts of Ava they wanted, “always the face and hands, often the shoulders and feet too, and sometimes the shorts”, using the “clean plates to prep out the rest of Ava, giving us a plate to composite with” while “camera- and body-tracking gave us a mesh that could be rendered with the HDR lighting captured on set.” They used PRMan for rendering and lastly, “the CG, the roto, and the clean plate were handed over to the compositing artists to final the shots.”

While it’s common for production heads to look to other films or real-world references for their designs, Whitehurst had a strict rule where the people working on Ava’s design (himself included) were not allowed to look at other robots for references, especially other films with androids. Instead, he assembled a trove of images of “Formula One car suspensions, high-end road bicycles, lightweight aircraft airframes, human anatomy and procedural sculpture” to find inspiration for Ava’s mechanical design and quality. Other influences were sculptures by Constantin Brâncuși. Whitehurst notes:

We worked very hard to give Ava a plausible mechanical quality that also had a lot of feminine beauty: the audience had to believe that a human could fall in love with her.

One challenge was copying Vikander’s subtle body movements to create Ava’s robotic elements. Whitehurst notes:

You might imagine that this would be easy to copy, but it turns out that no one is ever truly standing still: there are always tiny, subtle movements, and it’s these that are especially hard to copy because they are so delicate.

To add to the difficulty, Garland shot long takes lasting as much as eight seconds; while that doesn’t sound like a lot, by modern movie standards, it’s an eternity. But it also meant that the VFX team had no cuts or edits to hide anything. Even when they put the showreels together for showcasing the work they did on Ex Machina, the reels didn’t really have “wham-bam moments that work well in a quick cut reel”.

“Most of the work in the film you know has to be an effect,” observes Whitehurst, “but I think the extent of the work sometimes passes people by.”

One such scene is when Ava dresses herself. The VFX team had to add CG clothing to be seen through sections of the robotic limbs in addition to the parts that made up Ava’s body— including the inside of her stockings and dress. “And animate them to perfectly match the photographed real clothing,” adds Whitehurst.

Another shot they’re really proud of is a splash of blood that was CG and not practical effects. “That’s the thing I love from visual effects, obviously you look at Ava and know that’s effects,” Whitehurst continues, “but the thing that gets me excited is the blood. It doesn’t excite anyone else probably, but it’s the hidden things that nobody would ever watch in that movie and go ‘oh look at that CG blood’.”

Double Negative also teamed up with Sara Bennett at Milk VFX to create the 800-odd VFX shots, of which around 350 or so consisted of Ava. Bennett explains how they created the shots for the scene where Ava’s creator Nathan (Oscar Isaac) shows Caleb (Domnhall Gleason) Ava’s brain.

Ava’s brain was created procedurally in Houdini and rendered in Maya with Arnold. Having an initial brief consisting of a mix between an organic jellyfish and computer-wireframe, we realised the look would be evolving throughout the process so Houdini’s procedural nature allowed us to prototype and iterate versions quickly. The brain setup was built from the inside out, we had a core which looked like a potato from which a stem procedurally generated pores, this included moving tentacles and antennas created using curves and sets of undulating frills using grids and wireframe cages. In the empty volume inside the bowl, floating particles representing air bubbles were scattered and air bubbles near the edge of the glass would stick together into nice pockets of geometry.

She continues:

The setup was modular so each element [frills, tentacles, antennas, and pores] could be worked on separately and strong emphasis was put into having each element react and collide with each other. The tentacles and antennae were created using animated curves which were then extruded and their detail increased using procedural noises. The motion was procedurally created using noises and collisions [with other elements] which were derived using volume techniques as a post-animation process. The brain was then exported using a combination of alembic and Arnold asset caches and rendered using sets of translucency and false colour shaders in Maya. A big portion of the look development was pushed into compositing which allowed for quick colour and look experimentations.

As this was a small film with a small budget for VFX, that meant Alex Garland had to initiate discussions and start collaborating with the VFX artists extremely early on in the development. According to Whitehurst, Garland brought them some initial concept art of the film drawn by a comic book artist called Jock, with whom he’d collaborated earlier on Dredd.

“Those bits of art were photoshop paintings, very loose, impressionistic, to give a feeling of the kind of emotion and some ideas about what structure Ava might have,” explains Whitehurst, “but very loose in terms of the brushwork so there was plenty of room for discussion and ideas to filter through.”

After discussing in detail about what Garland wanted, Whitehurst used those initial concept art to design their own concept art while also discussing the practicalities:

Well, if you want the robot to look like this, this is what we think the costume should look like to help us track the performance. What about if we did this to make the shoulders of the costume be on camera because that’s something that’s very difficult to rig in CG, because shoulders and shoulder blades are very complicated mechanical parts. So if we can make that real rather than being in CG, it will save you money, because it will make it easier for us to do the work.

As ideas and feedback were traded and incorporated, it soon reached a point where it was time to actually build what had been painted. Explains Whitehurst:

And then you’re reacting to it as if you’re reacting to a sculpture or to a piece of engineering. And again we refine the design even as we were building it in 3D, right up to, just after the shoot really. And once we got a finished model and built a robot that everyone was happy with, then we could actually start doing the shots.

Ex Machina proves that visual effects don’t have to be solely the dominion of big-budgeted tentpoles. Consider that even a film like The Social Network had about 1000 VFX shots; while the 2023 Godzilla Minus One only had 610 VFX shots4 created by a 35-member team. The 2022 Best Picture-winner Everything Everywhere All At Once had only an eight-member team of visual effects artists to make a film packed with eye-popping scenes of kung-fu fighting (where everyone was fast as lightning!), bonkers moments, and a CGI bagel. The horror breakout film this year from A24, Backrooms, blended VFX with set designs to create a seemingly-infinite vast space. Production budget: $10 million.

Films like these offer filmmakers a chance to tell genre stories while incorporating realistic visual effects at small scale. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising if we started to see smaller films using VFX in a more exciting way than the big-budget films from the major studios.

For filmmakers unfamiliar with visual effects but looking to incorporate them into their films, Whitehurst advises planning as much as possible up front. Not just with the visual effects supervisor, but with the director of photography, the production designer, and costumer, in order to “get together and flesh out who’s going to contribute what, at what stage, how that’s all going to fit together, and then shoot it on that basis.”

A common mistake that drives both VFX artists and viewers insane is when inexperienced filmmakers don’t think too much about the visual effects until after the movie is shot.

“The more [visual effects] are factored into the actual shoots, the more everyone is aware of what visual effects are required to do a good job, the better the end result, and the much less painful it’ll be for everyone involved in post production,” says Whitehurst.

“Filmmaking is a team game,” he continues, “and it’s all about conversation and discussion and that iterative design process to figure out what it is exactly that we want. And none of that can be rushed and end up with a good end product, I think.”

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

Survivorship bias aside— hundreds of people could repeat what Raimi and Barker did without achieving the same results— the story isn’t a simple If-you-do-this-then-this-will-happen case study. There’s a lot of luck involved in helping both careers take off.

But there is also a valuable lesson in both cases about practicing early, fine-tuning your process, and finding the right collaborator to practice early with.

Oh, and the power of starting with comedy. That might be the biggest parallel between Raimi and Barker.

Let’s start with Sam Raimi.

Sam Raimi (b. 1959) grew up in Michigan during the sixties where he was fascinated by the home movies that his father would shoot on a Super 8mm movie camera. In 1975, Raimi met two important collaborators in his life: Bruce Campbell and Scott Spiegel.

All three of them made 8mm movies; Raimi and Spiegel in particular bonded over The Three Stooges. It soon became clear that Campbell was the star of the group—or at least the best-looking, so he became the actor in all their shorts.

And they made quite a lot. All of them comedies.

Spiegel had an ingenious tactic: He would take the soundtracks to Three Stooges shorts and match them against his own visuals to create Stooges-inspired comedies titled Three Pests in a Mess and Half-Wits Holiday.

Campbell also liked to make comedies and directed flicks such as Supa Bad and Son of Hitler, the latter being a comedy about Hitler’s progeny who is too young to drive and is driven around everywhere by his mother in a station wagon.

This trio continued making 8mm films all the way to college. Things got a little more ambitious there.

In 1977, they made a $700-budget short called The Happy Valley Kid. Raimi directed, and all three appeared in it. By this time, they also met the fourth important person of their future collaboration: Robert Tappert. They screened the short film on their college campus, charging $1.50 for admission. Making $250 per night, they ultimately grossed about $5,000 over forty-four screenings until the print was shelved before it could completely fall apart.

Their next short was also a comedy— and a disaster. It’s Murder! had twice the budget of The Happy Valley Kid— $2,000— but none of its success. The first night, only the cast and crew were present. The next night, only one person turned up, and he walked out halfway, telling Raimi and company to keep his money, the film was so bad he didn’t want it back. It was a blow and an eye-opener for Raimi. As he sat in the balcony and rewound the film, he thought to himself: “I gotta somehow figure out a way not to be in this position again.”

This meant pivoting to a more commercial genre. Despite his love of comedy, Raimi decided that horror was “the entry level that most people use”. Moreover, they realized that a failed comedy made less money than a failed horror movie.

In other words: horror made better business sense.

Bob Clark, the director of both the horror Black Christmas and the comedy Porky’s, once said:

It was smart to go into horror films to get yourself started if you wanted to build a career. You could get together with your college buddies, make a movie, and have a market for that genre, whereas anything else is a tough sell.

It was a screening of Halloween (1978) that sparked the idea in Raimi’s head to make a horror movie. He’d gone to watch with his girlfriend, and noticed the women in the audience screamed their heads off the entire film. He wondered: could they make something that good?

Now this part is a little important. Unlike today, they didn’t have the internet to easily watch and study horror films. For that matter, there weren’t so many good horror films out there, either.

Instead, they went to the drive-in movie theaters. Basically, an outdoor movie theater set up in a parking area where you watched the film from your car. At the time, Raimi and his collaborators could catch two movies for two bucks each night. A good bargain, as a lot of those movies left much to be desired.

They noticed that whenever the audience didn’t like the movie, they’d “honk their horns, or white out the screen with their headlights.”

Raimi also noticed that these movies always had:

• Thirty minutes of “slow stuff”

• A good scare

• Another fifteen minutes of “slow stuff”

• A good suspense sequence

• More “slow stuff”!

• And a good ending

Finally, after enduring about twenty such movies, Raimi brainstormed with Tapert and Campbell and said:

Why don’t we just make one that has all the good stuff and skip the slow stuff?

Campbell noted that this became their creed:

Keep the pace fast and furious, and once the horror starts, never let up. We determined, whether our movie was good or bad, to go all-out, nonstop. If we were going to make a horror film, we were terribly concerned to make a horror film with a capital H.

But since none of them had made a proper horror before, they decided to make a demo film to show potential investors.

The group raised $1,600— with much difficulty— to film Within the Woods, a thirty-two-minute short film. It was shot on Super 8 in eight days on Tapert’s family farm in the spring of 1979.

Before they shopped it around to raise money for a feature version of Within the Woods (then titled as Book of the Dead), they decided to test it out on actual moviegoing audiences— their customer.

So they arranged a screening and tested it at their old high school. The feedback was, according to Campbell, “good… and loud”.

Encouraged by the response, they managed to convince the manager of a local theater called the Punch and Judy to screen Within the Woods. That’s how on August 1979, they got the short film in front of audiences. In Campbell’s words:

There was our crappy little Super 8 projector taking up about a quarter of the screen, with the sound system hissing and humming, but it worked, and audience members actually reacted.

In the days long before YouTube was born, the group used a live audience at a local theater to test out Within the Woods, also got a positive review from Michael McWilliams in The Detroit News on August 24, 1979, who wrote:

“[Sam Raimi] has looked at Night of the Living Dead and knows the terror of the grave. He has looked at Carrie and knows the effect of the bloody arm out of the blue. He has looked at Psycho and knows our fear of knives and cellars. He has looked at Texas Chain Saw Massacre and knows our primal fascination with blood.… Raimi displays a wealth of learning in Within the Woods. Perhaps he will be able to make a more extended work, a feature film, in which he can clean up some of his technical deficiencies and prove that he has the personal depth to provide a context—a thematic meaning—for all his gore.”

And this prototype eventually led to the making of The Evil Dead launched Sam Raimi’s career, though that’s a whole other story. For now, these are the events that led up to the film that helped Raimi get started.

Curry Barker (b. 1999) grew up in Mobile, Alabama. He moved to Los Angeles to study at the New York Film Academy and there, he met fellow student Cooper Tomlinson. Together, the two formed a YouTube channel called that’s a bad idea (all in lowercase) and started making YouTube videos together, what Tomlinson called their “film school outside of film school”.

Barker would write, direct, and also co-star with Tomlinson, making skits that featured a blend of “observational comedy” that soon turned into “darker or more surreal territory”. It wasn’t Barker’s first YouTube channel; he’d started a smaller one much earlier when in school. His first video was uploaded about 9 years ago, so we’re looking at 2017. Over the following years, including when he and Tomlinson moved in together, Barker would shoot and upload a lot of videos.

In an excellent detailed breakdown, How That Movie Got Made observes that before Obsession, Barker spent close to a decade honing and polishing his craft1:

Just in terms of long-form videos (not counting YouTube shorts), between the video above and this video below, Curry released an additional 14 videos in the intervening 3 years.

More crucially, he notes something that most people might miss about Barker’s early days while daydreaming about replicating Barker’s success.

The first video uploaded on the channel got 39,000 views.

Three years later and 14 more long-form videos later, while the polish and craft has improved, the video gets lesser views.

That’s the brutal reality. Despite getting better, the video doesn’t boost views.

But that’s the name of the game. As How That Move Got Made notes:

You can’t be in this for instant gratification. A lot of the stuff you’re going to try isn’t going to work, or is only going to work for a finite audience. This is true for filmmakers, for writers, for anyone pursuing anything creative.

The channel’s 17th video is the first horror short film uploaded, called HEAVY EYES. It came out three years ago (circa 2023). The 18th video, a prank video, nets the channel their first 1 million views.

It took them 6 years and 18 videos to hit their first 1 million views.

From there on, the videos start averaging higher views and that same year, he uploads the video that really gets him a lot of attention: a horror short film called The Chair. How That Movie Got Made makes two points:

1. The filmmaking craft has grown significantly since that first video uploaded in 2017.

2. When you zoom out to look at the body of work on the YouTube channel, the “ incremental improvements” were “clearly present”.

The Chair would become the most popular video on the channel, but most importantly, it would catch the attention of producer James Harris of Tea Shop Productions, who’d go on to fund and produce Obsession.

But even before Obsession, Curry Barker went out and made his first feature film for $8002 called Milk & Serial, an hour-long found footage/slasher film shot largely in his and Tomlinson’s shared bedroom, about YouTube prankers who take things too far. He spent a year trying to sell the film through traditional sales agents, festival submission networks, and buyers.

He failed. Despite the numbers on that’s a bad idea, no conventional distributor made a deal.

One nearly did, though. But after chasing down the proper forms and releases they hadn’t prepared for production, Barker ultimately uploaded it on YouTube. In an interview, he says:

We just wanted the best home for it. Interestingly enough, after getting all the right paperwork and everything settled, we thought, ‘Man, this distribution company is probably just going to put it behind a paywall, and someone’s gonna have to pay $2.99 to watch it on Shudder or whatever it ends up being on.’ I feel like our fans deserve to have the opportunity to watch this. They’ve seen the poster on my IMDb for a year and wondered, ‘What is this?’ So even though we worked really hard for a year trying to get distribution for this thing, we said screw it and threw it on YouTube. Before, I always felt to be respected as a real movie it has to be on Netflix or Shudder or Hulu or whatever. But people do respect it and respect that it’s for free, too.

Thanks to the following they’d built over seven years, the video eventually garnered 3.8 million views and fostered discussion on the internet. With YouTube advertising, Barker quickly made back the rest of his money. But more importantly, it got Barker representation which, you can bet, was crucial in the road leading up to the release of Obsession.

Again, that’s a different story.

But have you noticed the parallels yet between Sam Raimi and Curry Barker?

Both started in comedy— Raimi with his love of The Three Stooges; Barker with sketch comedies such as Key & Peele.

Both made a lot of early comedy videos— Raimi with his 8mm short films; Barker with his skit videos on YouTube3.

Both screened their early stuff to audiences, just in different ways— Raimi on campus (where they made a little money); Barker on YouTube, with the ones hitting high numbers probably generating advertising money4.

Both had an actor friend and collaborator to make stuff with that allowed both actor and director to practice their craft— Raimi had Bruce Campbell; Barker had Cooper Tomlinson.

Both pivoted from comedy to horror in order to get their foot into the door.

Both did their research to determine what worked and what didn’t— Raimi did his research at drive-in movies to understand horror films; Barker probably studied the YouTube comments on their videos and other data pertaining to it.

Curious, isn’t it?

Everyone in Hollywood is now scrambling to find the next YouTuber to make a film— Hollywood does tend to take the wrong lessons, remember the rush to make movies based on toys after Barbie5? And I’m certain every aspiring filmmaker is probably thinking that a YouTube channel will automatically make it easier to get into Hollywood— wrong lesson again.

Holding up the early trajectories of Curry Barker alongside Sam Raimi’s, I do believe the lesson is to pay more attention to their processes than the outcome, and emulate that.

That means finding a willing performer to act in your stuff. The beauty of the Raimi-Campbell and Barker-Tomlinson partnerships is that both actors get to work on their respective crafts. Everyone benefits.

That means failing early and failing fast by making a lot of stuff for as little as possible, and being willing to endure long stretches of time without any results.

Raimi finished shooting The Evil Dead in 1979; it took another two years before it was released because they couldn’t find distribution.

Barker’s first film, Milk & Serial, didn’t find distribution for a year until he uploaded it on their YouTube channel.

There’s no such thing as overnight success. Zoom in, study the details, and you’ll discover that it took many years and failed efforts to reach that point.

That’s the other thing: show your stuff. Whether you’re a filmmaker, a writer, a musician, or an artist, you have to put your work out there— even if it is rough. Yes, it can make you feel self-conscious; yes, it can feel like you’re walking down the road naked; but it’s the only way to test out your material early to see what’s working and what isn’t.

Barker had an advantage that Raimi didn’t have: YouTube. But Raimi took advantage of screening his stuff at university— which was where he learned that failing in comedy was a bad financial prospect— and later at his old school and local theater for testing Within the Woods. For Barker, uploading The Chair plus the later release of his found footage film got him noticed by people interested in offering him a chance.

The eventual outcomes of both The Evil Dead and Obsession are aspiring for filmmakers. But instead of being dazzled by the success, look at the grueling years of work, effort, and failure it took both Sam Raimi and Curry Barker respectively to get there.

And ask: Are you willing to go through all that early hard years… or do you just want the shiny prize at the end?

Thanks for reading! If you liked this essay, you can sign up here for more issues. If you’d like to support Three Left Feet Media, share this newsletter with a fellow film lover you think would appreciate it.

Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

A viewer will forgive a film for a slow beginning, even a bad beginning, but they will never forgive a bad ending. Psychologically, we seem to remember how something finishes than how it started— something that fans of TV shows know only too well, as shows that started off well undid a lot of goodwill with their fans by the time it ended (hello Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother, and Dexter season 8!1).

Endings are difficult. It has to tie up all the story threads satisfyingly and know when it’s time to stop for maximum impact. The following nine films— listed in the order of the year it was released— do exactly that.

(Note: Wherever possible, I will try to attach a clip of the opening for your viewing pleasure. If it’s not available and you haven’t watched, I highly recommend you get a copy of the movie and check it out. Also, this goes without saying: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS, SO PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!)

Brief Encounter (1945)

Directed by: David Lean
Written by: Noël Coward, Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean, Ronald Neame
Based on: Still Life by Noël Coward

Before David Lean made literal epics with films like Lawrence of Arabia, he brought that same sense of scale to the love affair of Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) and Dr. Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) in this British romantic tragedy, about two married people who are attracted to each other but don’t act on their feelings due to the mores of their middle-class values. The entire story is told from Laura’s point-of-view, as she recounts in voice-over how it all happened. The voice-over might seem a lazy device but in Brief Encounter, it is Laura’s confession, telling her husband what she cannot bring herself to say. Yet, in the final moments, even he has deduced Laura’s anguished state. Does he guess the cause? Maybe. Maybe not. If he does, however, all he says is this: “You’ve been a long way away. Thank you for coming back to me.” It’s an ending that is both beautiful and sad simultaneously.

Notice how Lean breaks the 180-degree-line after Laura’s husband gets up and approaches his wife, signalling a shift. Watch the interplay of shadows and light across Laura’s face as she stares out, lost in her feelings. Observe the camera slowly pushing in on the couple as the husband crouches beside her, pausing in a medium and keeping only the two of them in the frame, before pushing again into a close-up as the music rises and the scene fades out. David Lean was a master at telling a story in visuals, whether it’s in a small-scale story like Brief Encounter or sweeping vistas like Doctor Zhivago decades later, finding the epic even in the smallest moments.

Au hasard Balthazar (1966)

Written and directed by: Robert Bresson

It’s hard to write about this without getting emotional, and I’ve never quite forgiven Robert Bresson for it. Throughout the entire film, the patient donkey Balthazar is mistreated by everyone except the kind Marie, who also suffers throughout the picture. Ultimately, Balthazar gets shot one night after he is illegally taken to transport contraband across the border. However, he manages to flee his captors, and the morning finds the donkey in a field, bleeding from his wound. He goes and sits down, and a flock of sheep come and surround him. Balthazar quietly sits, his eyes close. He lies down on his side and dies, released at last from his long years of burden.

This isn’t one of those cutesy Disney stories with animals. Bresson instead observes his animal star, simply letting the camera watch. It reminded of something I came across around the time that The Banshees of Inisherin was released— which also had a donkey in it— that I think about:

Donkeys are fabulous animals. They’re lovely but because really nobody gives them much attention, they know nothing. A donkey is a donkey is a donkey. For many years, they were used as just a working beast, and they were never taught how to learn. They existed and led a life where they just did their job and that was it.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Directed by: Bob Rafelson
Written by: Adrien Joyce
Story by: Bob Rafelson, Adrien Joyce

Can Bobby (Jack Nicholson) change? As Five Easy Pieces arrives at its final moments, it tentatively holds out hope that maybe— just maybe— he and his partner Rayette (Karen Black) can make it work out despite all their past tensions. At a gas station, they stop to refuel. Rayette steps inside and Bobby goes to the men’s washroom, and studies his reflection in the mirror for a long time— the camera doesn’t push in, it just observes him. Then outside— shot in a wide— we watch Bobby hail a truck driver parked near the building while in the right corner, we see a man working on his car. We don’t hear the dialogue, but we can guess what is happening when Bobby climbs into the truck’s passenger seat. Inside, the driver offers him a spare coat but Bobby declines and says tonelessly that he’s fine. It’s almost as if he’s punishing himself by refusing any clothing that will keep him warm. He keeps telling himself he’s fine, as it cuts to another wide shot of the truck turning and driving in the other direction just as Rayette climbs back out and looks for Bobby, but Bobby is running away again, just as he ran away from home, just as he seems to always be running from himself. There’s no music whatsoever— any music would ruin the scene. And your heart sinks, because just for a moment, you hoped it wouldn’t be so. But in real life, unlike the movies, people don’t always change before the end credits. In real life, most people are like Bobby. Sometimes, change eludes them, and they’re running, always running. And poor Rayette is still left standing alone at the station, thinking Bobby is still in the bathroom.

The Karate Kid (1984)

Directed by: John G. Avildsen
Written by: Robert Mark Kamen

Did you realize that The Karate Kid moves from the climax (Daniel scores the winning point) to the credits in 30 seconds? That makes it one of the fastest, if not the fastest, endings in a film. Strangely, it wasn’t the planned ending; what became the beginning of The Karate Kid Part II— Mr. Miyagi beats Kreese in the parking lot in front of his Cobra Kai students— was meant to be the actual ending of The Karate Kid. Yet it seems that Avildsen and the team realized early that finishing on Daniel’s moment of triumph was the best place to stop. In under two minutes, we watch Mr. Miyagi quietly exhort Daniel to get up. He does, and assumes the crane stance. The ref gives the signal, Johnny Lawrence charges— and Daniel kicks him, scoring the point and winning the championship. Bill Conti’s score crescendos, Ali rushes Daniel along with his mother, and the rest of the crowd. Johnny gives Daniel the trophy, tells him he’s alright (liar, this moment is the foundation for the entire Cobra Kai spin-off!) and Daniel is hoisted into the air. He looks for Mr. Miyagi, who’s still watching from the side, and the film freezes on Mr. Miyagi smiling for the first time. The cymbals clash, the picture fades out, and the sea of music washes us into the credits. It’s the best example of knowing when to quit while you’re ahead and going with the ending that serves the film’s rhythm best. I watched this film as a kid, and it is still magical.

Witness (1985)

Directed by: Peter Weir
Written by: Earl W. Wallace, William Kelley
Story by: William Kelley, Pamela Wallace, Earl W. Wallace

The case is over. Captain John Book (Harrison Ford) has brought the killers to justice, and the boy Samuel, the film’s titular witness is safe. And now it’s time for Book to say goodbye to the Lapp family who took him in and kept him in their Amish community. The hardest goodbye he has to say is to Rachel (Kelly McGillis). Both are attracted to each other, but Book knows that either he has to stay, or she has to leave her community to be with him, and neither option would work in the end. The parting of the ways is inevitable. But what is there to say in such a situation that doesn’t sound forced or trite? Originally, the script had the two characters explaining their feelings to each other but director Peter Weir wisely decided not to shoot it, choosing instead to let the two actors communicate their feelings with their emotions and looks. He trusted that the audience would get it. With Maurice Jarre’s score, you can believe they got it. Goodbyes have never been more heartbreaking and sublime at the same time.

The Dead (1987)

Directed by: John Huston
Written by: Tony Huston
Based on: ”The Dead” by James Joyce

How do you top James Joyce when you adapt his work to film? In the case of The Dead, you don’t. John Huston’s final film is remarkably faithful to the short story of the same name, but it’s the ending that is really sublime— just as Joyce wrote it. After hearing the strains of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, Gretta (Anjelica Huston) is struck by past memories and is pensive all the way back to the hotel. When her husband Gabriel (Donal McCann), who has been hoping to have sex with his wife, finally asks what is bothering her, Gretta tells him about a lover from her young days, who used to sing that same song and died, apparently, out of love for her. Later, she cries herself to sleep and Gabriel, deprived of both sex and depressed that he has never felt love as powerfully as his wife’s dead lover, watches the snow falling outside their hotel window as his thoughts drift. The ending is nothing flashy; if anything, it’s a risky way to end because it is entirely a monologue, but one that more or less entirely lifts Joyce’s final paragraphs, especially the last lines from which the story— and the film— gets its title.

“Like everything around me, this solid world itself, which they reared and lived in, is dwindling and dissolving. Snow is falling. Falling in that lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lays buried. Falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

The Age of Innocence (1993)

Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: Jay Cocks, Martin Scorsese
Based on: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

For a film without blood or violence, The Age of Innocence is one of Martin Scorsese’s most violent films— that is, about the violence of passion. In Scorsese’s films, violence comes with a price, and so it does here, too. Newland Archer (Daniel Day Lewis) loses the opportunity to be with the woman he really loves, Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), thanks to the subtle scheming by his wife May (Winona Ryder). After May dies, his adult son reveals that she told him that Archer gave up the thing he wanted most when she asked him to. After absorbing this, Archer corrects his son: “She never asked me.”

And then, even after the son arranges for Archer to meet Ellen again after so many years, Archer finds that he cannot go through with it. The passion of their unconsummated love affair has taken a toll on him, and he slowly walks away instead of going up to her flat to see her. It makes you want to reach through the screen, grab Archer by his coat front and scream in his face, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

But this is the appropriate ending. It’s the same one that Edith Wharton wrote, and just as devastating. Wharton writes why Archer chose not to see Ellen again: “It’s more real to me here than if I went up”.

Archer fell in love. Then, bound by the codes and strictures of his time, he did the dutiful thing by staying with May. For that, the price he paid was to give up his happiness— and ultimately, the best years of his life.

And not a single shot was fired. Some types of violence don’t need bullets to do the job.

Spider-Man 2 (2004)

Directed by: Sam Raimi
Written by: Alvin Sargent
Story by: Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, Michael Chabon

“Isn’t it about time somebody saved your life?” That’s the question Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) puts to Peter Parker, after ditching her fiancé at the altar (how positively soap operatic!), to tell him that she’d rather be with him even if his alter-ego puts her in danger— the reason behind his choosing to avoid being with the woman he’s loved since forever. But the romantic kiss is cut short by the sound of police sirens. For a moment, Peter is torn. But Mary Jane tells him to go and out he goes in costume, swinging through the buildings as she watches from the window. It’s grand! It’s amazing! But that’s not the image Sam Raimi chooses to end on. He ends it on Mary Jane’s face, as if the reality of her choice is sinking in, compounded by Danny Elfman’s sombre final notes. The last shot is actually a callback to the opening shot— in the film’s first image, Peter sees Mary Jane on a billboard, like some sort of goddess forever out of reach; in the final image, we see the real flesh-and-blood woman. An ideal turned into a person, and all that accompanies it. The visual effects have dated (the CGI helicopters really give it away) but between the emotion built up to it, Elfman’s score, and that last shot, Spider-Man 2 sticks the landing like few superhero movies do.

It Was Just An Accident (2025)

Written and directed by: Jafar Panahi

The entire film builds towards answering the question that it has been asking all along: is the man tied up in a box in the van really Eghbal the prison guard who tortured several captives in an Iranian prison— or not? After the main character Vahid finally gets his answer, he chooses to let his former tormentor go instead of killing him as planned.

But the next day, as Vahid is preparing the van for his sister, we notice a white car approach, similar to Eghbal’s car. We stay with Vahid as he re-enters the house… and freezes when he hears the dread squeak of Eghbal’s prosthetic leg. Vahid doesn’t move. Is Eghbal going to turn him in? The camera stays focused on Vahid’s back. All we hear is the sound of the prosthetic leg, moving closer like some dreaded beast. And then, it seems to recede. Or does it? The sound continues as the credits begin to roll and we’re left in ambiguous suspense. Was that Eghbal’s way of thanking Vahid for sparing his life and taking his pregnant wife to the hospital? Or was it a warning that he knows who Vahid is and where he lives? Whichever way you cut it, the fact of the matter is that director Jafar Panahi builds up Hitchcockian levels of suspense using only the power of sound, and it is NERVE-RACKING.

What are your favorite film endings? Please share your answers in the comments.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this essay, you can sign up here for more issues. If you’d like to support Three Left Feet Media, share this newsletter with a fellow film lover you think would appreciate it.

Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

The following examples of magnificent openings in movies stand out in different ways. This is NOT a list of the best opening scenes ever, but some examples of great opening scenes and why I think they work so effectively. One has no dialogue; another is entirely driven by dialogue. Yet another serves as a prologue to a vast story, while another uses sex and intimacy to tell us so many things about the characters before we know anything about their identities.

What they do have in common is that they effectively set up the world we are about to enter and establishing the tone. A great opening scene might introduce all the principal players; or it may not.

But when it’s done properly, there’s nothing quite like it.

(Note: Wherever possible, I will try to attach a clip of the opening for your viewing pleasure. If it’s not available and you haven’t watched, I highly recommend you get a copy of the movie and check it out.)

A Shot in the Dark (1964)

Directed by: Blake Edwards
Written by: Blake Edwards, William Peter Blatty
Based on: A Shot in the Dark by Harry Kurnitz

Without a single word (except for one character softly calling out a character’s name), Blake Edwards establishes the world and social classes of the Ballon country house using unhurried long takes that follow various characters sneaking up and down staircases, in and out of rooms, as they try to clandestinely meet each other while also avoiding running into people they don’t want to see in this farcical comedy of manners that is also a standalone sequel to The Pink Panther— and the best Inspector Clouseau film of them all. Imagine the amount of prep and blocking required to get the timing of the characters’ movements right; all set to Gina Carroll’s crooning vocals of ‘Shadows of Paris’. Even without any dialogue, we understand what kind of world we’re about to fall into— and this is before Peter Sellers even turns up to create havoc. What’s amazing is that *SPOILER* the opening gives away the identity of the killer that sets the story in motion— which then makes you wonder what is in store for the rest of the film. There’s nothing show-off-y about the length of the shots. It’s just pure confidence that tells the viewer: Buckle up, it’s going to be fun!

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
Written by: Quentin Tarantino
Story by: Quentin Tarantino & Roger Avery

It’s impossible to talk about creating memorable opening scenes without mentioning Quentin Tarantino at least once— dude knows how to boldly open a film. For my part, I like the diner scene from Pulp Fiction best. It starts off seemingly normal: a couple having breakfast in a diner, trading quips over a friendly argument. But the good-natured banter slowly reveals that these two are a modern-day Bonnie & Clyde… and they’re about to rob the diner they’re in.

What is easy to miss is that the dialogue doesn’t exist for the sake of adding color. No, Tarantino uses it to build suspense. For instance, look at the film’s first line:

PUMPKIN: Forget it. It’s too risky, I’m through with doing that shit.

The line is an immediate hook. What is he calling risky? What is he through with? Right away, Tarantino creates mystery. He also drops us into the middle of the action, not at the start.

Then he starts using repetition to create rhythm and a kind of musicality:

HONEY BUNNY: You forget about it in a day or two.
PUMPKIN: The days of me forgetting are over, and the days of me remembering have just begun.

The other thing that Tarantino does is that the dialogue is actually structured in three acts, and each act ends on a cliffhanger with the use of a waitress refilling their cups as an interlude between each act.

Observe.

After the initial dialogue and after Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) makes fun of Pumpkin (Tim Roth), we end the first “act” on this exchange:

PUMPKIN: Take heart, cause you’re never gonna have to hear it again. Since I’m never gonna do it again, you’re never gonna have to hear me quack.
HONEY BUNNY: After tonight?
PUMPKIN: Correct. I got all tonight to quack.

Now what is happening after tonight? That’s the intrigue. But before we hear more about it, the waitress turns up, asks if they want anything else, then leaves.

Then begins the second “act”: Where Pumpkin talks about it being easier to rob a bank. It sounds like he’s making an exaggerated point with his quirky anecdote about a man who robbed a bank with a telephone, but you soon realize that he’s a robber, and these two have been taking risks robbing liquor stores. Honey Bunny is puzzled— what options do they have?

Pumpkin lifts his cup, hollers for coffee— and right before a different waitress turns up, he taps the table and says, “This place.”

That’s the end of the second “act”. The waitress is snooty, and this interlude creates more tension— you can’t help wondering if she’s going to get whacked if Pumpkin actually decides to rob the diner.

When she leaves, the third and final “act” begins. Pumpkin elaborates why robbing a diner is a low-risk robbery. We watch Honey Bunny get convinced. We see them prepare to go at it— and then it ends on a real cliffhanger when the frame freezes on Amanda Plummer deranged line (“Any of you fucking pricks move, and I’ll execute every motherfuckin’ last one of you!”)…

… AND THEN WE DON’T RETURN TO THE DINER UNTIL NEAR THE END OF THE FILM, THUS CREATING THE CYCLICAL STRUCTURE OF PULP FICTION!

What’s remarkable is that Tarantino doesn’t use any visual effects or fancy sets to create a gripping opening. He just uses dialogue effectively to build suspense and create the world we’re about to enter— the sleazy low-level criminal underworld of Los Angeles— and before you realize it, he’s got your attention. It’s pretty brilliant.

Scream (1996)

Directed by: Wes Craven
Written by: Kevin Williamson

It was Drew Barrymore’s idea to play sweet Casey Becker, because as the biggest name in the cast, nobody in the audience would expect her to get brutally killed in the first 12 minutes of the film. Once Wes Craven and everyone else came around to it, Barrymore’s presence added a Psycho-like twist to the proceedings.

But the scene’s brilliance is due to Kevin Williamson’s clever screenplay paired with Craven’s meticulous shooting. Right off the bat, we are dropped into a world that was revolutionary at the time: it’s a horror movie in which the characters actively watch horror movies. And unlike most horror films, the entire opening is BRIGHT. Bright lights, no shadows for the killer to jump out from. The telephone, that modern invention used to connect people, becomes an instrument of torture in which Ghostface first flirts with Casey, then switches to sinister while toying with her. The real horror isn’t that a teenage girl is alone at home— it’s that she ISN’T alone.

The entire opening, which stands on its own separate from the film, was inspired by two things. One was a one-act play he wrote in college about a young babysitter who gets a creepy call and starts talking about all the tropes in horror movies. The other was a real-life experience where he was house-sitting for a friend and getting creeped out by a true crime report about the Gainesville Ripper, when he discovered an open window in the house that he couldn’t remember being open. Freaking out, he started searching the house while a friend stayed with him on the phone (a scene that would inspire a similar one in Scream 2). There was no killer hiding, luckily, but the discarded one-act play plus this experience sparked an idea for a script he could write— and behold, a franchise— and an excellent opening scene— was born.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Directed by: Peter Jackson
Written by: Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson
Based on: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Here’s a riddle for you: How do you introduce a world of magic rings, elves, dark lords, and hobbits— plus an entire history and context of Middle-Earth vital to the plot— without confusing your audience?

That was the challenge cut out for Peter Jackson and his co-writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. They had to get the average viewer who’d never read the books to understand and care about Middle-Earth, a fantasy world entirely of its own.

In the book, it starts off right away in the Shire, then starts providing the background and history of the One Ring in the second chapter— effectively grinding the story to a halt as Gandalf tells Frodo about the trinket in his possession. But Jackson and the team must’ve realized that they couldn’t do that.

What they needed was a prologue that delivered all the necessary exposition.

Peter Jackson also had one objective: he wanted to “blow people away in the first five minutes”, because it would then buy “that little bit of story set-up time during your first act”.

So for ideas, he turned to a movie that he loved which had the kind of bombastic prologue he wanted to emulate: Thunderball. Yep, Jackson modeled the Lord of the Rings prologue after the fourth James Bond movie— and you can see the flourish, the excitement, and drama with all the dramatic imagery and swooping cameras.

But he doesn’t just dump exposition. He creates mystery and intrigue, like a parent uses to recite a bedtime story, holding the attention by injecting drama and suspense. almost as if telling a fairy tale.

He sets the tone with Howard Shore’s music, its ethereal choir conjuring a world different from our own. Then we hear the first line of dialogue in voice over… spoken in haunting Elvish. Followed by Cate Blanchett saying: The world is changed. By the time she gets to the line “Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it”, you are drawn forward. This Tolkien-esque dialogue is the equivalent of “Once upon a time, there was…” or the equivalent of “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”

And only then do we get the story of the Rings of Power, but instead of telling it like it’s a documentary, it’s delivered with twists and turns— Great Rings were forged and given to different races BUT a Dark Lord forget a ring in secret to rule the others and start conquering Middle-Earth; BUT there was a Great Alliance and battle with victory close at hand; BUT then Sauron began to decimate them until Isildur cut the Ring from his hand BUT instead of destroying the Ring, Isildur… well, you get the picture.

The exposition doesn’t have to be told like it’s exposition— here, it’s told like a story. And when it ends with the tantalizing cliffhanger: “For the time will soon come when Hobbits will shape the fortunes of all”, you have an idea about what kind of movie this is going to be, what kind of characters are there, what kind of enemy is out there… and of course, what is a Hobbit??

In seven minutes, the prologue establishes everything required. Either you’re in, or you’re out. Judging by the film’s success— the entire trilogy’s success, really— a lot of people were in.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)

Directed by: Sidney Lumet
Written by: Kelly Masterson

Opening with a sex scene is certainly one way to get an audience’s attention (well, except maybe the more sex-averse Gen Z viewers) but in Sidney Lumet’s final film, there is an absolute reason for this scene: it captures the dilemma of the couple, Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Gina (Marisa Tomei), and it’s going to be the only moment of happiness for them. As a matter of fact, the actual sex only runs for less than a minute… the rest of the scene is pillow talk; we don’t get their names, or much about them in terms of identity, but we get the impression that this couple haven’t felt this connected or intimate in a long time. “Well, what the hell happened?” Andy marvels. “We’re an old married couple! Was it the pot?” They’re both happy…

… until Gina suggests it could always be like this if Andy has enough money to stay in Brazil forever. Okay, so they’re in Brazil. But Andy hesitates… and that kills the mood. Gina’s smile fades away and she turns away from him. A melancholy tunes fades up, echoing the strained straits of their relationship. Andy tries to comfort Gina but it doesn’t really work as Gina starts crying and says: “I don’t feel like such a fuck-up when I’m here, that’s all.”

All of that opening— especially that last line— is set up for one truly messed-up series of events, in which Andy convinces his younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) to rob their parents’ jewellery store for money (Andy says they’re insured, and they’ll be fine) only for it to go horribly wrong. Oh, and in the midst of all this, Gina and Hank are having an affair because she’s terribly unhappy in her marriage and Hank is unhappily divorced and in a bad financial state.

Sidney Lumet had a fun anecdote about blocking this scene, recounting in an interview:

I wondered, it occurred to me, "Is Philip [Seymour Hoffman] going to have more difficulty with this than Marisa [Tomei]—because he's never had to do this?" The way good actors are with each other, and how well they understand each other…

Because it was the first scene in the picture, it was the first scene I had to stage, block. There was a bed for the bed in the hotel room. We walked over to the set and Marisa hopped onto the bed, got up on her knees and elbows and slapped her ass and said, "Come on, Phil!" Well, the generosity of that! No, I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. How brilliant it was! She took all self-consciousness out of it. If Phil had been feeling self-conscious about it, it was over. And she did it. It was generous and giving and loving. I don't know, I'm sure—I don't think it ever occurred to her how generous it was. But she's got a generous heart, and that's what she did, without thinking. It was great.

Get Out (2017)

Written and directed by: Jordan Peele

In less than three minutes, Jordan Peele turns an innocuous bland suburb into something terrifying— for African-Americans. It begins with a bit of funny dialogue as Andre (LaKeith Stanfield) banters with his girlfriend on the phone, but then as he’s walking on the empty street, the tenor shifts as a passing car (white, no less) turns around and follows Andre. Jordan Peele stages all of it in one single take, which keeps us locked in with Andre to experience everything at the same time that he does, which makes the moment when he sees the car’s driver door open and the masked driver suddenly marching up to put him in a chokehold all the more shocking. Peele doesn’t use any music until after the assailant gets back in the car— the only music is diegetic and comes from the car speaker, playing the eerie choice of the 1939 song ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’. It’s a bold scene to start both the film— and his directing career— while also rapidly establishing what we need to know: it’s taking place in contemporary America, the target is African-Americans, and the threat is humans (later, we learn White). Now that’s one way to begin your horror movie.

Midsommar (2019)

Written and directed by: Ari Aster

The horror in the opening of Midsommar is not supernatural: it’s that a couple who really need to break up are going to be stuck together for much, much longer. The first image does hint at the folk horror to come, courtesy of a tapestry as well as the soundtrack of a woman singing in Swedish over images of a forest in winter. At night. Which is ironic because later, all the horror is going to happen in broad daylight.

There’s also a real palpable anxiety that emerges from the situation to follow. Dani (Florence Pugh) is anxious about the latest email that her bipolar sister has sent— “I can’t anymore- everything’s black – mom and dad are coming too. Goodbye”— and she can’t get through to her parents. Then comes the excruciating phone call between Dani and Christian (Jack Reynor), the latter who has clearly checked out a long time ago but is also reluctant to break up; mind, Dani knows something is wrong as she frets in her conversation with a friend.

The opening also establishes the key players— or rather, victims— of the film: the aforementioned Christian, the crude and vulgar Mark (Will Poulter), and the pretentious Josh (William Jackson Harper). The other person in the group is the guy who is secretly responsible for arranging their eventual demise, the Swedish Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren).

The scene runs for 11 minutes, but Ari Aster effectively gives us everything we need to know. More remarkably, he establishes a low-key dread that continues to build and build and build until the end of the film, which makes the horror in this unnerving and different from typical horror. The horror isn’t supernatural or a ghost; it’s how people hurt each other in different ways. You don’t need a ghost to scare an audience or make them uneasy. You just need to make them think about the people in their lives struggling with mental illness or the relationships that they should have ended a long time ago.

What are your favorite opening scenes? Please share them in the comments below.

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

As Aliens celebrates its 40th anniversary (it was released on July 18th 1986), it’s worth noting that James Cameron’s career would look very different without Aliens. The Terminator helped him get a foot into Hollywood’s door, but the sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien catapulted him all the way to the top— and he’s never looked back since.

But there’s a really unusual thing about this story that rarely happens to filmmakers.

What happens most often in the cases of directors who break out is that they make the film that gets them attention, then they leverage that success to get their next film which is sometimes a studio film. It is a linear process— one thing after another.

Not for James Cameron.

The Aliens project came his way before he directed Terminator. And the studio basically said that if Terminator did well, he could direct Aliens.

In other words, if his first film succeeded, Cameron had his next film already lined up.

Well, it was a little more complicated than that, but that was what happened, more or less.

How it came about was just as fascinating as how Cameron went about it.

In the spring of 1983, the then-unknown James Cameron was gearing up to begin principal photography on The Terminator when Arnold Schwarzenegger was suddenly pulled away. It wasn’t his fault: Conan the Barbarian had been a hit and now producer Dino de Laurentiis1 applied an option in the contract to make a sequel. That meant Schwarzenegger would be away for nine months. Cameron didn’t want to recast, but he was also in a strange limbo— not enough time to shoot another movie, yet enough time to write on assignment.

So he sent out his Terminator script as a writing sample, and it got him quite a few meetings, including a fateful one with Brandywine Productions.

Brandywine Productions had secured the remake rights to Spartacus (1960). Walter Hill and David Giler—two of the company’s three founders (the other was Gordon Carroll)— wanted to do a space version of the Roman slave drama. Cameron went in to pitch an epic take but to his disappointment, Giler and Hill only wanted a literal swords-and-sandals epic like Spartacus, just set on a different planet. The meeting was seemingly a bust, and Cameron was on his way out when Giler mentioned another project that they’d been trying to make: a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien.

Cameron loved Alien. He had no idea that Brandywine Productions owned the rights to the film. And he badly wanted this project. But not wanting to seem desperate, he played it cool. The producers shared a half-page description of the idea they had for a follow-up: A colony gets wiped out and the Marines are sent in. That was about all they had come up with; the document literally ended with the words “And then some bullshit happens.”

Cameron suggested he might be able to do something with this. He’d write a treatment and send them, that would be the best.

And then he raced home and furiously got to work.

It’s important to remember: at the time, Cameron was just another young filmmaker with big ambitions. Did he think that the studio would hand him the reins to the film? Maybe. Cameron seemed to have a lot of his confidence in his abilities2. But right now, he was a young filmmaker with big ambitions who happened to have an idea for an Alien sequel.

This is why you don’t discard all your unused ideas. You never know when it might come in useful.

Eighteen months prior, James Cameron had written a spec script called ‘Mother’. He’d initially titled it ‘E.T.’ until he heard that Steven Spielberg was already making a film under the same name. It took place on a surface station on Venus; the mother creature was a genetically-engineered human-alien hybrid designed to live in an environment fatal to humans. The script eventually climaxed in a battle between the mother alien and the male lead who wore an exoskeletal loader called a power suit. Cameron simply swapped the male lead with Sigourney Weaver’s character Ripley, and added the story of ‘Mother’ to Giler and Hill’s Marine pitch3.

A week later, Cameron turned in a 42-page outline that had all the bones of what ended up in the finished film. Hill and Giler loved it so much that they hired Cameron immediately to start on a script.

Just one teeny tiny problem. That very same day, Cameron landed another plum writing assignment: a sequel to Rambo. Two simultaneous writing assignments would’ve been tough enough, but Cameron also using the time to rewrite and polish The Terminator, especially with production ready to start in a few months. However, Cameron must have realized that opportunities don’t come like this all the time, because he called up Giler to ask for his advice.

“Well, don’t be stupid,” Giler replied. “Take both jobs.”4

What follows has to be one of the most ambitious if insane feats of creative writing I’ve ever heard about: During a three-month period in 1983, James Cameron wrote three feature scripts:

1. The Terminator rewrite;

2. Rambo sequel;

3. Alien sequel.

It was a challenge of Herculean proportions that, in hindsight, feels very much in keeping with James Cameron’s entire approach to life and creativity: Do the impossible.

To solve the problem, Cameron approached it with a scientific and engineering rigor: He decided that each script would be 120 pages; that meant he had to write a total of 360 pages. He divided the total number of waking hours he had during that three-month stretch by the total page count to calculate how many pages he’d have to write per hour.

“And I just wrote that many pages per hour,” says Cameron.

But he went one step further to help him. Since these were three distinct films, each with their own identity and universes, Cameron decided that each project should have its own space for keeping all the relevant materials to the story in that area. So he went and got a desk for each script. Already owning one desk, he placed the two additional desks in the bedroom and the living room. He explains:

“That way when I moved from one desk to the other, all the notes and papers and everything were right where they were supposed to be.”

Does that seem excessive?

On the contrary, it’s an effective psychological trick: By literally dedicating different spaces for each project, he’d be able to literally move between stories and work better than if he kept everything in one space and had to keep switching back and forth.

With his writing arrangements sorted, Cameron got to work. During the day, he’d attend to pre-production duties on The Terminator. When he got home in the evenings, he’d start working on the three scripts and write into the early hours of the morning. He wrote longhand on yellow legal pads, listening to music to help put him in the mood— the Apocalypse Now soundtrack for Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’ for Aliens (‘Mars, Bringer of War’ was a favorite)—and drank lots of coffee and eat plenty of junk food.

But despite it all, even Cameron couldn’t quite finish all three scripts by the end of three months. It was just impossible.

What happened is that he devoted his time to the Rambo sequel (he wrote four drafts)5 and The Terminator as filming was about to start soon; by contrast, he’d only finished ninety pages of Aliens by the end of those three months. After all, the man is only human, and I’m pretty sure working all day and all night for three months straight on three stories must have taken a lot out of him.

But while Brandywine Productions liked what Cameron had written, Twentieth Century Fox was a little more lukewarm6. Cameron recalls: “An executive told me he didn’t like the treatment because it was wall-to-wall horror and it needed more character development.” There was discussions about Fox selling the rights to producers Mario Kassar and Andrew Vanja (Rambo) but the deal wasn’t closed7.

Meanwhile, Cameron moved on to film Terminator now that Schwarzenegger was free again. It was now 1984.

But Cameron’s luck was really good. In July 1984, Lawrence Gordon took over as Fox’s head of production. Needing projects, he looked for possible sequels and came across the Aliens file. Recalled Gordon:

I couldn’t believe it hadn’t already been done. In this business there are those decisions you agonize and lose sleep over, but this was so obvious. It was a no-brainer.

Even better, Gordon had worked with Walter Hill before, having produced the Eddie Murphy-Nick Nolte buddy cop movie 48 Hrs.; he revived the project and it was Gordon who agreed to let Cameron write and direct the script after seeing an early cut of The Terminator; the deal would include Gale Anne Hurd as producer.

Gordon, who’d later be appointed as the Fox president before stepping down prematurely due to health concerns, said about his decision on picking Cameron:

Sometimes a director fits a movie like a glove. Everything about him spelled right guy, right guy, right guy.8

Of course, Fox could easily have gone back on its word— Hollywood always has another “right guy” just around the corner. However, producer Gale Anne Hurd said: “We chose to believe it.”

As Rebecca Keegan says in her Cameron biography The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron:

Sometimes when you’re young in Hollywood, it pays to assume people actually are telling you the truth.

Julia Phillips, producer of The Sting and Taxi Driver, warned James Cameron about directing the sequel: People would attribute anything good in it to Ridley Scott’s film, and anything bad to Cameron.

“Yeah, but it’ll be cool,” Cameron said.

Later, he’d recall:

“I was such a geek fan. It may have been hubris, but I never really considered how it could have been career suicide.”

There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that James Cameron came up with the title by holding up the back of a torn-off script page, writing ‘ALIEN’ in Magic Marker, then adding an S and drawing two vertical lines through it, turning it into a dollar sign. Regardless of origins, the sequel had a title.

Keep in mind, in the 1980s, sequels were still a rarity. And half a decade had lapsed since Ridley Scott’s film had opened. That’s a long time between movies; a 13-year-old kid in 1979 would have been 20 when Aliens came out. Mind, this is also before home video made it possible to watch films endlessly. But Giler and Hill believed that a war movie in space had solid box-office potential.

As for Cameron, packaging Aliens as a war movie came with upsides: He knew there was no way he could outdo Ridley Scott in creating the atmosphere of horror made Alien so good. What he did know was that he was good with action and combat; he could take what Scott had created and make it his own.

His research into the Vietnam War, especially for the Rambo sequel, also allowed him to layer the metaphors of that conflict into the story. He watched Apocalypse Now, and read Tim O’Brien’s ‘Going After Cacciato’ and Michael Herr’s ‘Dispatches’, and made connections between Aliens to the Vietnam conflict. “It was a definite parallel to Vietnam to tell the story of a technologically superior military force which is defeated by a determined, furtive, asymmetric enemy.”

A fan of war movies, Cameron envisioned Aliens modeled on World War II combat pictures like Sahara or The Dirty Dozen— where a squad of soldiers trapped behind enemy lines must pull together to face an overwhelming foe— as well as the 1960 John Wayne vehicle The Alamo, in which Wayne, as Davy Crockett, galvanizes his overmatched, ragtag troops against the advancing Mexican army. In Aliens, Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, would be the John Wayne character in this movie, leading the charge.

Bringing Ripley back seemed like a no-brainer— after all, she was the sole survivor in Alien and provided the connective tissue to Scott’s film. When Cameron was writing the script, he kept a picture of Weaver by his side; and if you watch closely, Ripley is there in nearly every scene. He fleshed out her backstory and character, giving her the first name of Ellen, and adding an element of tragedy where her daughter back on Earth had died while Ripley had drifted for fifty-seven years in hypersleep. The maternal subtext is carried throughout the film, especially when she takes on the protective role of LV-426’s lone survivor, the little girl Newt, as a surrogate daughter9. Despite not being a parent at the time, Cameron wrote a convincing parental love story, something that took him by surprise when he looked back on it decades later:

I’m surprised that I got it as right as I did, since it was not an emotion I’d ever felt. I had never even had my own dog.

So imagine Cameron’s surprise when he learnt that Weaver wasn’t under contract for a sequel; and, worst of all, had no interest in revisiting the world of Alien.

Cameron took a gamble— as he always has in life, it would seem!— and called Sigourney Weaver herself, who was in France at the time filming One Woman or Two with Gérard Depardieu, and told her:

Look, you don’t know me from Adam10, but I just wrote this script I’m calling Aliens. And now I’m in an embarrassing situation. I’ve been working on this film for some time, but now I’m being told you know nothing about it. So— can I send you the script?

Needless to say, Sigourney Weaver was intrigued by the script, but she still had to be persuaded it wasn’t a mere cash grab. She nearly walked when Fox refused to pay the higher fee she wanted; negotiations grew so lengthy that allegedly, Cameron and Hurd called Arnold Schwarzenegger’s agent to say that they were going to write Ripley out of the film— they knew the agent would pass this to Weaver’s agent who’d then inform Fox’s Head of Production.

True or not, Weaver ultimately signed on for the role that would turn her into a cinema icon and earn her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

But Cameron’s challenges were a long way from being over.

With the Avatar movies, Cameron has since shot entirely in New Zealand. Prior to that, he’d shot his films in America. But for Aliens, he’d shoot at Pinewood Studios in England… and it would be the first and only time that he’d make a movie over there.

Just as the Marines are put through hell in Aliens, Cameron found making the film in England a nightmare. Cameron, raised in the Roger Corman school of filmmaking tradition— worked hard and worked fast. He was not used to the way the British crew would— and the tea breaks that would bring production to a halt would be the bane of his existence.

The tensions weren’t one-sided: the British crew did not like Cameron. It didn’t help that they mistook him for an American— he is actually Canadian, and in 2025 was granted New Zealand citizenship— but they seemed to dislike the notion that he had not paid his dues and worked his way up the system. Nor did things get better when Cameron, a filmmaker who knew what he wanted and could probably do everyone’s job, had no regards for union rules— if he wanted to move a light, Cameron would do it himself instead of waiting to ask a crew member. Tensions were also high because the crew thought that Gale Anne Hurd was only producer because she was Cameron’s wife instead of an accomplished producer and creative collaborator— they didn’t seem to realize that Hurd was the ONLY person unafraid to stand up to Cameron and challenge him11. Not sexist at all.

Cameron recalls:

Gale and I were shocked to be working with people who simply couldn’t care less about the film they were working on. The Pinewood crew were lazy, insolent and arrogant. There were a few bright lights amongst the younger art department people, but for the most part, we despised them and they despised us.

Things got so bad that Cameron fired the original Director of Photography, Dick Bush, because they kept clashing, and replaced him with Adrian Biddle. James Remar, who was cast as Corporal Hicks on Walter Hill’s recommendation, was also fired when he was arrested for drug possession; Michael Biehn replaced him. But things really came to a head after Cameron fired first assistant director Derek Cracknell. The first AD felt he was better qualified to direct the film and would undermine Cameron’s and Hurd’s authority. Hurd recalls:

Jim would ask him to set up a shot one way and Derek would say, ‘Oh no no no, I know what you want.’ Then he’d do it wrong and the whole set would have to be broken down.

All this caused Hurd and Cameron to fall behind schedule. When Cracknell was fired, the crew walked. Things were at a standstill.

It was dicey. Hurd and Cameron couldn’t bring in another crew immediately to replace them; Cameron wanted to move the production out of England, but Hurd convinced him otherwise. She says: “It was, to this day, the most difficult moment of my entire career.”

Instead, they summoned everyone on the set for a meeting, and Cameron addressed them with characteristic frankness:

Look, this is a really important movie to me. This is my first studio movie. We have an almost impossible shooting schedule and I need everyone’s help. I can’t do this on my own. But I also can’t have a situation where it seems like the crew is working to prove that the endeavor is gonna be a failure. If you have a problem with that, you’ve gotta step forward cause we’ve gotta replace you.

The meeting ran for a long time, as crew members aired their grievances about the long hours (and Cameron’s hostility towards the tea breaks). In the end, a tenuous compromise was reached: The AD staff agreed to be more supportive, and Cameron would be more sensitive to tea time.

But though managed to work together cordially enough to finish principal photography on time and on budget, relations remained cool between Cameron and the British crew. When he wrapped up at Pinewood, Cameron addressed them again:

This has been a long and difficult shoot, fraught by many problems. But the one thing that kept me going, through it all, was the certain knowledge that one day I would drive out the gate of Pinewood and never come back, and that you sorry bastards would still be here.12

Cameron would keep his word: He never shot any of his films in England again.

The filmmaker would also clash with composer James Horner, who was under the impression he had seven weeks to compose the score, only to ultimately get two weeks because the film was still being edited. Horner was booked to score The Name of the Rose afterwards, and he couldn’t get more time; nor could they cancel the scheduled scoring session with the London Symphony Orchestra without forfeiting the entire fee. Horner later recalled:

It was horrible. It was just too hard. I think Jim and Gale thought I was just being an asshole and I didn’t get it. I completely got it. I knew it wasn’t going to satisfy everything they wanted.

Just to imply how stressful it was: Horner wrote the final piece of the score overnight and recorded it with the orchestra on the last day of the scoring session. Additional music was used after he left, but despite the positive reception and Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, neither composer nor director were entirely happy with the results. Still, they admired each other’s drive and creativity enough to meet ten years later to work on Titanic and another decade later, on Avatar. The working relationship ended when Horner tragically passed away in 2015 after the Short Tucano turboprop aircraft he was piloting crashed in the Los Padres National Forest near Ventucopa, California. He was only 61 years old.

Aliens didn’t just boost Cameron’s career. It helped Fox chairman Barry Diller prove himself in the eyes of Fox’s new owner, Rupert Murdoch. It also gave the studio a much needed lifeline. Fox’s marketing head, Tom Sherak, would say:

Aliens helped save the studio. I don’t even think Cameron knew what the impact was on us. It’s one of those rare times when one movie can change almost everything.

Cameron’s positioning of Ripley as the main character continued his trademark of making films with women in leading roles or at least equals with the male star, which helped drum up box-office receipts not just for Aliens but all his subsequent films.

Meanwhile, Aliens threw James Cameron into mainstream success and into the studio system, where he’d eventually prove himself to be a director who could make crowd-pleasing films about the things that he was interested in. With Aliens, he proved he could deliver a sequel that was as good as its predecessor while being entirely its own thing. Plus, the film’s unexpected seven Oscar nominations (winning for Best Visual Effects and Sound Effects Editing) continued the trend of genre fare gaining respectability and acceptance with the mainstream. And most of all, Cameron got something that all directors cherish but few receive: final cut.

And boy, would he wield that privilege quite well in films to come.

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

Do I need to read J.R.R. Tolkien’s books to know what’s happening in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy?

Do I need to read Frank Herbert’s Dune (and Dune: Messiah) to enjoy Denis Villeneuve’s three-film series?

Do I need to read Peter Benchley’s Jaws to understand Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film?

In the cases of the above three examples, the answer is no. In fact, I read Tolkien’s trilogy after watching the films— Peter Jackson’s adaptation was my gateway to the books. I’ve never read Dune but I can follow what’s happening in Denis Villeneuve’s movies. As for Jaws, I get the impression I’m better off not reading the book1.

Up until now, one could enjoy the Harry Potter films on its own terms without ever picking up the book. Some bits can get a little confusing if you haven’t read them— like how did Lupin and Sirius know about the Map in Prisoner of Azkaban?— but it wasn’t enough to leave you flummoxed. I’ll even argue that Order of the Phoenix, despite being cut to the bone and a bit more in the adaptation, still manages to work on its own.

The same can’t be said for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. For the first time, a casual viewer might be a little lost with what’s going on, and that’s because the adaptation downplays the franchise’s core components and focuses on trivial stuff instead.

It fails my simple metric, and thus, that makes Half-Blood Prince the weakest film in the bunch.2

For a film I claim as the “weakest”, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince did quite well. It got better ratings than the previous entry, Order of the Phoenix, though it made less than that film and had the biggest budget compared to the other entries at that point.

And it’s handsomely made, even I can’t deny that. If each Harry Potter film is a child in a family, then this one is the best-looking sibling. Which is saying a lot because “gorgeous” is an adjective you’d rarely use to describe large-scale blockbuster movies.

So what makes it a bad adaptation?

When I wrote about Chamber of Secrets, I declared that the Harry Potter stories were basically mystery novels with wizards, and Harry Potter as a child detective. Where Hercule Poirot had a magnificent mustache and his “grey cells”, and Sherlock Holmes had his magnifying glass and deerstalker cap, Harry had a magic wand and a scar on his forehead. And like any good series, there was a formula.

1. Harry is stuck with the Dursleys for the summer holidays and miserable

2. Harry cuts short his stay with the Dursleys and goes away, usually with the Weasleys— Hermione often joins

3. Harry returns to Hogwarts

4. New Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher— sus or not?

5. School stuff

6. New mystery afoot

7. Christmas and Easter holidays

8. Final exams

9. Mystery reaches crisis around the time of final exams

10. Harry uncovers the truth behind mystery, and it’s connected to his past and arch-nemesis Voldemort

11. Harry saves the day

12. Gryffindor wins the House Cup

13. Harry goes back home to the Dursleys for the summer holidays (in the case of the films, it ends in Hogwarts but still at the end of the school year)

Now formulas in a franchise get a bad rep but that’s when the story is running on autopilot. Good writers and filmmakers find a way to make the formula work. The James Bond films are the best example: classics like Goldfinger and Casino Royale are structurally identical to the weaker films such as Live and Let Die and Quantum of Solace. There’s the pre-title sequence, Bond is given the assignment, Bond gets either a car or gadgets or both, Bond seduces the girl, Bond beats the bad guy. Sometimes, the film will deviate slightly from the formula— Bond loses the girl in Casino Royale, Bond goes rogue in Licence to Kill— but for the most part, that’s how it goes.

The problem isn’t the formula; it’s mistaking the superfluous stuff for being more interesting. In the Bond films, the ones that pay more attention to the gadgets or large-scale set pieces versus the mission are the films considered the weakest.

And that’s what Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince does: it forgets about the mystery, and instead ramps up the romance and comedy to turn it into an expensive BBC sitcom.

Which is a bit odd because the book has about SIX mysteries running at the same time:

1. Who is the Half-Blood Prince?

2. What is the memory that Professor Slughorn is ashamed to reveal?

3. Why did Professor Dumbledore make Snape the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher?

4. What is Draco Malfoy up to?

5. What is the story behind Voldemort’s past?

6. What are the Horcruxes?

Now— to be fair: the film doesn’t ignore these mysteries wholesale. Well, except #3— that gets one nod at the feast, and then it’s completely forgotten, making this the second film not to feature a Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson3. Out of the six, the ones that get the biggest focus are #2 (Slughorn’s memory) and #4 (Malfoy). But numbers #5 and #6 gets truncated— Voldemort’s past is restricted to just memories of him as a boy; and the Horcruxes are glossed quite quickly. So much so that the relevance of the objects— trinkets connected to Hogwarts or Voldemort— are lost unless you’ve read the books.

As for the mystery of the Half-Blood Prince… well, you’d be forgiven for being baffled by Alan Rickman’s reveal towards the end. No explanation is given as to WHY he’s called that; the film barely even tries to drum up interest in the character’s identity. Even though… you know, the film’s subtitle is literally about the HALF-BLOOD PRINCE.

So who’s to fault here?

David Yates was asked if he’d like to direct Half-Blood Prince while still working on Order of the Phoenix. It was a sign that producers David Heyman and David Barron—as well as Warner Bros. studio—were happy with his work. This also made it the first time since Chris Columbus was hired that they didn’t have to look for another director4. In fact, halfway through production on Half-Blood Prince, the producers asked if Yates would like to finish the franchise, making Yates the only director to make more than two Potter movies.

After sitting out the fifth film, Steve Kloves also returned for scribe duties on Half-Blood Prince. And both of them had ideas about deviating from the Potter formula.

For instance, it was Kloves who proposed breaking the pattern of starting every Harry Potter story with the Dursleys. Yates explains:

Steve [Kloves] came up with this notion that, after Order of the Phoenix, Harry’s in this quite intense, dark place and he’s riding the trains to free his brain a wee bit. He meets this really attractive waitress who he really likes. You immediately set up the notion that suddenly these characters are a bit more sexualized, if you like. They’re aware of the opposite sex and their hormones are kicking off. I thought it was a really charming, lovely idea.

It is effective, though it’s a bit of a pity because in Book Six, the scene with the Dursleys does provide some context about why Dumbledore sent Harry to live with them. Still, I think the changed opening is good. It works. A good adaptation doesn’t slavishly recreate the source material; it takes the spirit of what worked to create something new.

But prior to that, Yates had an idea: What if they opened with an action piece showing the Death Eaters attacking London, something hinted at in the book? The collapsing bridge is mentioned as a throwaway line, but to David Heyman, he felt such a dramatic opening would capture the heart of the story’s increasing darkness:

We really like the idea that these magical places are so close to us—that the wizarding world exists right next door to our world, around every corner. Witnessing a Death Eater attack on places both magical and familiar reinforces that fantastic possibility.

Additionally, the Deathly Hallows was published by this time, so some of the events in Film Six would be influenced by the final book— hence, the seemingly throwaway setup where the Death Eaters kidnap Ollivander the wandmaker to explore in the next film. Again, it works— although the action scenes are mostly spectacle without any reversals or changes to make it dramatic.

Just as the beginning would be modified, so too would the ending. As much as the three Davids and Kloves desired to depict Dumbledore’s funeral, they realized that a funeral would disrupt the rhythm of the film and pacing after already showing his death,. Early drafts did contain the funeral scene but Heyman found it underwhelming and had it taken out. The battle between the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix (plus Neville Longbottom and Luna Lovegood) was also removed to avoid repeating it with the Battle of Hogwarts in the final film.

The idea to play up the romance and comedy seems to have been a collective responsibility. In an interview, Yates said:

We all got on really well and the studio and the Davids really liked the work even before 5 came out, they said that I’d do 6. We had a conversation that went like this. They said, “We think we’d like you to do 6, but can you do comedy?” I was like one of those actors trying to get a job. “Can you ride a horse? Can you do a French accent?” I said, “Of course I can do comedy!”

Not that the comedy and romance is unimportant— but imagine if a Bond film put more focus on the romance while downplaying the mission at hand, and you’ll get the Half-Blood Prince.

Voldemort’s past became a point of contention between writer and director. Kloves wanted to show it, but Yates felt it was more important to concentrate on Voldemort as a young boy and his relationship with Slughorn. The disagreement must have been quite strong because in the end, Yates had to actually veto the writer.

We thought it was more important, in the limited screen time we had, to concentrate on Voldemort as a young boy in the orphanage and Voldemort's relationship with Slughorn.

Which is funny, because to compensate for this absence, it was Yates who gave us a scene in which Ron sits between Harry and Ginny and offers a mince pie:

That was just a bit of improvisation. There was just a big plate of pies and I went, “Rupert, I know what we’ll do, let’s try this” and then Steve [Kloves] writes a lot of really funny stuff which I adore, and the guys adore doing. I think we need to keep that. I think audiences enjoy it, it keeps them in the right mood.

No, my guy. Just… no. It’s fun but not at the expense of what the film is about.

And then there was the attack on The Burrow halfway through that was added. Yates explained why:

First of all, it felt like the middle of the story needed an injection of jeopardy and danger. That doesn’t exist in the book, but when we were developing the script, it felt like there was a lot of comedy and a lot of lightness and as a rhythm, it kind of felt like it continued for too long. Putting some jeopardy right in the middle just felt, it would just remind the audience that the world beyond Hogwarts is still a very dangerous place.

A good sentiment— for instance, the death of Henry Winkler’s principal in Scream was added because Dimension felt there was a lull in the middle of the film without any kills. But that addition, for instance, actually sets up the scene later when the house is emptied for the final act. The attack on The Burrow… doesn’t actually further the story.

Do you know how you can tell if a scene doesn’t add to the overall story? Remove it and see if it affects the rest of the narrative. If yes, then it’s necessary. If no, then it is expendable. If you take out the attack on the Burrow, the film… continues as normal.

Look, the Half-Blood Prince book is the most episodic one of the lot, which meant that not everything was not going to make it to the screen. That’s the reality. But I’m not alone in the fact that the film is a little incomprehensible. Apart from casual viewers people complaining about not understanding what is going on, even the critics pointed this out:

• Roger Ebert wrote, “The middle passages spin their wheels somewhat, hurrying about to establish events and places not absolutely essential. But those scenes may be especially valued by devoted students of the Potter saga. They may also be the only ones who fully understand them; ordinary viewers may be excused for feeling baffled some of the time.”

• David Stratton of Margaret and David at the Movies wrote, “For non-readers, the films are now borderline incomprehensible, because so much prior knowledge is assumed, but I understand from loyal book readers that, especially in this new film, a great deal of important incident has been deleted.”

• Dave Golder of SFX Magazine thought the film spent “huge swathes of the film to subplots about Harry and his chums’ teenage romances, while treating the plot with apparent disinterest – an unfortunate necessity to be dealt with in as few lines as possible” and that “exposition is cut to such a bare minimum that those unfamiliar with the story may be mystified about what’s going on”.

If someone who hasn’t read the books needs to ask what is going on, that is the mark of a bad adaptation.

That being said, let’s talk about the cinematography. There’s quite a bit to learn here.

As I mentioned earlier, the Half-Blood Prince film is the best-looking one of the bunch. Bruno Delbonnel (Amélie) wanted to light the set differently from past cinematographers, explaining:

Some of the sets are there since the very first Potter. How could I light them in a different way? This question brought another one based on the series itself. It was Potter number six, the story was less about the big fights than the relationships between the characters. Nevertheless the drama is still there and I thought it would be interesting to have those very intimate stories amidst this very dark mood. As if the school was a dark character. That’s when I suggested to go for this (again) dark moody variations of grays.

Even the light-hearted scenes are painted with bleak colors and a dreamlike glow. More wide shots appear, as well as silhouetting the subjects. Plus, Delbonnel framed scenes in a way that wasn’t simply straight-up pointing the camera at what was happening in front of them.

The scene in the cave was a particular challenge. In the book, the only source of light came from a bowl in the middle of the cave, making it static. So Delbonnel decided to add a light rising in to the air and circling around Harry and Dumbledore, creating an unsettling atmosphere to an already creepy scene.

Yates explained that he and Delbonnel arrived at the film’s look through digital grading, something that the cinematographer worked on daily, creating a half-dozen ‘looks’ for the studio. But Warner Bros. didn’t like one of the looks, citing their dislike of the “very European looking film”. Yates recounts:

So we sat with the execs and got to the bottom of what they didn’t like. We had a very European looking film – which we wanted to retain, so we didn’t want to compromise on that. Bruno [Delbonnel] had also used some de-focussing and soft wipes in the digital grade that unsettled them.

So Delbonnel went back with colourist Peter Doyle and started adding back a little color while taking out the soft wipes and defocusing. Yates rememebers:

It looked really beautiful – all the soft wipes and de-focussing had gone, and you could see all of Stuart [Craig’s] sets, the costumes. It was a real journey for us. So we phoned up the studio and said, “Come and have a look at it now – we’ve made changes. It’s not what you wanted, but we’re happy with it”. So they flew over, watched the first five minutes of it, and said, “This is beautiful – we’re so happy!”

As for Delbonnel, he called it his best work at the time!5 The Academy certainly thought so, nominating him for the Best Cinematography Oscar.

A successful adaptation needs to stand on its own two feet without requiring a little homework to be understood. There’s still a sense of ambition and swinging for the fences six films in— on a production level, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the franchise’s biggest swing yet and I admire that. But while creative change is necessary and healthy for a franchise’s longevity, it should never come at the expense of forgetting its core appeal and engine. The wrong type of change in creative direction can do damage, and it’s sheer luck that enough people turned out for the film as it was time to land the plane, after nearly a decade, and end the Harry Potter series. Not with one film, but two…

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

A hundred years ago, short films were the province for up-and-coming animation companies like Walt Disney, Hanna-Barbara, Fleischer Studios, Pixar Animation, and Warner Bros. Cartoon. Short films allowed animators to test nascent animation techniques and build its brand through a variety of characters. Often, they were one of the attractions in a cinema, playing before the feature film.

But somewhere along the way, animated short films have gone the way of the dodo. I mean, sure, they’re still being made— there’s still an Academy Award given for Best Animated Short! Yet their place in the media ecosystem seems to be largely restricted to festival screenings or online releases.

At the start of 2026, I actually got a chance to experience what it must have been like to see a short film screened before the main feature when the animated short Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey played in front of The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants.

It was great!

I think cinemas need to bring back this tradition. A fun short film is like the band that warms up the audience at a concert before the main star comes on stage, it really makes a difference watching a movie after enjoying a satisfying short film.

Plus animated shorts can be truly fabulous on their own.

So here’s a list of seven animated shorts that I love ranked in the order of the year that they came, that I think you absolutely should check out.

Note: Wherever possible and available, I have attached links to either the entire shorts or clips from them. The full-length ones are, unsurprisingly, hard to find online.

1. Lonesome Ghosts - Walt Disney Productions, 1937

Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy are ghost exterminators lured to a haunted house by bored ghosts, and shenanigans promptly ensure. Was this where Ghostbusters got its idea from? Lonesome Ghosts is fun and riotous, and there’s even a gag with Goofy and a ghost that pays homage to the famous mirror scene from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup. Incredibly, this was the 98th (!) short film in the Mickey Mouse series, and it was released just three days after the premiere of Disney’s first full-length animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

2. Red Hot Riding Hood - MGM Cartoon, 1943

A Tex Avery short film is never dull, and this one is chock-full of his signature style: visual gags from beginning to end, a risqué sense of humor, and a subversive streak. This one starts off as a typical version of the Red Riding Hood story until the characters break the fourth wall and express their annoyance with the clichés. Suddenly, the story is given a makeover: Red Riding Hood is now an adult performing as a nightclub singer called Red Hot Riding Hood, the Big Bad Wolf is a Hollywood swinger who is gaga about Red, and Grandma is EXTREMELY thirsty for the Wolf. It’s great.

3. The Little Orphan - MGM Cartoons, 1949

Tom & Jerry are the titular leads, but The Little Orphan is famous for giving us the perpetually hungry Nibbles, an orphan sent to spend Thanksgiving as Jerry’s guest. Nibbles promptly tries to eat and drink everything in sight at a table laid out for Thanksgiving, only Tom will be damned if he’s going to allow them. One of the funniest gags is Nibbles swallowing an orange whole, prompting Jerry to slap it out of him which then flies into a sleeping Tom’s open mouth. It’s got some of the best visual gags of the franchise, including Jerry dressed in a pilgrim’s hat and Tom wearing a broom that makes him look like a Native American. It’s got some classic Tom & Jerry chase gags, including Jerry firing a champagne cork at Tom, and Tom getting a custard pie catapulted into his face. But since it’s a Thanksgiving episode, it ends on a rare conciliatory note with Tom & Jerry sitting down together to eat… only for Nibbles to demolish the turkey. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Short 1948.

4. Duck Amuck - Warner Bros. Cartoons, 1953

Daffy Duck thinks he’s starring in a Three Musketeers spoof, only to break the fourth wall when the unseen animator keeps riling him up in a series of increasingly escalating and sadistic pranks until poor Daffy finally gives up, only for the camera to reveal the punchline that Bugs Bunny was the animator. It’s a Chuck Jones classic, and voted #2 of The 50 Greatest Cartoons by members of the animation field in 1994, before it was added in 1999 to the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

5. Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers - Aardman Animations, 1993

Only Nick Park could have made a silent penguin with small unblinking black eyes look terrifying. The Wrong Trousers introduces Wallace & Gromit’s arch-enemy, Feathers McGraw, as a lodger who creates a fissure in the relationship between the cheese-loving Wallace and the skeptical Gromit while carrying out his plan to steal a valuable diamond. Park thought it would be fun to stage an action sequence in a living room, and co-writer proposed having a model train be the centerpiece, leading to a chase sequence that has been praised as one of the best action sequences ever (by no less than Danny Boyle). No, really. The Wrong Trousers was only the second Wallace & Gromit short film, but it was the one that really elevated Aardman Animations as a force to be reckoned with. It was also revisited as a feature-length sequel in 2024 with Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. Want to get into the Wallace & Gromit world but don’t know where to start? This is the place. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Short 1994.

6. La Maison en Petits Cubes - Oh! Productions, 2008

An ageing widower lives in a town with rising water levels, and keeps adding new floors to his house each time it does. But when he drops his pipe into the water and goes to retrieve it, his descent through the many floors causes him to relive his memories. No dialogue, a minimalist art style and animation, and a simple yet poignant piano soundtrack, La Maison en Petits Cubes is a sweet tale told without being saccharine or treacly, finding just the right balance between sentimental and melodramatic.

7. Day & Night - Pixar Animation, 2010

Two characters, Day and Night, are uneasy about each other, yet come to appreciate what the other has to offer. There’s no dialogue, but then it doesn’t need it, telling us all we need to know courtesy of some gorgeous visuals combining 2D and 3D elements and visual storytelling, including some gags certain to raise some chuckles (like when Day wakes up and moves to a running stream that makes it look like he’s peeing). It’s a well-made short about prejudice and overcoming it that never gets ham-fisted or preachy about its message, trusting the visuals to convey it instead.

What are your favorite animated short films? Please share your answers in the comments below.

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

There are many elements that go into making a good action scene. It’s rarely about the best visual effects or big-things-go-BOOM destruction. It’s about understanding how to build tension, having emotional stakes, with reversals and pay-offs to create rhythm and momentum.

The following scenes are simply a handful of action scenes in the wide canon of great action scenes. They’re the ones that have stuck in my mind, that subconsciously influence me when I’m thinking about the kinds of action scenes I would like to create, and what makes them work.

Let’s dive in!

Seven Samurai (1954) - Final Battle

Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film would revolutionize Hollywood action films, popularizing the ‘assemble the team’ trope that is still in use today all the way down to Marvel’s The Avengers. Yet the final battle in Seven Samurai puts most other Hollywood films to shame, shot in pouring rain and using an innovative multi-camera setup and telephoto lenses to help maintain clarity and focus on the unfolding action. Mind you, all this was pre-CGI, by the way.

What makes it work— and what Hollywood clearly ignores— is that the surviving samurai and farmers aren’t fighting an endless horde of enemies. Instead, they are facing the remaining 13 bandits. Before the action starts, the leader Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura) outlines what they’ll do, and how and where they will draw the bandits to— which orients the geography and creates an expectation in the viewer on how the plan will unfold. Then, we watch it unfold, and then watch the samurai respond when the plan changes. And mentally, we’re counting down the losses— 12 bandits; 11; 10; 9… instead of mentally checking out against the repetitive action, the clear target of enemies keeps us engaged because there’s an endgame.

It also helps that the composed shots with tight editing keeps everything lucid versus shaky-cam action and choppy editing. Something else that heightens the battle is the lack of music. Instead, the soundtrack consists of the sounds of pouring rain, the splashing mud, the sound of horse hooves, bodies hitting the grounds, and shouts from both sides.

It also ends on a downer note. The samurai win the battle, but at the cost of five of their number, and the villagers seem content to ignore the samurai now that the bandits have been taken care of.

Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977) - Trench Run Sequence

Last month, Marcia Lucas died. She won an Oscar for editing Star Wars (along with Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew), and she deserved her win for many reasons, but definitely for some ingenious work into making the fabled Trench Run more exciting: by introducing a ticking clock.

The “ticking clock” is a narrative device used to create a time constraint or deadline that makes everything feel more urgent and tense. It heightens the emotional engagement and immerses the viewer in the character’s race against time, with every second being critical.

Here’s what I learned after Marcia Lucas passed away: in the original version of the Trench Run sequence AFTER it was filmed, she told George Lucas that the scene in its current form didn’t work.

What she did next is one of the reasons why the scene makes the list. In the original version of the trench run, the Death Star WASN’T traveling to Yavin 4 to destroy the rebel base when the fighters attack. That was Marcia Lucas’s idea, and she did it to create a ticking clock. And she did this by having new computer graphics created to show the Death Star closing in on Yavin, hiring a voice actor record a voice over ominously counting down the space station’s progress toward Yavin, and reusing shots from the Alderaan destruction sequence in which Governor Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) stated “You may fire when ready” and the technicians pressing buttons. Watch the sequence closely and you’ll notice two things: In the shot where Tarkin tells the technicians to fire when ready, Cushing’s mouth can’t be seen; and you’ll notice that nobody on the rebel base is actually talking about the Death Star closing in on their position and about to blow them up. But you feel it, thanks to its clever editing.

If you need to give your action sequence some tension especially in the final act, add a ticking clock. If Star Wars could fix it in the edit, then so can anyone!

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) - Hospital Escape

Few directors craft great action sequences like James Cameron, and the escape from Pescadero State Hospital is a prime example where Cameron balances three parallel narratives— the T-1000 infiltrating the hospital, Sarah escaping her room, and John Connor and the T-800 breaking in— converges them to the moment where Sarah, John, and the T-800 unite, and then ups the ante when the T-1000 pursues them.

What makes it work— apart from the pacing and the still-visionary effects of the T-1000 changing shape— is that the sequence covers heavy emotional territory: It’s the moment when Sarah finally snaps out of her apathy into action and we get to see her in Action Sarah mode for the first time; it’s when John realizes his mother wasn’t crazy after all, and has to save her; and it’s mother-and-son are reunited for the first time, with the T-800 for the ride, and become this weird makeshift family unit.

The two narrative threads that get the most screen time are the T-1000 sneaking into the asylum first and scoping the place for Sarah Connor, and Sarah breaking out. The third narrative— John and T-800— get the least because theirs is straightforward. This is the sequence that gives us the moment when the T-1000 shapeshifts into the guard and also walks through the bars.

Cameron loves reversals in his action scenes. He’ll let the characters get close to what they want or get what they want, but then something shifts and then they’re one step back and they have to respond to new circumstances. In T2, Sarah almost escapes but then sees the T-800 and panics, leading her to nearly getting sedated by the hospital officials. Sarah, John, and the T-800 unite, only to immediately face the more dangerous threat of the T-1000— leading to the next stage of the action, where the T-1000 chases them to the underground car park and even latches on to the fleeing car, and Sarah and the T-800 working seamlessly to shoot at it. There’s an emotional satisfaction of watching them work like a team, like mom and dad working together to protect their kid. Which only reinforces the family dynamic of the film.

Great action scenes have emotional stakes. And like the scene from The Wrong Trousers (see below), reversals of fortune help to build tension.

Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers (1993) — Model Train Chase

The two-minute climax of The Wrong Trousers short film is a masterclass in how to design an action sequence. No, really.

For context: Wallace and Gromit are trying to stop criminal penguin Feathers McGraw from escaping their house with a stolen diamond. In the process, Feathers falls on a moving train set running throughout the house, and Gromit and Wallace try to stop him.

It sounds absurd, but it is one of the most kinetic set pieces I’ve seen, and it puts most of Hollywood’s efforts to shame. And the reason it works is that it uses a lot of reversals to build momentum and stakes.

For instance:

When the train is headed towards the front door, Feathers sees his opportunity to escape through a penguin-shaped hatch BUT Gromit quickly hits a button that causes the train to switch tracks, THEREFORE preventing Feathers from getting away.

Another time, Feathers hits a switch that sends Wallace and Gromit onto the other track away from him. It looks like the end when the track is unfinished BUT Gromit snatches up a box of spare rail tracks and rapidly starts laying down fresh tracks, THEREFORE allowing the train to turn around and catch up with Feathers.

This is actually similar to South Park creators’ Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s advice on writing story beats using the words “but” or “therefore” where events react to each other. In the case of The Wrong Trousers, the reversals in fortune thwart the characters from achieving their goal, building suspense and tension:

• Goal for Wallace and Gromit: Stop Feathers from escaping

• Goal for Feathers: Escape from Wallace and Gromit

Whenever something works against them, the characters are forced to come up with new ways to act in direct reaction to the situation. Without a million-dollar budget at his disposal, Nick Park and Aardman Animations have created a brilliant study in crafting an action sequence— and Wallace and Gromit didn’t even have to save the world to do it!

Spider-Man 2 (2004) - Runaway Train

Another train sequence makes the list, but this one deserves its place. It’s got all the ingredients needed for a juicy action set-piece: Spider-Man is back in costume, he battles Doc Ock, who kidnapped Mary-Jane Watson, and then everything escalates quickly. The battle starts atop a clock tower and ends on top of a moving Subway train when things take a turn. Doc Ock damages the controls, destroying the brakes and causing the train to move at high-speed. Spider-Man chooses to stop the train and save the passengers over chasing Doc Ock.

I remember watching Spider-Man 2 in the cinema and 10-year-old me just gawked at the screen. What stayed with me wasn’t simply Sam Raimi’s kinetic action, it was the emotion behind the entire scene.

In the process of stopping the train, Spider-Man loses his mask which exposes his identity. In the effort to stop the train, he is so drained that Doc Ock later knocks him out in one punch and captures him easily. It’s a victory that comes at a price, because Spider-Man chose to save the people versus stopping the villain.

It’s a little similar to the airplane rescue sequence in Superman Returns, which I wrote about sometime earlier. Like that, the situation requires the hero to stop a vehicle from crashing and killing the passengers aboard; the difference is that in Superman Returns, Superman had a personal stake since Lois Lane was aboard the plane. In Spider-Man 2, it’s a train with strangers, and yet it still feels emotional because of how they respond.

What also works— apart from the editing, effects, acting, and music— is the Christ-like imagery of Spider-Man using his webs to slow down the train, arms splayed out like he’s on a cross. This symbolism is reinforced with Elfman’s music and the shots of the passengers gently passing his unconscious body into the carriage and lowering him to the floor. There’s also the emotion when the people realize that underneath the mask, Spider-Man is just this young guy trying to do the right thing. As one passengers remarks, “He’s just a kid. No older than my son.”

Want to add some gravitas to your action scene? Add a little Christ-like imagery. Done right, it can go a long way.

Casino Royale (2006) – Airport Chase

In the origin story, Bond is not yet the Bond that we know. While he still keeps his composure under pressure and uses quick thinking to stay on top of an escalating situation, he’s still rough around the edges and not exactly discreet. Earlier, he created an international incident by attacking one bomber in an embassy; here, he gets arrested for stopping another bomber from destroying a prototype plane at Miami International Airport.

This sequence is a work of beauty (although the poker game is equally magnificent). The film already introduced Bond in a rough-and-tumble parkour chase sequence in Madagascar, but the airport sequence is the first time that Bond actually has to prevent an act of destruction. From the start—when he follows the Greek Dmitrios to a museum exhibit, then follows the bomber to Miami International Airport—Bond never loses his composure but he isn’t exactly the suave agent of past films. He’s still rough around the edges, but is constantly using his wits to stay on top of the situation. The trouble is that despite trying to keep things covert, as a good espionage agent should, things get out of hand.

Martin Campbell stages the chaos with a mix of handheld and steady shots courtesy of DP Phil Phil Méheux, but everything is in focus and there’s never any confusion. We know exactly where the characters are, and where the target is. Bond is pushed to the edge, and there’s a genuine question of whether things will end up just as it did in the Madagascar scene. The icing on the cake is when it seems that the bomber is about to win and arms the bomb… only to realize that during their fight, Bond had secretly strapped it to the bomber’s belt. The push-in on Daniel Craig’s face as the bomber blows up off screen, and the small smirk at the scene’s end, signals that this Bond is on his way to becoming the famous Bond we know.

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) - Opening

Tom Cruise strapped himself to the side of an Airbus A400M and hung off the side for real to get this shot, and did it eight times until he was satisfied! It’s a fabulous stunt, and the fact that it happens within the first five minutes of the movie is a bold statement because it’s the fifth film’s equivalent of the Burj Khalifa scene from the earlier installment, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol— all before the titles roll. It’s the closest it gets to rivaling Goldfinger for best pre-titles sequence, in which we get the main character doing something fabulous that captures the essence of his personality— a hero defying the odds, jumping into chaos, and risking life and limb to save the day.

Funnily enough, the sequence kept moving around until it was decided that it worked best as the opening. In a way, it’s almost as if the film is saying, We know you expect Tom Cruise to do some daredevil stunt like the Burj Khalifa, so let’s get that right out of the way so that you aren’t left wondering when it’s going to happen (only to proceed with more daredevil stunts).

The scene also introduces most of the team with whom Hunt will be working— Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), analyst Brandt (Jeremy Renner), and bringing Luther back into the fray after he sat out Ghost Protocol, while also alluding to the events of that film, creating continuity. It also carries over the element from the fourth film in which technology doesn’t always work— in this case, trying to remotely open the plane doors— which adds an almost-screwball comedy tone with the characters bickering and nothing going according to plan. Which also sets the tone for the rest of the film. Which is Ethan Hunt doing an Indiana Jones and making stuff up as he goes along. It’s great. And it’s only the beginning.

What are some of your favorite action scenes? Please share your answers in the comments.

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

With The Dark Knight, it became very clear that Christopher Nolan was a director who thrived in making films that had cerebral underpinnings while also aiming for maximalist thrills. The man was born to film trucks being flipped for real in the middle of a Chicago street! But if you read/watch his interviews, he is also someone who thinks a lot about the world, about cinema, about literature— and not in the pretentious shallow way, either. If he hadn’t gone into filmmaking, he could easily have become a erudite professor, the kind you’d want to hang out with and talk about things over a cup of tea. Maybe two, even!

And The Dark Knight was the film that really allowed Nolan to marry his artistic sensibilities to a big-budget tentpole film— based on an existing IP, no less. It shouldn’t have worked; there are parts that he himself admits that he didn’t think would turn out well, only it did. The result is a film that is very much his, in a way that few superhero films or blockbusters can boast.

So how did he do it, and what does that have to teach us in our own approach to making films?

Lesson #1: Start Your Film By Thinking Of An Image

When working on Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer started with the image of Bruce Wayne as a small boy at his parents’ funeral. Inspired by the real photo of a three-year-old John F. Kennedy Jr. at his father’s funeral, it captured what kind of Batman story that Nolan wanted to tell: one that focused on the man under the mask and how he got to being Batman. Thinking about the image allowed them to also think about what the teaser trailer would show, and what the marketing department could use to promote Batman Begins as an origin story.

Once again, when thinking about what he wanted to see in a Batman sequel, Nolan was struck by an image that came to him while scouting locations in Hong Kong: Batman on foot, being chased across the rooftops by the police. Even though it would be reworked, this image served as the bedrock for the film’s trajectory, in which the hero takes the fall for a villain to save the city, and disappears into the night, disgraced and disavowed.

Jonathan Nolan, the film’s co-writer and the director’s younger brother, elaborated:

Chris [Nolan] is very driven by endings, and he likes to pare down endings to an image. In early drafts of the script, that image was of Batman on foot, being chased from rooftop to rooftop. In the final version of the script, we had him on his amazing Bat-Pod, but it was the same essential image—Batman being pursued by the people he’s just helped to save. There was something very tragic about that.

Already famous for his endings, Nolan’s choice to end The Dark Knight on such a note evokes his love of noir, which influenced his early films— especially Raymond Chandler. His private detective Philip Marlowe mirrors Nolan’s Batman, a man navigating a corrupt rotten world and trying to do his best, though the truth may never come out. There’s something valuable in approaching a film script by starting with an image that encapsulates what it is about. After all, film is a visual medium.

Lesson #2: Steal Like An Artist And Draw From Many Influences

Nolan has admitted that he is not well-versed in comic books. That’s why he brought comic book super-fan Goyer to help him make his Batman movies. He’s not trying to make a comic book movie, he’s trying to make a good movie based on comics, starting with the source material while fleshing it out with other influences. He elaborates:

I’m not attempting to represent the medium of comic books on screen here anymore than I would a novel that I was adapting or a stage play. It’s a different medium and when I read a comic book I’m able to interpolate a real world from the drawings.

Two Batman comics were a huge influence on The Dark Knight:

1. Jeph Loeb’s and Tim Sale’s limited series Batman: The Long Halloween, which also influenced Batman Begins in its depiction of Batman’s war against the criminal faction represented by Carmine Falcone. For The Dark Knight, the Nolans and Goyer took the alliance between Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and Harvey Dent and made it central to the film— the scene of the three men on the rooftop is lifted from the comic book’s panels.

2. Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, in its depiction of the Joker. Nolan explains:

… I definitely feel the influence of The Killing Joke, not so much in the specifics as in constructing some sense of purpose for an inherently purposeless character. That is to say The Joker is an anarchist. He’s dedicated to chaos. He should really have no purpose but I think the underlying belief that Alan Moore got across very clearly is that on some level The Joker wants to pull everybody down to his level and show that he’s not an unusual monster and that everyone else can be debased and corrupted like he is.1

You might also be surprised to know that Heath Ledger’s Joker mirrors the character’s very first appearance in the 1940’s Batman comics in issues #1 and #2 with the Joker described as a kind of “grim jester”. Nolan recalls:

It’s a weird thing. [Jonathan Nolan] called me up halfway through his job and said, “By the way, have you looked at [Joker’s] first and second appearance recently?” And I think maybe years ago I’d seen them. I think David Goyer had told me about them. Went back and looked at them and we wound up at a place that’s drawn very directly from that stuff.

However, he emphasizes that it was a coincidence:

… we arrived at it in our own way by researching a lot of the more recent Joker stuff, and thinking about what this icon is when viewed through the prism of Batman Begins. When viewed in the world we created, in the tone we created. And what we arrived at is somebody who is quite a serious guy, really, considering his name’s the Joker and that turned out to be quite similar to his original conception.

To build up on the realistic take he brought to the superhero, Nolan turned to movies to help him conceptualize the sequel. One big influence was Michael Mann’s crime crime drama Heat (1995) in finding a way to use Gotham City as its own character (Nolan loves the film so much that he moderated a Q&A with Mann, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro for its 20th anniversary). If Batman Begins was more like James Bond in its globe-trotting approach, The Dark Knight would remain constricted to Gotham City (with only a brief sojourn to Hong Kong). Nolan explains:

Batman Begins had been as big as we could make it. I knew we couldn’t stuff any more in, geographically. So you have to look at the scale in a different way. What I wound up doing is looking at it differently in terms of storytelling and cinematography. One of the biggest epic films I have ever seen is Michael Mann’s Heat. That is a true Los Angeles story, just wall-to-wall within the city. Okay, we’ll make it a city story. We’re going to shoot in a real city, with real streets and real buildings, because the scale of that can be massive.”

He continues:

Heat was very much an influence, because Mann is a fanatic for architecture, too; he understands the grandeur of a city and how it can become a kind of epic playground. I don’t think we realized what an icon that image of the Joker on that street would be. That’s the thing about iconography: You try and build it consciously in all films, and sometimes it’s something you know, but sometimes you don’t. We put a lot of thinking in it, it wasn’t unplanned, but it wasn’t until we saw the IMAX footage that we really knew it.

Another influence was the TV series The Wire— Jonathan Nolan was a big fan of how creator David Simon told his crime drama in a key of realism while it ultimately develops into a Greek tragedy. So too was The Godfather in focusing on the world of crime.

Sidney Lumet’s Serpico was a big influence on Batman Begins, about one man trying to fight corruption in the city. A lesser-known Lumet film, The Offence (1973) influenced The Dark Knight, particularly in a scene where Sean Connery’s ferocious Manchester police detective batters away impotently at a laughing child molester (Ian Bannen)— similar to how Batman uselessly hammers a maniacally laughing Joker in the police interrogation room, unaffected by the Caped Crusader. In The Offence, Connery’s detective goes to criminal lengths to get his solution; in The Dark Knight, Batman too would employ troubling tactics to fight back against Gotham’s criminal underworld. This also ties into the themes of escalation hinted at by Gordon at the end of Batman Begins; here, we see how it plays out; the only two people to question Batman are Gordan and the Q-like Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman). The one person who doesn’t question Batman? Harvey Dent.

Nolan says:

Harvey doesn’t question Batman as much as Gordon does, and therein lie the seeds of his ultimate trouble, because what Batman does is questionable. There are some disturbing ramifications to the way Batman chooses to fight crime, but Harvey Dent is in favor of Batman’s approach, and avails himself of the advantage it gives him in fighting criminals— which immediately raises the question: How far will Harvey Dent go?

Nolan doesn’t stop there. One major influence on The Dark Knight was Fritz Lang’s silent film Dr. Mabuse The Gambler (1922), particularly in conceiving the character of the Joker. Nolan explains:

[Mabuse] was the direct feed because that gave us the original master criminal. I had Jonah [Nolan] watch Dr. Mabuse and said to him, ‘This is what we’re going to make the Joker and he’s going to be the engine of the story.’ He totally got it. My brother’s early drafts had a lot of impracticalities and a lot of amazing ideas, but the thing that he absolutely nailed was the character of the Joker. He just had that down. When Jonah came back with his draft, it was like, ‘Yeah, there’s still work to do,’ but the Joker was absolutely there and his effect on the story.

In approaching the Joker, another film that provided a template was Jaws. Or more accurately, the shark in Jaws. Goyer recounts how he and Nolan wanted the villain to arrive in the film fully formed, saying:

We always talked about the Joker as being like the shark in Jaws, this force of nature that is unknowable. That’s why he has a kind of ‘choose your own’ origin story. We never wanted to explain his origin, which had become another lame convention of these types of movies. With each successive film, it was ‘What’s the origin of the new villain?’ That had become a real cliché, and so we decided to subvert that by not showing his origin at all, which we thought would make him much scarier. The Joker had never been scary in previous film depictions, but we were determined to make him very scary in The Dark Knight.

A big influence on the late Heath Ledger’s portrayal came from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange2, namely the character of Alex (Malcolm McDowell). Years after he finished the Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan recalls:

I think Alex was the closest to the Joker that had come before. He’s a teenager essentially. He’s just ‘I’m just going to tear it down because fuck it.’ He doesn’t even care about why he’s doing it. He’s that out there. It’s a very real force of human nature, and it’s not one that I have. I’m afraid of that in myself. I’m afraid of that side of human nature. The Joker is what I’m afraid of more than anything, more than any of the villains, these days particularly, when you feel civilization is very thinly lined. I think the Joker represents the id in all of this. All three films, we did with a real truthfulness of our intentions. What do we worry about? What am I actually afraid of? What’s the worst thing the villain could be doing? I don’t have that anarchic impulse, I really don’t. I’m much more controlled. I’m afraid of that in myself. I feel like I carefully used it as the engine of the movie, but I was afraid of it the whole time I was making the film.

Nolan didn’t stop there when it came to references. For creating the look of the Joker, he directed costume designer Lindy Hemming and her team to the works of Francis Bacon, especially his painting Study After Velàzquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) (more familiarly known as ‘The Screaming Pope’) which conveyed the Joker’s “edgy, unsettling essence” to the filmmaker. For Hemming, it convinced her that a purple suit would work on the actor.

For her part, Hemming collected images from Vivienne Westwood—the British fashion designer famous for bright colors, radical lines, and geometric prints— and pictures of Iggy Pop, Johnny Rotten, and Pete Doherty to help in creating the look of the Joker for Nolan’s realistic world.

I’ve made this point before in previous posts, but this is why it’s important to watch and read widely. The ability to draw from a big pool of references and influences can enrich a film to create something original. Quentin Tarantino does this on all of his films, lifting from obscure titles and remixing it through his own particular style to create something different; Nolan does the same. I mean, how many people have heard of— much less watched— Dr. Mabuse the Gambler3? I’ve seen the sequel, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and I could see what Nolan must have been going for.

Lesson #3: Collaborate With Talented Writers Who Push You

Christopher Nolan gets a lot of credit for the Dark Knight trilogy, but his collaborators on the page— David S. Goyer and Jonathan Nolan— deserve equal credit for their contributions to the script.

The process of writing the script turned out to be quite similar to Batman Begins. First, Nolan and Goyer worked out the story over 2-3 months, writing down the main beats on index cards. This time, however, Goyer did not write the first draft; that task fell instead to Jonathan Nolan4. According to older brother Christopher Nolan:

We sent Jonah [Nolan] off to work on his own because I was working on [The Prestige] so he had 6 months to do that first draft and he would show me stuff as he did it and I would look at it before he shared it with anyone else including Chuck [Roven] and the studio. After the studio read the first draft Jonah spent another couple months working on it and then I took it over when I finished the other film and over the course of 6 months in pre-production, Jonah and I still worked heavily on it through that time.

One of the reasons it took one-and-a-half years to get the script right was because the story they had in mind was quite sprawling as they tried to fit all the ideas they had, testing different versions and taking out different story elements. He admits:

One of the reasons the film is 2-and-a-half hours long is because we tried everything we could on paper to make the story shorter but that was the story we had. In the end we compressed it to the point where it was dizzying so then we had to flesh it out a little bit.

Jonathan Nolan’s work cannot be overstated, being responsible for two big moments in The Dark Knight. The first is distilling the story’s essence and themes into one of the film’s most popular lines: You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Jonathan explains:

The idea that you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain is really the theme of the movie for me. And Batman lives long enough to see himself become the villain, or to allow himself to be mistaken for the villain. That was the idea coming out of the story that David [Goyer] and Chris had put together that most excited me.

Years later, Christopher Nolan would reveal in an interview that he initially didn’t get the line:

I’m plagued by a line from The Dark Knight, and I’m plagued by it because I didn’t write it. My brother wrote it. It kills me, because it’s the line that most resonates. And at the time, I didn’t even understand it … I read it in his draft, and I was like, ‘All right, I’ll keep it in there, but I don’t really know what it means. Is that really a thing?’ And then, over the years since that film’s come out, it just seems truer and truer. In [Oppenheimer], it’s absolutely that. Build them up, tear them down. It’s the way we treat people.

I admit: if my brother came up with one of the best parts in a movie I made, I’d be a little jealous, too. Sibling rivalry is a real thing!

Jonathan Nolan elaborated about the line:

The first part of that line is ‘you either die a hero’ — and that part’s important, because not everybody wants to be a hero; it’s engaging in heroics that puts you in this space, where you have this binary outcome. The idea is there are people who put themselves on the line and so often that wager turns on them. It’s also that old idea of absolute power corrupting absolutely. It felt uniquely resonant to the tragedy of Harvey Dent and the tragedy of Batman. The fact that it resonates with people beyond the film is gratifying. I was proud of that line.

As if that wasn’t enough, he also took another idea that Nolan and Goyer had cooked up, and worked it into the film’s memorable climax. Which brings us to…

Lesson #4: Dare To Be Different By Breaking The Unspoken Rules

Tentpole films, especially of the superhero variety, seem to have this unspoken rule about how everything in the film’s climax needs to be big and explosive— hence the big final battle. I mean, you see this in Batman Begins when Batman literally has to save Gotham City from tearing itself apart. And if it’s a sequel, everything has to be bigger.

But The Dark Knight goes in the opposite direction. Instead of a big battle or even the city on the brink of destruction, the climax features Batman trying to rescue hostages and stop the Joker from detonating bombs aboard two ferries, while the people on the ferries are forced to choose to detonate the bomb on the other vessel or be destroyed themselves. Turns out that was Jonathan Nolan’s idea— and one that Christopher Nolan initially rejected. The older brother recalls:

David [Goyer] and I came up with the story idea of Batman facing this choice between saving one person and saving the other in the middle of the film. My brother then went and made a grander extrapolation of that for the climax. I immediately called him and said, ‘You can’t. That’s not going to work. Forget it. We do that Sophie’s Choice thing earlier; you can’t just keep doing it.’ And he was like, ‘You amplify and you follow the Joker’s theme until the audience comes to expect it.’

Nolan’s objection wasn’t merely about repetition: he just couldn’t fathom NOT ending the movie without anything blowing up. And he kept pushing back:

Jonah’s always been very much in favor of doing something different, not doing the expected thing. That’s a huge impulse of his when he’s writing. And my thing is, ‘Yes, that’s very valuable, but you have to think of it as a piece of music. So if you just don’t do a crescendo, it may not work. It may not feel right.’ I needed a crescendo. He tried and tried, and finally I took over writing the script, but I couldn’t ever get rid of it, so what we wound up doing was taking the action to the Prewitt Building and then crosscutting between that and the ferries. I mean, it shouldn’t really have worked, but it did. The movie literally stops. Then it goes, Oh, and another thing.

That “another thing” was Batman stopping Harvey Dent from killing Gordon and his family, leading to the ending of Batman fleeing the cops.

The closest comparison The Dark Knight has to this approach is the grand-daddy of darker sequels: Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back. That film also bucked expectations— it had its big battle around the 30th minute, while narrowing its final battles to Princess Leia and her allies trying to stop Boba Fett from escaping with a carbonite-frozen Han Solo, and Luke’s duel with Darth Vader.

Worked out for both in the end. Sometimes, scale doesn’t necessarily mean LITERALLY bigger. Sometimes, EMOTIONALLY bigger works better. In Empire Strikes Back, the revelation of Darth Vader’s identity and losing Han Solo hits harder than a big battle; in The Dark Knight, the moral test of the Gotham citizens and prisoners choosing not to kill each other to save themselves and Harvey Dent’s tragic fate has a bigger impact than something blowing up. In fact, Nolan GOT to blow something up: it was just figurative, not literal.

It also helped that the foundation laid by Batman Begins allowed Nolan and his team to push Batman in new creative directions, which this time included a new utilitarian design of the Batsuit, Nolan’s take on the Bat-Pod5, and shooting largely on location in Chicago to create a certain verisimilitude that fit with the film’s tone, though sets were still used for interiors such as the Bat-Bunker, the city version of a Batcave.

And speaking of daring to be different…

Lesson #5: The Hero Doesn’t Have To Always Be The Protagonist

Batman Begins is Bruce Wayne’s story— it’s literally right there in the title. But that doesn’t always have to be the case; sometimes, the character’s emotional arc can belong to another.

Writers Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and John August (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) offer the best definitions and differences between a hero, main character, and protagonist. In Scriptnotes, they note that a character is all three but not always:

The hero is the character whom you hope to see “win”… the hero doesn’t have to be noble or courageous or especially talented. As long as you’re rooting for them, that’s what matters.

Usually, the hero is the person the film is about; their name is usually in the title. Examples: Harry Potter, Shrek, Citizen Kane.

Meanwhile, here’s how they define the protagonist:

The protagonist is the character who transforms over the course of the story, traveling from point A to point B, either literally or figuratively (emphasis mine). They learn and grow as the story progresses. Generally, protagonists want something at the start of the tale and, over the course of their journey, discover they need something else.

Take Ripley in Aliens. She is the main character and also the protagonist, who goes from reluctantly accompanying the Marines to taking charge; she is also the hero who literally chooses to descend into a kind of hell to save the little girl Newt and comes to face with the ultimate nightmare: the Alien Queen.

The protagonist can be the hero, but it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. This is true especially in ensembles, where the roles of hero, main character, and protagonist can be assigned to different people.

For example, in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, Danny Ocean is the hero and main character—it’s literally about his team. But the real protagonist is the Matt Damon pickpocket character Linus, who spends the entire movie trying to prove his worth and step out from the shadow of his famous (unseen) father. Danny Ocean remains the same person he was at the start of the film, though he succeeds in getting his wife Tess (Julia Roberts) back again.

But sometimes, the hero, protagonist, and main character are not the same person.

The same thing happens in The Dark Knight. Bruce Wayne/Batman is the hero and main character, but he is the same person he was at the beginning. Instead, the protagonist is District Attorney Harvey Dent, who starts out as Gotham’s White Knight and ends up as a “horrifically scarred and tragic figure”. In fact, the film’s title also alludes to Dent as the corrupted White Knight.

The result is that the film is a Shakesperean tragedy wrapped up in comic book trappings, as Dent’s figurative soul becomes the battleground between Batman and the Joker. David S. Goyer elaborates:

We had Batman/Bruce on one side, saying that Harvey Dent represents a good vision of what the city can become, and then we had the Joker on the other side, saying that any man can be corrupted and turned into a villain if you push him hard enough. And the Joker is kind of right, which is why we wrote an ending in which Batman and Gordon conspire to hide that truth from Gotham. They protect the image of Harvey Dent, and Batman sacrifices himself. That makes the ending of The Dark Knight very tragic.

But different doesn’t have to be restricted to the level of designing the story. Sometimes, it can be in the technology itself.

Lesson #6: Embrace The Tools Available To Create A Memorable Cinematic Experience— Or Just Shoot In IMAX!

IMAX has been around for decades, but Christopher Nolan was the person who decided to shoot a major motion picture in that format.

It wasn’t, however, the first time that IMAX was used on a Nolan film. On Batman Begins, visual effects supervisor Janek Sirrs got some IMAX shots of the Chicago landscape to use later as CGI background plates, as the high-resolution image quality and flexibility offered by the format gave his team the option of reframing effects shots as needed. On Nolan’s next film, The Prestige, he tested it out on a visual effect to get an idea of how IMAX worked, confiding in cinematographer Wally Pfister that this was meant to be a test for shooting some scenes on The Dark Knight with IMAX.

The reason IMAX cameras hadn’t been used in a film before was for practical reasons: they were large, cumbersome, and noisy. Nolan knew it wouldn’t work for scenes with dialogue, forget it. But for the action sequences? If astronauts in space and Mount Everest climbers could shoot footage in more dangerous environments with IMAX cameras, then shooting on location in Chicago ought to be doable.

And he would shoot the film’s opening scene with it.

Nolan has developed a reputation as a director with a singular artistic style who also gets butts in seats. I think it’s partly because he also thinks beyond the film and how it will be seen, possibly born out of his days as an independent filmmaker trying to get as many people as he can to watch his films. That’s why he thought about what the teaser trailer for Batman Begins would look like even before he started writing a script: he’s thinking about ways to get his film marketed. This time, he went beyond thinking about a teaser trailer: he envisioned a self-contained prologue featuring the Joker carrying out an ingenious bank heist; it’d be similar to a James Bond pre-titles sequence, one that could stand on its own AND be released early to create buzz for the film.

Shooting the prologue in IMAX came with multiple advantages:

• From a marketing point of view, it’s a unique sell.

• From a visual point of view, it immediately sets itself apart from Batman Begins and declares itself to be a different kind of Batman film.

• From a practical point of view, it allowed Nolan and his team to figure out whether it was possible to film motion pictures with IMAX cameras. If it didn’t work, they could simply go back to film stock and reshoot the prologue without having wasted a lot of money.

Still, Warner Bros. executives were “petrified” about the costs of shooting on IMAX, which was four times the price of regular 35mm stock and processing. Remember, Nolan was still THE Nolan as he is known now.

So Pfister ran the numbers and did his homework; before committing, he had to see if it was possible and affordable to shoot in IMAX. While Nolan read up on the IMAX technical stuff, Pfister spent three months learning the basics. He sent two of his camera assistants and a camera operator to Toronto (the headquarters and birthplace of IMAX) to study the system. They gathered all their information and research and took it to Warner Bros. to explain how he’d do it. The pitch must’ve been convincing because Warner Bros. gave Nolan and Pfister approval to go ahead.

As a result, principal photography began with filming the prologue itself before shooting anything else. That week became “IMAX School” for all involved, learning what it was like to actually to shoot with IMAX cameras. Despite all their prep, they still had to see if the dailies turned out well; if not, they’d abandon shooting in IMAX and shoot normally.

It worked. Everyone was happy, and Christopher Nolan introduced, almost single-handedly, the idea of shooting films in IMAX— twenty years later, after shooting a handful of scenes in IMAX, Nolan would become the first director to shoot an entire film with IMAX 70mm film cameras. Brady Corbet would do something similar with The Brutalist, reviving VistaVision as a format worth shooting feature films on— Paul Thomas Anderson shot One Battle After Another in it, as did Emerald Fennell for some scenes for Wuthering Heights (2026).

If the tools allow you to create a better film experience, use it! Or, you know, shoot it in IMAX. That works, too— it’s what Ryan Coogler did for Sinners and it was glorious.

Lesson #7: Clever Marketing Gets More People Curious To Watch Your Film

It’s not enough to slap the film’s poster on a billboard or take out ads in a magazine anymore because that world has long passed— for better or worse. In fact, it’s DEFINITELY NOT ENOUGH to rely on the familiarity of IP or brands anymore, either.

Look at what happened at the 2026 box office so far: seemingly “safe” bets like Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (Star Wars brand), Supergirl (DC Comics brand), and Masters of the Universe (popular 80s brand) disappointed; while riskier bets like Project Hail Mary, Michael, Obsession, and Backrooms performed much better.6

No. Today, with attention divided between more entertainment options than ever, films have to convince audiences to turn up to watch.

And Nolan is aware of this fact. In fact, going all the way back to Memento, he has used the early web to help promote interest in his films. For that film, Jonathan Nolan himself designed the film’s official website, providing clues and hints to the story without giving away anything crucial, such as a newspaper clipping about Leonard’s murder of Teddy— clicking on highlighted words in the article would lead to more material about the film, such as Leonard’s notes, photographs, and even police reports.

With the Internet becoming a more prominent feature in people’s lives (oh the horror!) and this time with the full backing of Warner Bros.’s coffers, the marketing team leaned heavily into digital marketing and other tactics to drum up interest in The Dark Knight. Once again, Jonathan Nolan got involved, as he and associate producer Jordan Goldberg began the first stages of marketing using presidential campaign–quality political polling to target over eleven million people in over seventy countries to get the word out— a move that The Los Angeles Times called “one of the most interactive movie campaigns ever hatched by Hollywood”.

One of the primary reasons for the early promotional push was to squash the negativity surrounding Heath Ledger’s casting of the Joker7. At San Diego Comic Con, “Jokerized” dollars were scattered around in a scavenger hunt with clues that led to a vantage point where a plane would sky-write a phone number; when people dialed the number, callers would be issued an invitation to join the Joker’s army.

Meanwhile, cards at comic-book stores led to a “Harvey Dent for District Attorney” website. When pixels were erased on the site, users were treated to the “Joker reveal”— the first public image of Heath Ledger as the Joker.

Harvey Dent also became part of the promotional campaign. A fake news site, modeled on the Drudge Report, peddled fake news about the election. (Some fans even went out on the street to support Harvey Dent—a fictional candidate running for a fictional position in a fake election in a city that didn’t exist). When “election time” came, voter-registration cards were sent out in the mail; a direct-action group was created dedicated to supporting Batman through pizza deliveries. Inside the box, people found a Batman mask, propaganda, and directions to an “underground” forum on the Internet, “Citizens for Batman”; they were organizing to meet in Chicago and New York to watch the Bat Signal light up the city skyline.

It didn’t hurt that these tactics also coincided with the 2008 U.S. Presidential elections, which tied into the film’s themes. It also didn’t hurt that this was the same time that people were congregating on the then-new platforms of Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter, where many of the film’s lines—especially the Joker’s—became fodder for memes and remixes. In The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan, Tom Shone describes:

An early viral ad featuring Heath Ledger’s Joker scrawled with the line “Why so serious?” was endlessly remixed, with cats, babies, Miley Cyrus, Al Gore, and then-presidential candidate Obama all given the “Joker treatment.” Left-wing bloggers cried foul; right-wing bloggers claimed credit. In The Wall Street Journal, novelist Andrew Klavan penned an op-ed, arguing that the film was “a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror.” Others on the Left embraced what they saw as the film’s stance against Bush and Cheney’s warrantless surveillance and torture tactics, and the decision of companies like Verizon, AT&T, and Google to turn over more than 1.3 million law-enforcement requests each year to the National Security Agency’s two-billion-dollar surveillance center.

But the film’s biggest publicity boost was both the unexpected and worst one: the tragic and untimely death of Heath Ledger, which ignited interest in the actor’s penultimate role8; his brilliant performance only brought audiences in droves— ultimately, The Dark Knight became the highest-grossing film of 2008, running for a staggering nine months (which seems like a fantasy nowadays), with reissues of the film pushing it past $1 billion, making it the first superhero film to do so9. Its snub for a Best Picture Oscar nomination provoked such an outcry that the Academy changed its rules for the first time to allow up to ten nominees in the category.

Nobody had expected The Dark Knight to perform so spectacularly, especially compared to the relatively modest gains of Batman Begins. Few would have expected a superhero film to be so critically acclaimed outside of fans; when Werner Herzog ran into Nolan after a screening, he congratulated him for making “the most significant film of the whole year”. Nolan thought he was joking but the German director replied, “No, no, no! This is a film of real substance. It doesn’t matter if it’s mainstream or not.”

It was a sequel, yes, but The Dark Knight is almost its own entity. Batman Begins was more of a classical superhero story; The Dark Knight is in new territory. The differences in cinematography, sound, score, and editing allowed Nolan to channel his artistic vision fully into the sequel in a way that he couldn’t with Batman Begins. It is also the one film of his that Nolan would agree is “cold”:

Compared to Batman Begins, The Dark Knight is a cruel, cold film. People talk about my films as being cold, and that’s really the only one where I see that, because the Joker is such an engine driving that film in such awful ways. That’s all the film is, a relentless series of horrible situations contrived by the Joker, and that was always the intent. There was nothing accidental about that. I pitched it in the studio as “It’s a white-knuckle ride—it’s just this descent.”

The Dark Knight is the film that really allowed Christopher Nolan to flex his artistic choices and visions within an established IP no less, and still made it his own. It’s a tentpole feature, yes; but it’s also very much a Nolan film, that addresses themes of surveillance, escalation, and chaos that preoccupies him. It is a personal blockbuster in every sense of the word. And when he proved that he could repeat it, his ascent into the club of A-list film directors only skyrocketed from there on out…

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

And I’ve got to confess: Writing about Harry Potter Films #5-8 has been tough. I’m not the biggest fan of the David Yates-directed installments, but I also wanted to be fair to the films and measure it on their own merits rather than as a Potter fan. Sometimes, though, the Potter fan in me does have some valid points, which only complicated it.

That being said, I know I’ve been more objective than I expected, because for the longest time, I used to consider Order of the Phoenix as the weakest link in the franchise. Now, though, I think that honor goes to a later Potter film; whereas this one has its merits, despite my complaints.

However, stepping back and looking at the franchise as a whole— including its Fantastic Beasts prequels— I hate to say it but… a lot of the things that don’t work for me in the second half of the franchise was largely the responsibility of its director; a man who’d shape the Harry Potter cinematic universe more than anyone else.

Turns out that having one director for several installments can be a double-edged sword.

Harry Potter franchise finds its fourth— and ultimately final— director

Mike Newell was the first to be offered the Order of the Phoenix gig. But after Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, he was done.

Once again, producer David Heyman— now joined by David Barron, who served as an executive producer on Chamber of Secrets and Goblet of Fire— turned to find a new director. Three interesting names were floated as potential candidates.

One was Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the man behind the whimsical Amélie (2002). He declined for two reasons: He was tired after finishing A Very Long Engagement, and would’ve had to start on Order of the Phoenix right away if he said yes; and for him, it didn’t really seem he had anything to contribute. He elaborates:

Everything was ready. The costume design, the story, the casting. I had to just be a director, so I turned it down. Sometimes I regret, and think I probably made a mistake, but this is the story.

Another name that came up once again was Guillermo del Toro— he and Potter would forever be ships passing in the night. This would have been around the same time that he was working on Pan’s Labyrinth; later, his attempts to adapt The Hobbit would also prevent him from directing the last two Potter books. Alas.

For a brief moment, Order of the Phoenix might have been directed by a woman, had Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!) accepted the offer3.

One British candidate in the running was Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake). It seems that producers passed on his vision, which he described as “a tad too graphic and violent for the studio’s taste”. He elaborates: “I did slightly scare them by saying the next Potter has got to be more like The Dirty Dozen. But I’m not going to be one of those directors who isn’t honest about what he intends to do, and then changes everything when shooting has started and it’s too late to fire him.”4

In the end, David Heyman would once again take a gamble by picking yet another unlikely candidate: David Yates. Unlike the previous three directors who’d helmed Potter, the British Yates had only made the one feature film (The Tichborne Claimant) but he had made a name for himself in television, directing gritty miniseries such as State of Play (2003) and Sex Traffic (2004). Heyman must’ve seen something in those shows that made him think Yates was suited for the fifth film. He says:

David Yates has an overwhelming sense of humanity and a tremendous energy about his filmmaking. He’s also confident about handling political subjects in an entertaining way.

For Heyman, Order of the Phoenix was analogous to Germany in the years leading up to World War 2. Elaborating, he says:

This is a world on the verge of war. Clandestine meetings are taking place; people are training and preparing for battle. The politics of Hogwarts and the wizarding world are very much at play here, lending that subtext to the film. We thought [Yates] could handle that brilliantly.

Yates, though, wasn’t sure if he was suited for a big budget studio film. He recalls:

They invited me in to talk about it. I probably gave the worst interview I’ve ever given. It was always the work that got me the gig. If I was ever given work on the basis of my interview technique, I’d still be unemployed. I went in to pitch to David Heyman, and about fifteen minutes into it, I sort of gave up and said, ‘David, this isn’t really working. I’m going to go now.’ I left, and about ten minutes later, he called me and very sweetly said, ‘Look, you’re meeting the studio next week, and I think you should just concentrate on this point and this point and just relax.’ I thought, ‘Bloody hell. He wouldn’t have encouraged me like that if he wasn’t interested in me making this film.’

It was certainly an interesting choice, to say the least. The fifth film came with the biggest price tag yet— an estimated $200 million. This was partly due to the fact that new contracts had to be negotiated with the cast, especially the three leads— in 2000, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson had only signed on for four films. Radcliffe and Grint signed on, but there was a time when Watson was reluctant to return to the franchise. According to Heyman:

For Emma, the decision to return was always harder than for the others. School was important. She yearned for normalcy, for her friends, to play hockey—all the things that a regular child would have but were denied her. We tried as best we could to help her. Friends visited, we provided dance classes and other extracurricular activities, but I think Emma always found it more difficult than ‘the others [did].

Ultimately, Watson did sign on, but it wouldn’t be the first time that she’d waver on being back.

Behind the camera, though, for the first time, a new screenwriter would be joining the new director.

Adapting Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix proves to be more challenging than fans think

In researching the making of Order of the Phoenix, I’ve actually become more sympathetic to the challenge of adapting such a massive book for the screen. Book #5 remains the biggest book in the series, and it covers a LOT of territory, expanding the world massively.

The first four Potter films had all been adapted by Steve Kloves. But this time, he opted out. As Heyman recalls:

I think Steve Kloves found the fourth film very hard, and he had been working on Potter now for seven or eight years, and he felt he needed a break. We asked him again and again, but he decided he wanted time out to work on another project we had together— The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.5

To fill the vacancy, Heyman enlisted Michael Goldenberg, who’d actually been the runner-up choice for adapting Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Goldenberg had had some experience in fantasy family films, having co-written the 2003 Peter Pan. But this would be a different beast altogether. When he and Yates sat down to work on Order of the Phoenix, they knew that they’d have to get brutal in paring it down, both for the runtime and the budget. Adapting Book Five scene-for-scene would push the price tag as high as $400 million. Drastic cuts would have to be made.

One of the first casualties, one that Goldenberg himself hated, was all the sub-plots connected to Quidditch. But, he says, “the truth is that any movie made of this book, whoever made it, that had included the Quidditch subplot would have been a lesser film.”

Goldenberg continues:

As with any adaptation, the main problem is compression. With a 900-page book the basic amount of narrative material isn’t actually much more than in the other books, but it’s a lot of digressions and side journeys and detail. The solution got much clearer when I figured out that the organizing principle of the screenplay was to narrate Harry’s emotional journey.

That was the same guide that Kloves used to adapt Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire, which also allowed them to take creative liberties. One scene Goldenberg worked hard to keep in the drafts included the wizarding hospital St. Mungo’s. He recounts:

One of first things I said to [producer] David Heyman when we were first talking about it was “We gotta keep St. Mungo’s” [the wizarding hospital where Harry runs into schoolmate Neville and learns a sad secret about what happened to Neville’s parents]. In early drafts it was there and you had the Neville scene, but it did slow things up, so we kept trying to compress it until it was basically a fly-through. Toward the end of shooting we had it in but it required a new set. And whatever people think about Harry Potter films, there are not unlimited budgets, and we didn’t really need it to tell the story, so it got cut. But it was something we all held on to until the very end, and I would have liked to see it.

And you know what? I get that! I really do. The Potter fan in me from 20 years ago would wail but from a filmmaking perspective, Goldenberg is right about the justifications to remove both the Quidditch and the St. Mungo’s scenes. The former revolves around Harry getting banned and Ron Weasley’s disastrous Keeper performance until he finds his confidence. Rupert Grint was pretty disappointed about this; in fact, I’ll return to this point later.

What Goldenberg and Yates did try to do was abbreviate as much as possible the myriad stuff that was in the book; one of this was the flashback scene when Harry discovers that his father, James Potter, was a bully; which only gets a few seconds in the film. Goldenberg explains:

There was a much longer version of it at one point, but it’s still in there at least as an idea -- the moment when you see the authority figure you’ve either idealized or demonized revealed as more complicated. It’s an iconic moment when you realize your parents are normal, flawed human beings. That was a motif in the book, this revelation about James Potter being quite bullying and arrogant. And Snape was an outsider in the same way Harry was. It’s a motif that also plays out in Dumbledore’s last scene, where he finally shows his cards and goes from being the omniscient benevolent father figure he’s been throughout the series, to somebody who’s scared. He confesses to Harry that he’s made a strategic mistake by ignoring Harry all year.

Things get trimmed out, but I kept the meat of that in there -- and that was what really gave me the coming-of-age story.

Now, I don’t want to dump over the efforts of adapting this book, which was no way easy, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying that this is the first Potter film where it feels like the adapting knife cut more than just fat. What’s stranger is that the eventual film turned out to be the shortest film at the time of its release— by the end of the franchise, the eighth film would become the shortest.

And here’s the thing: I think that the stuff that ought to have been given priority don’t require major sets or visual effects. It’s the relationships and the smaller moments between the characters. One of the things that definitely got shortchanged was setting up Harry’s and Ginny’s relationship for the last two stories.

The other thing that got the short end of the stick that I think was ultimately detrimental was cutting out the fact that, well, Hogwarts is a school. We get one class with Umbridge and the rest of the lessons are shown in a brief montage; furthermore, Year Five is a pivotal educational moment with the O.W.L. exams, the equivalent of British Ordinary Level exams, but this only gets paid lip service and forgotten.

The third thing: Harry Potter has always been a mystery series, but the mystery doesn’t feel set up in the most exciting way. Throughout the story, Harry is plagued with visions of a strange door, and is being told to close his mind, without really being told why. He does find out why— and it’s a pretty big reveal connected to the prophecy that sent Voldemort after him and setting up his fate: only one of them can live in the end. In fact, the film utterly forgets to resolve one underlying mystery: the identity of the person who sent the Dementors after Harry at the beginning of the story. Now the film does talk about the prophecy and the door, but it’s so rushed that it’s almost an afterthought.

The fourth thing, and this is one that I grieve the most: It cuts out Harry’s sardonic humor from the book. For all the darkness and gloom, Book Harry deals with his frustrations with sarcasm, and there are some real zingers in the novel:

The film omits that, keeping Harry sullen and gloomy throughout, which is honestly a shame because Daniel Radcliffe has demonstrated that he has a good sense of comedic timing and I could easily see him getting some big laughs with some good one-liners.

What I’ve mentioned above wouldn’t require massive sets or visual effects. It just needs a few more scenes and lines of dialogue.

So what gives?

Well… this is where the evidence seems to point to the director.

David Yates wanted to make a film that was dark. In Michael Goldenberg’s own words:

David Yates always referred to it as a political film with a small ‘p’. It’s about a situation that recurs in history about the abuse of power and what happens when citizens being oppressed by that power are forced to fight back. Nobody was interested in overtly political didactics; it was just the context of the story. This film is about when power gets concentrated and human nature kicks in to reestablish equilibrium.

Heyman echoes the sentiment: “This one’s not comedic. It’s very much about the brink of war.”

Credit where credit is due, Yates does bring that ‘political’ part out through both the Order and subsequently Harry’s own legion, Dumbledore’s Army. And throughout the film, it does feel like everyone is bracing themselves for a coming storm. But I think Yates forgets that in such times, people cope with humor and finding the light in the dark. Those moments are necessary because they humanize characters, and help to connect. I mentioned earlier how Book Harry is sarcastic: that’s Harry’s way of coping with all his PTSD and trauma. Giving Radcliffe some one-liners wouldn’t undermine the film’s tone or turn it into a comedy. On the contrary, it would have made Order of the Phoenix much richer. In fact, we did get a glimpse of that version of Harry in the previous film, Goblet of Fire. Newell really captured that aspect of the titular hero quite better than any of the directors— even my favorite, Alfonso Cuarón.

This is also why the exams subplot should’ve been given a little more time. It reinforces that notion that even with a war brewing outside, life still keeps moving, and things as mundane as exams and career choices matter. Yeah, the exams are hinted at, but to a casual viewer who has never read the books, the implications would’ve been lost.

Yates viewed Order of the Phoenix from the perspective of its young characters:

It’s about rebellion, and it’s about understanding the limits of what adults can do and achieve for you. It’s also about discovering how difficult the world can become and how sometimes you have to make your own way.

You know what teenagers sometimes do when they’re rebelling? They get sarcastic. Look at my prescriptions! None of them cost a lot of money! Would it kill to have a little humor?!

One thing I did like was how Goldenberg updated the classic cinematic spinning newspaper technique in Hollywood films for Harry Potter to deliver the exposition of articles in the Daily Prophet and make it more interactive to convey important information. He says:

I thought it was a uniquely cinematic way of using the Daily Prophet newspaper and an elegant way of getting through a lot of exposition. It connected the Hogwarts story with the larger story of what was going on with Voldemort in the real world, and we always wanted to keep that in the forefront.

Michael Goldenberg found these media montages to be a “fun, 1940s-type movie convention” throwback with the prospect of “being able to ‘fly’ through the paper and into the next scene” as “too delicious to pass up”. It also reinforced his view of the newspaper as a character in the film, elaborating:

The media is a character in the book. The Daily Prophet is a force that Fudge is using to shape public opinion and to shape people’s opinions of Harry and Dumbledore at school.

Which is why I thought it was a shame that they didn’t spare a little time for the subplot where Harry fights back by giving an interview in The Quibbler. It was included in early drafts but it didn’t make the shooting script. What’s odd about this decision is that it actually DOES tie into Harry’s emotional journey— the interview helps to shift people’s opinions of him as a liar, which in turn helps him in the healing process.

Now this is where I make a more contentious claim: While David Yates made well-crafted Potter films, I don’t think he quite understood what made it work6.

Take the scene that caused a bit of fan controversy when Harry catches an unexpected glimpse of Voldemort on a train platform, wearing a three-piece suit. Does the Dark Lord look good in a suit? You bet! But was the moment simply a trick of Harry’s imagination, or was Voldemort really there? And why could only Harry see him?

The scene was Yates’s idea, and here’s his reasoning:

I found it interesting to see Voldemort taunting Harry, saying to Harry, ‘I can find you anywhere. All these Muggles don’t realize how dangerous I am, and I’m here. Look at me.’ I found that an unexpected, new threat for Harry to encounter. I know some people found it tricky, but I felt it was useful, to prove that Voldemort could be and was present in the non-wizarding world. [J.K. Rowling] was cool about it. So it was in.

Even though David Heyman signed off on it, it seems that he has a contradictory view of what was happening:

The scene was all in Harry’s head. It was about Voldemort messing with Harry and about highlighting the connection between the two— you can see this as first Voldemort, and then Harry, tilts his head to the side, verifying this.

I know producers and directors don’t always see eye-to-eye, but this is a bit weird to say the least. And also, unnecessary?7

But perhaps the biggest sign is that Yates seems to break some of the story universe’s rules in favor of spectacle.

A story’s universe has to have rules to work. In Toy Story, the rule is that toys aren’t audible when humans are around (except that one time they traumatize Sid); in Ratatouille, all the rats walk on four paws while only Remy stands upright.

In Harry Potter, one big rule is that only wands sharing twin cores can have spells connect, as happened in Goblet of Fire. In Order of the Phoenix— and later in Deathly Hallows - Part 2— that rule got completely ignored when Dumbledore is able to do the same right away when he battles Voldemort8.

And that really is my big complaint about the Yates’s movies: a lot of spectacle but sometimes missing the engine of a well-structured action sequence— and often rushed. It’s like the TikTok equivalent of an action scene before TikTok was ever a thing!

I’ll readily admit that Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix is well-crafted. And under Yates’s direction, the films were financial hits and earned positive reviews— the final film was the highest-grossing entry in the franchise. But Order of the Phoenix is rushed, less enjoyable, and certainly drearier. And some of these aspects would get carried forward. Harry Potter might be growing up but that’s no excuse to lose out the magic that was still retained in the books.

For me personally, this is one change in creative direction that doesn’t quite work. In fact, this is where Chris Columbus’s involvement might have been crucial in retaining the magic that made the franchise so successful in the first place. But Order of the Phoenix, I’d argue, is still a better adaptation than the next one, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince…

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

The 1950s were a remarkable period for cinema. While there had been famous directors, the attention usually was granted to the stars or, in the cases of big names like David O. Selznick, the producer. But in the 1950s, we see film directors becoming names unto themselves— something that would become more prevalent with French critics promoting the ‘auteur theory’ which catapulted the likes of Alfred Hitchcock to prominence.

It was also the time that television was encroaching cinema’s territory, creating a fear that cinema was under attack (something that feels familiar today with social media and streaming), which led to some creative attempts to lure people back to the cinema.

As with past entries, the goal was not to select the definitive “best shots ever” from the “best films ever”. They are simply shots from movies that I like made during this time period.

As with an earlier list of shots arranged in alphabetical order, there are two rules for selecting the films— and thereby, the shots:

1. One film from each year;

2. The same director cannot be featured twice.

What films from the 1950s era do you like best? What shots do you love from them? If your favorite films and shots aren’t included, please share your answers in the comments!

Rashōmon — Akira Kurosawa, 1950

A Streetcar Named Desire — Elia Kazan, 1951

Singin’ In The Rain — Gene Kelly and Stanley Donan, 1952

Le Salaire de la Peur — Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953

Rear Window — Alfred Hitchcock, 1954

The Night of the Hunter — Charles Laughton, 1955

The Searchers — John Ford, 1956

The Seventh Seal — Ingmar Bergman, 1957

Dracula — Terence Fisher, 1958

Some Like It Hot — Billy Wilder, 1959

Thanks for reading! If you liked this essay, you can sign up here for more issues. If you’d like to support Three Left Feet Media, share this newsletter with a fellow film lover you think would appreciate it.

Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

The 1940s were… “interesting”, to say the least. World War 2 was underway; Europe was under attack; America and Japan wouldn’t get involved right away. Over in Hollywood, the Hays Code reigned supreme in its censorship.

And yet, this era yielded some true gems of cinema— and I haven’t even included Citizen Kane!

As with past entries, the goal was not to select the definitive “best shots ever” from the “best films ever”. They are simply shots from movies that I like made during this time period.

As with an earlier list of shots arranged in alphabetical order, there are two rules for selecting the films— and thereby, the shots:

1. One film from each year;

2. The same director cannot be featured twice.

What films from the 1940s era do you like best? What shots do you love from them? If your favorite films and shots aren’t included, please share your answers in the comments!

His Girl Friday — Howard Hawks, 1940

The Lady Eve — Preston Sturges, 1941

To Be Or Not To Be — Ernst Lubitsch, 1942

Shadow of a Doubt — Alfred Hitchcock, 1943

The Uninvited — Lewis Allen, 1944

Brief Encounter — David Lean, 1945

La Belle et la Bête — Jean Cocteau, 1946

That’s some real Freudian imagery right there that’s missing in the Disney version. And the Disney version is the poorer for it.

The Lady from Shanghai — Orson Welles, 1947

The Red Shoes — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948

The Third Man — Carol Reed, 1949

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

The market for low-budget exploitation films was shrinking because the majors were making the same kind of films—science fiction, sword and sorcery, action/adventure, youth comedy, horror films—at an average cost of $15 to $20 million and getting much bigger production value on the screen.”

Weirdly, the very movies that the major studios stopped making— dramas, melodramas, comedies— would get picked up by the independent film producers, and today, move towards TV/streaming. Everything truly is cyclical.

Take a look at the top-grossing films in America between 1978 and 1987 and see if you can spot the difference:

Fewer comedies and dramas, and an uptick in genre fare; though there was still an appetite for big-budget dramas. In 1983, Terms of Endearment was the second-highest-grossing film after Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi.

Fast-forward to 2007…

… to 2017…

… and the picture changes so dramatically it feels like whiplash. The straightforward dramas and comedies are gone, or subsumed into other genres— Jumanji is a comedy! So is Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and Thor: Ragnarok!. Everything is genre genre genre, especially when studios realized this stuff exported well in other countries as language stopped being too much of a barrier issue.

Back to the 1970s.

Star Wars wasn’t the first sci-fi movie made by a big movie studio— although it’s really more space opera— but it was still a genre rarely touched by the majors. The last time it did so was in the late 1960s, such as Fantastic Voyage (1966), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Planet of the Apes (1968). But the the cataclysmic success of Star Wars prompted the big players to sit up and pay attention to all the stuff they’d previously sneered at.

In fact, the big studios copied “The Peter Pan formula” pioneered by independent filmmaking company American International Pictures— or rather, its publicity department— that is STILL being used today, even if they don’t consciously realize it:

1. A younger child will watch anything an older child will watch;

2. An older child will not watch anything a younger child will watch;

3. A girl will watch anything a boy will watch1;

4. A boy will not watch anything a girl will watch2;

Thus, the demographic that they needed to appeal the most to was the 19-year-old male. Ergo, “The Peter Pan Syndrome”.

But that’s a different story altogether. My point is that in 1977, the studios saw that kids were flocking to watch Star Wars, drawing in the kind of audiences that would normally gravitate towards the low-budget stuff, and saw that science fiction was the hot new genre. And 20th Century Fox wanted to capitalize on it.

The only script it had sitting on their shelves from that genre, however, was a story from two relative unknowns: about a crew of space miners who explore a distress call from a strange planet and encounter a terrifying extraterrestrial species…

The studio decided to leap on it.

‘Jaws in space’. That was the pitch.

Simple, memorable, and definitely bound to catch the attention of eager studio executives desperate to be responsible for a colossal-sized hit.

The story of Alien is credited to Dan O’Bannon; although disputes arose over who deserved final screenplay rights. I’ll get to that later, but what is indisputable is that the O’Bannon came up with the idea.

The idea, in fact, was an amalgamation of everything that O’Bannon liked as a child. In fact, he’s famously gone on the record to say: “I didn’t steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody!”

Some of these influences include:

• The Thing From Another World (1951) - Professional group pursued by a deadly alien creature through a claustrophobic environment3

• Clifford D. Simak’s short story ‘Junkyard’ (1953) – A crew discovers a chamber full of eggs on an asteroid

• Forbidden Planet (1956) – A ship is warned not to land on a planet and when they disobey, a mysterious creature picks them off one by one

• Philip José Farmer’s Strange Relations (1960) – Alien reproduction

• Planet of the Vampires (1965)4 – Heroes on unexpected planet discover giant alien skeleton

• EC Comics horror titles – Monsters eating their way out of people

O’Bannon also grew up on a farm near St. Louis, Missouri; his fascination with insects and their anatomies no doubt fueled his interest in non-human features and habits.

I want to pause for a moment here to point out something in the above influences.

Apart from their sci-fi roots, a genre that O’Bannon loved, all of these films and stories came out between 1950 and 1965. O’Bannon- born in 1946- grew up reading and watching these stories as a child. And just as George Lucas did with Star Wars, he took all the things he enjoyed as a child and poured them into Alien.

That’s why it’s important for artists— of all kinds— to read and watch widely especially as children because it helps to:

1. Identify what kinds of stories you like and would like to tell;

2. Be able to borrow so widely and disparately that you end up creating something entirely original out of familiar parts.

The latter is something that I picked up on when studying for my undergraduate degree as a psychology student. I was taught that to write academic papers, we needed to cite at least five papers. Less than five, our paper was at high-risk of being flagged for plagiarism; more than five, our paper would become more original.

Over time, I’ve come to see that the same applies to creativity.

If you borrow from less than five other films/books/ideas, it’s plagiarism or worse, unoriginal.

But if you take from more than five other films/books/ideas, you have something that increasingly becomes more original.

The genesis of Alien began with a short script that O’Bannon wrote years ago called Memory. Nothing came out of it.

In the 1970s, O’Bannon found himself homeless and broke in Los Angeles after Alejandro Jodorowsky’s attempted adaptation of Dune fell through— he’d been hired to supervise special effects. Living on the couch of his friend Ronald Shusett and in need of money, he and Shusett decided to write a spec script that studios would be eager to buy. That’s when they picked up O’Bannon’s unused Memory script. Shusett suggested it with another O’Bannon World War 2 story about gremlins infiltrating a B-17 bomber, only set on a spaceship.

Bit by bit, the script started falling into place. Initially, it was called Star Beast. Later, they changed it because O’Bannon disliked it; noting the number of times that the word ‘alien’ appeared in the script, and liking its simplicity— it was both noun and adjective— they switched it to Alien.

But the two stalled when it came to figuring out how the alien could get onto the ship. It had to be interesting, not merely “it just snuck in”.

One night, Shusett shook O’Bannon awake. He said, “Dan, I think I have an idea: the alien screws one of them [...] it jumps on his face and plants its seed!”

O’Bannon said, “Oh my God, we’ve got it, we’ve got the whole movie.”

Now here comes an interesting part that signals the growing shifts and trends in Hollywood.

At the time they O’Bannon and Shusett took their spec script around, Star Wars still hadn’t released, and the major studios still looked down on science fiction. O’Bannon and Shusett were about to sign a deal with Roger Corman’s New World Pictures— a film that specialized in that kind of sci-fi movie— when a friend offered to get them a better deal and passed the script to Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hill. The trio had formed a production company called Brandywine, and had a deal in place with 20th Century Fox.

They couldn’t have known it at the time, but when Brandywine agreed to pick up the script, it was going to change things.

However, Hill and Giler weren’t satisfied with the script, so they rewrote and revised it several times. O’Bannon and Shusett were less than pleased, because Hill and Giler had very little experience with science fiction. This became a point of tension when it came to the final credit of the screenplay. Hill and Giler, for instance, came up with the android character of Ash and his subplot; across their eight subsequent drafts, they focused mainly on this aspect while writing the dialogue to sound more natural and reducing sequences on the alien planet. But though they wrote the final shooting script, the Writer’s Guild of America ultimately awarded O’Bannon sole credit for the screenplay with Shusett getting a ‘Story by’ co-credit.

Then, in 1977, Star Wars hit. 20th Century Fox, eager to capitalize on the sci-fi interest, found the Alien script and gave it the greenlight.

Enter Ridley Scott, the man who— like George Lucas— would give this sci-fi picture a sheen of respectability and A-grade production value.

At the time that 20th Century Fox hired him to direct Alien, Ridley Scott had only made one film, The Duellists (1977). He wasn’t the studio’s first choice— according to Scott, he was their fifth choice. Not surprising since Scott was new to films— he came from the world of commercials and art— but the other contenders to direct Alien were truly baffling, including Peter Yates (Bullitt), Jack Clayton (The Innocents), John Boorman (Deliverance), and Robert Altman (M*A*S*H*). The first director that Fox wanted was Walter Hill himself, but he declined due to other commitments and his reluctance over the visual effects needed for the film.

Scott’s hiring proved vital in what happened next. The initial budget was $4.2 million, but when Scott created meticulous storyboards for Alien, Fox was so impressed that they doubled the budget.

This is vital because now Scott and his team had more money to create some serious production value, the kind that Roger Corman and other independent filmmakers making sci-fi films could never compete with. Had it not been for Scott, Alien could have looked like a low-budget film; now, it could look as good as Star Wars. Combined with Scott’s fantastic eye for visuals and the rapid advances in visual effects technology, low-budget genre fare would never stand a chance competing with the majors.

This would be critical as both films elevated the visual look and polish of genre fare; which in turn created legitimacy and, dare I say it, respectability. I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if a major studio scores a hit with a ‘romantasy’ story that legitimizes it in the mainstream.

No story about Alien is complete without mentioning Scott’s other crucial decision: to gender-swap the character of Ripley. Originally written as a man, Scott cast a young Sigourney Weaver in the role— something unheard of in the genre. For Scott, it was more pragmatic than gender politics.

I thought, ‘Why not?’ I’ve always gotten along with females, as friends and equals. I never understood the fuss over what roles they should fill. I never saw it as significant, that the hero is a woman.

Even Scott acknowledges that this helped with preserving Alien’s element of surprise, as it carried over a tradition from horror films at the time like Black Christmas (1974), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), and Halloween (1978) in which the girl is the final survivor. In fact, Scott greatly desired to amp up the horror aspect of the film than the science fiction, describing Alien as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of science fiction”. Scott notes:

When you see this pretty woman, or girl, virtually, as Sigourney was in her early 20s, you think she’s going to be the one who goes first, or in the middle of the film. And when she hangs on, and becomes the boss, that surprises people. When Hitchcock did Psycho, he murdered his star in the first 40 minutes. And that shocked us, because we thought, ‘Well, now we’re really vulnerable.’ I think Alien surprises people too, because of their expectations.

Alien celebrates its 47th anniversary this year, becoming a classic that spawned a still-thriving franchise. But it’s interesting that it was one of the films that helped, alongside Star Wars, to legitimize science fiction and space stories in the mainstream, whereas it was previously a niche genre. The same thing happened with superhero comics, especially after Marvel’s Blade (1998), X-Men (2000), and especially Spider-Man (2002) made studios realize that there was a lot of money in adapting comic books, leading to the glut of superhero movies that we’re still dealing with today.

While this meant we got better-looking sci-fi stories, the downside is that the studios encroached the territory of low-budget filmmakers in the independent space; the same space that helped famous film directors, writers, and producers cut their teeth on learning how to make movies.

Francis Ford Coppola. Martin Scorsese. Jonathan Demme. James Cameron. John Sayles. Ron Howard. Peter Bogdanovich. Polly Platt. Gale Anne Hurd. Joe Dante. Curtis Hanson. Robert Towne.

Which is sad because the independent film scene today is not as profitable as it was in Corman’s day. In a bizarre reversal of roles, as the studios started making the type of films that independent filmmakers were famous for, the independent scene started making the type of movies that the studios began to abandon— dramas and comedies.

It makes you wonder: if it becomes possible to create good visual effects at a low cost, could we see the independent scene reclaim genres again?

Everything is cyclical, I guess.

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

Picking these shots, I felt a strange schism when I looked at them— I was thinking about how these images made me feel now, but I also remembered how I felt at the time I watched these films. The films and shots haven’t changed, but the guy selecting them most certainly has… while also still remaining the same in some ways. For better, let’s hope.

Despite the endless laments about the death of cinema, the shots and films on this list prove that the rumors have been greatly exaggerated. The 2010s gave us some wonderful films, and I suspect many of them will become classics in a few decades (if not already!). David Fincher delivered some career-best work, as did Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson. Greta Gerwig adapted a beloved book for a new generation and further established herself as a director to be taken seriously, and despite its 90s setting, Stephen Chbosky made his touchstone novel a film for millennial adolescents. It was a good decade for cinema.

As with the previous entries in this series, the shots I’ve selected aren’t meant to be a list of the definitive “best shots ever” from the “best films ever”. They are images from movies I liked that were made during this decade, that made me think about things.

As with an earlier list of shots arranged in alphabetical order, I’ve used two rules to select the films— and thus, the shots— from the decade:

1. One film from each year;

2. The same director could not be featured twice.

What films from the 2010s era do you like best? What shots do you love from them? If your favorite films and shots aren’t included, please share your answers in the comments!

(NOTE: There will be spoilers below, so proceed with caution!)

The Social Network — David Fincher, 2010

There are so many images to pick from The Social Network, but I’m going to go with this moment when Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) realizes that his best friend Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) played him from the moment that he got into the Phoenix Club. Garfield is the real focus of this medium shot— honestly, what a great actor!— but what’s interesting is that Fincher and DP Jeff Cronenweth also include Eisenberg in the shot, instead of only focusing on Garfield. This visually highlights the relationship between the two characters, but Zuckerberg is blurred, as if to underscore the fallout happening in real time. I also like the way the fluorescent tubelights in the background run diagonally, which prevents the image from feeling flat.

A Separation — Asghar Farhadi, 2011

This shot comes towards the end of Farhadi’s wrenching tale about two families as well as the individuals. The composition here is a masterclass in simple yet subtle composition, placing Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moaadi) on opposite ends of the frame, then further dividing them using a door frame to visually underscore the tattered state of the couple’s relationship where they are no longer seeing each other at the same level. At a practical level, this framing creates layers and depth— which is further enhanced through the long corridor— which only makes the visual more arresting. Here’s an experiment: move Simin to right opposite Nader, and notice how the shot immediately feels less interesting. You don’t need millions to create powerful shots. You just need composition.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower — Stephen Chbosky, 2012

I read Chbosky’s novel when I was 16, the same age as the protagonist Charlie. Even though it was set in the 1990s, the emotions felt very vivid. Chbosky successfully preserved that feeling when he wrote and directed his own adaptation of the book, which is pretty rare. This shot is towards the film’s final moments, recreating the famous tunnel sequence in the book in which Charlie (a pitch-perfect Logan Lerman) finally begins to feel that he is getting better. He’s in the back of the truck, with two of his favorite people in the world in front. The lights in the tunnel, plus the movement of the vehicle, captures that fleeting heady rush of what it’s like to be young. I’m no longer 16 but this story still holds a place in my heart. I’ll close this with Charlie’s final words in the film:

“There are people who forget what it’s like to be 16 when they turn 17. I know these will all be stories someday. And our pictures will become old photographs. And we’ll all become somebody’s mom or dad. But right now these moments are not stories. This is happening. I am here. And I am looking at her. And she is so beautiful. I can see it. This one moment when you know you’re not a sad story. You are alive. You stand up and see the lights on the buildings, and everything that makes you wonder. And you’re listening to that song on that drive, with the people you love most in this world. And in this moment, I swear... we are infinite.“

Before Midnight — Richard Linklater, 2013

I think about this moment a lot. Actually, this entire film is food for thought. If the first two Before movies were fairy tale romances, then Before Midnight shows what really happens after “And they all lived happily ever after”— which is that even Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) have to really work hard at keeping the love and romance alive, which threatens to fall apart after a major argument. But this shot shows the moment in which Céline and Jesse actively try to repair the conflict, the two warily working their way back towards each other. Which, you know, is really really tough. But… I guess that’s the real romance, isn’t it?

The Grand Budapest Hotel — Wes Anderson, 2014

“I apologize on behalf of the hotel.”

Wes Anderson’s film is packed with funny one-liners but nothing captures the absurdity and pathos of Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes) quite like the concierge trying to take back his momentary xenophobic-laced outburst at his protégé Zero (Tony Revolori) by roping in the Grand Budapest Hotel into his apology.

Our Little Sister — Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015

Hirokazu Kore-eda has a knack for composing shots in a manner that feels both realistic and formal at the same time. Here, he captures an almost postcard-like shot with the sisters in front of a panoramic view of the countryside. But it’s not cheap or picturesque for the sake of it— he frames the sisters in a manner that conveys volumes about their relations and feelings towards each other, especially in the way the adult women lean unitedly towards the younger and neglected Suzu (Suzu Hirose), whose existence they’ve only recently discovered, in a way that sets up the dynamic between the new sisters for the rest of the film.

The Handmaiden — Park Chan-wook, 2016

Only Park Chan-wook could find a way to end a scene in which motives are laid bare by staging it in a beautifully composed wide shot that results in the gag where Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) reacts to the discovery that, contrary to thinking that she was deceiving Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee), her mistress was duping her the entire time. In a moment of outrage, Sook-hee accidentally drops Hideko, who had tried to hang herself, causing the latter to start choking as the noose tightens. Park Chan-wook is a master at juggling several emotions and framing his shots artistically, and this is just one such image.

Lean on Pete — Andrew Haig, 2017

Charley (Charlie Plummer) has spent the entire movie on the run, losing first his father and then Pete, the horse he stole, in his search for his Aunt Margy (Allison Elliott). Having finally found both his aunt and a sanctuary, Charley’s emotions finally start to bubble as he confesses about all that happened to him and suffering nightmares about his father and Pete. Andrew Haig and DP Magnus Joenck frame it entirely in a medium shot, using shadows to keep Charley half-cloaked in darkness. The restraint heightens the emotions, delivered magnificently by Plummer.

Cold War — Paweł Pawlikowski, 2018

The tumultuous decades-long love affair between Zula (Joanna Kulig) and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) finally reaches its peak when both are reunited. Zula— who married a man with contacts to free Wiktor from a work camp— is an alcoholic barely keeping it together and pleads for Wiktor to help her. Bathrooms aren’t exactly the most romantic places, yet the sight of the two clinging to each other against the tiled wall at a tilt, creates an impressionable and romantic, if sad, picture of an enduring love. The black-and-white also sells the impression— there is something undeniably romantic about black-and-white imagery.

Little Women — Greta Gerwig, 2019

It might be because I’m older but I think about this shot a lot, the moment when Jo (Saoirse Ronan) wordlessly comforts her anguished and grieving mother Marmie (Laura Dern) over the death of Beth (Eliza Scanlen). Greta Gerwig and DP Yorick Le Saux frame the medium wide shot without overdoing it, lighting the scene through the windows and using a faded blue tint to convey the deep pain over the loss of the youngest March sister.

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

It’s the second longest book in the series, double the size of its predecessor, Prisoner of Azkaban. It was also the darkest story yet, marking a turning point in the overall direction. Harry Potter was growing up; could the films afford to do so too?

As David Heyman, Steve Kloves, and Chris Columbus got to work on making Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the early 2000s, author J.K. Rowling sent them physical copies of the manuscript for Goblet of Fire to help them prepare. Columbus recalls:

We got physical, tangible copies of the manuscript, which was huge. We had a chance to read Goblet of Fire months before it came out. So, it put into effect, basically, a plan for us to be prepared in terms of filming each subsequent movie.

In fact, Columbus suggested to Heyman that Goblet of Fire should be broken into two movies, but Warner Bros. disagreed. Even as early as April 2003, though, there was speculation that it might end up being two films after all, as Heyman gave an update in an interview:

We started work on the script last Monday. We’re going to shoot it as one and see how it ends up. If it’s too long then we’ll make it into two.

Despite Heyman’s willingness to adapt to change and actively take creative risks by hiring unlikely directors, two things raised the specter of uncertainty over the franchise’s future.

The first was Alfonso Cuarón declining to make more than one Potter movie— the production schedule made it too hard to finish Azkaban AND prepare Goblet of Fire. The second— and most concerning— was that Chris Columbus would not be involved anymore with the films from film #4 onward. He was moving back to America to spend time with his family. Looking back, I strongly feel that the franchise lost a little of its magic allure once Columbus was no longer on board— it’s not a coincidence that opinions about the franchise started to split following Goblet of Fire.

Which meant it was time to start hunting for a new director and pray that the magic wouldn’t vanish without Columbus or Cuarón.

Searching for a new director

One director that they approached was M. Night Shyamalan— what’s interesting was that this was the third time they offered him a Potter gig. He’d first been offered for Philosopher’s Stone on Steven Spielberg’s recommendation, then approached again for Prisoner of Azkaban, and once again, for Goblet of Fire. Like Peter denying Jesus, Shyamalan declined three times to helm a Potter film.

Ultimately, Heyman circled back to a director who’d been at the top of the wishlist to direct Philosopher’s Stone: Mike Newell. Newell, the director behind the 1994 hit Four Weddings and A Funeral, had decline that offer because he was in the middle of making another film—1999’s Pushing Tin. Naturally, he was interested in making a Potter movie Pushing Tin backfired on Newell.

On August 2003, Mike Newell was announced as the director for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. And in another first for the franchise, he would be the first British director to make a Harry Potter movie.

In the end, Goblet of Fire becomes one movie

Mike Newell believed that Goblet of Fire should be one film and his explanation was simple:

I thought that while there was enough content in the book to make two movies, there wasn’t really enough story to make two. Its big, driving story was sufficient for one film.

Now plenty of Potter fans, especially those who don’t have a background in writing or filmmaking, might find Newell’s reasoning unforgivable— bordering on sacrilegious even!— but the fact of the matter is… he’s actually right: Goblet of Fire IS one story. Split it in two, you get two half-stories, neither of which would be completely satisfying.

Let’s do a thought experiment.

Let’s say we split Goblet of Fire into two movies. Where would be the best place to end the first film?

The story is built around the Three Tasks, so the first question is do you split it before the Second Task or after?

If you split it before the Second Task, Goblet of Fire - Part 1 spends a lot of time treading water, and Goblet of Fire - Part 2 becomes crammed with a lot of stuff.

If you split it after the Second Task, the reverse occurs: Part 1 is too crammed, and Part 2 has little to do.

Okay, you argue, but it could have been a three-hour-plus movie and fitted in more. To which I’d say Goblet of Fire ended at 157 minutes, so it was already near the three-hour mark in its current form.

As much as I would’ve liked to have seen some of the things that got left out— the Quidditch World Cup match in proper; Hermione campaigning to free house elves, and certainly Dobby— they would just have been extra baggage. In fact, while the upcoming HBO series has the advantage of runtime (if the first season has eight episodes and each episode is an hour, that’s eight hours of storytelling), I wouldn’t be too surprised if the eventual adaptation of Goblet of Fire follows a similar path as the film and leaves some plots on the floor; the material is enough for one season instead of two.

For the film adaptation, Alfonso Cuarón’s guide for Azkaban became the North Star once again: Writer Steve Kloves and Newell focused only on the narratives connected to Harry’s point of view and his emotional journey. That being said, I readily concede that the adaptation shortchanged both Voldemort’s and Barty Crouch’s backstories, something that would have have enriched the film.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as thriller with a dash of ‘Bollywood’

Newell made Heyman nervous when he said that he wanted to make Goblet of Fire like a “Bollywood film”.

“I love Bollywood films, but that wasn’t quite what I had imagined,” recalls Heyman.

Luckily (for Newell and us!), Heyman came to understand what he meant. He continues:

There is no singing or dancing, but of all the films, Goblet of Fire has the most colors. There’s teenage romance, the glamorous Yule Ball, the theatrical Quidditch World Cup, and the spectacular Triwizard Tournament.

Newell also sought a meeting with his predecessor, Alfonso Cuarón, who asked if he wanted to see about forty minutes of Azkaban that was already cut. Newell recounts: “That’s a very generous thing to do, because you do feel very private and defensive about those very early cuts.”

But what Newell watched stunned him. “[Cuarón] had done all the things that I wanted to do,” he admitted.

Still, Newell had his own strengths to bring. He wanted to depict the youthful rebellion found in a British boarding school, something he knew since he’d been to a British public school as a child, as well as drawing out the anxieties and emotions of being an adolescent. “[Harry Potter] needs his friends and relationships with the people around him. We need to see moments of anxiety and vulnerability,” he explains.

The other element that drew him to the Goblet of Fire, one that would define the visual approach of the film, was a new type of story previously unexplored in the books: a thriller. Newell elaborates:

[Goblet of Fire] was a great thriller— a story about a man who didn’t know that he was in danger and then, when he found himself to be in danger, had no idea why. It was a kind of paranoid thriller, like Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, where Cary Grant has no idea why he’s being chased, but he is, and he’s getting in worse and worse trouble. I wanted to make a thriller like that.

Now that he mentions it, Harry dangling off a castle tower roof while a dragon snaps at him does give strong North by Northwest vibes.

Thus, he decided that the thriller genre would be the “shape” of the film… just one with dragons and wizards. For this, Newell applied a cold blue tint to the film, emphasizing the shadows and underscoring the darkness of the story; building up on the desaturated color palette from Azkaban. It was another example of the Harry Potter films flexing its cinematic confidence; Newell inherited several of the crew from the previous films— including production designer Stuart Craig, set decorator Stephenie McMillan, costume designer Jany Temime, visual effects supervisor Tim Burke, and makeup effects designer Nick Dudman, to name a few— while bringing back a past Potter alumnus, cinematographer Roger Pratt (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets)1 to bring the story to life.2

The thriller element worked well to mark the shift in the tone of the overall story, as Harry Potter finds himself, for the first time, unprotected from other sinister forces at work. Actor Daniel Radcliffe explains:

Harry’s world is completely shaken when, for the first time, he sees Dumbledore as just an old man who is powerless to intervene or protect him when he’s thrust into the Triwizard Tournament. Something is trying to get a hold of Harry, and Dumbledore doesn’t know how to deal with it. We realize that Hogwarts is not the safe place it used to be3. Harry’s life is in danger, and he has no one to turn to for guidance.

And this, dear reader, is the reason why we have this infamous meme.

Instead of playing the moment calmly as described in the book, Michael Gambon opted to show his character’s normally collected mask slipping for a moment. “Dumbledore is no longer in control, and he’s frightened,” said Gambon. “Although he pulls himself together in the end, he panics, and for the first time, Harry and the audience see Dumbledore as a man who isn’t perfect, which is very unnerving.”

I’m sure fans will be split even after that explanation, but I personally find that it adds a touch of humanity to the otherwise Machiavellian Dumbledore from the book— and yes, Dumbledore IS Machiavellian! It takes a certain type of person to prepare and train a young boy from an early age to march to his death in order to ultimately vanquish Lord Voldemort.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is also the most action-packed story in the franchise yet thanks to the three Tasks. Despite the box-office performance of the last two sequels, Warner Bros. gave it the biggest budget yet—an estimated $150 million, excluding marketing costs. Even then, it would be curtailed where required.

For instance, while the book has four dragons, the film really only shows one: The Hungarian Horntail, for which practical and CGI effects were used.

For the first glimpse of the dragon in the woods, the production team repurposed and converted the Basilisk from Chamber of Secrets into “a simple puppet”. According to effects supervisor Nick Dudman, people hid behind the wings to make it look as if it was moving, and fixed a flamethrower in its mouth to make it seem it was breathing fire. As Dudman recalls fondly:

I stood there looking at a fire-breathing dragon shaking a cage to pieces in front of me. And I thought, this is fantastic. This is what I joined up for.

For the Horntail’s full appearance, it was created entirely with CGI, though visual effects supervisor Jimmy Mitchell and production designer Stuart Craig went out of their way to distinguish their dragon from other movie dragons. Mitchell explains:

… even though [the dragon] is a mythical creature, our goal was to create some realism. Stuart Craig and I discussed whether it should be a quadruped or biped with wings. We decided that as dragons are so closely associated with dinosaurs, we would give it a raptorlike movement with bat wings. Then we aged it and tore up its wings to make it look as if the creature had lived for a number of years.

To mollify fans for not showing any Quidditch matches— the first film (though not the last) in the series to do so— the First Task was modified to the dragon breaking its chains to chase Harry around the castle, giving Goblet of Fire its first true action set piece. Radcliffe recalls filming the battle as “very physical and challenging, even scary at times”:

There was one stunt where I fall down a roof and I find myself literally dangling by my ankles upside down and forty feet up in the air. I’m dropped suddenly and find myself hurtling towards the ground headfirst. I knew it was safe because our stunt team is so brilliant. But you do feel your life flashing before your eyes just for a second!

How Goblet of Fire built the largest water tank in Europe for the Second Task

That, however, was only a prelude to the film’s most complicated set-piece: the Second Task which takes place entirely underwater4. Newell and the team did initial tests of shooting the scene “dry for wet”, a decades-old technique of shooting in dry environments and then using sound, atmosphere, and visual effects to simulate being underwater. Some of the most famous examples include:

• Titanic: James Cameron used it with submarine models to match the footage he had personally shot at the wreckage site

• Aquaman: All the underwater scenes

• The Lord of the Rings: The scene where Sam nearly drowns in the lake and when Frodo falls into the Dead Marshes

• The Shape of Water: the opening and ending scenes.

But dissatisfied with the results, they realized that the scenes would have to be shot underwater for real. Only few films have attempted this, notably Thunderball (1965) and The Abyss (1989), for good reason: it’s HARD.

To start, they built the largest water tank in Europe, measuring sixty feet by twenty feet by twenty feet. It was special effects supervisor John Richardson who lobbied to build the tank as big as possible, even over the objections of the others. He had the last laugh, though, recalling:

Everybody thought I was mad, [but] to their credit, they all came up at the end of the movie and said I was right, which was nice. Why we needed such a large tank became apparent when we added Daniel [Radcliffe], Stanislav [Ianevski], Robert [Pattinson], and/or Clémence [Poesy], the stunt and diving team, the camera crew, the huge backlit blue screen, and the camera equipment.”

Radcliffe spent six months scuba diving and training for the scene, and would spend over 40 hours underwater over the three weeks it took to film. An underwater track was also built for the camera operator and a diving chamber for the cast to rest in, which contained pure air to breathe and also had a camera and two-way microphone in it to talk to the director.

Bringing Lord Voldemort to life

Not all challenges are set pieces; for the Goblet of Fire, one major challenge was creating the appearance of arch-enemy Lord Voldemort. For Philosopher’s Stone, old Voldy appears only as a face via computer-generated effects and actor Ian Hart (who also played Professor Quirrel) providing both the voice and face source. But this time, Voldemort returns to physical form, and an actor was needed. Mike Newell always wanted Ralph Fiennes, though the actor would not be cast until the film was halfway through the shoot!

Fiennes was hesitant to accept the role at first. He recalls not knowing much about the world of Harry Potter when Mike Newell approached him, but when he spoke to his nieces and nephews “to get the range of who this guy was”, he realized it was one of the best villain roles around. He asked Newell if he could come down and see some of the film before he gave an answer; Newell obliged. The trip would convince Fiennes:

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to play the part for various reasons until I saw this incredible image—they’d taken photo-graphs of me and morphed them into this frightening, reptilian-looking creature. I got a real buzz off it, and that’s pretty much when I thought this would be cool to do.5

It wouldn’t be Fiennes’s first rodeo playing a chilling villain, having nabbed an Oscar nomination a decade earlier for his portrayal of Amon Göth in Schindler’s List. Once again, Fiennes brought his actor training in approaching a character referred to as “the personification of evil”. He explains:

These labels of ‘evil’ and ‘good’ are kind of useless for actors. I said to Mike, we have to give him human qualities. I wanted him to be really deeply, humanly evil, not just an idea of evil, and have it come from fear, frustration, and unhappiness. He’s a rejected child, and that can be the place where hatred, anger, and jealousy fester. The book details the idea of love being repulsive to Voldemort. You can’t help thinking that he’s been cheated of it, so therefore it becomes a thing to despise and destroy. That all made sense to me.

It’s hard to know whether Fiennes came up with this view prior to shooting the film or in hindsight when recounting his experiences; if the former, it’s an eerily accurate glimpse into the character before the release of Half-Blood Prince, which confirmed that Voldemort was the child of a loveless marriage (to put it mildly).

The filmmakers took a few liberties with Voldemort’s appearance. For instance, they opted not to make his eyes red as it was felt that red contact lenses would cause viewers to focus more on the color than on the lack of emotion behind the eyes. Heyman and Newell also clashed over the issue of Voldemort’s nose— a sentence that becomes much funnier when you type it or say it out loud. Newell was against removing the character’s nose, arguing that it would mess up the performance and everything would become about the nose But Heyman, who’d been determined to be as faithful as possible to the books, argued that the villain had to look like the book, at least to a certain degree. They did a lot of tests, and kept going back and forth until Heyman won. Newell, for his part, was gracious enough to admit: “I’m very, very stubborn about stuff like that and, as you can see, not always right.”

The funny thing is that if you look at the Ian Hart portrayal of Voldemort in Philosopher’s Stone, the character had red eyes and a nose! I would even argue that, sans nose, this version of Voldemort was more accurate to the books than Fiennes’ appearance. Fiennes, though, brings a certain menace and charm to the character that makes him much more unsettling than any contact lenses could.

The effects team was asked if they could create Voldemort’s snake-like nose— or lack of nose— with a prosthetic but Nick Dudman said no, it wouldn’t work. In the end, CGI was used to remove the actor’s nose in post. The filmmakers still checked in with the actor to make sure he was okay with them altering his appearance, though. To their relief, Fiennes agreed once his worries about prosthetics blocking his expression were appeased. He said:

It’s the sort of part where you are easily tempted to cover an actor. They only put on pieces to cover my eyebrows, but I wear nothing around my mouth or neck, so the muscles of my face were not held back by too much stuff stuck onto them. I would prefer to do it just by the energy and through the acting of it, rather than through how it looks. Having said that, I would think everyone’s very pleased with the look. It’s simple and strong.

Fiennes’s transformation was so effective that when his nieces and nephews visited the set, they didn’t recognize their uncle since he had “no hair and no eyebrows”, “horrible, yucky teeth”, and “pale, spindly hands with long, long nails on them.”

For his introduction and reveal, Newell gave Fiennes a great suggestion: Since Voldemort was in a new body, he should be “testing” it. Fiennes recounts:

We see him touching his head, feeling his face, his eyes pop open6. We see him test this whole new body for the first time, just sort of feeling how a muscle might move, or what it’s like to walk again.

Newell also told Fiennes to lean into Voldemort’s unpredictable temperament and show “a few moments of craziness”. The actor shares:

[Mike Newell] was very keen to explore the unexpected mood swings of Voldemort, that we had these moments of real, violent anger and explosive rage. You don’t quite know when he’s going to change or what he’s going to do. So there are moments when anger spits out at Harry, but there are other moments when Voldemort is almost pleasant. You sense the danger underneath something soft and silky.7

To maintain the enmity between the characters, Radcliffe and Fiennes avoided speaking to each other during the shoot. But Heyman recalls the older veteran actor’s generosity to the younger star:

There’s a scene where Harry is trapped by Voldemort in the arms of the Angel of Death in the graveyard, and the Dark Lord is taunting Harry. For the shots on Dan when Ralph was off-camera, Ralph would go up to him and shout insults at him to get him into as angry a place as possible. It was electric.”

Though even Fiennes admits: “It was a challenge to be really horrible to Harry Potter, because everyone loves him.”

In a long-running franchise, how much creative liberties can filmmakers take without breaking what works?

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the franchise’s biggest swing yet— and riskiest. Alfonso Cuarón’s creative reinvention earned acclaim from critics and fans, and though it made good money, its box-office receipts were less than the first two films. You can probably imagine the concerns that despite the phenomenon of the books, box-office takings of subsequent films would decline.

Cuarón’s creative risks gave Mike Newell permission to take a few of his own— imbuing the film with a distinct Britishness absent in the previous films, playing up the boarding school atmosphere, and amping up the heady mix of adolescent emotions and hormones. It’s the film in which the characters develop crushes—Harry’s pining for Cho Chang (Katie Leung)—and mingle with members of the opposite sex as potential love interests. It’s also the film in which Harry and Ron realize that Hermione was a “girl” when they see her in her Yule Ball dress— which also triggers Ron’s feelings as he realizes for the first time, though refuses to acknowledge, that he has feelings for Hermione and is jealous to see her with another guy. There is a definite rambunctiousness and energy to the proceedings, but there is also a deepening darkness. This is the the first Harry Potter film to end on a slightly downer note, with the death of Cedric Diggory (played by future Batman Robert Pattinson). Harry Potter was growing up, the story was getting darker, and the world more dangerous.

Would audiences continue to show up?

They did.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the highest-grossing film of 2005, beating Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith for the crown, and became the second highest-grossing film in the Potter series, a significant upswing from the previous two films.

This is where it gets a little more, well, interesting.

Critical reviews were quite positive, similar to that of Prisoner of Azkaban. Consider the scores on Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes for both films:

Prisoner of Azkaban:

Metacritic: 82
Rotten Tomatoes: 90%

Goblet of Fire:

Metacritic: 81
Rotten Tomatoes: 88%

However, audiences and fans were a little less enthusiastic about Goblet of Fire:

Prisoner of Azkaban:

Metacritic: 8.4
Rotten Tomatoes: 86%

Goblet of Fire:

Metacritic: 7.9
Rotten Tomatoes: 74%

While Rotten Tomatoes shouldn’t be gospel of how a film audience feels, there is a sense that some fans were a little more split on the creative direction that Goblet of Fire took.

Personally, I do think that Chris Columbus’s absence is felt here. Goblet of Fire carries over that sense of joy and wonderment about the wizarding world— there’s literally a moment where Harry says, “I love magic”— but something is missing a little, especially when compared to Azkaban. I do wonder what the film— and the rest of the franchise, for that matter— might have looked like if Columbus stayed on in a creative capacity.

I also this is where the HBO series will have a chance to stand apart from the films and distinguish itself— not just by putting in all the stuff in the book left out, that’s a terrible way to adapt it, but by putting a different spin on the material, from both a narrative and visual perspective.

Still, this much was irrefutable: David Heyman had delivered four successful blockbuster hits in a row, proving that there was plenty of life— and money— in the Harry Potter film series. But the fifth film would prove to be a major challenge: the Order of the Phoenix book was the biggest and most complex yet. On top of that, the contracts of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson were up— they only signed on for four films. Would they return? If any of them chose not to, would they recast? Producer David Heyman was about to gamble once again instead of simply repeating what worked earlier. Nothing about Harry Potter would ever be certain…

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Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes

Up until this point, many of the movies through my Film Shots Of The Decade series (see here for Film Shots of the 1960s, Film Shots of the 1970s, Film Shots of the 1980s, and Film Shots of the 1990s) were films that I watched much, much later (that should give you a rough idea of my age). But at least half the films on this list, I’ve watched— more or less— around the time that they were released, so it’s starting to bring back certain memories.

As with the previous entries in this series, the shots I’ve selected aren’t meant to be a list of the definitive “best shots ever” from the “best films ever”. They are images from movies I liked that were made during this decade, that made me think about things.

As with an earlier list of shots arranged in alphabetical order, I’ve used two rules to select the films— and thus, the shots— from the decade:

1. One film from each year;

2. The same director could not be featured twice.

What films from the 2000s era do you like best? What shots do you love from them? If your favorite films and shots aren’t included, please share your answers in the comments!

(NOTE: There will be spoilers below, so proceed with caution!)

You Can Count On Me — Kenneth Lonergan, 2000

Sammy Prescott (Laura Linney) and Terry Prescott (Mark Ruffalo) only have each other in the world, having lost their parents quite young. Sammy wants her wayward brother to stay, but can’t have him in the same house. Terry decides to move again, but before he leaves, brother and sister reunite. Kenneth Lonergan frames the two in a tight medium with shallow depth of field, keeping the focus on the Prescott siblings, which only emphasizes the fact that they’re all they’ve got, which makes it easier to reconcile before Terry departs. Linney’s coat draped over the bench in the left corner is a nice touch— no really, crop the image and you’ll realize that the shot is missing something.

Y tu mamá también — Alfonso Cuarón, 2001

In this fun road trip that no one will forget, this moment occurs right after the two boys Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael García Bernal) have been boasting about their sexual experiences to Luisa (Maribel Verdú), but when Luisa asks something provocative, the two boys react comically just as the car radiator packs up. It’s a punchline (the boys’ reaction) on top of a visual punchline (the radiator choosing to break at that moment) layered with the realization that for all their boasting, these boys aren’t really prepared to deal with a woman who can talk about sex.

Cidade de Deus — Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002

Cidade de Deus is not about the Mafia, but it’s the exact kind of crime movie that Martin Scorsese would make, one that blends social drama, politics, violence, and laughter indiscriminately. Take this shot in particular: the villainous Li’l Zé has just committed a horrible crime— he raped a girl who turned him down, beat up her peaceful boyfriend, Knockout Ned, and then walked away. But much later, Li’l Zé stops and turns around, perturbed. Why did he let Knockout Ned live? He’s so baffled that it’s hard not to laugh, only to feel horrible about laughing at the idea that he’s talking about killing someone, but that’s the thing: City of God feels alive and full of three-dimensional characters in moments like this. This medium shot is the tail end of a sped-up crane shot that adds to the effect, conveying the speed at which the thought hits Li’l Zé, plus actor Leandro Firmino’s delivery really sells the moment.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King — Peter Jackson, 2003

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is packed with bombastic epic images that look like David Lean’s compositions on steroids, in the best sense! But against all the staggering wide shots and the grand battles— not to mention the stakes for the very freedom of Middle-Earth— it is this medium close-up of an exhausted and bleeding Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) that sticks out for me, as they embrace each other and wait to die after successfully completing their mission. It reminds us that ultimately, amid all the scale, this is a story about two ordinary small folk who risk everything to save the world. Not for glory, not for deeds, but to protect their home. As Frodo said: “I’m glad to be with you, Samwise Gamgee. Here at the end of all things.”

Sideways — Alexander Payne, 2004

Poor Miles. That is the face of a man who knows he has colossally fucked up his chance to kiss a beautiful woman who just made a pass at him. It’s funny and pathetic and sad all at once, a sentiment that is only enhanced with the film’s warm yellow light falling on Paul Giamatti’s face in this medium shot, which prevents the actor’s brown clothes from seeming dull and muddying the image. Virginia Madsen’s red pullover in the right foreground adds a splash of color (as does a bit of her blonde curls in the top-right corner). In fact, having Madsen in the shot instead of just framing Giamatti alone only makes it funnier as he fumbles, so you can actually feel his opportunity slip away in real time.

Munich — Steven Spielberg, 2005

Munich was the first Steven Spielberg film that I watched in the cinema. I was 10, in the early months of deciding that I wanted to make films for a living, and learning about directors. I didn’t know a lot about Spielberg, but I knew that he was a famous director, so I begged my parents to take me to watch it. I don’t think my poor parents, as well as my brother and grandfather— who tagged along to watch— knew what the film was about or they might have refused. As it is, a lot of the political stuff flew over my head. But I was still enthralled by Munich and was able to follow the story for the most part. This scene stuck in my head, the part where they kill a Dutch contract killer on her boat in retaliation for killing one of their own. When Eric Bana and a pre-Bond Daniel Craig screwed the pneumatic tubes to shoot her, I remember being overwhelmed by the brutality and coldness of her execution. I knew why they were doing it. But even at 10, I could sense Avner’s ambivalence and his resolve for the mission wavering. Many years later, I rewatched it and realized that Spielberg had made a rare film that actually questioned about the price of war that is still raging on between Israel and Palestine. Ten-year-old me may not have understood the politics, but he certainly knew enough to know that this was a fine film.

Pan’s Labyrinth — Guillermo del Toro, 2006

Pan’s Labyrinth shattered the myth for me that fairy tales ended happily. Not here. Even after many re-watches, when I know how it ends, this image of Ofelia bleeding to death still hits hard. Harder still is watching Mercedes (Maribel Verdú) knowing that there’s nothing she can do to save the child, except to comfort Ofelia by humming her a lullaby. The red of the blood stands out under the blue color grading, making it all the more vivid. Which only makes it more painful to watch.

4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days — Cristian Mungiu, 2007

This moment in Cristian Mungiu’s film comes after a really bleak series of events— though bleak is an understatement— which only heightens everything. Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) has returned from the hotel where her friend Găbița (Laura Vasiliu) has just had an illegal abortion performed by a guy whose payment includes sex, and now she’s sitting there at her boyfriend’s mother’s dinner party listening to adults talking about trivial stuff and doing the thing that adults do where they bash the generation after them for not having the same values as they do. Watching Otilia sitting there silently as the older generation around her jabber is akin to being waterboarded, especially as the camera remains stationary throughout the scene, with Otilia hemmed in. Given that we know what she has just been through— and given that the film is set during the 1980s, when dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule was in full swing and abortion was illegal— the older generation’s hypocrisy pricks like hot needles. By choosing not to cut away or zoom in or out, this shot becomes increasingly uncomfortable to watch. Also, everyone needs to watch this movie before they start talking about abortion— because it puts a human face to a topic that is becoming increasingly polarized.

The Dark Knight — Christopher Nolan, 2008

I remember the moment I learned about Heath Ledger’s death in January 2008. I was watching the news as part of a class assignment where I had to write down five headlines for a language course, when the chyron under the news program announced that actor Heath Ledger had passed away. I knew he was starring in The Dark Knight so I was a bit stunned. In my world at the time, the concept of an actor dying before their film was finished or released was new. And when The Dark Knight released, like many millennials, I remember it hit with the explosive force of a bomb, namely Ledger. Everyone was enthralled and quoting The Joker like it was Scripture. Especially online. It took me MANY years later to realize that The Joker was NOT a character to be idolized, even if he was a fascinating supervillain. In the hands of Ledger, the Joker became the embodiment of chaos, an online troll in a purple suit and completely unstoppable. In 2024, I caught The Dark Knight on IMAX, and this image— one of Ledger’s final onscreen appearances— is still on my mind. Despite being caught and defeated by Batman, he has one last cruel trick left to play: He reveals that he brought down Harvey Dent. In the background, Gotham is upside down, but the Joker is the right-side up. And he loves it.

Coraline — Henry Selick, 2009

Coraline Jones is not likeable, especially for a girl, which makes her such a realistic character. In fairness, it’s hard not to blame her— all she wants is a little attention from her loving if absent-mindedness and busy parents. But this shot is an understated heroic moment: Coraline has escaped the clutches of The Beldam but her parents are now trapped. Coraline knows she has to go back. She’s scared to, but she must. It’s like Alice in Wonderland but so so much darker.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this essay, you can sign up here for more issues. If you’d like to support Three Left Feet Media, share this newsletter with a fellow film lover you think would appreciate it.

Long live the movies!

D.L. Holmes