Making movies matter on mobile

Making movies matter on mobile
Director Ridley Scott went on the offensive against technology this week, claiming during an appearance at the Venice Film Festival that viewing on mobile handsets, portable devices and PC screens is killing the art of filmmaking. "We try to do films which are in support of cinema, in a large room with good sound and a big picture," Scott told reporters. "But we're fighting technology. While it has been wonderful in many aspects, it also has some big negative downsides."

If the comments above were credited to a hack like Michael Bay or Brett Ratner, I wouldn't think twice about them, but Scott is a different story--he's the man responsible for Blade Runner, the most profound science-fiction film of the last quarter century, and his unwillingness to embrace the new storytelling, production and distribution possibilities inherent in the PC and mobile platforms is far more discouraging. Digital channels promise to open many more doors than they close, and if the limitations of the smaller screen portend doom for any segment of filmmaking, it's almost certainly the endless parade of big-budget, over-the-top popcorn movies built on special effects and computer-generated imagery--i.e., the kinds of films most dependent on the state-of-the-art sound and image Scott champions. No great loss.  

Hollywood has a long history of knee-jerk reactions to new platforms, of course. The movies were afraid television would spell their demise. Didn't happen. Television was frightened home video would bring its end. Also didn't happen. Mobile devices and PCs are simply the latest threat to the old ways of thinking and doing, or the latest opportunity--depends solely on your creative perspective. Independent filmmakers are already seizing the moment: In the past year, both the Sundance Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival launched mobile initiatives, and it's difficult to imagine an A-list filmmaker with a penchant for experimentation--a Steven Soderbergh or a Richard Linklater, perhaps--wouldn't relish the challenge of writing and directing a no-budget feature expressly for smallest-screen viewing.

It's the promise of a return to lower budgets and bigger ideas that's most exciting--after yet another summer of virtually nothing but soulless sequels and overblown remakes, who doesn't want to see something new and different? The "large rooms, good sound and big pictures" Scott celebrates have nothing to do with a movie's overall quality. Just because you can't make a Spider-Man 3 or Transformers that flourishes on a mobile handset doesn't mean the platform is fundamentally flawed--it simply means that the rules must change, and that films produced for new-media screens must emphasize dialogue over action, close-ups over CGI and reality over fantasy. At the same Venice press conference, Scott himself admitted "I think movies are getting dumber, actually. Where it used to be 50/50, now it's 3 percent good, 97 percent stupid…commerce is taking over art." It's a shame he's already dismissed a viable solution to the problem. -Jason