Who are you going to believe, Oscar-winner Paul Thomas Anderson or Vin Diesel.
Anderson says his fellow filmmakers should focus on bringing better dialogue to cinema. He said so in the most gentle way possible, but we still got the message.
What I would like to see more of is more writing, more solid writing in filmmakers coming up. The writing underneath [the great filmmaking] has to be so foundational and so strong.
If you've been to the theater recently, you know what he means. It's why some feel, or fear, that A.I. could do just as good of a job of hammering out scripts as your average scribe.
Meanwhile, Diesel says he's read a killer screenplay, one that drove him to tears. The movie? "Fast Forever," the final film in that high-speed franchise.
I just read the Fast Forever script by Mike Lesslie. It is the best script I have read in decades ... If that wasn’t enough, he then added, “I am still crying.
Two very different artists with very different takes on the modern state of screenwriting.
The comments point to a larger problem in La La Land. Many modern screenplays stink. Flat writing. Anachronistic dialogue. Tepid jokes. Poor character arcs. Even "The Odyssey," a guaranteed Oscar favorite and box office sensation, is getting hammered for some of its clunky exchanges.
And then there's "Supergirl."
The new DC film flopped in theaters. That's not breaking news. And the clunker deserved to stumble in the competitive movie season. What's lesser known about the film? Producer James Gunn, overseer of the revamped DC movie universe, said he greenlit the project, in large part, due to his love for the movie's screenplay.
I didn’t necessarily know that Supergirl would be the second movie we were going to make, but Ana [Nogueira] wrote an incredible script, and then we hired an incredible director. We’re going to do this movie after Superman because he was the best option.
Really? That screenplay? Incredible!
Recent film screenplays may be suspect, but we can't always blame the screenwriters. They're often among the more abused figures in the filmmaking process. They hand their scripts over to a studio, a director, or a producing team. Then, more often than not, their handiwork gets rewritten by any number of people.
A-list actors who want their lines written a certain way. Co-screenwriters tasked with "fixing" the words in question. Sometimes it's a combination of the two.
Either way, their name may appear in the credits, but sometimes they may not recognize their handiwork in the finished product. It's just the way it works, and most scribes begrudgingly accept that status quo.
Screenplay blather often leads to actors pushing the boundaries of the truth.
It's one thing for someone of Anderson's stature to address the screenplay status quo. He's delivered some of the better movies of the past 20-odd years, including "Boogie Nights," "Magnolia" and "There Will Be Blood."
Hearing Diesel talk up a "Fast" franchise extender as a beautifully written work strains credulity.
Diesel remains a popular film star, but no one points to any given "Fast & Furious" installment and says, "man, that dialogue really made me think."
