there's been a shift...

Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh (in an interview with fellow director Richard Lester):
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SS:  Whenever I'm on a panel anywhere, the question always comes up:  'Why are films so violent, and isn't that provoking more violence?'  All I can say to people is that (a) when people stop going to see these films they will stop being made -- this is a business driven completely by money.  So somebody is not being straight here, because everyone is complaining about this and yet everyone seems to still go and see these films.  And (b) these same films are shown all over the world, and in England and in Japan and in France people are not being shot in the street because they don't have access to guns like we do in America....

All that is to say, I think the ultimate responsibility has to be the film-maker's.  I saw Natural Born Killers on Times Square when it opened, and to sit in that audience and feel the crowd being whipped up and excited by the violence in that movie was really disturbing.  I thought, 'What possible purpose is this serving?'  The culture in America had moved beyond the point of satirizing that issue.  That satire, we passed on Tuesday.

...But more than that, at some level, to document violence with such care indicates a fascination on the part of the film-maker....

There's been a shift, in that people who make dumb movies that make a lot of money are now treated with the kind of respect that used to be reserved for people that made good movies.  There used to be a distinction, that if somebody made crap that was successful, they were tolerated but not taken seriously as artists; there used to be an acknowledgement of the crassness of what these folks were up to.  Now that sort of crassness has been completely embraced.  I don't know when that sociological shift began to happen within the industry.

------------------- Sunday, 29 September 1996

{Getting away With It, by Steven Soderbergh.
Copyright, 1999.  Faber and Faber, London}

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