When director Steven Soderbergh defected to television in 2013, it felt like big news. The film business was no longer set up to make the kind of original, adult fare that interested him, he said that April in a speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
"Point of entry [to release] a mainstream movie: $30-million [U.S]," he said. "Now add another $30-million for overseas. To make that $60-million back, you need to gross $120-million." Math like that, he continued, was the reason his Liberace film, Behind the Candelabra, was better suited for HBO, even though it starred Michael Douglas and Matt Damon: It would have had to gross $75-million in theatres to break even, "and the feeling amongst the studios was that this material was too 'special' to do that."
Cut to three years later, and you can't turn on a TV without stumbling across a film director. Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) is producing and directing the brother/sister series Casual for Hulu (now airing in Canada on Crave). Paul Weitz (About a Boy) helms Mozart in the Jungle for Amazon (Shomi in Canada). Danish director Susanne Bier, who won an Oscar for In a Better World, directed the AMC miniseries The Night Manager, which premieres April 19.
Cary Fukunaga made True Detective for HBO; David Fincher did House of Cards for Netflix; Jane Campion created Top of the Lake as a co-production with the U.S Sundance channel. Soderbergh directed two seasons of the period hospital series The Knick for Showtime, and is now producing The Girlfriend Experience for Starz. Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée recently signed on to direct two HBO limited series: He'll helm all eight episodes of Sharp Objects, based on Gillian Flynn's novel, starring Amy Adams. And he'll direct all seven episodes of Big Little Lies, starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon.
What started as a math problem has become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Where once we turned to television for its broad appeal, and to cinema to satisfy our niche tastes, that has flipped. These days movies tout their four-quadrant allure, while television is the home for anything dark, cynical or risky.
"Now movies are all superheroes or knockoffs of Paranormal Activity, and adult drama is happening on television," the screenwriter Scott Alexander said last week in a joint interview with his writing partner Larry Karaszewski about their triumphant FX miniseries American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson (available on demand).
"Television is where the good writing is," Karaszewski agreed. "That's where all the water cooler stuff is happening. Breaking Bad, Fargo, True Detective, The Jinx – these are the Broadcast News and Network of our time."
Reitman "didn't wake up one morning and decide it's time to do television," he said in a separate phone interview. "I simply read Zander Lehmann's pilot for Casual, which was better than all the film scripts I was reading." Television has become "the place where we face our inner demons," he continued. "It's the place where visionary writers can get into a tone that's not currently accessible in film."
Paul Weitz tells a similar story about deciding to do Mozart in the Jungle: "I wasn't looking to do a TV show at all," he said by phone last week. "I was lying on my mom's couch in Manhattan" when the pilot script arrived, by his friends Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola (nephew and son to legendary director Francis Ford Coppola, they were also breaking away from film). Weitz read it and signed on immediately. It didn't even go through his agents.
"It was clear that so many preconceptions of 'what is film' or 'what is television' have gone by the wayside," Weitz said. "For one thing, people have become used to viewing excellent films at home. For another, television is fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces, which are aimed at people's specific tastes. Television's agenda used to be not to offend. Now movies are doing that, and television wants a devoted, passionate audience – which is how one used to think of film."
It's important to note that film directors tend to be attracted to limited runs on cable or specialty networks, which take more chances than the traditional broadcasters. "Mozart is very much in the tradition of Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka by way of Billy Wilder," Weitz said. "There's an effervescence to it. An executive has to have a degree of eccentricity to allow that to happen. Amazon gives notes, but their references are largely independent film. They allow authorship to the people who do their shows." Another incentive: "It's wildly comforting that you don't get Nielsen ratings," Weitz admits.
A limited run also allows film actors such as Gael Garcia Bernal, who plays the passionate orchestra conductor Rodrigo on Mozart, or Tom Hiddleston, the rising star of The Night Manager, to sign on to a series without disrupting their careers. "Actors want to do interesting roles," Weitz says, but a 10-episode season is an easier commitment than 22.
Writers benefit from limited runs, too – they can arc out seasons with clear beginnings, middles and ends. Alexander and Karaszewski spent a full year writing the pilot and bible for The People vs. O.J. Simpson. "That was a lot of time to kick the tires and think about the themes and characters," Alexander said. "Our friends who do TV laughed at us: 'Imagine if you had to do 40 episodes.'"
As well, subscription services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have deep pockets; they're willing to splash money around to make an impact. When I spoke to Weitz, he was in Venice, gazing at the Rialto Bridge, scouting locations for Mozart's third season and contemplating whether he could stage a concert on a barge in the Grand Canal.
"One of the most fun things the first season was taking Gael and a camera onto the New York streets, filming him reacting to whatever we found, using a white pizza box as a bounce board," Weitz says. "But I also got to direct Gael conducting the actual L.A. Philharmonic in front of a 12,000 person audience, because [musical director Gustavo] Dudamel had seen the show and thought it could bring classical music to more people." The series also staged a concert in an empty Manhattan lot, and took its cast to Mexico City.
That kind of directorial freedom is another way television has changed. "Television was traditionally a writer's medium, and directors would come in to do one episode at a time," Reitman said. "A decade ago, the director would be told, 'This is how we shoot, here's your master, here are your close-ups, this is our framing.' Now TV directors are doing actual directorial storytelling." (Case in point: Looper director Rian Johnson's famous Breaking Bad episode, in which Walter White spent an hour trying to kill a fly.) "I think that's why audiences are responding to TV more than they ever have," Reitman continued. "They can feel the voice of the filmmakers."
Control in TV is "a shared control," Reitman went on. "That can be a daunting thing for a director, because generally in our DNA is the desire to control everything, down to the light bulb in every room you ever walk into." But the collective experience of being in a writers' room, sharing one's personal stories and blending them into the narrative, offers a different reward.
And then there's the feedback. "Television reaches more people, and because of social media, you get instant feedback," Alexander said. "It's so satisfying to see what people say the night of, and in the next morning's postmortems. People would bring up connections that we weren't aware we'd made."
"The level of discourse is very high with television," Karaszewski added. "People really wanted to discuss big issues and ideas – gender politics, race relations. It was so satisfying when people said to us, 'During the trial I hated Marcia Clark, but I didn't realize what she was going through.' It's really rewarding to watch people digest what you're doing."
All that said, however, none of the people I spoke to are giving up on cinema. Alexander and Karaszewski are currently writing a feature about the Patty Hearst kidnapping. And Weitz believes "there are more great films being made every year than one could possibly watch. The fact that you can make one so inexpensively means that the implements get into the hands of more interesting storytellers. If you want to make a ton of money, the prospects of that are probably less than 20 years ago. But statistically, not a huge amount of people were doing that anyway." (His last film, Grandma, starring Lily Tomlin, cost only $600,000.)
"I think it's a fantastic time to be a filmmaker," Weitz summed up. Once you drop any remaining snobbery about film versus television, "you can tell whatever story you want to. There's a lot to be said for the centre not holding."
Johanna Schneller