A Question of Language
Recently, I stumbled across a post on another blog site
in which the author was discussing the film Shallow Grave (1994); the first
collaboration between director Danny Boyle, screenwriter John Hodge and
producer Andrew McDonald; the team behind later works like Trainspotting (1996),
The Beach (2000) and T2: Trainspotting (2017). There, the writer introduced Shallow
Grave as "Boyle's 1994 debut film."
This struck me as somewhat peculiar, as even a cursory
glance at Boyle's listing on the IMDb sees him credited with directing no less than
eight films prior to the release of Shallow Grave, each running 50-minutes to
an hour in length, as well as two feature-length episodes of the television
detective series "Inspector Morse" (which, at 1 hour 44 minutes each,
both run longer than Shallow Grave and even Trainspotting), and a four-hour
long miniseries, Mr. Wroe's Virgins (1993), starring Jonathan Pryce, Kathy
Burke and Minnie Driver, which was nominated for several BAFTA awards. How then
would Shallow Grave, in any strict sense of the term, qualify as Boyle's debut film?
Shallow Grave [Danny Boyle, 1994]:
The review in question goes on to argue that Boyle
"came straight out of the starting gate a success." I guess it's
always helpful when crafting that perfect debut to have already directed actual
films with professional actors and technicians for a seven-year period.
Boyle's actual debut as director came as early as 1987,
with the made for television film The Venus de Milo Instead. Written by the
Northern Irish screenwriter Anne Devlin, who would go on to adapt the 1992
version of Wuthering Heights, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, as
well as adapting later films, Titanic Town (1998) for director Roger Michell, and
Vigo: A Passion for Life (also 1998) for Julian Temple. The Venus de Milo
Instead stars Irish character actor Lorcan Cranitch, who would later become a
fixture on TV drama serials like "The Bill", "Cracker" and
"Rome", and it runs for a total of 60 minutes, only 28 minutes
shorter than Shallow Grave.
After this, Boyle would direct Scout (1987), written
by Frank McGuiness and starring Ray McAnally and Stephen Rea, The Nightwatch
(1989) written by Ray Brennan, and Monkeys (also 1989), based on the book 'The
DeLorean Tapes' by Ivan Fallon. Like his mentor, the British filmmaker Alan
Clarke, whose famous non-narrative film, Elephant (1989), about the Troubles in
Northern Ireland, was produced by Boyle, the director would go on to contribute
to the drama anthology series "Screenplay", directing the films The
Hen House (1989), again scripted by McGuiness and starring Sinéad Cusack, Arise
and Go Now (1991), written by the Irish actor Owen O'Neill, and finally Not
Even God (1993), written by the Nigerian playwright, novelist and filmmaker
Biyi Bandele. With this in mind, how do we arrive at a point where Shallow
Grave could possibly be considered Boyle's "debut film?"
The Hen House [Danny Boyle, 1989]:
It's possible that when the author of the blog in
question said "debut film" they really meant cinema debut, which
would be fair. Boyle's earlier work was produced for television, but directors as
varied and esteemed as Spike Lee, Ingmar Bergman, Michael Haneke, Werner
Herzog, David Lynch and others, have all produced works that are technically
"TV movies" or movies that clock in under the accepted 90 minutes,
and yet they remain very much a part of their directorial "canon." No
one would discount the validity of long-form, produced for television works
like "Berlin Alexanderplatz" (1980), "Dekalog" (1989),
"The Kingdom" (1994) or "Top of the Lake" (2013) from the career
retrospectives of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Lars von
Trier and Jane Campion respectively, so why draw the line here?
We've seen similar instances of this in the past. Often,
it's the dismissal of any work that clocks in at under 70 minutes in duration
as somewhat inferior or invalid to films that run over 90 minutes in length.
Case in point, The Hunger (1983) is often categorized as the directorial debut
of Tony Scott. Scott had directed three films prior to this; One of the Missing
(1969), which runs 25 minutes, Loving Memory (1970), which runs 52 minutes and
is one of the director's best and most interesting works, and The Author of
Beltraffio (1974), which also runs 52 minutes. Early films by Peter Watkins,
such as The War Game (1966), or Ken Russell, such as Elgar (1962), have similar
running times to these early films by Scott, but while their works are
considered canon, Scott's are seen as little more than rough drafts or practice
work before his more commercial films produced in Hollywood.
Loving Memory [Tony Scott, 1970]:
The Hunger [Tony Scott, 1983]:
In most cases, short films are rarely discussed in the
context of certain filmmakers. Often, they're seen as surplus to their
feature-length work, rather than a continuation of it. Similarly, when we talk
about the work of directors, we tend to discount discussions around music
videos, corporate films and TV commercials, as if these works are somehow
separate entities from their feature-length endeavors.
In talking about a director like David Fincher for
instance, many would say he made his directorial debut with Alien 3 (1993). But
Fincher had been directing high-profile music videos and TV commercials since
the early 1980s, all of which required a level of ability and technical
comprehension for which he would've been paid generously. They weren't made for
practice, they were genuine assignments, no different in their intentions than
the aforementioned Alien 3. IMDb lists Fincher's first directing credit as a
1984 music video for Rick Springfield titled "Bop 'Til You Drop." Barring
any unknown student films, corporate videos or TV commercials, "Bop 'Til
You Drop" is technically Fincher's directorial debut and as such deserves
to be included in any discussions relating to his life and work.
Rick Springfield: Bop 'Til You
Drop [David Fincher, 1984]:
Bop 'Til You Drop is already characteristic of
Fincher's work from an auteurist perspective, as he takes the implication of
the title and envisions it as a joyless dystopia in which enslaved masses are
forced to work themselves to death for a race of alien overlords. Already we
can recognise the designer misery of works like Seven (1995), Fight Club (1999)
and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011).
American Cancer Society - Smoking Fetus [David Fincher, 1984]:
Fincher's other big credit for 1984 was this 30 second
commercial for the American Cancer Society. Since I'm not sure which he made
first, it's possible that this represents his first known directorial credit
and is once again a work of critical/auteurist interest in the context of
Fincher's career.
While it may be a pedantic line of argument on my
part, a directorial debut should, presumably, be the first time a person took
on the role of director, in any capacity. For instance, in discussing the work
of the English director Sam Mendes, it would be fair to call American Beauty
(1999) his "debut film for cinema", but it's not, by any stretch of
the imagination, his directorial debut. Mendes had been directing theatre for a
decade prior to American Beauty, including a successful production of
"Cabaret", which was broadcast on television in 1993, a new
production of Lionel Bart's "Oliver!" produced by Cameron Mackintosh,
and a production of David Hare's 1998 play "The Blue Room", starring
the Hollywood actor Nicole Kidman in the lead. To call American Beauty a directorial
debut considering such credentials is not only factually incorrect, it's
genuinely absurd.
Cabaret [Sam Mendes, 1993]:
When does a filmed play become an actual film? Surely
once something is recorded, with framed shots and cutting for emphasis, the
theatrical becomes the cinematic? What makes Cabaret less valid than concert
films like The Last Waltz (1978) by Martin Scorsese, or Stop Making Sense
(1984) by Jonathan Demme?
At a time when the future of cinema is in jeopardy
post-Covid-19, when high-profile films are going straight to streaming
platforms like Netflix and Disney+, and when the discussion around visual media
is moving further away from standalone feature films to focus on long-form
series like "Fleabag" (2016), "Killing Eve" (2018) and
"Normal People" (2020), there's no need to diminish or erase the
existence of Boyle's early television films as somehow being separate to his
later works, such as Shallow Grave or 28 Days Later (2002), just as there's no
reason to separate the music videos of directors like David Fincher, or the TV
commercials of Jonathan Glazer, from their no less corporate or commercial work
in the cinema.
In a post-content world, in which an epic like The
Irishman (2019) can be streamed back-to-back with an entire season of
"Game of Thrones", a TikTok video or live music clips on YouTube, or
where acclaimed filmmakers like the aforementioned Spike Lee, Woody Allen and Ava
DuVernay make long-form serials that can only be seen on Netflix or Amazon, the
notion of clinging to the "cinema debut" or the "feature-length
debut" as something significant or qualitative in nature, seems positively
archaic. Whether a work is short or long, made for television or released to cinemas,
streamed online, or sold as physical media, it's all just content. A film is a
film, regardless of the unnecessary qualifications that have been forced upon
us.
