If you didn’t know, there’s a story about Star Wars (in the behind the scenes on the dvd and I’m sure elsewhere) that after the first screening they the film, to George Lucas’ director friends it was almost universally agreed George Lucas wasted his on a movie that would be a failure (only Steven Spielberg felt differently. Apparently in that first screening there was no soundtrack either which I could then imagine feeling that way.)
Apparently the same thing happened during pulp fiction. Only Katherine Bigelow saw the potential, one of the directors in that first screening was lamenting the heart to heart he would have to have with Quentin until Pulp Fiction won the palm D’or at Sundance before he got the chance.
Which makes me wonder a lot of questions:
What is the point of feedback at this stage of the movie is basically done? I guess you could re-edit a few things. I’m not suggesting people lie? But why tell someone they movie is crap weeks before release of there is nothing to be done? Make it easier to stomach the response?
How did these director’s approach feedback? I can sort of see why no one liked Star Wars, it was a radical departure from what was happening in the 70’s and probably a radical departure from the kind of movies these directors thought should be made.
Pulp fiction is also a radical departure, but it feels like a director’s movie. Was no one into the sort of 70’s exploitation films that inspired it? Or, and this is where it gets weird, were they trying to be “objective”?
Maybe the feedback really was, hey I really liked this but audiences are going to think you’re nuts.
This reminds me of an HBR article I read that basically said there are two types of valuable feedback:
- I’m an expert and you got this fact/detail wrong. This can happen all the time in all sorts of different ways, in cinema I imagine there are details about as how you combine lenses and lights to get certain effects that you could get wrong.
- This is my personal subjective opinion. This can’t be wrong, but should be worded as such. Ultimately as a commercial artist you’re trying to get in touch with people me subjective opinion. maybe there’s a few different ways to film a scene and everyone tells you one way evokes the emotion you’re trying to evoke better than the others. It may not be universally true, but it could be a good signal if you’re genuinely unsure.
It’s an interesting thing about - especially commercial art, and this probably has to do with product development and anything that creates a curated artifact that people interact with. There’s a balance between what you personally might like, and what a general audience might like, and I imagine the best directors understand how to balance this almost intuitively (I also get the impression that over time it can be easy to lose this intuition as there is more pressure to make a certain amount of money). Tarantino was worried Pulp Fiction was to Tarantino, a valid concern, but Tarantino was probably so in tune with what makes a movie entertaining that doing it the Tarantino way was doing it the audience way, he just didn’t know it yet.
Listening to only one strong signal in product development can be tough (though it can depend on where the signal is coming from) but a “strong hire (or string no hire) signal I think is one to be listened too. Especially if there’s an imbalance in the strength of the reasons.
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