TORNADO (and ECHO VALLEY)

Last week I saw two films within 24 hrs and they have caused me to reflect on the harsh realities and immense difficulty of succeeding as a film director, even if you are a mawg (middle-aged white guy…).

I’ve already said what I have to say about ECHO VALLEY, Michael Pearce’s third feature film since he leapt onto the scene in too-cool-for-school fashion with 2017’s BEAST.  Yes, his third feature in nigh 8 years.   He wrote and directed BEAST, co-wrote and directed ENCOUNTER and has directed ECHO VALLEY as a hire for Apple, a clearly discernible slide away from the auteur promise of his debut and his various award winning shorts (including a BAFTA for RITE in 2010).

And now I’ve seen John McLean’s TORNADO, his second feature after the equally too-cool-for-school SLOW WEST in 2015, a film buoyed by the presence of Michael Fassbender who also elevated McLean’s memorable shorts, MAN ON A MOTORCYLE and PITCH BLACK HEIST. Yes, his second feature film in nigh 10 years.  And TORNADO is very good: it is a teeny movie, neat as a pin, heavily influenced by Japanese fare and by those who are influenced by Japanese fare (this film is ‘post-Tarantino’, for sure, a phrase I was taught when I worked in development in circa 1997 and which came into usage about a minute after PULP FICTION’s release, such is Hollywood’s propensity for kneejerk overreaction).  McLean has written and directed TORNADO (although Kate Leys, HRH of script editors, gets a “story by” credit, which is odd, right?  Any clues as to how that happened given the assignment of rights any producer is putting in front of any script editor the moment they start work?) and, although I feel critical of its lack of ambition, I believe he has made precisely the film he wanted to make with the piddling £3M he was able to raise.

So, while Pearce has incrementally moved away from the auteur spirit of BEAST and into the inner-workings of the industry to take on bigger budgets and bona fide movie stars like Julianne Moore, McLean is sticking to his SLOW WEST guns and making what he wants to make with his pennies and Tim Roth (sorry, Tim, but….).  And neither Pearce nor McLean is working as a director as much as he presumably needs to work in order to have a roof over his head and a crumb or two to posit in the mouths of his young directorlets.  How on earth are they surviving?  Maybe they’re both from the aristocracy (although I don’t get that impression, particularly) or they are scraping together 45 development deals a year to make ends meet, but certainly they paint a worrying picture for the prospects of British independent filmmakers, even those who storm our theatres with proper break-out films, even the mawgs.  Poor mawgs.

Anywho, if their track records are telling us something, it is that we will be lucky to see another film written and directed by Michael Pearce (he described screenwriting as “the hard bit” at the Q and A, tellingly) and we might not see another teeny-tiny and perfectly formed John McLean film for a decade or more.  Life as a film director ain’t easy, folks.

[And I don’t mean to conflate Pearce and McLean and suggest they are of a type and homogenous and thereby discriminate against them, but I have a very small brain and these two share a bunk within it.  Plus, those mawgs all look the same to me.  🙄]