THREE CHAIRS, THREE DIRECTORS A Conversation on Tarantino, Fincher & Nolan VOICES: HOST A — measured, structuralist, loves pattern and form HOST B — visceral, instinctive, defends the gut over the diagram HOST C — a working filmmaker, talks about what's actually on the call sheet A: Three directors. Tarantino, Fincher, Nolan. All born within a few years of each other. All broke through in the nineties. All American cinema's most recognizable auteurs of the last thirty years. What holds them together? C: Money. B: Excuse me? C: Money. They are the three directors who proved you could make a personal film at scale. Before them, you had Spielberg and Scorsese, but Spielberg was the studio system perfected and Scorsese fought the studio system his whole life. These three figured out how to make their movies, on their terms, at a budget level that used to be reserved for impersonal franchise work. That's the structural fact. Everything else is style. A: That's a good materialist read but I want to push past it. What holds them together aesthetically. C: Aesthetically? They are all three control freaks. All three of them shoot on film. All three of them are obsessed with the theatrical experience. All three of them write or co-write their own material. All three of them work with the same crews for years on end. They are the last of a particular kind of American director. After them I don't know who's coming. B: That's bleak. C: That's the industry. A: Okay. Let me try a frame. The three of them divide up the major obsessions of post-nineties cinema between them. Tarantino owns language. Fincher owns surface. Nolan owns time. B: That's clean but it's too clean. Tarantino is also obsessed with surface. The Kill Bill yellow tracksuit. The trunk shot. The product placement on Red Apple cigarettes. He is a profoundly visual filmmaker who hides it because his dialogue is so loud. A: Fine. Tarantino owns language and uses surface. Fincher owns surface and distrusts language. Nolan owns time and uses both. C: I'd flip one of those. Fincher doesn't distrust language. Fincher is one of the best dialogue directors working. Watch The Social Network. That's Sorkin's script but Fincher is the one who made those people talk that fast and feel that real. He shot the rowing scene to a Trent Reznor cover of In the Hall of the Mountain King. The man uses language like a weapon. He just doesn't let language run the film. B: That's the difference. Tarantino lets language run the film. Fincher uses language as one weapon among many. Nolan treats language as exposition that has to be survived. A: Ouch. B: I love Nolan but his dialogue is the price of admission. You don't go to a Nolan film for the lines. You go for the structure and the spectacle. C: That's true but I'd defend him. The dialogue in Oppenheimer is good. The dialogue in The Prestige is good. He gets a bad rap because Bane is hard to understand and because he writes some clunkers. But when he wants to write a real scene, he can write a real scene. A: Let me run a different frame past the two of you. The three of them represent three different theories of the audience. B: Go on. A: Tarantino believes the audience is hungry. He thinks they want spectacle, language, music, blood, style. He's a populist in the deepest sense. He thinks cinema is for the back of the house. Fincher believes the audience is suspicious. He thinks they have seen everything and need to be tricked into feeling something. He's not a populist. He's a magician working a skeptical room. Nolan believes the audience is intelligent. He thinks they can follow anything if you respect them enough. He's the most flattering of the three. He treats the audience like a graduate seminar. C: That's a generous read of Nolan. I'd say Nolan thinks the audience is intelligent and also thinks they need to be told things twice. The Tenet protagonist explains the plot four times. A: Fair. But the underlying respect is real. He believes you can keep up. B: The audience theory thing is good. Tarantino is feeding the audience. Fincher is testing the audience. Nolan is teaching the audience. C: Three different relationships to the seat. A: And three different theories of what cinema is for. Tarantino: cinema is for ecstasy. Fincher: cinema is for diagnosis. Nolan: cinema is for comprehension. B: Now I want to fight about which one is right. C: You'll lose. B: Why? C: Because they're all right. Cinema is big enough for all three. The mistake is thinking one of those is the real purpose and the other two are decoration. You need filmmakers who do all three or the form withers. A: Say more. C: Look. If you only have ecstasy, you get a hundred years of musicals and action films and nothing that asks the harder questions. If you only have diagnosis, you get a cinema of pessimism that can't move anyone who isn't already a believer. If you only have comprehension, you get TED Talks at IMAX scale. The reason these three are important together is that they cover three different appetites and a healthy cinema needs all three appetites fed. B: That's the most adult thing anyone has said yet. C: I'm older than both of you. A: Let me ask the harder question. Which of the three has made the best single film? B: Pulp Fiction. C: Zodiac. A: Memento. B: Of course you said Memento. A: Of course I said Memento. It is the most perfect object the three of them have produced. It is short, it is structurally inevitable, it has a moral argument, it has a performance in Guy Pearce that does not exist on a list of best performances of the era and absolutely should, and it ends on a line that recontextualizes the entire film. There is no fat on Memento. It is the only one of the three that has achieved the discipline of a short story. B: Pulp Fiction has more cultural weight. A: Pulp Fiction has more cultural weight and less artistic discipline. It is a great film. It is not a perfect one. It has a forty minute middle section that is technically not necessary to the story. Memento has nothing extra. C: Zodiac has nothing extra either. Zodiac is two and a half hours of a man losing his life to a question that will not be answered. Every scene is necessary. The film refuses to give you the catharsis you want. That's the whole point. It is the most morally serious of the three films we just named. B: Then we have three different criteria. Cultural weight. Structural perfection. Moral seriousness. And each of these directors wins on one of them. A: Tarantino wins on cultural weight. Fincher wins on moral seriousness. Nolan wins on structural perfection. B: That feels right. C: That feels right. A: So we agree on the frame even when we disagree on the films. B: Last question. If you had to lose one of them, who would it be? C: That's a cruel question. B: That's the question. C: I'd lose Nolan. A: Why? C: Because the other two cannot be replaced. There is no other Tarantino. There is no other Fincher. Their voices are fingerprints. Nolan is doing something that other very smart filmmakers can also do. Denis Villeneuve does a version of it. Alfonso Cuarón does a version of it. The slot Nolan occupies is not empty if he steps out of it. The slots Tarantino and Fincher occupy go dark. B: That's a heretical position. C: It's a working filmmaker's position. I'm telling you who's replaceable on the call sheet. A: I'd lose Tarantino. B: What. A: Hear me out. Tarantino's influence is so total that we already have him. Every prestige show on television has absorbed his rhythm. Every screenwriter under fifty has read his scripts. He has won. If he stopped tomorrow, his fingerprint would still be everywhere. Nolan and Fincher are doing things that have not been absorbed yet. Their work is still load-bearing. B: I'd lose Fincher. C: Why? B: Because Fincher's worldview is the easiest of the three to replicate. The cold camera, the sick green palette, the procedural rigor. Other filmmakers are doing it. Fincher is the best at it but he is not the only one. Tarantino's voice cannot be borrowed without sounding like an imitation. Nolan's scale cannot be funded without his name. Fincher's mode is teachable. A: So the three of us would each lose a different one. B: Which means we shouldn't lose any of them. C: That was the answer the whole time. A: That's the ending. C: That's the ending.