"I had previously obtained specialized survey data from several professional companies."
During this period, choosing such a film was not a blind decision for Murphy, just as Hollywood's major studios conduct market research before pushing forward any project. He too had data to back him up, "From the late sixties and early seventies to now, the divorce rate in American society has exceeded forty percent. Those who have been hurt by marriage, as well as the adults who were once children of broken marriages and broken homes, will become our potential audience."
Everyone knows that promoting certain values is one thing, but whether people accept them is another matter entirely. Even if people agree with so-called mainstream Hollywood values, they will not necessarily reject the film's views on marriage.
Kara Faith fell into deep thought, and after a while, she said, "According to you, marriage is terrifying. I was wise to choose to stay single."
Murphy shrugged, "Maybe sooner than you think, you'll meet someone you want to marry and think all I'm saying is nonsense."
Kara Faith just pursed her lips and said nothing more.
"Let's get back to the film," Murphy brought the conversation back on track, "I also obtained another statistic. The divorce rate in Hollywood films is even more astounding, reaching ninety-five percent on screen."
"Is it that high?" Kara Faith was surprised.
"It's only high, not low. This is another trend caused by Hollywood films," Murphy explained in detail, "There is also a tendency in Hollywood films to sell anti-family and anti-emotional sentiments as a selling point."
"Like our film?" asked Kara Faith.
Murphy nodded, "Besides playing the warm family card, Hollywood scriptwriters are good at turning marriage and family into 'horror films.' A bunch of scriptwriters earn tears by breaking down families, while others tear them apart, saying these 'family tragedies' are made for the post-'70s, '80s, and '90s."
He added, "This group now dominates the movie market, nearly half of them have experienced family and marital breakdowns."
Kara Faith realized Murphy's work was incredibly detailed, even more so than the market research departments at twentieth-century Fox. No wonder he always managed to achieve high returns with low costs.
"It's getting late," Murphy checked his watch, "Let's go."
They continued discussing films as they walked out of the warehouse studio's main door, got into their cars, and left the small town of Venice.
On the way back, Murphy reflected on his earlier conversation with Kara Faith. Another critical point in choosing "Gone Girl" was that he had only watched most of the Oscar-winning films rather than studied them like academia. Watching and studying academically are completely different concepts.
The former will surely be forgotten over time; after all, how many people can remember the details of a film they saw years ago? The latter leaves a much deeper impression.
Due to personal preference, Murphy studied and understood films with a distinct noir style the most. This was the cinematic path he followed and was best at.
He wouldn't abandon his strengths to work on productions that came off the Oscar industrial assembly line.
There is a difference between an Oscar for best director and an Oscar-winning director. Some directors, with ulterior motives, use the Oscar template to make films and win awards, but their influence and the level they elevate to are very limited.
Since he did not grow up in this country, Murphy's approval of the values promoted by the Oscar model was not high. He had not studied this type of film much, but he did have in-depth research on a few films that had been nominated or won awards due to their heavy noir style.
Frankly speaking, compared to the works that come off the Oscar industrial line, these noir films are more likely to become timeless classics.
This is not just Murphy's view but is also generally recognized.
Since the late 1990s, not only have Hollywood's commercial films fully entered a production line mode, but so have the films contending for Oscars.
In recent years, if you look at the films released in North America after October, you see more homogeneity rather than diversity, a new genre has emerged, aptly named "Oscar contenders."
A few years ago, the period from Thanksgiving to Christmas in North America was a pretty term, allowing fans of independent films and the professional media to get excited about some different movies. After the dense film festivals of early autumn, those productions that traveled from the Venice Film Festival through the Toronto Film Festival to the New York Film Festival let Hollywood momentarily put down the summer blockbusters and switch to another channel, showing another facet of Hollywood films.
However, driven by the huge benefits and honor that the Oscars could bring, the long screening period from late autumn to the following spring evolved into an "awards season" — rivaling the summer season and even overshadowing the traditional North American Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons.
A new formulaic film format has also emerged; these movies are specifically crafted to cater to the tastes and preferences of elderly white Oscar jurors, with controversial topics and lead characters that seem edgy but ultimately return to a framework that the mainstream can accept, ensuring quality performances with actors often trained in method acting.
Also, it has to be a drama; no laughter allowed.
Biopics have become prevalent, a very practical "safe" choice for Hollywood studios because most jurors prefer familiar faces playing familiar roles.
These Oscar contenders, except for a few with strong personal styles, if analyzed closely, are fundamentally no different from summer visual blockbusters; they are both industrial products tailored to a specific audience, bland as plain water.
As Murphy said, in most Oscar competitions, the right choices are made first before considering anything else.
This directly leads to the contestants being stable, and stability often means blandness.
With a personality like Murphy's, how could he like bland movies, let alone study them?
Similar to how summer blockbusters like to impact audiences with visual effects, the vast majority of Oscar contenders, produced to suit the tastes of academy's elderly white jurors, are as formulaic and stable as ever, leading to another consequence: the diminishing differentiation between films during the summer.
The Oscars have gradually become a kind of thematic essay writing, which no one would deny.
Of course, there are exceptions among those vying for the Oscars, but most films, especially those that jurors like, are becoming increasingly homogenized.
In fact, since the new millennium, if you look at the three most important film festivals in North America before the Oscars — Telluride, Toronto, and New York — and then reflect on these festivals, what you remember is not how different the competing films were, but rather the opposite, most films are very similar, making it easier to summarize trends than to find differences.
When commercial big productions and youth films are increasingly leaning towards clichéd themes like comic book adaptations and hero-saving-the-world, the films participating in the award season were supposed to be a form of resistance against clichés, but under the years of effort by Oscar jurors, this resistance has ultimately turned into another cliché.
Similarly, for the actors and actresses vying for performance awards.
On the road to becoming best actor or actress, men either play geniuses or patients, never normal people. Women are in distress, uniformly unlucky, suffering, passive, each needing to be saved or to save themselves.
These also form templates with clauses for reference.
For example, the roles that won awards for Julia Roberts
and Charlize Theron, or Leonardo DiCaprio's self-destructive performances, etc.
In fact, it has been a consensus in the North American entertainment industry that the Oscars and the entire Hollywood selection system measure acting within a narrow perspective, with method acting from the 1960s still being the gold standard for judging performances.
On the path to becoming best actor or actress, you have to play characters that seem very different from yourself, transform your appearance completely, and play characters who are not quite normal, with behavioral deviations.
Getting an award for playing a normal person, or like James Franco, an acting oddball winning the little gold man, is really difficult.
Honestly, Murphy would rather see films like "No Country for Old Men" than some thematic essays.
Especially female roles, do they all need to be saved or save themselves? In the direction of going for awards, he thinks films like "Gone Girl" that can create some noise are more rare and more interesting.
Perhaps after the film is released, some might think that a movie that places women's inner darkness and madness under a microscope, set against the current Hollywood backdrop of promoting "saints" and "female heroes," might be going against the historical trend.
But compared to those uniform, stable award films, Murphy prefers to see a clamor in the cinemas.
This is his Oscar philosophy.
Whether it's because he hasn't studied it before or due to personal preference, he prefers to use films with an extreme style to vie for the little gold man, rather than formulaic thematic essays.
In the remaining time of December, Murphy hid in the Venice studio, quietly shooting the studio scenes. After the Christmas and New Year holidays, when the studio needed to be re-scened, he took the crew to a small town in Orange County to shoot exterior scenes.
Shooting exterior scenes was bound to attract onlookers, but Murphy hadn't expected the town's residents to be so curious about the filming; nearly half the town gathered near the set to watch, causing quite a bit of trouble for the production.
___________________
(Support with power stones, comments or reviews)
If you guys enjoy this story, In support me on Patreon and get access to +200 advance Chapters
Read Ahead
Patreon.com/INNIT