Back in London and unexpectedly the sun is shining. Good weather these days provokes a rather complex emotional response in most of us. It goes a bit like this.

1. First, the natural human reaction is to go “how nice, its sunny”. In the old days, we’d stop there.
2. But now, because so often the weather is not as we would expect, we follow up with a “but how odd” reaction: how odd – its not supposed to be sunny in January in London. There wasn’t supposed to be freak flooding in Malaysia over new year where I spent Christmas with my family; but they continue unabated (and the citizenship there needs volunteers to help, so if you can do anything, please do).
3. And that’s when the third reaction hits: it’s global warming. Thankfully this reaction has also finally hit the mind of George W. Bush
4. And then, at the moment we realise (3) we feel guilt for feeling (1). (Do we think Dubbaya is feeling guilt?)

Like I said, complex.

So what does any of this have to do with the slingblog, slingshot studios or the making of movies? Well more than you might think.

One reason is a decision I came to over Christmas: that the blog is going to start to be more multi-purpose. I’ll continue to chronicle developments here at slingshot, and I’ll continue to debate and posit on issues that effect the movie industry. But I’m going to start talking about other stuff to. I often have other issues I would like to post on, but have held of on the grounds of relevance. But since I clearly don’t have a particularly good work / life divide, and since it seems silly to divide the readership between two blogs, you can, for better or worse, start to expect to see my musings on subjects beyond the movie industry here.

But this particular rant is, in fact, linked to movies after all. Because its about complexity. Global warming and its effects is one of the most important, but by no means the only, example of how complexity shapes our modern world. On how cause and effect are not linear, but endlessly iterating and interconnected. And how not appreciating that subtlety, leads to all sorts of problems. See Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent piece in this week’s New Yorker for the difference between Mysteries and Puzzles for an illustration of this. Another interesting, perhaps even seminal and populist writer on the relevance of complexity to everyday life is Steven Johnson, who is a pretty active blogger. As of course is my friend, the no less active, and every bit as brilliant (if somewhat less intelligible) Simon Hill
So we live in a complex world. And to understand the world we need to understand complexity. And one of the chief ways we come to understand our world, is through the media, and king of media is movies. So movies, to continue to be relevant, should help us understand complexity. Right?

Except conventional wisdom says that movies should be simple. They should be simple in plot: 3 acts. They should be simple in characters: one protagonist. They should be simple in themes: one controlling idea. These principals have become the guide for screenwriters everywhere, and are codified in endless books, starting with McKee’s STORY, but now in many more besides, Movies have rules. Seven principles, five laws, three acts, 1 idea.

Depart from this conventional wisdom, try and make a movie as complex as the world, and , even if you get your movie made, you will loose your audience. And so often, it is true. We have been finding this in the edit of Sugarhouse Lane - every time we tried something to make the movie more multi-layered, and took it away from its core premise of 3 men, 1 gun; then audience got bored. We have been finding this in finalising the script for our next movie, FRENCH FILM, the latest draft is the strongest by far, and in part because it hews more closely and clearly to its through line: a movie about how relationships begin.Even though its writer, Ash Ditta, is one of the most complex men I know.

Most of the greatest and most successful movies ever made, are also the simplest, with the core idea easily reducible to a single line, without diminishing the movie: JAWS (Shark eats people, man hunts shark), LORD OF THE RINGS (Hobbits return ring), ROCKY (loser boxer learns to win). Not a lot of complexity there.

But yet, but yet. For each of those examples, there is a great counter-example. How would one reduce the complexity of CITIZEN KANE, or CHINATOWN or SHORT CUTS without also diminishing them. Or more recently, the unusual, and almost great SYRIANA and BABEL?

What is interesting, is the latter two are movies very explicitly about the complex, inter-connected modern world we live in. Movies for an age of global warming, for an age of the Internet. And I think we need more of those movies.
So I’m increasingly interested in the idea of making a movie that is not just complex, but that is somehow ABOUT complexity. My holiday reading suggested some avenues to explore (on which watch this space) but in the meantime, I’d welcome thoughts and suggestions.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 16:18 and is filed under Blog, Film Business 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.