Some discriminations

The 'post Spielberg' style is associated (negatively) with thrill-ride, blockbuster, mainstream cinema. But I think it's important to note that the style itself is not problematic. More often, the problem is the way in which the style becomes an easy way to replace understanding with roller coaster experience.

For example, this is a little thing but it annoys me. In Jurassic Park there is a sequence in which the T-Rex stomps closer and closer to the car. We don't see him. Instead we see ripples in a plastic cup. The DVD extras shows the prop guy talking about how hard it was to create that effect. And that is the problem. The problem comes out of the mind, not from experience. Does the water in a cup ripple? It sort of does, but not as pretty as it does in JP (yes I tried it). And that's the problem I have with so many feature films. Subjective emotional experience takes precedent over any understanding of the way things work. It's almost like a perfect description of Kierkegaard's definition of aesthetic experience in which the world becomes so uninteresting that our encounter with it must be intensified into poetry. Even water moving in a cup has to be a visual effect. This is what I'm always complaining about—the falling spaceship in Superman Returns, the crowd scenes in Lord of the Rings, Here, psychological devices replace understanding.

Still, the post-Spielberg style does not necessitate this use of psychological devices. In fact, I tried to do a lot of post-Spielberg moves in noise film but they were just too hard. Few people have seen one of the early desert shots in which we see Ben looking at a photo from a high angle crane shot. Then the wind comes and the photo blows into the sky right toward the camera. We tried a bunch of times but could never make that shot work.

Then there was the desert blood reveal that I storyboarded. We would see Ben's feet walking toward the car from an underneath-the-car view. Then rack focus close to see blood dripping. The camera cranes up slowly showing us blood dripping down the side of the car door. The camera then stops in the window which we can see is cracked and bloody. Through the window we see Ben walking closer and closer to the car. I didn't try that shot because we couldn't go back out to the desert. But I doubt we could have gotten that shot anyway. It would have necessitated using a long lens on a crane plus two focus pulls. The shaking from moving the long lens would have been enough to make the shot impossible (though I wonder if we could have stabilized the shot in post?). These shots contain many post-Spielberg elements. However I designed them for grace and efficiency, not psychological effect.

The question that arises is whether the reality of shooting in the post-Spielberg style encourages a certain take on things. Yes, the style itself is not a problem. And yet, to make it work requires an extraordinary control over mise en scene. Your blood has to be dripping just right. You have to use a lot of hardware and personnel to get the camera move right. Plus, any visual effect has to be seamless. In the shot of the photo flying overhead, we were trying to use a real photo pulled by fish line. I knew that using a CGI photo wouldn't look good (even good CGI tends to look fake to me). So in my thinking, you have to have all that control plus you can't use effects. At a certain point, working in the post-Spielberg style becomes counterproductive. But I think it can be done. One way is to give up attempts at photorealism. Going slightly theatrical would make the approach possible.