The Epic Directors
John D Bertucci
The mark of a good movie is how I remember it the next day.
Christopher Nolan and The Odyssey
Nolan is one of the greatest directors alive. I discovered him with Memento. I thought Memento was genius, so I went and watched his first film, The Following, to see how this guy got started. Memento had just come out in the movie theaters and nobody went to see it. Then it turned up on HBO, and I watched it there. I have seen all of his films, maybe except one or two that were not his best. I went to see The Dark Knight because it had the name Christopher Nolan. I was not interested in superhero movies. In fact, I did not like any of them. Batman Begins was good, but The Dark Knight is by far the greatest superhero movie ever made, and no one will top it.
Christian Bale was a great Batman, but he was like a one-dimensional Bruce Wayne. I never really felt much from his Bruce Wayne. I never felt love. I never felt hate. I never felt anger. I never felt revenge. You could have put anybody in that cape and done what he did, because he was just playing the action part. Michael Keaton was an interesting Bruce Wayne. He let the cracks show, that odd, wounded man behind the mask.
If you took Heath Ledger out of that movie, would The Dark Knight have garnered the same critical acclaim? No. It would have still been a good movie, but he would not have been on the top of the mountain. He would have been at base camp with all the rest, without Ledger. Ledger shocked the world. He took a character that everybody is familiar with and everybody has seen, and he found something within himself to shock you, and do it differently. That is the mark of a great actor.
That is why I put Nolan in my top five, but not among my epic directors. If a guy could do that with a character such as Batman, he has got to be a very good director. Nolan is still a top-five director. But he is not an epic director. Not like the other three.
My top three epic directors, living, worldwide, are Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Zhang Yimou. This is not about gangster directors. This is not about drama or comedy directors. No disrespect to them. This is about epic directors.
I am eliminating James Cameron. After Titanic he really proved that he peaked, and it was over. Titanic was a great film. Then he decides to make three cartoon movies, and I do not think those cartoon movies hold up at all. I think they are just eye candy. I do not care about blue people from a weird planet. The Abyss was a good movie. Terminator, Aliens, Titanic, he was on an arc to bring him to the top of the mountain. And then he had a slow decline ever since. He could have been up there with the other three, but he chose to go off in some stupid, weird direction.
Nolan could have made the Odyssey the greatest epic of the last twenty-five years. Instead, in my view, it is a forgotten afterthought. Why? Because the casting took me out of it. The plausibility factor is going to bother me so much it is going to pull me out of the movie. It would be like Cleopatra being played by Liberace in 1962. It was bad enough you chose a white-skinned Elizabeth Taylor, but back then all the British Shakespearean actors were the best, so you wanted the best for your film. I understood that. You did not have a choice. You could not find an Egyptian actor to carry the weight of that role. But if you would have chosen Laurence Olivier, the greatest male actor alive at the time, to play Cleopatra, dressed up as a woman, with Richard Burton as his love interest, would it have been the same film? No. You just have to accept that he is a woman, and forget that he is a real man. That is what Nolan is doing to us. He asks us to accept something that breaks the world's plausibility, and the epic becomes something you cannot believe in, no matter how grand it looks. That is why I am not paying to see the Odyssey. I might watch it on TV, just to judge it, because I do not like to judge things without seeing them. But I know the plausibility is going to pull me out.
Zhang Yimou is the best director of the Eastern world. He is better, probably, than all the Bollywood directors, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese, for that genre. He has done it over and over and over again. How many epic films does he have? Seven? Shadow might be a sixth or seventh. Hero, Curse of the Golden Flower, House of Flying Daggers, The Great Wall. There is probably one more I am missing, but that is the point. He keeps returning to that grand scale.
John Woo is great, and he did come close with Red Cliff 1 and 2. As an epic, those are up there. But you cannot climb the mountain with one or two films. Should John Woo top Zhang Yimou because he made Red Cliff 1 and 2? No. Critics generally place Zhang at number one for epic scope in the Eastern world, with Woo just behind him. That means I know what I am talking about. That makes me a critic.
I have seen these movies since 2010, fifteen or sixteen years. We are talking about three hundred films. All Eastern, all subtitled, all Asian. I have seen a lot of great movies, a lot of great epics, war battles, even the Korean ones. The guy who directed the trilogy of the turtle ships, the 1591 story of the turtle ship battles, Kim Han-min, The Admiral, Roaring Currents, Hansan. I saw the battle in those movies, I looked him up and I said, wow, I have seen a lot of his movies. This guy is great. In fact, he is probably the best Korean director there is.
Epic means historical. Epic means battles on the field. Epic means a huge story with a giant cast. I define epic the way D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille defined epic. That eliminates some very big names. It eliminates James Cameron. It eliminates Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma. It even eliminates Francis Ford Coppola. They are great directors, but they are not in the same breath.
John Huston was even a great epic director. He did some biblical epics, and I thought, I am not so sure John Huston gets his credit in American film history. The critics give it, but the American public does not think of John Huston as a great director. They think of him as an actor. But I think he was a greater director than he ever was an actor. And do not forget The Maltese Falcon. That movie is the definition of noir. In fact, I think he absolutely invented the genre. The French did noir first, because the word is French, so it had to come from France. But he took it to a new level. He took it to an epic level. He took it to a level that made history, and it is considered one of the greatest American films of all time.
Wolfgang Petersen got my attention in 1980 with a little movie about a submarine, Das Boot. I watched it a few months ago, and after all of these years it still holds up. It is absolutely a classic. He took a submarine movie, and how many submarine movies have I seen? Hundreds. Even up until that point we had seen a lot of submarine movies, and yet he made his stand out as the best. The shaky camera, the explosions, the audio, the sound effects. He shook the camera just to give you the effect of what it was like inside that submarine. The tension he created just with silence was impressive. Most directors will not do that. They will not hold a shot for several minutes showing everybody's face. The tension he created with silence reminded me of another great director, Sergio Leone, especially in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. And then he made Troy, a great epic. He had to be the best German director of his era.
George Miller from Australia belongs on the list too. He takes that epic scale and puts it in the dust and the chase, and makes the whole horizon feel dangerous.
And the pacing in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, it is so unlike anything on the silver screen today. You have the rapid-fire scenes of the gunfights, and then you have the slow, absolute stillness of the extreme wide shot, then the medium shot, then the close-up, then the extreme close-up. Imagine, on a sixty-foot screen, you are looking at two eyeballs. That is not done anymore. That pacing is gone from today's movies. We do not see the wide shot that the camera can see for miles, all the way to a tight shot of somebody's eyes. Think about how much work that is, to get a shot that is several miles long. Get in a car, drive all the way up, bring everything with you, all the set, everybody, the lamps, the lights, everything outside, to get the same shot with the same background, just to get a five-second shot of the extreme wide to close-up. That is a lot of work. And most directors will not do all of that work. But Lean and Leone did it. One British and one Italian, and both masters.
If I had to give a number one to all of them, dead or alive, I am putting David Lean at the top of the mountain. Look how many he made. Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, A Passage to India, and a couple more. I have seen them all. With that body of work, he does not just deserve the top of the mountain, he built it.
When I measure them against each other, it might be just one man's opinion about the greatest epic directors in American and worldwide film history, but a good movie I remember the next day, an epic I remember a decade later and still want to see again.
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