Thoughts on Industry and Craft: Kill the A24 propaganda

A24 logo (A24)

The other day I was reading this really nice profile on a current favorite director of mine, Matt Johnson, in Toronto Life (not Star, as I keep calling it to friends). Matt Johnson is a Toronto based filmmaker who's latest film, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie has been going triple platinum in my life, like I went to see it in theaters twice alone, something I never do. His other feature films (The Dirties, Operation Avalanche) are all smaller indie, except for Blackberry, his biopic on Mike Lazaridis and the rise and fall of the Blackberry phone, which was still pretty small in the grand scheme of filmmaking, clocking in at a $10 million budget, not quite indie but still low. Now Johnson has another film on the table, A24 backed Tony, another biopic, this time on a young Anthony Bourdain, derived from his memoir Kitchen Confidential.

A24 is a very interesting figure in the current film world, and especially the world of independent film. The formal box for 'independent film' is any movie made outside of the Major Hollywood Studios, this then includes anything from a $10 million budget film like Blackberry, and a film like The Dirties, which had a shooting budget of $10,000 (licensing took an additional $45,000, so totally $55,000) and while they employed similar visual styles (and had the same director) it's a totally different execution in terms of the actual production. I mean if i got together 4-5 friends and we made a film and didn't buy a single thing, that too is an independent production. The issue with A24 to me, is it shifts the perception of "Independent" into a selling point for mid-budget films, abandoning the micro-budget ones. I guess it also comes down to the branding, people say "the new A24" as if A24 is a director personally making a film, extending auteur theory to a brand, in a way that is frankly annoying. The sort of aesthetic people have thought up as the "A24 Aesthetic" is actually very broad and more widely a popular filmmaking style and use of colour than a coherent visual language bar the projects that share a director. "More than a studio, A24 has become a cultural brand" writes the instagram account secret.filmclub in their post about the 10 best A24 films. They characterize the films A24 produces as confusing to the point of having to google the ending, and moody visuals worthy of Tumblr mood boards. But to me, the most interesting characterization I want to focus on is "young directors with full creative freedom."

Back to Matt Johnson, who in my brief time of being familiar, is a very openly opinionated person (just watch him read Letterboxd reviews, this charmed me to no end). Johnson is hungry and driven, you see that in the way he speaks about film, he isn't saying stuff to be mean per say, he's saying it because he believes it, it being true is the eye of the beholder of course but it's a good trait when it comes to filmmaking. The collaborative nature of filmmaking is to me, the magic of it, it a pile of checks and balances, keeping things on rails and ideas moving. A film where no one ever questioned the director is hell, because once someone questions you, your idea grows as you defend it.

Johnson describes Blackberry as the story of a bunch of independent filmmakers (Research in Motion, RIM) joining with an entrepreneur (Jim Ballsillie) who's idea of how to do things is standardized by the system, in turn throwing off the rag tag trial-and-error system the independent filmmakers had, thus throwing off their workflow and relationships. In a way you can read Blackberry to be about Johnson as RIM and A24, or even just studios as a whole are Ballsillie. That's how I read it after watching it between The Dirties and Operation Avalanche, both films are about film and filmmaking though in different ways. To me Operation Avalanche is about the role of the director in telling a story and lying to an audience, and The Dirties is about how film can distort reality and perception and the way concepts interact with the real world. To me, Blackberry is about how to do the thing you want to do, the thing you basically believe you were put on this earth to do, you have to sell little bits of yourself, and you have to be careful you don't sell too much.

The film industry is a series of trades you must make, if you want to make a personal project that you want total control over and don't want some studio telling you no, you need to make a project to finance it (though you can crowdfund but that is difficult at times) for a studio. This is where Tony comes in and also that Toronto Life article I mentioned earlier. The charm of a lot of Johnson's previous works are how improvised they are, Nirvanna the Band is described by Johnson and his costar in that, Jay McCarrol as being them not acting per say but 'reacting' to things around them. A big 'go wherever your instincts take you' mentality exists in Johnson's films and I like that quite a bit, it lends a sort of strangeness to interactions that is really funny to me. When Johnson talks about Tony, it's like he's talking about someone else's kid he got saddled with babysitting and now has to follow all the household rules. It's more of a process to get something to happen, you can't just tap your actor on the shoulder for an impromptu shot at sunset day in five minutes. The layers of a big studio production make that tiny shift take way longer, with more people the longer communication takes. I guess my point with this section is there's more "things you can't do" than on a smaller project, because for those the only limit is really your problem solving.

I think the issue of A24 is that it's the acceptable indie, which is a middle bar expensive project (i mean to me anything more than a million is expensive like that is a lot of money) that is close enough to a lot of Hollywood big budget films in look that it won't alienate casual audiences but strange enough to stand out. And sure the existence of A24 has given homes to some amazing films like a personal favorite, I Saw the TV Glow, which A24 distributed (not produced, two different things and not synonymous) so I don't think we need to ban A24, but I do think we need to stop stanning production companies. Also Matt Johnson if you see this please bring Tony to the Chicago International Film Festival I will be so seated even if I'm skeptical of how good it's going to be.