Bill Bennett And His Auteurs-Are-Bad Theory

Describing Symptoms Does Not Make A Diagnosis

That's the best bit of life-experience I got in my brief time as Medical student. It's so true when you come up against a real suffering person, after spending time behind books and in the lecture theatre getting talked at by professors. If there ever was a chronically struggling patient, it's the Australian Film Industry. Today, in the aftermath of the abysmal opening of 'Australia' in the US market, Bill Bennett has piped up with his own analysis of what is wrong with the Australian Film Industry and it is remarkably self-defeating:

The only way we're going to have an Australian film industry is if we get rid of the auteurs. Baz Luhrmann is an auteur, George Miller is an auteur, Peter Weir is an auteur, Jane Campion is an auteur - by that, I mean that these film-makers speak with their own unique voice through cinema. And largely, they keep making the same films. But this does not an industry make.

We need a "modular" system, like Hollywood, if we're ever to break out of the cottage industry mould that we've got ourselves into. By "modular", I mean the antithesis of the auteur system which we largely have in place now - where a film is typically developed by a writer-director, or by a director working with a writer to put down his vision into script form. And then a producer comes on board and then the actors. In this system you cannot separate the script from the director, or sometimes the producer from the director. We have too much respect for the creative process. Big mistake.

Get that? Bill Bennett says what's wrong with the business are the auteurs, and then he lines up Baz Luhrmann with George Miller, Peter Weir, Jane Campion and tries to run them all down. Let's face it, these people are our success stories - they're not part of the problem as I keep saying. If anything, it's Bill Bennett and the system that keeps funding him over, say, me, that is the problem!

Let's be clear about this. About a decade ago, Bill was boasting that he gave advice to funding bodies so that their criteria for selection would favor him the most. Subsequent to that boast he made 'Spider and Rose', which must be the quintessential Australian film people stayed away from in droves.

Let's be even clearer about this. 20th Century Fox bankrolled 'Australia'. It's an American film. Its wins and losses are already part of the Hollywood system, and not really part of the Australian system. Even though it flopped and will shrivel away in the market place, it's actually not our industry's big loss. It's Rupert and Fox's problem, for having bet on Baz Luhrmann this time. It won't be the last time.

So Bill's got a gall trying to call out George Miller, Peter Weir and Jane Campion on the back of Baz's one commercial failure.

Bill Bennett goes on to describe the Hollywood system as he sees it and then hits a point where he realises that he, as a director would not be served by it too well.

The Hollywood system has its own pitfalls and to an extent they treat a director as merely part of the manufacturing process - but hell, what's wrong with that? That's what we're doing. We're manufacturing entertainment and playing with budgets of millions of dollars. And even within this artless box-office driven factory, filmmakers can still keep their own voice. Look at how Peter Weir has continued to make his own unique films within the Hollywood studio system. Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and Master And Commander could only have been made by Weir. And George Miller has continued to keep control of his movies while getting the Hollywood studios to pick up the tab. Happy Feet broke the Pixar mould and got an Oscar for best animated movie in the process. And then there's Australia - which both supports and denies my "kill the auteurs" theory. Baz Luhrmann has taken too damn long to make that movie. He should be working more. We should be seeing more Baz Luhrmann movies. He has to stop being a writer/director and take on some Hollywood crap. Turn it into gold. Like the fabled directors of the 1940s and '50s: William Wyler, George Stevens, even Alfred Hitchcock. As Picasso once said, if you go to work and you're an artist, then what you'll do is art. If you're not, then at least you did a day's work.

That's really weak. He starts off arguing that it's the auteur's fault and then gets to the last bit and comes to the point that it's the fact that there's not enough stuff being made. Yeah, well, I've been saying that or about a decade, while you've been pulling down chump change from the funding bodies to make your cruddy films, Bill - I don't have the box office returns of 'Kiss or Kill' and 'A Savage Land' and 'The Nugget' on my conscience.

Bottom line for me is that the Australian Film Industry lets Bill Bennett make loser films, while I would've made a bunch of genre movies in its place that might have had a real chance of making money; but the funding bodies backed him instead of me.

Auteur or not, the real problem with the industry is that it can't make quantity for various reasons, and when it does, that small quantity it does make is largely crap in the eyes of the domestic market.

If Bill Bennett wants a clearer picture of what's wrong, here are my 5 pointers:

1) Government should stop trying to make development decisions. They keep making movies that bomb in the market place. We know this. They should get out of that pretension and business altogether.

2) The ATO has got to play ball properly. The Tax office has to play by the rules the government has set with the tax break legislation. Without it, the investors won't return.

3) There has to be a domestic market created through artificial means. Australian films should be cheaper at the box office, and exhibitors should be made to screen them. Distributors who handle Australian films have to be protected. This is a must.

4) Make lots of genre pictures. That is to say, more Australian Horror, more Australian Action, More Australian Crime, more Australian Science Fiction and so on. You know, the kinds of pictures people actually watch as their movie staple.

5) Make More. We just don't make enough to know how good we really can be.

If these changes are made, it won't matter if Baz Luhrmann is an auteur or not, or for that matter if, that one picture succeeds or fails.