How To Make a Bad Movie
The recipe for a bad movie is simple—and no it’s not bad lighting, bad editing, bad acting, bad whatever. Really, there is no ‘bad’, at least not in a sense specifically achievable by any particular aesthetic, or failing thereof. Badness, if we can call it that, is reached most easily, effortlessly, through one particular state: being unfinished.
Are there unfinished movies that are good? Sure—what’s ‘there’ is good. But it can never be good in the way that a good movie is good—it is forever tainted by not being done, complete, a vision seen through to its full fruition. It is a life cut short, a someone remembered fondly perhaps, but with a question mark hovering beside, of what it could have or would have been. Kind of morbid, kind of depressing, I know—but it’s like that.
So many movies are released in an unfinished state. This is something gamers complain about in regards to video games—buggy things that are just-playable-enough to legally sit on a store shelf. Moviegoers don’t complain about it enough when it comes to movies, because it’s not always immediately discernible—or even ever discernible to anyone but fellow filmmakers. In fact, the entire industry banks on this disconnect—a film’s failings can be blamed on any number of factors that are easily pointed to, the studio execs never once having to address the fact that they rushed a project that needed more time, or that all films, even great ones, are pretty much inedible until the point they are fully cooked, and no sooner. Doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who love eating raw cookie dough, and think of it as dessert in and of itself—just means that a movie that reads as ‘bad’ could literally be bad because it’s only 99% done.
When, then, is a film ‘done’, you might ask? Some artists would work on a film forever if given the opportunity, that is true—I believe though that a film is done when it can understand its own existence. Every film must at some point become existential, whether it has that literally woven into its plot or not—it needs to know, on some level, what it is. Not that the characters need to know—no fourth wall breaking stuff like that—just that the point of the movie must tie into how the film is even presented. Its purpose guides its ‘doneness’.
A film does not know what it is at the script stage, no matter how great the script is. It doesn’t know what it is when it is being shot, and only starts to know what it is being edited—and then, only towards the very end. Everything before that is just assembling—putting things together according to how they make sense to go together, and then sanding, polishing. At some point though, the movie becomes done enough to become self-aware, sentient—it gains the ability to understand what it is, and communicate that to you.
It is the filmmaker’s job to listen. What started out as a drama could in fact be dying to be considered a comedy. What was a horror could in fact just be a tragedy. Basically, the film realizes the context it requires in order to survive out there amongst the uninitiated. A filmmaker who doesn’t take that role on during editing, tailoring that understanding into the final cut, will have to cross their fingers and hope for some film critic, or ad guy, to pick up the slack after the fact, contextualizing it as best they can. But really, it’s the job of the filmmaker—or, it should be. So much time spent with the piece, listening to it along the way, it just makes sense to listen to it one final time.
If you want to make a bad movie, the surest way towards that is to just not care at all how things are ‘playing’, ‘reading’—no regard for presentation, plating. No regard for how the film lands, most of all—how it becomes the story of its own self, its own metaphor. You essentially have to become uncaring to the film’s needs, driven mad by your own stubborn idea of what the film is ‘supposed to be’ and not what it actually literally is. The best filmmakers are the most attentive, the best listeners to their own work. The worst filmmakers don’t even think that their film has any voice at al, save for the one they give it—they see it as dead, no spirit, a mere ventriloquist’s dummy. That’s why their films, when they reach audiences, are dead on arrival—you have to believe in the spirit of the thing your hands are making speak. If you don’t, why should anyone else?
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