Sporting a gray WGA-branded “strike” t-shirt, writer-director Charlie Kaufman led a packed-out masterclass this morning in the primary corridor of the Bosnian Cultural Heart on the Sarajevo Movie Pageant.
The Being John Malkovich author is on the town to obtain the Bosnian competition’s profession achievement award, and through his masterclass, he supplied a powerful condemnation of the present Hollywood studio system and urged filmmakers to seek out new methods to create work.
“At this point, the only thing that makes money is garbage. It’s just fascinating. It makes a fortune, and that’s the bottom line,” Kaufman stated. “It’s very seductive to the studios but also to the people who engage and become the makers of that garbage, especially if they’re lauded for the garbage because they don’t have to look inward or think long about what they’re doing.”
Kaufman, who has writing credit on pics like Michel Gondry’s Everlasting Sunshine of the Spotless Thoughts and has directed cult options reminiscent of Synecdoche, New York, and Anomalisa, continued to inform the viewers stuffed with native and worldwide trade professionals to“make movies outside of the studio system as much as possible and think of ways to do that.”
“I have this pipedream of creating an organization of artists to figure out how to finance and support filmmakers who make things that have value,” he added.
With these sturdy declarations, Kaufman promptly moved on to the gray elephant within the room: the present WGA strike, telling the viewers that the broader dialogue across the WGA’s “AI issue” is that “writers have been trained to eat and make the garbage too,” that means writers bask in and create work that he described as missing artistic ambition and humanity.
“As long as they are in that arena making that shit, then you might as well have AI do it,” Kaufman stated.
He added that writers are and needs to be “better” than the circumstances they’re handed by the trade, earlier than concluding that the WGA should keep resolute in its opposition to using AI.
“Once you give that up and allow the studios to use AI to write their screenplay, there’s no going back,” he stated. “Then there’s no hope because AI can’t create a moment of humanity. As long as people are doing it and there’s that struggle, then there’s always a chance that something will come out of it that will be worth something to human beings.”
Later within the discuss, Kaufman additionally lent his essential eye to audiences, who he stated have change into careless customers of what he described because the shallow work they’re offered by the Hollywood “movie machine.”
“They don’t seem to see past the cynical sales pitch,” he stated of audiences. “Even though the sales pitch is presented in a way that suggests they are being fed something of value, they’re not.”
He added: “The diet is so corrupted and has been for so long. It’s like if you eat shit all your life, you want shit. If you eat processed food, you crave it. And you wouldn’t if you hadn’t been fed it all your life. That’s what the movie machine does and I find it really offensive. It makes me angry.”
The dividing line between precise artwork and leisure described as typical Hollywood fare, Kaufman stated, is the “difference between truth and bullshit.”
“If the agenda is to sell a product and if that product is the movie or something within the movie, it can’t be art,” the Oscar-winner concluded.
Elsewhere this morning, Kaufman screened his not too long ago accomplished, cellphone-shot quick movie Jackals and Fireflies, created in collaboration with poet Eva HD. The little-seen movie was commissioned by Samsung and follows a girl who contemplates her life and loneliness whereas wandering the streets of New York Metropolis.
Kaufman will choose up Sarajevo’s lifetime achievement this night earlier than a screening of Adaptation, the second movie he wrote for director Spike Jonze, starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Tilda Swinton, and Jay Tavare.
The Sarajevo Movie Pageant runs till Aug 18.
