The Comment Factory

There seemed to be a strange magic pouring out of the television tube on the recent Oscars night in Hollywood. The British production, Slumdog Millionaire, had aced its opposition in the shoot-out for statuettes and taken eight awards, including best picture, director and adapted screenplay. It was the ultimate accolade and provided an appropriate bookend to an amazing cinematic run, a climax almost as dramatic as the closing reel of the film itself.

Jean Luc-Godard, pioneer of Auteurism

But away from the staggering hoopla of black ties and red carpets, an almost predictable backlash had been percolating, and it seemed to be spreading quickly across newspapers, their web-based associates and the blogosphere. Perhaps the most high-profile criticism in recent weeks came from Salman Rushdie in the UK’s Guardian newspaper. In an extended piece on the pitfalls of adaptation, Rushdie set his sights squarely on Slumdog Millionaire and in particular its director, Danny Boyle. Rushdie criticised the movie on a number of fronts, calling it “banal fluff” and “slum tourism”, but saved his best for Boyle, commenting that: “I imagined an Indian film director making a movie about New York low-life and saying that he had done so because he knew nothing about New York and had indeed never been there. He would have been torn limb from limb by critical opinion. But for a first world director to say that about the third world is considered praiseworthy, an indication of his artistic daring. The double standards of post-colonial attitudes have not yet wholly faded away.”

Before the week was out, bloggers from all corners of the web were corralling about the fatwa-cursed writer, pronouncing him as the figurehead of their capricious movement. But while many of his comments regarding Slumdog Millionaire were spurious, perhaps Rushdie’s biggest blunder was his attack on Boyle. In an article that actually touches upon the concept, Rushdie had allowed himself to be sucked into the concept of convenience known as Auteur theory.

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Auteur theory, invented in France in the 1950s by a bunch of then critics and aspiring directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, claimed that a director’s films reflect that director’s personal creative vision, as if he or she were the primary “Auteur” or author. Auteurism held that it was the director who created the film – the director who made the film. The Nouvelle Vague period in French cinema of the 1960s, of which Godard and Truffaut were two of the creative forces, became synonymous with the theory, and the Auteurists held up US-based directors such John Ford, Nicholas Ray and Alfred Hitchcock as figureheads of their theory on the Western side of the Atlantic.

In the wider film community, the idea was greeted with a mixture of confusion and ridicule. Auteurism was dismissed by creatives and technicians at all levels of the industry – including directors – as being total bunk, with screenwriter William Goldman writing in his 1983 book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, that: “Godard, in a recent interview, said that the whole thing was patent bullshit from the beginning, an idea devised by the then young scufflers to draw some attention to themselves.” Auteurism failed to take hold in the industry and as a method for making films it all but faded away.

But the theory never did quite go away completely. Instead, it quietly mutated and matured. Now, instead of being promulgated by a bunch of ambitious and savvy young filmmakers, it’s kept alive by a media machine hungry for hype. Every time a critic writes “Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road” or “Gus Van Sant’s Milk” the idea is protracted, to the detriment of the army of creatives and techs that work on a film and, ultimately, the directors themselves. Directors don’t ‘make’ films. Producers, cinematographers, screenwriters, editors, actors, production designers, art directors, set designers and various other creatives and techs along with directors come together to ‘make’ films. A director does exactly that; he or she ‘directs’ a film.

Slumdog Millionaire is a case in point. Danny Boyle did not devise the story, later sitting down to scribble away at a screenplay, nor did he compose the music, design the costumes and slave away in the editing room; if you look down the list of credits for Slumdog Millionaire, his name sits next to but one: ‘Director’. Instead, when production companies Celador and Flim4 had already organized finance and started filling other key production roles, Boyle was approached by producer Christian Colson through his agent and sent a screenplay that Simon Beaufoy had adapted from Vikas Swarup’s novel. Boyle initially read the script with some reluctance, only signing on to the project when he realized the quality of Beaufoy’s adaptation. Yet, regardless of this exceptionally typical director-for-hire sequence of events, it has of course been Boyle who’s thrust into the limelight as Slumdog Millionaire has rolled from one accolade to the next, the director seemingly judged responsible for every creative accomplishment of the film.

It’s natural then that when the backlash started and the knives were sharpened, it was Boyle who came under the most fire. Rushdie’s claim that Boyle is guilty of post-colonialism might have been totally erroneous, but it’s just one of many trumped up charges dumped upon the director. Walter Chaw at Film Freak Central refers to the flick as “Danny Boyle’s frivolous, exploitive, essentially unforgivable Slumdog Millionaire” while Eric Hynes of IndieWIRE writes, “Like a deep-pocketed club owner or talent manager, Boyle sells Mumbai—or the hip Anglo vision of it—as the new hotness. And pace the title, he’s slumming his way to millions.” Of course, Boyle is a victim of his own success as a member of a triumphant filmmaking team and for every negative review where he’s personally blamed there are probably five indicating he has the multi-tasking talents of a super computer. But when the director suffers the dubious honor of having his effigy burned by angry Indians incensed at the term ‘Slumdog’ being used in the title of the film, the personal pitfalls of Auteur theory perhaps become a little more obvious.

But regardless of whether he believes his own hype or not, Boyle wouldn’t be the first to be undone by Auteurism. In the past, if the media wasn’t knocking down directors, they were sometimes gently hanging themselves. Truffaut and Godard’s own Nouvelle Vague movement declined in the quality of its output, eventually falling apart under the weight of its own labored pretensions, while in Adventures in the Screen Trade, Goldman provides a convincing case for the Auteur theory also having destroyed the career of Alfred Hitchcock. Having been hand-picked as an idol by the Auteurists, Hitchcock was elevated as a serious artist, but after sucking in the praise, his films, from The Birds onwards, quickly went downhill. It’s perhaps the ultimate example, and illustrates that you can be one of the finest filmmakers the world has ever known but still sail straight into the ego-inflated folds of the Auteur trap.