‘AMP’ Sci-Fi Thriller in development by Alex Proyas

[tharpdevenport]

From the perspective of a writer ... any script written "on the fly" (so to speak) as pages are handed to them from a novel still being written, instead of being planned out, thought ahead, and a personal project which someone had creative and caring investiment in ... is gonna blow hard. With a vengeance.

 

[Harvey]

As far as being satisfied goes, I'm pretty sure that being publicly dissatisfied is generally regarded as being unprofessional.

Some people might consider it so, but it still happens all the time. Considering how candid Proyas has been about the way FOX treated him during the production of I, ROBOT, it hardly seems like he's afraid of speaking his mind. I will grant that his praise of KNOWING was made while the film was in release, and could change given the benefit of distance from the production.

You even go to the extreme of assuming that Proyas just "let" Nicholas Cage play the role as the actor wished. Cage is a big name in Hollywood and Proyas is just the director. The other performances in Knowing were unexceptional.

The director is responsible for working with the actors and crafting their performances. If he couldn't control a star like Nicolas Cage, then he failed at his job. That you acknowledge he also failed to elicit any exceptional performances out of less powerful actors shows how unimpressive his direction on that picture actually is.

I don't have a problem with either performance you highlight in DARK CITY, though that is, of course, a matter of personal taste.

I agree that screenwriters are discussed less than they should, but your approach seems to suggest that the director could be anybody without the finished film being notably different. The corrective approach to the Hollywood perversion of the auteur theory isn't to undervalue the contribution of the director, but to value the role of the screenwriter. This is of course something I often fail to do, but it should not be such a surprise. Directors are granted more interviews and their actual contribution isn't as hard to discern as the task of writing. At least, when there is more than one writer. On one-writer productions such as THE SOCIAL NETWORK, I think you'll find plenty of people discussing the writing.

 

[Kegg]

But, if you insist on thinking the auteur Proyas was fantastic in Dark City but for some unspecified (metaphysically unknowable?) reason incompetent in Knowing, that is your privilege. It doesn't pass the sniff test for making sense, whereas my position that Dark City had an artistically coherent script, as opposed to script by committee at least gives a possible.

Lots of people make good movies and then make bad movies. Sometimes with the same amount of control and direct influence, sometimes with even more.

They're human. Stuff can go wrong. They can have bad ideas and stubbornly stick with them or bad influences.