Preface This

If there’s one trend in film that I cannot understand (or sometimes tolerate) it is the rise of the Director’s Introduction.

Today, someone asked if I’d watched the DVD of Bon Cop Bad Cop, a Canadian feature film which had been a box-office smash when it was released last year. He then told me that there was a Director’s Intro where Eric Canuel talks about – wait for it – how successful the film was at the box-office. And if that weren’t bad enough, you couldn’t skip through it to the film that you had just paid money to either rent or buy. Why anyone would think it a good idea to hold the paying audience ransom so that they could congratulate themselves on making a profit is the sort of provincial-minded Canadian bullshit that I’ve unfortunately come to expect from a country pathologically unable to take its head out of its ass. But why does any film need an introduction in the first place?

I remember renting Spielberg’s Munich last year. Not only did he have an intro (optional though it was), but in it he more or less apologized for his film – politically. Could you imagine Bertolucci apologizing for The Conformist or Orson Welles apologizing for Citizen Kane? Spielberg: the man who has brought more money into the box-office than nearly anyone in history, who in his prime innovatively defined, through works like ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind “the film for everyone”, now prefaces his work as if there had been a manufacturing error of epic proportions which caused hardcore pornography where there used to be sunsets.

What the hell is going on? Do we not trust ourselves? Are we becoming so fearful of litigation or clouds of doubt on the horizon of our career’s posterity that we must now preface our work, selling its merits as if applying for a loan, as if spending the millions of dollars to make the film was, in retrospect, an uncertain mistake?

Guillermo del Toro, in his introduction to the Pan’s Labyrinth DVD talks briefly about how much weight he lost during production. Terry Gilliam, who filmed an introduction for the theatrical run of his much-maligned feature, Tideland, stood there reminding us that his film was about the world through the eyes of a child. Indeed, it’s as if the general public were being treated like infants.

In my writer’s group, during our monthly meetings, we will read new work aloud. We have a firm rule: you do not preface your work. You do not say “I was trying to write about…”, or “This is based on a story…”. No. Stop it. If it’s good, it will stand up on its own accord. If it’s good – even if I have questions – I’m comfortable that I will be able to find this out on my own after the fact. If you need to explain your work before you present it to an audience then chances are you have not produced a work that an audience should be seeing (as opposed to, say, yourself).

When I see a film, I want to see the film. I do not want or require a preface where somebody “explains” things for me or, worse still, some risk-averse apologia. I’m a big boy, I can handle it.