Michael Caton-Jones is caught between two worlds. “It’s easier for me to get $70 million to make a Hollywood movie than it is to get $4 million to make a small British movie!” says the exasperated 48-year-old Scottish-born director. Not much of a dilemma for your average wannabe wunderkind, perhaps, but for Caton-Jones it’s indicative of the creative crisis facing the modern mainstream moviemaker — sell your soul for studio respectability or sell your house for indie credibility? And, as if to prove a point, Caton-Jones has two thoroughly contrasting movies coming out on the very same day. One,
Shooting Dogs, is a shoestring heartstopper about the Rwandan genocide, while the other,
Basic Instinct 2, is a lavish Hollywood sequel that has been on and off the production line for nearly 14 years.
Caton-Jones describes the former as a labour of love, a film driven by anger and political despair, made with genocide survivors, and funded for buttons by the BBC. The latter, he says, well, the latter was a job. “It’s not necessarily my cup of tea, but I’m a professional film director and I can turn my hand to more than one thing. I’d rather be making films like Shooting Dogs, but I can’t afford it. I have kids. I have to pay the rent.”
Caton-Jones has no delusions about the nature of his relationship with the Hollywood machine. The former London-based stagehand who made his directorial debut with the Britflick classic Scandal, shoots technically polished mainstream movies that are often critically appreciated without being adored, and financially profitable without breaking records (although his 1997 Bruce Willis vehicle, The Jackal, made $160 million worldwide). He says that he sees himself as a director-for-hire, a throwback to the classic era of Hollywood, when masters such as William Wyler and Howard Hawks pumped out movies on demand, and answered obediently to the crack of the studio boss’s whip. Understanding Hollywood, he says, is all about knowing your place in the food chain.
“Originally, they want you for, you know, that ‘stuff’ you did on that little film you made. ‘Give us some of that stuff,’ they say. ‘But you’re going to have to change it, because we’re going to tell you what works and what doesn’t.’ So your job is to try to give people what they want while maintaining your integrity. You know from the start that you’re going to have to make compromises in your work, so you have to figure out ultimately what are the compromises that you can live with.”
During 2003, after the failure of his efficient Robert De Niro cop thriller City by the Sea, the compromises began to take their toll. Caton-Jones says, bluntly, that he became “sick of making Hollywood films”. He needed to stretch his creative legs. He found himself drawn to a ruthlessly compelling account of the murder of 2,500 Tutsi innocents in a Kigali secondary school in April 1994. Fuelled by anger and a zeal to tell the truth about Rwanda, he secured minor financial backing from the BBC (less than $3 million) and decamped to Kigali for six months. There, with the aid of John Hurt and a legion of non-professional actors and local survivors, he could tell the story of slaughter at the École Technique Officielle without any compromise.
The result is the best film of Caton-Jones’s career; Shooting Dogs is also one of the best political films of the year. It’s a tougher and more mature film than the Oscar-nominated Hotel Rwanda, which, according to Caton- Jones, was clearly burdened by studio insistence on a “romance, a happy ending of sorts and a soft-pedalled truth”. Instead, Shooting Dogs does away with expectation entirely. Or rather it turns it on its head for the sake of a greater, deeper truth. It gives us sympathetic white protagonists who turn out to be bureaucratic drones or moral cowards. It gives us a hopeful narrative vignette about a resilient Tutsi mother and her newborn baby, only to cruelly put them both, seconds later, under the machete. And then, when we least expect it . . . without spoiling it, let’s just say that things get even worse.
“I didn’t set out purposely to make something that was heavy and dark,” says Caton-Jones. “But there’s a point where you cross over, where you are really doing a disservice to the reality of what actually happened, if you don’t try to represent it.”
Despite the movie’s punishing subject matter, Caton-Jones says that the experience of making Shooting Dogs was professionally reinvigorating and he returned to London in 2005 a new man. There was just one snag: “When you work for the BBC you don’t get paid.” Cash-strapped and eager for work, he soon heard that his former studio paymasters were searching for someone to guide Sharon Stone through the $70 million Basic Instinct 2.
He took the job and says that, post-Shooting Dogs, he was eager to bring a darker, sinister, more European sensibility to the production. “Until, of course, I ran into the censors and had to take out all the sex.” Dealing with the US ratings board was an education. “They have all these unwritten rules. It’s like, three thrusts and you have got to cut away. It’s the same with oral sex — you get three bobs and you’re out. And you can show them banging away in close up, but full length isn’t allowed. It’s crazy!” In the end, though, he had to be content with finding some personal satisfaction in turning Basic Instinct 2 into a glossy, sleek and, to an extent, superficial piece of bums-on-seats entertainment. He says he would rather be making his next Shooting Dogs — in this case an adaptation of Alan Warner’s cult Edinburgh-set teen novel, The Sopranos (no, the other ones!). But in today’s movie-making climate, low-budget, starless, and effects-free films are becoming increasingly hard to finance. And that is especially true in the UK, he adds, “where the power to make films is concentrated in the hands of a few people — generally male, from the South-East, Groucho Club, cokesniffing . . . well, you know?” In the meantime, he will remain an old-fashioned studio director for hire. “It’s a complex thing, making films. If you keep doing it sometimes you’re going to f*** it up. But sometimes, too, you’re going to get it right.”
Shooting Dogs and Basic Instinct 2 open on March 31. See next week’s Knowledge for a free Shooting Dogs screening, and, for more on the film, www.shootingdogsfilm.blogspot.com
