Hope for Film by Ted Hope

Author:Ted Hope [Hope, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023956
Publisher: Soft Skull Press

After making American Splendor, I continued to have that same feeling of wanting to create movies that were different from everything else. I had loved a 2000 Mexican film called Amores Perros and thought this kind of innovation was where independent film needed to go. It was adventurous, kinetic, with no individual protagonist, really pushing the envelope. I remember lamenting to one of my Good Machine colleagues, Mary Jane Skalski, that there wasn’t a single filmmaker I wanted to work with, other than the Perros director, Alejandro González Iñárritu. But how would I ever meet, let alone work with, a Mexican director? Literally, the next day, I got a call from Alejandro. I have never believed in heaven’s intervention or that the universe provides much beyond chaos, but this was weird. Just like Bob and Shari’s walking into my office and providing the exact fit that I needed for American Splendor, Alejandro came to me exactly when I wished he would. But it wasn’t God working in splendorous ways. It was Alfonso Cuarón, the Mexican director who had made Y Tu Mama Tambien with Good Machine International (and would later make the best of the Harry Potter films and the 3-D masterpiece Gravity); knowing that Alejandro was looking for an English-language producer for his next project, Alfonso recommended me.

After a number of failed attempts, I finally met Alejandro in Los Angeles at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, a gathering hole for people in the indie film industry. He first approached the producer Albert Berger (Little Miss Sunshine), who was also sitting in the café and who Alejandro thought was me—I considered it a compliment. Alejandro finally found me, and we bonded over the possibility of taking film form to new places. We discussed how cinema was a hundred years old but we were doing it the same way we always had. After 9/11, I felt that if I was going to continue to make movies, they had to be movies that mattered. And if the cinema purports to be the art that most captures what it means to be in our world, the challenge was how to create something that feels new and of the moment. I hadn’t yet read the script for 21 Grams, but I knew Alejandro wanted to capture the subject of free will, which sounded enticing.

Alejandro and his scriptwriter Guillermo Arriaga had developed a nonlinear approach to their story, which skillfully captured some complex ideas. But it was funny because the two of them were coming at the concept from opposite philosophical positions. A lot of times, we believe we need collaborators who think like we do. But Alejandro and Guillermo demonstrated that it’s sometimes beneficial to find collaborators who make you think harder and force you to take chances. Alejandro is a believer—his religion is very important to him—and Guillermo is an atheist. And yet, both men wanted to tackle this question of fate through a unique storytelling strategy. The complicated structure of 21

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