Wow - Howard's character is arguably more important to the story than Phoenix's. Was he that big of a draw back then to be able to demand so much more pay? Well - he had probably been in "Gladiator" just prior, so I guess he was a hot commodity. It looks like William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Adrien Brody, Brendan Gleeson all got paid pretty well. The movie made money despite not finding favor with critics.
> Ebert named the film the tenth worst film of 2004 and subsequently put it on his "Most Hated" list.
I used a lot that movie as an analogy during covid, when we were told that all borders were closed and it was impossible to travel, but the few friends who actually showed up at airports were surprised to see the whole thing functioning normally and be a rather nice experience (no lines). That was 2020 of course. 2021 was a different story.
I had a girlfriend in Denmark and travelled throughout the whole of covid. In Denmark the restrictions weren’t just less they were at different times. Which is the biggest deal because if you move about and the rules are all different they don’t make any sense and hence don’t impose a sense of ordered control. I’d have coffee on the high street in Denmark and then be berated on a train in London the day after by a crazed wild eyed old lady ( who understandably ) had spent the last 6 months or so quarantined in a basement and was cross I was drinking coffee and lowering a mask ( no masks were even required in Denmark that I remember)when I mentioned I had literally been in cafe without a mask the day before it wasn’t a look of annoyance but utter confusion. Understand this was during the height where everything was closed lockdowns extending the darkest moment before the dawn type thing.
The different timing of the rules is what honestly made me not experience the restrictions - just an odd confusion.
Lastly I remember I walked to the airport , told a stewardess in the airport I was going to try fly same day to Denmark and she looked at me like I was insane ( 3 day covid testing required).
I bought a ticket from a machine walked straight into a place with a passport check landed in Denmark - no test. ( when flying to Denmark the test could be done on landing at the airport I have no idea why but it was legal - they just didn’t bother to mostly)
The airport lady wouldn’t have believed it but even to her , working in global field - changing global differences hadn’t registered.
TLDR You CAN have a The Village situation IRL I experienced it!!
"Signs" was one of my favorite films of the 2000s, if you don't nitpick about the water. Suspenseful, well acted, leaves you guessing, eager for more.
Suffice to say, I eagerly anticipated "The Village" from the moment the first trailer dropped. The costumes looked cool. The colors, the creatures, the mood and the mystery.
I don't think I've ever left a theater quite so disappointed. The twist ruined what had been a magical experience for the better half of the film. I wanted the magic to endure, but I got slapped with a bad episode of "The Outer Limits".
Shyamalan remains a fantastic filmmaker for his hits, but this one hurt me. I don't wait for films anymore.
I felt exactly the same about signs, and really loved the village.
I don’t really like the world we’ve built, and I fantasize about leaving it behind. That’s a major reason I lived in the Yukon for years (many people living more like the village than outside it)
These people (the village founders) had an idea and went for it. I really like that.
Signs is the worst movie I’ve ever seen. The plot makes no sense and it’s not like it has good character development or dialogue so that leaves nothing.
Yep. Signs was the movie that revealed to me my irrational fear of aliens walking in the distance for uncertain purpose.
Not joking, I am a big strong man but I was holding onto my girlfriend and shaking like a leaf during that movie.
Then the water scene happens and ruined the whole movie for me.
But I still get hairs standing up on the back of my neck if I think too long and hard about 7' tall aliens walking sideways in the distance. (Actually getting creeped out just typing this out).
I love it that there is a thought that can disturb me. I don't know where it comes from and I can't exactly control it.
Anyway, same thing with the Village. Great mood. Great cinematography. Great acting. Supernatural horror ominous period piece. So much well crafted build up that ended with an unfunny rehash of the ending of Monty Python's Holy Grail. Total cop out to the rest of the story. Unforgivable.
It was ruined for me because we arrived just as it was about to start, were pointed to the wrong screen, and ended up walking in to a viewing in progress just in time to see enough to make the twist obvious...
As much as I've enjoyed many of Shyamalan's movies, the big problem with them is how much hinges on the twist. To this day I feel very little interest in rewatching them because of that.
It isn't only the twist, though, it's the timing of the twist. Plenty of movies with that kind of twist are re-watchable, but you have to put that twist about ... two-thirds, three-fifths of the way through. The rest of the film is devoted to the protagonist exploring the consequences of realizing that one of their big axioms was wrong. Shyamalan's timing puts the twist at the end, the characters don't really get to react, etc.
I swear I know this twist from a short story in an English textbook I read in school. Seemingly set in the mid-19th century, a pair of young teens, maybe a group of three, were in the process of exploring outside their village (I think with the intention of leaving for good) -- knowing it’s not allowed by village authorities -- when they walked onto a modern paved road and saw the headlights from a vehicle and didn’t know what they were looking at.
I never watched the movie but from all the conversations I’ve heard about it, it sounds like that’s the twist. This 19th-century village is just a probably slightly cult-y hideaway for some people in modern times. Is that right?
Variations on the this has been done many times, so I wouldn't be surprised. E.g the broader "protagonist lives in a bubble" theme includes The Truman Show, or Brian Aldiss' novel "Nonstop".
As someone else pointed out part of the problem w/how Shyamalan handles it is that too much hinges on the twist in some of his movies.
> the big problem with them is how much hinges on the twist
I feel similar but different to JJ Abrams' Cloverfield universe. Cloverfield Lane and Cloverfield Paradox are just 2 movies where he attaches a random scene at the end to tie them into the Cloverfield universe. Those scenes have nothing to do with the movie, and if left off would not negatively affect the movie itself.
> Cloverfield Lane and Cloverfield Paradox are just 2 movies where he attaches a random scene at the end to tie them into the Cloverfield universe
That is exactly what it is supposed to be. Think of it like The Twilight Zone, every story is different but they all exist in a world that is distinct and unnatural.
I think JJ Abrams finally came up with a good way of explaining it to people: "It’s like Cloverfield is the amusement park, and each of these movies is a different ride in that park."
Your critique is totally spot on. I can’t stomach Shyamalan’s current movies. Oddly though despite the cheap plot twist and how much it got made fun of in the media at the time, I love The Sixth Sense. I still watch it to this day. The scene where Cole sees the dead biker and tells his mom they’re standing outside the car window? Goosebumps every time.
I cant find the source right now but when Shyamalan wrote the Sixth Sense, it was a complete script on about the fifth draft before he even _thought_ of the twist. And I think thats why its such a great movie. Its like a twist that gives you a whole new movie on top of the perfectly good one you've already seen. And the twist is not just a gimmick, it has emotional depth.
edit: I first saw the sixth sense in perfect conditions - a pirated VCD from Malaysia before any publicity for it had happened in the UK, so had no idea what I was getting myself into other than it had Bruce Willis in it. Absolutely blew me away.
edit: found the source:
According to an interview in Scenario magazine (Volume 5, Number 4), Shyamalan had written five drafts of the screenplay before an idea came to him that transformed it into something totally new, leading to a landmark film with powerful performances from the film’s stars. It happened in the sixth draft.
This was Bryce Dallas Howard's first film so it was her big break, before that she had only done theater. Hopefully she got a percentage of the profit and some extra money for promoting the film.
Edit: Also worth noting that her father is Ron Howard so she probably didn't need the money.
Actors get paid for their ability to draw an audience, which largely depends on the success of their previous work. Howard was a nobody, but probaly got paid a lot better for her next movie, since this movie was a success.
From what I have learned about this whole show business / movie business / music business game as played at least in N. America and U.K. (?), the whole thing is pretty rigged and works on a "handshake" basis for the lack of a more loftier term. Hollywood , for the sheer amount of global power it wields, is amazing when you think about how its run like a company town & how little scrutiny it gets overall.
I highly recommend watching the HBO series, Vinyl (2016) about a record executive from the 1970s & the music business then. All those radio hits - that were hit and the ones that werent - you've always scratched your head about make a lot more sense when you understand the inner workings.
Movie goers buy individual tickets which makes a huge difference vs radio. Unpopular movies get booted from theaters very quickly where unpopular songs can stick around on the radio indefinitely.
And it doesn’t matter how connected you are, movie flops quickly kill careers.
It was also one of the first movies for Jesse Eisenberg, but I cannot find his character (Jamison) in the list. I wonder if it was renamed during shooting. There is a small part for Joseph ($8K total), but there is no character with this name in the final cast.
Probably because "Uncredited" signifies the absence in credits sequence(s) in general for crew and staff, while the term "Extra" applies just to actors.
Do you have some evidence he was paid or just making stuff up?
AFAICT he was a pretty honest reviewer giving his own opinions. People have different tastes. Like some people like stinky tofu and others find it disgusting. Some people like The Village and some don't.
My sister likes everything, for example all episodes of Star Wars, 1 though 9. Whereas I only like 4,5,6 and find the rest to be horrible. She liked the latest "Haunted Mansion" so I watched and found it atrocious.
> Do you have some evidence he was paid or just making stuff up?
It's fairly easy to corrupt a single person (this happens everyday, everywhere) and even if he was never paid, he probably had people he liked in the industry that he would not dare to criticize because, you know, they were friends.
I'll trust review aggregators any day over a single person's opinion.
He was Rotten Tomatoes before Rotten Tomatoes. If you think, even for a second, that he was not a cog in the machine, you haven't lived in this world the last 10 years or so.
If only we could live in a world where reviews weren't gamed. Amazon owes a lot to its early reviewers, who created a lot of value for the site. Nowadays it's absolutely worthless for reviews and doesn't even have good prices.
Shyamalan got good out of it. Usually it's ~5% of the budget for director, but he did write it as well and then some. Hefty fee. Looking through the budget I guess only surprise would be music composer at 4x Deakins' fee; That's interesting. Always weird to see Hollywood sheets like that, they're so inflated in some ways. For example, 50k for someone to run a generator on-set for three months and then also 30k for same generator rental. Or, matte shots/plates 50k apiece, 50k wrap party allowance, DI at 350k (jesus, yet whole of foley was 112k), titles at 160k, 2 AVID machines rental at 270k (even then one could've bought several times over several full systems for that), 20k for MIDI file transfer :P And all that's in 2003 money.
Generators on film sets aren’t the type of thing you power your house with in an outage; they are a truck sized, high power piece of specialist equipment. Running one of those generators safely with zero downtime is absolutely a job. People think of movie sets as dangerous places due to stunts, fire and explosions. I was always weary of the electricity.
I worked on a few films back in college. It's a huge deal if the generator goes down. It completely stops production, especially when shooting at night with giant lights. It's not possible to run most productions off of the normal power grid due to the voltage and amp requirements of the lights. At least that was the case before LEDs. I'm not sure what the large studio production lights are using these days.
And then you’re stuck paying for every cast and crew for the time they are not working. If you end up having to shoot another day, you’ll have to pay that too, which may not be budgeted for. This can easily put the value of a few lost minutes of power into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It’s very similar to the discussion of self hosted vs cloud providers. Business people are willing to pay more for a predictable cost, rather than save a significant chunk of change but run the risk of having an unpredicted event that ends up with a large extra cost (such as replacing a whole rack tower
I was on a number of film sets, you are right, but it's also not a job that warrants that much of a compensation and it usually is included in rental fee. Rarely will rental company of a genny give out generator itself without a guy or two.
Not only that, but rain and wet environments, it takes a skilled person to keep everyone safe, and also be able to wrench on a large diesel engine...while starting at 3 am, wrapping 14hrs later.
And in some large film unions, you need to pass a test just to get into the department, let alone run a generator.
Those costs remind me of the cost for dealing with emergency water damage.
They would be extraordinarily cheaper if they were working nonstop, but the asks are so intermittent they have to charge enough to maintain availability of the service. This becomes especially true and high cost-of-living areas.
The technicians are good at configuring and fixing issues but they don’t have the ability to call up Avid and demand a new machine get overnight courier carried to replace one
DI probably also involves at that time the cost of scanning it into film. I worked in the industry a little after this and some of the DI theatres rent out for 1K+ per hour, plus there’s conform artist time, incorporating new cuts, etc. I could see it.
This film gets bashed often but I remember seeing it in the cinema when it was released and I absolutely adored it, and still do. I’ve ’inflicted’ it on several friends and acquaintances — and keep in mind I’m no M. Night Shyamalan fan having never seen Unbrekable and having walked out of the cinema midway through The Last Airbender that I hold to be one of the worst films ever. Anyway back to The Village: its scenery and ambiance were absolutely perfect. The twist was pure genius.
It's one of my favorite movies. I love movies or books that get me thinking "what the hell is going on" until in the end there's a twist where it now all makes sense.
I remember liking it a lot, I didn't see the twist coming even though the guy was known at the time for having a twist in his films. I liked how it wasn't just about a "gotcha" but revealed character motivations and how people try to retreat from the world due to trauma, and the lengths parents go to protect their children. I bet it would hit harder if I watched it now that I have children.
The film didn't work for me, because I didn't realise the "twist" was supposed to be a twist. I had assumed it from the start and was expecting the reverse to be the twist.
I expected the high fees for actors/director/writer, but the composer fee was surprising (page 69). And the movie was nominated for Oscars for original score (and nothing else)! Interesting decision to hire that composer, presumably made by MNS.
I'm pretty sure the studio is putting up the money for the movie. This seems to be the production budget and does not include whatever his profit participation was.
In reality, these lines are a lot blurrier. Executive producers usually are investors, but they're not necessarily the primary investors. Definitionally, they're responsible for the financing of the film. Producers on the other hand, are, in theory responsible for managing expenditure of the investment (making the film), very much like a CEO/President as you describe.
Not necessarily are producers involved in any budgeting. My First Wife and I were producers on a film that was made from a stage script of her. Our role as producers gave us vetoes on screenplay changes and gave us a hand in the production, plus royalties, but we had no hand in securing the budget or spending it.
The director is the person who actually crafts the movie. They don't necessarily have anything to do with managing the money. Sometimes you have producer-directors, but it's like a restaurant that is owned by the chef.
Is it surprising? It’s the same for costumes, sets, visual effects, and many other creative aspects of the production: there’s a lead designer / supervisor who is in charge of the overall look and concept, and then individual artists who implement the look.
Make-up and hair seem quite critical to the atmosphere and look of a movie like The Village which is set in an ambiguous time and place. I think this was probably an interesting project for the make-up designer, and IMO he/she deserved the $105k fee.
I'd assume it is an office copier that can produce lots of copies of scripts, receipts, invoices, signs for the sets etc. they might need all through the day. And by renting, if it breaks down they get an immediate replacement from the rental company (at zero cost) I guess. So don't need to worry about repair downtime.
Am I reading this right that M. Night got over 10M (and possibly the most out of anyone) because of the 7.5M story rights/writing on top of the 3M for directing?
I remember these sheets (or the same type artifact) in a newstand magazine fifteen years ago or so; I read it in Wired, Esquire or some similar publication, iirc.
This breakdown is about $71M, and it doesn't even account for reshoots in 2004 ~april. Which one is the more accurate? Are all publicly reported budgets this different?
Or is there something in this report that is not counted there?
I think the public "budget" number is best considered as part of the film's publicity. It might reflect reality, it might not. Some films exaggerate their production budgets to make them seem like good value to buyers, some understate them for "plucky outsider" cred.
A few things to note: this isn't the budget that Disney ended up having. This doesn't include Prints & Advertising. I'm assuming the picture also had a state tax credit for filming in NY and Penn. So the overall budget would probably be 10-15 million dollars less than itemized. It also looks like N.Night had a 3 picture deal at Disney.
I was at a "special invite." I remember this movie well because many of India's Bollywood whos-who were there. When the film ended, I came out and kept thinking, I wish the movie ended before the revelation, stayed on the cliffhanger, and didn't expose that the Village was "staged."
The ending made me feel like, "Duh! Was it all for nothing?"
No, I loved the ending and then thinking back through the whole movie and remember how I just assumed it was in the seventeenth century or whatever. The “it was all for nothing” in an isolated compound in the modern world made the movie for me.
I liked it too. There's a bit near the start where one of the characters makes some comment with slightly awkward-sounding wording; I forget what, precisely, but it was exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from a modern English speaker fluffing an attempt to stay in character as a Victorian or whatever. They even sounded a bit like they were half-realising this as they were saying it.
I put it down to a mistake that they didn't have time to fix. But then, given the ending, I realised it must have been deliberate.
I don't know if that would have helped. I figured out the twist long before its revelation, and I think the movie would have made even less sense without some kind of explanation of the characters' strange behaviour. I came out of it thinking "I guess some names can get anything funded", since it seemed like an obviously bad story, but with more hindsight "obviously bad story" is not a problem for a film project if it makes money (just a problem for the audience), and in 2004 Shyamalan's name on a movie was guaranteed to make money, so the investors had no need to care about story.
I'm so sorry to those pissed off about the spoilers. I was under the impression that for movies, it is like "about a week-ish" before hinting on spolers, and about "couple of days" for TV episodes!
Let me make it up to you. If you haven't seen it, there is a TV series based off George RR Martin's work, Game of Thrones[1].
That one's not really a spoiler. The heroes set out to do that to win, and it's obviously the type of movie where the heroes win. What's less certain is how exactly they'll get there.
Watch enough movies and you'll know that certain things don't test well with audiences.
Is a young girl in peril? Don't worry, nothing will happen to her, the audiences won't like it.
Have we been focused on one guy for the first 20 minutes? He definitely won't die, at least until the end. And he will achieve something great regardless; it won't all be for nothing.
Did they show a gun in some scene? That's important for later; some guy called Chekhov wants it back.
Once you see the boundaries in modern storytelling, it definitely makes things rather predictable.
If you want to see a film that breaks some of the rules, watch Brimstone.
Apologies if this is too much of a spoiler, but you might be a bit surprised by how the film's immediate sequel plays out.
Edit: And considering when it was made and who made it, a happy ending was by no means guaranteed. Compare and contrast with the endings of Silent Running or American Graffiti.
That's partly why the [spoiler] of The Empire Strikes Back is effective, but that movie also has a different tone right from the start (even before that, with the title), and doesn't really tell a complete story but sets up the next sequel to provide resolution and the inevitable heroic victory.
Silent Running is a dystopian setting, so the ending is unsurprising, and American Graffiti is a of genre that often has bad outcomes for some characters as cautionary tales.
It's a money making project. I assume it would be easy to have the mainstream movies have "better" stories but they are money making not artistic endeavours.
VFX is 250K for 5 shots. Total VFX budget is 500K. And total post production is 10 Mil. Or ~14% of the whole budget. These days I bet it's probably double or triple that.
SPOILER well The Village benefits from the fact that the monsters were in fact just the other characters in rubber masks. Practical effects would have been entirely accurate anyway, no VFX required. I expect that money was mostly spent on color correction and removing phone lines and such.
looks like "fringes" are what we call in German TV and ad productions "markup".
>Fringes can track the value of benefits or fees that are required above and beyond the raw cost of labor or materials. Fringe benefits could include employment taxes, fees for pension & welfare programs, or daily charges for a given resource. They might also include allowances for holiday or sick leave funds.
>Fringes can also be used to track things like sales tax on materials.
>Many employment benefits have a limit or cap for how much total compensation an employee can make before the Fringe benefit is cut off in a given project.
> Ebert named the film the tenth worst film of 2004 and subsequently put it on his "Most Hated" list.
I dunno, I enjoyed it. I'm a simple man.