Here is how movies are made:
First, you take an idea that is genuinely interesting to you and that you are willing to go to great lengths to realize, then you secure the participation of others who share both your vision and your willingness to realize that vision, and finally you sprinkle in dumb shit to make the financiers, who are functionally useless squid-people, happy.
That’s pretty much it.
Let’s talk about the Cat People movies.
Cat People (1942) and Cat People (1982)
“What if werewolves, but cats, and also boning,” is an objectively stupid idea for a movie. Don’t take my word for it: the original film in this series was built out from its fucking title, because someone at RKO thought that Cat People sounded scary; costs were kept down by re-using sets from other movies. This is not what you do when you take your own concept seriously – it’s what you do when you’re trying to turn a quick buck on a schlocky B-movie concept. Cat People (1942) wasn’t even supposed to compete with the quality of the Universal monster movies, because RKO’s B-movie division felt they were no match artistically for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
But it fucking worked, because once rich people finished burping up their latest idiotic idea for easy money, smart people got involved and actually did something with it. The original Cat People is good! Layered atop its inspirational raison d’être of, “make me money – here is your sole resource with which to work, a large cat,” is an actual movie, one trading on genuinely creepy visuals and the theme of being enculturated into finding your own sexual urges monstrous.
And Paul Schrader’s 1982 remake continues in that fine artistic tradition of Fine, Whatever, I’ll Sculpt My Movie Out of Garbage if I Have To. I mean, this fucker hits the ground running – the audience is immediately thrown into a world of foreboding framing, the obvious withholding of vital information, oppressively unnatural color grading, and Malcolm McDowell doing that creepy thing he does where he just stands there and is Malcolm McDowell – everything you need to know that Something Is Wrong. If you were watching this movie in a theatre in 1982, you would be forgiven for thinking that the projectionist had accidentally laced up a movie with a better name than Cat People.
All of this is made possible by the fact that Paul Schrader is a smart man. He knows that he is being bankrolled by idiots, and that he must move among them, live among them, avoid their suspicion, if he is to continue making movies. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), if that movie somehow had an even more depressing ending.
Seriously, Cat People ’82 is like if someone recreated Michelangelo’s David entirely out of those gross Styrofoam clamshells that cheeseburgers used to come in. We have snap zooms on evil leopards, a somber reflection on the generational component of mental illness, Malcolm McDowell taking his impression of a hungry cat-person more seriously than the Allies took Operation Overlord, the psychological underpinnings of toxic relationships, so much gratuitous nudity that a woman who has just been mauled and forced to crawl down a flight of stairs takes a moment to pop her bra off because she knows what kind of movie she’s in, apocalyptic imagery that for some reason is also a music video, obvious giallo influences, and Ed Begley Jr. getting his arm ripped off. And it all fucking works, because Paul Schrader’s understanding of the Sliding Scale of Seriousness is goddamn masterful.
The End
Greatness can absolutely be born at the intersection of Earnestly Smart and What in the Actual Fuck. The suits will always exist, and will always be the ones signing the checks, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – being forced to launder a real movie inside of a hulking corporate turd activates entirely different areas of the creative brain, leading to movies you might not otherwise have ever thought to make.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but understanding how to work the system is invention’s cool older brother – not always around, sometimes misses Christmas because he’s out on a drunk, will probably eat it before the age of thirty because he fell asleep on train tracks, but always having a good time, and gave you a pocket knife and some fireworks for your ninth birthday. Maybe not world-class brothering, but at least he knows not to take any of this shit too seriously.