Rebels on the Backlot

On October 4, 2001, a Thursday, a banner headline in
Variety
caught my attention. “Helmers the Reel Deal,” it read, bold type marching across the top of the tabloid-sized trade paper. The sub-headline followed: “Young directors will run own shingle at USA Films.” The story announced that a group of Hollywood’s most talented, most exciting young directors—Steven Soderbergh, Spike Jonze, David Fincher, Alexander Payne, and Sam Mendes—young artists who, between them, had created some of the most original and important movies of the previous few years, were banding together to create a “major film venture.” The article said: “They will direct films and enjoy complete creative control, along with the opportunity to own the titles in five to seven years.” It added: “In the new venture, each partner has pledged to direct three movies over the first five years, and the venture will exist only for the production and distribution of their films.” The article evoked memories of the halcyon years of the late 1960s and 1970s, when “then-powerhouse helmers Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and William Friedkin” created a director’s studio within Paramount Pictures.

T
HE REFERENCE TO THE GREAT DIRECTORS OF EARLIER DECADES
was not a coincidence. The young generation that emerged in the 1990s—and these young men were chief among them—were
nothing if not self-conscious heirs to the mantle of directors such as Coppola, Bogdanovich, and Friedkin, along with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Hal Ashby, Robert Altman, George Lucas, and a long list of others. In the 1970s, these older visionaries created the movies that defined their era with groundbreaking, challenging, and ultimately enduring films including
The French Connection, Nashville, Raging Bull, Apocalypse Now
, and
Midnight Cowboy.
By now, most of those talents had retired, burned out, or become hacks in the Hollywood studio system. Some of them, like Scorsese, still struggled to make movies that rose to the level of their youthful artistry, with mixed results. Only one, Spielberg, still seemed to succeed at his craft with any degree of regularity.

Their time was past. Moviemaking is a young man’s game, as more than one of them had told fawning interviewers over the years. Now a new generation of visionary talents had emerged, marking the movies of their time with their own distinctive stamp. By 2001 a true community of young film artists had emerged from the final decade of the twentieth century. Many were friends, others were rivals, and some were enemies. Embracing the spirit of the filmmakers of the 1970s, the new generation avoided their excesses and instead focused their energies on their work. As a group, their sensibility was utterly new, and they shared a collective disdain for a studio system designed to strip them of their voices and dull their jagged edges.

W
ITH THEIR FILMS, THE REBELS OF THE 1990S SHATTERED
the status quo, set new boundaries in the art of moviemaking, and managed to bend the risk-averse studio structure to their will. They created a new cinematic language, recast audience expectations, and surprised us—and one another. They included not only the five from the
Variety
story and their films, from
Traffic
to
Election
to
American Beauty
, but also David O. Russell, who wrote and directed such comic gems as
Flirting with Disaster
and the satiric drama
Three Kings;
Wes Anderson, who had made
Rushmore
and
The Royal Tenenbaums;
Sofia Coppola, who conjured up
The Virgin Suicides
like a tone poem; and Darren Aronofsky, who had made
Pi
and the piercing
Requiem for a Dream.
They included Kimberly Peirce, who had made
Boys Don’t Cry
, which won an Oscar for Hilary Swank, and Paul Thomas Anderson, who had made two sweeping masterpieces before the age of thirty,
Boogie Nights
and
Magnolia.
Baz Luhrmann revived the musical with his delirious genius in
Moulin Rouge
, Atom Egoyan wrought delicate emotion in
The Sweet Hereafter
, and Cameron Crowe penned the path into postmodern romance with
Say Anything
, and
Singles
, and
Jerry Maguire.
They included the sci-fi surrealism of taciturn brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski with the blockbuster
The Matrix
, and the painterly lyricism of taciturn twins Mark and Michael Polish in the miniscule
Twin Falls Idaho.

Quite possibly none of these directors who bucked the Hollywood system of cookie-cutter scripts and cheap MTV imagery could have succeeded without Quentin Tarantino, the rabble-rousing writer-director of
Reservoir Dogs
and
Pulp Fiction
, who very early in the decade broke every rule in moviedom to the roaring acclaim of critics, audiences, and (finally) the Hollywood establishment, then brought his irony-tinged violence and retro-cool ethos into mainstream culture.

The movies of the new rebel auteurs shared many things. They played with structure, wreaked havoc with traditional narrative form, fiddled with the film stock, and ushered in the whiplash editing style true to a generation of video game children. Their movies were often shockingly violent and combined their brutality with humor. Paul Anderson’s scene in
Boogie Nights
when William H. Macy shoots his wife as she publicly fornicates with a member of the porn film industry vibrated on the same cultural wavelength as Tarantino’s deadpan discussion of the state of European fast food by his assassin-philosophers in
Pulp Fiction.
David O. Russell’s Iraqi torturer in
Three Kings
, who asks his torture victim about Michael Jackson before applying electric prods, was cosmically related to the very pregnant Catherine Zeta-Jones snarling to a hit man, “Shoot him in the head”—referring to a witness against her narcolord husband—in Soderbergh’s
Traffic.

Their stories engaged the viewer in the possibility of parallel realities, whether in the mind of a movie star like John Malkovich,
or the subjugation of the human species in
The Matrix.
David O. Russell questioned the place of the American superpower in the world with uncanny prescience. Paul Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and Sam Mendes went inside daily human experience to explore the small tragedies and the cracks of humanity in daily, suburban American life.

The filmmakers owed a debt not only to the filmmakers of the 1970s but to the handful of auteurs of the 1980s who struggled through a mostly New York–based indie system: Joel and Ethan Coen with the brilliance of their early
Blood Simple
and later work from
Barton Fink
to
Fargo;
the dark humor and sinister absurdity of David Lynch in
Blue Velvet
and
Wild at Heart;
and the take-no-prisoners politics of Spike Lee, starting with
She’s Gotta Have It
and
Do the Right Thing
to
Jungle Fever
and beyond. The style, the tone, the visual and thematic edge of these auteurs of the eighties set the stage for the filmmakers of the next decade.

These nineties filmmakers were—almost all of them—self-taught, having avoided the strictures of film schools that produced Lucas, Scorsese, and many others of the seventies. A notable number of them had strong, iconic fathers who loomed large in their childhoods (Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher) or tended to ignore them entirely (David O. Russell, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Jonze). Several seem to have disliked their mothers (Tarantino, Soderbergh, Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson). They came from all over the country, in a hurry, most of them, to remake cinema in their own image. Paul Thomas Anderson dropped out of New York University Film School after a couple of days, deciding he had nothing to learn from the process. Fincher, Soderbergh, and Jonze never made it to college at all; Fincher’s prickly personality belied the insecurity of a loner that came partly from missing the shared experience of school (which he mostly hated) and university. Tarantino, dubbed an attention-deficit child, never made it out of high school, much less to college. Jonze was slapped with a label of “learning disabled.” Payne was from Nebraska; Soderbergh, from Louisiana; Fincher, from Northern California; Jonze, from Maryland; Paul Thomas Anderson,
from the San Fernando Valley; Wes Anderson, from Texas; and Russell, from the monied suburbs north of Manhattan. Some came from the indie world (Russell, Soderbergh), some worked their way up through the burgeoning outlet of music videos and the talent-hungry system of commercial-making, where their anger and their edge first emerged (Fincher, Jonze). Their arrivals were never subtle: Fincher made his name early on with an antismoking commercial that showed a fetus smoking in the womb.

For years the directors shared similar sensibilities without knowing one another. But as the 1990s wore on, they began to meet and form friendships. Eventually many collaborated, and even those who had not met recognized kindred spirits in the work of their peers. Tarantino remembered meeting Fincher at a party for Fincher’s dark thriller
Se7en
, the movie in which Kevin Spacey plays a killer with a biblical sense of drama, and Brad Pitt the detective who gets handed his wife’s head in a box in the last scene. “If ever a movie didn’t need a party afterward, it’s
Seven,”
Tarantino remembered. “You had all these celebrities who looked like they just got hit in the head with a two by four, all right. They’re just sitting there in a daze.” Tarantino was an immediate fan of Fincher’s. He later said he considered
Fight Club
to be “a diamond bullet in my brain.” Tarantino met Paul Thomas Anderson after the Cannes Film Festival when their mutual publicist, Bumble Ward, introduced them, with the idea that Tarantino could mentor the younger filmmaker in the byways of fame. David O. Russell met and befriended Spike Jonze when he was hired to do a rewrite on
Harold and the Purple Crayon
, a project that Jonze was supposed to direct but which never came to be. Fincher met Spike Jonze when he and his colleagues gave the young director a production deal at his Propaganda production house. They became friends, and Jonze invited Fincher to his bachelor party (he was marrying Sofia Coppola) at a bowling alley; that’s where Fincher and Russell met. Alexander Payne first crossed paths with Steven Soderbergh in 1989, when the Louisiana filmmaker had an overnight hit in
sex, lies, and videotape
and was remixing it for general release. Payne was working on mixing his student film,
The Passion of Martin
, acclaimed
in its time, but they did not become friends until years later, when their work was in the public eye. Many of these directors met at the podiums of award ceremonies in 1999, the banner year of the rebel directors’ emergence. After that, they all swapped favorite actors—Mark Wahlberg, George Clooney, Bill Murray—and pitched in on one another’s films (Fincher appears in both Soderbergh’s
Full Frontal
and Jonze’s
Being John Malkovich
, uncredited) and polished one another’s scripts.

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