FILM-MAKING standards are suffering because too many productions give the impression that they were written by a computer, Bob Hoskins said yesterday.
The British actor told The Times that creative decisions were too often made by committees of marketing men and executives who had no love of cinema. When he read a script or watched a film he sensed when they had included what they thought were the fail-safe ingredients that guaranteed commercial success.
“Films are being made as though they were written by computer. They think, ‘What has sold before? Films with this? Films with that?’ They think that if they have those elements, they have a winner. There is no desire to create.”
Film companies were no longer headed by film-makers, he said, but by executives who could just as easily be making cars or building bridges. “They have nothing to do with the film industry. I don’t think that they are interested in that way.”
Although he believed that the problem was an international one, he was frustrated by executives in British companies. He said: “I listen to them and think,‘Oh dear, this is what the industry has come to’.”
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The actor played a gangland boss in The Long Good Friday and the faithless sheet-music salesman in Pennies from Heaven. He was nominated for an Academy Award, and won the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actor award, for his performance in Mona Lisa. He was speaking at the Venice Film Festival, where his latest film, Hollywoodland, had its world premiere last night.
He believed that the most imaginative work was coming from the independent sector, which lacked support and money. He cited Sideways, the acclaimed comedy about wine-tasting, as an example, saying: “It nearly didn’t get made because it was independent.”
Later he walked up the red carpet, lined with hundreds of plaster-cast golden lions, with his fellow cast members, Ben Affleck and Adrien Brody.
Hollywoodland is a film noir inspired by the unsolved murder, in 1959, of the actor George Reeves, who played Superman on television. When the Los Angeles police closed the case, his grieving mother hired a private detective. He discovered that the affair that Reeves had had with the wife of the MGM studio executive Eddie Mannix — played by Hoskins — could hold the key to the truth.
The film marks the feature directorial debut for Allen Coulter, who made his name with award-winning TV dramas such as The Sopranos and Sex and the City. He described his film as being about the search for identity. It reflects how Reeves — played by Affleck — believed that his life would have value only through success and fame.
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Affleck said: “That ultimately makes the film a tragedy.”