A new episode, a new blog post. And just like always, this baby is a stream of conscience response the latest episode.
I'm really happy to post my episodes on Train to Busan because: a) it's a very fun movie to talk about and b) it's a popular movie, so hopefully a lot of people have seen it or at least heard of it. This ain't no Wild Strawberries (which I enjoyed watching and talking about, but is not popular).
Train to Busan is a very interesting movie to cover now because one of the thought exercises I go through when watching these movies for the podcast is "what would've been different if this movie was made in America?" That question is partly an indirect way for me to pinpoint interesting cultural differences between the where the movie was made and the United States. But it also helps me focus on the differences between the film industries of the home country (in this case, Korea) and Hollywood. Those are two different but sort of parallel questions and I think both of them are fascinating. And what's so interesting about covering Train to Busan now is that we're about to have an answer to that question, when the Hollywood remake, Last Train to New York, comes out in 2023.
Film industries are just that- industries. They are big business. They are board of directors and shareholders and parent companies. Denis Villeneuve can fuck off, they'll put Dune on your Apple Watch if it'd help get more subscribers for their app. At least, that's how it works in Hollywood because films are paid for entirely by private companies who need to break even to survive. But that isn't the only model.
If you've watched a foreign film recently or even an indie American movie, you probably noticed that there were about 89 production companies in association with that movie. And some of them just seemed like the governments of wherever they filmed the movie. A recent example- I saw the movie Compartment No. 6 last week. It's a movie with a mostly Finnish creative team (director, co-writer, and it's based on a Finnish novel) that's about a Finnish woman who takes a train from Moscow to a remote northern part of Russia. So, it's filmed entirely in Russia with a mostly Russian cast and the Finnish lead actress mostly speaks Russian. This is about as close as you can get to a 50/50 Finnish-Russian film (in my opinion- it was Finland's official submission for the Best International Feature Film award, so I guess it's a Finnish film). Anyways, here are the production companies for this movie:
CTB Film Company (Russia), Aamu Film Company (Finland), Amrion OÜ (Estonia), Achtung Panda! (Germany). With the support of the Finnish Film Foundation, YLE, ARTE, the Estonian Film Institute, Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, MEDIA, Eurimages.
That's 11 different entities that were in some way involved in paying for this movie, including one just called MEDIA. It also includes three different government agencies from Finland, Estonia (the co-writer of the film is Estonian and seems to be where they come in), and Russia. This is pretty common around the world- a lot of countries essentially act as financiers for local filmmakers by funding and/or providing loans to film productions. If the movies make money, the loans are repaid, and if they don't, then the filmmakers aren't required to pay it back, that money was just a donation to the arts.
Obviously, even these government agencies need to consider some bottom line- they can't only fund financially unsuccessful movies or the pool of money they're using will eventually dry up. But they don't have to focus AS much on it. In Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's book Making Waves, he talks about how one of the big impetuses for the French New Wave in the late 50s, early 60s is that the French government funding (from the Centre National de la Cinématographie, a part of the French Ministry of Culture) refocused from funding studio films to funding shorts and debut feature films from the new wave of young directors. This was how people a great deal of New Wave directors got money to pay for their first films.
The CNC also lost a fair amount of money doing it- a lot of these first-time directors weren't Francois Truffaut or Agnes Varda. They were Vagnes Arda, who I'm sure is very nice person, but unfortunately was an unsuccessful young filmmaker. A lot of these movies didn't even get finished. But the CNC knew that going into it- in a perfect world, they would fund young artists making new, fresh box office hits. Buuuuuut if they had to choose (and they did, so so often), they chose to fund young artists making new, fresh movies that made no money. This isn't the only reason for the French New Wave, but it's certainly A reason that it not only flourished, but that they New Wave directors quickly became part of the French film industry proper. Nothing remotely like that happened in the United States.
This has been an incredibly long tangent when I'm supposed to be talking about Train to Busan and zombies and cool baseball players hitting those zombies with baseball bats. But this whole thing was to say that film industries around the world have very different financial incentives, and those incentives make a big difference on the final product. And every time you ask yourself, "how would this be different if it were made in America", part of what you're asking is how would it be different, if say Korea had the Hollywood financing system.
Train to Busan didn't get any funding from the Korean government or anything, so I'm sure that it was just as bottom-line driven as the new remake will be (and very successfully bottom-line driven, the movie was a mega-hit). But I'm fascinated by all of the different factors involved in international financing and firmly believe that even if your movie didn't receive government artistic support, having your entire film industry pushed 10% more artistic because one of the big sources of funding isn't QUITE as capitalist, affects not just every movie but every filmgoer. Suddenly the film diet available to people is (ideally) more diverse and varied (ideally). It's a lot easier to enjoy a nice meal when you don't have scurvy. I feel like this metaphor was not only great but precise and clear.
Anyways, James Wan is producing the remake and he is a very smart, weird filmmaker and it's being directed by the director of The Night Comes for Us, which was fine. So hopefully it'll not only be good, but different and weird and justify its existence. But there's basically no way for me to watch it and not examine it for differences and try to figure out what spreadsheet or focus group or profit projection made them feel compelled to change this or that for American audiences.