Genre Choice

For my next film I want to make a drama in the style of early Scorsese. While I have been focusing on weird art films recently I want to make a more realistic film, closer to the style of Speaking of Courage, using the Avant Guard editing as a means to tell a grounded story. Furthermore, I've learned the pitfalls of making films with multiple actors in quarantine, so I want to work in a genre where I can easily use a single subject to tell a story. In this next drama I want to reflect on themes of isolation with a political undercurrent, similar to the above example or The Shopping Cart Intellectual. Furthermore I have a couple short stories that can make interesting films such as Oil-Slick Rainbows or A Post-Industrial Suicide. 

While my favorite Dramas tend to be character studies on individual people with some weird intrigue like my two favorite movies Synecdoche New York and There Will Be Blood I feel this is an idea I've already done replicating Kaufman in The Shopping Cart Intellectual and Anderson in Speaking of Courage. 

These films and filmmakers will obviously have influence on this next project as they are the basis of my overall style, however for this next project I want to make an edge lord drama. My biggest inspirations for this next drama will be Martin Scorsese, particularly Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, and David Fincher, particularly Fight Club. While Scorsese was making the first iterations of this type of movie in 70s, the edge lord drama did not come into form until the 90s with movies like American Beauty, Donnie Darko, American Psycho, and Fight Club. All of which carry the energy of a 23 year old white dude smoking a hand rolled cigarette and telling you he's edgy and cool.

While there are cases of these types of dramas taking their edge seriously and working, like American Psycho, for the most part these films are only effective when they are not only critiquing their protagonist but the subgenre they are operating in. Fight Club can be taken on face value as a movie about the type of guy who says "this is my life and it's ending one minute at a time" and then starts a underground boxing ring for men to release their toxic masculinity, giving him enough power to make a terrorist organization. Or it can be a movie that's making fun of that edge and type of guy as dangerous and ultimately just as dogmatic as the yuppies they are against. Similarly I want to use this self-reflexive style of edge lord drama to reveal the toxicity of contemporary internet conspiracy theorists. I think a Scorsese style drama about the Pizza Gate Shooter would be rather effective. 

I am drawn to these edge lord stories because I'm a bit of an edge lord myself. I own a copy of Being and Nothingness after all. Furthermore, through these stories you can humanize people who have been guided by circumstances to do terrible things. Allowing for derision against the things that drove these people towards these acts, not the acts themselves.