It’s become a cliché — a very tired cliché — for journalists to ask esteemed auteurs whether or not they like the dominant (almost the only) kind of movie big Hollywood studios make these days: the superhero movie. Guess what? Unless they’ve been hired to make one of them, like Oscar-winner Chloe Zhao, they’re not huge fans! Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Lucrecia Martel (who famously turned Marvel down after they wouldn’t let her direct her own action scenes) — all have dared disparage the number one game in town.
There’s also Jane Campion. The director of The Power of the Dog, currently nominated for 12 Oscars, had a brief but unambiguous take on superhero movies, despite having made a movie starring Doctor Strange himself. “I hate them,” she told Variety much earlier in awards season. “I actually hate them.”
Or maybe she’d like them if they gave her the chance to make her own eccentric version. Judd Apatow recently did an interview round-up for the DGA called Directors Talkin’ to Directors About Directing. The filmmaker spoke with all five of this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees for a series of loose, jokey chats. When he got to Campion, he made sure to bring up her superhero movie diss.
“I just felt bad because Marvel people never asked me,” Campion told Apatow, who replied with a furious “Me neither!” Then Campion suggested it might work if they did it “together.”
Apatow thought that was such a brilliant idea that he tried to rope in Licorice Pizza‘s Paul Thomas Anderson. Alas, while PTA though that sounded “pretty good,” he confessed he’d “rather do, like, a Zucker brothers movie,” referring to the gag-a-second parodies done by the team of Jim Abraham and David and Jerry Zucker, who burst on the scene with the Airplane! movies, Police Squad!, and Top Secret! before breaking up and doing solo movies like The Naked Gun, Hot Shots!, and the Scary Movie sequels, to say nothing of Jane Austen’s Mafia!
Apatow did remind Campion that, if she sold out to Marvel, she could “get everything you want in a movie.” Of course, on top of an unimaginable budget, she’d still have to throw in flying dudes in spandex. But maybe the genre needs a renegade entry by the auteur of The Piano. Maybe she could cast Hulk alum Sam Elliott.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)