A little tribute to the two directors, who manage to build classics with outstanding visual effects.
A little tribute to the two directors, who manage to build classics with outstanding visual effects.
I’m not a movie buff. I don’t hang movie posters in the apartment, I don’t visit cinema religiously, and I don’t really find the motivation to spend hours standing at the line in Hollywood to have a chance to see a movie star. But I do enjoy a good movie now an then. And I love great films.
A good movie, like a good novel, or a good game, really, is all about the story. To make a good movie, you just need to have a good story and tell it in the perfect way. But a great movie is something completely different.
A great movie is something that stays with us forever. It tells a story, which goes beyond the simple limitations of climax, build up or time. It’s a story, which shows the triumph of spirit or the deepest, darkest depth of human character, it’s a story that manages to illustrate in the language of cinematography what life could actually be.
There are a lot of great directors, who made great movies. Hundreds of them. But, in my humble opinion, there are two contemporary directors, who manage to do it in the best possible way: David Fincher and Guillermo Del Toro.
Both these directors come from the VFX background, but they use the language of post-production and ‘green screen’ to speak about completely different topics.
Fincher is a realist with a very ironic, almost wicked eye. His films are about those darkest depths, I’ve been speaking about. It may seem that he talks about social media, or imaginary friends, or consumerism. But he’s actually talking about loneliness, fear, and lies. He’s more on the negative side of things, showing what life could have been if it was a David Fincher movie. It would be a very dark place. And in all of his films he uses VFX to make the world more real, he doesn’t make monsters, because his world already has people.
Guillermo Del Torro is the complete opposite of Fincher. Where Fincher uses VFX to build his dark vision of realism, Del Torro goes miles to use his VFX to create this magical world, which may look dark, strange and sometimes pretty horrifying. But his films are really about a triumph of hope. They are about love, compassion, friendship, commitment, and compassion.
It fills me with great joy to see Guillermo Del Torro finally get his well-deserved Oscar. Shape of Water is a great film, but I guess he gets this award for his whole body of work. By telling these fairy tales, with heavy prosthetics, some clever CGI, showing these monsters, he actually tells us that humans are not that bad. There’s still something there worth taking care about.
So in this battle of two parts of mine: brain and heart. I guess heart will always be a winner.