There has always been something rather self-indulgent about film-makers making films about making films. Too often it is a form of tedious navel-gazing, a bit like those singers who sing about how terrible it is to be involved in the music industry (as compared to working in a sweatshop, presumably).
Still they come. Drawing on her experiences making Romance and A Ma Soeur!, French director Catherine Breillat has opted to make a movie about the difficulty of shooting sex scenes. In Sex Is Comedy, a female director (Anne Parillaud) is ready to go to any lengths to get the scene she wants.''The director is a predator,'' Breillat has said.
Well, sometimes. Steven Soderbergh revealed in his journal about the making of his first film, Sex, Lies And Videotape, that he was too embarrassed to ask one of his actresses to take her clothes off. Still, directors on-screen often live up to the image of the sadist with a megaphone.
In Shadow Of A Vampire, director FW Murnau (John Malkovich) casts a real-life vampire in the part of Nosferatu and is then willing to allow his star (played by Willem Dafoe) to sate his appetites on the rest of the cast. In John Walters's lumpy satire Cecil B Demented, meanwhile, Stephen Dorff plays a guerrilla film-maker who kidnaps ageing screen queen Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) and forces her to star in his latest cinematic attack on Hollywood.
Of course, tyrannical directors are not unheard of in real life. Alfred Hitchcock, pictured above, said his recipe for a good thriller was ''torture the heroine''. When it came to Tippi Hedren, however, he was a bit too keen. Making The Birds she was exposed a little too often to the beaks and claws of her feathered co-stars (because she rejected Hitch's advances, if Kenneth Anger is to be believed). Art imitates life.
There are exceptions. Ed Wood may have been the worst director in the history of cinema, but in Tim Burton's sweet comedy about the man, Wood comes across as a dewy-eyed visionary (albeit lacking in anything resembling talent). Burton has never made a better movie. Sometimes films about films can be the right direction.
Sex Is Comedy is at the Filmhouse, Edinburgh.
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