Almost two-thirds of the way through, I got nervous that the structure wasn't working. It was interesting, funny, but it wasn't working as a film. The complicated thing was that if you made a dynamic change in one of the characters, by the nature of it being tied to four cameras, you then had to change everything. There was a domino effect. The character of the super-brat director, who wants to do a digital movie like this one and comes up with these clotted, dialectical justifications for it, was hilarious.
Most situations potentially are funny.
This is just one film made in a certain way for a certain reason. You're talking about, within the mainstream, a younger audience and a whole slew of techniques that would have been unthinkable five years ago. Michael Sragow's column about moviemakers appears every Thursday in Salon. For more columns by Sragow, visit his archive. Table Talk Three's company, four is crowded Mike Figgis juggles style and substance in Timecode.