"Historically the director has been the key creative element in a film and we must maintain that. We must protect that, in spite of the fact that there is new technology that's continually trying to erode that"
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Frankenheimer is staking a claim for authorship at the exact moment Hollywood started pretending authorship was optional. Calling the director the "key creative element" isn’t just self-serving pride from a veteran; it’s a defense of coherence. A film can survive bad weather, thin budgets, even uneven performances. What it can’t survive is the absence of a single intelligence shaping tone, rhythm, and point of view. His repetition - "maintain", "protect" - sounds like labor language because it is: he’s describing creative control as something you have to fight to keep, not a perk granted by enlightened studios.
The barb is in "new technology". Frankenheimer isn’t talking about technology as a neutral tool; he’s talking about it as a bargaining chip. Each wave - from special-effects escalation to digital post, from previsualization to studio-controlled editing pipelines - gives producers and financiers more leverage to treat directing as replaceable: you can "fix it in post", swap sequences, test-screen the edges off, manufacture spectacle where intention used to be. Technology becomes the polite alibi for committee decisions.
Context matters: Frankenheimer came up in live television and made muscular, location-driven films where logistics and vision were inseparable. For him, the director isn’t a brand; the director is the person who makes a thousand choices add up to meaning. The warning is less nostalgic than it sounds. He’s not anti-tech. He’s anti-erosion: the slow cultural shift where movies become systems, and the director becomes an operator inside them.
The barb is in "new technology". Frankenheimer isn’t talking about technology as a neutral tool; he’s talking about it as a bargaining chip. Each wave - from special-effects escalation to digital post, from previsualization to studio-controlled editing pipelines - gives producers and financiers more leverage to treat directing as replaceable: you can "fix it in post", swap sequences, test-screen the edges off, manufacture spectacle where intention used to be. Technology becomes the polite alibi for committee decisions.
Context matters: Frankenheimer came up in live television and made muscular, location-driven films where logistics and vision were inseparable. For him, the director isn’t a brand; the director is the person who makes a thousand choices add up to meaning. The warning is less nostalgic than it sounds. He’s not anti-tech. He’s anti-erosion: the slow cultural shift where movies become systems, and the director becomes an operator inside them.
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