"The only folk I can judge are people like Woody Allen who I think is a genius, largely because I think he has beaten the system. He has his own company, and his films are all his own ideas. It's his direction, and so it comes out the way he imagined it"
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Genius here is measured less by brilliance than by autonomy. The highest praise goes to the artist who slips the grip of industrial compromise, who arranges the machinery so that imagination survives the grind. The system is development hell, executive notes, market testing, the producer who owns the final cut. Most filmmakers work as talented guests in someone else’s house, adapting their voices to the wallpaper.
Woody Allen becomes the example because he built a house of his own. A small company, modest budgets, scripts he wrote, direction he controlled, and a cadence of releasing work on his terms. The result is that idea, tone, rhythm, and ending arrive largely undiluted. Some films fly, some falter, but they belong unmistakably to the same mind. That is what auteur theory looks like when it is not a slogan: the pipeline from conception to release remains in one pair of hands.
Nigel Kneale knew the costs of losing that pipeline. A television dramatist forged in the BBC era, he worked in a medium nicknamed the producer’s domain, where the writer’s vision often bends to institutional taste. The creator of Quatermass, he had both high ambition and frequent friction with broadcasters. Admiring a filmmaker who engineered independence is also a veiled critique of structures that sand the edges off idiosyncratic work.
There is also an ethics of judgment being proposed. Evaluate artists by the extent to which they claim responsibility for the whole. Autonomy makes praise and blame clearer; there is no camouflage of committee. Beating the system is not merely about power but about coherence, the rare chance for a finished work to match the mind’s first spark. In an art form built on collaboration and capital, that kind of control is the exception, and to Kneale it is the ground on which real genius can be seen.
Woody Allen becomes the example because he built a house of his own. A small company, modest budgets, scripts he wrote, direction he controlled, and a cadence of releasing work on his terms. The result is that idea, tone, rhythm, and ending arrive largely undiluted. Some films fly, some falter, but they belong unmistakably to the same mind. That is what auteur theory looks like when it is not a slogan: the pipeline from conception to release remains in one pair of hands.
Nigel Kneale knew the costs of losing that pipeline. A television dramatist forged in the BBC era, he worked in a medium nicknamed the producer’s domain, where the writer’s vision often bends to institutional taste. The creator of Quatermass, he had both high ambition and frequent friction with broadcasters. Admiring a filmmaker who engineered independence is also a veiled critique of structures that sand the edges off idiosyncratic work.
There is also an ethics of judgment being proposed. Evaluate artists by the extent to which they claim responsibility for the whole. Autonomy makes praise and blame clearer; there is no camouflage of committee. Beating the system is not merely about power but about coherence, the rare chance for a finished work to match the mind’s first spark. In an art form built on collaboration and capital, that kind of control is the exception, and to Kneale it is the ground on which real genius can be seen.
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