Todd Field Looks Back on How the Film Industry Has Changed Since 2000: ‘Those Days Are Gone’
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When the 2000s began, Todd Field was a journeyman actor best known for his work in “Ruby in Paradise,” “Eyes Wide Shut,” and a pair of Jan de Bont spectacles. (“Twister,” “The Haunting”). A year into the decade, he would be recognized as one of the most promising filmmakers of his generation after writing and directing “In the Bedroom” (2001), a low-budget indie that became a surprising commercial success on its way to five Oscar nominations. Looking back now, Field recognizes that it was a unique time not just for him, but for film history in general.
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“There are so many advantages now, technically, for young filmmakers starting out,” Field told IndieWire. “But in terms of actually having people see the work, it seems much harder. The idea that this film got made, that it got into Sundance, that somebody wanted to distribute it, and that people went to see it is remarkable. I think that would be very challenging in this day and age. Back then there were plenty of films to go and see about human beings, which was always my attraction to movies — we go to them to watch ourselves. So it was a very exciting time.”
Field had actually hoped to adapt a story by Andre Dubus, the author of the source material for “In the Bedroom,” in the mid-nineties when he was a student at AFI but couldn’t get the rights. “As it turned out, Andre had been burned by another AFI student who had made a short film of ‘Killings,’ which is the story that ‘In the Bedroom’ was ultimately based upon,” Field said. “So he swore off ever giving any of his rights to anyone, though I didn’t know any of this until years later.” Instead of a Dubus adaptation, Field “pestered” his wife Serena Rathbun to write the script for what would become “Nonnie & Alex,” a short film that won a prize at Sundance and served as a calling card for the young director.
“That was a really incredible experience, because it taught me what was possible back then,” Field said. “Back in the ’90s and early 2000s there was an industry, so you could go out and walk down Alameda and walk through doors and say, ‘Hi, my name is Todd Field, I’m a film student, I have no money, I need help.’ And people would help you.”
Among the people who helped Field was Chris Jenkins, a world-class sound mixer who later worked with Field on both “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” (2006). “He literally walked out of a mixing session on Michael Mann’s ‘Heat’ to look at ‘Nonnie & Alex’ and told me he’d mix it for free.”
After “Nonnie & Alex” screened at Sundance, Field attempted to get a feature going. “The lie was always, well, you go to film school and make a film and it goes to a festival, then Hollywood comes calling,” Field said, “which was, even then, not true.” Taking the advice of director Carl Franklin, for whom he had worked as an actor on some Roger Corman films, Field wrote an autobiographical coming of age story. “Carl always said that your first film had better be a signature film because it might be your last, so make it count.” When Field showed the script to the agent he shared with Franklin, however, the reaction was dispiriting. “She said, ‘You can’t make a film about the ’80s. It’s not an era.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s an era for me.'”
For a while, Field focused on the acting work that was coming his way, ultimately finding himself in England working with Stanley Kubrick and Tom Cruise on “Eyes Wide Shut.” Field was inspired by Kubrick’s way of working, which resembled that of Victor Nunez on “Ruby in Paradise.” “They were not afraid to create their own process in terms of how they made a film,” Field said. “It was very different from what I had experienced earlier in Hollywood as an actor working on studio films. There was nothing industrial about it, they were more feeling their way around.”
Kubrick and Cruise encouraged Field’s directing aspirations and he used his downtime on “Eyes Wide Shut” to write what would ultimately become “In the Bedroom.” When he was back in the States, he had an agent send the script around but had no takers. “They sent it to 35 companies, and they all turned it down,” Field said, “which was not very surprising. It was about this middle-aged couple that loses a child, and that wasn’t really where the independent film scene was at that moment. It was still riding really high on some very exciting things that had happened in the industry with people like PTA, Soderbergh and Tarantino.”
Ultimately the film found a home with Good Machine and producer Ted Hope, with whom Field had worked as an actor when he appeared in Nicole Holofcener’s first film, “Walking and Talking.” “Ted had a young assistant at the time, Ross Katz, who had produced Jim Fall’s ‘Trick,'” Field said. “Ross came in and he was like a bulldog. He said, ‘We’re gonna make this,’ and he was really with me from soup to nuts.” Good Machine teamed with Fisher Stevens’ company GreeneStreet — which at that point was making early shot-on-video films for theatrical distribution — and got the movie up and running in 24 months, which felt like forever for Field at the time but which he now acknowledges was relatively fast. Not that there weren’t speed bumps.
“I had another actor set to play the lead who fell out a couple of weeks before shooting started,” Field remembered. “I called up [Kubrick’s right-hand man] Leon Vitali in London and said, ‘I’m looking for a middle-aged actor that’s superb, that no one in America knows of.’ And he said, “I know just the guy. It’s Tom Wilkinson. He’s a guy that Stanley really wanted to work with and they never found a way of doing it, but that’s who you want.’ So I literally cast him off of that phone call.”
Following his instincts served Field well on the film, whose scrappy independent nature allowed for a certain amount of flexibility within the tight economic restrictions. “I made the film I wanted to make, and made it for very little,” he said. “No one really got paid; we were using green stamps to fill the grip trucks. But there was also a level of trust.” Field remembered reading an American Cinematographer article about Harris Savides’ work on the driving scenes in David Fincher’s “The Game” and realizing that the technique Savides used would be perfect for “In the Bedroom” — and would also eat up $40,000, a significant portion of the budget.
“Ted Hope said, ‘You’re crazy, we can’t spend that kind of money,'” Field said. “And I said, ‘No, I’m telling you, this is the way to do it.’ So we did it, and it worked, and I can’t think of a lot of other situations outside of the independent film scene where they would have taken that gamble. If I was having that conversation at a studio where there’s a physical production executive, on a budget that size, they would never have approved that line item in a million years.”
Field had that kind of more industrial experience on his second film, “Little Children,” which was made as a feature after the director was unable to set it up as a limited series as he originally intended. “Tom Perotta and I pitched it to Carolyn Strauss at HBO, and she laughed,” Field said. “She looked at us like we were old men and said, ‘Mini-series? Nobody does those anymore.'” “Little Children” ultimately found a home as a movie at New Line, where Field found himself expending a lot more of his energy than he was used to on battles he didn’t have to fight on “In the Bedroom.”
“For the first time I was exposed to the supposed know-how of studio filmmaking,” Field said. “That’s where there’s a head of physical production and they have an opinion and they’re not really interested in hearing yours. You have a post-production person that doesn’t care who you like to work with. They don’t care that Chris Jenkins stepped out of a mixing session with Michael Mann and did you a favor, and mixed ‘In the Bedroom’ for a penny and he’s the head of the sound department at Universal. They have their own people. Negotiating all those sorts of things was a very different experience, and honestly not one I was really prepared for.”
On the plus side, Field did find a certain degree of comfort in the studio filmmaking process. “When I said, ‘I need to meet with Tom, we need to get a hotel room and work together because we don’t live in the same town,’ they said okay,” Field said. “That would never have happened on an independent movie. They might have found you a pillow on someone’s floor or something.” Field also found that the creative executives at New Line were a pleasure to work with, as they all believed in him and the movie. The problem is that they had bought the project while the head of the studio, Bob Shaye, was in the hospital — and when he came back he was not happy.
“He hated the film,” Field said, noting that Shaye’s reaction echoed what happened when Harvey Weinstein learned his staff had acquired “In the Bedroom” out of Sundance. “My first experience at Miramax was Harvey yelling at Mark Gill and Agnes Mentré. Harvey wasn’t allowed at Sundance because he had attacked someone the previous year, so he wasn’t there when they bought the film. So it was like, ‘Why would you buy this shitty film? Were you guys on acid or something?’ ‘Little Children’ was kind of like that too. I had been warned by Terry Malick that I might have a rough ride at New Line, because he did ‘The New World’ there. Bob just didn’t like it, and they didn’t really release the film until award nominations came out and they had to put it on a certain number of screens to meet industry obligations. But it was a very tough experience.”
Although both “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” have aged extremely well — in today’s cultural landscape they feel both rarer and more profound than ever — Field hasn’t watched either in a while and acknowledges that directors tend to obsess over how hard things were; he remembers John Boorman being disappointed with “Deliverance,” a film Field and nearly everyone else considers to be a masterpiece, because of his memories of fights with the studio. “I don’t think that filmmakers are necessarily the best judges of their own work,” Field said. “We’re process junkies, and when the process is flowing and it’s great, there’s real pleasure. But we tend to forget that and only remember when it’s not.”
Field’s most recent film, the acclaimed 2022 drama “TáR,” was his most ambitious and original film to date, and was released by a division of Universal, proving that thoughtful adult films with Hollywood resources are not completely extinct. Yet Field acknowledges that the studios are constricting as a world in which to make the kinds of films in which he specializes. “In terms of studio specialty divisions, now you have Searchlight and Focus and that’s it,” Field said. “I mean, you have other exciting companies like Neon and A24 and things like that, but in terms of other studios being in the business of things with a human scale … those days are gone.”
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