5. “Rachel Getting Married” – Jonathan Demme (2008)
Budget: $12 million
How Was Their Career Doing? Jonathan Demme enjoyed a brief period of tremendous prosperity in the ’90s with the one-two punch of “The Silence of The Lambs” and “Philadelphia.” This allowed the filmmaker to explore a legion of other niche topics through documentaries and shorts, though his last big film in the decade was the poorly-received “Beloved.” Demme licked his wounds by playing the studio game, having his cake and eating it too: he got in the chair for two remakes of iconic, unforgettable classics. “The Manchurian Candidate” was a nervy, political thriller that respectfully transferred the paranoia of the original into a contemporary worldview, though it was an underperformer at the box office. And “The Truth about Charlie” was an ill-advised redo of “Charade,” with Mark Wahlberg dubiously stepping into the shoes of Cary Grant. Demme stepped out of that world once again to helm documentaries on Neil Young and Jimmy Carter, but made his triumphant return into narrative film with “Rachel Getting Married,” an improv-style indie about the chaos suffered by a dysfunctional family during a multi-cultural wedding.
Did They Take Advantage Of Their Freedom? To hear it from Demme, it was his work with documentaries that gave him the ability to scale down his approach. “The difference between that and the previous fiction film I did, which was ‘The Manchurian Candidate,’ was just amazing,” he told the AV Club. “It was like a skeleton crew, but that said, there were a lot of people on the crew. There is a lot of help there. That was a procedural change. The fun there was to shoot a fiction while pretending we were shooting a documentary. That meant no rehearsal, no planned shots… You can only say “action” without any planned shot at all when you’ve got Declan Quinn‘s eye on the eyepiece, because he’s going to do something great in the moment.” The result is a film that bathes in emotional immediacy, observing the delicate balance of peace and tragedy, particularly between the ecstatic title character (Rosemarie Dewitt) and her self-destructive cannonball of a sister (Anne Hathaway).
How Did It Fare & What Happened Next? Demme’s avoided the big screen for the most part, continuing to shoot documentaries while moving into television, directing episodes of “The Killing” and “Enlightened.” His next feature “Fear Of Falling,” a Wallace Shawn adaptation of a Henrik Ibsen play, looks to be of a similarly small scale, reflecting his restless creative energy through his late-career flirtation with Dogme 95 aesthetics. “Rachel Getting Married” was his most significant artistic statement since the ’90s, though it’s likely his interests will continue to evolve years into an adventurous, unpredictable career.
6. “28 Days Later” – Danny Boyle (2002)
Budget: $8 million
How Was Their Career Doing? The late career of Steven Soderbergh proved that there was only so much flexibility a filmmaker had by genre-hopping, and that the budgets had to be diversified too. When “Trainspotting” helmer Danny Boyle found high profile back-to-back failures with genre mashup “A Life Less Ordinary” and the moody “The Beach,” he found it was necessary to retreat to more lo-fi filmmaking.
Did They Take Advantage Of Their Freedom? Returning to England, he became one of the first filmmakers to embrace the cheap aesthetic of digital filmmaking with what may be the last truly great serious zombie film ever, “28 Days Later.” The film was a massive hit stateside and abroad, bringing Boyle a whole new outlook and creative approach, raising his profile as a still-viable voice in mainstream filmmaking. Like Soderbergh, Boyle is a filmmaker not boxed in by any one genre or style and he has spent the decade since mixing it up with projects large (“Sunshine“) and small (“Millions“). The films that have fared best (“Slumdog Millionaire” and “127 Hours“) seem to be the ones that have fused the looseness of his intimate projects with the scale of his larger budgeted work. With a cast of mostly unknowns, Boyle pulled some favors to clear out entire sections of London, giving “28 Days Later” its strong hook, and creating a classic of the genre.
How Did It Fare & What Happened Next? Easily his biggest hit thus far, Boyle could have gone on to cash a hefty Hollywood paycheck. Instead, he did a 180, and moved on to direct the low-key kids film “Millions” before re-teaming with “28 Days Later” writer Alex Garland for the sci-fi picture “Sunshine.” He even had a heavy influence with “28 Weeks Later,” a sequel that upped the ante under his influence as producer. Creatively he was re-energized, but sadly, it didn’t pay off financially; “Millions” was mostly ignored, and “Sunshine” was poorly marketed and barely released stateside. He headed far east for “Slumdog Millionaire,” a film with an initial profile so meager that when purchased by the now-defunct Warner Independent Pictures, the studio had planned a direct-to-DVD release, one that may have permanently grounded Boyle’s career. It was Fox Searchlight who realized that the eclectic styles and visuals of “Slumdog Millionaire” were the work of a filmmaker who had been restlessly experimenting, gambling on low budgets and creating a new experience each time. A few Oscars later, Boyle was at the peak of his career. Tellingly, his big Oscar follow-ups were a low-fi true-life survival story (“127 Hours”) and a shifty, unpredictable noir mystery (“Trance“); neither of these lit the box office on fire, which means we’re only a movie or two away from Boyle’s next reinvention.
