A writer/director in search of material deliberately pulls the thread that causes an entire marriage to unravel; a film-maker tortures an actress to the brink of a vodka-sodden breakdown in his quest for a “truthful” performance. Meanwhile, the first assistant director is battling waves of food poisoning, the stoned script supervisor has temporarily forgotten how to read, and the rest of the crew is jittery with caffeine and nervous tension.
Lawrence Michael Levine’s savagely comic, unrepentantly dark-hearted Black Bear follows a film-maker stuck in a creative cul de sac to a lakeside retreat run by a failed musician and his pregnant wife. Fiction and reality collide, and the boundaries between the two are increasingly blurred in a slippery, mind-bending thriller in which the lives of all three central characters are plundered for inspiration.
Part meta deep-dive, part gleefully malicious artistic assassination, Black Bear might be the most perceptive film about film-making since a hapless Steve Buscemi struggled to keep his creative vision in focus in Tom DiCillo’s 1995 Living in Oblivion. But the picture, which stars a slinkily disruptive Aubrey Plaza in a career-best performance, goes further: it’s not just a film about film-making, it’s a film that explores film’s sometimes unhealthy fascination with itself.
There is arguably no art form as self-absorbed as cinema. The movie world’s appetite for introspection has spawned a whole genre of pictures that hold up a mirror to the industry. But what they reflect is almost invariably unflattering. Why does cinema tend to see the worst in itself? And what does that say about the creative process?
Perhaps appropriately for a discipline that is as much a business as an art form — but which continually struggles to balance the two — films about film-making tend to buy into the idea that all art, but particularly great art, comes at a considerable cost. It’s a cost usually borne by the cast and the crew, who have to work alongside the flawed genius director or the producer with the juggernaut ego and the sensitivity to match.
Take 2020’s Mank, for example. David Fincher’s loving recreation of old Hollywood doesn’t deny Orson Welles’ gifts or that Citizen Kane was ultimately a masterpiece — but it does suggest that Welles was also a temperamental bully and an opportunist who believed that his star status gave him the right to claim credit for someone else’s work. Then there’s Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), which stars Kirk Douglas as unscrupulous producer Jonathan Shields. Shields betrays and alienates a writer, an actress and director in turn on his way to the top, but the film makes a somewhat convoluted case that his rough handling was actually for their own good.
Comedies about the industry tend to be equally cynical: in Frank Oz’s 1999 Bowfinger, Steve Martin stars as a hack director who attempts to trick Eddie Murphy’s movie star into unwittingly appearing in his film — when his guerrilla techniques fail, he resorts to blackmail, but at least he finishes the film and gets his red-carpet moment. A degree of toxicity, runs the argument, is as essential a part of the moviemaking process as the catering truck.
Of course, there are sunnier, more romantic depictions of film-making, movies such as 2016’s La La Land and 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain, which focus on an underdog success story of talent recognised, of dreams realised rather than crushed. Musicals, however, operate by a different set of rules from the rest of cinema. Escapism and fantasy are rather the point. Even so, in La La Land, Emma Stone’s aspiring actress spends much of the film getting ground down by industry indifference. And in Singin’ in the Rain, Debbie Reynolds comes within a whisker of having her talent cannibalised to prop up the career of a star with a voice like a pickaxe scraping across concrete.
What becomes clear is that movies that turn the lens on themselves can give an insight into the filmmakers’ often conflicted relationship with their own creative process. It’s something that Black Bear director Levine has pondered extensively. “I think an artist, in some ways, can feel like a vampire who’s sucking life out,” he says. “But while a vampire takes it in to sustain themselves, an artist kind of processes it and reshapes it and then emits it. So the idea for me about art and creativity is that it can be therapeutic and cathartic. And that by processing the negative or bearing witness to the negative aspects of ourselves, we can turn it into something positive.
“Some movies do that in very obvious ways by having uplifting messages. Other movies show you a negative example that you wish to avoid. I think this is probably the latter.”
Levine is not the first film-maker to explore that particular analogy. E Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000) fictionalises the making of FW Murnau’s 1922 silent film Nosferatu, suggesting that the director struck a Faustian pact with an actual vampire to star in the film. An Oscar-nominated Willem Dafoe plays Max Schreck, who played Count Orlok. Murnau gets the verisimilitude of an undead lead actor; Schreck gets an unlimited supply of live ferrets and opportunity to eat the leading lady once principal photography has wrapped. Unfortunately, Schreck can’t resist snacking on the cinematographer. Murnau is furious, but more about the impact on his precious film than about any loss of life. “You and I are not so different,” says Schreck, toothily and not inaccurately, to Murnau.
The film-maker driven by the compulsion to make great art at the expense of everything and everyone else is a fictional trope rooted in numerous real-life examples. Stanley Kubrick, for example, was so tough on Shelley Duvall during the making of The Shining (1980) that she ended up gifting him the chunks of hair that fell out due to the stress of their collaboration. Dissatisfied with the performance of Toshiru Mifune in 1957’s Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa had real arrows fired at the actor, the better to create a convincing look of terror. Alfred Hitchcock was notoriously hard on his actors, whom he famously described as “cattle” — but a particular low point came during the making of 1963’s The Birds, when he insisted that live birds be tied to Tippi Hedren by nylon threads. More recent examples include Lars Von Trier, who would direct in the nude in order to unsettle his actors, and likened them to potatoes.
In films about film-making, the relationship between director and actor is frequently depicted as a flashpoint in an unstable power dynamic. And Black Bear, with its sly mind games and engineered jealousies, is no exception. It is not, Levine points out, representative of his own way of working: “I’d like to think I would stop short of conscious manipulation of a kind you see in a movie. But there were many times in the making of this film that I looked at the actors and felt a sense of guilt for having put them through it. I had to remind myself, this is their job, they agreed to do this. And the emotions explored in the movie are unpleasant. You can’t make them pleasant. The movie won’t work.”
Perhaps, ultimately, a film about film-making is more than a catharsis for the film-maker — it’s a means of exerting control over the uncontrollable. “My films have all been really hard to make,” says Levine. “I’ve had really short schedules and very little money, and it’s a very stressful situation. I feel like I’m basically at war with God every time I make a film. You’re trying to impose your reality, your vision, and express it to the world. And the world has no interest in co-operating. I always feel like I come face-to-face with God’s indifference. You’re confronted with the chaos of life when you’re trying to impose this order on it. And life just doesn’t want to be organised.”
No coincidence, then, that Levine’s favourite film about film-making is Living in Oblivion, a picture in which everything that could conceivably go wrong does go wrong, and yet despite all this, the director finally gets his shot — the closest thing to a happy ending that you’re likely to find in this particular genre.
Black Bear is released on digital platforms April 23
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