A sophomore slump can last decades, says DONALD CLARKE
DO YOU really want that great lost director to re-emerge from the shadows? What a stupid question. I ought to go back to cleaning lavatories or doing whatever it was I did before some lunatic gave me a column.
But hold on a moment. Consider the long gestation of Bruce Robinson's The Rum Diary. It's been nearly 20 years since the director of Withnail & Ioffered us a new movie. In that time the reputation of the fine 1987 comedy has soared. Once seen as an entertainment fit only for students and the chemically troubled, Withnailnow regularly appears on shortlists of the greatest ever British films.
Following Withnail'srelease, Robinson moved on to the underrated How to Get Ahead in Advertisingand the misconceived Jennifer Eight. Then silence.
When deprived of new work from an admired artist, the thinking fan tends to pass through a fairly predictable series of emotions: impatience, anger, boredom, suspicion and, ultimately, creeping unease.
Remember Stanley Kubrick's appalling Eyes Wide Shut? We had to wait 10 years for a smutty perfume commercial shot on what looked like the set of an ITV soap opera. Each time Francis Ford Coppola emerges from one of his lengthy hibernations, the world swallows hard and braces itself for further proof that talent can curdle if left untended.
It is hard to avoid the suspicion that there may be good reasons why our favourite directors are cast into the wilderness. Maybe they're just too eccentric to cope with Hollywood's cookie-cutter aesthetic (sounds like Robinson). Maybe they've genuinely lost it ( Jennifer Eightreally was a mess). Maybe they're suffering from performance anxiety (the defining feature in Kubrick's career).
At any rate, when the eventual film turns out to be as ordinary as The Rum Diary, the sane observer rarely manages to work up much degree of disappointment. Commercial film-making is not like writing: it's not a pursuit you can easily practice in private. Yes, directors can shoot a few scenes on their hand-held camera. Sure, they can edit them together on their laptop. Such dabbling, however, offers little preparation for walking on a film set and directing a megaphone towards a thousand sceptical professionals.
This is not to say that film-makers can't return from the wastelands in triumph. Consider Lynne Ramsay. It took nearly a decade for the Scotswoman to follow-up the promise of Ratcatcherand Morvern Callar. Yet We Need to Talk About Kevinhas become her most celebrated picture. In two weeks, Terence Davies, another missing British director, returns with the moving The Deep Blue Sea.
So, it can be done. But no film-maker should risk spending too much time lurking in the outer darkness. Madness sets in. Paranoia builds. You risk – to paraphrase Paul McGann in Withnail– making an enemy of your own future.
