Mark Boal, the previous journalist who wrote the Oscar-winning author who gained two Oscars for the Bin Laden film Zero Dark Thirty, has shared his ideas on the massive Marvel-style Hollywood blockbusters. Appearing on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Boal was requested if a studio has ever come to him asking him to jot down an enormous blockbuster.
“Nobody ever f**king asked me that, no, they never do,” he mentioned.
The closest Boal has ever come to one thing like this was some script-doctoring work he did, although he did not identify any initiatives particularly. That mentioned, Boal mentioned he enjoys these jobs–which can involving punching up dialogue or serving to repair the third act, for example–because they pay “crazy good money.” But Boal has by no means been requested to work on a large IP like Spider-Man, for instance.
“Nobody has ever said, ‘Here’s our prized piece of IP, here’s like Spider-Man, we want you to shepherd it through.’ No,” he mentioned. “They don’t need that, they don’t want that.”
Zero Dark Thirty was made on a manufacturing funds of $40 million, Boal mentioned, noting that Megan Ellison wrote a examine and paid the invoice herself. As such, the film was made like an impartial movie, Boal mentioned, and this helped the crew, together with himself and director Kathryn Bigelow, keep true to their imaginative and prescient with out a lot exterior studio affect. But the larger a funds a film has, the more cash it must make to recoup its prices, and this could result in points involving inventive expression, Boal mentioned.
“If I’m running one of those companies, I wouldn’t hire me,” he mentioned.
Big studios like Marvel have a “playbook” for his or her movies, Boal mentioned, they usually wish to preserve the formulation the identical to create the very best probability of a constructive return on funding. If Boal have been to make a film on this scale, he would possibly pitch adjustments {that a} studio would not essentially agree with.
“We have a playbook. It’s worked every f**king time, and we’re going to do the same playbook again,” Boal mentioned an govt from an enormous studio would possibly inform him.
“I’d like, yeah, but can’t we change it up and what if we made it more realistic. What if we tried to make it more authentic. They’d be like, ‘Bro, we are selling toys for kids,'” Boal mentioned.
There are exceptions, in fact, as Boal identified that Christopher Nolan–a director he mentioned has “insane artistic chops”–did a terrific job with the Batman film The Dark Knight. This is uncommon, nonetheless, Boal mentioned.
“Those systems, they are factories. Those are really industrial projects, when you go and watch a Marvel movie. There is a limit to how much any one filmmaker or writer can really change what [a big studio] is trying to do with their product. So it’s ultimately–the money is great–but it’s ultimately not that interesting,” he defined.
Boal broke out in Hollywood with 2008’s The Hurt Locker, which was primarily based partially by his personal experiences protecting the struggle in Iraq. Boal gained two Academy Awards for the movie. He went on to jot down 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty, selecting up two Oscar nominations for it. Later credit included Detroit and Triple Frontier. His newest work is the thriller sequence Echo 3 for Apple TV+.
