“Successful cinema”
‘Ever since I was a young boy growing up in the popular area of my town, in Eastern Algeria, I have always had a fascination with the Neighborhood Movie Theater. All those wonderful movies, westerns, actions films, romance, comedies, war films, grasped my attention from the beginning to the end.
While the film was running on the screen, I was the hero. I was Gary Cooper, Kirk Douglas or Douglas Fairbanks. What was obvious to me: The hero was an entrepreneur.
Through time, I became aware that every film is a two-folded dream: The dream of the film’s hero to achieve a noble goal and the director‘s dream to make this film.
In the beginning, it was just a single idea of a single man. Then the man became a crowd and the crowd became people and the people achieved the goal: the film as well as the hero’s need in the film. However, this can only be achieved under two things: Freedom and the rule of law.
Freedom means you control your own life, your work, choose freely your partners, keep and enjoy what you earn.
Rule of law means you work in an environment of tolerance, security, mutual respect for the lives and property of everyone and fair commercial competition.
And when this kind of environment becomes available, the inherent contagious process of the hero’s individualist enthusiasm, by its exemplarity, spreads in the mass.
We feel then committed to our work, we make it ours, we make it a private matter and its achievement becomes a matter of personal honor. We feel self-responsible and endowed with a mission.
Almost all the films I was screening pointed, at the end, to this obvious fact:
– A successful film is a private endeavor but a collective reward.
Later on, I became a filmmaker , a screenwriter and a novelist. I know now that successful filmmaking could not be any other thing than a private business because at the beginning, it is a personal idea, a personal challenge.
The proof, the only place where Cinema has remained strong is Hollywood because it has remained faithful to this credo.
But, let us look around.
Does not any human project look like a filmmaking one?
What if we consider any economic project as a filmmaking project?
We will have
the script (The company plan)
the actors (the workers)
the technicians (the staff)
And the Director (the manager).
As far as a film shooting is an ever-renewed challenge, and considered under this angle, any working day could be experienced as such and why not, in the end, lived as a sheer pleasure and a pure joy. This is what we call endurance.
But the first one who must experience this feeling should be the director. Then he will have to transfer his enthusiasm to his co-workers.
And in order to transfer his enthusiasm to his co-workers, the director should have an accurate idea of what he wants and the benefits that his co-workers are due to expect, that creativity will be fully rewarded.
In this respect, a successful film is just putting intelligence into action, and action is the word that the director utters when he starts shooting his film.
A successful cinema is just but intelligent business done by private undertaking in the way stated above.
And this is what, really, every successful film is.
Putting Intelligence into acts? Action!
Abdelouahab Hammoudi
Screenwriter
