I can’t tell you how many times I get an email asking about what happened to this or that director. There are so many great filmmakers who haven’t released a film in 10+ years, for one reason or another, mostly due to financing issues.
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Sadly, there are too many talented hermits out there. Of course, you have filmmakers who are purposely inactive — I wouldn’t be surprised if we never again hear from the likes of Haneke, Weir, Carpenter and Darabont.
This decade has been difficult for many talented directors to get their projects going. Hollywood’s been stuck in a risk-averse mindset. There’s been far less of an emphasis on investing in filmmaker-oriented films. It’s more about the bottom line, and that means IP product is king.
These are just some of the filmmakers who haven’t released anything in a very long time:
Kathryn Bigelow, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Bennett Miller, Kenneth Lonergan, Peter Weir, Spike Jonze, Richard Kelly, Mark Romanek, John Carpenter, Frank Darabont, Peter Jackson, Shane Carruth, John Waters, Todd Solondz, Charles Burnett, Terry Zwigoff, Tony Kaye, Cameron Crowe, Wong Kar-Wai, Maren Ade, Derek Cianfrance, John McTiernan, Alex Proyas, Shane Black, Carl Franklin, Brad Bird, John Sayles, Vincent Gallo, Martin Brest, Lisa Cholodenko, Joe Dante.
The good news is that Bigelow, Solondz, Crowe, Cianfrance, Bird, Black, Dante and Proyas all have films that have been shot or are set to be shooting this year.
Peter Jackson was the one I thought of immediately - a lot of the others are (semi) retired but he has been keeping busy with documentaries but he must be getting “The Itch”. They mention a Tintin sequel, but he can pretty much do what he likes - how about a return to his roots with a low budget horror?
Did the hobbit trilogy burn him out? I only saw some of the behind the scenes stuff about how the lack of planning and rushed production all caught up with him at some point, and it certainly seems like the sort of thing that could just irreparably burn someone out, especially with the general reception (and shall we say final quality) of the films.
Wasn’t Peter Jackson involved in a bunch of documentaries restoring old footage? He did They Shall Not Grow Old and then more recently that Beetles documentary series, Get Back
