Indie cinema is in an odd position at the moment.
We’re long past the arthouse boom of the ‘90s that anointed artists such as Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, and Richard Linklater. We’re even past the point when major studios opened or bought up indie shingles to expand their empires (Focus Features is owned by Universal, Searchlight Pictures by Disney, etc.). The streamers have had sporadic interest in making huge buys at film festivals - Netflix and Amazon were on a spending spree the past few years but have slowed down in favor of big-budget content, while Apple looks to move into this space next with their acquisition of the Sundance winner CODA. Then there’s the ongoing effects of the pandemic, as blockbusters have been pushed to the front of theatrical release schedules and most completed films considered financial risks have been sold off to streamers (look at all the mid-budget movies that have been snapped up by Netflix and Amazon - from The Trial of the Chicago 7 to Coming 2 America).
In the arthouse space, the production company A24 may be the closest thing to truly “independent” (their closest competitor NEON - producer of Parasite - frequently cuts deals with Hulu like their dual acquisition of Palm Springs last year). The nascent (started in 2012) company behind such hits as Best Picture winner Moonlight and Room has gained a significant following over the past few years as the savior of niche cinema for grown-ups.
There are certain trademarks of an A24 movie - they are incredibly proud of the oddball, alternative nature of their product in the increasingly homogenized market (just look at the trailer for the upcoming Lamb, where they fully embrace the weird and have been rewarded with 1.5 million views on YouTube). They release trailers with images that are tailor-made for the One Perfect Shot Twitter account. Mostly, they’re known for being the coolest kid in school - the one seeking in cigarette breaks when everyone else is in class (or rather, making Fast and Furious movies). That under-the-radar movie you recommended to all your friends? It was likely A24. So obviously, Apple recently considered buying them for $3 billion dollars.
However, there are pitfalls to being a production house with a sterling reputation (and a surprise early Best Picture win under your belt). Mainly, there’s the issue of hype. When you release several films a year, not every film can be as “mind blowing” as its trailer. Some are bound to disappoint.
For example, this year’s recent release Zola - a true(-ish) story about strippers on a dramatic Florida road trip - failed to achieve the same high for me as the similarly-themed Spring Breakers (an early A24 hit). For me, Zola was more a by-the-numbers adaptation of the viral Twitter thread than a film with a strong thesis - missing the opportunity to comment on capitalism, or race or sex work in an interesting way.
There are such outsized expectations for every A24 project because the company’s stable of auteur filmmakers is part of its mythology. All indie filmmakers have ups and downs in their careers, especially after they make a splashy debut. Still, A24 tends to stick by the talent even through the underperforming films.
A24 financing is a sign that the company has stock in a director’s career, which they hope will eventually pay off.
For example, Ari Aster might be one of the greatest A24 success stories (next to the Safdie Brothers, the duo behind A24 films Good Time and Uncut Gems). Aster’s debut (after making some truly bizarre and transgressive shorts like The Strange Thing About the Johnsons) had already been produced by A24 when it became one of the most buzzed-about titles at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Hereditary is a film you’ve no doubt heard of, already frequently cited as one of the most terrifying films of all time and a modern horror masterpiece. It belongs to a genre that offers A24 fairly consistent box office returns - that of “elevated horror” (also known as just “horror,” but palatable for the snooty arthouse crowd - popularized by films such as It Follows and Get Out). In fact, Aster was originally interested in making a wrenching family drama, but added the supernatural horror element in hopes of getting the film financed. It paid off, as Hereditary made $80 million on a $10 million budget. It was lauded by both audiences who were truly shocked and critics who saw the larger messages. Even Martin Scorsese was a fan.
Aster repeated the same trick again with the daytime horror film Midsommar, which was similarly profitable and a critical success. It was helped by the growing reputation of Hereditary as a film not to watch alone at night, as well as the buzz over the movie’s gorier moments.
Aster is now a certified master of horror with name recognition. He appears to now have a blank check with A24, as they’re financing his next film Disappointment Blvd. starring Joaquin Phoenix. This one is described as a “nightmare comedy” (I for one can’t wait to see an Ari Aster “comedy”).
You can contrast Aster’s success (and that of Robert Eggers, who similarly had horror hits The Witch and The Lighthouse both set up at A24), with the varied career of A24 regular Trey Edward Shults.
Shults is still young (only 32), but he’s already had the opportunity to try his hand at several different genres. He started his career with the anxiety-inducing family drama Krisha, starring his aunt and members of his family. The film was by no means a commercial hit, but it was the perfect launching pad - a critical darling that was heralded by anyone who discovered it.
Shults’ horror follow-up It Comes at Night had a bigger, A24-approved budget, and made a profit in its wide release ($20 million on a $2-5 million budget). However, audiences were turned off by the film’s ambiguity. The film’s box office dropped off sharply in its first weekend due to poor word of mouth.
Despite the mixed results of It Comes at Night, A24 still committed to the next Trey Edward Shults film, Waves. They gave the film, a drama set to a soundtrack of such artists as Frank Ocean and Kanye West, a plumb awards-friendly release date in November 2019. This time, both audiences and critics were divided on Shults’ work (though the critics leaned mostly positive). In particular, the decision by Shults - a white filmmaker - to tell a story about a black family drew criticism (Shults has said he worked on the story with star Kelvin Harrison Jr.) Ultimately, the film was also not the success that A24 had clearly anticipated - it cleared less than $3 million at the global box office.
I’ll take this opportunity to voice my affection for Waves, a film that only A24 would have funded. It is truly go-for-broke and dazzling in its ambition. The filmmaking techniques that Shults uses to involve the audience in the film’s high drama are uncomfortably visceral - the pulsing music capturing every surging emotion onscreen. I find particular inspiration in the film’s diptych structure, something that Shults has said was lifted from the genius pacing of Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express. However, there’s no doubt the film was overlooked in its initial release and hasn’t gotten the same love as other A24 films since. Shults has not announced a follow-up film yet. I hope he gets another shot to make a film that is as emotional and semi-autobiographical as his initial features.
If Aster represents the height of A24 fame, and Shults is still stuck in a period where art and commerce have yet to intersect, then David Lowery has been somewhere in the middle the past several years.
The Texas-raised Lowery’s first film, the meditative Western Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, starred Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara and was released in 2013 by IFC Films. Lowery was part of the same class of Sundance filmmakers as Colin Trevorrow (who parlayed the success of Safety Not Guaranteed into directing Jurassic World) and Ryan Coogler (who directed Fruitvale Station, then Creed, then Black Panther). Lowery’s path seemed pretty assured when he next signed on to direct Disney’s remake of Pete’s Dragon (starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Robert Redford and a giant furry green CGI dragon). But then something strange happened…
Lowery shot a film in secret with Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara for $100,000 in the summer of 2016 (the very summer his big Disney film was released). The resulting A24 film, A Ghost Story, stars Casey Affleck as a man who dies tragically in a car crash and becomes a watcher in his former home. The twist? He appears like a Halloween ghost, wearing a sheet with holes cut out for eyes. The film takes this (somewhat comical) central image, and brings out the existential anguish of being cursed to watching history pass by. Affleck’s character watches his former wife (Mara) gorge on an entire pie in her grief. He watches the hipsters that move in after her discuss the end of the universe late into the night, oblivious to the eternal spirit in their midst. He even walks the halls of his home as it becomes a skyscraper in a future city-scape.
I saw A Ghost Story in the summer of 2017, one of the only audience members in a theater in Cranford, New Jersey. It was a tumultuous summer for me, as I was just settling into post-college life and grappling with the question of what comes next.
The film has lived in my head since then, visualizing how minuscule our lifespans are in comparison to the vastness of time. It is a film that also aches with eternity - portraying about how long both grief and love can last. Lowery had achieved something rare and beautiful as a storyteller by going back to basics, and interrogating his own sense of mortality.
Lowery’s next film, the Fox Searchlight release The Old Man and the Gun, served as a fitting tribute and swan song for its star Robert Redford (who reportedly retired after the making of the film, but showed up in Avengers: Endgame nonetheless). Despite a truly delightful Sissy Spacek performance, the film is mostly a light genre exercise running on Redford’s charm (I suppose every director deserves to make their love letter to ‘70s cinema).
However, Lowery’s newest film The Green Knight finds him returning to both A24 and his themes of mortality. He enters another genre for the first time - the Medieval epic - with a story based on a 14th century poem (not exactly the type of superhero IP studios are rushing to mine nowadays).
I was initially surprised when The Green Knight was held over a year for a theatrical release (it was initially scheduled to release in May 2020). It didn’t seem as immediately bankable as A24’s horror films (which often get a wide release even at their most esoteric). It was also another odd move and a risk from a director shuttling between independent and studio films (Lowery is currently filming the children’s film Peter Pan and Wendy, which is set to release exclusively on Disney+).
However…
The Green Knight is a simply stunning achievement.
It marries craft (with a stellar lead performance by Dev Patel, as well as an exemplary score and production design) with the pathos and introspection of A Ghost Story. Lowery treats his subject matter reverently, whereas other directors might hide behind self-consciousness or parody (I can imagine a version of this story given the anachronistic A Knight’s Tale treatment).
Lowery has described his influences as being medieval '80s films like Willow and The Dark Crystal, but I see The Green Knight as much more indebted to the early Ingmar Bergman works such as The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring. Those films also confronted mortal dread in medieval settings, when death was much more of a constant. Like Seventh Seal, The Green Knight is highly symbolic - the other characters often speaking eerily like manifestations of the lead character’s psyche.
It turns out that for all the trademarks you can list for A24 films, there is one that trumps them all - the studio’s sustained belief in the director’s vision.
Whatever it may be, whether it be a 19th century black-and-white two-hander set in a lighthouse or a film starring Happy Gilmore as the world’s foremost degenerate gambler, you can bet that A24 will fund your weird-ass movie if you’re a proven artist.
They may be one of the last production houses left to place so much faith in the creatives rather than market testing.
Let’s hope they stick around for a long time…
Some overlooked A24 films you can check out
I was a big fan of Mississippi Grind starring Ben Mendelsohn and Ryan Reynolds (in one of his last indie performances before reentering the studio space with Deadpool) when I caught it recently on cable. It’s a fun character piece (almost a remake of Altman’s California Split) without any higher aspirations.
I also want to acknowledge the female filmmakers who are now A24 regulars, whose careers didn’t fit into my essay (partly because their films are too idiosyncratic to work into a larger structure). Andrea Arnold’s 2016 film American Honey deserves to be a classic of the road movie genre, a vivid study of modern American youth by a British filmmaker. Claire Denis’ High Life is an intergalactic meditation on life in microcosm. Lynn Shelton (Laggies) and Joanna Hogg (The Souvenir) have also directed A24 films, proving the company’s eye for talent.
Then there are the A24 films I love that I feel are fairly well known, of which there are too many to list here (Lady Bird, Ex Machina, First Reformed, Green Room, The Lobster etc.)
Other Stray Thoughts
I also saw Stillwater over the weekend, which is just as worthy of its own post. I found it to be an engrossing, nuanced character drama - full of equal parts empathy and ambiguity.
Tom McCarthy has lived so many lives as a filmmaker (remember when he followed up an Adam Sandler flop with a Best Picture winner?) that it's easy to forget that he started his career with character pieces like "The Station Agent" and "The Visitor” (it makes sense that McCarthy has such a gift for creating fully-realized characters for his actors to inhabit, given that he himself started his career as a performer).
Matt Damon is fully committed to showing all facets of Midwesterner Bill Baker as he fights to free his daughter from French custody. Baker is a character that the audience thinks it knows and understands - a Midwestern gun-owning tattooed oil rigger, a type. Baker himself would probably agree at the beginning of the film that he is a simple man. However, Baker’s ex-pat experiences, being outside of the “bubble” of the United States, unlocks unexpected depth to his character. The film is not the mystery it is being promoted as, but rather the story of one man’s discovery of himself.
Stillwater makes the case that no man is a stereotype, and we can all be altered by new experiences - no matter how firm we may feel in our core identity. That is a rare message today, in an age where we are defined by how strongly we hold on to our immutable beliefs, no matter the changing context.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched the House of Gucci trailer - the line readings (from Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto [?!?!], Al Pacino and more) are already iconic. Between this and The Last Duel also coming out this year, Ridley Scott continues to show stamina at 83 (only Clint Eastwood, who at 91 years old also has a film out this year, has him beat in the grizzled immortality department).
Acknowledgments
Fleming Jr., Mike, “Apple Lands ‘CODA’ For $25M Record Setting WW Deal; First Major Virtual 2021 Sundance Film Festival Sale.” https://deadline.com/2021/01/coda-apple-record-deal-2021-sundance-film-festival-north-of-twenty-five-million-dollars-1234683970/
Donnelly, Matt, “Indie Film and TV Studio A24 Explored Sale With $3 Billion Asking Price.” https://variety.com/2021/film/news/inside-a24-billion-dollar-sale-1235018988/
Sharf, Zack, “Scorsese Champions Ari Aster Movies: ‘So Disturbing’ They’re ‘Deeply Uncomfortable.’” https://www.indiewire.com/2020/07/scorsese-champions-ari-aster-hereditary-midsommar-1234571523/
D’Alessandro, Anthony, “Why ‘The Mummy’ Turned Crummy At The Domestic B.O. & What This Means For Uni’s ‘Dark Universe.’” https://deadline.com/2017/06/wonder-woman-beats-tom-cruise-mummy-at-the-box-office-1202110164/
Hampton, Rachelle, “Sterling K. Brown on Making a Movie About Black Masculinity With a White Filmmaker.” https://slate.com/culture/2019/12/waves-movie-sterling-k-brown-interview-black-masculinity.html
Lee, Chris, “Trey Edward Shults Says His A24 Movie Waves Is a Panic Attack Followed by a Hug.” https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/the-story-behind-waves-according-to-trey-edward-shults.html
Clarke, Cath, “'Maybe I'm taking things too far': Trey Edward Shults on mining his family's trauma.” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/jan/03/maybe-im-taking-things-too-far-trey-edwards-shults-on-mining-his-familys-trauma
Smith, John, “Director David Lowery on the shared DNA between THE GREEN KNIGHT and WILLOW & BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA.” https://drafthouse.com/omaha/news/david-lowery-guest-selects-willow-dracula