Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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Hollywood: “I get offered a lot of material working in Los Angeles, but most of it’s not
very good, - it may be [good in] technical or generic [terms], but it never has any
originality […]. It’s hard to find good material; it’s hard to develop good material. And
I’d rather just hold out for things […]. I only want to do stuff I really believe in”. 955
However, once he had found a project he believed in – What Dreams My Come – he
still had to contend with constraints inherent in working in the Hollywood studio
system. That he was thoroughly aware of the problems for a filmmaker of his type was
evident in his comment to AdMedia “With a studio film, you have a lot of people
making the decisions and they are spending vast amounts of money, so the decision
making becomes very conservative. Those involved can get very scared and at that
point, you start making yesterday’s film. I try to thread myself through the maze and
make the films I want to”. 956 Ward is not the only auteur director in Hollywood who
has had to face similar problems. His comments are similar to those of Francis Ford
Coppola, who is quoted as saying: “A lot of the energy that went into the film [The
Godfather] went into simply trying to convince the people who held the power to let me
do the film my way”. 957
The way Ward managed the “maze” of Hollywood was to stay “absolutely focused” on
his own work, according to Graeme Barnes, a school friend who stayed with him while
he was living in Hollywood. His impression was that Ward was only living there
because that was where he had to be to do his work, and was completely unmoved by
some of the famous people he met, although when he was involved in making a movie,
he felt he had to play “a whole lot of strategy games”. According to Barnes, for Ward,
the stress of making What Dreams May Come was not in actually making the movie,
but the “difficult negotiations to maintain artistic control”. Another telling comment by
Ward about Hollywood was that the people he was negotiating with were scared, since
if the movie lost money they would be out of a job, and he found it exhausting to work
with people motivated by fear. 958
Ward’s comment in an interview for Pavement pinpointed the root of the problem of
working in Hollywood: “The industry isn’t looking for the same thing I am. Their
955 Sam Gaoa, unpublished interview with Ward, 17 October 1998.
956 "Vincent Ward: Arthouse Madman," 19.
957 Coppola quoted in Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam 112.
958 Lynette Read, interview with Graeme Barnes, 16 December 1999.