A Messenger
Active member
I like a quote by Quentin Tarantino where he said that his target audience was people like himself, which is assumed to be intelligent people who are aware of the conventions of cinema.
This is clearly not the target audience for most Hollywood fare, see Transformers.
What sort of audience do you think of when you're writing? I'm sure it's a much easier decision if you plan to self produce but do you feel like you're ever pressured to dumb it down?
A couple examples:
In the Great Gatsby it's never explicitly stated why Gatsby is so drawn to Daisy. One interpretation may be that he's just deeply in love with her. Another interpretation is that she's really just a trophy and that Gatsby wants her because he fells that she'll move him closer to where he wants to be. Fitzgerald didn't feel the need to explain all this but left it for interpretation. Then again his story delivers the goods so he can get away with that. I sort of saw the same sort of ambiguity at the end of the Spider-man films which I think worked.
In the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey we get a number of sequences where seemingly meaningful things are happening but there really isn't any sort of payoff. We understand that the monolith, which appears periodically, is in some way moving the plot forward but we aren't really given the tools to decipher what it all adds up to in the end. It does not deliver the goods.
The two cases are interesting because they show what can happen if you aim for subtlety. I strongly doubt that Kubrick was trying to make such an indecipherable mess of a movie but he didn't seem to realize that he would lose the audience. The Great Gatsby on the other hand has a definite theme which sort of guides the audience along and the conclusion is the logical progression of this theme.
If you're attempting to be a bit subtle how can you as a writer know that you've hit the sweet spot? That you've said enough without saying to much?
This is clearly not the target audience for most Hollywood fare, see Transformers.
What sort of audience do you think of when you're writing? I'm sure it's a much easier decision if you plan to self produce but do you feel like you're ever pressured to dumb it down?
A couple examples:
In the Great Gatsby it's never explicitly stated why Gatsby is so drawn to Daisy. One interpretation may be that he's just deeply in love with her. Another interpretation is that she's really just a trophy and that Gatsby wants her because he fells that she'll move him closer to where he wants to be. Fitzgerald didn't feel the need to explain all this but left it for interpretation. Then again his story delivers the goods so he can get away with that. I sort of saw the same sort of ambiguity at the end of the Spider-man films which I think worked.
In the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey we get a number of sequences where seemingly meaningful things are happening but there really isn't any sort of payoff. We understand that the monolith, which appears periodically, is in some way moving the plot forward but we aren't really given the tools to decipher what it all adds up to in the end. It does not deliver the goods.
The two cases are interesting because they show what can happen if you aim for subtlety. I strongly doubt that Kubrick was trying to make such an indecipherable mess of a movie but he didn't seem to realize that he would lose the audience. The Great Gatsby on the other hand has a definite theme which sort of guides the audience along and the conclusion is the logical progression of this theme.
If you're attempting to be a bit subtle how can you as a writer know that you've hit the sweet spot? That you've said enough without saying to much?