Which, of course, was the movie that:
- Had an excellent director in Irvin Kerschner
- Had excellent writers creating the screenplay, in Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan
I remain unconvinced. One thing for certain is that he can’t pick scripts for shit, and he’s consistently terrible in the bad projects he picks. Awake was terrible, and he was terrible in it. Jumper was a mess, and he played down to the badness quite well. Virgin Territory was an unwatchable trainwreck, and as cruel as this is to say, he may have been worse in it than Mischa Barton. And of course his work in the Star Wars prequels is legendarily bad.
He was very good in Shattered Glass, yes, but I’m comfortable dismissing that with the same logic everyone else gets a pass for the Star Wars prequels: direction. I think that director was just particularly good at getting a good performance out of him. Every other director ends up with a pile of shit.
I haven’t seen Life As A House, and I don’t remember his part in Factory Girl. I didn’t love Factory Girl but I don’t remember thinking it was particularly bad, so I’ll give Hayden the benefit of the doubt. But one or two more stinkers and I’ll be forced to conclude that he just sucks.
Gotta agree. His snivelling, unctious embodiment of Glass was fantastic, but I’m inclined to believe he got a lot of coaching and direction there, because everything else I’ve seen him in as been disastrous (Jumper a travesty, Awake an embarrassment, and House incredibly overrated).
What’s he worried about? Somebody else taking his ideas and not screwing them up on screen the way he would?
I don’t think it has anything to do with trust. After all, he did trust other directors to helm Empire & Jedi.
I think once he did Ep.1, he was commited. The mixed to neg reviews were vocal enough, he couldn’t risk giving the next installments to someone else and having people praise them to high heaven. That would put, in sharp relief, how injurious he is to his own franchise. So in for a penny, in for a pound–he would have to direct all of them so that, for better or worse, he would get any credit as well as any blame.
Life as a House is among my favorite movies Christensen’s performance was excellent then he followed that with Shattered Glass which he was once again excellent in. I’ll give him some passes for bad acting in the star wars movies after those two.
Since his names been brought up here I checked out his IMDB profile looks like I have to watch Awake, Virgin Territory, and Jumper.
Trust me - you really don’t need to watch that one.
I remember reading an article on Phantom around the time it came out and there was a part in it about how, due to the technology, there was a vast amount of control over the post production, even down to the most minute level of detail (like changing where an extra is looking in one particular frame). There was some line like “this is the first film that has been made with the ability to completely match the director’s vision” - I think this is telling and clearly such a thing is more important to Lucas than what is being shown actually being something people like.
I gotta agree with the OP. He wasn’t any worse than any of the others.
Listening to his monotone delivery, his lack of emotion, and then watching IV, V, and VI and hearing James Earl Jones, they weren’t polar opposites. There was some commonality and I think Hayden’s Anakin was more deliberately like that than accidentally like that. Not that JEJ was bad, but I think he was being robotic sometimes and that’s ok because, well, Vader was more machine than human.
I do remember reading an interview with Lucas (conducted during the production of the prequels, IIRC) in which he stated that he felt that bringing in Kerschner and Marquand, in retrospect, was a mistake – not that he felt that they did a poor job, but that he realized that he really wanted 100% control over the movies, and the only way he could have it was to direct them.