We at EFS are generally quiet, polite types of animal. We have always been very quick to acknowledge influences and lavish praise on the very many filmmakers we admire. But one fine night, as a group of three of us stood gazing into the bottom of our beer glasses, we decided to turn nasty and complement our long list of heroes with a list of irritations. The overrated, the insupportable, the contemporary filmmakers warping cinema with bullshit. We boiled this down to twelve representative names and decided to publish this list as a statement of what we are against. This list is not aimed at blatantly commercial multiplex fodder: those films are what they are, take them or leave them. Nor is it geared towards showing up run-of-the-mill bad filmmakers: goodness knows, it's tough to make any sort of film and we ourselves are humble craftsmen as capable of getting it wrong as the next fellow. No, what we hate most is the sort of middlebrow posturing that misrepresents the powers of cinema and ends up selling the medium short, the worst thing a director can do to an audience.
This ad hoc 'Committee of Cinematic Public Hygiene' consisted of Rashidi, Le Cain and Kavanagh. Our dislikes proved almost unanimous, with only Terrence Malick (two for, one against) proving in any way divisive. Ridley Scott was only let off due to Le Cain pleading that anyone with the guts to bring a script as bold and magnificent as THE COUNSELLOR to the screen these days (and having taken the consequences of doing so) deserves at least respect- even if that writing deserved Peckinpah.
The list, in no particular order:
Neil Jordan
Gaspar Noe
Danny Boyle
Guy Ritchie
Steven Soderbergh
Sofia Coppola
Luc Besson
Steven Spielberg
Fernando Meirelles
Wes Anderson
Spike Lee
Quentin Tarantino
The list is best read with this accompaniment HERE
Dean Kavanagh / Maximilian Le Cain / Rouzbeh Rashidi / December 2013