<em>Doctor Strange</em> director shares his own strange journey with Lipscomb
Janel Shoun-Smith |
Derrickson dishes on his artistic influences, career ups and downs and the impact on his personal life
If you were feeling a little strange on Friday, Dec. 2, it could be because Scott Derrickson, the director of the latest Marvel blockbuster Doctor Strange, was on campus that night sharing his career experience and personal philosophy toward filmmaking with Lipscomb students and film fans alike.
Derrickson, who first came to prominence with the film The Exorcism of Emily Rose, grew up in the same Colorado town as Lipscomb Filmmaker-in-Residence Steve Taylor, who quizzed Derrickson on his artistic influences, career advice and how working in the film business has impacted his personal life as part of the College of Entertainment & the Arts’ Artist-in-Residence Speaker Series.
Derrickson not only shared personal nuggets (i.e. he was inspired to become a filmmaker by Top Gun and his favorite singer is Bob Dylan), but he shared what it’s like to direct a film for a studio that “has never made a bad movie” (his description of Marvel) and how he survived a career low when one of his past films turned out to be a critical dud.
During his undergraduate years at Biola University, a Christian university in Southern California, Derrickson went through a time of doubt in his faith, during which he voraciously read literature and philosophers searching for answers in his life, the director told the audience.
He credited G.K. Chesterton’s book Orthodoxy as bringing him back to faith. “I was lost. I know what it feels like to not believe,” he said.
Eventually the boy who used to make haunted houses in his basement every Halloween grew up, and when he saw Dario Argento’s 1977 horror film Suspiria, he knew he wanted to make his artistic statement in the American horror film genre.
“Many European filmmakers were making high art out of horror. Suspiria was filmmaking at the highest level, and you just don’t see that in American horror,” said Derrickson, who now teaches the history of European film in California.
In fact, American horror films of the 1970s (Halloween, Friday the 13th) came to define the genre as a low-budget realm.
Derrickson, who is also a scriptwriter, set out to create a horror movie that was also a well-made film with a script that held up on its own, even without the “jump scares.” The result was The Exorcism of Emily Rose in 2005, which he wrote and directed. The movie toggled back and forth between the possession story and a courtroom drama.
“When I complete a script, I always take the jump scares out of the script and see if the drama is good enough to sustain the film. If it’s not, the script is not done,” he said.
Next Derrickson was hired to direct a huge blockbuster event, The Day the Earth Stood Still starring Keanu Reeves in 2008, which turned out to be a defining moment in his career. Due to legal and monetary issues, the film was not as good as Derrickson had hoped, and the film critics had no problem saying so. Domestically, the film did not earn much money.
“It killed my career, and I was offered nothing but bad sequels for two years,” Derrickson said. “I was stunned… by how much my identity had become rooted in the success of Emily Rose. I knew that was wrong.”
So despite his fear about his future and career, he turned down all the bad jobs offered him and waited for the right opportunity. Finally, a producer of the Paranormal Activity films approached him and offered him $3 million to make whatever he wanted (The Day the Earth Stood Still had an $80 million budget).
He made Sinister (2012), a film about a true crime writer so desperate to recapture his successful writing career that he moves his family into the home of a murdered family, and refuses to leave despite dark occurrences. Basically, a film about the way Derrickson used to be.
“The strongest fear driving this movie… is fear of losing status and career,” he said. “My attitude was: if I die on this sword, this will be my sword. So I made the movie exactly the way I wanted it to be.”
Derrickson brought his personal experience with making “your work your idol,” as Taylor described it, to his latest film, Doctor Strange, where the main character, a hot shot surgeon, is so desperate to get his dexterity back after a car crash that he spends his fortune on surgeries and travel to the Far East to explore a mystical solution.
Derrickson said he spent $45,000 of his own money to prepare a 90-minute visual presentation to convince Marvel to hire him to direct the 2016 blockbuster about a superhero who can bend time and space. It worked. The director said his father had a philosophy of life: always give 10-20 percent more than the closest competitor. That strategy has served him well in the film industry, he said.
Other advice he gave the audience included:
- Writing is the currency of the film business. Of all the skills a filmmaker needs to thrive, writing is the top one, he said. And once you write something good, hold on to it and use it as leverage to get a better deal, as he did in writing Emily Rose and only selling it to the studio that would let him direct it.
- The best experience to gain to succeed in show business is sales, says the Colorado native who sold cars at his father’s dealership growing up. “I’ve spent as much time peddling myself as I have spent doing creative work,” he said. “(At my father’s car dealership) I learned how to negotiate and how to close a deal. I learned how to both create, and meet, the need in a buyer.”
- “The filmmaking business is so difficult, that one must be truly humble about your strengths and weaknesses,” Derrickson said. For instance, until recently he did not feel confident enough in his writing skills to write a script alone, so he always works with good writers, to help him learn. “It’s nice to have someone in the trenches with you. It’s a tough business,” he said.
Today, Derrickson hasn’t read any of the reviews of Doctor Strange (which were quite good). The film’s box office haul so far has made it among the top 10 earners in the past year. His last film, Deliver Us From Evil, was not reviewed well, but Derrickson said “it didn’t bother me at all. It showed me I had learned my lesson.”
“I changed the reasons for my ambition after The Day the Earth Stood Still,” he said. “My ambition now draws from my desire to do what I am good at, as well as I can. So the ambition has to be part of your artistry. I go into a project to challenge my point of view, and so it becomes a process of discovery.”