The English Patient

[INTERIOR, MIRIMAX STUDIOS] A studio executive is speaking to a director. EXEC: We need a prestige movie. Something to really put us on the map in Hollywood. We want a movie that can -- no, WILL -- win Best Picture. DIRECTOR: Well, let me say I'm honored you'd think of me to be the person to-- EXEC: We think we've cracked the formula. DIRECTOR: Umm, okay. I don't really think there's a formula. It's more about-- EXEC: You know what genre always delivers? Epic historical romance dramas. DIRECTOR: I could probably name a dozen off the top of my head that failed. EXEC: And I can name some that won. DIRECTOR: Yes, but that number pales in comparison-- EXEC: Have you seen Out Of Africa? DIRECTOR: Excuse me? EXEC: Out Of Africa. Meryl Streep, Robert Redford. Looks like a National Geographic special. Won Best Picture in '82. DIRECTOR: It was 1985. EXEC: Not the point. That movie dominated at the Oscars that year. I want something like that. DIRECTOR: You want a dull, ponderous movie that has the pace of a tectonic plate. You want a travelogue disguised as a movie. You want to take a handsome actor and make him aloof and unlikable, and make the actress working with him to put up with his mercurial attitude and come to him whenever he summons. You want me to make a movie like Out Of Africa, a movie considered, retrospectively, to be one of the least deserving Best Picture winners of all time, all to try and win the award. EXEC: Hmm. You have a point. DIRECTOR: I'm glad you underst-- EXEC: Have you seen Gone With The Wind. DIRECTOR: Oh no. No. EXEC: What do you mean, no? DIRECTOR: It's a bloated, self-indulgent movie that confuses length for scope, and it has two of the rock-bottom worst characters ever in the history of cinema. They spend four hours making their lives and the lives of everyone around them miserable for as long as they do their shitty tap-dance of supposed romance. Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara are toxic. And that's not even mentioning the movie's historical-- EXEC: But people love Rhett and Scarlett. DIRECTOR: And McDonald's has sold billions of burgers, that doesn't make it the best burger in the business. EXEC: Doesn't it, though? DIRECTOR: ... NO! No, not even close! EXEC: We're getting off track. I want you to make Out Of Africa, but with characters that have the passion of Rhett and Scarlett. DIRECTOR: Let me be perfectly clear here. You are asking me to make a movie that is unnecessarily long, and spends as much time enamored with the scenery as it does the characters. Characters who are, in no uncertain terms, selfish, deceitful, abhorrent people who ruin their own lives and the lives of friends and loved ones. EXEC: Set in Africa, during wartime, yes. And they don't end up together in the end. Make it something tragic, like the guy causes her death somehow, and he winds up bitter and alone. Oh! And you know those movies where everything is told in flashback, but it keeps cutting back and forth to a framing device that is poorly defined and yet somehow still more intriguing than the main story? That. I want that. And nudity. Guys need a reason to see this. I'm not some peekaboo shit where the sheet slides down and you get a glimpse of nip. Full frontal, Basic Instinct-style. Those British actresses love getting naked. Get one of those broads. DIRECTOR: Sir, I say this with all due respect. The movie you are describing sounds like one of the worst movies I could ever imagine, and a movie I could not bear to sit through. The mishmash of disparate elements, the toxicity of the romantic element, the exploitative nature of sexualizing the lead actress, demonizing the lead actor in the end ... I cannot, for the life of me, imagine a redeemable feature of this movie. EXEC: I'm not paying you to make a good movie, I'm paying you to make a Best Picture winner. DIRECTOR: I should've stayed directing commercials.