I think Mendes has too much power, but I suppose he's been hired to helm it so that's what he's doing.
I'd much rather the producers put the power in the hands of the directors that they hire rather than simply hiring a puppet to basically serve as their surrogate in the director's chair. That's what has led to some of the staleness that had crept its way into the franchise, with some films repeating the same storylines, and the checklist becoming the most important part of the structure of the film, in some cases even exceeding the script in terms of its importance.
Nicely put. In British TV they call a format - a menu of plot points for which the story is created and must adhere to. It's been a way of making entertainment shows for decades, but has now become a staple of documentary and has crept ever so insidiously into drama. Hence most British drama seems to be made from the same template (particularly at the one time vanguard of drama, the Beeb. Sad times).
Gone are the days of nurturing talented Directors like Maki Lee, Ken Loach, Danny Boyle - we are now in the era of the Producer who oversees all, most of which they don't fathom, and run to a brief that supersedes all creative aspects. Every detail is micro managed until anything that made it remotely unique has massaged out of it. They've brought tv down to the lowest common denomenator, turning all genres into panto - from drama, to doc, to current affairs.
These middle management Producers go on to be Executive Producers and finally channel Commissioners, who for some ungodly reason are treated like absolute royalty. I've once been asked to re-cut something because of a dream the Commissioner had the night before. The Commissioner said this flippantly and no one in the room seemed to take it seriously because it made no sense in the edit. But once the Commissioner left the room the paranoid whispers began and office politics being far more persuasive than good story telling her 'dream idea' was implemented...!
This is why it's good to have a director with great influence on the job - this is why, despite any whatever issues you may have with Mendes, ultimately it's great for film lovers to have him in that chair.
Fore these days most Movie making and tv drama is so much artifice hiding so little content. It's chicken and egg stuff to figure out if this factory-line way of making films started in tv or in the action movies of the 80s and then the rom-coms of the 90s, but it's a very very poor substitute for making films in which the content informs the structure, rather than visa versa.
Eon are in a period of content informing the structure by allowing directors to determine how the story is told. Long may it last.
Rant over.
Edited by Odd Jobbies, 30 April 2014 - 07:08 PM.