I've heard a lot of good stuff about Rampage, but i've not seen it. It's a film about a mass murderer, GTA style who just spends the entire film killing. It makes sense that a movie with little plot (I assume) would work better for Uwe Boll. As a director with many movies under his belt he probably understands the technical side aspects well.
Many of those ropes of being a director is something anyone can learn. You, me and everyone else could be capable directors. That isn't a rocket science. If you also have a crew with a DP and assistent who knows how to work with a director and read him and get a visual style that works for the film, as well as a solid crew, a directors ignorance can be masked a lot in the technical departments.
But there is no doubt that a movie directors biggest integrity and flair comes from 2 sides;
1) Being able to see the cohesive vision for the film. When Tarantino makes a film every little detail in the film is planned in his head. From the clothing of what extras are wearing, to small prop effects, to the font used during the intro sequence. He is a visionary, like many other great directors who have his crew direct his vision. They follow his instructions and try to make it become as close to what he envisions.
For other directors it's more like you just shoot some scenes and follow a script like an IKEA manual and hope it will be fixed in editing. "We'll fix it in post" is one of the cardinal sins of filmmaking. We fucked up shooting, now lets hope the Editor can make some magic from our mish mash of different angles.
2) A director being able to direct actors. Even the best directors sometimes fail at this because it's not just having the social know-how and the competence to make an actor seem believeable, guide them, you also have to make them believeable in front of a camera.
This was a shock to me the first time I saw it on a set; Sometimes things that are real in real life, looks fake through the 2D world of the screen. And vise versa. Sometimes an actor can act out something that seems cringey, fake and corny, but look awesome when you watch it in editing.
Sometimes an actor have to over act, under act or be incredible stereotypical for the film because it works in the vision of the film. but the correct shots needs to be made with the correct editing and pacing and music.
Both vision and directing ability are not taught in film school. They do try to nudge them, but they really seem to be more like inter-personal life skills. You can always work on those, but some directors just seem to have this knack more than others. It's not something you can teach like you can teach the 180-degree rule, or the methods of blocking, or frame composition.
And even if you mimic the styles of famous directors you might not get the result.
That's why you end up with people like Lars Von Trier. He is an incredible asshole to his actor. We're talking psychological manipulation to get his desired performance out of the actor. He justifies it because he gets them so much better, but the actors risk trauma. Emily Watson was purposely ignored and had anxiety during the shooting of Breaking the Waves because it fitted her character.
Sometimes actors welcome this form of method acting themselves, but when it's done by a directors hand it is different.
A great director also knows an actors limitations. One of the most fun stories is Robert Rodriguez who during in the making of his first film had no money for actors, so he had to cast people he knew in real life who couldn't act that well. What he would do is that in the critical moments of acting; with suspense and character development, he would cut away from the reaction shots and focus on something else. This allowed him to "hide" the bad acting to a larger extent. An example of the inginuity and creativity you have to deal with in indie filmmaking.
It's a shame that Uwe just became known as the guy who made the bad games-movies. Instead of making a campy dungeon siege movie, he could have made a smaller, narrow, experimental and more high-concept film. Dungeon Siege is loaded with great actors. If that film had gotten much of it stripped away, how could it have been?`If you removed 90% of the overnatural and just focused on one thing, and did that thing really well, something surprising and skillfully made might have emerged. If Rampage is really good with its no plot structure, it stands to reason that Uwe Bolls big problems is that he should never have tackled films that want to mimic large hollywood productions.
Nobody in Europe can do what Ridley Scott or Spielberg does. Not just in volume, but even as a single film. The Hollywood machine is incredible. It has an ethos and a army of experts within the large studios. In the European scene states have to fund and cover the cost of film. Europeans don't watch their own film- They watch American films. Hench the "artsy" reputation of European great films, versus the "commercial" reputation of American great films. You see it from award shows to festivals to the types of directors who reign supreme in each continent.
And there still is a real bitterness in Europe. Europe was the place in the early days of filmmaking where a lot of the top films were made. But after World War 1, the tone had shifted and resources moved to the US. A lot of the talent pool left for the US or "sold out" as they say, and European film tradition never really recovered.
That is why European crews cannot make films comparable to the US. They can make narrow films, social realism. But they cannot do large budget films with big armies and hundreds of extras. Sometimes the power and vastness of Hollywood is understated. Combined the large studios are among the top 5 most influential cultural influencers in the entire world. Hollywood shapes everything along with fashion and music.
