With the SAG-AFTRA strike beginning right now and the WGA writers strike heading into its 74th day, most of Hollywood involves a standstill. When will these guild strikes finish? When negotiations between each of them and the AMPTP resume. But the AMPTP hasn’t contact the SAG-AFTRA nationwide board since talks fizzled late Wednesday evening. So it’s picket strains, work stoppages, and launch schedule delays till talks start once more.
And IndieWire reviews that Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn stands in solidarity with each guilds as a result of he thinks it’s what’s greatest for the business. “I’m all for it,” Refn instructed IndieWire in an upcoming interview. “Burn it all down to make it emerge again, almost. And I think in terms of what’s happening right now in the industry, business-wise, I think it’s just another piece of a global problem of just the inequalities, and the lack of sharing of opportunities, is just rising above what people are able to accept. Look at your own [U.S.] presidencies for the last 10 to 15 years. So what happened? And yet no one really learns from it. So all you can really do is go back and look at the French Revolution and remember what they did at the end: They chopped off everyone’s head, and I think we should try to avoid that finale.”
Refn continued, “If contracts need to be renegotiated because times have changed, of course. Everyone would understand that I’m very much a pro-union person. I believe unions are very important. I believe that workers need protection, especially in corporate America. In the E.U., we have more restrictions and more labor rules in our governmental guidelines, where [in the United States] it’s like the Wild West […] So I think there’s a complete understanding of why people are frustrated and going on strikes because things have to be reimagined, revised. It has to be renegotiated […] and the ones that are against it… well, what are you protecting? Just more wealth? You know, it doesn’t make any sense.”
Refn, a Denmark resident, linked the continued points in Hollywood to a bigger international situation of wealth disparaty as an entire. “I come from a socialist country,” Refn went on, “I come from Denmark, the home of Bernie Sanders. So I can certainly say why we’re the happiest people in the world, and I think that we need to be better at coming together rather than pulling it all apart to obtain more profit. But what does that really mean, or give us, if there’s nothing to experience? So the people that are actually creating the works, shouldn’t they be equally as part of the upside as the downside?”
Refn then introduced up how the COVID-19 pandemic shook up the worldwide economic system. “I think that nowadays, obviously, because especially up to the pandemic and post-pandemic, the realization of the divisiveness in our society, of the gap between rich and poor and have-and-have-not, escalated to beyond what is acceptable,” he continued. “We have to be better at sharing wealth because if we don’t, then we lose our humanity, we lose our empathy, and it becomes just corporate insanity. And that has never led to anything good. History has proven time and time again at a certain point: we rise against what we feel is unfair, and, right now, there’s an enormous inequality in terms of how we share our opportunities. And I believe that needs to be readjusted.”
But Refn didn’t cease there. He additionally finds the continued strikes as a technique to rethink the form of artwork and content material media Hollywood and streaming networks create. In the auteur’s eyes, the emphasis on producing numerous content material for streaming platforms has confirmed inimical to the artwork type of filmmaking. “We produce content as a business, but we speak so rarely about why are we making content,” he continued. “What’s the meaning of it? We never talk about why we’re making content. We just talk about making content and more of it and as fast as possible, and everything is becoming a swipe, but that’s not necessarily a healthy mirror to society or us as people.” Maybe as a substitute of an never-ending output of empty content material, Refn suggests the enter of inventive intention and inventive assertion ought to take precedent.
For Refn, the latest rise of streaming platforms is “all about jamming everything into one and as fast as possible and as meaningless as possible because it can never confront any elements. In his point of view, “the more empty it is, empty calories, the more you can consume it, the faster you can move past it. Out of that comes stupidity, lack of empathy, uneducated, all those things that art has the ability to contribute. So in a way, we’re going the wrong way.”
So what’s the best final result of those strikes for Refn? In his interview with IndieWire, he concluded with, “I think that’s why there’s such a beautiful revolution amongst young people who are turning against the system of corporate and now entertainment […] I think that’s fantastic.” It stays to be seen, nonetheless, if the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes would be the starting of a revolution, a lot much less a good looking one, throughout the leisure business. But each guilds make it clear of their respective work stoppages that they need issues to alter, and so they don’t plan tok work once more till their phrases are met.