Here’s the thing: Hope is something that, in any situation, you can never afford to let go of entirely. But when things turn dire, it’s just as counterproductive not to acknowledge the reality of it as loudly as possible.
And that’s precisely what Madame Web star Dakota Johnson has refreshingly chosen to do in a recent interview with L’Officiel, lamenting the number of hurdles—some of them effectively impassable—that stand in the way of making creative work in an industry that seems to be demanding less and less adventurous films. She recalled the grit that was required to get Daddio, a Telluride Film Festival darling that she starred alongside Sean Penn in, made:
“We made a movie called Daddio that was sold at Telluride to Sony Classics, which was amazing, but it took a lot of fighting to get that made. People are just so afraid, and I’m like, ‘Why? What’s going to happen if you do something brave?’ It just feels like nobody knows what to do and everyone’s afraid. That’s what it feels like. Everyone who makes decisions is afraid. They want to do the safe thing and the safe thing is really boring.”
By “people,” Johnson is very clearly talking about the studio and streaming executives who make the uncanny sanitization choices that are entirely unrooted in the desire for a project’s creative well-being. These are the people—the people that need to be kept happy in order to get movies made, by the way—who shudder at the thought of the word “gynecologist” making its way into a feature film.
Johnson continued, suggesting that the increasingly watered-down creative freedom that tends to get imposed on artists will lead to an implosion of despair:
“The people who run streaming platforms don’t trust creative people or artists to know what’s going to work, and that is just going to make us implode. It’s so hard to get anything made. All of the stuff I’m interested in making is really different, and it’s unique and it’s very forward in whatever it is.”
It’s a bleak take from Johnson, but unfortunately not an entirely unfounded one, either. Day after day, it’s looking more and more likely that we’ll be living the Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers movie before long, and as great as that movie is, it’s for the best that the real world resembles it as little as possible.
Madame Web is due in theaters on February 14.
(featured image: Sony Pictures)
