Have you found yourself wondering why Netflix’s original content catalog has gone down the drain whereas platforms like HBO Max and Apple TV+ always seem to have something unique and interesting to watch? Have you wondered why a video game or movies sticks in your memory for decades but others feel like entirely forgettable experiences? A Kojima game or a Spielberg film carries a different weight of expectations in terms of the journey you’re about to be taken upon than the next season of The White Lotus or the next Assassin’s Creed game.
You tend to know the memorable experience by the name of the creator more than the product itself. You’re watching The Odyssey because it’s a Nolan film. You’re buying the next From Software game because it came from Miyazaki’s mind. I’m primarily using film & game examples here because unlike music and books, these are massive teams with intersecting disciplines that are all coming together to create something worth making. But the vision they’re standing behind is often attributed to one person, the auteur whose fingerprints are all over the product.
Every game or movie project has someone who holds the title of Creative Director, but you can’t often feel their influence or stamp on the end product. A strong creative lead will ensure that all disciplines are rowing in the same direction towards a shared unified vision, but an auteur will often go the distance into ensuring that their specific taste and perspectives are reflected in a particular way. They can be overly controlling and steer the direction of the project often to a point of unreasonableness and will stubbornly stand by their intent even if the team doesn’t see eye-to-eye with them on it. This working style often gives them a reputation of being too demanding or top-down when it comes to creative direction, but they’re often pushing for wholly unique and memorable experiences that will be remembered for decades to come.
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If anyone tells you that Prisoner of Azkaban is their favorite Harry Potter film, you almost immediately know why. Alfonso Cuarón’s signature is all over that film. The iconic long-take in The Leaky Cauldron immediately signals Cuarón as the director, even if you didn’t know it was him. It has everything: slow panning camera movement in one sequential take as characters whirl and whiz about to establish the frenzy and mania of the place while various characters grab Harry to chat him up, only for the scene to transition through one of Black’s wanted posters as Lupin pins him against a dark corridor to explain the grave dangers coming forth. Later on the train to Hogwarts, the slow creeping freeze of the Dementors’ arrival shown through wilting flowers and ice cracking through the windows of the Hogwarts Express cements the grittier tone of this film as the series transitions to a more adult setting. The shots of the large clock tower and camera sweeps passing through glass and windows while Harry is dwarfed by the shadow of time foretells the events in the climax of the film where time itself is the primary antagonist.
Cuarón is known for making the environment around the characters feel as much as a part of the scene along with the characters themselves. Children of Men, one of my favorite films for cinematography, has lots of long takes where characters are just moving through a space and yet most of the story is told through the space they’re moving in: the body language of background characters or signs and flyers on a wall and news channels blaring the latest controversy. Y Tu Mamá También makes you truly feel like you’re sitting in the car with the trio of misfits as it drives through scenes of corruption and violence but also beauty and boredom. Cuarón’s intent and authorship over what’s shown in the frame is so strong that I’d easily be able to tell if a movie was directed by him or not.
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The God of War reboot that came out in 2018 got a lot of attention, not only because it brought back the fan-favorite character Kratos from the overly violent action games that released a decade ago but also because it presented him as a grown up father figure who was now more mellow and was trying to raise a son. Cory Barlog, the game’s creative director, co-authored an extremely human narrative and insisted that game have a fixed camera that does not cut between scenes and gameplay throughout the entire runtime of the game. This is an insane thing to undertake. A video game typically transitions between gameplay, combat, cutscenes, all of which are different systems that don’t neatly stitch together. But staying with the continuity of Kratos’ narrative evolution was so important to Barlog that he pushed for it as the singular focus of the game. It was an impossibly difficult undertaking for the team, but the game landed extremely well to such rave reviews that the no-cut camera became a defining feature of the series that was carried over in the next two games in the series.
You know the sense of authorship is strong when an earth-shattering concept becomes a tame audience expectation from you going forward. If the next God of War game didn’t have a no-cut camera, it would feel weird. It was such an effective narrative tool that it became a baseline feature of every game in the series. Not only did it serve its intended purpose of bringing the player closer to the character, but it also forced the combat and cinematics teams to create technology that seamlessly blended the game’s camera between the most hectic and most intimate moments. The speed at which the camera moved, how far it zoomed out or in, and how it framed every scene became a narrative and combat device in itself that was used to great effect to highlight not only deeply sentimental moments between characters but also epic boss fights at titan scales in true God of War fashion.
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Arrival is my favorite film of all time. I believe it’s the best first-contact movie ever made for a myriad of reasons: the unique depiction of aliens, the narrative focus being on deciphering the language of the aliens, the slow-paced cerebral burn of the film’s events, and the very plausible-feeling realism of how the world’s governments would actually behave in a threat like this. But the way Denis Villenevue controls the flow of time in this film is my standout favorite thing. Louise goes about her life with an uncertain certainty about what’s happening: a gut feeling about what she needs to do next but not much clarity about why. For most of the film, you go along with this thinking it’s an aspect of her personality. But when the twist at the end hits, it makes the entire film hit ten times harder. After cracking the Heptapods’ language, she is able to perceive time non-linearly and can foresee future events while also seeing the past at the same time.
My mind was blown at the end of the movie so much that I immediately rewatched the film the next day. And then again after a week. It’s the only film I’ve watched three times in theaters. I was so impressed at all the foreshadowing throughout the film with red herrings that are shown as flashbacks but are actually future events or with the way scenes are shot to show Louise’s life across time with shots spanning the past, present, and future. Villenevue’s intent is such a clear throughline across the whole film. I immediately noticed this deliberation in the color usage in Blade Runner 2049. Yellow is used as a leading motif through the film in key moments while moving light in the form of yellow sun rays cascading through windows or rippling in the reflections of water signifies a decaying Earth that’s slowly being taken over by Replicants. The stark difference between the daytime yellow dust and the nighttime cool blues of the dystopian cyberpunk streets is such a beautifully drawn contrast, and I knew while watching it that this came straight from Villenevue’s mind.
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Alan Wake II had a sequence that had my jaw on the floor the entire time I was playing it. The entire game is a phenomenal work of art, but the We Sing chapter in particular was mind-boggling to a new level. It was a musical in a game, full with FMV screens and combat sequences with offbeat Finnish rock-metal playing as you walk through the events of the lead character’s life so far. It’s impossible to describe to anyone and simply must be experienced, especially in the context of what’s supposed to be a horror game by genre definitions. This had Sam Lake written all over it, the Creative Director for the game at Remedy International who leans fully into the weird and unexpected as a game design philosophy. Sam Lake himself plays a character in this game and appears in the musical dance sequence as his in-game character, bringing the meta-absurdity of the moment in the game full-circle.
Remedy’s games have always had an off-kilter feel about them. Control was exceptional in its mysterious and unique setting of the Oldest House, a shapeshifting brutalist building that you navigated through with telekinetic powers trying to uncover the mystery behind the madness. Even in that game, you’re taken on a wild sequence where a rock song starts blasting as you’re navigating a section called the Ashtray Maze with gravity-shifting doorways and corridors closing in on you while you fight through a combat gauntlet to get to the end. These games have a unique Finnish whimsy about them that comes straight from Sam Lake’s insistence that the only way to compete in a tough games industry against large AAA-titles is to be absolutely weird. Sam Lake’s vision for Remedy at this point is something along the lines of “the carefully curated strange”, and it works wonders for them. No one knows what to expect from their next game and how oddball it’s going to me, which is an amazing asset to have in a world with repetitive or generic games coming out every year.
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There’s of course so many more examples. Eiji Aonuma and Shigeru Miyamoto are at the top of Nintendo’s braintrust when it comes to franchise continuity for The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario series. They have the final say on what passes the creative bar set for an entry in that franchise, and if it doesn’t meet the bar, it needs iteration. They’ve produced every entry in those franchises and have such strong creative control over them that the characters are inseparable from them. It would feel like a different era when someone else is overseeing these franchises, as Aonuma and Miyamoto both have an indescribable stamp of authorship over these games.
Neil Druckmann is another great example who established the tone and feel of The Last of Us game so definitively that he also collaborated with Craig Mazin to ensure that the same vision carried over to the HBO TV series as well. It was his idea, his concept, and his expertise that led the game to be a landmark title in the history of video gaming where it redefined what narratives could be in a game. Story, writing, characters, and dialogue were taken way more seriously in video games after The Last of Us released in 2013. Druckmann even pushed the bar even further by going in an unexpected direction for The Last of Us 2 by having two halves of the game with two playable characters, one of which comes at an extremely uncomfortable time as a player. He has established such a strong authorship over this franchise that players are hotly anticipating whether there will be a third entry in this series and are eager to see where he’ll take it.
The thing that allows auteurs to stand out is that they go above and beyond to ensure that the creative vision is present and felt throughout the entire experience. There is a real and felt sense of their handwriting in every detail, from the camera framing to the narrative to the soundtrack & score to the costume design. You can sense them interacting with every discipline that worked on the project and giving them feedback on every little detail to make sure that the end product is as close to the vision they have in their mind as it can possibly be.
This is what makes me personally excited for the next Ridley Scott film or the next Vince Gilligan TV show or the next Jonathan Blow game. I will often go out of my way to watch their movies and shows or play the games they put out even if I’m not a fan of those genres just to experience their vision. I know for a fact that I’ll sense them in it and that it’ll be a pure expression of their intent as opposed to anything else I could experience. I know that their output won’t be shaped by audience expectations but instead come from a place of true desire to put something beautiful out into the world. And that’s authenticity. In a world that seems to be teetering on the edge of collapsing into a sea of “good enough” slop entertainment aided by AI, true authorship form auteurs is seemingly the only saving grace that provides an experience worth experiencing.
Netflix’s catalog has been focus group’d and design-by-committee’d into the lowest common denominator entertainment offering that works as background noise for people who are on their phones and watching Netflix content as a second-screen experience. It’s how you get mindless, forgettable shows where nothing really happens like Emily in Paris or The Four Seasons. Sure, there’s a cast and stuff happens in it, but there’s nothing interesting that sets it apart from other generic fluff in the catalog with predictable stories. HBO and Apple TV are chasing creators who have interesting stories to tell with a unique vision of delivering it, which is how you get critically acclaimed content like Chernobyl, Silo, True Detective, For All Mankind, Succession, Severance, and Pluribus. These shows will be talked about for years and decades after, but almost none of Netflix’s catalog will be. It’s because they’re authentic in a way that allows the visionaries behind it to exert their creative influence with a strong sense of authorship that’s unmatched by anything else that can be made, and I hope that the one constant as we move into the AI era is that auteurs continue to make incredible content with their unflinching and uncompromising visions for us all to enjoy for years to come.