Movie Maker’s Difficult Crowdsourcing Experiment
Total Recall and Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven has been complaining that a crowdsourced script writing project he set up was a “headache”.
The Dutch filmmaker made his comments in an interview with the BBC about his latest film. It grew out of a script written collectively by the audience.
In 2011 Verhoeven invited the public to help write what was then billed as ‘the world’s first ever user-generated movie’. It started with a professionally-written three minutes of script and then the crowd did the rest.
The result is a film called Tricked that has been premiered at two film festivals including Tribeca in New York. Critical response has been favorable with one magazine calling it “ingenious”.
Difficult Process
But it’s an experience the director would not repeat in a hurry. At 75, he says he was looking for something to rejuvenate him creatively, but found the process difficult.
He told the BBC that: “We actually found the whole process a headache. Because no, the public can’t write – not professionally, anyway. There were some great ideas, but their main failing was that they had no idea of narrative structure.”
Before embarking on the crowdsourcing initiative, Verhoeven envisaged coming across a handful of really good scripts and being able to develop ideas from them. But it did not happen that way.
When pressed by the BBC interviewer about whether there are any great writers out there waiting to be discovered, the director said “I doubt it.”
That may be a little unfair, but crowdsourcing ’disaster stories’ like this can be useful learning tools.
Was Verhoeven’s scope too broad? Could the crowd have been better directed? Were expectations too high?
Bold Experiment
Whether the problems were with the project’s setup and management, expectations or the crowd, it was a bold experiment.
Moviegoers and critics often complain of formulaic Hollywood movies, and crowdsourcing is potentially one way to deliver more inventive, creative and surprising pieces. Although for the time being, Verhoeven believes it’s something that should be left to the professionals.
To read the BBC’s interview feature in full click here.
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