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'Seems A Little Ludicrous': Director James Mangold Reveals Why He Didn't Stop Making Musical Biopics After Walk Hard Satire'd The Genre
James Mangold was unaffected after the 2007 film satire’d one of his musical biopics. The director thought the film was “hilarious” and did not put a tombstone on the genre.
James Mangold's musical romance Walk The Line was heavily referenced in the 2007 comedy Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox, which was a satire on the predictable patterns of musical biopics. However, the director didn't take this criticism to heart and found the movie to be "hilarious."
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Mangold—who recently directed another musical, the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown—clarified that the satiric comedy did not intend to discourage the creation of real and original musical biopics.
"I found Walk Hard hilarious," Mangold admitted to the outlet. "But I also never understood why satire would negate making the real thing anymore," he added. He joked that he wasn't frightened any more than Robert Eggers should be before making a monster movie in the face of Young Frankenstein.
The director explained that when someone satirizes a genre, it does not imply that genre's death. That seems a little ludicrous to me," he added. Mangold admitted that the musical genre did fade away after Walk Hard, but simply because it had run its course at the time.
Making a movie takes a considerable amount of time, and it’s impossible for one movie to “instantaneous” makeup people’s minds about a genre. But one thing Mangold held a beef against Walk Hard was the difference in budget between his film and the satire, despite coming from the same studio.
"I was more unnerved that the studio who made the movie paid twice as much for Walk Hard and refused to pay half as much for Walk the Line," the director recalled. Lastly, he gave a message to filmmakers on how to deal with the cynicism of a satiric film, advising them not to take anything too deeply to heart.
"We live in an age of such irony that sometimes there's good cliches to avoid, but there's also some things that we should hold on to," he said, defending the cliches of musical genre. "There are traditions that are beautiful to uphold," he added.
Mangold believes in earnest filmmaking and is often optimistic and idealistic with his approach. He doesn’t want to be satire’d out of telling the stories, but even if his work has “echoes in other stories,” it doesn’t mean it’s not relevant.
A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet, is currently in theaters.
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