Awards News

Call the director category the place that fetes this specialty-film business's key operatives, a new generation of auteurs who shoot for $25 million and under and largely get to call their own shots because of that.

For his part, nominee Tony Gilroy says he couldn't have made "Michael Clayton" -- independently financed by Boston developer Steve Samuels and acquired by Warner Bros. through negative pickup -- within the confines of a studio.

"The budget ($20 million-plus) would inevitably be higher, just by the nature of the infrastructure of the studio," Gilroy says. "With that comes the burden of the kinds of questions ("Michael Clayton") doesn't want to answer. If someone is spending $80 million on the movie, and it costs another $40 million-$50 million to release it, it better hit on a bunch of boxes. You have to make sure everyone in the audience knows what's going on, and you have to make sure it feels good to everybody."

Perhaps most importantly, "I got final cut -- I wouldn't have gotten that on a studio picture," Gilroy adds.

Of course, over the last several years, the Academy has considered -- and even awarded -- directors who did work in the confines of the studio. But for the most part, these projects were overseen by older, highest-of-echelon helmers who can call their own shots under any circumstance, such as Martin Scorsese ("The Departed"), Clint Eastwood ("Letters From Iwo Jima," "Million Dollar Baby," "Mystic River") and Steven Spielberg ("Munich").

However, no such big-budget fare adulterates this year's crop of Oscar nominees, who display a collective level of frugality -- and closely associated with that, an amount of autonomy necessary to make personal, narrowly targeted, commercially limited films -- perhaps unprecedented for Oscar's helmer category.

Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," for example, was shot for around $10 million, financed by Pathe Pictures and picked up by Miramax at Cannes; Jason Reitman spent only $7.5 million to make "Juno," with Mandate Pictures providing financing and foreign sales, and Fox Searchlight acting as co-financier and handling domestic release.

As for Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," and Joel and Ethan Coen's "No Country for Old Men," both were built on co-production deals between Paramount Vantage and Miramax and reported $25 million budgets.

Of course, most of the aformentioned directors are not necessarily total outsiders, but there does seem to be a collective body of experience suggesting to them what movies should be made within a studio and which ones shouldn't.

For his part, Anderson has been involved in a number of creative battles with studios over the last dozen years, with Rysher Entertainment taking away his first film, "Sydney," and renaming it "Hard Eight," and New Line challenging him over the lengths of "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia."

The Coens, meanwhile, endured perhaps their least critically and commericially successful venture with the big-budget studio pic "The Hudsucker Proxy."

Gilroy is also well acquainted with big-studio processes, having penned the blockbuster "Bourne" franchise for Universal. "The movie I'm doing right now for Universal (the spy thriller 'Duplicity' starring Clive Owen and Julia Roberts) wants to be there," he says. "It fits there."

For films that don't fit as well, Gilroy says working outside the system with a modest budget yields not only creative leeway but, ironically, a kind of freedom that comes from not having too many choices. Rather than getting lost in countless decisions, a director with limited means is focused -- and perhaps comforted -- by the notion that, "That's the only way I can do it," he explains.

On "Clayton," he adds, "We didn't have the luxury of a cushion. And I do think there's a tipping point where limitations become limitations. But I also think limitations can be valuable."