one for them

Steven Soderbergh's line for it was "one for them, one for me" — the deal every director with a personal voice eventually makes: take the studio's franchise, and the studio funds the next thing that's actually yours. Ang Lee made Sense and Sensibility and Brokeback Mountain, and also Hulk. Chloé Zhao won an Oscar for Nomadland one year and was directing Marvel's Eternals the next. David Lynch made Eraserhead, and also a G-rated Disney road movie about an old man on a lawnmower. Nobody finds these by browsing a director's shelf, because a shelf reads like a body of work — and this is the one film on it that was a job, not a voice.

Films here also carry Identity Crisis, Loneliness & Isolation, Found Family, Redemption, Cultural Dislocation · Most represented: John Carpenter.