The celebrated director makes his movies with an audience in mind, but that audience isn’t a big group: “It’s me – I am the audience. I am the guy who pays $8 to go and see a movie, and I’m betting there are other people like me out there.”
In the film Sicario, Josh Brolin’s character pauses and looks away before he reveals the big plot twist: the FBI is trying to create single Colombian-run business that the US can more easily control. But the pause only came about because Josh Brolin forgot his lines.
The Sidemen channel recently released an eight part ‘Big Brother’ style YouTube series, which gained over 10 million views (more than the Prime Minister debate and Love Island combined). TV in disguise.
The Oscar-winning film Sideways did more for Pinot Noir than any wine seller could have dreamed of. The film’s hero, a schoolmaster and wine snob played by Paul Giamatti, loathes merlot and loves pinot noir, its less favoured rival. In the weeks after the film opened Sainsbury’s reported a 20% surge in pinot sales, while across the US sales increased by 16%.
The epic power of Squid Game. The hit Netflix show increased:
– Vans sales by 7,800%
– Korean signups on Duolingo by 76%
– Korean candy on show up 250%
According to the most commercially successful director of all time, “I always like to think of the audience when I am directing. Because I am the audience.”
Rocket launches are synonymous with countdowns (T minus), but this wasn’t a scientific invention. Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang invented the countdown in his 1929 silent film Woman in the Moon, as a way of building suspense for the fictional launch. NASA adopted it as common practice decades later.
In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, Don Corleone scolds a man for visiting him on the day of his daughter’s wedding – while petting a cat. Was the cat a metaphor for Vito’s cunning nature, or perhaps his soft and calm exterior that bellies his brutal acts? Neither. According to director Francis Ford Coppola, “the cat was not planned for, I saw the cat running around the studio, and took it and put it in his hands without a word.”
Need to save your company from going bust? Ask Tom Cruise to use your product. Ray Ban was struggling in the early 1980s, selling 18,000 pairs of its Wayfarer glasses. But just when the company was about to discontinue the range, Tom Cruise wore them in the film Risky Business and sales increased by 50%. Three years later, when Top Gun was released, Ray-Ban saw another massive increase of 40%. By the end of the decade Ray Ban was selling 1.5 million pairs annually.
In 1992 the 100-year-old Wensleydale creamery was in danger of closing, but luckily Wallace & Gromit came along. The iconic TV duo helped to revive the cheese’s popularity, and when the 2005 full-length film, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, was released, sales increased by 23%.