The International stars Clive Owen as an Interpol agent and Naomi Watts as an assistant New York District Attorney. Normally in any thriller starring young and attractive stars such as Owen and Watts, romance would bloom between them. In The International, however, director Tom Tykwer and screenwriter Eric Singer only wanted to suggest an attraction between Owen and Watts’ characters, never to be fulfilled; it was their intention to stress the job, the case, over any romantic elements.
The only problem is, that’s not what we want. What is worse, it isn’t what we expect. There is no way to structure a marketing campaign for the movie that stresses what it doesn’t include; anyway the marketers don’t want to advertise lines like ‘You know that romantic element you like in thrillers? We don’t have that in our movie.’
But when they do set up the marketing to make it look like a sexy, fast-paced conspiracy thriller, they promise what the film does not deliver. The billing alone promises us romance; we expect romance; when the filmmakers don’t deliver, we are going to be disappointed.
The way around this for Tykwer and Singer would be to cast unsexy, character actors in the two leading roles. Owen is a leading man, and Watts is a leading lady. These are the kind of actors who get the money-men to green-light a big expensive production like this. The producers did not do their job in allowing Tykwer and Singer to sabotage the audience expectations for romance.
The rule is, therefore, ‘Mostly, give the audience what we want.’
There is a qualification to this, based on the fact that part of what we want is to be surprised. But we only want to be surprised in entertaining ways.
The only way to make a twist like this contravention to our expectations work, is to build it into the structure of the movie – make it work for the movie. The most-cited example of this is in Hitchcock’s Psycho when star Janet Leigh’s character is killed at the mid-point of the plot structure. This works because shock and terror are the forms of entertainment we seek in this movie genre. We don’t believe the star’s character is going to be killed; when she is, we are horrified; we can scarcely believe what we have just witnessed; and we know that nothing henceforth in this movie will conform to our comfortable conventional expectations.
I suppose that the creators of The International might have found some way to make the lack of romance work – but I don’t see how.
— asotir
