They are now: The Matrix gobbled up $171 million at the ticket booth and has become a Blockbuster behemoth--the best-selling movie ever in the aggressively Neo DVD format. "At the risk of sounding a little bit dramatic, I think there is a new age of cinema upon us," says Ricky Strauss, 33, senior VP of production at Columbia. "With the dawn of the millennium, there's definitely this set of really exciting young artists who have their own voices."
Don't think the artists haven't noticed--especially in a year when esteemed vets like Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese gave us DOA duds like Eyes Wide Shut and Bringing Out the Dead. "The previous A list of directors are running on empty now," says a director of one major Class of '99 movie. "It's not like we're looking at Oliver Stone's latest and going 'Oh, it's gonna be great.' Or Rob Reiner. Or Sydney Pollack. Or even Scorsese, you know? All these guys feel like they're running on empty, and we're all gaining. We're inspired."
"This is our screen," says Darren Aronofsky, flipping a switch in a vast rec room.
Aronofsky is the director of [Pi]--1998's frantic parable of cerebral meltdown--and this is Protozoa, his New York City production compound. Protozoa doesn't look like the outpost of a revolution. Aside from a few hints of youthful clutter--a Chemical Brothers sticker, a woozily lettered flier that says "No sex causes bad eyes"--Protozoa is a warren of white walls and computer nooks, almost as tidy and sleek as one of those utopian vistas in The Matrix.
A massive movie screen comes gliding down from the ceiling. "We put the PlayStation away when we have journalists come over," Aronofsky laughs. "But playing it on the big screen is really awesome."
He's not joking. If the last wave of Hollywood rebels (Coppola, Scorsese, Rafelson) drew their creative sustenance from the global titans of the art house (Fellini, Truffaut, Kurosawa), the new brigade is just as likely to find Parnassus in a Game Boy. Films of the new guard dart and weave; they reflect the cut-and-paste sensibility of videogames, the Internet, and hip-hop. "It's about figuring out ways to entertain people who have been bombarded by billions upon billions of images," Aronofsky says. Your average movie has 600 or 700 cuts; Aronofsky's next, Requiem for a Dream, has over 2,000. Images riff on themselves in a kind of synaptic spray. "We call them 'hip-hop montages,'" he says.
"If you're growing up cutting and pasting constantly on your laptop or your home computer, yes, then you look at visual information and visual storytelling that way," says Bill Block. Block is the president of Artisan Entertainment, the indie renegade most readily identified with the new wave: Artisan's slate includes [Pi], The Blair Witch Project, The Limey, The Cruise, and Requiem for a Dream. "You look at scenes as just chunks--data chunks. To play with and move around. PlayStation Cinema, you could call it."
