On the plane on the way back from Davos to New York, I caught up with The Bourne Ultimatum, the Paul Greengrass-directed action thriller, starring Matt Damon.
Like many Hollywood films these days, it was a travelogue of countries as well as a drama. Madrid, Tangiers, Manhattan, Waterloo Station . . . it went to all the most glamorous spots.
This, of course, is part of a broader trend for Hollywood films to feature foreign countries in order to raise vital international box office revenue. There is a piece on it in the New York Times, which points out that New York features heavily in Hollywood films because it is the only US city that is recognisable (apart from Washington, perhaps) around the world.
That irritates Andrew Leonard, who says that it leads to lowest common denominator film-making or the dumbing-down of Hollywood. Personally, I do not think that Hollywood’s penchant for populism is affected one way or the other by setting its films against international backdrops. It is true that Omaha, Nebraska only features regularly in the sardonic films of Alexander Payne, but I am not sure that this proves anything.
If anything, I think the US film and television industry is now getting as much from the rest of the world as the world gets from it.
US studios are now much more open to foreign formats, from Asian kung-fu action films to British reality television. This means the import of mass market formats such as the UK’s Pop Idol aka American Idol. But there are also classier imports, including HBO’s cable television series about a psychiatrist and his patients, In Treatment, which debuts tonight. That is adapted from an Israeli drama.
Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC Universal, which produced The Bourne Ultimatum, has also become a fan of the UK approach to television drama. He told me in Davos that he was enamoured – for reasons of cost-efficiency – of the UK tradition of making a few six-part series rather than producing a lot of expensive pilots and then picking a few to expand into series.
In general, I think the US media benefits from taking account of the rest of the world. It used to think it had a monopoly on good ideas and now it does not. That surely must be progress.
