Actors making their first stab at directing are mainstays at festivals, often never heard from again. That is not the case for Jason Bateman.
Over the weekend at the Toronto International Film Festival, Bateman premiered his spelling bee comedy “Bad Words,” a foul-mouthed R-rated riot. Just hours after it had festivalgoers roaring with laughter, it was picked up for distribution by Focus Features, with Universal Pictures distributing internationally.
“It was exactly what I would have scripted,” says Bateman. “It was pretty surreal to see such a long dream come true.”
Bateman’s career has already undergone several evolutions, from child star to an “Arrested Development”-powered comeback. His next chapter, he hopes, will be as a director. (His spotmaking roost is HSI Productions.)
“I want to be able not to act,” Bateman said in an interview. “My ambition is true.”
The film, from a script by first-time screenwriter Andrew Dodge, is about a 40-year-old man (Bateman) who enters a national spelling bee with uncertain motives for sabotaging the children’s contest. For Bateman, so often the mild-mannered straight man in the middle of chaotic stories, it’s a cathartic shift into a darker comic personality.
He plays a man on a questionable and mysterious mission, with no patience to explain himself or coddle his younger competitors. He calls one 10-year-old Indian boy (Rohan Chand) “Shawarma” and “Slumdog.” And that’s just what’s printable. In the quaint spelling bee environs, Bateman is a cruel but hilarious villain.
“Its humor is similar to mine, I somewhat cautiously reveal to you,” says Bateman. “We’ve all got different parts, and I’m fortunate that I’m friends with a lot of the different parts in me. I know each of those parts really well and I can ask them to come to the party whenever I want.”
But the part of the 44-year-old “Identity Thief” actor that most comes across is the seriousness of his directing plans. His models, he says, are filmmakers that mix drama and comedy with an edge, like David O. Russell, Spike Jonze and Paul Thomas Anderson. Of becoming an actor-director, he speaks with careerist clarity of taking “a Ben Stiller route or a Clooney route or an Affleck route.” It’s a goal he’s harbored since he first was exposed to Hollywood by his directing and producing father, Kent Bateman.
“I never wanted to be obnoxious about jamming myself into the director chair any more than the community would truly embrace me,” says Bateman.
He and his team, he says, are “reading furiously,” pursuing his next script. He hopes to be in pre-production by February on his next directing effort.
His aim is certain: “I want to do this a lot more.”
AI-Assisted Works Can Get Copyright With Enough Human Creativity, According To U.S. Copyright Office
Artists can copyright works they made with the help of artificial intelligence, according to a new report by the U.S. Copyright Office that could further clear the way for the use of AI tools in Hollywood, the music industry and other creative fields.
The nation's copyright office, which sits in the Library of Congress and is not part of the executive branch, receives about half a million copyright applications per year covering millions of individual works. It has increasingly been asked to register works that are AI-generated.
And while many of those decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, the report issued Wednesday clarifies the office's approach as one based on what the top U.S. copyright official describes as the "centrality of human creativity" in authoring a work that warrants copyright protections.
"Where that creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection," said a statement from Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, who directs the office.
An AI-assisted work could be copyrightable if an artist's handiwork is perceptible. A human adapting an AI-generated output with "creative arrangements or modifications" could also make it fall under copyright protections.
The report follows a review that began in 2023 and fielded opinions from thousands of people that ranged from AI developers, to actors and country singers.
It shows the copyright office will continue to reject copyright claims for fully machine-generated content. A person simply prompting a chatbot or AI image generator to produce a work doesn't give that person the ability to copyright that work, according to the report. "Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine ...... Read More