The director of Jake Gyllenhaal's Netflix movie, 'Velvet Buzzsaw,' explains how a doomed Nic Cage Superman film inspired him to make it

• Netflix's "Velvet Buzzsaw" is the latest movie from writer-director Dan Gilroy ("Nightcrawler").
• The movie is a twisted look at art versus commerce that's part dark comedy, part B-horror movie.
• But it's also personal for Gilroy, as it's a way he got over being the screenwriter for the doomed Tim Burton "Superman Lives" project, starring Nicolas Cage as the Man of Steel.
• Gilroy talked to Business Insider about making a past failure into its own art.

 

"Art versus commerce" is a topic that has been explored for centuries in many forms, but leave it to the writer-director of "Nightcrawler" to put his own demented twist on it.

Dan Gilroy's "Velvet Buzzsaw" (available Friday on Netflix) is part B-movie slasher film, part commentary on the monetization of creativity, and like his two previous directing efforts - "Nightcrawler" and "Roman J. Israel, Esq." - it's also a personal story.

The movie is a gory, darkly comedic tale set in the art world that follows what happens when the paintings of a recently deceased unknown artist become a must-have for the art gallery elite. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a renowned critic and Rene Russo plays a prominent gallery owner. As the works sell for millions, the people responsible for making a profit from them begin to be killed by the art.

Gilroy wrote the movie to release his frustrations from the experience of being involved in the doomed Tim Burton "Superman Lives" movie. The scrapped attempt to make a Man of Steel movie in 1996 (the behind-the-scenes debacle was told in the 2015 documentary "The Death of 'Superman Lives:' What Happened?") is known best for the infamous costume test photos of Nicolas Cage dressed as Superman.

"I worked on it for a year and a half with Nic Cage and Tim Burton and they pulled the plug days before shooting," Gilroy, who was a screenwriter on the movie, told Business Insider. "It was my worst fear in regards to my career, I thought it was going to be this great film."

"Velvet Buzzsaw" is Gilroy's way to get over it. In the movie, the art has the unstoppable superpower to destroy anything that wants to taint its purity. But Gilroy doesn't just show the connection through the movie's subtext. There are literal points of reference. In one scene, John Malkovich's struggling artist character can be seen randomly drawing shapes on the beach as the waves wash them away moments later, which is similar to what Gilroy did after learning that "Superman Lives" would not be made.

"I went in my car, I remember the day, and I drove to Santa Monica Beach and I got on the beach and I stared at the ocean trying to process what had just happened," he said. "I felt I could have taken all the words I had wrote and drawn them in the sand and had the waves crash them away for any relevance they may have had to a larger audience."

Then there's an art exhibit in the movie called "Hoboman," an animatronic figure Gilroy based on Jordan Wolfson's "Female Figure" exhibit he saw at LA's The Broad contemporary art museum. Gilroy said Hoboman represents what's left of his Superman/Clark Kent character in "Superman Lives" after being chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood machine.

"I was there for all the visual tests and the design of so many elements of it," Gilroy said of witnessing preproduction of "Superman Lives." "So I wanted to draw a connection, do a piece that has to do with a superhero."

Gilroy said there was interest from studios in making "Velvet Buzzsaw," but it was Netflix's deep pockets that allowed Gilroy to make the movie properly, including elements like the use of CGI.

It probably also helped that Netflix subscribers are fans of his work. Gilroy's acclaimed directorial debut, "Nightcrawler," starring Gyllenhaal as a stringer selling footage of grizzly accidents and other violent events to LA news stations, got a lot more notice from general audience once it made its way onto Netflix.

In the industry, Gilroy is best known for penning scripts like "The Bourne Legacy" and "Kong: Skull Island," but after directing three very different movies, he's built a unique filmography. All his movies come from the heart are all set and actually filmed in Los Angeles, giving them a different texture than most productions that travel to other states and countries for huge tax breaks.

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A lot of it has to do with how Gilroy has gone about his craft since being on that beach after "Superman Lives."

"I decided when I walked away from the beach that I was going to do things that I wanted to do that had relevance to me," he said. "That from that point on I was not always going to react to what the market dictated, I needed to satisfy myself. Like John Malkovich in the film, on the sand with all his art washing away, but utterly free."