John Huston didn’t want to be ahead of his time: “It’s better to have a success from the first”
It’s highly unlikely that any filmmaker sets out with the intention of being remembered as ahead of their time, especially when it doesn’t yield the instant gratification key to any sustained career. John Huston much preferred being sat on the curve and not ahead of it, which helped him become a legend.
There’s nothing wrong with being several steps ahead of the rest, though, even if it comes with its own set of dangers. John Cassavetes, for example, was miles in front of everybody else when it came to his self-created independent works that changed the face of independent cinema, but he had to place a series of risky bets on himself in order to do it.
Alfred Hitchcock pioneered the archetypal suspense thriller before dedicating the majority of his filmography to the genre. Akira Kurosawa was so influential that every modern filmmaker owes him at least a small debt of gratitude. In addition, Orson Welles’ mind worked at such a pace he was never able to truly capitalise on the jaw-dropping promise Citizen Kane realised so early on in his professional life.
Huston was well-travelled, well-educated, and always saw himself as something of an outsider despite being one of Hollywood’s leading directorial lights, and yet he wanted to experience the immediate success the best movies receive so he’d be in the best possible position to start working on the next one.
A couple of flops or a misunderstood masterpiece or two doesn’t bring offers flooding in, which made the 14-time Academy Award nominee quite content to be a man of his time. He made classic films, influential movies, and sizeable box office hits, but the benefit of hindsight hardly revealed him to be years ahead of his contemporaries, blazing a trail that nobody could even see he was blazing.
Huston was meticulous, sketching out every scene of his films on paper and matching his compositions with the actors when he was on set and planning out every frame so far in advance he admitted he didn’t always know who his editors were, with his economical nature making him laser-focused. Economical? Yes. Revolutionary? Not quite.
Discussing the essence of timeliness and timelessness with Roger Ebert, Huston confessed that he’d prefer his work to be appreciated in the present. “Of course, it’s about as bad to be ahead of your time as behind it,” he said. “It’s always nice when pictures are revived years later; it gives you the satisfaction of seeing them finally accepted.”
He named Beat the Devil and The Asphalt Jungle as two specifically underappreciated examples that came to mind before suggesting that “as far as the material rewards are concerned, it’s better to have success from the first”. Fortunately, that was something he was accustomed to, having been the recipient of constant acclaim and accolades, with history remembering him as one of Hollywood’s all-time greats.
