Tasha: When Scott and I threw down on the most recent episode of The Dissolve Podcast over Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street, one of the many topics we glanced across was our different opinions about how messy a film it is—whether all the scenes are really narratively necessary, or some are just digressions thrown in because Scorsese loves the subject; whether the scenes sprawl out to unnecessary length because Scorsese loves the milieu and the performances too much. But even if we agreed on whether Wolf was a messy film, that wouldn’t change our markedly different opinions of it: “messy” doesn’t necessarily mean “bad.” Some directors produce great art that feels sprawling and discursive, like Robert Altman or Terry Gilliam. On the other hand, there are plenty of tidy directors, too—people whose work is lean and pointed, and who make every scene count. For me, the categorization has to do with the amount of flavor in a film—how much is about telling a tight A-to-B story, and how much is about soaking in a scene, or telling a loose story that might hit C, D, and E before it winds to a finish.

Let’s start by defining our terms, guys, since there are plenty of different ways for films to feel messy or tidy—and I don’t want to confuse either one with rigor or control. For instance, I’d call Stanley Kubrick an extraordinarily rigorous director whose process sounds incredibly messy—deliberately wearing actors down with 50 or more takes in order to get at some essential truth seems to me like a more shot-in-the-dark prospect than Clint Eastwood’s one-and-done policy. And while Kubrick’s films feel rigid with advance planning and directorial control, Eyes Wide Shut is a shambling, sprawling movie compared with the much more narratively traditional Paths Of Glory. I’m hoping that by typing Kubrick as sometimes being a “messy” director, I’ll make it clear that that isn’t a pejorative term, and it doesn’t imply someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, or who gets slovenly results. We’re talking about two conscious choices in filmmaking here, not about skilled directors vs. slapdash ones. What else do we need to think about in defining our terms?

Scott: It can be difficult to determine where certain directors fall on the spectrum between tidy and messy, in part because we’re not privy to the actual filmmaking process—just the results. But in certain cases, usually extreme ones like Robert Altman, Mike Leigh, or Stanley Kubrick, we know enough about their process to see plainly how it affects the finished product. I would disagree with you on Eyes Wide Shut, though, Tasha. Kubrick wants the film to be sprawling and dreamlike, and he goes about making it so with the same deliberateness and rigor he brought to more cut-and-dried narratives like Paths Of Glory.

That’s where these tidy/messy distinctions can get, well, messy: when filmmakers like Kubrick or the Coen brothers bring their everything-in-its-right-place style to projects like Eyes Wide Shut or The Big Lebowski, which has the shaggy-dog quality of a Raymond Chandler novel, but is as precision-crafted as Fargo. Or even something like The Wolf Of Wall Street or Blue Is The Warmest Color, two three-hour movies from last year that allow scenes to unfold for much longer than expected. Do we call Blue Is The Warmest Color “messy” because it has an explicit seven-minute lesbian sex scene or a raw, wrenching break-up scene of comparable length? (This from a director, Abdellatif Kechiche, who made a splash previously for an 11-minute belly-dancing sequence in The Secret Of The Grain.) I’m not sure. With Kechiche, you could argue both ways: that he’s a Kubrick-like tyrant who will go to extraordinary lengths to achieve a very specific effort, or that he’s a filmmaker who wants life to unfold organically over the course of long sequences. There are other directors whose messiness is more obvious: Robert Altman is the prime example of a filmmaker who did everything he could to soak in a scene and encourage improvisation and happy accidents. I want to say more, particularly about how certain techniques have led to a surge of messy contemporary comedies, but let’s hear from Keith first.

Keith: I haven’t even chimed in yet, and already we’re blurring the definitions? I’ll try to push back in the right direction. There’s a shot in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey where Peter Fonda’s character looks out over a balcony. It’s a static shot, but for just a few seconds, the camera looks like it’s trying to find the composition, as if someone were moving it around to line up the framing. It’s the kind of footage that gets cut in editing, but Soderbergh’s choice to leave it in gives the scene a nice, New Wave, anything-is-possible feel, as if in putting the film together, he decided that brief, out-of-control moment said something about the narrative, so he decided to leave in a bit of raw material. That might be the case. Or the moment might have been completely planned, a self-conscious homage to the New Wave-influenced 1960s filmmaking on which that film was drawing. But to me, the difference between a great messy film and a great tidy film can be summed up in that shot: The former is improved and enhanced by those sorts of loose ends, and the second has no room for it.

To elaborate: Among contemporary filmmakers, I’d put Wes Anderson on the far end of tidiness. Part of the joy of a Wes Anderson movie is in the careful arrangement of objects and elements. Not only does every carefully planned shot play into the overall effect of the film, but every element in every symmetrical frame serves a purpose. The other end is where I’d put Judd Apatow, who shoots and shoots and screens and pools and reshapes, then lets the films he makes emerge from that process. That isn’t to say one approach is better than the other. With both of those filmmakers, and those who bunch on either end of the spectrum, the underlying philosophy of the process is part of the overall feeling of the film. When either approach works, it can feel like magic.

Tasha: True, although with Judd Apatow productions and similar contemporary comedies, it can also come to feel like bloat, at least in the way it detracts from any attempt at the putative narrative. People who don’t really care what happens to Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl as a couple in Knocked Up (and I don’t blame them) are more likely to actively welcome all the goofy, unhurried riffing between Rogen and his comedian buddies. Viewers who don’t care whether Rogen makes it as a comedian in Funny People will have more fun with narratively irrelevant, jokey sequences like the one where Rogen and Adam Sandler jeer at Sandler’s oncologist because of his foreign name and accent. Personally, I get impatient with contemporary comedy films that obviously relied on improvised humor, because it can be so much like watching an improv show: any given bit can sprawl out as long as the audience is laughing, except that the actors actually created the bits while playing to an audience of their peers inside a studio, and what’s funny in that environment, among friends, doesn’t always play onscreen. Judd Apatow-related comedies and their spiritual descendants often seem hit-or-miss and self-indulgent to me, like the filmmakers were primarily interested in hanging out with and one-upping their buddies. The films Apatow directs himself are generally on the high end of the scale, but the low end can get pretty dire.

When it comes to comedies, frankly, I prefer something tidy and meticulously crafted, like the banter-heavy screwball comedies, or more recently, weird but tightly written movies like A Fish Called Wanda, Stranger Than Fiction, or Hot Fuzz, where every scene and visual seems like part of a ticking machine. But your mileage may vary. For me, visible signs of carefully planned work—fast, smart back-and-forths; elaborate setup-and-payoff gambits; complicated plotting; and so forth—make a comedy much funnier than a rambling but visibly spontaneous bit that feels like it wants to go into a stage stand-up routine. I like my comedies surprising, and I’m much more likely to be surprised by a thought-through, elaborately constructed development than one pulled out of someone’s ass on the day of filming. Where do you guys fall on messy vs. tidy comedies?

Scott: I share some of your reservations with improv-heavy comedies, Tasha, but not all of them. On the minus side, I greatly miss the structured comedy that Blake Edwards perfected in films like A Shot In The Dark or The Party, which are not only well-calibrated in terms of rhythm and timing, but are better planned out to use the camera to enhance the jokes. The trouble with comedies of the Apatow school, especially early efforts like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, which were more crudely directed than his recent work, is that Apatow seems content just to place the camera in front of funny people and watch them go. On the flip side, that can lead to spontaneity and surprise, like the scene in 40-Year-Old Virgin where Steve Carell gets his chest waxed as his buddies look on in horror. There’s an organic quality to the laughs there that can’t be manufactured any other way than putting talented improvisers in the moment and letting them go. And as much as I found Apatow’s This Is 40 to be as shapeless and indulgent as its harshest critics claim, the messiness of it is Altman-like in its attempt to capture the fullness of a family’s life, from the contentious tone of its kitchen-table conversations to smaller details like the husband sneaking off to the bathroom to play Words With Friends on his iPad. A director like Adam McKay can strike a balance a little easier—there are action sequences in Talladega Nights and The Wrong Guys that wouldn’t be out of place in a non-comedy, which is rare—but I agree that we’re currently in a time where more disciplined comedy is on the outs.

Keith: What I think we’re losing in this discussion, or at least what I believe, is that tidy isn’t necessarily better than messy, and vice versa. I tend to think of tidiness and neatness as different tools, and for some filmmakers one set of tools works better than another. It takes filmmaking discipline to construct a tightly choreographed scene, but it takes daring to let the camera roll. Would it be more instructive to talk about drama? On the one hand there’s the kind of tension someone like Hitchcock creates via careful planning and timing, on the other the kind of tension someone like John Cassavetes creates by training his camera on raw human passion and letting it happen. Is one better than the other? I’d say no. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a useful way of talking about films, however, or that isn’t possible to have a personal preference. Tasha, does your preference extend beyond comedies?

Tasha: I theoretically agree that whatever best fits the story and the filmmaker is the right tool for the job, but in practice, sprawl in comedies often bores me. (Really, Scott? The Party as a bastion of careful planning and comic timing? The excruciatingly repetitive “birdie num-nums” sequence is the epitome of what I hate in messy comedies: The sense that the script just said, “Peter Sellers does something hilarious here,” and it never quite happened, so Sellers kept digging a comedy hole, trying to find the gag.) I’m much, much more tolerant about dramas going to either extreme. I love a good, tidy everything-in-its-place, well-structured action movie like Die Hard or Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but I also respect Ralph Bakshi, who throws all his reckless energy into his films without much sense of a plan or a coherent thought, and I love Terry Gilliam, whose anarchic sprawl defines his filmmaking. The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus and The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen can blame some of their storytelling chaos on troubled, messy productions, but an awful lot of it is just Gilliam’s voice, which disguises craft as random, expansive kookiness.

He isn’t the only one with a consistently messy artistic voice. Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, must have taken a lot of planning and fussing—Kaufman has never come across as a spontaneous, seat-of-the-pants artist—but its intricately built symbols and ideas come fitted into a story that seems random and cluttered, and full of dead ends to people who are expecting any sort of conventional narrative. Kaufman’s other scripts can seem equally disorderly and random, simply because they’re so unusual: There’s no pat, familiar storytelling precedent for what happens when people crawl through a magical portal into an actor’s head in Being John Malkovich. Some of Kaufman’s stories seem more mannered (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind) and some seem more wild and organic (Human Nature, Adaptation), and part of that comes from the direction, but I think part of it comes from Kaufman’s immense ambition, which tries to pack so many concepts into his stories that they wind up racing around maniacally.

In that sense, it seems to me that films can sometimes appear narratively or directorially messy while still having a tidy conceptual or symbolic core connecting all the ideas at once. When that works well, you get Synecdoche, New York or Nashville. When it works poorly, you get Southland Tales. When it works predictably and mechanically, you get rote “everything is connected” movies like Crash and Babel. Does this make sense to you guys? Do you have favorite messy dramas, and in general, do they have tidy ideas holding them together?

Scott: I’ve never thought of Kaufman’s work as anything but tidy, even the ones that seem like they’re wilder and more organic, like Synecdoche, New York. These are complex puzzles that he’s trying to put together here, and while it’s a challenge for viewers to peel back the layers upon layers of reality and fiction that make up a movie like Synecdoche, the script itself strikes me as completely worked out. Ditto the films of Shane Carruth or Peter Greenaway, which require multiple viewings to comprehend, but have been constructed with a meticulousness that makes it clear nothing is an accident. Critics of these types of movies—and Kubrick is on that list—tend to slag them as too hermetic and worked-out, missing the complications that can come from allowing the contributions of others (and the conditions of the shoot itself) to fill out the picture more. But as Room 237 teaches us, even the tidiest filmmakers don’t have complete control over their own work, much less the way they’re interpreted.

To that end, I’ve always admired something the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami said about his films—that they’re half-finished, and are completed by the audience. You can see that dynamic at play in Kiarostami’s A Taste Of Cherry, which spends much of its time following the conversations between a taxi driver and his passengers, only to end with an unexpected reveal that turns the audience toward the artifice of cinema, and its relationship to the reality we’ve just accepted as drama. That deliberate messiness also figures into the essay films of directors like Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, whose connections and allusions can be extremely obscure, but which tease viewers into playing more active roles in completing the experience. Like Keith, I have no preference for movies at either end of the spectrum—it would be a shame to cut off the different kinds of surprises that Hitchcock or Cassavetes offer—but it’s fascinating to see how filmmakers marshal the action in front of their camera.

Keith: Do you feel like we’ve figured anything out? I usually leave these conversations with a sense of clarity, but if anything, I’m more confused than when we started. So I’m just going to add to that confusion with the observation that it’s possible to fake tidiness and messiness. Example of the first: American Hustle. Beneath its elaborate camerawork beats the heart of an out-of-control improv film. Example of the second: Captain Phillips, which has a documentary immediacy, but wouldn’t be possible without careful planning. And that’s fine, too: It’s an art based on illusions, no matter what approach you take.

Tasha: We’ve covered some interesting ground, but I don’t feel like we’ve figured everything out, and in part, I think that’s because you guys are caviling. Keith, you say it’s possible to have a personal preference between tidy and messy without declaring either one as better, but you don’t express an opinion yourself. Scott, you also claim no preference. But praising all things equally isn’t that much different from expressing no opinion. Really? No personal leanings whatsoever? All shapes and sizes of films are equal to you, not just in theory, but in practice? You’re so objective that personal tastes don’t enter into the debate?

To fight against that tendency—which I understand, you’re worried about sounding like you’re offhandedly dismissing an entire spectrum of filmmaking in one go—let me try turning things around: We’ve been talking a lot about excellent filmmakers who epitomize the form, and generally make the most of it. It’s no major surprise that Kubrick or Hitchcock or Soderbergh or Kiarostami or Altman would make fantastic films regardless of whether they’re working in a highly mannered way, or an off-the-cuff, seat-of-the pants way, and whether the scripts they’re working with are slim or shambolic. But what about filmmakers who aren’t masters? What about films that are downright lousy?

As critics, often when we say a film is sloppy or messy, we mean it as a pejorative, implying that the director has lost control, or that the movie feels baggy and aimless. But there’s also precedent for calling a film too neat or pat, because it feels unimaginative, literal, or predictable. I can see more of an argument for personally accepting great films in any form, but maybe you have a personal preference when it comes to bad ones? Which would you rather be stuck with, a bad film like The Internship that proceeds so neatly from standard-issue plot point to standard-issue plot point that it feels like it was written by a computerized Mad Libs program, or a shambling mess like Movie 43? At least the tidy bad film is likely to get you out the door faster, but then again, a seemingly endless discursive bad movie has the benefit of being unpredictable and hitting unusual destinations on its tedious journey to the end.

Scott: Okay, now you’ve prompted me to state a preference, Tasha. I like my bad films untidy, because there’s nothing worst than machine-tooled mediocrity. For me, that’s the great distinction our own Nathan Rabin made in his My Year Of Flops columns: A failure is a dull proposition, something that sinks under the weight of its own stolid mediocrity; a fiasco at least has some life. This happens in horror films all the time, especially in recent years, when teen-friendly PG-13 horror has held sway. Compare 2006’s When A Stranger Calls remake to its 1979 counterpart: The remake is slicker, better made, more structurally sensible, and about as lifeless a moviegoing experience as you could ever have. The 1979 version is remembered for its urban-myth business about checking the children and the call coming from inside the house, but it’s a comically amateurish, oblong film that spends much of its time mired in a weird urban police procedural. None of that messiness made it into the remake, for good reason, but absent distinctive badness, we’re left with just badness. And that’s never any fun.

Keith: Fine. Given the choice I, like Scott, prefer my bad films to be unpredictable. And, pushed a little further, I might even admit that I like my good films served neat. I have great respect for directors who engage in cat-herding and on-the-set discoveries, and carve their films out of huge chunks of stone. (Altman is one of my favorite directors.) But there’s something about being in the hands a master, and of watching a film that feels thoroughly considered, with every shot and every element forming part of a cohesive whole. Then again, I think part of that thrill also comes from knowing how easily it might all descend into chaos.