Jessica Lange plans to retire, says comic book films have sacrificed art 'for the sake of profit'
Jessica Lange has no interest in seeing "90%" of the films being made today.
In an interview published Thursday in the Telegraph, the Oscar winner said she wants to quit acting because the industry is more focused on profit than artistic quality. “I’m not interested in these big comic book franchise films. I think that they’ve sacrificed this art that we’ve been involved in … for the sake of profit.”
Lange, 74, told the newspaper that she’s planning to retire in the near future. “Creativity is secondary now to corporate profits,” she said. “The emphasis becomes not on the art or the artist or the storytelling. It becomes about satisfying your stockholders. It diminishes the artist and the art of filmmaking.”
The actor, who’s collected her fair share of Oscars, Emmys and Golden Globes over the course of her four-decade career, said she's mourning the loss of “wonderful films by really great filmmakers, wonderful stories, great characters.”
The “American Horror Story” star echoes recent comments made by filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who doubled down on disavowing comic book movies. In a GQ profile last month, the “Killers of the Flower Moon” director said comic book films were a danger to our culture “because there are going to be generations now that think ... that’s what movies are.”
Read more: Martin Scorsese urges filmmakers to fight comic book movie culture: ‘We’ve got to save cinema’
“Which means that we have to then fight back stronger. And it’s got to come from the grassroots level. It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves,” Scorsese continued. “And you’ll have, you know, the Safdie brothers, and you’ll have Chris Nolan, you know what I mean? And hit ’em from all sides. Hit ’em from all sides, and don’t give up. ... Go reinvent. Don’t complain about it. But it’s true, because we’ve got to save cinema.”
Scorsese referred to movies inspired by comic books as “manufactured content” rather than cinema.
“It’s almost like AI making a film,” he said. “And that doesn’t mean that you don’t have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork. But what does it mean? What do these films, what will it give you?”
Lange, whose recent projects include “American Horror Story” and “The Politician,” has been toying with the idea of retirement for a while now. In 2013, she told The Times, “I am coming to the end of acting. I have a list: another stage production, maybe one or two more movies, one more season of ‘American Horror Story’ ... and then that is it for me. Because I think that’s enough. I want to go out with a bang ... or should I say, a scare?”
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At the time, she told The Times that her foray into horror reinvigorated her love for the profession.
“It brought back the thrill of acting,” she said, referencing her TV movie “Grey Gardens.”
“It was the perfect storm. It’s all the tired stuff everybody says — age working against you, films that made your career not being made anymore. But also, I really needed a distraction in my life; I was still getting used to the idea of my kids leaving the nest. I thought it was a good time to go out on a limb because horror is not my thing.”
Despite her pending retirement, Lange is still accepting projects for now. She will star in a big-screen adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” alongside Ed Harris. The actor also has a Marlene Dietrich biopic in the works. “It’s a project that I would love to do, but there’s no guarantee that films like that are going to get made,” she told the Telegraph.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.