Every time a new music biopic hits theaters, people make some sort of joke about how Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story should have killed the genre completely. Director James Mangold should take those comments more personally than most, given that the movie Walk Hard is most directly parodying is his 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line.
Instead of taking the suggestion to heart, though, Mangold has made another music biopic with A Complete Unknown. In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mangold explained why he didn’t want to let all the Walk Hard jokes deter him.
“I found Walk Hard hilarious,” Mangold explained. “But I also never understood why satire would negate making the real thing anymore. I wasn’t frightened off any more than Robert Eggers should be frightened of making a monster movie in the face of Young Frankenstein or if another filmmaker might be frightened of making a Western in the face of Blazing Saddles. It’s unfair to say that if someone makes a satire of a genre, it somehow has put a tombstone in the genre for all time. That seems a little ludicrous to me.”
Mangold did acknowledge that the genre became slightly less popular in the wake of Walk Hard, but he didn’t think that was because of the movie.
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“That was just that they had run their course for that moment,” he said. “It takes so long to make a movie that I don’t think things operate in quite the instantaneous fashion where everyone suddenly stays away.”
Ultimately, what bothered Mangold the most about Walk Hard wasn’t the jokes, but the fact that it got a much bigger budget than the movie it was making fun of.
“I was more unnerved that the studio who made the movie paid twice as much for Walk Hard and refused to pay half as much for Walk the Line,” he said.
He added that no filmmaker should take satire of their work too seriously. He clearly doesn’t. “We live in an age of such irony that sometimes there’s good cliches to avoid, but there’s also some things that we should hold on to,” the director explained. “Trope is not a negative word if you look it up.”