8 ½ Meta Movies about Making Movies

We’re all self-centered. We have no choice. For creative types, this natural and unavoidable self-centric impulse can result in painters creating self-portraits, writers including themselves in novels, and in movies we find movies made about making movies: Meta Movies! There are more than you might think, but we’re only going to pick 8 ½  of them here. These aren’t just meta movies, they are also really fun.

1. 8 ½ (1963)

8 ½ is a Federico Fellini film about a film director starring Fellini as the director. Now don’t make my mistake of lumping Fellini (Italian) and Godard (French) into the category of “New Wave” avant-garde artsy-fartsy stuff and thinking it’ll all be weird, experimental, sometimes incomprehensible High Art. That’s Godard, not Fellini. Fellini’s films are often light and airy, funny and entertaining for a popular audience with maybe some existential angst. That’s 8 ½. It’s a behind-the-scenes movie about movie-making. It’s not a technical film about the difficulties of making a movie and is much more about the director’s creative angst and everyone working on the movie trying to get him past his doldrums so they can finish the film and get paid, hopefully. I’m not selling it well, but I really like it. Bonus: Music by Nina Rota, who did a lot of the music for Fellini and others (e.g., The Godfather). He’s one of the best movie music composers ever.

Honorable Mention and our ½ movie: Day for Night (1973) directed by François Truffaut and co-starring Jacqueline Bisset. Similar themes to 8 ½ and I actually think this movie is more fun. Trivia? The French title of the film is La Nuit Américaine, American night. You know, shooting in the day and dropping a blue filter on it and pretending it’s night like in olde tymie movies?

2. Bowfinger (1999)

Bowfinger is an underappreciated Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy film about making a film. It is absurd in every way. Steve Martin plays a down-on-his-luck producer who needs a hit. He literally lies, cheats, and steals to get what he needs to make this absurd scifi alien invasion script his accountant gives him. He convinces one of his friends to act in his movie (Christine Baranski) and hires a naive girl (Heather Graham) from Ohio who wants to be in the movies. Another friend has access to a studio lot and he temporarily steals equipment for a day at a time and returns it at night. All they really need is a crew that will work for free… and a superstar. The crew he gets is a few Mexicans running from border patrol who need a place to hide. It’s fun to see the crew grow into competent professionals by the end of the movie, discussing film theory and technique over coffee. They also need their superstar: Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), who is the most famous actor in America. He’s also extremely paranoid and a member of a Scientology-esque cult. He obviously won’t do the film, so the main plot is that the film crew chases him around and the actors run up to him and do their lines out of nowhere – about an alien invasion and whatnot – which does nothing for Kit’s mental health. Phew. That’s the short summary. There’s a lot more going on. Frank Oz directs, Robert Downey, Jr. cameo, etc. Highly recommended.

3. Tropic Thunder (2008)

Tropic Thunder is an absurd movie about making a movie. It has an insane ensemble cast with Tom Cruise, Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Steve Coogan, Danny McBride, Bill Hader, Nick Nolte, Matthew McConaughey, and many more in brief cameos. One of the screenwriters is Ethan Cohen. It quotes other war movies like Saving Private Ryan, Platoon (twice), The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and there are a ton of background Easter eggs (even a Star Trek one). Like Bowfinger, the movie eventually becomes a highly regarded award-winning film (in the movie, anyhow) as it wins the Academy Award for “The Most Fake Expensive True War Story Ever.” Yes, it is a stupid movie and that’s not a criticism. It runs a little long (even at 107 minutes) as the premise fades into “Yeah, we get it,” but the all-star-studded cast, goofball execution, and people occasionally blowing up (mostly Steve Coogan) is pretty fun.

4. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005)

Steve Coogan stars in this meta-meta movie. It is very different, but also really funny. Seriously funny. The basic premise is that two arrogant actors are making a movie about an 18th-century novel (Tristram Shandy), which is already an autobiography that is mostly digressions (and is 9 volumes long). So it’s sort of a film within a film about a novel that’s about a novel. I think. It’s hard to follow, but it’s so funny you won’t mind. Rob Brydon, Gillian Anderson, and Stephen Fry fill out the cast. The soundtrack features music by Nina Rota from 8 ½ , which is Fellini’s film about making a film.

5. Ed Wood (1994)

This movie is a much more straightforward movie about movie making, specifically the B-Horror film director Ed Wood, played by Johnny Depp. It also stars Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette (and quite a few more household names), and is directed by Tim Burton. It’s not exactly a comedy, but it is funny. There’s not a lot of technical behind-the-scenes, but there sure is drama with financing and finding actors willing to play the roles.

6. The Disaster Artist (2017)

Do you know who Tommy Wiseau is? You really should. Wiseau’s 2003 film The Room is so bad, it’s good, and I don’t mean that in a negative way: It’s genuinely entertaining. The Disaster Artist is a fictional movie about the making of that movie, heavily mining the real making of the film with Tommy Wiseau’s maybe true, maybe not, stories about it. Starring James Franco and Seth Rogen, it’s very silly, but it’s played straight. There are plenty of technical details, like Wiseau (who seems poor) buying movie equipment instead of renting it (like normal producers do, even the biggest names you know simply rent) and lots of conflict with the actors and crew. The movie treats the extremely strange Wiseau as a real person with a lot of warmth and affection.

7. R2PC – Road to Park City (1999)

R2PC is an indie’s indie film. Shot on a low budget, the film follows an indie producer named John who wants to make a movie that can win Sundance, the famous film festival held in Park City, Utah. It’s kind of a mockumentary, which were popular in that era, but it’s also quite realistic about how to make a serious indie film. An example is when our hero John goes to B&H in New York, an ultra ultra-famous gear shop for movie equipment. The (real B&H) salesman asks John what kind of camera and lens he would like for his movie and John says “One that will win Sundance.” This movie is maximally meta and it’s clear that the purpose of the movie is, indeed, to win an award by appealing to the jurors at film festivals who are all in the film industry. That said, R2PC is not a great film, but it is very fun for 83 minutes, especially if you’ve ever worked on an indie film or dreamed of doing so.

8. Adaptation (2002)

The movie is more about writing a film than producing one with a semi-autobiographical (but entirely fictional) plot being about the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) who is writing an adaptation of Susan Orlean‘s novel The Orchid Thief, but he has massive writer’s block. Charlie, who is already a successful writer, attends a paid seminar by popular screenwriter Robert McKee to attempt to get over his block, but it doesn’t work, because Kaufman doesn’t want to write a popular script and instead wants to be faithful to the book. Many shenanigans ensue and there are plenty of cameos. It’s absurd enough that “unreliable narrator” will cross your mind, but it doesn’t matter because this movie about writing a movie is very entertaining.