When great directors get basic

Despite the millions of words spilt on the subject of the film auteur, it really is a collaborative medium, with hundreds of people contributing to the most modest cinematic efforts. But you do learn to trust the person in charge, and can expect certain levels of quality from trusted film directors.

So you can have your favourite directors - and I've certainly got a few - but it's also fairly striking when genius directors also put something incredinly basic on screen.

Even the greatest cinematic minds can make a false step, show a flaw in their film diamond. Where a decision is made, and it's clearly the wrong one, but it's still sitting there in the finished picture. A film with a delicate touch becomes immediately obvious and basic.

The greatest example comes in the final seconds of Martin Scorsese's The Departed. Marty is an obvious cinematic genius, his craft is impeccable, and he has put images on screen that remain startling and deeply heartfelt.

And The Departed is a terrific adaption of Infernal affairs, with some britlliant perfromances right across the board. It's complex and gritty and nasty and clever, and when everybody is dead at the end, there's nothing more to be said. You definitely don't need a fucking literal rat running across the bottom of the frame.

It's a sour note to end the film on, and almost inexplicable that Scorsese didn't see how silly it was, but he didn't, and there it is.

All the great modern directors do it, and even stone-cold classic movies by Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Lynn Ramsey, Quentin Tarantino and Bong Joon Ho have moments of clumsiness. Their cinematic voices soar with ambition and class, but can still hit the wrong note.

It's all the more jarring when the rest of the film is so good, but it's also reassuring that even the best of us can get it wrong sometimes. That nobody is really perfect, and that nobody can talk them out of putting a literal rat on screen.