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Sunday's NY Times explored Warner Bros.' outwardly inscrutable decision to hand over the reins of holiday "tear-jerker" We Are Marshall to Charlie's Angels fauxteur McG, whose seizure-inducing directorial gifts and well-documented fear of flying would appear to be fundamentally incompatible with a project requiring a heavy reliance on gimmicks like "story" and "emotion" and which prominently features a phobia-flaring plane crash. In the article, McG (given name: not actually McG) bristles at length over the baseless perception that he's artistically limited to the attention-span-destroying aesthetic established in the Angels movies:

As for the skeptics, "it's the privilege of everyone to work in shorthand," he noted. " 'Oh, he does this, she does that. He's that guy.' I'm not known for 'Let's tell a very methodical story and make 'em cry.' I know that 'Let's get McG to do it' is not a natural place to go. But I went in, and I had a very specific take with regard to what I wanted to do with the film, and they went for it." [...]

"I'm a recovering agoraphobic," he said. "That's my identity, that's mine for my entire adult life. So don't tell me about pain and being a disposable pop throwaway. I'll ask anyone about the path they've walked and what it means to really feel alone and feel chastised and have pain and try to express that in your own artistic way. Maybe I'm successful, maybe I'm not, but it's my own personal shrug that I wanted to bring and funnel into this story." [...]

"I'm known for karate and explosions and pop color, and I'm very pleased with the tone we invented for those 'Charlie's Angels' pictures, but I wanted to go 180 degrees away from that," he said. "This isn't a sports movie. It's a movie about survival, it's about humanity and what we do when adversity comes up and smacks you in the head. There's certainly a football component, but it's just a story about how to make sense of tragedy." [...]

"I just want to let the film speak for itself," McG said. "It's funny to be known as a pop culture, high-energy guy that's always in a good mood, when I'm mentally ill. Don't act like I'm Mr. Jacuzzi and girls in bikinis and Hollywood. That's not who I am."

There you have it: While your hacky Ratners and Bays (both name-checked in the piece as "quick-cutting, narratively challenged" directors with whom he's unfairly grouped) gleefully detonate every object on set before retiring to care-free hot-tub orgies in their Hollywood Hills pleasure domes, McG's jittery edits and explosions give him no pleasure, existing only as tools to distract him from lingering too long in his dark places.