Feedback

Perhaps oddly, I had never seen a feedback letter from the Commish until a filmmaker I know showed me one they had received. It was feedback for a script that had made the shortlist of 14 for the 1st Writers Initiative but had failed to make the final six scripts chosen for the workshop.

The 1st Writers Initiative is for filmmakers who have not received funding for a feature film. Six scripts are chosen to go to a workshop and one or two of those go into the Commish development process. I may be wrong but I don't think any Writers Initiative scripts have been made or are about to be made into films.

I've been asked not to divulge the script and the filmmaker in question so I can't say verbatim what was written, I will try and give a flavour. The letter thanks the filmmaker for their time and effort and on being shortlisted. Since they were shortlisted they get feedback which is not the case for the other one hundred+ scripts that didn't get that far. After that cheery beginning things do go downhill somewhat. This particular script belongs to a very specific type of genre and the the giver of the feedback (one of the more senior members of the Commish, not an underling) is quick to point out that such genre pieces are prone to failings of the well worn kind. After that things really bottom out when the feedbacker states that this script doesn't do what the genre is supposed to do. Suggesting for instance that for a horror film (it's not a horror film) it isn't at all scary. The coup de grace is made by essentially telling the writer that their story needs passion/drama/stakes/everything else. Then it ends in cheeryland again by wishing them well for the script and their writing in the future.

Hmm. As you can imagine, this particular filmmaker wasn't very encouraged. Does the Commish want them to continue on this script? No one knows. There's no where to go under the 1st Writers Initiative. Rejection for that is basically the end of the line for an idea. So do they keep working on it? The letter says that the reason for the feedback is for the ongoing development of the script. But why continue for no money on an idea that the Commish doesn't seem to like in the first place?

It's ridiculous to let people spend a good deal of time and energy on a project that the Commish will never make. When the filmmaker in question told me the idea I said it sounded fine but the Commish would never make it. It just didn't tick enough of the boxes. But the Commish should be telling filmmakers that, not me.

New Suggestion. Get filmmakers to send in treatments. Select twelve to turn into 1st Drafts. Give those twelve a small amount of money to write that first draft. Select six to go the workshop. Then if they're good enough they go into development.

Don't have one hundred plus angry people feeling like they wasted three months or more of their lives. They might turn into Commish haters...

The Pods

It's that time of the year again. Applications for short film funding in NZ closed on Friday. I have applied this year and despite knowing I shouldn't tempt fate I am quietly hopeful of a shortlisting. The film I have applied for funding for this year is an adaptation of Katherine Mansfield's short story Bliss. If you know the story then you'll know it's set in London around 1920. It would be highly unusual to have a pod film set in another country (I'm struggling to think of any) but I believe Mansfield fills the relevant criteria of NZ content. If you disagree, then I have two words for you - Dean Spanley. If that can get funding then I think the parameters are fairly wide.

The pod system has its critics like all the others but it's hard to argue with the statistics. As I've mentioned before the system works because of the amount the commission puts into the films. NZ short films stand out internationally because of their production values.

The decision to devolve the funding from the commission to three separate production companies on a rolling two year basis has been mostly positive. I've heard this decision goes back to the film Hinekaro Goes Up A Mountain And Blows Up Another Obelisk. Hinekaro stills holds the record for the most expensive NZ short ever made. NZ is a small place and it's too easy for a small bunch of people in Wellington to hand out the money to their mates. After Hinekaro I assume it was realised that the system could be too easily abused with what is of course tax payer money.

Personally I've been shortlisted once before. That was with Whenua Films. It was an interesting process and it taught me a lot. Looking back if I had really thought about some of the questions posed to me about the script I had submitted I could have figured out the answers and got the film to production. The answers didn't come to me until about two years later but I still hope to turn that particular project into a feature. My mistake then was to take an almost adversarial approach to the questions posed to me instead of stepping back and thinking them through. I'm a bit older and hopefully wiser now.

I've enjoyed adapting Bliss immensely. When I first read it I immediately thought "this is a film". That's a great feeling to have. I had some structural issues to deal with in the adaptation but once those were solved I found it a straight forward process. I made a decision early on to not change any of the dialogue if I could help it and that luckily held through most of the script. Much of the pleasure of the adaptation was coming to grips with the sheer depth and density of Mansfield's writing. Each rereading revealed something new to me. Hopefully I get the chance to do filmic justice to a fantastic story. If you would like to read Bliss it's here.

Spike Lee

One of the bonuses of being a cinephile in London are the number of talks with well known film practitioners. The BFI normally has at least one major filmmaker speaking every month. This month it was Spike Lee who was in town to help promote screenings of Do the Right Thing in its twentieth year since release. The quality of these talks depend highly on the interviewee getting some flow to proceedings and David Lammy MP was a pretty good choice. Spike had to cut him off early in the night to make sure he got to the point but after that it was an enjoyable evening. The highlight ironically was getting home and turning on Newsnight to see Spike Lee ask Jeremy Paxman "How long have you been black?"

Werner Herzog next up, this Saturday at the Royal Festival Hall. "Chaos, hostility and murder." Can't wait!

Publish Post

Jane Campion for Best Director!

Only three women have been nominated for the oscar for best director. Jane Campion was one of them for The Piano in 1994. Campion has a new film out called Bright Star and the reviews have been brilliant so far. Now is the time for a woman to get her hands on that oscar. Jane Campion has the pedigree and should take it away next year. If anyone out there reading this is a member of the academy then get the word out now.

The Vintner's Luck has had early bad reviews from the Toronto Film Festival. As I mentioned in an earlier post the trailer was uninspiring and bode ill for Niki Caro's third feature. Caro was hot property after Whale Rider but if this film flops her next film will have to hit the mark.

Talkin bout my generation

Two weeks without the internet is a long time, especially when so much is happening. The ministerial review has just published the submission's it's received on its website. Ant Timpson has made the case for a NZ Film Month. But what I want to focus on today is Matthew Horrocks and his Notes for a New New Zealand Cinema.

Matthew Horrocks worked at the Commission for a few years mostly in development and is now on the other side of the fence as an independent producer. In his Notes he sets out the basis of why filmmaking in NZ isn't as rosy as some people would like you to think it is. There is a lot to be said about his thoughts but what really struck me upon first reading was this paragraph.

"The key cause of the situation in which new filmmakers are not making new films is that in the absence of a clear set of ideas about the types of films we want to make we "new" - though not necessarily particularly young - aspiring feature filmmakers, have for some years now been proving spectacularly unable to generate a healthy supply of film projects that are demanding to be made because we are having real problems finding and developing cinematic stories that just have to be told on film."

I don't think I've ever seen this idea articulated before. To put it simply, most of the ideas that have come to the commission in recent years from filmmakers are crap. That's very harsh. But it should be. I am also part of the problem. I've known a bunch of filmmakers since I moved to Auckland in 1999. We're mostly all in our mid 30's now. Apart from a handful of digital features we have very little to show for our efforts. We know our stuff, have fairly good taste, but have failed to make a mark. Why is this?

Horrocks says "The challenge is cultural. It has arisen because a number of the various streams of ideas to do with identity - national, masculine, feminine, gay and Maori - that have nourished the development of our film culture thus far have to a certain extent run their first course. That they are not being replenished is in turn reflective of the type of crisis of values, meaning, and identity that grips a culture, and a person, that is struggling to make a difficult transition from one era of development into another"

That is pretty heavy stuff and not the intellectual debate you see coming from within the NZ film industry very often. It does have a strong whiff of truth about it. It encapsulates the gnawing feeling that many of us have had watching our films in recent years. Let me use Eagle vs Shark as an example. It's the first film that came to mind so I'm certainly not trying to be dismissive of the work Taika Waititi and his producer Ainsley Gardiner have done. However, that film is basically an American independent quirky romnatic comedy. Now, the problem with doing this is that every film can't be made to stand for the whole. Eagle vs Shark can't represent an argument about the whole NZ film industry. What is interesting is what the films of my generation look like. What they look like is probably other people's films or the filmmaker's own navels.

Horrocks again "I think we need to blast the way we think and talk about films far out beyond the self-referentiality that occurs so often when we discuss films only in relation to other films. Lets discuss films in relation to the true source of all film material - life."

It astounds me that more filmmakers don't look at the newspaper for their next story. There are amazing stories happening all the time in NZ. The feature film idea I'm working on is based on an incident that occured just last year. Why aren't we all mining the news? I think there is more to this than simple laziness.

There is something going on with my generation of filmmakers. Our post-84 liberal minded socially conservative genreation. We don't really remember pre 1984 NZ. We don't remember what it was like to live in an effectively socially democratic country controlled by the state. We don't remember what it was like when pretty much everyone had a job and lived in an egalitarian nation. We don't remember what it was like to have only very limited job prospects (maybe civil service if you went to uni). We don't remember what it was like to not have to lock your door at night. We do have a collective consciousness because when we were young we all watched the same two tv channels and went to see Top Gun and The Goonies at the movies or watched Olly Olson After School. We may have faint memories of the Springbok tour of 1981 when people got pissed off at each other and expressed it. But that might seem like a world away now. Very few of us get really annoyed at anything political. Very few of us are angry about politics in any way although you may be annoyed that (new) Labour ran out of ideas last year and we decided to let the other team have a go again. When I think about the group of filmmakers I know well, they simply don't care about politics. They couldn't care less. What bothers me about that is that it tells me you have absolutely no interest in how we got to our current state of affairs. It tells me that you think that "stuff happens" that you have no control over. That you naturalise the world. That things just are because that's the way they are. You can't tell stories if you don't know how to structure them. It makes sense that you can understand the stories that happen around you if you understand the structures that created them. I can see why you wouldn't notice if a story occurred that raised profound questions about the current state of the country and its people. The problem is - that's the good stuff. The Godfather is just a gangster film if you don't place it in the context of what it tells us about the place of immigration and commerce and violence in the nation building and (maybe) collapse of America.

If you care about all this I suggest you read Notes on a New New Zealand Cinema. The debate about the future of NZ film is happening now.

Movie-Con!

I've just spent the weekend at Movie-Con II. It's an event run in conjunction with the BFI and Empire magazine. I think the genesis of the event was movie geeks in the UK wishing they could see the special previews of Hollywood films being shown at Comic-Con in San Diego.

Movie-Con is nicely British version of the huge San Diegan event. It occurs over one weekend in one theatre NFT 1 at the BFI. Essentially it involves screening a bunch of trailers for upcoming films. There were also two full-length screenings, District 9 and Adventureland. District 9 was a secret screening and the audience whooped when the title 'Peter Jackson Presents' came up. Essentially it's a souped up 1950's sci-fi B-Movie but with less of a script. The initial reviews were ecstatic and it wasn't a surprise that it didn't live up to expectations. It's an enjoyable diversion but the political allegory element is simplistic and will leave audiences thinking South Africa is a refugee infested hell hole. Adventureland is the latest from Greg Motolla who is now in Judd Apatow's stable. It's a coming of age comedy that was a diverting two hours. Both films were a step-up from last years full screenings Step Brothers and RocknRolla.

Guy Ritchie did turn up as he did last year and he had Robert Downey Jnr in tow. They showed footage from Sherlock Holmes and Downey Jnr came back the next day to introduce Iron Man 2 footage. Robert Downey Jnr's unexpected entrance had the audience whooping. Possibly the most interesting preview was for Kick-Ass which looks and is directed by Guy Ritchie's old partner Matthew Vaughn. That one had me whooping. Terry Gilliam and Kathryn Bigelow also showed up (how does Kathryn Bigelow look like that???). The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus looks like typical Gilliam, Bigelow's The Hurt Locker looks terrific.

The weekend ended with a presentation of 3D trailers from Disney and seven minutes from James Cameron's new epic Avatar. Avatar wasn't quite as mind blowing as some reports have suggested. The aliens still look like CGI aliens. The 3D element was fascinating. I found myself very aware of 'long lens' shots though. I didn't like anything out of focus. James Cameron has mentioned this somewhere already, his style of shooting suits 3D. A shallow depth of frame doesn't work because you need depth of frame to create the effect of 3D. That sounds obvious, but I didn't expect my eye to be drawn to the out of focus portion of the frame. It's like 2D animation that uses the out of focus style, you notice it because it's unusual. The excellent Marvel tv cartoon Wolverine and the X-men uses this technique and its hard to get your head around. I also wonder if I don't watch enough cartoons and I'm out of practice with what is the norm.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend but I can't help mention the one sour note for me, which was the clip from the Harry Brown starring Michael Caine and directed by newcomer Daniel Barber. The footage from the film looked fine. It's a revenge vigilante thriller, an exploitation flick that looks fairly stylish. The director himself seemed to be an idiot. Assuring the audienence that he had made this film because it was about a VERY important topic, UK street crime, or something along those lines. Apparently he only wanted to make films that had some kind of 'message'. I don't care if anyone makes an exploitation flick, Dead Man's Shoes is a terrific British example of this, but please dear lord, don't also pretend you're delivering a message.

Roll on Movie-Con III!

Return of the Big Hitters

The trailers are up for the new films by the two most important kiwi filmmakers of all time - Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones and Jane Campion's Bright Star. It will be interesting to see how many LOTR/KONG fans make the journey to the multiplex for this one. Unless the reviews are horrible it's likely to do very well. Bright Star relies on good word of mouth and good reviews but seems set to be Campion's biggest film since The Portrait of a Lady. Both trailers are o.k. but the voiceover for Bright Star grates "He was a dreamer...". The Lovely Bones goes for the more modern tell a story no voiceover style. The end of the voiceover? A sad day indeed.