Rant

It's good to have a rant once in a while. Ant Timpson's piece that I quoted in full in my last post has inspired me to let rip at what I consider the most insidious element of the Commission's controlling mechanism.

I said on his facebook page,

"A few people have contacted me privately saying they thought Headstrong was a failure and therefore this low budget studio idea is a bad one. The problem is that very few people have seen the final figures for what HS made. HS didn't fulfil its remit of x number of films in a couple of years but unfortunately very few of us know why. The problem seems to be that the commission made life very difficult for that initiative rather than enabling it. The lack of accountability from the commission has been unbelievable. Few of us outside a certain Wellington cafe set know what goes on inside their doors. This has to change. It's a sad fact that the commission keeps power through the mechanism of development money and fear. At some points the commission has had up to 80 films in development. Some of those are in development for 5 years or more. This creates a culture of acquiescence because you're never quite sure if you're getting your next development paycheque.

It keeps at least 80 directors/writers/producers silent. “I’m in development!”. How many of those films get made? It’s probably less than 10%. It’s hard to believe the Commission enter all those development deals in good faith, thinking that a certain project will actually get made. I’ve told good friends that their projects won’t get made even though they’re in development but they take some commission development person’s notes and dutifully do a rewrite. There’s even a scheme now where if you’ve been in development hell for five years you can get even more feedback about how you might get out of it. I mean, come on, just tell the director it’s not happening and let them get on with their lives. The development process is expensive and ridiculous. Write to the ministerial review and ask for those funds to be funnelled into production. Specifically a low budget studio!"

end of rant...

Shorts vs Low Budget features

Ant Timpson has just made a call on his facebook page for the $1 million spent on the Pod system of short films to go instead to low budget feature films. I've quoted him in full below.

"The NZFC have just done a call out for applications for the Short Film Fund. What this means is that three devolved exec-producer teams will eventually be in control of the final funding to do call outs for scripts, then selecting three to be made with the final talley being nine 35mm short films created.

The cost of making the nine films will be nearly one million dollars.

It's a lot of work (from the call out, development, production and finally release) and the results in the past decade have ranged from utter brilliance to absolute dross.

Now one million dollars sounds like a lot of dough but it's really not a lot in the film biz. But here's something I would like to throw out there.

Since there appears to be very little money in the coffers to produce low budget features, the question must be asked :

Are 9 shorts at nearly $100,000 each better for the NZ film industry than 9 low-fi features budgeted at $100k? Lets break it down.

The pros for shorts :
1. High Quality 35mm end result.
2. Major Interest from the Big 5 fests in NZ shorts of high calibre
3. Tightly controlled and well supported productions
4. Talent and crews paid reasonably.
5. Builds awareness of talent internationally
6. Creates a talent highway.. short - Sundance - fest support - 1st feature invited

The Cons for Shorts
1. Little return on investment
2. Bring zero awareness or growth to NZ film audiences
3. A lot of time, money and energy expended for a 11m result.
4. No real local audience for them.

Now lets look at low fi features.

The pros for making 9 low-fi features
1. Creating excitement amongst new young talent in NZ.
2. Better odds for an overall return on a low investment than shorts
3. More interest from local sponsors/ partners
4. More interest from local broadcasters
5. More interest from local distributors
6. An opportunity for the stars of 48Hours to fasttrack into features
7. An opportunity to have consistent product in front of local audiences
8. Building the next generation of film and filmmakers.

The Cons (which are all true but all can all be remedied wth some work)
1. The Ghost of Kahukura (however a lot was learnt from this early scheme, which was also ahead of its time and there was no digital infrastructure ready)
2. Low fi features usually look like arse
3. No one gets paid well, bloody slave labour!
4. They sometimes don't get finished and run out of money
5. There is no money set aside for P&A (release, prints and advertising)
6. Local audiences supposedly don't want to see that crap

Now I'm not saying I have all the answers but with a major review coming up, I think its time to look towards the future and one area that I see lacking in the NZ film scene are local high energy films aimed at anyone under 30. The cons above do have solutions to them and they're not to hard to facilitate.

There'll be a few bigger budgeted films coming along that will hit a younger demo but surely we also need to create hope and excitement amongst young filmmakers here. Do they really want to see the staircase of 5yr development hell looking at them in the face. A process which I've seen water down and generally suck the life out of 'some' projects like a vampire.

The general argument from many about these low-fi films is "why don't you just go and make it yourself! ". Well people have done this (big kudos) but many are not thinking of the bigger picture. Some make films with no audience in mind and that's fine and dandy but they also don't create much energy or excitement in local filmmaking by doing so. They have no end game planned for anyone to see the film or how its going to get out there. Making something and getting it seen are two completely different targets to hit.

A support structure where these films get help with marketing, release plans and finally onto digital screens is probably more important than finding what films to make, because without a long term vision for consistency and strategy, we're back to square one again in a few years time.

This is just one part of an idea being sent into the review of the NZFC coming up. I'm interested to hear anyones thoughts on all this and whether some think everything is aok as it stands, and there's no need to rock the boat.. ie leave the shorts alone you prick!

There is no question that real talent has come through the shorts programme and now those people are on the international radar. Their eventual first features (5yrs time) maybe be invited by the very fest where their shorts originally played.

However, would those people have been able to pull off something just as remarkable in a feature scenario? Saving 5yrs of time and possibly get the same results?

Or do you have something you'd like to add. Remember all debate is healthy.

There is also a real feeling that we are moving into a new era at the NZFC and that should be cause for some elation.

The one thing I know without any doubt is this...
The talent is out there to do pull off these films.

best
ANT TIMPSON"

It is fantastic that someone with the profile of Ant in NZ has spoken his mind on an issue that affects filmmakers at the lower end of the scale. He makes a lot of good points and some I disagree with.

The pro's of the Pod system of short films outweigh the cons. The 'talent pathway' that he mentions is probably their most successful aspect. It is a great way to get into a big film festival. NZ makes high budget short films that often get into A List Film Festivals. Those filmmakers then have a much wider door to get their features into same festival. Basically, I think targeting the Pod system to be replaced by a Low Budget Feature one is a bad idea. The Pod system works. Let's not break it.

The low budget feature idea is one I'm very interested in. When I was in NZ in March I canvassed a few people about the idea of setting up a low budget feature studio. The idea would be that you make about ten films a year. You would buy most of the equipment you needed initially (e.g. using Red technology) thereby avoiding nasty hire fees. The biggest point was that we would seek out private investment. Investors would put in money for a years slate of films. Hopefully, after theatrical, dvd and ancillary the investor would make money. It's a lot more complicated than that but the idea would be that an institution would be set up outside the Commission to make films that the Commission couldn't make. If you want to make low budget features they must have a strong support structure, from preproduction through to distribution. Filmmakers can create this. They don't need the Commission to tell them to do it and ask them to report back every five minutes.

There's a lot more to say about this. The deadline for submissions to the Commission review are due in a few days. I'm going to get writing about that and report back when I'm finished.

Can we have filmmakers on the Fonterra Board please?

The Film Commission has three new board members: Patsy Reddy (who is the new Chair), Rhiannon Evans, and Charles Finny. None of them are what you would call 'film people'. They are for lack of a better term 'business people'. The Film Commission is run by the Government and therefore can have whoever they want on the board, but does it have to be mostly business people? The Board doesn't just meet every few months to check that the Commission hasn't fallen into a financial black hole, they actually make the final decisions on what gets made. Would you really want a filmmaker making the decision about what amount dairy farmers get back on their milk solids? Why do people who know very little about the process of making a film get to decide what gets made?

The partial answer of course is that filmmaking is an art form and a business. The government thinks filmmakers can't be trusted to make informed choices about what will succeed in the marketplace. The odd thing about this idea is that theoretically it's producers who should understand these things. I know nothing about the dairy industry but I do know quite a lot about the film industry business because I've read things like Variety. Do the new Board members read Variety? Do they know how the market at Cannes works? Producers should know these things but the role of the producer is neutered by the structure of the industry in NZ. Producers and directors/writers are encouraged to link up to bring projects to the Commission for development. They may receive development money which is usually equally split between the producer and director/writer. This process continues until the Board decides to give you production financing. The problem then is that producers don't have to do very much. They simply get hold of a project, get development money, repeat. I'm not saying that producers don't do a lot of creative work, it just seems that's what they mostly do. There's no incentive to find alternative means of funding. Either the Commission funds the project or doesn't. Next.

This seems to be the issue Peter Jackson has the most problem with. The Commission has recognised the issue itself and spends money sending Producers overseas to learn about the international market. It also looked at devolving some money the way of producers so they could develop their won slates of projects. The issue with both of these ideas is that they don't alter the current paradigm. In the end, the Commission is who funds your film.

I'm thinking a lot about these ideas at the moment and I want to send them to the review the Ministry of Culture and Heritage is implementing. The deadline is 31st July. When I get something together I'll also post here.

Finally I want to mention a blog I've discovered about women's filmmaking in NZ. It looks great. Great title too, Wellywood Woman.

Films!

I thought I better point out that the Film Commission does actually make films and some very good ones. Here are links to the trailers for Niki Caro's first film since Whale Rider - The Vintner's Luck and Under The Mountain which pretty much every child of my generation saw the televised version of back in the early 80's. Under The Mountain looks okay although something feels missing. The director is Jonathan King of Black Sheep fame. It will be interesting to see how this mixture of science fiction and kiwi gothic plays to a modern audience. I'm a fan of Niki Caro but I fear the trailer for The Vintner's Luck puts it in Euro-pudding Perfume territory.

There is also a reel of the short films screening in this years NZ Film Festival. It's a great reel and makes me desperately want to see these films, if only to see what my contemporaries are up to.

The July Newsletter

The NZ Film Commission brings out a monthly newsletter. It's an interesting one this month and I'll go into more detail in my next entry. But I want to quickly focus on a new list that has appeared in the newsletter that outlines how much Commission money was invested in recent films.

TITLE	AMOUNT INVESTED
The Ferryman	$1,000,000
Black Sheep	$3,518,214
Out of the Blue	$3,000,000
Eagle vs Shark	$1,661,669
The Devil Dared Me To	$859,314
Dean Spanley	$3,000,000
The Vintner’s Luck	$3,876,775
Strength of Water	$4,475,719
The Tattooist	$4,000,000
We’re Here to Help	$1,890,000
Rain of the Children	$1,411,820
Matariki	$2,500,000
Under the Mountain	$5,450,000
Separation City	$2,000,000
Second Hand Wedding	$714,450
Song of Good	$461,600
Apron Strings	$1,109,517
Show of Hands	$1,175,492
Rubbings from a Live Man	$720,000
Topp Twins	$624,406
The Volcano	$250,000
After the Waterfall	$2,500,000
Predicament	$2,500,000

At first glance this list seems pretty reasonable. We're Here To Help was a box office failure but there are a number of films here such as Out Of The Blue and Black Sheep that must be considered successful. The out and out failure here must be The Tattooist which shows an investment of $4,000,000 and it barely got a limited cinema release if any release at all. There may have been some boost from dvd and ancillary markets but it still appears to be a bomb.

Rubbings From A Live Man also strikes me as interesting case. I know the production budget of the film was a good deal lower than $700,000 so most of that money has gone into post production. The question would be why. I know the filmmakers would have liked more money upfront so they could have put it onto the screen. Florian Habicht is clearly a filmmaker to watch and there has already been a sizeable investment in him, so why not just give him the money upfront and let him get on with it?

Meanwhile news is coming through of a new board for the Commission... More next time!

I'm Sorry Mr Jackson

Followers of the New Zealand film industry may recognise the title of this blog as an ever so slight dig at the organisation that runs film in that country. NZ film is essentially bipolar. The New Zealand Film Commission is a state funded ‘quango’ type organisation that effectively funds the majority of filmmaking in NZ. The other half of the industry is a chap called Peter Jackson. The Commission runs on the relative smell of an oily rag. It expects to make around 4-5 feature films per year mostly at either $2million or the $10million depending on the project. Peter Jackson runs a movie making empire out of Wellington and is on a par with Steven Spielberg and James Cameron. In any bipolar system you expect tensions, but the Commission and Jackson have traditionally had fairly demarcated lines of control and influence. The Commission cannot expect to compete with Hollywood blockbusters and for the most part does not try to. Peter Jackson makes Hollywood blockbusters. The Commission does control the purse strings to everyone else that wants to make films in NZ and therefore has enormous influence. Jackson is influential on a world scale and the concerns of our local filmmakers would seem to be insignificant to him. There is however a problem. Jackson and the Commission have a history and that history is likely to now come back and bite the Commission squarely on the bum.

I don’t have the time to go into the detailed story here. The history of Jackson and the Commission is well documented. Essentially Jackson was a no-budget filmmaker who made three cheap horror films before having his first mainstream hit with Heavenly Creatures. From early on though Jackson and the Commission didn’t see eye to eye. He was lucky that Jim Booth an exec at the Commish liked him and his films and came on board as his producer. But Jackson quickly became too big for the Commission to handle. He was their darling after Heavenly Creatures. It’s the perfect Commission film. A New Zealand true story set in the 1950’s with the added ‘cinema of unease’ factor and done in style on a low budget. Heavenly Creatures won awards and audiences around the world. The problem was that that wasn’t really where Jackson was ‘at’. The next film he made was The Frighteners a Hollywood studio film that tanked at the box office. In hindsight The Frighteners can be viewed as Jackson’s transitional film to blockbusterism. It’s easy to imagine the head shaking the film must have caused at Commission HQ however. “He was doing so well!” you can imagine them saying in pity. It’s at this time that Jackson starts letting rip at the Commission, pillaring them in an article published in Metro magazine. Jackson has had a few run in’s with the Commission since then but both parties have kept a slight distance, until now.

The new Minister for Arts and Culture is Christopher Finlayson and he has charged Peter Jackson with the task of running a ministerial review of the Commission. Finlayson had been making noises about the Commission before National won the election so this review isn’t a surprise but getting Jackson on board to lead the review is a stunning coup and speaks volumes about how serious this could be for the Commission. Jackson, you would expect, is a very busy man so to lend his time to this review must mean he wants to reshape the landscape of NZ film. I don’t think I would want to be a ‘producer’ who has been living off development cash for the last few years in this new environment.

My personal history with the Commission is a mixed one. I’ve never been given direct funding from them. The one time I actually asked for money was when I asked for $500 to help with my trip to the Berlinale Talent Campus. I wrote to Ruth Harley personally but no dice. One of the reasons given for not helping me was that they hadn’t given me money before. Right.

I have been a benefactor of the Commission indirectly attending workshops and seminars funded through them. I am grateful for that support. I also recognise that the Commission has issues. The Commission basically operates by having a large number of films and producers in development at any one time. I tried counting them up and got to nearly 80 projects. That is an extraordinary number for a small country. It means that a lot of people can say that they have a project in development and feel that they are close to making a feature film. The maths tells you otherwise. 4-5 films produced per year means that most of those films in development will never see a movie theatre. Because you have 80 films in development you need a number of people to stay on top of all that work and that is where most of the Commission’s work seems to go.

The Commission is continually trying to find its place in the world. It doesn’t have a remit that states it has to make money but it does try to balance art house films with commercial fare in the hope of balancing plaudits and an audience. The problem is how to express this message to filmmakers. The Commission can’t conjure up great scripts from thin air. It has to work with what is put in front of them. What the Commission does like to do is to suggest what type of films it may be more interested in making. This is almost always a recipe for disaster. In the mid 90’s came a desire to create low budget quirky comedies. This was followed by a penchant for horror films in the 2000’s. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when the Commission party to Cannes returned last year to impart the knowledge in a newsletter that for some reason interesting true stories seemed to be in vogue. It was as if they thought local filmmakers didn’t have access to the Internet.

The point of this is that the Commission has been a consistently reactive organisation and in the film world that isn’t a great place to be. Mr Jackson may have his own views on the matter and his will count.

First Post

It seems slightly odd starting a blog now. According to Wikipedia blogging as we know it started in the mid to late 90’s. I got my first cellphone in 2001 so it’s a recurring theme for me to be behind the times. At this rate I’ll do my first tweet in 2020.

The impulse behind this blog is film. Specifically my films, the New Zealand film industry, and to a much lesser extent the rest of the filmic universe in general. I hope that I will be able to chronicle my own fortunes in the film world with some degree of literacy.

Here’s hoping.