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.
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