How does the film industry work? What is involved in putting together a movie?
ELLIOTT: As a writer/director, I’m very lucky that I’m usually not out hunting for material – I generate my own which is a very big plus. I’ll get to a point where I’m happy with a script, and then we take the big jump and start looking for a producer and money. For me, the most successful place to do this has been the Cannes Film Festival. And Troy Lum is usually one of the first people I bump into.
LUM: I do six festivals a year. I have a hit list and I’ll constantly track films. I’m out there searching for projects; I’m looking for material that I can get involved in straight away and I try to circumvent my competition. In the case of Easy Virtue, I was involved in the film years before it started production.
IVANY: Once a film is made, a cinema exhibitor needs to decide how many screens it will devote to it and when to play it, against all the other products around at that time. One of the important things for a film is how many minimum weeks we give it to play, so the distributors have a chance of getting all their marketing expenses back and the producers and investors have got a chance to get their money back.
What makes a good project?
LUM: We’re very material focused at Hopscotch. It is very much about the script, the emotional response and matching that with a director. We’ve seen many good scripts turn into bad films through poor handling. I think a director is the most important element that you can have in a film.
ELLIOTT: But that’s very much Troy. A lot of other companies are completely the opposite. The bottom line is they don’t care who is directing, they want to know who’s in it. Troy’s attitude is quite unique.
IVANY: It’s a very imprecise science. Most films don’t last a long time, and so you look for a whole range of things. A good story is great but if it’s poorly executed, then it doesn’t work. There’s another element that’s important: how many marketing dollars are put behind the film. That’s where the studios have a significant advantage because they can promote a film with a big enough budget to ensure that it at least has a healthy opening.
What type of person is successful in film, what attributes do they have? Is it a lot of persistence? A capability for uncertainty? Is it luck?
LUM: There’s an element of luck. As a distributor you’ve got to be able to inspire confidence in people around you. I don’t think I’m much better than many other people at picking films. What I do think I’m good at, is I’m good with people. The business is built upon relationships, maintaining goodwill and being trustworthy.
ELLIOTT: We’ve all been struck by luck once or twice. Priscilla was a moment in time and a moment in the market. I saw the hole and I wrote the film for that hole because nobody else had. Now that was luck.
IVANY: The people that have sustainable success in this business are no different to those in any other business. The people that have sustained luck over many years are actually good at their craft, very disciplined and hard working.
In such an unpredictable business, how do you invest and manage risk?
IVANY: The quality of information you can expect as an investor in film is very low. It’s a creative industry and you’d like to get the same level of information that you would in other industries, but you just don’t.
LUM: You have to acknowledge that the business is up and down. My philosophy is to be really calm. You can’t think that the business is something that it’s not. You lose money on many films. What matters is how much you lose. At the same time, when you’ve got something good, you’ve got to invest – you might have five films coming out in six months but you might have one that is the ultimate. You’ve got to know what you have and be very considered about it.
IVANY: Troy’s unique because, in the film industry, when you’ve got executives and people around you, success has many fathers and failure is an orphan. They do get carried away and I think that’s one of the issues. But you’re also in a competitive process. You’re bidding for films you’ve not seen against other people and so you have to keep a measured view.
ELLIOTT: Harvey Weinstein’s (co-founder of Miramax Films) attitude was to make 10 films, with the view that one of them will strike. He just kept making a slate of 10, 10, 10, and the model worked.
How much of a threat is digital piracy to the industry?
LUM: It’s hard to measure how much of a threat it is but I think it’s very hard in the modern world to stop people from getting what they want. The windows between cinema, video and television are just going to have to collapse. If we’re not monetising the fact that our nephew wants to see Twilight on day one on his mobile phone, then we are losing money. We have to accept that that’s just the reality of the situation. Let’s get into the process of actually trying to work out how to make money from it.
ELLIOTT: The film industry is just going into it now but the music industry has near on collapsed in the last couple of years, and they are reinventing the wheel. The film industry is not far behind. So it’s moving, and who knows where it’s going but it’s going to be shaky times.
IVANY: Piracy is a huge problem because it devalues the commodity. The issue will be whether there is worldwide, coordinated action to tackle it. This will be difficult, because of the different legislative jurisdictions involved. Pirates bypass copyright legislation by operating in different countries. The problem is, the films they pirate get distributed internationally. Ultimately it’s going to be up to the industry to figure out a way it can control its product. They’ve got the most to lose because the industry could dissipate and there won’t be money to make new films.
LUM: If The Twilight Saga: New Moon was available immediately to everybody but it was more expensive to watch in your house than it was to go to the cinema, then kids would go to the cinema. The problem is that we don’t control it from day one.
What is Australia’s role in the international film industry?
ELLIOTT: At the moment, we’ve gone back to one of those bad cycles of making a lot of kitchen sink dramas. The bottom line is that nobody is going to see these films. If they do the maths and can work out what’s going to make a big noise, then we could have an explosion of Australian cinema again and I believe we’re right on the cusp of that at the moment.
IVANY: I think the Australian film and television industry is in reasonably good shape. There’s a strong demand for Australian product, both domestically and to an extent overseas. There is government support, although I think that will need to be increased if we want to maintain our position in the global film industry. I’d like to see more encouragement for risk. We have to create a framework that enables people to take more risks and be rewarded.
LUM: We’ve got the talent here. We’re just limited by our ideas. We don’t care where the films are from; we just want the films to have a good idea, good audience emotional involvement, and at the moment, we’re not thinking in those terms. It’s not about being Australian. It’s about having the breadth of ideas in cinema that people want to go and see.
http://www.business21c.com.au/2010/01/cafe21c-the-australian-film-industry