Remo Notarianni, the editor-in-chief of The Pocket Arts Guide interviewed me the other day over a lot of gin and tonics, about the impact of new technology on Hong Kong's film makers.
REMO: Here's some questions. I know a lot of the answers but it would be good to get quotes. From what I can see, to a certain extent, after tiring of pitching scripts to producers you aimed for the full production process. You might want to compare Singapore in your answers and the UK even.
ME: That's about the measure of it. I'd say that compared to Hong Kong, the UK and Singapore are both more conducive to individuals just going and doing it. The UK has lots of regions with their own media agendas that a wide range of people can respond to. However the UK also has a peculiar division between amateur and professional. If you're labelled an amateur film maker it is hard to break out. And the new kit is often sen as the hall mark of the amateur. Film Schools in the UK as a rule still teach film rather than video, and working in any manner that doesn't conform to the concept of "Film Discipline" is problematic.
Singapore on the other hand is really making a push to create multi-platform content with interactive aspects and the use of new technological innovations as fully as possible. The UK has a strong literary and dramatic tradition and so writing is the cornerstone of everything whereas in Singapore writing is weak and so other aspects of film making are hoped to plug the gap, as it has in Hong Kong in the past. But Singapore has also understood the unique position of Hong Kong in it's hey day and how the market simply disappeared for the Hong Kong movie and it's reliance on basic recycled plots with lots of stunt and fight scenes. So Singapore is trying to develop a screenwriting culture, and they are making inroads in this area not the least because they hire me to go and teach Screenwriting there on a regular basis.
REMO: At what point and with what project did you see that it was possible to make the transition from a writer to filmmaker?
ME: It was when I could afford a professional camera that I realised there was an opportunity. And of course after yet another spate of pointless run ins with producers promising more than they could deliver. 30 years of being kept at arms length from the industry by people whose only talent was to be born with enough money has left me with a low opinion of most producer and director types and a very twitchy left eye.
REMO: What changes in the industry do you think made this turning point possible and how far can they take this?
ME: Digital editing and high quality cameras. And they get better and better. However they didn't invent Indie Film Making. There was a time when 16mm film, good German cameras, and cheap portable sound recording equipment, fueled a new wave. Then the 16mm fueled cinema of the fifties, sixties and seventies became somehow more expensive as people tried to get a bigger and better look and tell stories in a way that was less dictated by the limitations of the technology. You can see this process happening already with the digital revolution. Suddenly everyone is using the DSLR cameras and spawning a bunch of films heavily reliant upon focus pulling and shallow depth of field because it is supposedly "filmic" and all looking very much the same. The better or at least more entertaining stories pop up on the big screen, but often after more money has been injected and the post production improved or even whole segments of the film re-shot to make it work on the big screen. And right now a bunch of new cameras with big 35mm chips are coming on the market which will plug some of the technological weaknesses of the DSLR. Those who adopt early hope to gain an edge on the others. And adopting early means spending money and so you can see the cycle happening again where a technology that suddenly becomes more widely available, creates a body of creatives who seek advantages by cranking up the production values and throwing money at the problem. It is like a rock guitarist with his three basic chords just attaching a new pedal to his array of effects and creating a new sound. It is still just three chords, but it sounds cool for a brief moment. In short, nothing really beats learning the craft properly rather than relying on being a self-taught kid with a limited range.
REMO: What do you think is possible and what is not possible for writers using available resources?
ME: Writing is the bedrock of film making but writing for the budgets of these home brewed concoctions isn't necessarily a skill that scales up. For that matter having the ability to write for the big studios doesn't necessarily scale down either. I think for some it can be a stepping stone to big budget professional productions but for most it is an industry in and for itself. If you want to be a writer director, and I think that is the only thing worth being nowadays because the opportunities for making a living as purely a screenwriter are very limited at the best of times, you can train yourself by buying a camcorder and making small films. You then scale up to festival winning shorts, and then start attracting investors in bigger projects. You might also use the Internet to build audiences and reputations. However, whatever story you tell is always going to be limited by the budget. Locations are going to be few and close on hand. Actors are going to be whoever is available and also as few as possible. The shots are going to be dictated by the amount of time you have to get them, which is little. And the skills of the crew are going to be hit and miss.
In the end you will be competing with people who put more money into the process and buy themselves an audience. The trick here is to decide what is a real audience and what is merely a construct of the PR. Chasing after massive Internet hits can be self defeating and self deluding, and similarly Festival success can be more a sign of knowing the festival organisers than a sign of good film making. Money however can create it's own impetus and open up opportunities that can create a career. All of which makes the indie film world a dangerous one for the writer-director. If you stay writing for the budget you can command and make good little films, you might merely stay forever amateur and overlooked by those throwing more money than talent at the process. If you begin chasing the bigger production values that pull in a wider audience though you can get into a spiral of throwing money at the problem and forgetting the basics, ending up with nothing but lots of debt. And as you are not someone with venture capital on hand, because you are an artist and not a financier, this is a very bad position to be in.
I always tell people not to forget TV because here writing is everything. Look at the big TV series that are popular and see how they make episode after episode of brilliant stories all set in a studio set consisting of a couple of offices, a conference room, and a corridor. Look at House! At Boston Legal! At Mad Men! There is no reason why the film maker cannot strip everything back to merely recording a well acted and well written show. Better still writing for these kind of shows is actually easier than writing feature scripts, and certainly easier than writing a decent feature script for minuscule budgets. But, as will no doubt be pointed out, it aint film making.
However, if you take a look at a number of the emerging directors in the UK you will find an awful lot of them are coming out of making sitcoms for TV. They found a genuine audience and a professional arena in which to hone their ideas, and then attracted the confidence of investors. Whereas if you merely pick up your camcorder and go about making your films and trusting to the masses discovering you, you are going to be trapped within the amateur zone and not really engage with a professional industry, which you may even consider the enemy or somehow old-school. The belief that it is only a matter of time till the old-school move over and die and allow all the brilliant indie film makers to make a decent living through self-distribution and massive Internet hits, is a fantasy.
You have to get into the professional industry as quickly as possible and the easiest way into it is through the burgeoning multi-media multi-platform but essentially TV market. And then leverage that into film making with a viable commercial budget.
REMO: How do you think the current artistic environment is responding and helping to nurture the digital art in HK?
ME: There is no nurturing of anything in Hong Kong. All that has happened here is that the government is pointing HK's artistic community towards the north and sending them off to Beijing where there are more opportunities, though they have to toe the party line. Anyone not Chinese need not apply.
REMO: HK is said to have a spirit of freedom about it that may be conducive to the kind of artistic spirit that defined its golden age of independent cinema and do you think that makes a difference with these new opportunities?
ME: HK is also said to be a cultural desert and the last thing one would call most of those cheap and tacky films it churned out in the sixties and seventies is art. Horribly amateur, badly written, badly acted, and wildly dangerous for its actors, and extremely exploitative of many of the talents involved, the industry blossomed because there was quick money to be made in a region that was essentially third world without any competing local industries. The cinema chains wanted lots of product to sell cheap to a poverty stricken mass of entertainment starved people all around Asia.
By the end of the seventies things had changed considerably. In the eighties only the better Hong Kong films made money, but the investment required in them increased, and eventually at the end of the decade even the triads couldn't make money out of them and so you had the rapid decline of the nineties and the complete collapse by the turn of the century. And the reason for this is that HK's film industry could not develop its skills beyond the rudimentary. Those who had talent left for the US, often discovering that they didn't quite have as much talent as they thought, but they did learn that you have to have training programmes of some sort in order to compete in a very competitive market. And local industries require a government who will nurture such an industry. If you don't then Hollywood will dominate.
But it is hard to imagine how Hong Kong, with it's essentially cantonese culture, can justify nurturing a cantonese film industry when Beijing is doing its utmost to eliminate regional "dialects" and wants increasingly to emphasise, especially in Hong Kong, Chineseness, as defined by the Communist Party of China, which means speaking Poutungwa and working within the censorship regime of the mainland.
So whatever initiative that comes from the Hong Kong government is designed less to create a Hong Kong film industry but more to encourage engagement with the mainland industry. The scripts that the various funding schemes that have emerged back all have to be written in Chinese by Chinese writers, and although not explicitly stated the reality is that it means poutungwa and not cantonese. And as for those of us writing in English, forget about it. We are simply seen as a bunch of ex-pats doing what arty ex-pats do to pass the time, indulge in various amateur dramatic societies that have nothing to do with mainstream culture.
REMO: Talk about some current landmark projects. What do you think is likely to be more possible in future with regards cutting out the producers and how will that affect the industry?
ME: You can't cut out the producers. In fact one is seeing a plethora of producers. The film maker cannot spend their time doing all the production jobs. It is hard enough to write the script and direct the movie, but impossible to do that if you spend your time raising the funds, dealing with the legal requirements, dealing with distribution deals, insurance payments, equity allocation, publicity and the business of running a production office, let alone the requirements of an actual shoot with with costumes and props, location wrangling, equipment management, and catering and first aid. One man and a camera can create art and not have to bother with any of these requirements but if you want to make a movie that people will pay money to see, you need to tell stories with actors, scripts, properly dressed locations and photography that doesn't make you sick because it's shaky and blurred. You need producers to find the finance, producers to deal with the production management, and producers to organise the publicity and distribution. And given the extremely competitive environment you need these guys more than ever!
I'd say a skilled producer is the rarity. And probably the most undernourished aspect of the technological revolution that has made every man and his dog think themselves capable of producing a movie. Whether people will learn this is another matter because there is nothing glamorous about being a producer of low budget movies. You don't even get the girls like you used to. Big budget means big power and power and sex go together and it was always a powerful motivator of the film industry. The monstrous moguls that created Hollywood have had their day, but those are the guys people should study. If you are ever going to get out of the amateur zone you are going to need to think more like those guys than seeing the process as merely a logistical operation.
There are no landmark projects in Hong Kong. There are a few properly financed low budget movies around that have managed to make a few waves, but none of them have come out of the DSLR sector. There are some cheap action things that have gone straight to DVD, whatever that means, because you'll never find them in HMV. You can find some self-financed festival shorts, some features and webisodics that were hurrahed briefly before everyone started muttering how bad they were, implying that they would be doing something far better in the near future. Largely one is dealing with the equivalent of the self-published book. Only it is more expensive. Self financed films buy you an education in film making. And you have to practice to get better at it, and when you do, you move as swiftly as you can into the real industry with investors and commercial considerations and paying living wages to actors and technicians alike. That's where the break through material occurs, and that may well be heavily influenced by the techniques explored when you were making the amateur movies.
REMO: The industry itself has fragmented. How will that change things?
It always was wasn't it? There are lots of platforms for transmitting various content nowadays and I think people will become more attuned to this. A writer who can churn out three minute cartoon strips for viewing on cell phones can make a lot of money if it takes off. Aardman has made more money out of "Angry Kid" than out of Wallace and Gromit! The guys who churn out "Annoying Orange" are hardly engaged in a major artistic enterprise, but they are pulling in the bucks for very little outlay.
Building a production company on the back of successful content creation can lead to developing a base for feature film production, or mainstream TV series production. The guys who will win in this environment are those who think in terms of building up a production company with a good business model and a good stream of revenue from as many platforms as they can cope with. That's the kind of artist/film maker who will rise to the top of the pyramid. I'm not sure whether that wasn't always the case.
There will always be guys who just go off and make a movie regardless of whether there is an audience for it and some of those might get lucky but for the most part they'll make their movie, get bored or discouraged, and probably broke,and move on. Some will persist in their folly and finance it by teaching or whatever other sidelines that spring up out of their involvement in film making. I would probably count myself among this group. I don't see any of this changing.
The only thing that changes is the number of people thinking they can do it. And there are more out there, and mostly too naive to look at the whole business aspect. You can concentrate on the art and hope the businessman will come in and enable you to exercise your creative muscle, but the businessman will simply exploit you, especially if all they see is a one hit wonder, and especially if they see someone who is too blind to be aware of the business side of things. I suspect even more predatory and scammy producers will emerge and con people. Perhaps that will be the greatest change of the present environment, more scumbags finding more vulnerable victims to exploit.