At the end of January 2014, Dave Gibson, founder of the Wellington production company The Gibson Group,
took on the role of CEO of the
New Zealand Film Commission. Since then he’s been busy introducing his ideas to the film industry for a more streamlined, effective and accessible Film Commission. He kindly took the time to talk us through his proposed changes, as well as discuss his new life as a bureaucrat.
At the end of January 2014, Dave Gibson, founder of the Wellington production company The Gibson Group, took on the role of CEO of the New Zealand Film Commission. Since then he’s been busy introducing his ideas to the film industry for a more streamlined, effective and accessible Film Commission. He kindly took the time to talk us through his proposed changes, as well as discuss his new life as a bureaucrat.
RC: So, how’s it’s going – its been three months now – are you enjoying life as a bureaucrat?
DG: When you put it like that I suddenly cringe! I would rather say I’m enjoying life at the Film Commission. I had one day where I went ‘this is funny, all the other days have been really good, why have I gone home tonight and felt a bit weird? Not as chirpy as I normally am’. And I thought it through; everything I did today was to do with politics, and the political aspect of the job. I went OK, well, that’s interesting, I need to mix it up a bit and at least spend a certain amount of time every day helping get projects made and helping people’s careers, the kind of things I came into the job to do. I know there’s going to be some politics and you can’t avoid that but the trick is obviously not to do it all on the same day.
RC: During February and March you’ve been around the country meeting with the industry outlining a number of changes, what’s the reaction been like?
DG: I think it’s been pretty good. The type of feedback I get, and it sounds wrong if you put it this way, I’ll just sound like some arrogant wanker but that’s alright, is basically, ‘nice to know there’s a vision, nice to know you’ve got some philosophy you’re basing everything on’.
The presentation [available to watch at www.nzfilm.co.nz] has worked pretty well for people, because they go, ‘OK I get it. I might have a vision I think is about making culturally significant films, but then someone else might say, look I think it’s about making a living. At least you have an overall concept of what you think the industry should look like’, and that’s seems to have gone down well.
Then the other thing I’ve had pretty good feedback from is a real sense that if that’s the vision then all that the Film Commission is there to do is to try and help make that happen, and everything we do comes off the back of that. How we structure ourselves, how we divide up our work, who does what, how we go about it, is all to do with that, and people seems to be responding quite well.
Just little things, like we did this shift into the Talent Development and Relationships area and set that up with Chris Payne running it, and that seems to have had a really good response. People are delighted that someone is actually saying to them, ‘Are you going to Cannes? Why aren’t you going to Cannes? Where are you at with your film, what’s happening?’ Just pushing it along a bit really, and that sort of thing seems to be good.
RC: Would it be fair to say there’s a loosening up – a change in attitude and accessibility, as well as an attempt to streamline the organisation. Is this the result of someone with 35 years experience in the private sector making sense of a public sector organisation?
DG: I wouldn’t have put it that way, but it’s not bad. Someone said to me the other day, why do you think you got the job? And I said, ‘I don’t necessarily think I was the best person at particular things but I think I’ve got a nice balance’. I’ve got a production background, I get what people are trying to do when they’re trying to make something and it’s not that easy, and how to help.
The other thing which I have, which I think is a little bit underrated, is I have actually run a company with about the same number of people and about the same turnover. So, that sort of idea of trying to make life fun and simple and easy for people in an organisation so that they feel good about doing their job, and they can go home at the end of the day and go, ‘well we did some shit today and it was good’, people seem to be responding well to that. I’m hoping that I can help the people here work a little better, and maybe a little smarter and that’s probably a private enterprise thing.
RC: I think it’s a very brave call to transition from rejection letters to rejection phone calls. Who has to make those phone calls?
DG: [laughing] In a weird way it’s actually easier. Sometimes with rejection letters they go backwards and forwards and they take hours and hours to write because everybody’s very nervous about how to get it right, and it’s like love letters, people pour over them and go,’ but what does that really mean?’
I did get a very funny letter from someone, this was before the stage when we started doing the phone calls, and this letter came in to me because it was a ‘I want you to override this decision’ letter, and the first sentence was something like ‘I don’t want to be one of these grumpy old buggers that just goes on and on’, and then preceded to do that for like seven pages. I just looked at it and I started thinking about writing back and then thought, ‘no, this is the problem’, and just picked up the phone and went, ‘no we’re not going to change our mind I’m sorry’. Sometimes it’s really simple [with scripts], it’s OK. It’s nice, it’s not too bad but it’s not great. It hasn’t hit the bar, it’s just another film, it’s nothing that’s going to give us a fright or excite us or make us cry or anything, and that’s an OK answer.
RC: Tell us a little about the changes you’re proposing, for feature film development and funding?
DG: I think the big one is, we’re not just reading scripts and saying what we think about the scripts, we’re actually trying to decide about the films [in general] and so we’re coming off much more the original ideal; is it a really great idea, does it excite us? Sometimes the Film Commission in the past has been guilty of finally funding a film because they had run out of ways to say no, and when they give the person the money no one feels particularly happy. Well, that’s just crazy. I want us to be really excited by a film and say we’re so keen to give you the money because we’re so excited about the film. So I think that’s a big thing. Trying to get a little bit more positivity and that this is a film we want to make or support being made, this is what we want to see happen.
And a more holistic view right through with quite a lot more emphasis around the post-production and the cuts. We’re trying to put in this new thing called the Pause Clause which is where everybody sits down for a while and has a cup of tea and a good look at it and makes sure it’s the picture we all set out to make, and if it’s not that’s OK. Maybe, let’s change the marketing plan or that sort of thing. So probably just a more holistic view.
RC: So you’re not just looking at the script but the big picture – where does cultural significance come in?
DG: That’s still there; the thing with audiences is that it’s appropriate… It’s like I say to people, if you say to us, this is a really commercial film and it’s going to make a lot of money, then you should expect us to take a corresponding commercial position on it and make sure that all of those things work. If you want a whole lot of money because it’s commercial, well we want to know what the marketing plan is and we want to see evidence from the market that the sale agents thinks that.
But if you come in and say this is a culturally significant, delightful coming-of-age art film that will play at the Rialto Cinema and Lighthouse Cuba in Wellington, that’s fine. There is no suggestion at all of commercialising the business, it’s more just getting the right audiences for the right films and everyone knowing what we’re doing at the time. What I’d love to see more than anything is more diversity of films. More films getting made in a more diverse range.
Look at the documentary Gardening with Soul and how well that’s done because it’s working to that grey audience, and its one of the few growth cinema going audiences. They don’t download, they’ve got good word of mouth, they go [to the movies] during the day as well as at night, it’s a good audience, but we’ve been a little bit slow to be making the number of films that you’d expect. Everyone sits and looks at Marigold Hotel and Quartet, but where’s our one? It’s not to say we shouldn’t be making the other films, it’s just we should be making a little bit more of a diverse range.
RC: There is this new emphasis on exciting ideas and great films which sounds really encouraging– however I’m sure the FC believes its been making great films. So in this new era, what makes for an exciting idea and great film?
DG: You don’t know till you see it. That’s the really interesting thing. There’s no formula, that’s the whole point, that it’s not a formula, you just get that feeling when you read it and you think ‘oh my god’, it’s just one of those things, it just bites you.
RC: There are also significant changes proposed in the marketing and selling of NZ film, and you’ve decided that being a Sales Agent is no longer a core function. What’s brought about this change?
DG: It was sort of happening anyway. There are more sales agents now than there’s ever been. They’re mostly based in the northern hemisphere where they’re close to the markets and because it’s so competitive they can provide significant cash advances on films of several hundred thousand dollars. The Film Commission is pretty much the last government agent film sales operation in the world I think. I couldn’t name you another one. There might be one somewhere, but the world’s moved on, it doesn’t make any sense.
What’s happening a little bit is that films that have got good international audiences are getting international sales agents and advances and they’re in the right place. If it’s a dance commercial film, they’re getting a dance commercial type sales agent, if it’s a particular art film they’re getting a French sales agent from Paris, they’re getting the right kind of thing. So the films the Film Commission had were probably not films that were going to sell particularly well and so then the thing becomes a bit of a spiral. You’ve got to go to overseas markets and have overheads and costs associated with that, but you’re just selling a few films that aren’t really selling so you might as well get out of the business.
Having said that, what we are going to do is try and start a guardianship model for all of the back catalogue and try really hard to look after it properly to make sure the relationships with the sales agents are properly monitored and films don’t get lost, and people don’t go bust and the negatives disappear.
And also, we’re going to be building the VOD [Video On Demand] platform, it may takes us a number of years, but we’d eventually like to have the situation where you could watch any NZ film you wanted in NZ off the platform. I think that would be great.
RC: And there are some significant changes to the short film program as well which now comes under the banner of Talent Development and Relationships. The idea is that short films lead to feature films, but I do imagine that this is one of the changes that has ruffled a few feathers.
DG: I would expect it to ruffle a couple of feathers. There’s a consultation on it, so there’s a paper that has been put on the website that we’re asking for feedback on. I’ve had plenty of people tell me how good an idea it is, and I’ve had a couple of people feel uneasy and nervous about it. I’m just waiting to see what the specific criticisms are. The bottom line is in our production area we’re really in the feature film business. Yes, shorts have a place, but it’s not the primary driver and I’m worried about a couple of things. One, is that it’s too easy for people to be doing several shorts in a row and not moving on to features or having it in their mind, and if that’s the case I don’t think we should be supporting them beyond one or two short films. There’s a point where, that’s not what we do, that’s not what we’re here for. If we can take some of that money and do something else I think I’d rather.
The second one is that people are not moving through at the rate and speed and drive that I would expect. Taika Waititi (Two Cars, One Night) is an exception, and the next film he’s got is really big and we’ve already made a conditional investment depending on him getting some other investment for it. But he’s an exception, and I feel if we can focus it a bit more that would be good. The anecdotal story I tell is that there are people whose short films get into festivals, they’re invited to the festival, the Film Commission pays for them to go, they become hot for a week, but they have nothing to sell because they don’t have a feature script. Then they go home and maybe two years later they have a feature script by which time people have forgotten who they were. It’s a business that works a lot off people having a moment and I think New Zealanders are pretty poor at managing our careers and thinking what we’re going to do next and and talking to people about it.
We don’t have agents much here for directors and writers, those who sort of plot someone’s career like they do in the States or the UK. I’ve made a point of saying you don’t have to use the talent development department, it’s not compulsory or anything, but I think some people would benefit from having a few chats to people and talking about what to do next.
RC: So you need to have a feature script in order to get funding for a short film?
DG: A script in development to get the Premium Shorts funding, which is the one for trailers, scenes, taste-tapes, short films or whatever it is. It doesn’t have to be in development with us, it just has to be in development. We have to look at it and feel reasonably interested in it, think that it’s got some opportunity to cut through. You can’t just go and write it over night.
And then on the lower level the Fresh Shorts will still operate the way it is, you can come in and you’ve got a good short or not, but if you get into that and you’ve got an idea for a film we will throw another ten grand at it, to help you get going on writing the script. People seem to like that. We’re not going to make everybody happy, I’ve worked that one out pretty quickly.
RC: And all this is a response to what – what are the foremost challenges for the FC you see over the next few years.
DG: If you wanted the longer-term vision you’d have to come back to me in a little while, and I don’t mean that because I don’t have one. What I’m trying to do are some things I think need doing quickly, shake it up a bit and get it refocused. The most I would say is that the government have done a really good thing with these incentives, and yes it came off the back of Avatar, but at the same time they’ve increased the television incentives to 40%, they’ve introduced that new middle ground for $15 - 50 million features at 40%, so it’s a pretty good landscape. What I worry about the most is that the industry won’t take advantage of it, that in two or three years the government can say, well we gave you a pretty good setup and you guys haven’t really come through. So I think what the Commission needs to try and do is things to increase the variety and amount of stuff getting made. It’s about that simple, and it would be really good if it was good! But we do need to kick it along a bit, so whatever we can do to do that is probably the middle term aim.
RC: What’s been the biggest surprise, what’s the one thing you didn’t know about the Film Commission three months ago?
DG: This is very much an industry thing, its not a general public thing, but I’ve had a couple of conversations with producers where I’ve said ‘how can we help you?’ and a few of them are very cagey, sort of, ‘I won’t tell you too much about that… I’d rather wait until I’ve got all my ducks lined up and come in’. I take that to mean in some cases a slight weariness about the role of the Commission and whether or not by sharing it won’t be a partnership, it will be a negative thing and somehow we’ll tell them what’s wrong with it and it will depress them. And I think that’s interesting.
We all know that you take a script to market you don’t want to take it too early because you know when you’ve fixed all the problems and you take it back to those people a few years later they go ‘oh, I think I read that, it wasn’t very good’. And I get that, but I do think it’s kind of interesting because I don’t think you can develop these things in isolation...
One of the things that interests me is that lots of good ideas come in for a first draft or an early script and then a lot of them get lost somewhere, and I’m trying to work out where they’ve gone. Because they’re not coming up the back end, they start off on the straight and they come out of the gates and they all look pretty good and by the time they’ve come around to the funding line they vanished and I’m not sure what’s happening. That’s probably the interesting one.
RC: Best of luck, and thanks for talking to us!
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