The Art of Filmmaking: Phil Grabsky
Searching out stories as well as audiences for conscientious nonfiction features, Phil Grabsky, one-man documentary band, plays a rare tune.
By Michael Fox
The prolific British documentary filmmaker Phil Grabsky must surely be the hardest-working man in the movie business. The veteran director of the much-loved In Search of… films about classical music titans Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn always seems to be in production on one ambitious film while developing at least two equally daunting projects as follow-ups. He goes to extraordinary lengths for his historical documentaries, and chooses the rockiest path for social-issue docs such as The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan (2003) and its acclaimed sequel The Boy Mir—Ten Years in Afghanistan (2011). Grabsky also authored Great Artists, I, Caesar and The Great Commanders, which accompanied his various nonfiction TV series. He recently produced Leonardo Live, a tour of the National Gallery exhibit “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” beamed via satellite to hundreds of theaters around the world. Somehow he still makes time for barnstorming tours to cities and theaters far from his native Sussex. I caught up with him on a spring afternoon at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco’s Richmond District, midway between the Marin County town of Larkspur where he’d screened In Search of Haydn the previous night and San Francisco International Airport. Grabsky spoke at length about the financial travails of documentary filmmakers and the decline of television.
Michael Fox: Let’s start with your approach to profiling late, great composers.
Phil Grabsky: It’s very hard to get screenings for films about classical composers, unless you dramatize it, and you do something like [Rene Feret’s 2011 feature] Mozart’s Sister. But I’m frustrated with [those films]. First, they’re very expensive and secondly, they’re full of inaccuracies. Amadeus is one of my favorite films but it’s not Mozart. It’s not about Mozart, it’s about Salieri, and the burden of mediocrity and what it’s like trying to be a great something or other and someone else comes along who seems to have it as a gift of nature. So of course when [playwright and screenwriter Sir Peter] Shaffer writes it, he exaggerates and highlights. That’s not Mozart. Mozart was a highly serious, highly determined, very commercial animal.
Anyway, so what was great about Chicago was there was a cinema that said, ‘We’ll give it a go.’ And it ran and ran and ran, and when I turned up, it was full audiences, extremely enthusiastic audiences. Lots of DVD sales. All this kind of thing. And you think, ‘You know what? There is an audience out there.’ Forget what television says about no one’s interested in this kind of stuff. All those cinemas who say, ‘Oh, we don’t think people are going to come and see a film about [Mozart].’ The same thing last night, in the Lark cinema. Fantastic. Virtually sold out. Very enthusiastic. They’ll have me back anytime. Certainly where I work, in classical music, arts films, it’s a real struggle getting that in cinemas. And also I do social docs, I’ve just done this one about this boy in Afghanistan [The Boy Mir—Ten Years in Afghanistan], so these are the toughest areas, in a way. What’s frustrating for me, as a filmmaker, is when the audiences see them, they really like them. There’s nothing so-so about it; they really like them. So it’s like, ‘Well, why won’t the cinemas…?’ That was a big release.
Fox: People come to nonfiction from all sorts of disciplines. Do you have a law background, or journalism, or history, or social work, or perhaps painting?
Grabsky: I made my first film when I was very young. I’m always interested in historical context of, say, great composers, because I know how important it was to me. I was always interested in photography, and I remember having a fight with my school. My school wanted me to try for Oxford or Cambridge to do English. I’m like, ‘No, I want to be a photographer.’ ‘No, no, no, you gotta go—‘ Anyway, I got into photographic college. But when I went there they said, ‘You know, we think you would benefit from a year off.’ For various reasons they said that, so I went to visit my brother, who at that time was in India. When I got there he said, ‘Look, you can only stay two weeks as my visa’s running out’—I thought I was going for six months. He said, ‘So we’ll go to one place, we’ll go to the north to Dharamshala where the Tibetans live.’ I said, ‘Who are the Tibetans?’ So we went up and I immediately got to know about the Tibetans and about the Dalai Lama. I thought, ‘This is an extraordinary story. I didn’t know this.’ And I’d been to a good school, you know. I thought, ‘I don’t know how I would do this photographically. I’d need audio to tell this story.’ So when I went back to my photographic college, I swapped to film. And during those three years, apart from learning my course, I made a film about the Dalai Lama and Tibet. And it was competently made and it sold to television. And then the TV channel asked us to make another film, and I needed a limited company, an incorporated company, to sign the contract. So in 1985, I became an independent producer, age 22.
Now bear in mind that the reason I’d chosen this course was because there were three courses in Britain where you got a union card at the end of them. Without a union card you didn’t work. And in those three years [at photographic school], [then-Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher, who is not someone I particularly look up to, but for good and ill she completely changed that, and basically destroyed the union. This is also the time that Channel 4 started in the UK, and we had three channels. Channel 4 came along and their remit, their directive, was ‘you only use independent producers. You don’t have any in-house team.’ Which, of course, was the way BBC and ITV did it.
I’ve always been interested in documentaries. I’m not interested in drama. I mean, it’s fun on occasion when for a documentary I’ve had a set, and we’ve done some reconstruction with ancient warriors. People dressed as Romans and stuff. It’s fun to do, but I like telling stories about real people. I did a lot of history in the ’90s for the BBC, usually co-produced with either A&E or the Discovery Channel. I, Caesar, a six-part series on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. That was three years’ work, every day. Every single day, ‘cause I did a book as well. You probably know, a book’s twice as much work as any TV program. And then lots of history programs with Terry Jones, again shown here [in the U.S.] on Discovery. Around about 2000 I was getting a bit frustrated with broadcast because they were getting less—I mean, you can see what Discovery is like now, and A&E. I switched on the TV last night, and I just happened to switch onto a program which was called 1000 Ways to Die. Rock ‘n’ roll music and graphics and they were going on about this guy—I don’t know if he died or not, but there was a shot of him basically covered in sand because he was unloading sand from a lorry and it had fallen on him. ‘The sand crushes your lungs so you’re asphyxiated.’ This is a guy dying. Whether he died or not, I’m not sure. That’s where TV’s gone, you know. TV now celebrates going into people’s lockers, and let’s look through their stuff to see what it’s worth. Ten years ago, there were people at Discovery who were interested in making films about Rome or Egypt.
Fox: I’m a staunch supporter of showing and seeing movies in theaters. But isn’t television, despite your understandable pessimism about its current state, still the best weapon and the best outlet you have?
Grabsky: Television is still the mass medium and I hold television to account for a number of social problems that we have. I think television has abdicated its public and social responsibilities in many ways. I think you can be entertaining and also be socially and morally responsible. Let’s take The Boy Mir—Ten Years in Afghanistan. I could make an argument why I think every single person on the planet should watch that film. If you’re interested in the world you have to be interested right now in Afghanistan, and if you’re interested in Afghanistan you have to be interested in the Afghan people. Who are the Afghan people? What are their concerns? I would say my film is relatively unique. I haven’t seen too many films which go inside an Afghan family. There’ve been lots of films, decent films, about the experience of American troops, French troops, British troops. There’ve been one or two about the Afghan cricket team or an Afghan beauty parlor.
Fox: Weren’t they Afghan refugees in Michael Winterbottom’s narrative feature In This World?
Grabsky: Yeah, they were. But you don’t really get a sense of—all you know about Afghanistan is poverty and/or perhaps the Taliban. The Boy Mir, people who’ve lived in Afghanistan and even Afghans say, ‘We’ve never seen inside an Afghan family like this.’ Now, ultimately the best way of me getting that message across is television. And I’ve worked really, really hard. We have had a lot of television screenings. Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Austria. We cannot get an American screening. I thought I was going to get a ‘P.O.V.’ screening. Then I thought we’d get an ‘Independent Lens’ screening. And they both only recently turned me down saying, ‘We prefer to concentrate on the American experience in Afghanistan.’ Same with In Search of Beethoven. The audience last night was stunned when I was explaining it to them that PBS said, ‘We really like the Beethoven film but we’ve got nowhere to put it.’ I find American television the hardest to sell to. They recently said they’d like to show two of my arts films, and that I’d need to pay for insurance, I’d need to give them video rights, video on demand rights, Internet rights, various other things—and they couldn’t pay. They wouldn’t pay me a penny, but they said, ‘What you can do, of course, is you can advertise your DVD on the end.’ That’s not a sustainable business, to say, ‘Well, we’ll show it. We’re not going to pay you.’
OK, so why do cinema? Well, the thing about cinema is one, it’s the best place to see a film. I absolutely recognize only 200 people watched it last night. But I know from being there that they had a very powerful reaction to In Search of Haydn. Two, it’s nice for the filmmaker to have that kind of feedback from people. One, to be in attendance when they like it is nice; two, to be in attendance when they have comments to make is important. It’s why I put stuff out. I think the most [TV viewers] I’ve ever had is five and a half million in the UK for a Muhammad Ali film. I didn’t get one email. Whereas last night I went to dinner with some of the audience, five or six, I had to cut it short after two hours. It was very interesting, their response, not only in terms of film but they were giving me suggestions for funding [and] other cinemas to show here. Also, what is increasingly important and will become more and more important for the distribution of films is video on demand and DVDs. DVDs aren’t going away; they still remain a fantastic medium, because often films like mine have bonus DVDs with lots of extras and stuff. Of course, video on demand. People are increasingly going to [streaming services]. One used to be able to argue that it was a much worse [viewing] experience. It’s still not as good as the cinema but now the screen’s getting better, the audio’s getting better. If you’d asked me this months ago, I’d have said that we’re not making any money from this kind of thing. Actually, last month we earned $600 from The Boy Mir iTunes downloads alone. That’s really quite significant. I mean, that’s one month and that pays one person’s weekly wages.
Fox: And the film is reaching people you might not have reached in any other way.
Grabsky: Different media appeal to different types of people. The audience last night, a slightly older audience, they’re maybe not on the Internet quite so much whereas the younger audience will be more on the Internet. I think television is running itself into the ground, so you can’t rely on television. Cinema—it can work. I argue for self-distribution, because if you get distributors involved on these kind of [specialty] films they’ll cover their costs, they’ll make a little bit of money, but that will be it. Then all the money’s gone. So you’ll find that you’ve had lots and lots of screenings and you’ve earned nothing. So although [self-distribution] is extraordinarily time-consuming, hugely time-consuming, I never recommend it to anybody unless you want to do 20-hour days, but if you are willing to do it, it’s worth it to try and get screenings.
Fox: Let’s go back to television for a moment, and the difference since you began making films in the 1980s.
Grabsky: It’s a huge change. You’re not going to bump into stuff [by accident] the same way. When television was at its best, it would have the news followed by a drama or a comedy show followed by, I don’t know—
Fox: A current events program.
Grabsky: A current events program, and people would sit in front of the TV for three hours basically being fed a relatively mixed diet. No longer. So if you like burgers, then you’ll find any flavor burger you want. You can get a burger from Venezuela. But if you as a burger eater didn’t realize how great dim sum was, you’re never going to find out. With In Search of Haydn, my work is to communicate to the audience that likes classical music. With The Boy Mir, I try to communicate to everybody. Now this is the double-edged sword of technology. On the one hand, technology gives you the theoretical possibility of talking to everybody. So I’m on my email last night, I’m emailing Chile, England, the United States, Canada, Germany—it’s worldwide. At times you have to think, what is realistic here? I’ve got to limit my ambition a little bit. It’s just all-consuming. You clear your inbox and you wake up in the morning and you’ve got another 50 emails.
Fox: Do you do a screening like last night, with an audience, to replenish yourself energy-wise, and to remind yourself why you do what you do?
Grabsky: No, ‘cause you only get that if it’s a successful screening and you don’t know that in advance.
Fox: But you know the quality of the work you’re showing, so you can anticipate a positive response.
Grabsky: What I’ve got half-established in the U.S.A. now is a series of cinemas that have shown my films before and have enjoyed the Q&As and have basically said, ‘Come back anytime.’ But I need more. I did hear of a filmmaker last night who’s about to go on a 70-date tour, 60 screenings in 70 days.
Fox: Do you remember his name?
Grabsky: It’s a her and I don’t remember, no. I can only imagine that she’s single and has no kids. The truth of the matter is, documentary is an infantilized industry. It’s a very childish industry. My friends who have been working in the same industry and have been relatively successful for 28 years—which I have been—if they’re lawyers or teachers or administrators or bankers or IT specialists, they work in a different commercial framework than I am. I’m still having to hustle every cinema. My friend, if he’s asked to give a talk, he’ll be paid $800. After a four-hour train journey to a cinema in Britain recently, where they weren’t paying for the Q&A, they weren’t paying for travel, they wouldn’t pay for a hotel, I turned up and I said, ‘I’ve had this journey, can I get a special coffee and cake? Do you mind if I have a bit of that for my lunch?’ We have to hustle the cinemas for $100 there, $50 there. My view is that if film festivals want to show our films, they’ve got to pay. If they want us to do Q&As, they’ve got to pay. This thing about cinemas only paying 30 percent of box office—why? Why are cinemas taking 70 percent? They get 200 people in, paying $15, in one screening they’ve taken $3,000. Explain to me why the filmmaker gets a thousand and the cinema gets two thousand. That comes from when the studios would say, ‘We want you to guarantee two weeks, four screenings a day.’ Some of those screenings are not going to be terribly busy so the cinemas say, ‘All right, but it’s got to be 65 percent in our favor.’ We come along with a one-off [specialty] film. ‘No, no exceptions to this.’ What is changing things is the [specialty] films like Leonardo Live, because they’re the most successful days in the cinema, and thankfully the distributors have said [to the cinemas], ‘It’s 50-50 or you’re not getting it.’ The cinemas know that it’s going to make them money, even at 50-50. So that’s starting to break that down a little bit.
We’ve hustled and hustled cinemas, and sent postcards, and social media, and end up chasing for a hundred-dollar check. It’s really not worth it. I cannot raise the money for my films. I can’t raise the up-front for broadcast because they’re not interested or they don’t pay enough, and I can’t raise it on the back end because basically I end up with five to seven-and-a-half percent of box office. I’ve been on tour now for four weeks with two more weeks to go—Australia, New Zealand, America. Has it been worth it? Many, many benefits but commercially, if I had stayed in Britain and done one good deal with a broadcaster, I probably would have made more money. What I would say to filmmakers is ‘Don’t do what I do.’ I’ve got reasons why I do it but I would say that if commerce is your preeminent necessity in that moment, then you’re better off sitting at home, on your computer, trying to do a couple of good deals. I can only hustle these cinemas because I have six or seven staff working for me in Brighton, some of whom are doing the deliverables, some are redesigning posters, sending out Blu-Rays. It’s a huge machine. All are being paid. I’ve probably made more films than most documentary filmmakers will in their entire lives, so I have a catalog of my own work and I’ve got a kind of strand developing. I want to do two more In Search of’s. I’m going to do Chopin and if I can raise the money I’ll do Bach. And the exhibition films I’ll continue. So I have some product. If you’re a one-off filmmaker, moving from Somalia to gas extraction in Wisconsin or whatever, they’re completely different niches. It’s very tough, very tough. And that’s why the Internet is going to be increasingly important.
Fox: I have to say you’re bumming me out. I operate under the illusion that in the UK, or Germany, there’s still support for quality nonfiction films, especially for filmmakers with a track record and a reputation.
Grabsky: We have no government funding in the UK, no local grants, no tax breaks because traditionally broadcasters are so strong. Everyone else says, ‘Why do we need to support [docs]?’ January 1, 2003, I think it was, the law changed whereby we own the copyright on our works. A very significant change. Channel 4’s distribution arm essentially went out of business because they no longer got the products automatically from Channel 4. Broadcasters are very savvy and they said, ‘All right, well if we don’t own it we’re not paying as much.’ So it went to a license fee. Channel 4’s #1 documentary strand, called ‘True Stories,’ took my Boy Mir film and are very happy with it. They talk about it publicly, it’s won some awards. They pay 15 percent of the budget. Where do you get the other 85 percent? Germany—they have some money, but as a non-German it’s pretty difficult. And the market’s hugely competitive now. All these new cameras—everybody I meet is a documentarian. They’ve got a still camera that shoots video in their bag or they’ve got a small video camera in their bag. It’s almost like anyone who picks up a pen now calls himself an author. Anyone who buys a video camera calls himself a documentary filmmaker. Now, you and I know that most of them aren’t, the vast majority are not, but they’re all sending in ideas to these commissioning editors, they’re all sending pitches, they’re all trying to get them on the phone. So the whole industry’s clogged up. How a commissioning editor can work their way through to find the good ones is beyond me and often, of course, they don’t. [Germany’s] ZDF are a big player but I’ve never managed to get anything out of ZDF. The one conversation I had with them was about the world’s greatest ports. And two had to be in Germany—no, I had to do Hamburg. And Discovery was involved, so we had to do, I don’t know, whatever the American one was. I don’t want to do stuff like that.
Fox: So talk about your approach to making historical docs for contemporary audiences.
Grabsky: OK, let’s look at something like [In Search of] Mozart. I wanted to make a film that would explore who Mozart really was. One of the first things I do is I write down all the things I don’t know, which is a lot. It’s important to write this stuff down to remember where the audience is. I’m like everyone else who got a vague sense from Amadeus but that’s about it. But I have the ability to go out and talk to people and I’m good at asking questions. I think the basis of documentary filmmaking is preparation and the ability to ask the right questions, I did a lot of history films and explored all sorts of different ways of doing it. We did a series for Discovery TLC called Ancient Warriors. All—well, not all, but a lot of reconstructions. Romans dressed up, Spartans dressed up, and sometimes we’d have a lot, a hundred, and sometimes you’d be recreating the Battle of Thermopylae with four Spartans on a Sussex beach in the winter. It’s amazing how often these re-enactors would run around the camera.
The better history programs I got to do next were The Great Commanders, also on DVD, where I looked at six commanders from Alexander the Great to [Marshal] Zhukov and each episode is based on a particular battle. Right away what I figured was that it’s in the storytelling. I didn’t want to show off as a filmmaker. The best compliments I get—I had this the other night when someone said, ‘That narration for Haydn was spot on.’ I love it when people compliment the editing or the photography or whatever, but I really love it when they compliment the narration, because the narration’s the backbone of the film. And it can’t be too flashy. I allow myself one purple moment in [In Search of] Haydn, right at the end, otherwise you got to be pretty transparent. You’re carrying a lot of information, it’s got to be underpinned to a clear-cut understanding of the subject, it’s got to be short, to the point, not too wordy. Anyway, The Great Commanders was all about that, this mix of intelligent narration with interviews. I enjoyed doing that.
Then I did six history programs with Terry Jones from Monty Python. I thought it would be good to use a presenter, and a presenter with a huge brain who doesn’t want to just spout off stuff, he wants to make a thesis. I remember flying with him, I was upgraded to business class for it, right at the front of the plane on Virgin Airways going across to New York. Fantastic. A real thrill. And he talked to me about the script the whole time. Before the plane took off to the moment the plane landed, he was, ‘Now how are we going to do this?’ ‘Come on, give me a break, I want to enjoy sitting in business class.’
That’s the way the BBC does it these days. It’s mediated through a presenter. [The BBC] feels the audience needs to see someone telling them stories. I moved away from that, except for my art shows with Tim Marlow, for two reasons. One, yes, it helps the storytelling but it also gets in the way of the subject matter. Two, it’s also an excuse for lazy filmmaking. ‘How do we cover this?’ ‘Oh, we’ll just see the presenter walking.’ And usually, when it’s a female presenter, the amount of shots from behind or silhouetted against the sun, it’s sick-making, it really is. I also have to say I can only survive if to some extent my name has some recognition. In this highly competitive industry, I need broadcasters and cinemas and audience to have some recognition for Phil Grabsky. I’ve just started a second company called Phil Grabsky Films.com, and it’s not because I have a massive ego but it’s branding. And it’s worked, because in Leonardo Live on the posters it’s Phil Grabsky Films.com and cinemas said to me, ‘Oh, right, you did In Search of Beethoven, didn’t you?’ Some of them, not too many, then did dual screenings, In Search of Haydn and Leonardo Live from the same director. If you do a history program with a presenter, you as director are completely anonymous. It’s a Terry Jones film.
I feel a massive responsibility to the composers to get my interpretation right, to get the best musicians possible and to have that feeling—this is my #1 thing, actually—to have that feeling that if Joseph Haydn sat down in front of the film, he’d watch it and go, ‘Yeah, good work.’
Fox: Let me steer you back to your approach. The In Search of films have a narrator, but they’re not illustrated monologues.
Grabsky: OK, the biggest fear straightaway when you approach a film like In Search of Mozart is, ‘It’s going to be concert footage, sit-down interviews and two-dimensional rostrums.’ And an audience, even if they are big fans of Mozart, if they are coming to the cinema or watching on television they need to be entertained. It should be enough I’ve made a selection through hundreds and hundreds of people and got 60 of the world’s best performers to be filmed live. That should be enough however I present it to you. But no, people want more. So with Mozart, I thought, to give this some energy, to give this some life, I’m going to have contemporary footage, as much location footage as I can get. You’re going to see shots out of the car I’m driving going along the motorways. It’s dynamic energy. It’s movement. And it reflects the fact that Mozart drove endlessly. Now he was driving, not on motorways, but he was bored driving in the same way that we’re bored driving. So that was my excuse. I also used contemporary images. This is something I’ve done in my history films. In Nero’s Golden House, we’re talking about the way ancient Romans were, and people becoming unhappy with Nero, and we have shots of modern Italians. We’re using modern images to help tell the story. In Mozart, people really liked it. It made it quite fresh and appealing. But I decided not to do that again for Beethoven nor Haydn. I felt that both those composers—and the way that I’ll do it subsequently—there is enough energy in the way that I film the concerts. There is enough energy, not necessarily in the framing of the interviews but in what they say. What I’m tending to do now is use location footage. Natural footage. The danger with these types of films is that as a director you have so little confidence in your audience that you start to throw too much at them. ‘Oh, you’re not interested enough in the music so I’m going to put some words over the top. Oh, you’re not interested enough in those two things so what I’m going to do is put lots of cutting images of this, that and the other thing.’ The key to any film about composers is the appreciation of the music. Even if I had had the money I wouldn’t have done the reconstruction route. Then I’m telling you what to think, and probably getting it wrong. In the same way as when I watch Roman reconstructions, they almost always get the armor wrong. I know enough to know that they get it wrong. Because they’ve gone to reconstruction groups, [and] all the guys who do that want to wear the same gear. In fact, the Roman army was picking up stuff, using other people’s, a complete mishmash.
Fox: How do you reconcile the desire to express yourself as an artist with serving as an intermediary for the composer? You’ve mentioned your responsibility to the audience, but what obligation do you feel to your subject?
Grabsky: I’m glad you asked that. I feel a huge responsibility to the composer. ‘Cause no one’s made these films before, and I’ll be surprised if anyone makes them again. Because it’s hugely complicated. That’s not to say people won’t make biographies of these composers. This huge wave of people coming in, [even] if they were interested to do this they wouldn’t do it this way. So there’s a definite degree to which this is unique. I feel a massive responsibility to [the composers] to get my interpretation right, to get the best musicians possible and to have that feeling—this is my #1 thing, actually—to have that feeling that if Joseph Haydn sat down in front of the film, he’d watch it and go, ‘Yeah, good work.’ And the same with Mozart and the same with Beethoven.
Fox: That’s a lovely way to end, but I’d like to add that the craft and the art of documentary are largely unappreciated.
Grabsky; That’s true. Even though I would probably say [that of my films] only Heavy Water: a film for Chernobyl was documentary as art. Having been around contemporary art just a little bit, I would still stumble, I’m still hesitating now, but I’m almost at the point where I could call myself an artist. I certainly don’t have any hesitation calling myself a filmmaker or a film director. And probably in the ’90s I would have said producer, so there has been a change.
http://www.fandor.com/blog/the-art-of-filmmaking-phil-grabsky
