6am my time, grey outside. Talking to Australian radio – 3pm
their time & sunny. No wonder I get confused. Life would be so much
easier if you didn’t have to sleep. I have to ring New Zealand now, then LA….I
am rapidly losing touch with what time or day it is in little ol’ Brighton. I
only got back last night from a thoroughly exhausting but highly productive
four days filming in Warsaw (for In Search of Chopin).
So it feels time to share some thoughts…. Our biggest
project remains of course EXHIBITION. Our second film in the
brand went out last week. Munch from Oslo has been very well received by
audiences although some of our cinema partners have yet to screen so we don’t
have a full picture. It takes years to build a loyal audience, as NT Live now have, but we’re clearly moving
in the right direction. The problem is always going to be press &
publicity – trying to connect with folk who have hundreds of other ‘products’
all chasing for their attention. We only have 162 Likes on our facebook page –
we need to get into the thousands. The galleries in Oslo have expressed their
delight with the film which is nice – and has led to new (and major) galleries
coming to us. That’s great – and quite right too! It’s our idea. It’s only
three years since everyone was looking at me in amazement at the very idea of
putting an exhibition in a cinema – not any more. The paintings by Munch looked
absolutely fabulous on the big screen and difficult and expensive though it was
I am thrilled we chose that exhibition to cover. Now we’re busy on Vermeer –
and really that should be a blockbuster. What a painter! And there is this myth
that there’s little to say about him or his work as we don’t have many records.
Well, a bit of detective work and actually one can say an enormous amount. I
start editing the biographical films in a couple of weeks and can’t wait.
Having been lucky enough to film the 4 Vermeers at the National Gallery of Art
in Washington DC and then the 5 Vermeers at the Met in New York a couple of weeks ago, I know just how
remarkable his art is. So that’s very exciting. Plus we’re advanced in the
planning to film 4 or 5 more major galleries & exhibitions next year.
As always it’s the funding that slows us down… We’re trying a Kickstarter crowd-funding appeal
but that’s not working out. And talks with possible brand sponsors
continue without resolution. On the other hand, we have more and more cinemas
coming on to the network. And DVD sales of Manet are strong. I saw a guy gave
the Tate £10m yesterday…I wish he’d thought of us instead! It was exciting
though to be in Warsaw yesterday knowing that Munch would be shown there. Also
last week working with Leif
Ove Andsnes in Bergen and knowing Munch would be shown there
too. Then, as I said, in the USA a few days before that and Munch would be
there too. Global really does mean global. I hope my In Search of Chopin gets
the same distribution.
The past few days in Warsaw have provided so much material –
I did six extensive interviews with Polish experts and that added so much
colour and understanding to the story. Plus a lot of hiking around with my
camera gear to get location footage – some of which I have never seen in any film on Chopin. By the way, I have
to say I very nearly missed the flight out. I had top leave home at 4am on
Sunday and then foolishly realised I was low on fuel. I stopped to fill up and
for the first time ever I put a Petrol pump in to my Diesel car. It fitted but
wouldn’t start: then I noticed my error. It didn’t start because the attendant
had, by pure chance, dashed out for two minutes at that very moment and the
pumps need the attendant to turn on. What a stroke of fortune. Once I got to
Warsaw, it was a heck of a schedule – non-stop dawn to dusk but I have cracked
the all-important early years now. Be under no illusuions, he was not made in
Paris– he was pretty much fully formed when he left Warsaw as a young man. Our
image of Warsaw is so stuck on the images of 1944 & 1945 that we forget
what it used to be like…one of those great cities like Dresden, Prague, Berlin,
St Peterburg and so on. All being well, I can get to editing the film in the
Autumn.
One last thing: I must end by paying tribute to an
Australian documentary director that has died.Dennis O’Rourke was
an inspiration to me and many others – and is a great loss to the industry.
Here’s a extract from an unfinished book (that I hope to publish one day) about
my time in Afghanistan where I bizarrely first met Dennis on my first night in
Kabul:
The guesthouse was called Everest and the two young Afghan
owners, who had immediately seen an opportunity to make some money in post-war
Kabul, were very welcoming. Some tea, toast and boiled eggs were placed on a
table decorated with plastic roses in a cup of water. Nearby, gripped by music
videos on the satellite TV, sat Iranian traders, a Pakistani journalist and,
most remarkably, another film-maker. His name was Dennis O’Rourke and, to steal
a line from the film Casablanca, ‘of all
the gin joints in all the towns in all the world’, what a coincidence that
he was here! For, in some ways, it was his influence that had brought me to
Kabul in the first place. The feeling that I needed to change the way I made
films had been creeping up on me throughout the 1990s. I loved making films for
the BBC, Channel 4 and the Discovery Channel but this was unquestionably the
start of a ‘dumbing down’. Meanwhile, stories from outside the UK were frowned
upon; reality strands were the new ‘must-watch, water-cooler’ TV. ‘Big Brother’
was a massive success and I remember how joyful its commissioning editors were.
In private they told me that the worse the housemates behaved the happier they
were. Personally, I was fed up with it. I didn't want to make series about
British shopping centres and airports and ignore the other 200-plus countries
in the world. As I was beginning to ponder just how to change things, I visited
the Sheffield Documentary Festival. There I ignored the many sessions dealing
with what commissioning editors were looking for; instead I sat for three days
watching feature documentary after feature documentary. This was before Michael
Moore came along and changed everything by making Fahrenheit 9/11. That film took more than $100m at the box office
and, in doing so, opened up all sorts of doors. At this time, the very
word‘documentary’ was dirty to distributors and exhibitors. Few wanted them. And
yet here in a dark cinema in Sheffield, I was seeing film after film where the
film-makers clearly had felt compelled, no matter what, to make the films they
wanted to make. One film in particular made a real impression on me. It was
Dennis O’Rourke’s Cunnamulla. What
most impressed me was that he had shot it on his own with a small new Sony
camera called the PD150. Now, when the history of film-making is written, a
whole chapter ought to be dedicated to this piece of technology. This small
camera changed everything. Costing only £4000, fully kitted out, these cameras
were designed by Sony, apparently for the corporate market. But they made them
so well that professional film-makers snapped them up – no longer did we need
an expensive crew costing thousands a day – now, if you were a director who
knew how to use a camera, you could pack all you needed in one case and hop on
a plane. The only hurdle was your own indecision. People have asked if it was
hard to get into Afghanistan? No, it was easy. I caught a plane to Islamabad
then another to Kabul. I then caught a taxi and checked into a hotel where,
bizarrely, I had bumped into O'Rourke. Dennis was there making his own film –
eventually called Landmines: A Love Story.
We chatted over a beer and it was rather comforting that Dennis wasn’t really
sure what his film was to be about – the premise was to look at stories
concerning landmines in three different countries. In the end, it was focussed
entirely on Afghanistan. Here was a big-time, well-known director also on his
own in a difficult city searching for a city. If I had admired him before I
admired him even more now. To cap it all – and cementing my unequivocal support
for the man ever since – he gave me the last beer in his fridge. That says it
all.
