PRA Declassified

My sister over in the UK sent me this video link.

http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2563870.htm

Margaret Pomeranz (who was on the interview panel for FimLab) is interviewing producer Ted Hope for last night’s “At the Movies”. He talks about his early experiences working with Auteurs like Ang Lee and Hal Hartley on their earliest low-budget projects.

Hope reckons about 3,500 features are made in the US each year under $1,000,000 with maybe 2 or 3 of them finding distribution and the filmmakers going on to have careers. What helps these films and filmmakers get noticed is they are trying to do something very innovative that gets noticed. He was obviously lucky enough to work with two of these guys who broke through the impossible odds. He reckons despite available technology and technical literacy, emerging filmmakers now do not have the same opportunities in the market as he did when he started out.

He also briefly mentions working with Scott Meek, former FFC evaluation manager, who also interviewed us for FilmLab. Let’s hope we can be one of the three that make a break-out film.

Low budget films do succeed. Sometimes. But overwhelmingly they fail. Just exactly what are we up against?

At last year’s LA Film Festival Financing Conference, former Miramax president Mark Gill made his famous speech on the challenges facing filmmakers.

“Here’s how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year—generally with budgets under $10 million—maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That’s one-tenth of one percent.

Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure.”

It’s hardly encouraging is it? You raise an enormous amount of money, and even then it’s going to be hard to make the film on that much. Then after all that effort you struggle to even get it in front of a paying audience. Given that it’s rare for an Australian film to made on more than $10M, it doesn’t bode well.

It sounds a bit harsh. Mark is talking about US theatrical distribution here, and there are other places to a film can get seen. But still, we have lofty ambitions at PRA and want to make the sort of films that will find an audience in the US. Talented people with great films have tried this and failed.

Earlier this year, Oscar winning animator Adam Elliot was in the sort of situation Gill was talking about. His first feature, Mary and Max, made on a budget of roughly A$8 Million was the opening film at Sundance, but has been unable to find a US buyer. It has a great sales agent, Icon, doing sales for it and marquee attachments in the cast. Just goes to show how hard it could be even when you have all the right ingredients.

It costs money to make money.

Low budget films can succeed. Napoleon Dynamite, The Blair Witch Project, and Wolf Creek are the examples that Eddie always likes to remind me of. But overwhelmingly, they fail. For each Napoleon Dynamite, there are 1000s of films that will never see the light of day. Yopu want your film to get in front of an audience, and you want the investors of your film to get some sort of decent returns or else they won’t come back.

Given that, there are people who have found success making films for under 2M. At that amount, you don’t need to make as many sales to succeed. A US sale might not even be necessary.

There have been some interesting examples of animated low budget features:

•    2004 – Hungarian film “The District” (cut-out) was made on $500,000 and sold to 10 territories.
•    2006 – Danish Film, “Terkel in Trouble” (CG) was made on $2,000,000 and sold to 10 territories, and is among about a dozen low budget animated features the Danish Film Institute has funded in just the last 10 yrs.
•    2008 – Israeli film “Waltz with Bashir” (rotoscoping) was made on $2,000,000 and sold to 24 territories.

It’s hard to see how we’re going to keep the cost down. Expensive animation can be cheaper than expensive live action. But cheap animation is certainly more expensive than cheap live action.

Defrim Isai at SAFC often likes to make the backhanded compliment that we over-deliver in our work. It’s not untrue and we’ve never wanted anyone to think that we underdelivered. The possibility that we could bite off more than we could chew on such a big scale would definitely have been concerning to them when they considered us.

I don’t think the agenda of this is necessarily to make something that succeeds commercially. If it were it would have required a lot more paperwork in the application. A lot of this will be about development, and making a feature that will show the world what we’re about and open the doors to more opportunities.

I think we can manage that.