Playback Magazine: Paul Interview, March 09
The first line pretty much sums up the interview!
Paul Gross stops short of calling Toronto's filmmaking community a bunch of snobs. He says unabashedly, however, that Toronto's artistic "intelligentsia" has "made trouble in making our artistic output relevant to the population that pays for it."
In this one-on-one with Playback, Gross later turns down the critical volume and adds that he likes "cerebral" and festival films, "and watches them."
Of course, in his mini-diatribe Gross is ultimately empathizing with ordinary Canadian taxpayers who are indirectly the largest financier of movies in this country. And he says his background in the overtly populist medium of television - and its obvious reach to mass audiences - is the largest single deciding factor in why he is the only Canadian director to ever make a homegrown film to take in over $4.4 million at the English-Canadian box office.
Gross' attitude is also very revealing of his own duality as a pragmatic man (from booming Alberta), living the life of an artiste in the big smoke. He also slides just as easily behind the camera as he does into the glare of its lights as a sexy leading man.
Gross' multiple hats (writer, producer, director and actor) in the epic First World War love story Passchendaele drew some criticism from the filmmaking community when the $20-million film was in production. But Gross is not one to take anything lying down in the mud.
The outspoken and successful cineaste speaks candidly with Playback about what he thinks is wrong with the film funding system - and with the attitudes of 'film people' in general - and why his passion project will win this year's Golden Reel award in spite of everything.
Playback: How did you make a movie that makes money in English Canada?
Paul Gross: "I have no idea. You say that like I have my finger on some kind of pulse. I don't know that I do, but I've spent quite a lot of time in television. TV teaches you something about your audience.
If you're strictly in a film audience, you tend to gravitate into film festivals, which are not very reflective of the audience in general. You make films that are liked at the film festivals and discussed at the cocktail parties, but they don't necessarily appeal to the broader audience. I've spent most of my career in film and television being involved in a broader audience, and I think that probably would account for it.
You're not interested so much in making art films as you are in reaching Canadians. Is that fair to say?
Yeah, I think it's fair to say that's what I do. But it's not as conscious as 'I'm going to sit down now to construct something that will appeal to the broadest possible audience.' The story of Passchendaele is a story I wanted to tell. There was nothing compromised in it. I didn't say to myself, 'Oh, I'm going to need these ingredients,' because I think if you do that, it's quite probably not going to work.
It is a script that unfolded itself, over a number of years, and it ended up in that shape on its own. It was obviously guided and informed by me, but that's what it wanted to be. And then it just happens to be something that appeals to the popular base.
I think what happens quite often with an art-house film is that it is actually made more conscious of the audience for whom it is to be given. It is designed to appeal to a certain critical body, and it is designed to appeal to a certain level of intelligentsia that populates film festivals.
I think the intelligentsia of this particular city has really distorted our understanding of what we make culturally. Toronto has been damaging, in the long run, because it's a very peculiar city. It generally has a posture that kind of sneers at the rest of the regions, while at the same time, cowering in a sort of shame at the all-powerful New York City. It's caught inside this weird half-crouch, both intellectually and emotionally, and it is particularly present in the artistic community. And I think it's created problems for us nationally, because Toronto is the gravitational center for English Canada. As much as that may piss off people in Vancouver, it's just true. It has been, in any event, where the cultural financial gravitational center is, and with that crouched posture, it's created a very peculiar way of looking at ourselves and has made us have trouble, from time to time, in making our artistic output relevant to the population that pays for it.
This isn't a broadside against intellectual films. I'd like to be very clear; I like cerebral stuff. I do go to it. But the things that have moved me most over my life have been those things that have suspended my intellect and engaged my heart much more so. I can always read an essay about the First World War, but it's hard to get that experience of someone picking me up and shaking the hell out of me and putting me down somewhere I've never been before. It's that transporting that appeals to me in the artistic transaction.
I would suggest to anybody who thinks it's easy to move people collectively, that they should try it.
If you can get 500 or 600 people to sit down in a cinema and have them all collectively moved to tears; if you can do that, then you can turn your back on it, but it's not an easy feat.
The day I saw the press screening for Passchendaele with two other reporters, the three of us were sitting there sniveling. And when I got back to the office I said, 'You won't believe what I just saw; I saw a movie made in Canada. Somebody finally made a movie.' It has a big-movie feel and it feels engaging. I started to wonder right then, how do you do this when other English-Canadian films don't seem to do it?
Well, we've been discouraged from it; the whole system does not encourage that kind of filmmaking. I don't ascribe this to anybody; it just happened in a natural [way], but nevertheless became a very peculiar and skewed process. Our evolution was skewed. I think there was kind of a collective decision made many, many years ago to say, 'Well, we can't compete head-on with studios, which is a legitimate conclusion. You can't go head-to-head with Armageddon and make your own astroid-hitting-the-Earth movie; that is really the provenance of big-studio pictures.
The idea then was, 'We'll make our mark through the festival circuits. Our films will go to Cannes and they'll get notoriety and they'll get distribution and then they'll play.' That was very sensible many, many years ago, and it did produce great stuff from Patricia Rozema, Atom Egoyan, and these people are fantastic. But film festivals of that nature inevitably tilt the film production toward auteur filmmaking, and any given country can only support so many auteurs. How many come out of Germany? How many come out of any other country?
How about Canada?
Even in Canada there's not that many; Atom kinda holds down that position, and [David] Cronenberg, certainly. What I admire about both of those guys - and I admire them hugely - is that they are commercial filmmakers. Their films pay for themselves, and that's hard.
There's nothing to be sneered at with this. Film is a bizarre collision of art and commerce, and they are fantastically expensive undertakings, even the cheapest film. The average box office for independent cinema in Canada is $500,000. That's well below the average cost of a film to make.
So it's a very risky and very difficult business to compete in, and getting worse, because the independent cinema market worldwide has collapsed in the last two years, so it's pretty well dried up.
So what Atom can accomplish and what David accomplishes, and others, is really remarkable. The problem is that not everyone can be Atom, David or Patricia, but a lot of people feel they have to sign their movies that way, think that way, write that way, because that's what gets financed.
And this brings me probably to the fundamental point of the problem with the artistic production... certainly in film... is that it's bureaucratized. There is a layer in between the people who make the movies... and shoot the TV shows and the audience... You have to go through these gatekeepers that exist in various institutions - who are supposedly there to represent the interests of the Queen's purse, the taxpayer or the audience. But there's no bottom line to what they do. Failure or success does not determine whether they hold or lose their job. So they're making decisions on behalf of an audience with whom they have very little relationship.
We need our filmmakers and people who make our shows, in my opinion, to be more tightly tied to the audiences, and to have more of an understanding of them.
So what would you recommend then, let's say, if you could redefine Telefilm Canada or the Canadian Television Fund tomorrow?
I would recommend that we start with this discussion. We need to start discussing how we can tie ourselves more tightly to the audience, so that what we're making has some relevance to their lives. This is not to say, by the way, that we don't continue to make movies that also appeal to film festivals.
Your film crossed over the line by opening the Toronto film festival and making money. Is it a hybrid of sorts?
Well, Atom does that and David does that and Patricia does that and Don McKellar does that. It isn't impossible, but we've got to make sure that we're leaning in that direction.
And that's interesting, too, because once the notion was that we turn around and say, 'We're going to make commercial movies'. Well, what does this mean? I'm not sure what that means. I'm not sure how the hell you do it.
You know that Passchendaele was not for a second a kind of cynical exercise in 'I'm going to make a commercial film.' You'd be out of your mind to think that, if you sat down to make a movie set in the First World War, a period piece, with an obscure battle that virtually no Canadian knows about as a commercial film. It's not. It's as much a labor of passion as I could possibly dream of for myself.
[Oscar-winning Canadian writer/director] Paul Haggis was talking about Crash, and he was saying, 'I think the only thing that you can do is make a movie about something that you have an enormous personal investment in, that you're personally interested in.'
Is that what brings out the heart?
I think so, and I think audiences will respond to that. I think the trick is to make the movie that you burningly need to make, as opposed to making a movie that you think will get financed, and that will be toasted at a film festival. That is the path that usually leads to something arid and stale.
Is there a formula?
We talk about formulaic film, and there certainly is stuff that comes out of studios that makes you say, 'My god, what is that food processer that churns out scripts like that?'
But there is equally a kind of formulaic approach to festival circuit art-house films; we pretend as though there isn't, but there is. There are things that you cannot include in a movie that's designed to play the circuit at the art house because it will bump it out of the art house. And that's a formula.
There are people who make festival films that will never go beyond that circuit around the world.
I don't want to discount those pictures either; people are going to them and that's great. But I think if you're a film industry - if we're going to call it one - the business we have of making movies in Canada has to be balanced. It's a bigger tent; we need everything happening in here...
What would you recommend to balance or improve the distribution system in this country if you had the chance?
Filmmakers need to have a much more comprehensive and honest relationship with distributors. The distribution system in Canada needs some examination. It tends to be that there is an incentive for distributors to say they'll distribute a picture, even if they're not very interested in doing it, because they know they can pocket some money at the end of it. That's how the system works.
We need them to be distributing films that they actually want to sell, that they know they can get into the minds of the audience and make them come and see it, instead of this loss-leader distribution which props up a terribly false-looking economy, which isn't good for anybody.
It took me a long time to develop a relationship with Alliance [Films]. The sales team is fantastic and we were in lockstep long before Passchendaele was financed. We started discussing how we might bring this out to the public... campaigns to pierce through the din of competing entertainment options that the audience has. It is really tricky.
You've got to start figuring that out from early on, because you're never going to have as much money as The Hulk has. You have to figure out how we're going to place this, how can we get people to know about it?
If you could offer some advice on how to change the funding system itself in Canada, what would you do?
What I would do? Off the record...?
Another interesting stat from playback, in a separate article, was that Passchendaele alone accounted for 50% of English Canada's film box office in 2008.
Also, on the shallow level, Paul is on the cover of Playback this month with what looks to be a great photo...but I can't see it apart from a photo on flickr.