Culture

In the Auckland and Wellington International Film Festival, there is between 150-170 films playing. And slightly less in Dunedin?
Yes, but Dunedin is quite big. I haven’t counted exactly but it’s in the mid 90s. The thing is, with the availability of everything digitally, the time has now passed when the new films from Cannes only had two or three subtitles prints in the whole world. So we’d play them in Auckland and Wellington, then send them to the Melbourne Film Festival that we’ve always worked with quite closely. But now, because they’re just duplicable files, there are more films available than ever.

With such a vast array of films, how do you go about the selection process?
It’s a continuous process. There will be a few films that showed at the Cannes festival this year that we missed out on, or didn’t even choose to pursue for one reason or another, which may well end up on our programme next year. There are three or four films on this year’s programme that were in Cannes last year. The process never really stops. My colleague, Sandra Reed, who lives in Paris, does a lot of our programming. She’s continually watching films, and Paris is a great city for doing that, of course. She also goes to the Cannes Film Festival.

How much do you have to think about the balancing act of selecting films for different kinds of audiences?
There is a certain degree of that. We certainly recognise that there needs to be quite a few films in the programme that are going to please a wide audience, to ensure we have the numbers to sustain what we’re doing. Unlike most festivals elsewhere in the world, we are largely funded by box office sales. Last year, 87 per cent of our income was drawn from ticket sales around the country, which is pretty unusual for an arts organisation in any country.

Every year the Festival is so wonderful for supporting Kiwi film. Are there any filmmakers you are particularity excited about?
The comedy horror film Housebound is very good. It’s funny and quite original; so much of its success is that the characters in it make a certain amount of sense. They are not stock horror movie characters. It’s about a truculent, delinquent teenage girl and her very “mumsy” mum, a real kiwi type, brilliantly incarnated by Rima Te Wiata, who’s so funny. It is a very devious and complicated plot.

In your job, do you get much of a sense of how New Zealand film is performing on the world stage?
I watch individual films more than having a general sense of any kind of trend, but there have been quite a few films in the so-called exploitation genres that have done quite well commercially outside of New Zealand. And I imagine Housebound will have financial success for the makers outside of New Zealand. It certainly has amazing reviews out in South by Southwest.

You must have seen many changes take place in the industry. How has this affected New Zealand film, or has New Zealand not been affected by all of these changes?
I don’t think New Zealand has ever been ahead of the game, we’ve got to remember most exhibition and distribution is run by large entertainment corporations that are not based in New Zealand, and they pretty much define the key spaces and what’s improvised around that. The Film Festival is unique in New Zealand by being a national event that travels to so many different cities. I don’t know of any other country where the Film Festival is quite the same as that, although some festivals have travelling components if they tour around smaller towns in their neighbourhoods. That’s not quite what we’re doing; we are presenting that same programme in Auckland and Wellington, and a huge chunk of it in Christchurch and Dunedin as well. So that’s a particularly New Zealand response. It carries disadvantages for us these days, in the sense of there is an increasing amount of atomization of the cities, which has been painfully clear in the response to Open Wire, which opened this week. There’s this sense that Christchurch is quite isolated from the rest of New Zealand, but not just in Christchurch’s mind. There’s a dialogue of “why can a Wellington filmmaker make a film about Christchurch?” It does my head in; we’re such a tiny country and the filmmaker is a well-established chronicler of history and social change in this country.

Looking at the Festival programme, a few films jumped out at me for their innovative filmmaking techniques such as 20,000 Days on Earth and Boyhood.
Boyhood, which I’ve seen and which I love, is definitely one of the year’s outstanding films. I think what Richard Linklater had there was a very intuitive sense of something quite intrinsic about film, and its ability to capture the impact of time on people. Everyone loves the Michael Apted Up series. Certain people of my generation grew up with these films, where the filmmaker made a documentary about a whole lot of seven-year-old kids, and visited the same people every seven years. When you see those films now, you see the children as seven, 14, 21, 28 through to 56, which was the last one. There is something about that which is very gripping. Richard Linklater taps into that, but he’s done it not with documentary but with fiction. There was a fascinating piece in a recent New Yorker that was full of things I didn’t know about Boyhood when I watched it. A lot of it was about the relationship between the boy and his mother being very much based on Richard Linklater’s own relationship with his mother, and he talked about the enormous difficulty he had in showing her the movie, as she is a very distracted mother during some quite key moments in the child’s life.

If you were a poor student who could only afford two or three tickets, what would your advice be?
I would take advantage to see films at the Regent – I’d see Under the Skin and the Nick Cave film and, after that, Housebound. Gerard Johnson, the filmmaker, will be in Dunedin for the screening, which will add an element. The rest is up to individual fantasy and choice as there is such a wide variety on offer. I do say Boyhood is a film I would recommend to absolutely anybody. It would be interesting for people who are students now as it ends on the central character’s first day of college. It’s about people who grew up in exactly the same years, and listened to exactly the same music as students now.

And of course you studied here in Otago.
Yes, my degree is in English literature, but I spent most of my time at the movies ...