A Stranger to the Truth

It’s the end of another year at Film School and the graduation films are about to head off to have the DCP’s made… there’s a thing called ‘industry week’ where the jaded talk up the possibilities and bring hope to a ‘hopeless’ world… yep we sit in front of the students and make the film and TV biz sound perfect… no mention of standing on concrete for 12-hour days or the recent trend known affectionately as a ‘rolling lunch’ where you don’t get a sit-down lunch break.

It’s a beautiful time where the ‘industry’ can be glossed over and brutality of it ignored. You might even mention their upcoming roll in the climate change debate but why ruin hope right now?

Teaching at a film school becomes a self-fulfilling-study of inward and outward thinking and usually in equal amounts of bogus vs craft vs discovery and all of this already etched with those first sessions where you gaze out over the new students and instantly assume a whole lot about who they are. And then you get to know them through the year, as they prove how wrong your initial impressions were.

Over the years patterns have emerged and situations repeated themselves… perhaps so much so that it’s become predictable? But no. Every year there are at a least a dozen surprises you didn’t see coming.

I’ve worked in film schools where the ‘adult intervention’ has crippled the dynamic flow (the equivalent of an art school grabbing the brush whilst proclaiming ‘it goes like this’). This school is not one of those – where the surprises have been gold and the reason why you love teaching so much.

There’s those 3 pages of script that you’ve been using as a class exercise for the last twenty years and you thought you’d seen every different way it could be interpreted but no. Heck! Something new and free and fresh and from the guy from Palmy, but wait there’s more, a clapper loader who gets the slate in the middle of frame every shot for the entire 4 days, the student cinematographer who know instinctively where to put the key light… a screenplay that has insight into racism from within a racist education process and then been approved as a graduation script so it will get made… bliss, and then the day where everyone in the room has finally grasped which direction from camera ‘upstage’ and ‘down stage’ mean.

But besides never pointing out privilege, or making a comment about wealth versus-poverty – or reverting to institutional clichés like ‘level playing field’ – you know it’s a bit like never pointing out the fact that the bucket fountain in Cuba Mall doesn’t actually work, or that 'genius film maker' is not an ideal job description to put in that CV… and how do we become film makers instead of ‘film watchers?’ …and other esoteric waffle intermingled with great insight.

Yet getting this thing called ‘self’ out of the way appears to be the main point of every year.

By about the 3rd session in the classroom there’s usually half the room that have fixed you with that ‘fuck you’ stare (somehow you’re to blame for the middle of winter) and the other half that are now beginning to embrace the idea that they know a little less than they thought so you begin with ‘and so does most of the industry’ - the discussions can now free-flow around aspects of the ‘vanity’ and the actual function of the red carpet – ego and the role of the decision maker, or the role of the committee in a vital decision or simply the function of the class wanker in those early exercises, and then you get on with erecting a ‘c’ stand and it slowly dawns that this porous world of art within and without boundaries, a place that isn’t art school but neither is it a university nor is it a finishing school… it’s a film school, specific in the medium, random in the outcomes and purpose, and what could be so brilliant?

When I first started teaching in the film and TV business there was an air of refined expectations and lofty ideals mostly - perhaps - pertaining to a European form, a sort of film society thing that could be looked upon as a wee bit clever? – this expectation evolved many years ago at Pacific Films where a corporate project might involve a Fellini type ‘look’ where monolithic stands of wallpaper are made relevant to the seascape around Cape Palliser (Barry Barclay), theatrical stage masks are worn by actors and the subject of electricity and science of humanities’ plight on this planet is teased out in another corporate for the cinema market (Masks by Ian Mune, dir. Barry Barclay, DP David Gribble) … and then we are recording a voice over in the studio ‘whisk up a treat’ (Tony Williams) instant pudding paid the studio rent and our weekly wages …drinking tea all day and smoking roll-your-own cigarettes talking about it and doing it…

So now the lofty notion of art vs commerce has been replaced with an expectation of employment involving the ‘setting of a ‘c’ stand correctly’ and sorting the sandbags back into the grip truck after a long night shoot in the rain and not pissing off the Gaffer with endless questions - is more important than an elliptical edit or mise-en-scène defining screenplay moment; a world full of ego and greatness followed by despair and disappointments followed by a glimmer of distant hope and even bigger possibilities but someone is always in the road, get out of my way…

Sometime you have to point out that the person in the way is yourself. Insight comes in fits and starts – reading the tone of the room let alone the tone of the drama is beyond reach and an impossible task… but damn this is what I want to do.

We set the room with a chair up front and the other chairs spaced out like a classroom. Already I’m thinking the dynamic here is somehow creating a false hierarchy where the demi-god can proclaim greatness.

What’s the challenge here? Speak to the bit of the film and TV biz that is a factory floor and the long days of sore feet. How about the passion and the creative excitement until that day you were stiffed on the last week of wages on the offshore TV series that goes over budget and the producer does a midnight runner back to LA, never to be seen again… becomes a tale of caution… and then you explain why you need to invoice weekly and get paid weekly. This is the business of the business of the film game and it shocks you that some people are in this biz to make money off your labour…

and actually it’s a bit of a Ponzi-scheme at the best of times but it’s also addictive.

So I’ll maybe talk about how Country Calendar is still a New Zealand institution though it’s now sponsored by a car company and a foreign owned banking system…. or I could talk up more of the brutality of the long days and those dark nights driving home tired (I just fell asleep at the lights) or I could find a way of describing how you won’t find anything more addictive and more alluring and you’ll keep coming back… and all of it is sort of true because love can also be brutal and kind at the same time.

Waka Attewell nzcs