Being a Kind Producer and Still Getting My Way - How I Find the Middle Ground

The golden age of filmmaking in Hollywood set up an image of a producer being the person who calls the shots and says what goes and what doesn't – outsiders often or not have this image of a white, male, most likely middle-aged big shot, totally comfortable with demanding what he wants and getting it too. He is assertive, which is a kind way to say mean or bossy (when talking about men anyway), and everyone drops to their knees, scampering all over the studio to please him and meet his requests.

In the modern world, we still have these important producers, but the image of them has changed slightly, along with the way producers operate, and importantly what has also changed is how the people working below the producer respond to their demands.

Our generation is accepting of producers of any gender, religion, race and colour, but we are also aware of the power imbalance that comes ingrained in the hierarchy of the film industry. This was demonstrated by the much needed Me Too movement, and what followed for industries outside entertainment with the Time's Up movement. Both proved that you can't be simultaneously worshipped and an insensitive asshole that abuses the power that comes from your role.

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Living in the Shadow of Dace

Some actors have a character they portrayed on the screen whose shadow they live in most of their lives. For Sean Connery and Roger Moore it was James Bond, Boris Karloff had Frankenstein, Bela Lugosi had Dracula and mine is Dace Decklan: Private Eye.

Who the hell is Dace Decklan: Private Eye, you might ask?

It all started as a twinkle in the eye of film director Ivan Malekin. How he ever came up with the concept of melding Magnum P.I and James Bond I will never know. Then again maybe I should just ask him? I just realised I never did.

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Theft, Cannibalism & Shameless Self-Promotion

Novelist confesses: It’s probably all about me.

One of my early readers – let’s call him Dave…although his real name is Dave – made an astute comment about the novel I have just had published. Having known me for several years it was plain to him that the fictional world of the book was a stylised and more narratively concise version of the somewhat messier realm I normally inhabit.

“I also smiled at the many conversations that echoed discussions we have shared about your life observations and philosophies, and of course the colourful mix of autobiographical traits scattered across various characters.”

There are many artists who cringe when asked if their work is autobiographical but, as a novelist, I feel compelled to confess that my fiction feeds directly, sometimes brutally, on the plot points and psychodramas of self. But it doesn’t end there. I also feast on the blood and gore of friends, family and random strangers. In fact, anyone and everyone who veers too close.

Write about what you know. Isn’t that what they say? Little wonder The Last Summer of Hair is suffused with detail drawn from my own experience, and from my observations of those unlucky enough to fall within the cannibalising orbit of my literary appetite. Dave will not be the only one of my friends to detect unerringly familiar motifs in the book’s 292 self-referential pages. Indeed, some of those closest to me will wonder if it’s them I was writing about. (Truth is, it often was.)

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Is Piracy Damaging for Indie Film?

Generally speaking, most people believe that committing piracy is not really a big deal. It's not that harmful. For most of us average folk, it's simply not feasible to sign up to and pay for a multitude of subscription streaming sites. We pick one service, maybe two if we are on a steady wage, but how many people can afford to indulge in memberships to Netflix, plus Amazon Prime, and HBO Max, and Disney+, and Hulu, and all of the other streaming services out there? It becomes much too expensive, so when it comes to cost, piracy can be understandable too.

WHAT THE CURRENT STATS SAY

Certainly, more and more people are turning to piracy, not just in TV and film, but across all industries. The international piracy stats in 2021 indicate:

  • The USA is at the forefront of piracy with 17 billion clicks on illegal piracy websites in 2021 alone.

  • Russia has the highest piracy rate in Europe with over 14 billion piracy site visits, while Indonesia is the leading country in Asia for piracy with 6 billion visits.

  • 70% of online users find nothing wrong with online piracy while 34% of Gen Z (people born between 1997 and 2012) use stream-ripping programs and websites to download films and audio from streaming sites.

  • Pirated videos get over 230 billion views a year.

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SEX, VIOLENCE & CENSORSHIP

Exposing the Double Standard Surrounding Sex & Violence in Film & Art

Our new film In Corpore is too sexy for Tubi.

This is something we learnt two weeks ago, and we’ve added Tubi to our list of platforms and apps we cannot reach with the film. All our attempts to advertise In Corpore on Instagram fail. Our trailers and teasers are flagged on YouTube. When we wrote in the film’s IMDB synopsis “a sensual, sex-positive exploration of contemporary relationships”, the synopsis suddenly disappeared. Trying to advertise the film through GoogleAds is an ongoing battle and we are losing – Google restricted our ability to market the new release through YouTube due to images being deemed “adult content”. Images, mind you, of people dancing, fully clothed. And for a year leading up to the film release, we couldn’t even share the In Corpore website on Facebook or Instagram because it was blocked by those platforms. The crime: too sexy.

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2020: The Year Film was Forced to Adapt

If there is one phase to sum up the year in film at all levels, be it Hollywood or the independent and micro-budget filmmaking scene for the year of 2020, it would have to be ‘geeze, never saw that coming, mate’.

With the Covid-19 pandemic beginning to spread worldwide as early as February and still raging now to varied degrees across the globe, film distribution and releases, both in cinema and through streaming platforms went through a major shift, and the playing field between Hollywood and independent filmmakers was almost levelled out as nobody quite knew what to do.

This was due to most cinemas in North America shutting down earlier in the year (unfortunately some went into bankruptcy and closed their doors permanently), causing big budget Hollywood films that were planned for release like Black Widow and the latest James Bond installment No Time to Die to be pushed back until 2021. Also halted or delayed were anticipated films which were to move into production at the beginning of 2020, such as Mission Impossible 7 andThor: Love and Thunder.

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Releasing an Indie Film During a Pandemic

In February this year, Sarah Jayne wrote an article about self-distributing our feature In Corpore. She talked about screening the film in a cinema in New York, one of the settings of the film, perhaps doing a tour of the country à la The Joyful Vampire Tour of America, and then doing cinema screenings in the remaining countries we filmed in: Australia, Germany, and Malta.

Well, none of that went ahead. The world changed, as we all know; a global pandemic brought everything to a standstill. And still we aren’t clear of the spectre of this virus, with different parts of Europe facing another lockdown, America still out of control, and Australia suffering too. The way films are distributed changed, perhaps irrevocably. Cinemas shut like so much else. The traditional release windowing model was scrapped, blockbuster films like Mulan streaming for free on Disney+ as a $200 million dollar experiment, while Tenet by Christopher Nolan stuck to its guns and became the first Hollywood tent-pole to launch in theaters following their prolonged shutdown, the bold move hailed by executives and media as the saviour of cinema.

It bombed. Studios were spooked. Cinema wasn’t saved.

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What I’ve Learnt from Directing my First Documentary

I've been in this indie filmmaking community for over a decade, and I’ve been directing since 2013, yet it always amazes me how there is always something more to learn in this industry as a director with each project.

This year I fell into directing my first documentary, Cats of Malta, and man did I learn a lot as I researched the topic and subjects that make up the Maltese cat community. Right now as we edit the project I'm becoming even more knowledgeable on how producing docos work, thanks to Google.

I have watched a few docos this year too, standouts being Tiger King, which showed me a lot about how to interview subjects and that true to life characters exist, you just have to find the interesting and sometimes kooky parts of their story. Another Netflix doco, High Score, was entertaining from start to finish. Even though I am not a gamer, High Score was so well put together as a series, each episode explaining a different shift in the industry, that even I as a novice on the subject was hooked.

One of the first things I learnt from the process of directing a doco is that I had to know what I could legally film. People in the background, peoples faces as they interacted with our interviewees on the street, and I will confess that I was reading about the legalities as we were filming.

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The Cult of Busy

There seems to be this mentality held by some creative people and even non creatives who are working the daily grind that being busy all the time means you are the most productive person on the planet. That your self-worth is somehow tied up with how damn busy you are all the damn time. The busier you are, the more packed your schedule is, the more proof there is that you are working much harder than your peers or colleagues. And this is what defines us as people.

I confess that I was one of these people around four years ago. I use past tense as now I'm more chilled and sometimes less productive than I have ever been. I still get stuff done but in healthy moderation. Even with my full time job, I get home and manage to smash out a couple of hours working on an investment deck or marketing for one of my films.

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From Writing to Wrap: A Feature Film in Four Months

Just last week, on August 26th, we wrapped principal photography on Machination, our fifth feature film shot in the last four years. This was very much a film inspired by this new Covid-19 reality we live in, a story about a highly anxious woman named Maria who struggles to cope in isolation as a pandemic sweeps the world. Maria is forced to confront the monsters in her head, in the media, and in her past.

Maria in her bedroom, Machination Behind the scenes. Credit: Monika Kopčilová

We had the initial idea for the film during our own lockdown in April in Malta and spent a few days at the end of the month writing the first draft outline. May was spent redrafting and refining the outline. In June we approached cast, researched the equipment we would need as well as the VFX we wanted, and worked to fill gaps in knowledge for the story as well as the production, such as the specific mental health issues Maria was suffering from or how we could pull off a particular shot – a period that was a mix of development and pre-pre production. One month of official pre-production and rehearsal began from July 13th. Finally, in August, we went into a 10-day production period split into two halves – August 12th to 16th and August 22nd to 26th.


This was all done between Sarah working a full-time job and myself working on other projects, including still shooting our Cats of Malta documentary and planning a short film called Crossing Paths for the end of June. So until production, and perhaps the last couple of weeks of pre-production, we never dropped everything to simply focus on Machination, and Sarah didn’t stop working her day job until the first shooting day. That makes Machination a feature film done from first draft to wrap in four months, mostly part-time, during an uncertain time in the world where many productions shut down completely. And the budget was only €6000. And we still paid everyone.

This is how we did it.

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