A big debate that’s been raging as we cast up FRENCH FILM has been “How much do names matter in low budget film anyway?”

The typical studio approach to casting goes like this - movies need stars to get audiences, without stars, you can’t get press or attention on posters. In short your movie won’t open…
So if you can’t get proper stars, then get minor stars. If you can’t get minor stars, get recognisable actors, if you can’t get recognisable actors, get somone out of Big Brother or at least someone related to somone who used was in Big Brother.. And so on…
This can be very frustrating for writers and directors and actors who, understandably, just want to cast (or be cast as) the best actor for the job, regardless of fame. And indeed, how many movies have been spoilt by a bad or inappropriate piece of casting.

(One personal bug bear of this type of miscasting: Keanu Reeve’s casting in Ken Brannagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, a cynical, studio enforced decision which was the one false note in an otherwise perfect film)

Surely, the cry goes, getting the right performance will make it a better film, and that will get it good reviews, and that will find its audience.

Certainly, its true that plenty of movies with unknowns in them, end up making lots of money: Full Monty, Bend it Like Beckham, Whale Rider, Blair Witch, Brothers McMullen. Just to name a random selection (and yes, plenty of the people in those movies are now famous - but they became famous because of those breakthrough movies, they movies didn’t break through because they had famous stars…)

Its equally true that cast alone can’t save a turkey. Just ask the cast of The Da Vinci Code; indeed, the question came up at a panel discussion that I was moderating recently, and my friend Todd Huntley, VP of Theatrical Marketing for 20th Century Fox, quoted some recent research that suggested that about the only current star who can open any movie in any territory is Will Smith (hell, he’s even big in Japan)

So does that mean, that if we can’t get Will Smith, we should all feel comfortable casting the best person for the job and to hell if Joe Public could pick them out of a line-up?

If only, if only… The truth about that decision, like every decision in this business, is that its a complex one. The above two extreme scenarios (great movie with unknowns = hit; rubbish movie with stars = flop) are the least likely of all possible outcomes, accounting for at best 20% of all movies. Sure they are the ones that people cite in the argument, in part because they are memorable (the availability heuristic) and in part because it is always more fun to argue using extreme cases.

But they are rare. Most movies, the remaining 80%, are neither great nor awful. they sit someone between them on the curve. And in that grey area where most movies sit, that is where differentiation matters. Choosing between two average films, audiences will choose the one with famous people in it. That’s the terrible truth. But its true. For every Blair Witch Project, there are a thousand horror movies with unknown casts that disappeared into the video discount bin. Ditto Brother’s McMullen and no-cast Romantic Comedy’s, and ditto Full Monty and ensemble struggle tales. We can’t cite those examples, because none of us ever saw them.

And for every flop with stars, there are a dozen average films with stars that do good to great at the Box Office. These we can probably name: any Bruce Willis, Eddie Murphy, Steven Segal, Steve Martin, or John Travolta flick of the last 5 years.

And in that grey area, of the average film, lie the tension between the casting decisions that money men want to make and that creatives want to make. Because creatives believe - and have to believe that it will be great. That it will be excuted perfectly - and good creatives know, that the odds of perfect execution improve if decisions are made based on integrity to the story - i.e. the best person for the job, regardless of fame.

But financiers, can’t be that hopeful. Financiers have to assume that the team won’t execute perfectly. Because no matter how talented, most of the time, most people don’t. No one every sets out to make a bad film - or even an average one - but that’s where most of it ends up.

So financiers want ‘name’ casting for insurance purposes - for the situation where the film is average, because then the name means that some sales at least are guaranteed. With a few names, you can secure your TV sales, your DVD numbers, your average box office. In short you can make back your money without having to count on perfection.
And in that tension, between the financiers needs for insurance, and the creatives desire for perfect execution is potential for a vicious circle. Because casting the wrong person for the job INCREASES the odds that the film won’t be excellent but only average, thus making the whole thing a self fulfilling prophecy.

But of course casting the best person for the job doesn’t guarantee perfect execution, how could it, its just one factor amongst many: the script, the director, the crew, random chance, the alchemy between elements - in short it depends on the movie gods.
The job of the producer, of course, in this as in everything, is balancing between these tensions. Because the producer has to simultaneously believe that the film will turn out excellent and guard against it turning out average or worse. That is his dual responsibility to talent on the one hand and money on the other. Stressed yet? Welcome to my world.

Honestly, that’s a sentence I never thought I would write. I have long loathed BB above all reality shows both for its appeal to the lowest common denominators in the human psyche and even more so for its interminable dullness. These views have left me on the wrong side of the water cooler for six long years, and I have been patiently waiting for the tide to turn…
And now it has. But not in the way I expected. For the first time in years (in my view EVER) Big Brother is offering (a) gripping television (b) international news and (c) relevant and useful socio-culutral debate.

Recent events have so permeated the news that unless you have actually been IN the Big Brother house, there seems little reason for me to recap; but here is a neat summary and here is a photo of some naked models protesting the racism against Shilpa Shetty.

My two cents about it all:

• I support Andy Duncan, CEO of C4’s position that this type of “uncomfortable viewing” is useful in the context of exposing attitudes that any of us with brown skin who actually live in the real England, know are common place.
• But I simultaneously agree, from what I’ve seen, the actual “racism” has been of the fairly mild, garden variety, confusion and discomfort about difference, and reaching for the easiest weapon, rather than anything really cruel or evil.
• So I find it interesting that public opinion against racism seems to be so wide spread and voracious that it now has economic force: see how commercial brands ran a mile from Big Brother and the perpetrators of the alledged racism, forcing them to recant (but how did they know their careers were crumbling - that seems to imply that their agents had communicated with them -which is in breach of BB rules… hmmm)
• And I’m concerned that this is less about an attempt to get systemic about an understanding that Britain is a multi-cultural society, that needs to engage in a systemastic debate on race and culture, and more knee-jerk polictical correctness.

Still, score one for the power of popular culture to shape the agenda of the day…

We’ve been receiving post-cards from our favourite stalker…

Mary_Lou Postcards

For those who need reminding of the history of Mary-Lou, click here

Those Thai go-go bars, will never be the same again.

Two factoids from today’s trade news that gave this producer of Malaysian - Indian ethnic origins pause for pride and thought:

1. Amir Muhammad, a Malaysian documentary maker, has been invited to screen his latest film “Apa Khabar Orang Kampung” in the International Forum. ( The title literally translates as “What News, Village People?”, but the English title is “Village People Radio Show” which, I have to say for me conjurs up a revival of a 70s Gay Icon band, which is perhaps rather the wrong idea, given that the film is about die-hard communists in the Malaysian rainforests. Or maybe that’s what he was going for.You can see the trailer here. And its quality makes me want to see it and makes me realise that I am worryingly ignorant about the current state of the Malaysian film industry and will have to start doing something about that. Probably starting with Amir.
2. The Indian film industry had a bumper box office year. That’s good and interesting in itself, particularly when you realise that they dominated US releases, proving that cultural imperialism hasn’t yet extended to the Cinemas of India. But the more interesting fact is the nature of the year. Firstly a lot of the films that did well deviate from the usual cliches of Bollywood. Here is Screen International has to say about it:
   There were also successes where Bollywood broke out of its own formula, with films about a superhero (Krrish), social reawakening of the youth (Rang De Basanti), revival of Mahatma Gandhi (Lage Raho Munnabhai), arranged marriages (Vivah) and extra-marital affairs (Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna) dominating the box office.

Now the economically extraordinarry thing, particularly if like us you are interested in the potential for profit from low budget movies, is to look at the relationship between budget and box office for these films (again from Screen):

Box office top earners, 2006

1. Dhoom 2
Cost: $0.6m Revenue: $37m2. Krrish
Cost: $0.5m Revenue: $31m

3. Lage Raho Munnabhai
Cost: $0.3m Revenue: $29.3m

4. Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna
Cost: $1.1m Revenue: $29.3m

5. Rang De Basanti
Cost: $0.7m Revenue: $27mNow that’s startling. Returns at those multiples would have investors laughing all the way to the bank. It won’t escape regular readers attention (it certainly didn’t escape mine) that the budgets above are close to what we are spending on our first few films.

So it turns out, that (in India at least) it is possible to make thoughtful, intelligent micro-budgeted movies that become box-office mega-hits and post super-normal returns.

Our turn. Here in the UK.

Back in London and unexpectedly the sun is shining. Good weather these days provokes a rather complex emotional response in most of us. It goes a bit like this.

1. First, the natural human reaction is to go “how nice, its sunny”. In the old days, we’d stop there.
2. But now, because so often the weather is not as we would expect, we follow up with a “but how odd” reaction: how odd - its not supposed to be sunny in January in London. There wasn’t supposed to be freak flooding in Malaysia over new year where I spent Christmas with my family; but they continue unabated (and the citizenship there needs volunteers to help, so if you can do anything, please do).
3. And that’s when the third reaction hits: it’s global warming. Thankfully this reaction has also finally hit the mind of George W. Bush
4. And then, at the moment we realise (3) we feel guilt for feeling (1). (Do we think Dubbaya is feeling guilt?)

Like I said, complex.

So what does any of this have to do with the slingblog, slingshot studios or the making of movies? Well more than you might think.

One reason is a decision I came to over Christmas: that the blog is going to start to be more multi-purpose. I’ll continue to chronicle developments here at slingshot, and I’ll continue to debate and posit on issues that effect the movie industry. But I’m going to start talking about other stuff to. I often have other issues I would like to post on, but have held of on the grounds of relevance. But since I clearly don’t have a particularly good work / life divide, and since it seems silly to divide the readership between two blogs, you can, for better or worse, start to expect to see my musings on subjects beyond the movie industry here.

But this particular rant is, in fact, linked to movies after all. Because its about complexity. Global warming and its effects is one of the most important, but by no means the only, example of how complexity shapes our modern world. On how cause and effect are not linear, but endlessly iterating and interconnected. And how not appreciating that subtlety, leads to all sorts of problems. See Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent piece in this week’s New Yorker for the difference between Mysteries and Puzzles for an illustration of this. Another interesting, perhaps even seminal and populist writer on the relevance of complexity to everyday life is Steven Johnson, who is a pretty active blogger. As of course is my friend, the no less active, and every bit as brilliant (if somewhat less intelligible) Simon Hill
So we live in a complex world. And to understand the world we need to understand complexity. And one of the chief ways we come to understand our world, is through the media, and king of media is movies. So movies, to continue to be relevant, should help us understand complexity. Right?

Except conventional wisdom says that movies should be simple. They should be simple in plot: 3 acts. They should be simple in characters: one protagonist. They should be simple in themes: one controlling idea. These principals have become the guide for screenwriters everywhere, and are codified in endless books, starting with McKee’s STORY, but now in many more besides, Movies have rules. Seven principles, five laws, three acts, 1 idea.

Depart from this conventional wisdom, try and make a movie as complex as the world, and , even if you get your movie made, you will loose your audience. And so often, it is true. We have been finding this in the edit of Sugarhouse Lane - every time we tried something to make the movie more multi-layered, and took it away from its core premise of 3 men, 1 gun; then audience got bored. We have been finding this in finalising the script for our next movie, FRENCH FILM, the latest draft is the strongest by far, and in part because it hews more closely and clearly to its through line: a movie about how relationships begin.Even though its writer, Ash Ditta, is one of the most complex men I know.

Most of the greatest and most successful movies ever made, are also the simplest, with the core idea easily reducible to a single line, without diminishing the movie: JAWS (Shark eats people, man hunts shark), LORD OF THE RINGS (Hobbits return ring), ROCKY (loser boxer learns to win). Not a lot of complexity there.

But yet, but yet. For each of those examples, there is a great counter-example. How would one reduce the complexity of CITIZEN KANE, or CHINATOWN or SHORT CUTS without also diminishing them. Or more recently, the unusual, and almost great SYRIANA and BABEL?

What is interesting, is the latter two are movies very explicitly about the complex, inter-connected modern world we live in. Movies for an age of global warming, for an age of the Internet. And I think we need more of those movies.
So I’m increasingly interested in the idea of making a movie that is not just complex, but that is somehow ABOUT complexity. My holiday reading suggested some avenues to explore (on which watch this space) but in the meantime, I’d welcome thoughts and suggestions.