Young directors outside the studio orbit cannot develop international careers unless they’re given an opportunity to work regularly, says Montreal producer Roger Frappier, citing examples like Denmark’s Lars Von Trier and Canada’s Atom Egoyan.

‘When we find there’s talent in someone I think it’s our responsibility to give that person the means, the possibility, so that they’ll continue to be able to work,’ says Frappier (Jesus de Montreal, Un zoo la nuit).

‘Not only do you have to put new filmmakers on the screen,’ he says, ‘you have to work on the continuity, which is just as important as the first feature. The only way to establish a filmmaker is to give him or her the possibility of doing three or four films in a row.’

Frappier and his production house Max Films are in midstream on a multiyear production and development program aimed at launching the professional careers of young Quebec filmmakers. The returns have been swift.

The starter film, the omnibus day-in-the-life feature Cosmos, preemed in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes in ’97, winning the Prix International des Cinemas d’Art et Essai, while reception for two more releases this year, Denis Villeneuve’s August 32nd on Earth and Manon Briand’s 2 Seconds, has been rewarding.

Both August 32nd and 2 Seconds are on the program at the Toronto International Film Festival, Briand’s in the Perspective Canada section and Villeneuve’s at a gala presentation, Thursday, Sept. 17.

Villeneuve’s film performed well at Cannes and was also selected for the 25th edition of the Telluride Film Festival, Sept. 3-8, while Briand’s feature debut surprised local critics and the industry by virtually sweeping all the big prizes at the Montreal World Film Festival.

In August 32nd, Pascale Bussieres and Alexis Martin play the central characters in a story about a woman who drops everything to re-evaluate her life following a terrible accident. She quits her job, joins up with her longtime best friend and heads off to the American desert to have a baby.

Briand’s story of performance, passion and trust is set in the demimonde of bike couriers and had a virtual field day at wff, winning a slew of prizes.

Briand won the wff award for best direction, the Prix de Montreal for best first feature, the FedEx Award for best Canadian feature as voted by the public (3rd most popular overall behind Roberto Benigni’s La Vita e bella and Eduardo Mignogna’s El Faro) and the $25,000 Telefilm Canada prize for best Canadian feature. The film stars Charlotte Laurier and Dino Tavarone.

A fourth feature from yet another young director in the Frappier stable, Jean-Philippe Duval’s Matroni et moi, based on the Alexis Martin stageplay, completed principal photography this summer. Distributor France Film has already released 2 Seconds with Villeneuve’s August 32nd set to follow shortly.

Focus on first-time

directors

As it stands, Frappier has another three or four scripts from young filmmakers in development, projects he says will be ready by next spring.

‘Over the next two or three years, I as a producer and Max Films as a production house want to do first-time directors, put a new generation on the screen, a new vision and new way to tell a story,’ says Frappier, the sole Canadian producer to claim three best motion picture Genies and three Golden Reel awards.

Frappier now has his sights set on producing Denis Chouinard’s next movie, Tar Angel. Chouinard is the codirector of Clandestin, a low-budget coproduction about stowaways which earned strong reviews during a limited release last year. Frappier hopes to involve u.k. and French coproducers in Tar Angel.

‘This is what I like,’ says the producer. ‘I’m not producing only one filmmaker, I’m producing a group of filmmakers, all from the same generation.’

And of course there’s more on the way from Villeneuve, Briand and an as-yet unnamed third Cosmos director.

A gift

‘Cosmos was really a gift for me,’ says Frappier, one of 11 international feature film producers honored this spring at a tribute at the 51st Cannes Film Festival.

Frappier recalls Cosmos’ origins, during a short off-season holiday on the Maine coast three years ago this month.

At the time, the producer says he was pretty much disenchanted with the state of Quebec feature films.

‘It was all middle of the road and I didn’t have enough money to make big films so we were making little films.’

It was at that point the idea of working with a entirely new generation of filmmakers welled up, taking form in Cosmos, an omnibus or anthology feature initiating six new directors, three men and three women.

More women directors

‘I think there’s a need for more women directors,’ Frappier says. ‘Women in cinema are everywhere. They are producers, editors, they are in the majority in the [funding] institutions in Quebec at the moment, they are the majority in television. There are some women directors, but not enough.’

(A study by the Quebec directors association, the arrq, estimated the share of production budgets accorded to projects directed by women is as low as 15%.)

Four feature debuts in two years is an accomplishment, but Frappier says the development process for his young moviemakers is accelerating.

With the company’s new offices on Sherbrooke Street East, Frappier has provided a bright, relaxed place to work and interact and the talent isn’t left on its own to worry.

What seems especially important for the young filmmakers is the opportunity to work with skilled craftspeople and technicians. It means they can concentrate on developing their craft with actors, and perhaps an essential, the craft support ensures high technical production standards, the best assurance their first films will directly advance their professional careers.

They may not all become renowned international feature film directors, but without the solid production entourage, they don’t even have a shot.

For Frappier, the ability to follow through with new filmmakers points to highly topical industry concerns – namely the need to build a national program to reappropriate something approaching a meaningful share of the domestic theatrical market, and corollary proposition, that government needs to make a serious commitment to Canadian cinema.

Policy crossroads

A member of the Heritage Canada advisory committee on feature film policy, Frappier says the industry needs new funding for two reasons.

‘If we consider the cuts in Canadian cinema in the last five years, [the budget for] Telefilm Canada has been cut from $151 million to $84 million. So that’s nearly $75 million. Of course people will say, `We’ve cut everywhere,’ which is true, but we have been cut in cinema for around $75 million in the past five years so it really has hurt a lot.

‘And at the same time that we’ve been cut we’ve developed new talents, a new genration, and have broadened the working base as we’ve reduced the possibility of producing.’

Frappier says the industry is proposing an additional $100 million in feature film funding, half of it sourced from government.

‘We are asking that [the federal] government match $50 million which the industry is willing to [raise] so that funding is brought back to where it should be.’

The industry share of new monies would be sourced from the larger film and video distribution and exhibition market in Canada, and from broadcasters.

Frappier says the call for new public money is entirely reasonable and represents only half the amount of funding injected in television.

‘The government has put $100 million into tv for two years now,’ he says.

‘I have three films that I’m saying are very good and I want to produce next year. I produced Jesus de Montreal nine years ago for $4.2 million – a film that went around the world – because nine years ago $4.2 million was exactly the budget needed to complete the movie. We were able to shoot for 45 days, have the right costumes, shoot at night. We were able to have the music we wanted, the editing, everything. Ten years later we have the same budgets.’

(The Briand and Villeneuve films came in at $1.9 million each, exactly the same budget Frappier says he had 10 years ago for Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Un zoo, la nuit. The Duval film Matroni et moi incorporates more elaborate elements and has a $3.2 million budget.)

Return on investment

The danger of a policy which constantly downsizes production budgets, says the producer, is that the margin of assurance for investors, and the return on their money, is also reduced.

‘By cutting and cutting we’re just reducing everybody’s life, including the investors’, because we no longer have the possibility of competing on the international market,’ he says, adding:

‘When we arrive at Cannes with a movie, the film is there stark naked without any publicity in front of 3,000 international journalists. They don’t know the story behind the movie and they don’t want to know if it’s a $10-million or $25-million or a $2-million budget, they just don’t care.

‘So it becomes a matter of what’s on the screen and how people react. That is very challenging, but at the same time we have to have the means and the possibility of having presence with our cinematography.

Something that is

priceless

‘We are not asking too much,’ says Frappier. ‘We are asking that government understand this is important. We make a lot of people work and so much of that money is, in fact, returned to the community and returned to government.

‘More than that, if we want to exist as a [disticnt] culture we have to realize that cinema still travels more in the world than television. I’m not comparing the quality of one to the other, but if we look at Cosmos, that tiny little film went to festivals around the world.

‘I received a phone call from Anthony Minghella who did The English Patient, who screened Cosmos in London. He was amazed and asked about the project and about the work of Andre Turpin [who directed an installment and was the film’s cinematographer].’

Secondly, Frappier says the industry has matured and Canada now has many first-rate filmmakers, cinematographers, technicians and craftspeople of all stripes.

‘The Canadian infrastructure is excellent,’ he says. ‘For our cinema to have a real impact in the world we need a major investment at the moment because this industry has been growing tremendously in recent years. We can be one of the best film producers in the world, and that would mean that Canadian culture travels around the world. And that is something that is priceless.’

Reappropriating

our screens

Per Frappier, the low box-office average for domestic films (nationally at 3% or less) is essentially due to the low volume of production.

The immediate aim, he says, should be to reappropriate 10% of the Quebec box office for domestic movies, a level of performance that existed briefly a decade ago.

‘This fall will be fantastic,’ says Frappier. ‘There’ll be five or six [Quebec] films in theaters.’

Fall Quebec releases include Robert Lepage’s No, Francois Girard’s The Red Violin, Denise Filitreault’s Laura Cadieux, Briand’s 2 Secondes, Villeneuve’s 32 Aout, Jacques Leduc L’Age de Braise, Michka Saal’s La Position de l’Escargot, Jean Pierre Lefebvre’s Aujourd’hui ou jamais, a new National Film Board feature from director Yves Dion, and the Louis Saia comedy sequel Les Boys, which will preem in December.

‘If we can maintain and increase this level [of domestic release], then at one point or another it’s no longer out of the ordinary for people to go to see a Quebecois or Canadian film. There’ll always be at least one on the screen at any one time. Let’s do this over a period of two to three years and I’m sure people will come back to Canadian and Quebec cinema,’ says Frappier.

Creative triangle

While the industry in Canada is unanimous in calling for an increase in the output of Canadian films, voices like the Directors Guild of Canada and the Association of Provincial Funding Agencies and others are adding the condition that more films must also mean more marketable films. And since the issue of technical standards doesn’t seem to be the problem, the quality of screenwriting must be addressed.

According to Frappier, the screenwriting talent to build a stronger industry exists but the Canadian production process, at least in its institutionalized form, places too much emphasis on ‘the written word.’

‘If the triangle of producer-director-screenwriter really worked we’d have better movies,’ he says. ‘At the moment too many people intervene in the screenwriting process, and the effect is a story that is always watered down by the time it reaches the screen. I think we have to be more daring in our stories.

The director’s vision

‘When I see foreign films I ask myself, `Would this be possible in Canada?’ and sometimes I have to say `No.’ When I looked at Once Were Warriors I can say that would have been impossible to produce here.’

(He says it seems likely the funding institutions would have balked at what was arguably a discriminatory perception of indigenous New Zealanders, and sans doubt, the movie’s heated and indeed profane language.)

According to the producer, a script does not make a movie, first of all because it lacks what he calls ‘a director’s vision.’

‘That film [Once Were Warriors] could have gone one way or the other depending on who was directing and whose vision it was.’

Another case for comparison, Prairie blizzards aside, is the Coen brothers’ fact-based crime story Fargo.

Like many others, Frappier says he really liked the film but wonders if it too wouldn’t have been just a little too violent (the chainsaw and shredding scenes near the end of the film) to have received funding in Canada.

‘But we’re getting there,’ he says. ‘The Sweet Hereafter is very close to Fargo, at another level.

‘I think we’re putting too much emphasis on the written word. We tend to look at the script as if it was something in and of itself. It’s not,’ says Frappier.

‘The filming has to be better than the script, the editing has to be better than the filming, and the post-production has to be better than the editing. Then you have a good movie. If at each stage the bar is lowered, the end result is a bad film.

‘When you see films at the international level or in a festival, the ones that touch you have a vision – from beginning to end. When I’m told there aren’t any good screenwriters in this country, I disagree. What they should say is that we don’t let the screenwriter write their story.’

If more freedom for the creative filmmaking triangle is the best assurance of success, Frappier says there are still no guarantees in the movie business.

‘Good luck and we hope you will succeed because in this business we just don’t know. Because if we really knew we’d all be producing the only movie that would succeed.’

Wide industry

consensus

The industry advisory committee met in Quebec City Aug. 20-21 with Heritage Minister Sheila Copps in attendance on the first day. The committee meets again during tiff, or at the latest by the end of the month.

Frappier says the hope is the minister will seriously examine the recommendations this fall.

‘There is a big consensus in the industry at every level at the moment,’ he says.

All the major Canadian guilds, unions and professional associations including the cftpa, the apftq and the dgc are backing a major increase in funding, and Frappier says the second area of wide agreement concerns broadcasters.

Frappier says conventional broadcasters aren’t pulling their weight in terms of fair licence fees and investing in Canadian feature films.

‘In France, there are a 100 films produced each year. For 90 of those 100, 40% of their budgets come from television, pay and conventional. Here in Canada, it’s not even 2%.’

And while an investment by a European broadcaster may give them equity rights, Frappier says the broadcasters do not become the film’s producer, ‘and they don’t show up and say, `You should change your script and change this and change that.’ You give them the script, you give them your cast, your director, the budget, and they say yes or no, period.’

Other horizons

Frappier’s experience with young filmmakers has been more than rewarding, but the veteran producer also has other horizons and is currently gearing up to produce an English-language film in ’99.

‘I’m very close to signing so I can’t give you the name of the [Canadian] director yet, but it’s someone who is well known and very good. From now on I want to do one English feature a year.’

Dealing with Alliance

All of Frappier’s films for the next two years will be distributed by Alliance, domestically and internationally, a deal that was announced at Cannes.

Frappier says the partnership with Alliance Vivafilm gives him an on going relationship with an important distributor, as well as a ‘very interesting film-by-film development deal.’

‘A distributor can be the difference between life and death on a movie. If the distributor isn’t backing your film, the film dies, it’s as simple as that. It’s the only medium where there is no second chanceÉso it’s very important that the distributor understand the film and identify the audience it’s intended to reach.

‘Every spring there’s another 2,000 new movies – in Cannes, in Berlin, in Venice, Montreal, in Toronto.

‘Theatrical film is the only medium I know where [the product] has to be released properly. And I think the big lack we have here in Quebec, not with all distributors, is that we don’t have the full support of the media for Quebec cinema. If they come on set while you’re shooting then they won’t do a big article when the film is released a year later. So you end up with only a two-week window [prior to the release date].’

Frappier is a former drama studio producer with the nfb. His filmography includes three best motion picture Genies for Denys Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire (1986), Un zoo, la nuit (1987) and Arcand’s Jesus de Montreal (1989); and three Golden Reel awards for the country’s top-grossing movie for the two Arcand films and Alain Chartrand’s Ding et Dong, le film (1990).