ìMediapro Studios has an opportunity to become one of the great production houses in the world.î Andrew Mason

TALK TALK TALK
Andrew Mason, executive producer of
The Matrix Trilogy and Cave , in production at Mediapro Studios

>>Andrew Mason: A CAREER IN PICTURES

Vivid: I saw The Matrix again last night and thought I understood a little bit more about it.

there's a very nifty little scene in which Morpheus is describing this to Neo. He says, ìThis coupled with the form of fusion is how they keep the power going,î and you think, ìWell, if they had a form of fusion what the hell do they need with a bunch of human beings?î

So what was the purpose of the machines?

Some of those websites suggested that a better explanation would have been that the human beings' minds were being used as a wonderful data processing and storage operation ñ since we only use a tiny proportion of our own brains ñ and The Matrix was feeding into the human brains in order to keep them ticking over. A good idea after the event!

Most science fiction films have those sorts of problems in them. I've been to a couple of science conferences and for entertainment value for colour and movement they've had scientists and filmmakers criticizing each other. The Matrix generally comes out quite well, with people who are prepared to accept any minor difficulties they see. Because they are entertained enough, they don't mind.

I love the idea that you can just program in the learning of something. For example, towards the end of the first film, there's a B-12 helicopter and Neo asks Trinity whether she can fly one, and her reply is ëNot yet', whereupon she calls Tank for a download of a B-12 helicopter flight training manual. And there's a moment of flickering eyelids and wham she gets in and flies it.

I always though that was a pretty cool idea. ìI need my golf game improved ñ gimme a downloadî (laughs).

Exactly!

Those films at the very least force people to think about a lot of concepts they might not otherwise have thought of. And the sequels were criticised for different reasons. Some people thought they had become too formal, others thought the story had become too convoluted. But they nonetheless continued the process of people talking about larger issues. It's one of my particular sources of fascination that at the end of the last century there were an entire group of films appearing that dealt with the general question of whether everything that you saw was real. You could write a major thesis on why filmmakers were so fascinated with the concept.

Why were people so fascinated with the concept of reality?

I suppose it's partly because they had become so dependent on television to bring them reality. But once you get to the point where you're so familiar with the faking of a world, then a hundred years of cinema led to people saying, ëI don't know what I'm seeing any more, and I don't know that in real life either!'

You had films like The Truman Show, where everyone ñ the audience, and every other character ñ knows the truth except for the protagonist ...

And the film was over once he learnt the truth. You had The Matrix, where the audience and the main character learns the truth after about a third of the way through as does the character, and the rest of it is about fighting the evil that is attempting to confuse him. You had Dark City, in which we don't learn the truth until two thirds of the way through and the rest is fighting evil. You had The Thirteenth Floor, Memento, and there was a whole bunch of them that analysed the same problem from different points of view.

So what was the truth in The Matrix?

That filmmakers were able to get to make quite a revolutionary film with all the resources that a Hollywood studio would normally reserve for its mindless action pieces, and they were able to sneak in a whole bunch of serious philosophy into a summer action movie.

There's a great sense of excitement throughout the film Ö

Actually that sense of excitement was there during the making of the movie. People keep saying, ëThis is really cool!' We had that on Dark City, and in The Crow, which I also worked on. If you're lucky, you get that sense of excitement during the making of a movie. You think, ëWill we get away with this? Will we actually achieve this?' and it's very cool if you do. I believe that if there is a good vibe on the set it usually translates into an audience having a good time when they see it.

It usually works like that, does it?

It does kind of, because you can't hide the personality of the filmmakers. If the film is a very heavy, serious drama then you can have a heavy serious atmosphere on the set ...

Like Apocalypse Now, for instance?

Yeah, in a film like that you see the atmosphere of the set reflected in the film. But if you're making a science fiction/thriller/action/adventure/horror film, any of those categories, then you're basically looking to entertain people. So you'd better be having a good time yourself or it's going to spill out from the screen back into the audience, and they'll go home feeling grumpy.

Is there a good feeling on the set of Cave, the film you're making here?

There's a great camaraderie. This group has become great friends. They're all hanging out together, and having a really good time. You see that, every day on set. They have become familiar with each other very quickly, and it is that familiarity that you expect when, in fictional terms, people have been working alongside each other for years.

That's a crew of ñ how many?

About 100. And we have a rule on the set, that if your mobile phone rings during filming you have to buy a beer for the whole crew. It's only happened five times so far, and the first two times it happened it was Bruce Hunt, the director, and that kind of set the precedent.

As a film producer, what criteria do you think makes a successful director?

You've got to be able to sit a table having a meal with a director and be interested in the stories they tell. Because by giving them a film to make you're just giving them a bigger instrument to tell a story. And if they can't tell an entertaining story over a glass of wine then it's going to be pretty boring watching their movies. And Bruce, I'm glad to say, is great fun over a glass of wine. That would be the Mason Theory, anyway (laughs).

What's the film about?

A group of explorers who are also cave divers are called upon to help take some scientists down into a newly discovered cave system in Romania . They get trapped down there, and not only do they have the difficulty of making their way out, but there is something very nasty lurking in the shadows. And there's no fair guessing that they won't all make it out.

The film is being shot at Mediapro Studios. Are you using locations as well?

A couple of sequences, pre-title sequences establishing the background to the story, that we shot in the mountains in a gorge at Zarnesti. That was in the first week of filming and we will also do some filming at the Black Sea ñ with a bit of trickery we'll make it look like the coast of Mexico. And the rest is all at the studios. It's too impractical to film in a real cave. Not only would it be environmental vandalism because the presence of any people in a cave system distorts the environment but the presence of a film crew distorts anything. That would be hugely irresponsible and practically not very safe.

Why Romania?

The film could really have been made anywhere, but Bruce Hunt and I wanted to make it in Romania, because it's set here. We just kind of thought, ëWhy not?' We both knew Prague fairly well, we looked at Budapest and Berlin , and ended up coming here, because all the resources are here.

It would have helped too, to have Romanian actors playing the Romanian characters Ö

Right, instead of some Czech dudes pretending to be Romanian. Why wouldn't you make it real?

What about the facilities at the studio?

Mediapro Studios has an opportunity to become one of the great production houses in the world. The original building is marvellously established and proportioned and has a well done group of stages. They've got five really good stages and in the process of facilitating this film they've built one huge new building and another pool that will also effectively become another stage. That, plus a backlot which is a really decent size and the willingness to adapt anything to anything ñ those are fairly valuable resources.

Is there enough people who know what they're doing at Mediapro Studios?

I think we've demanded so much in terms of set building. We've stretched them to their limit in terms of the number of people with set building skills, but by the time we've finished, that number will be huge. As long as Mediapro Studios stay in touch with them, they'll have access to an amazingly skilled group of set builders and designers.

Would you recommend Romania, and Mediapro Studios, as a place to make a feature?

Absolutely. But I think there is always a particular type of film that you can make in some places that you can't make in others. For instance, I wouldn't look at Bucharest to make a very hi-tech futuristic sort of film, because the materials you need to build those sorts of sets aren't readily available here. The Matrix was pretty technical, and certainly the sequels had a lot of complicated rigs and electronics that were involved in the sets.

But there's only a small group of films that need that, and an awful lot of films that don't. And Mediapro Studios have proved that they can build fantastic sets.

What more can the government and Romanian film studios do to attract foreign production companies to make films here?

I think film companies very rapidly get a feeling for whether a city is friendly to film or not. You have to work hard at projecting that image. You have to make it so that a film company will come in and say, for instance, ëWe're making a big spy thriller and we love the look of this section of the city, and we need to close it for three days.î The city has to be flexible enough to have its administration gather rapidly its fire departments, police, transport and say, ëWe need to do this, because it will mean a lot of foreign dollars, so let's find a way to make it work. Let's reroute the traffic, let's do this, let's do that, and let's make it not be a major disruption.' Film companies know they have to pay to disturb the life of a city and they expect to pay for it. They don't expect to pay a zillion dollars because at a certain point it either becomes economical to go somewhere else, or to fake the city.

What cities are friendly to film?

It works in cities like New York and Sydney, where film makers know they don't have to deal with every single government department to film a street scene for example, or a car chase. The governments of New York and Sydney have mandated from the highest level that they will be friendly to film. They hold regular meetings of everyone who will have an impact, and have worked out how to make the approvals process, - all the permits, the police facilities, the transport arrangements - easier. The Bourne Supremacy, for example, which just shot a big car chase scene in Moscow ñ there's no reason why that shouldn't have been made here.

To do it you would need to close a whole lot of streets on a whole lot of days and everyone would have to be on board.

But that movie spent a lot of money in Moscow. This is clean export dollars we're talking about.

Is obtaining a film-friendly reputation a good investment for a city?

Whatever support a government gives to a local film industry they usually get it back in tax dollars from the big foreign companies coming into shoot. So you need a local film industry, and people who can work in it and be hired by foreign movies when they come here to shoot a film.

There are a lot of countries competing for the itinerant film making dollar.

It was The Matrix, and the fact that it became a hit, that really focused everybody's attention on what you could do in Australia. When you have movie stars kicking around a city, going in and out of restaurants and nightclubs and so on, that tends to get reported all over the world, and adds to the concept of that city being one that should be visited.

You were instrumental in persuading the Australian government to create a more film-friendly tax system towards film Ö

We used to have a more liberal system that was abused, so the government closed the loophole. I was one of many people lobbying for a change when it looked like foreign film companies weren't going to come to Australia any more, and we now have a system which gives film companies a 12.5 per cent tax rebate for any film made in Australia. That has helped, but the Australian dollar's recent rise has made it more expensive to make films there now.

Hungary is looking like the Ireland of the new EU countries. It just announced a 20 per cent tax rebate for foreign film production.

That's what you do to bring business in and to help build the infrastructure. You make an offer like that and you get a lot more films; each film leaves something, it improves or enhances something, builds a new studio or whatever. Then you have a whole lot of resources and you cut the benefit back, when the resources attract the work.

You could do that here.

You sure could do that here. There probably will be a film, and I dearly hope it will be Cave, that forces all the film financiers of the world to sit up and take Romania seriously.

It is nice to see, at the Australian Film Festival recently, films that are so obviously not made by a Hollywood studio.

It's so vital to reflect an individual culture. Those are not the films I spend time making, but they are the films I value. Those are the films I encourage my kids to go and see, because I think that Australian culture is definitely at threat from world culture, and specifically Californian culture, because we're a Pacific Rim country, from a similar socio-economic culture. So its very easy for east coast Australians to accept Californian television and culture, and you end up losing grip of your national identity. How many Romanian feature films are made each year?

I don't know. Five, at a guess Ö

Wow, that's not many. That's not enough, is it?

No, and to make up for that, Romanians are fed an endless diet of Hollywood pap that are just a waste of time seeing. You'd rather not see them.

Yeah, you don't care about the money, you want the two hours back. ëGimme back those two hours!' Well, that's a real urgent need then. It can't just be a local version of Big Brother. That's not what Romanians are, and I'm sure its not what they want reflected as their culture.

Romanians do have an excellent knowledge of their culture though. For instance, the average person would be able to tell you about historical figures and what they did and when. They'd put the average Australian to shame in that regard.

That wouldn't be hard. But that's the role of the artist ñ to meditate on the constantly changing nature of a society and to highlight things that are important and cause debate about what is important. I see it in theatre here, where you see a real energy, a way of using performance to question the values of a society. That is alive and well, as far as I can tell. And I'm sure it's there in painting and sculpture and so on. These guys seem to have a pretty solid tradition of valuing the plastic arts.

But it's hard to reach a broad section of society when people depend so much on TV for entertainment and information.

I don't think it would be hard for the government here to mandate drama content on television networks here. I mean, they're obviously making a dollar. So it's time to put a dollar back. It worked in Australia. There are so many Australian actors and filmmakers who have come up through television. I mean, the British view of Australia is almost completely related to Neighbours. That's what they think it is. And that's not bad, either. Maybe that's the first step in trying to reflect culture ñ to force the networks to create and carry drama.

You've got the language problem though Ö

But pretty much every country in the world has that same problem. Because the American machine is so effective, it's really difficult to sell anything but American programming elsewhere. And yet in every country there is a hunger for local programming. So all the reality format shows have ended up being successful because you can get the local version and you end up with some local benchmark to hang on to. You know its going to be economically difficult. You know that making decent drama is not necessarily going to be profitable. But the point is that the licence to have a television station or a network carries with it some social obligations, such as being mindful of censorship etc. But one of those social obligations should be that the licensee should spend some time reflecting the local culture. I don't think that's a big ask, really.

ANDREW MASON : A CAREER IN PICTURES

Producer - filmography
Cave (2005) (filming) (producer)
Matrix Revolutions, The (2003) (executive producer)
Danny Deckchair (2003) (producer)
Matrix Reloaded, The (2003) (executive producer)
Swimming Upstream (2003) (executive producer)
Kangaroo Jack (2003) (executive producer)
Scooby-Doo (2002) (executive producer)
Queen of the Damned (2002) (executive producer)
Red Planet (2000) (executive producer)
Matrix, The (1999) (executive producer)
Dark City (1998) (producer)

Visual Effects - filmography
Dark City (1998) (miniatures director) (visual effects supervisor and producer)
Crow, The (1994) (visual effects supervisor)
Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey, The (1988) (optical effects)
Time Guardian, The (1987) (visual effects supervisor)
Burke & Wills (1985) (visual effects producer)
Early Frost (1982) (opticals)

Source: www.imdb.com