Podcast – Distribution update and AD advice
Screen Australia Distribution Manager Anthony Grundy looks at the impact of COVID-19 on Australian theatrical while director/AD Neil Sharma imparts learnings.
Anthony Grundy, Neil Sharma
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At the beginning of 2020, the two films at the top of the Australian box office were Universal’s The Invisible Man, directed by Australian Leigh Whannell, and Roadshow’s Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears.
“I remember thinking, ‘this is going to be a great year’,” says Screen Australia’s Distribution Manager Anthony Grundy, also referring to the slew of Aussie titles that were set to release including I Am Woman, Babyteeth, Dirt Music, The Dry, Never Too Late and more.
But then Coronavirus struck, cinemas and cities were placed under lockdown and the distribution landscape, like the rest of the world, was turned upside down.
In this latest episode of the Screen Australia podcast, Grundy explains what happened next, why all eyes were on the release of Tenet and Mulan, and the problem that is in the pipeline for Australian exhibitors and distributors trying to schedule space.
The podcast also features an additional interview with director/assistant director Neil Sharma, who breaks down the different AD roles, getting an agent after his TV directing debut on The Unlisted, the advice he’s learned working alongside directors such as Jeffrey Walker (Lambs of God), and his insights on the differences between working as an AD on local TV compared to international features, like his role as third assistant director on Marvel’s upcoming Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
For feedback about this episode, please email [email protected]
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Audio Transcript
Caris Bizzaca [00:00:05] Welcome to the Screen Australia podcast. I'm Caris Bizzaca, a journalist with Screen Australia's online publication Screen News. Just a reminder before we jump into this episode of the podcast that you can subscribe to the fortnightly Screen Australia newsletter and you can also subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, please feel free to leave us a rating and review. But to today's episode, we're actually trying something a little different with this episode. We'll be joined by director Neil Sharma in a little bit, who's going to break down the different assistant director roles on a production and what they entail, but before we get to that, we've got a familiar face or should I say voice here today. It's Anthony Grundy, Screen Australia's Distribution Manager who you might remember from the Distribution 101 podcast episode and who's going to be giving us a bit of an idea of what's happening in distribution at the moment. So, hello Ant, welcome back.
Anthony Grundy [00:01:04] Hi, it's great to be back.
Caris Bizzaca [00:01:07] We'll jump straight into it. Like many industries, the screen distribution side of things has been massively impacted by coronavirus this year. Can you talk through some of the big things that have happened and where we're at, at the moment?
Anthony Grundy [00:01:22] Yes, so it has been a big year, literally just before cinemas shut after the coronavirus hit, we had the number one film at the Australian box office with The Invisible Man and the number two film in the same weekend with the opening weekend of Miss Fisher and The Crypt of Tears. I remember thinking, this is going to be a great year and then cinemas shut and the literally the whole world has turned upside down for the distribution and exhibition space. Of course, it's worth saying that, and as we talked about in the last podcast, it's a challenging space anyway, so throw on top what's happening with COVID and I think it's a really crazy new world. There's lots of people hanging on to the old ways that we used to do things. At the same time, there are a lot of companies, particularly led by the American studios, that are trying to work out what the new landscape is going to look like.
Caris Bizzaca [00:02:12] Just quickly for context, The Invisible Man was directed by an Australian, Leigh Whannell. It's one of the big Universal movies.
Anthony Grundy [00:02:20] Correct.
Caris Bizzaca [00:02:20] Then Miss Fisher and The Crypt of Tears, obviously starring Essie Davis and was created by Every Cloud Productions, which is an Australian company, so that was the Australian link.
Anthony Grundy [00:02:30] Yes and I bring those up specifically because I want to talk a little bit about what happened next. When cinemas shut, in Australia, there were a number of films that then looked at ways of selling tickets, essentially. Both of those films pivoted to a PVOD, which stands for Premium VOD (Video on Demand) model, where you're selling on iTunes, for example, for twenty dollars, for example. I can't remember what exactly the price points were, but they were a premium price for something that is express from cinema because essentially, they were just ripped out of cinemas because they were closed. In Australia, our PVOD market is less developed than in other countries, particularly the US, and what happened in the US was really interesting because that opening weekend that cinemas shut, they were expecting to release the Trolls sequel and Universal in America had spent millions of dollars marketing this film as a theatrical release, but then suddenly pivoted and became a premium PVOD release. Then a couple of months later, they announced how much money they made, which normally is quite secret. Normally a lot of companies don't reveal that type of detail about their business but Universal did and they were saying that the film did 100 million dollars in their PVOD release and that really shook the landscape up because it set a new road for releasing really big theatrical product in other ways. At the time, it gave everyone an indication that there could be other ways of reaching consumers and still making back the production budget and the marketing budget on these big films. That was an interesting thing. In Australia, Universal chose to not release Trolls on PVOD. They did with The Invisible Man, but they held on and there's a number of reasons for that. They are planning to release that currently, it's actually just come out, so it's previewing this week and it will move into a really wide release for the school holidays coming up in a couple of weeks. The other thing that's quite interesting about this, particularly with the Universal example in the US, when Trolls moved to PVOD, AMC Cinemas, which is one of the major cinema chains in America, had publicly come out and said that they were very disappointed with Universal for doing that and that they wouldn't play another Universal film, which are big words. Since then, a couple of months later, they've then announced a partnership with Universal where they were going to, they didn't say what films, but they would work on a 17-day theatrical window. Normally it's 90 days, so that's a long way short and share in some of the, and who knows what the deal would look like, but then share in some of the revenues from the digital release.
Caris Bizzaca [00:05:09] With a PVOD release?
Anthony Grundy [00:05:10] Yes, for a certain amount of time, who knows what the details are, which is a fascinating new model that we hadn't really seen before. And it hasn't happened yet, but it was just announced that this was happening, and then at the same time, a lot of companies were working out 'well, we've got these really big films that we've spent a lot of money making and we'd spend a lot of money marketing, what are we going to do with them?' The other one that's being talked about a lot, of course, is Mulan. When cinemas were shut, they reopened, I want to say about June, July in Australia, we saw cinemas starting to reopen. But, of course, all of the major studio product had moved out of this year for the most part. You may have heard that Tenet was being held up as the big saviour for theatrical to reignite consumers interest in going to the movies and we've now lived through that and it's come out and I can talk a little bit about that but at the time, it was Tenet and Mulan were the two films that were going to be the first ones back when cinemas reopened. Just before that happened, Disney announced that Mulan would be in territories where they have Disney+. Australia is one of those territories, that it would bypass theatrical and go straight onto the Disney+ service, but they had actually created a new window that didn't really exist before, which is a premium window in a streaming service. Imagine Netflix where you then pay an extra, and in this case it's 35 dollars, which is quite significant.
Caris Bizzaca [00:06:35] You can only access it if you have the streaming service, as well.
Anthony Grundy [00:06:40] Correct, es, so you need to be a Disney+ subscriber and then on top of that, you're charged a premium and no one knows how this will play out. Like that. A lot of those numbers aren't- companies don't release those publicly in the way that they do box office numbers, so maybe we'll never know. There's a lot of chat online and a lot of people speculating about how many subscribers they need globally to make up probably what they would have made theatrically. I don't think that's the point. I think that for those streaming services, their business models run in different ways and they're about retaining subscribers and limiting the churn rate, which is the number of people that decide to get rid of it each month and they need shiny jewels to draw people to their services, so their business models are slightly different. But the thing that I think is fascinating is the consumer perception around what this price point means, because I need to pay X number of dollars to have my monthly subscription to a streaming service, and then on top of that, I have to pay, in this case, 35 dollars. I'm sure people would argue that, well, if you took the family to the movies, then it's going to be more than 35 dollars, so you're saving money.
Caris Bizzaca [00:07:49] Especially when you consider like popcorn and driving there.
Anthony Grundy [00:07:53] Exactly, but you can look at it the other way and say, well, 35 dollars to watch one film, and I believe that you get to watch it forever, so it's not a stream, it's a download to own essentially. They used to be about twenty dollars so in the context of that perception, it's not out of the ballpark. But from a streaming service, the consumers don't care about the business model, they don't care how much films cost to make. They just want the content they want at the price that they are prepared to pay and I think what's really interesting here is 35 dollars is the equivalent of four months subscription for the whole Disney+ product. It will be fascinating to see and I think it just illustrates the way that the business model, the traditional theatrical business model, has dramatically changed and the pandemic has forced the studios to consider, in the case of Tenet, for example, are they going to release globally day and date, particularly for a film that's very secretive in terms of story and spoilers anyway. That type of blockbuster/Christopher Nolan film traditionally would be released in one go, globally. The idea you're stopping piracy, that's the way those blockbusters are released these days. Now, because certain markets aren't open, they had to stagger some of their release, Christopher Nolan very publicly had said, I want to stay with a theatrical release because it's important to me as a filmmaker and Warner Brothers supported that. It was interesting to see where that was going to land and they did. It came out a couple of weeks ago, Australia and I think South Korea would have had previews the weekend before and none of those box office numbers were reported. Obviously, because they don't really represent anything that you can compare to so they kept the numbers in the bag for a while. It's globally crossed 126 million dollars, which is terrific. It opened in China last weekend, it opened in some US cities, didn't open in, I want to say, L.A., New York and Chicago, which are really major markets in the US, but it still did 20 million in the US, normally a Christopher Nolan film might do fifty million dollars in the US. Given the circumstances, that it's a really great result, but then I guess to put in context, can one film save the business? In Australia in its opening weekend, we did about two and a half million dollars and there was about one point four or five million dollars from the sneaks the previous weekend.
Caris Bizzaca [00:10:28] And there's a whole state out.
Anthony Grundy [00:10:31] Exactly, so Victoria's missing and if they're 30 per cent of the market, that's a big hole. Like I said before, it's really hard to compare that to, well, I don't know what we should be expecting because there certainly were cinemas - because there's such a shortage of big American films - they were really heavily programming. I mean, one Sydney location was playing over 60 sessions a day that opening weekend, which is a lot. Whereas you think about a little Aussie film might go out on five sessions a day. With social distancing, they can't put the same number of people into a cinema, so the capacities are smaller. It's just hard to compare what that actually means, but to give that a little bit of context, that opening weekend, the total box office was about, I think, three point four million and normally this time of year, out of, not a peak period, the box office might do fourteen or fifteen million dollars, so we're still 85 percent down on what we normally would be doing. Of course, one film is hopefully just going to get cinemagoers back in the habit of going and remind them why they want that out of home, big cinema experience.
Caris Bizzaca [00:11:40] But if the lay of the land.
Anthony Grundy [00:11:41] I know, it's crazy times out there and I think we've had a couple of films bypass the theatrical, which is just, I think that's a sign of the times.
Caris Bizzaca [00:11:52] As in, they were meant to release theatrical and they've gone on to a streaming service?
Anthony Grundy [00:11:57] Yes, so they were initially conceptualised as theatrical releases and then other opportunities have presented themselves. For something like I Am Woman which recently released on Stan, the campaign, the audience awareness campaign that Stan delivers on a title like that, I don't know if you've noticed it's everywhere.
Caris Bizzaca [00:12:15] Huge.
Anthony Grundy [00:12:15] Like you just can't move for it, which is terrific from our point of view, because you get to the financial modelling for a theatrical distributor to spend at that level and earn at that level releasing it in a cinema, it's much harder to make those numbers back. But I think in the context of a streaming business, it's a different business and I Am Woman, I'm sure, is reaching a really massive audience via that medium so that's great.
Caris Bizzaca [00:12:40] On that note with I Am Woman, but then the other reverse side of it is that we do get box office figures, but with the streaming services, they have traditionally not released those numbers.
Anthony Grundy [00:12:52] Yes, with the streaming services, they all tend to hang onto that data about how many people are watching, and it's because they don't have any direct stakeholders. I mean, they have producers, but they don't have direct stakeholders that need the data to drive their businesses in the way that TV networks publish their ratings [and] overnight data, because advertisers need to know what value they're getting and who they're reaching. Their business models are different, they don't publicly release those details. Of course, everyone would love to know what this content is doing in terms of audience engagement, and Netflix along the line have definitely released versions of snippets of data but it's hard because it's new and it's hard to put context around.
Caris Bizzaca [00:13:38] And unless every streaming service is using the same measurement for what constitutes a view, it's very hard to compare.
Anthony Grundy [00:13:48] Also, Netflix is a global business, so there can be pieces of content that might be more niche and they might not necessarily work in Australia, but if you spread that across the globe, then the numbers for that piece of content can suddenly start making sense, and so it would be great to have some insights into that, particularly because at Screen Australia were part of the mix on the investment side of things.
Caris Bizzaca [00:14:12] We were talking a bit about some of the films that are coming out in the next few months. I have been seeing release schedules coming out and different studios putting out their slates for the next few months and into 2021. Can you talk through that a little bit and particularly any Australian films - Babyteeth released a bit earlier this year - but any Australian films that are maybe on those slates?
Anthony Grundy [00:14:40] Yes, there is and like I said, I think having Tenet lead the way, that has shown the studios, it gives you a starting point, a benchmark to say, 'okay, this is what we can expect.' But we're now starting to see the big American product coming through and like I said, at the beginning of the year, the slate this year was looking incredible. Every year there's the movie convention. It was in August or October last year and the Road Show presentation was absolutely phenomenal. They have a really, really strong line-up of exactly these type of broad, really well-produced cinematic feature films on their slate. There are still some that they're holding onto. One of them is The Dry, which is the Eric Bana film, directed by Rob Connolly and it's based on a book. I think it has an existing awareness. I've seen a rough cut, it's absolutely phenomenal. It's an amazing film.
Caris Bizzaca [00:15:34] You've also got Leah Purcell's directorial feature, directorial debut.
Anthony Grundy [00:15:38] Yes, the Drover's Wife. They have Penguin Bloom, which is Naomi Watts film and Rams, which is the remake of the Icelandic 2015 film.
Caris Bizzaca [00:15:48] And that's the one with Sam Neill?
Anthony Grundy [00:15:49] Sam Neill and Michael Caton, and Universal have Dirt Music, which is coming up in a couple of weeks. And of course, Never Too Late is going out in October, which Jacki Weaver and James Cromwell and is for an older audience, but is a whole lot of fun, and I know that we've had some conversations with exhibition and they're super excited about that. So, I think that's the other interesting thing, each demographic is reacting slightly differently to what's going on. Anecdotally, you hear lots of things. I know my mum's been to the movies a bunch of times. Some older people are taking this really slowly, the step back into cinemas, but by the same token, some of those really older demographics might not be embracing the PVOD technology or the streaming services. Hopefully by October there's a little bit more comfort for the older audiences to come back and I think Never Too Late is a great film for them.
Caris Bizzaca [00:16:49] And then still in the release schedules and things like that, I'm just thinking, do you feel like the industry is being a lot more flexible as they're responding to different things? And also, how is the situation then going to play out in Victoria who have not had cinemas open?
Anthony Grundy [00:17:06] Exactly, that is a massive problem for both cinemas and distributors because Victoria's effectively shut now. Tenet hasn't done its natural run and these big films, like I said before, the exhibitors have to give them a huge amount of their real estate, the cinemas and the seats because of social distancing. When a few of them start to bank up and by, I think the Victorian government has said cinemas can't open until mid-November, and by then there's Death on the Nile, there's the Bond [film], there's still Tenet - all of these films haven't been released in Victoria. There's going to be a huge backlog and programming those into Victoria could be very challenging. I think that it will be hard for them, and like I said before, because of piracy and these studios have to consider the international landscape when they pick a date in Australia, it might not be feasible to put one of these films out and put it in next year, which is very crowded because of [films coming] out of this year. It's a balancing act.
Caris Bizzaca [00:18:07] A jigsaw puzzle.
Anthony Grundy [00:18:08] Yeah, so it will be interesting to see what happens, but in my role, I talk a lot with the cinema chains and distributors and I think that there is definitely need for just a fresh approach and a fresh look. The windows debate is really heating up and it's easy to go 'well, I just think that consumers should have whatever they want whenever they want it.' It's fine to say that, but that's not good business for someone and there's many arguments that you can put forward on both sides, and ultimately, the thing that is true is the cinema experience - which is leave your house and pay twenty dollars to see a movie - has to have a premium attached to it somehow. That is because you can't get it somewhere else, so for some films, windows are really important and there are other films where they might be less important. It doesn't look like cinemas- cinemas are still holding steadfast into the idea that the theatrical experience needs to be preserved, but my feeling is that I think over the next little period, we're definitely going to see some of the old rules just revisited. There has to be some negotiation that's going on and it will come down to the content. There are certain things that work in a digital setting that might not translate as well theatrically or vice versa.
Caris Bizzaca [00:19:30] We'll just have to see how it plays out. Well, thank you so much for joining us again Ant and hopefully have you back again soon.
Anthony Grundy [00:19:37] My pleasure, thank you.
Caris Bizzaca [00:19:41] Now we're going to jump to an interview with director Neil Sharma. Neil was actually featured in our Next Step video series a couple of months ago. It's a series where we talk to directors who have made the leap into long form screen stories and how they went about it, but these chats are so wide ranging that we'll be including a couple of additional specific sections in some of the upcoming podcasts. So, a bit about Neil, Neil started out his career as a production runner on Dance Academy before stepping into assistant directing roles and climbing the ranks within the film and television industry here in Australia. He landed his first job directing network TV with The Unlisted, but here's what he said about being an assistant director, otherwise known as an AD.
Neil Sharma [00:20:27] So as an AD there's different levels of ADs, there are with many other departments, so generally you'd start off as a third AD. As a third AD, third assistant director, your job is to more or less help the first AD on set with all the background extras, making sure casts are taken care of, making sure they're happy and all the base level things to help run a set and just making sure all the different departments know what they are doing and helping the information flow within a set. As a second AD on television programmes and TV series', you're more or less back at the unit base, which is where all the costume and makeup trucks are based, where you'll often go as a company or crew to go and have lunch or breakfast or your meals and you're there making sure the run of the schedule is going to plan, so the days and weeks coming up, making sure all the actors are going through costume and makeup as they should, liaising with production as well as on set. You're the voice in between the two. As a second-second, which you tend to have that role on bigger productions and bigger international features, as a base second-second, you're there to help the second AD at base. As an onset second-second, you're very much there to help run a set with the first AD. So really being the right-hand man or woman to the first AD and the director to just make sure everyone's doing what they need to, getting that information out there because it's the key to good AD-ing is just facilitating every other department and making sure that they know what's happening and helping them do their jobs better and everything run smoothly. Then obviously, the first AD is the captain of the ship, if you will, and they just keep things driving and they are in charge of the schedule as a whole, making sure we're achieving the day each day and in a bigger picture of things, the shoot as a whole.
Caris Bizzaca [00:22:35] Another term that I've heard of, if you could please explain it, is a splinter unit. What's a splinter unit?
Neil Sharma [00:22:43] A splinter unit is essentially; you'll often hear the term splinter unit or second unit. They are different. On a TV show or a film, a splinter unit is generally where a few people will splinter off from the main unit and go off to shoot something a little smaller, be it a hand picking up a pen or establishing shots of the sun rising or whatever it may be. What they'll tend to do is just take the bare minimum amount of people to go off and do those shots so it doesn't really affect the main unit shoot, which is great when you've got the manpower to facilitate that. It's often a necessity to get a splinter unit to go off and get those shots just because the schedule deems it. You definitely need the people power to make that a reality, because if you're taking camera people away from the camera team and they're already under stress or you need to lose an AD and a lighting guy and a grip and a makeup person, then it can stitch up the main production. Second unit is generally where budgets attributed to bringing on a whole secondary crew, be it a second unit director, DOP, lighting team, camera doing the whole lot. They will often shoot pickup scenes, again, like establishes, if need be, but they'll pick up a lot of the scenes that the main unit just can't do, but it's a whole separate entity.
Caris Bizzaca [00:24:16] In terms of working in the industry, people often get representation. Can you talk to getting an agent and how you actually go about it?
Neil Sharma [00:24:28] In my experience, you'll find two schools of thought on it. I find having an agent amazing and really beneficial for me, because especially as an up-and-comer, you need somebody on your side to be out there putting your name across when you can always do that yourself, so having a great agent behind you is phenomenal. I'm really blessed and lucky to have a great agent behind me that helps me out in that sense. Then again, I know a lot of people who may be a little more experienced or have a lot more work under their belts don't find needing an agent to be so important. So, I guess it's just different horses for different courses. As for finding an agent, I actually linked up with my agent after doing The Unlisted, so I feel like once I had a bigger credit under my belt, it opened up a few more doors for me. That was reverse engineered to a point, but I feel like that's generally how it seems to work.
Caris Bizzaca [00:25:28] And can you talk through some of your key pieces of advice that you've learnt?
Neil Sharma [00:25:35] Yeah, so coming up through the ranks is a production runner and then an AD and then making the jump over to directing, I think one of the most valuable things that I've had the experience of is just working with a lot of different peoples that have had my back and are very open with giving advice and giving guidance as to how to make the next step to, from running to AD-ing, AD-ing to directing and so forth. A lot of the advice that I've been given would be in the early days, a lot of it was to just keep making things. You're not really going to hone your craft if you're not out there doing things, making productions, being a part of productions, your friends, anyone else out there who's willing to take a chance on you to make anything. Put your hand up and just get into it, because you're not going to learn by reading books and all the rest of it. You really need to jump in there and be a part of it. Some advice that was given to me as well early on was to not be afraid of failing. Even if you're making things and they're not quite what you anticipate, which will happen throughout your career I'm sure, don't be afraid of that. I think part of the process is learning as you make mistakes, so fail and fail hard is something I'd suggest because it's the best way to learn. In terms of advice that I've been given for my directing work, I think I was lucky in that being an AD, I surrounded by a lot of incredibly talented directors that I could just hover in the shadows and watch. I was really lucky to be taken under the wings of Jeffrey Walker, whom I met on Dance Academy 10 - 13 years ago, whatever it is now. I was a production runner, he was directing and when the position to be his assistant popped up through just getting along with him on set from Dance Academy, I think he put me up for consideration. That's been a relationship that's thrived for going on 12 years now, I'd say, and I've worked with him a lot. The things that I've learnt from him are hard work over everything. The industry as a whole seems really glamorous to a lot of people but the reality of it is that it's not, not all the time. If you do jump into this industry, you need to realise that it's incredibly long hours. You're going to sacrifice a lot to do what you're hopefully passionate about. If you're not passionate about it, it's not the right industry for you, you should definitely change your career path at once. But watching people like Jeff just work their butts off to make that vision become a thing was really inspiring. I would definitely recommend that advice that I got at a young age just by watching is that hard work really does pay off, and don't be afraid to get in there and just jump in the deep end.
Caris Bizzaca [00:28:38] Lastly, working as an AD on some of these Australian productions versus some of the international ones like the Marvel movie you mentioned, is there much of a difference between the two and how they run in an Australian versus an international project?
Neil Sharma [00:28:56] Look, in essence, a small Aussie drama on your Free-to-Air Network versus your Marvel studio pick, the very base level, they're the same, you're there to achieve the same things that obviously the bigger productions and the studio picks just come with a lot more money, a lot more time, often bigger toys to play with, a little more room to move in so far as things are at your fingertips where they're not always in smaller budget things. I think the most obvious difference when you do walk onto those sets are the scale of things. For me, you can always tell through set design, set design and then also just the movement of camera, because you've got bigger toys, the grips have got bigger toys to help you do some really cool stuff with cameras and how you choose to move them. They're the most obvious ways that you will often see the difference between, your larger scale productions to smaller ones and very importantly, the catering's always fantastic on big studio films and that's 98 percent of why I do this.
Caris Bizzaca [00:30:10] Priorities.
Neil Sharma [00:30:11] Exactly.
Caris Bizzaca [00:30:14] That was Neil Sharma, and a big thanks to him for chatting with us, as well as to Screen Australia Distribution Manager Anthony Grundy. If you have any feedback about this episode, please feel free to e-mail [email protected] or leave a rating and review on iTunes. Thanks for listening.