Making movies
NZ’s future film prospects cts
David Strong doesn’t see anything unusual in the fact that someone with a 22-year military background in peacekeeping is now running the NZ Film Commission. For a start, he says, working in the New Zealand Army is good preparation for the job.
“Funnily enough, we often talk in the military about leadership, being creative, [how] you must create a vision, you must explain and sell that vision. And you must lead people towards that vision. And storytelling is part of that.”
As well, Strong is no newbie to the world of film making. He’s always loved the art of telling people’s stories through film and has made four short films of his own. He has also worked for years as a military adviser on major film sets including The Water Horse, The Shannara Chronicles, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, and for seven months on Niki Caro’s Disney action fantasy Mulan. And he’s written, produced and directed his own short films.
“Certainly, in me the storytelling gene is quite strong. I love visual storytelling. When I write scripts, I see what is happening on screen as I’m typing.”
It’s significant that during the week of the Herald interview, heartbreaking real-life drama was unfolding at Kabul airport as the US pulled out of Afghanistan after 20 years.
One of Strong’s short films is about a Kiwi UN peacekeeper on his last night in the country, trying to persuade an Afghan warlord not to destroy a village the following day. Strong based The Last Night, made in 2014, on his experiences as a lieutenant colonel with the Armoured Corps trying to bring peace to war zones — Bosnia, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and East Timor. Although he never served in Afghanistan, he had colleagues who did.
The film, he says, is a commentary
on the futility of peacekeeping in those environments.
“Seeing what is happening there now, it’s heartbreakingly sad but it’s also, in some ways, how things are in Afghanistan.”
Right back to the time of Alexander the Great, the country has a history of defeating outside armed forces. In Strong’s The Last Night, the soldier asks the warlord: “If I go do you think Nato will leave you alone?” To which the warlord replies: “This is Afghanistan. No one leaves us alone.”
These days it’s New Zealand stories that Strong wants to see told on film, which is part of his job with the Film Commission. The commission spent $23 million last year and $30m this year on the film sector — money which comes from $5.4m of baseline funding from the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, $1.3m from MBIE, and from lotteries funding. This year $14m of that was spent to help produce 16 feature films, which in movie-making terms is not a lot of funding.
“These are incredibly powerful, iconic films that people make for not particularly much money, but they stay with us forever,” says Strong.
It’s early days in the job but he’d like to see “a conversation” around increasing that baseline funding of $5.4m in recognition of both the economic value of Kiwi films and the part they play in establishing cultural identity, both in this country and on the world stage.
Take films like Once Were Warriors, Sleeping Dogs, The Piano, Whale Rider and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, he says.
“I think we really punch above our weight in terms of the quality of the films we make and the stories we tell.”
Part of Strong’s role is also to make sure that New Zealand remains attractive to the big Hollywood studios, an industry worth between $600m and $940m in the past few years for international feature films and TV shows including the Avatar sequels, Sweet Tooth, and the upcoming Cowboy Bebop sci-fi series on Netflix.
Overall, the screen sector, including gaming, is worth an estimated $3.3 billion a year and about 15,000 jobs. “So it’s a significant contributor to our economy.”
News that Amazon was pulling out of New Zealand and moving production of future seasons of The Lord of the Rings to the UK came shortly after Strong joined the Film Commission. At the time, he was still dealing with fallout from They Are Us, the proposed movie on the Christchurch mosque terror attacks. And then the country went into lockdown.
Amazon was a blow, certainly, says Strong. In one shocking announcement, gone was the potential for another $650m of American money coming into the country, and 2000 jobs, if The Lord of the Rings had stayed. He feels for the supporting Auckland businesses that would have invested in infrastructure and staff on the assumption Amazon was in New Zealand
for the long haul. “It’s hitting them hard as well. So we would have preferred and would have liked them [Amazon] to stay in New Zealand for the sake of the economy.”
But he’s philosophical, used to dealing with setbacks in his military career and another 15 years in strategic roles with the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment, NZ Post and restructuring Fire and Emergency NZ before joining the commission.
“It’s not unusual for film productions to come and go.”
For Amazon it was a business decision, based on a major investment in a huge, new studio in the UK. He doesn’t think Amazon’s withdrawal will deter other international productions from coming. “They get why Amazon has done this.”
The commission is in contact with several big US studios that have large film projects in mind.
“When I say large, I mean in the hundred-million-dollar-plus bracket that are actively considering New Zealand as a location. One of their questions was ‘well, if Amazon’s leaving, will that mean we can use the studios that they’ve left?”’
The economic benefits aside, Strong says international productions also help to expose New Zealanders to the latest cutting-edge innovation in film production and techniques, and to what it’s like to work on large-scale productions.
Foreign film crews are often generous with their time during stand-down periods, a benefit Strong experienced when making The Last Night. The Hobbit construction crew at Miramar’s Stone Street Studios noticed Strong building in his studio when they walked past and offered to help.
“So basically these people who were used to designing the best quality sets in the world helped us build an Afghan warlord’s house.”
For those ongoing benefits, New Zealand needs to continue to be an attractive place for the big players to do business, Strong says.
“While the incentives remain, we will always remain an attractive place to do business.”
It is those incentives — a 40 per cent screen production rebate on local spending for international productions and a 20 per cent rebate for New Zealand productions — that Strong wants to see protected. He’s aware of criticism of the film rebate, which costs New Zealand taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Amazon was able to claim a rebate of $170m from MBIE. “But if [Amazon] hadn’t come in, then those 2000 New Zealanders wouldn’t have been employed in that sector, and we wouldn’t have seen $650m spent in our country.”
Strong points to the industry’s experience in Australia after film incentives were cut.
“The Australian screen industry dived by about 95 per cent from international productions.”
In the meantime, Strong’s sideline making films and working as a military adviser is on hold. It began at a New Year’s Eve dinner, when he met Lord of the Rings producer Barrie Osborne, who later invited him to work as a military adviser on the set of The Water Horse, filmed in Wellington, Queenstown and Scotland.
The father of three took leave without pay from the army to work with Osborne, an experience that introduced Strong to the world of film making.
His job was to train extras and actors to be “soldierly”, and advise on script notes, costumes, set designs and aspects including horses, sword fighting and archery.
“So you get exposed to all the departments and get to work with all the heads of departments.”
It was that exposure to movie making that encouraged Strong to have a go at writing and directing, often co-producing with his wife Wanda Lepionka, who is of Polish descent. She runs the New Zealand Polish Film Festival and has
co-produced Strong’s films. One of the most recent they made together was Maunga, set on Mt Taranaki in 1944. It tells the story of a Polish girl and a farm girl who meet a Ma¯ori boy and share stories of lost family.
It is those stories that Strong thinks are important to tell on screen, helping to add to Kiwi identity both at home and overseas.
“Film is a very powerful medium of telling the world who we are, so I believe we still need to make films that we’re really proud of and that show New Zealand on the world stage.”
● A selection of New Zealand films can be viewed on the NZ Film Commission’s website: ondemand.nzfilm. co.nz. To see films made by David Strong, go to Craftincfilms.com.