Small budgets and big ideas
A wave of fresh local films captures a new generation this month. JENNA BASS has written and directed Love the One You Love. She speaks about the process of making a film on a shoestring budget.
IT came as a shock to realise that making films wasn’t just about making films. I was a film school graduate, I’d done all the right things, I’d had a lot of very lucky breaks and head starts. And yet my big-budget, fantasy blockbuster was not getting made. It really came down to one catch-22: I hadn’t made a feature film, so few were willing to take the risk on me making one.
I’m sure this is familiar to many other young film-makers, artists and businesspeople - because film is a business and an art. But what can you do? I had this obsessive idea that I had to somehow get into this crazy song and dance show we call ‘the movies’. If I wanted that badly enough I’d have to start by looking at what I already had, in terms of money, location and friends. I would have to invent a new system of working, practically and creatively, that’d use what I didn’t have to my strength. I’d have to make a new kind of film, that’d hopefully be seen in new kinds of ways, and when I suddenly found myself making a movie in June 2013 only a few months later, it occurred to me that not only was it actually happening, but it was fun.
It was fun because of the freedom. In contrast to the freedom I thought I would get with bigger budgets, this was better, because I wasn’t enslaved to financiers, to audiences I depended on tricking into seeing a film that ultimately was a compromise between com- peting interests. I didn’t have to make budgetary concessions because we had almost no budget to begin with.
We were fed, we had some money for petrol, I was working with some wonderful actors, we could work at a pace which suited us and we had the whole of Cape Town as our set.
I’m painfully aware that ‘lowbudget’ is a relative term. Filmmaking inescapably requires some resources. You need something to shoot on and you need a way to edit your footage. But I think there’s a misconception of what these resources need to be. I shot Love The One You Love on consumer and prosumer cameras. I edited on an ancient laptop which crashed immediately after I’d done the final export of the film. But you could shoot and edit on your smartphone.
You don’t need an expensive camera to create beauty. You don’t need anything tangible to surprise your audience with new ideas. Yes, you need a sense of where you’re coming from. It’s helpful to have watched films, many of them that have done this before. And that’s where we as filmmakers need help, as much as we have the responsibility to be involved.
We need movies to be taught in schools, we need cinemas to show them – and not just the blockbusters that teach us the wrong lessons – films from around the world that are compelling and unique and, yes, entertaining. And we need those same theatres and distributors to support local cinema in a meaningful way, financially and whole-heartedly, so our budgets can be onscreen where they belong.
Without this, in a generation’s time, there will be no one to follow us, and South Africa will be denied one of the most powerful forms of expression that mankind has created in the last 100 years. Any art form has to adapt to its environment or face extinction. And that’s why it makes no sense to me that we copy and paste the cinema conventions of Western countries which have little to do with our context.
Of course, we want our films to appeal to global audiences, and our industry to be sustainable. But the first step to that is by being ourselves.
When you’re working on a low-budget, whatever that may mean, you have no excuse not to experiment. You also have no excuse not to be a good person: This is another thing that’s so great about this way of making films. You’re reliant on people, their trust and good-naturedness. You can’t mess them around and then buy them off. You have to repay them in kind with your own trust and respect, by giving them a good experience, preserving the notion that filmmaking is something everyone should be supporting and getting excited about.
I don’t know what the future holds for me, except that like any artist, I’m going to follow my opportunities.
What I do know is that lowbudget film-making has brought out the best in me: my creative ingenuity, my curiosity in the world, my respect for humanity, and an opportunity to take to heart the most important lesson to arise out of all this: small budgets and big ideas can, and will always, co-exist.
Making a film of any sized ambition may be exhausting, like screaming at the top of your lungs from inception until whenever it is you’re finally able to let go. But it’s comforting to know that to achieve the greatest, noblest of cinematic ambitions - to entertain and provoke equally – that all you need is yourself, some friends, a camera and ideas.
It is after all, a song and dance show. All you need to do is get up there and start dancing.
Love the One You Love screens at The Labia and Bioscope from Friday. See Top of the Times on Friday for more information.