Tony Keily's informative contribution to the low and micro-budget debate.

Q: Why were these initiatives set up in the first place?

A: Look at the IFB website. The guidelines tell us why.

Q: Can you read them out for me?

A: "The landscape for feature film production has changed dramatically in recent years. There has been a polarisation in the market place with €10m and higher budget films at one end and low budget films at the other. The heretofore mid-range €3m to €5m film has become very difficult to finance and BSÉ/IFB intends to encourage indigenous filmmaking at lower budget levels. New technologies have had a significant influence on approaches to filmmaking, with DV/HDTV cameras replacing 35 mm and S16 mm at the lower level. In response to this changing environment in filmmaking, BSÉ/IFB has decided to initiate a new approach to encourage low budget feature filmmaking."

Q: Mmmm. What's this 'polarisation' stuff?

A: A lot of 90s Irish filmmaking was influenced by the business notion of producing 'wallflowers': features on modest budgets that might break out into the international anglophone market place.

Q: But they didn't.

A; No. The thinking was very local in time and place. Soon the prestige heritage or rom com movies that US distributors might pick up and propel Oscar-ward were larger budget studio-but-for-the-cost productions. At €3-5M a pop, Ireland could not care for an Englishpatient, or throw three weddings.

Q: That's only one pole.

A: Patience. We also know that from the late 90s on, some very low budget features, often rough in look and shot on tape, did quite well. These ranged from Danish Zentropa products such as The Idiots of Festen to Chuck'n'Buck or The Contenders from New York's Blow Up Pictures: iconoclastic titles which often as not wore their 'dirt', their pixelation and disintegration, as badges of honour.

Q: Baise-Moi was freakin filthy, wasn't it?!

A: Yes.

Q: OK, were the new initiatives set up for this risk-taking cinema of yours, or were they there to... what was it?

A: "To encourage indigenous filmmaking at lower budget levels"?

Q. Yes, not for any new type of Irish filmmaking, but to get films shot on HD with union deals that couldn't get off the ground at €3-€5M?

A: That would have been dumb. Not only would it have contradicted the stated guidelines of the initiatives, with their emphasis on "personal visually-based" film, it would have made little business sense. If there was specific demand at the lower end of a polarised international market place, this demand was for the mentioned digital and risky specialty products. A twee glowing rom com or a feel-good disability movie wouldn't suddenly appeal to this market segment on the basis that it was shot for under a million on tape with the unions looking in the other direction!

Q: Nicely put. But aren't you coming on like the all-seeing-eye? How do you know what the IFB had in mind?

A: I interviewed the IFB late in 2002 (FI 90, p. 15) and what they told me confirmed all this. They said that the new digital technology "impacts more than the bottom line... It gives filmmakers freedom to shoot more footage and improvise, ... to be more aesthetically adventurous... to push the envelope and the boundaries towards forms of film that rely more on the visual than the verbal. This may open up new forms of narrative." The MB initiative in particular was there to "encourage new types of filmmaking. By the nature of this initiative it's very difficult to copper-fasten criteria... The Board recognises that these will be 'high-risk' projects... Paradoxically, in cinema, the further you push artistically, the more genuinely commercial you can be."

Q: That's kind of sneaky, using old interviews like that.

A: Yes.

Q: So to sum up, what can we assume about these initiatives?

A: We can assume:
a) that MB and LB films are meant to be aesthetically risky and innovative films shot on digital technology because that's where a market has been identified;
b) that the fact they are risky and innovative justifies their special type of financing.

Q: But the LB and MB titles to date are a sort of mixed bag. There's all kinds of stuff in there!

A: Indeed. Some films such as Pavee Lackeen and Adam & Paul look like new types of Irish filmmaking rather than new types of Irish funding. Other films look like youth movies, rom coms or thrillers shot on one-step financed low budgets.

Q: But don't the LB guidelines allow for genre movies?

A: Yes, but to make sense of genre in the stated context (i.e. the low-end market context defined in the guidelines), we should be talking Shane Meadows rather than Shallow Grave. Otherwise you not only fail to meet the identified market demand (assumption a)) but you fail to justify the nature of the funding (assumption b)).

Q: Never heard of Shane Meadows. But if the IFB wants to fund made-for-TV thrillers, is that such a problem?

A: Potentially, yes. It leads to the internal contradictions which underlie some of the problems identified in FI Issue 103's debate. If you make mainstream drama cheaply in a semi-state sheltered environment which for reasons of poor market demand can't be made with conventional financing at a higher budget, that's just making uncommercial commercial cinema.

Q: "Internal contradictions?" You talk like a Marxist pamphlet, except what you're saying is capitalist. Talking of capitalism, isn't what you've just described also a disincentive to real commercial filmmaking?

A: Exactly, and to the whole necessary and creative business of pre-sales and third-party attachment. That seems to be the danger Mark Woods is identifying in his response to Liz Gill in FI 103.

Q: How do you avoid that awful danger?

A: Reserve funding under the initiatives for the "new types" of film manifesting the risk which justify a special type of financing. That would not only bring more cinema of the Pavee Lackeen and Adam & Paul ilk, it would provide ample room for what two contributors to last issue's debate – Joe Comerford and Lelia Doolan – refer to as 'film as an art form' and 'cultural cinema'. In fact it mightn't be a bad idea to relaunch the initiatives as a single New Cinema Initiative to make the whole thing clearer.

Q: That's the first time you've said "art". OK, but shouldn't these filmmakers interested in making non-mainstream cutting-edge cinema be pushed into looking for pre-sales or other sources of financing? Most of them are probably those lazy bastards in black leggings up in Grogan's.

A: Certainly, but at least there's a logic to giving them some help. Pavee Lackeen didn't have a script for example, so it might have been hard to get a sales agent attached at script stage! The IFB could even share responsibility in 'end-user attachment'. The posted guidelines for LBs already create a precedent: "The Board has agreed an in principle partnership with Xtravision for Irish DVD/Video rights and with TV3 and RTÉ for specific films". Seeing that stable production structures with routes through to 'end users' are a huge headache for all forms of Irish cinema, a co-ordinated joint 'model-farm' approach to the problem of setting up and delivering very economic and very creative cinema seems like a nice idea.

Q: "Model farm'? Irish filmmaking is a bit like Irish agriculture, sucking up public money to make products nobody wants to buy anyway?

A: You sound like Carmen's funny uncle in Prenom Carmen!

Q: Thanks. Seriously, though, does the IFB have the funds for this "very creative cinema"? The Board says pressure on funds are a reason for the drop in MB/LB production in 2004.

A: A lot more projects were funded with similar pressure on an even smaller IFB budget in 2003. The problem is that if you don't have a good rationale for the funding, it's very difficult to justify it.

Q: Mark Woods says it would be "unthinkable" for filmmakers to obtain public grants of over €0.5M without third party/end user attachment in the UK.

A: He's right. But UKFC didn't publicly launch initiatives a couple of years ago which – at the time – allowed for the exclusion of such constraints. Of course if the money's used to make flashy TV thrillers shot on HD, people will start to ask how come.

Q: And why should taxpayers fork out for this "very creative cinema"?

A: Why not? They're paying for river tunnels with low roofs!

Q: Be serious.

A: Given that theatre seats are not unusually subsidised to the tune of €100 per spectator, even a single TV screening would justify most production under the LB and MB initiatives, specially if the underused MB level were to be prioritised from now on. One possible effective route to 'end user deliver' would be a broadcasting arrangement such as that existing with RTÉ and TG4 for the Film Centres' short films, ensuring a minimum audience of about 100 000 spectators per film. Do it at night and leave the VCRs humming.

Q: But look, even if you could come up with all this mad stuff, does the IFB have readers and other staff sensitive to the needs of new forms of (sometimes non-verbal) narrative? Aren't they all those script lab people who talk about acts and points of entry and rising tension and fucking Aristotle and 'Merlin figures'? You'd need to take them to a Frankfurt air base and wash out their brains!

A: Don't exaggerate. They're not all like that. If the initiatives were limited to innovative or personal cinema along the lines suggested it would also make it easier for the IFB to allocate the right kind of personnel in the right cases.

Q: But didn't the guys who made Adam & Paul take the piss out of their IFB reader in FI 103 for asking about the 'third act' when they hadn't written one?

A: Teething problems. They got the film made, didn't they?

Q: OK, but wasn't Pavee Lackeen actually turned down for production financing?

A: To my knowledge, yes. The filmmaker made the film out of his own pocket, the UK Film Council took a look and rowed in with funds at post, and the IFB turned up admittedly generous completion funding under the initiatives.

Q: But only after seeing what had been shot?

A: You can never call it right all the time. And as I said the film did very well out of the IFB.

Q: But in this high-risk game, the risk in this case could have been higher?

A: Are you trying to get us in trouble? Talking like this could ruin our chances of future funding.

Q: Are you vertebrate? This is the IFB, not the FBI! I'll try again: the risk could have been higher?

A: Maybe. But if the initiatives had a clearer remit, or followed their remit more clearly, problems of mismatched or unsympathetic reception could be avoided.

Q: Why don't you say "art" at all except when you quote Joe Comerford?

A: It makes people nervous. They think it's a four-letter word. In Ireland, men don't feel manly saying it. It reminds them of ballet lessons. Commerce is more suits and cigars, like somebody's daddy.

Q: It's the opposite of commerce, isn't it?

A: No. That's a polarity that's always stirred such silly and predictable debate. The opposite of art is artless: dull, clumsy, unable to extract any juice from the form. A commercial aspiration almost certainly produces artlessness in cinema when an unimaginative and inflexible business plan occludes rather than assists any urge to create. But the artless is as likely to result from a lumbering 'culturalist' approach, with its set stock of permitted themes and period unearthings of vapid literary-canonical texts.

Q: You sound like a Marxist again. So who's to say what this new, high risk, culture, or art cinema is? I have no way of being sure that what interests me artistically dovetails with other people's notions of 'art' and 'cultural cinema'.

A: But the initiatives were based on the pre-existence of certain types of high-risk cinema which correspond to certain commercial and marketing realities. Assumption a), remember? Anyway, if you want to know whether something is art, ask Metro Tartan how they'd distribute and market it. In any case it shouldn't be too difficult to create individual frames of reference for projects on the basis of precedents. If you say Catherine Breilliat, Werner Herzog, Shane Meadows, Abel Ferrara, the Dardenne Brothers, or Gaspar Noé, I know what you're talking about and can begin to work with you, even in terms of specific production plans and practices.

Q: Abel Ferrara isn't art, he's a pervert!

A: As is obvious from my article on LB and MB inspiration in FI 90, I'm very happy to embrace horror, pop or explo flicks as art. Let's not be hopeless: even the definitions visually-based personal cinema or high risk and innovative genre cinema should be able to include a broad range of filmmaking satisfying diverse notions of culture and art.

Q: D'you wear black leggings?

A: No. They've been known to cause rashes in warm weather.