This
blog post is an assignment for the “Negotiation and Deal Making” course that
I’m currently taking at Full Sail University. We had to watch three videos that
discuss negotiation techniques.
My
first discussion comes from
The Hollywood Reporter Oscar Roundtable hosted by Matthew Belloni. I found it on a blog
by IndieWire. The hour-long interview is titled
The Producers: Full Uncensored Interview, and
it features six producers whose films have gone on to receive
multiple nominations and awards this season, including the Academy Awards,
Golden Globes, PGA Awards, to name a few. Among the interviewees are Phillipa
Boyens (
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey),
Stacey Sher (
Django Unchained),
Joanne Sellars (
The Master), Grant
Heslov (
Argo), and Eric Fellner (
Anna Karenina,
Les Miserables).
Producers are problem solvers. In the case of Fellner, one
of his main goals include analyzing formulas that determine if producing a film
on a predetermined budget makes sense. On the other hand, producers such as
Sher, want to make sure they are able to make the director’s vision happen.
When it comes to negotiation techniques, Sher and the Django team had to handle a dirty trick
by “Mother Nature” in a creative way. The cast and crew were scheduled to shoot
a scene at a ski resort in Mammoth, California. To everyone’s surprise, no snow
was falling for the first time in a hundred years, and that was an essential
element to the scene. A few days later, the producers decided it would be more
efficient to move the set to a different state. This is an example of Murphy’s
Law at its best.
Another example of a hardship that Heslov talks about is when
somebody says “no” or falls back. Having to start all over again when you
depended on someone can be pretty frustrating.
The
second video is presented by the
Los
Angeles Times in association with
Epix,
and is hosted by John Horne. It is a
Directors Roundtable that includes Tom
Hooper (
Les Miserables), Sacha
Gervasi (
Hitchcock), Ben Affleck (
Argo), Kathryn Bigelow (
Zero Dark Thirty), David O. Russell (
Silver Linings Playbook), and Ang Lee (
Life of Pi).
The interview covered many different topics, but I picked
two that caught my attention. In the first one, Bigelow talks about the
challenge of capturing a moment of time that would test time. Shooting began
only a year after Bin Laden’s assassination, so realizing that it was very
recent and contemporary, as well as prepping for two continents, required a lot
of confidence on her behalf. When shooting began for Les Mis, Hooper wanted to shoot a scene with Hugh Jackman in the
French Alps. His line producers told him it was too expensive, but that he
should go look at Scotland or Wales. Convinced that there’s nothing like
France, Hooper came to a negotiation with the production team. They skipped
three days of rehearsal and put the Jackman and the crew on a commercial
flight. They shot that for thirty grand.
Last
but not least, I remembered a video I saw about three months ago on YouTube that
interviews screenwriters and directors Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer
of the underrated film
Cloud Atlas,
which also happens to be my favorite film of 2012. The interview is done by the
DP/30 Channel
They pretty much broke the “rules of cinema” and talk about
some of the things they made in a non-traditional way to make it happen. For
example, they composed the music first and played it during the table reads
with the actors. They talk about the challenge of telling a tale with six
stories and how it would require for the audience to engage in the storytelling
process. “There’s this trend in the industry where audiences go to the movies
to turn off, and we don’t want to turn off when we go to the movies. We don’t
want a passive movie-going experience. We want to be stimulated. We want to
participate. We are trying to take a stand in terms of trying to tell an adult
big film and something you’ve never seen before,” says Andy Wachowski.
An example where the director had to trust a key player in
the crew happened when the casting agent demanded them to send Hugh Grant the
script. At first, they never believed he’d be able to play the characters in
the film, but it took a try and listening the to casting director to find out
that indeed, he was meant for the part, or parts, since the main cast plays
more than three characters. Another thing that required extreme communication
skills was that they shot separately with two crews. They had two keys for each
department.
These
interviews definitely opened my mind a bit more to the challenges that present
themselves when making a film. However, they also reminded me that passion is
key to being successful. Sher mentioned how she was finally able to start a
project that had been in the talks for twelve years. So patience and finding
the right time for a project is important.
