BLACK GOLD: The Film And The Roller-Coaster Ride - Part 3

This is the third and last part of my interview with Marc Francis - co-director/producer (with his brother Nick) of the film BLACK GOLD.

You can view parts one and two here.

Next week, I’ll look in more detail at a few of the points he’s hit in the course of our conversation - and what we, as content-creators in this new environment, can glean from what Marc’s talked about.

Last time Marc spoke about the experience of putting BLACK GOLD out into the world as a roller-coaster ride - one where it’s very success threatened to sink this independent film before it had even gotten out of the starting gates.

This time, we look at straddling both mainstream and alternative models of distribution and what it means to be a filmmaker when you take responsibility for building audience around your films.

We look at how this changes the process of filmmaking itself and how to think about what you are and aren’t willing to do as a filmmaker in order to save your film from oblivion in the marketplace.

… Last time, we left off with Marc saying how BLACK GOLD, and it’s demands on them as filmmakers two years after it’s initial release, is finally slowing down - but still not stopping. In fact, it’s still very much alive - and that’s a good thing, no matter how demanding that may be...

Marc Francis: IT’S QUIETENED DOWN BECAUSE WE’VE TRIED TO QUIETEN IT DOWN, BUT IT’S NOT GONNA STOP AND IT SHOULDN’T STOP AND IT SHOULD CARRY ON - DEFINITELY.

LS: It’s like a business - it’s scaling.

MF: Absolutely. And coz it comes down to the obligation of the filmmaker to keep it going, that’s why it becomes really hard - but this might never happen again. I mean, we really hope it does but the fact that one should always embrace demand - I believe - if you have have a film that’s generating that coz you don’t know if it’s gonna happen again.

WE MIGHT LOOK BACK AND GO - ‘OH MY GOD, WE HAD NO IDEA HOW INCREDIBLE THAT TIME WAS! AND IT’S NEVER HAPPENED AGAIN FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES!’

So we said, let’s embrace the experience, let’s go on the ride, and let’s really give it everything we’ve got to maximize it’s global release and it’s global attention.

And it’s just been released online in the States now and there’s gonna be a whole online thing very soon with it in the UK.

SO I HAVE CONVERSATIONS WITH FILMMAKERS SAYING - TO WHAT EXTENT ARE YOU A FILMMAKER AND TO WHAT EXTENT ARE YOU A DISTRIBUTOR?

And I think there’s a very important argument to have - I think ultimately, if you get a distribution deal and if somebody is prepared to give you a $50million marketing budget and it’s gonna be on billboards and buses, great! You just turn up to your few world premiere launches and do your master interviews and get on with your next film.

But out of the thousands of filmmakers, how many actually end up being in that situation? And to what extent is it up to the filmmaker to really try and do it themselves, until they’re able to get into that situation? And some filmmakers will never be in that situation coz the type of film they’re making is not suitable for that type of global distribution.

We’re still asking ourselves a lot of questions with our next films we’re in development of - yes, we’ve got strategies in place right now, but how integrated are we going to be as individuals in that global campaign…? Or perhaps we start raising finance to have our co-ordinators in place to lead the campaign of which we kind of executively direct…?

LS: Because it’s become something that you can systematize.

MF: That’s right.

BUT THE PROBLEM IS THAT NO-ONE CAN EVER PREDICT WHEN A FILM IS GOING TO GO BIG OR NOT. NO-ONE CAN. NOT EVEN THE BIG PLAYERS CAN.

Films that have $1million attached to them, can sometimes not see the light of day. So it’s a weird thing, coz there’s a lot of unknowns as well. There’s more unknowns than there are knowns!

LS: And people working in this vein are actually creating the territory at the moment. You’re defining how it works, just by carrying on.

MF: Yes. And at the end of the day, regardless of what’s happened with Black Gold, we know that there’re two things we had the power to do with a limited budget:

1) Identify who our core interest groups are and communicate with them - that was the whole NGO community, the whole fair trade movement and also the coffee industry. People who drink coffee! Coffee consumers! So we knew we needed to communicate to them.

2) That we had the web to use as a tool that we could utilize to our advantage. And having our own website and really investing time into finding out ways that we could use our own website was very important. We controlled our own website from the very beginning. It was our design, our structure, our control from the beginning till now.

And we brought in our own web team to build it. Plus, social networks like building up a massive MySpace page - we’ve got around 6500 friends on there now and Facebook and these other things. MySpace started to become big in 2006 I think I recall - end of 2005 - so as soon as that started to come about, we hooked ourselves up with a MySpace page and other social-networking sites that could help us link to BG.

So there were the things that regardless how big or small our distribution was, we at least had it in our power to keep that going.

LS: Do you think it made it easier to build quality relationships (rather than just quantities of friends) because your film was about a cause?

MF: I believe in the quality over quantity too because it’s about what those individuals are gonna do. Ya know, you can have MySpace friends but if they’re not gonna tell their friends about it, what’s the point? I’d rather have 1000 people saying, ‘Hey, go check out Black Gold’ than 3000 wanting to be my friend and be seen on my site. So, I think cause or not cause, it’s about quality.

LS: But do you think the cause makes the channels easier?

MF: Yeah, definitely. You can’t compare it. And that’s a big issue. But let’s have a whole nother talk about MySpace and what that means coz actually I don’t know - I’m skeptical about that now. People who actively sign-up to our website, there’s a commitment. There’s a real commitment there - but I can’t quantify the impact of MySpace friends, the MySpace social-netorking site and how that has helped us. I’m not sure. I need to really evaluate the impact. It’s important. I wouldn’t want to put too much emphasis over it. The stories about bands being made through their MySpace page, I don’t think that necessarily translates as a film coz it’s a very different thing to somebody tuning into a band.

When the cinema release happened in the US and the UK, coz we had peoples’ postcodes (through newsletter sign-up) and it’s all about getting people in for the first weekend - we could tell people when the cinema was playing near them. And that was amazing.

LS: What’s interesting, I think, is that you’ve figured out how to use the traditional system and this new paradigm, and it seems that you’ve really merged them. Whereas other people tend to try for one or the other, a lot of the time.

MF: Yes, I think the mergence is very important because I don’t think that although we want our films to be seen, we don’t want to suddenly become a distribution company that only distributes one film - which is our own.

Some people wanna do that and that’s it but no, coz

I THINK THERE’S WAYS OF REALLY BENEFITING FROM DOING A TRADITIONAL DISTRIBUTION DEAL AND THEN PARALLELING THAT EFFORT WITH WHAT YOU CAN BRING TO THE TABLE - WHICH IS THE AUDIENCE THAT YOU’VE DEVELOPED OVER A PERIOD OF TIME. AND THE WEBSITE AND THE DIGITAL ASSETS AND THE GRAPHICS AND THE BRAND - THE WHOLE THING.

Some distributors wanna co-operate and others don’t like to be told how to do their job. And that’s another conversation because you get distributors that are like: you’re a filmmaker - what the fuck are you doing talking to me about how to distribute your film? We had that. So how you negotiate relationships with sales agents and distributors when you’re passionate about your film is also something to get a handle on.

LS: Do you think cause-driven docs are being favored over other sorts of documentaries?

MF: I’m not sure they’re being favored but if you’ve got a cause it’s easier. There’re more options available to get funding for cause-driven than non-cause-driven films. There must be.

LS: It’s kind of a dichotomy - on the one hand it’s easier to calculate a potential audience for cause-driven films based upon how much interest there is in that issue, but if the issue is already popular and reaching critical mass, then it’s likely too late to be making the film.

MF: Yeah, that’s why Leo DiCaprio’s film 11th Hour dived - because Al Gore had done it and people were like, okay, I’ve had my lecture on climate change now. I don’t want another one.

LS: Yeah, and it goes back to the whole issue of there being too much choice anyway.

MF: I think there’s two things to throw in here - the key point is: if you’re making a film that’s social-issue driven, by nature these are very hard films to get distributed. Depending even on how you make the film, it’s very hard to get distributed because the feeling is that generally, docs are for TV and people don’t want to go to the cinema to get an education. They want to go to the cinema to switch off and watch some entertainment. So it’s hard to get distribution.

So I researched all of the big social-issue based docs that have come into my radar in a really big way - they’ve had a cinematic, theatrical impact which has then had a knock-on effect onto DVD, onto online and TV: Michael Moore’s film, Supersize Me, The Corporation and Inconvenient Truth.

THEY GOT WHERE THEY WERE BECAUSE OF THE FILMMAKER AND NO-ONE ELSE - THAT’S THE REALITY.

When Bowling For Columbine hit the cinema - Michael Moore’s first big film - Michael Moore had already had 20 years or more of filmmaking behind him, and TV shows, and books - and then Columbine picked up traction in the cinema, and then Fahrenheit 9/11 - and he engineered that and that took him years and years and years. Not just in filmmaking but in other media as well where he established himself as a personality.

So for people to look at Fahrenheit 9/11and go, ‘I want that’, it doesn’t happen just like that for docs.

Similar thing when you speak to Morgan Spurlock for Supersize Me, same thing happened. He went to Sundance and he spent a fortune there to get his film noticed. Corporation guys - again, they worked their asses off in Canada and they really made it a cinema success in Canada and then it trickled to the rest of the world. Al Gore personally invested his own time and money to get Inconvenient Truth to become Inconvenient Truth.

Now, when you look at Man on Wire - it’s a different game coz that’s not a social-issue driven film, that’s a drama. It’s a dramatic story. It was released last weekend on 40 screens. And Icon, who’s distributing it, have done a massive, massive marketing campaign.

THAT FILMMAKER, JAMES MARSH, DOESN’T EVEN NEED TO HAVE THIS CONVERSATION. HE DOESN’T EVEN NEED TO GO TO YOUR WEBSITE. AND I THINK EVERY FILMMAKER IDEALLY DOESN’T NEED TO GO.

The other side of the argument is that if you’ve got a film that’s got dramatic tension, like Touching The Void or Man on Wire type docs, they’re easy to get much more serious distribution deals with coz they’re about adventures and dramas and all that stuff. So you can just do it normally within the industry.

Now, if we’d've gotten that kind of deal, I personally would have still wanted to invest time with my distributor about the release strategy coz I feel that as a filmmaker I’d be able to… actually, it depends on the film I’m making.

WITH BLACK GOLD IT’S DIFFERENT COZ WE FELT WE HAD A MASSIVE RESPONSIBILITY TO THE ISSUE SO WE GAVE IT 110%. IF IT WAS JUST A DRAMA-DRIVEN FILM, I DON’T THINK WE’D'VE GONE ON AS LONG AS WE DID - NO WAY!

So it goes around in roundabouts in a kind of way. It depends on the filmmaker and the film that they have that would dictate how necessary it is to do this - or not.

The thing is with docs is that it’s totally wrong to assume that people’ll see the paper and say, ‘Oh, shall I go and see Oceans 13 or go see a doc?’. Doesn’t even matter what doc it is  - even if it’s Michael Moore - it doesn’t matter, it’s a documentary. Even arthouse cinema. Anything actually that isn’t a massive Hollywood film - you can’t…

THEY ALL NEED TO BE MASSAGED. THEY ALL NEED WORK. THEY ALL NEED EXTRA CARE AND ATTENTION. THEY ALL NEED SOME KIND OF AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT BEHIND THEM TO BE SUCCESSFUL.

And big distributors don’t have the time, money or head space to allocate that level of detail and attention to develop an audience in the same way that a band develops an audience. And I think with film, certainly with BG,

WE WANTED RELEASING BLACK GOLD TO BE THE SAME AS A BAND RELEASING AN ALBUM.

And we need to go on tour around the world. We need to be doing our Q&A’s, we need to get people signing-up to our website list and…

WE NEED TO STICK WITH THEM AND THEM TO STICK WITH US. NOT JUST FOR THE CINEMA RELEASE BUT FOR THE DVD LIFE AND FOR ANYTHING ELSE THAT HAPPENS.

If you’ve got big ambitions for your film, there should always be a period of time you set aside for it’s promotion and marketing.

FOR US IT HAD A MASSIVE IMPACT ON OUR LIFESTYLE BECAUSE IT WENT ON TOO LONG, BUT THE THING IS THOUGH, EVERYTHING WE DID AS A RESULT OF FOLLOWING IT ON HAS HAD A DIRECT IMPACT ON ALL OF OUR OTHER FILMS.

So hanging out with people from NYC, Mexico, Addis Ababa, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv - wherever we were -  we’re building up an international network of filmmakers, funders, we’re building up relationships with audiences - it’s all relevant. And all of these things that we’ve done has and will help us enormously for the rest of our career. And we might or might not have such an extended outreach campaign for our next film but if we did it’s because there’s going to be added value there.

EVERY TIME WE GOT ON A PLANE WE REALLY ASSESSED WHAT’S THE ADDED VALUE OF DOING THIS?

What’s this film festival gonna give us? Are we gonna sell to a distributor? Are we gonna meet filmmakers? Are we going to???

LS: You’ve got two new films slated - do you have plans for scaling back your involvement in BLACK GOLD as those new films go out into the world?

MF: I think it even might become easier.

THE MORE FILMS YOU HAVE ON YOUR SLATE, THE ECONOMIES OF SCALE WORK BETTER.

So we can employ more people to help us. We have distribution co-ordinators to deal with this stuff, we have a web team. So, if we’ve got more films out, it’ll work out better for us to have more out there than just one or two.

It’s worth saying - a very important point you asked me that I didn’t answer about how we fund all this. After Sundance, half way through the year when we knew we needed money/external funding to help us fuel the global distribution campaign, we started to look for money and we were fortunate to be able to raise finance from the Doc Factory which is a company set up to produce and promote social issue-based docs and they gave us funding that really helped us with our infrastructure with how we did the global campaign.

LS: Has the idea of ‘filmmaker’ changed for you?

NO, IT HASN’T CHANGED. WE’VE JUST BECOME MORE AWARE OF THE IMPLICATIONS OF OUR ACTIONS AND DECISIONS.

IT HASN’T CHANGED, WE’VE JUST GOT A GREATER UNDERSTANDING OF IT AND FOR US, BEING INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS - SPECIFICALLY AT THE MOMENT IN THE AREA OF NON-FICTION - WE DO FEEL THAT WE HAVE TO INVEST TIME INTO THE GLOBAL DISSEMINATION AND PROMOTION OF THE FILM AND THAT’S PART OF BEING A FILMMAKER.