Do people still get offended by films (other than the recent flap over Me Before You)? If anyone’s going to provoke that response, it’s Ant Timpson, whose annual selections for the NZ International Film Fest under the long-running Incredibly Strange banner can be anything from daring and provocative to distasteful and harmful, depending on where you sit on the film-watching spectrum.
Tucked away at the back of the programme, it’s the section I’m simultaneously most excited about, and try to save until last, as I work my way through the booklet each year and gradually shed cinematic pretensions on the home straight. I sat down with Timpson to find out more about how Incredibly Strange comes together.
FLICKS: So, how many years have you been programming this as part of the NZ International Film Festival?
ANT TIMPSON: 2004 was the first year as part of the NZIFF. I think Bill Gosden was surprised that I even mentioned it. And then I was even more surprised that he said yes, and then we took off from there. Obviously it was a reduced programme, but it was pretty much carte blanche again, except obviously the retro titles weren’t the focus as much. I think I had a couple, we played things like Head actually. Yeah, so there were a few retro titles during the crossover.
It was fun but obviously I miss the looseness of when it was a sole fest. When we could do carnage.
What’s the process of selecting titles, and how has that changed since Incredibly Strange first became part of the film festival – and even before that?
Obviously the turnaround times now are so much faster than they used to be in terms of discovering films. In the old days, you could have a film that was a year old and still no one knew about it. And now it’s kind of instantaneous, everyone tells everyone what they’ve just seen.
We have a film list that a lot of programmers are part of, and we share a lot of information and what we see, and collaborate a lot more than we used to. At the end of the day, you just want to play things that you dig personally, but it’s a lot easier than actually fronting up to hand pick films. Instead of wading through a lot, the list is a lot shorter. So it’s a bit more efficient than it used to be.
What considerations do you take in mind with piracy, and how’s that affected your selections?
Piracy’s obviously a huge part of the mix. And films that have come out on VOD before their New Zealand festival date, we try to avoid unless they’re really big, strong films that have a big screen component that people will make the effort to go out and see. But otherwise, if they’re kind of cult-y, niche titles, it can be really damaging if it’s been out for a while and on the torrents. So yeah, it comes into the mix. At the end of the day, I can’t rule out everything because we won’t have much if we do that!
It’s quite rare to have an entire line-up that hasn’t been released somewhere. Things like High-Rise have had pretty substantial releases elsewhere before we get to see them, but that was a really highly requested title. It’s really weird, it’s so dependent on the film. You have action films like Taken where everyone thought it was going to be a disaster because it had been torrented around the world, and then it was a massive hit. So there’s all these anomalies that prove that it can happen. They can still be viable.
From personal experience, I’ve noticed that in terms of genre stuff, smaller cool titles are kind of really hurt by early piracy. It just doesn’t pull in as much for the theatrical experience as it used to. It’s identifiable, it’s not like creating it out of thin air. It definitely has been something that’s become more and more apparent as the last few years have come on.
I guess the stuff that you’re programming is one of the most vulnerable in terms of genre as well, right?
Yeah, definitely. It’s like Marigold Hotel is torrented and then no one gives a toss. And that audience is not downloading from Kickass Torrents, they don’t even know what Kickass Torrents is…
The films that are completely aiming at that male youth audience are the ones that are going to be problematic for us, which unfortunately means a lot of the horror stuff. If it’s been released elsewhere, it’s going to be virtually impossible to get a decent crowd up.
Sometimes when it’s like Under the Shadow, an Iranian horror film with a lot of critical acclaim, we’ve got more chance of that actually working. Because hopefully it’ll attract an audience that aren’t necessarily the same as your spam-in-a-cabin sort of movie fans. But yeah. You’ve probably noticed that that horror component has dropped away, unless it’s more in the doco area or something else.
Do you have a gut feeling for what the existing audience actually is for your titles? As in, how big are these pockets of people that are aware of the films?
That’s a really good question.
This is all part of the problem I have with being too tight with filmmakers in festival bubbles, because it’s a completely over-exaggerated atmosphere of how popular certain things are. So, in terms of people I know who run websites and genre sites, there’s certain titles that seem to have so much noise out there. But the reality is, that is hitting a very small fraction of the audiences who go to film festival films. So you cannot rely on that. And a big part of that are people who are seeing the film for free, either the media or press, or self-perpetuating that little bubble.
In terms of things like Swiss Army Man, that’s the kind of film that broke out of Sundance. But it also reached massive mainstream press – when you hit things like the New York Times or Esquire, you cross over into those more sort of mainstream publications. That’s a lot more safer, knowing that, yeah, it’s kind of cult and eclectic and fringe, apart from having Harry Potter in it. And Paul Dano, who’s frigging awesome. That’s a film that’s got a lot of noise that should translate into some decent crowds.
Whereas even films that I’ve produced, Deathgasm and whatever, to us seemed like there was a huge amount of noise, but in reality it was really just the same horn going over and over. So you can be a little bit deluded by how popular things are.
What’s the online comment that you are least happy to see about films that are in the programme? Besides “just fucking download it”.
You know what, it’s kind of overly supportive. What I notice, is that it’s the same really enthusiastic fans that are on my feeds that are real die-hard viewers, and they are seeing a huge amount of films way above the normal per capita response. So they’re usually really highly enthusiastic and fully supportive in endorsing it. You don’t really see a lot of negative stuff. I guess it’s because either I’m not looking for it, or I just want to remain in that delusional bubble where everything is awesome and everything’s going to work.
But yeah, I don’t know. I guess it’s like, “I’ll check it out later. I’ll check it out when it comes out on torrent” is probably one that kind of bugs me. But you know what, you can only go to see so many films, and it’s expensive and it adds up. If I wasn’t involved with the festival, I’d pick only a certain amount of films, stick to that and go to see those ones. And they have to be films that are going to be memorable experiences I would think. So yeah. I don’t really know about the negative. You should tell me what you’ve seen.
Well, without narcing on anyone in particular, it’s when people are talking about an upcoming film and someone pipes up with “I watched it and it wasn’t very good”. When there’s only one way you could have watched that film, and you’re only speaking up to look really cool. But you look like a dick.
Yeah. I mean unless they completely admit it, they could have seen it somewhere else if they travel extensively. You can’t really j’accuse anyone immediately. But obviously that’s the majority of online commentators, that’s how they’ve gone and have seen advance films, through an illegal process. So yeah, fuck it, it’s annoying. If you’re going to do it, shut up. Don’t promote it and don’t publicise it.
I think it’s redundant to try and tell people not to do it. We’re just flogging that dead horse. It’s definitely affected things from a business side of things, I know how it’s affected it. But also in terms of just like the gluttony and how the mass consumption of popular entertainment, to me I think it’s drastically had a massive impact on people’s appreciation of things over the last decade, and it’s not the same as it used to be. But then again, that’s what every old man says.
Of the titles in this year’s programme, what was the one besides your own (‘The Greasy Strangler’) that you had as the earliest dead cert to screen this year?
Earliest was The Lure, mainly because I’m not really a fan of musicals. There’s cult musicals since things like Rocky Horror, which I did really dig when I was young. But ever since then people have tried and attempted that formula with genre tropes mixed into it, have usually been horrendous failures. There’s been a couple of weird ones.
But this thing man, a Polish vampire mermaid horror musical – straight away that’s like “that’s a train wreck, no way it’s going to work”. But it’s just got a hypnotic, really fun, cool sensibility. Songs are just crazy. Some of them don’t work exactly, they sound like really horrendous Eurovision numbers. But then when they do work, they’re kind of really beautifully sublime. So it’s a really fun mix of so many styles, and a great debut from a woman director.
At the moment the big hot topic is who in genre is getting a go at making films. It’s been dominated by pasty, white, boring 30-something dudes. And now since the last year or so, there’s been a real concerted effort to get exposure for women in genre, so I’m really happy to present this baby.
From there I presume it’s a lot of moving parts with some films being contingent on others, right?
Yeah.
You must have some kind of a jigsaw puzzle in mind.
Yeah. There’s pressure sometimes where… you know, it hasn’t really happened to me but I know that it happens to other festivals. It’s like, “you’ve got to take this title if you want this title” kind of vibe. My section’s so small that I don’t really have that sort of pressure. I really am so limited that it’s like I’ve got to be very selective in the titles.
Fuck, what was the question [chuckles]?
Whether it’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle, “have I got enough of this subgenre” scenario.
It’s like you’re trying to create the ultimate dinner, I guess. No, the degustation menu or whatever. I love my food analogies in fucking movies, man, I tell you.
So you’ve got to get the right diversity throughout the selection. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen every year because there’s a proliferation of horror films or something. I try to steer clear of having a really dark programme, mainly because I’ve just realised it’s really hard to find good comedies these days. Apart from mainstream comedies that you kind of passively watch and get some mild laughs out of, it’s really hard to find smart comedies in terms of genre, apart from horror comedies, God forbid. So I try to get a mix and that usually involves a couple of documentaries, foreign fare, and then new voices, like who’s got the break-out film on the scene.
And then also filmmakers where there’s been a history of showing their earlier work. Obviously this year, Ben Wheatley with High-Rise is that guy, and also I guess, Green Room is a follow-up from Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin. All the others are new. I didn’t play The Dirties but I wish I had, which is Operation Avalanche director Matt Johnson’s first film. That’s great.
How late do these things move around, and do films end up not making it in due to running out of time?
It’s always last minute, and there’s always films that fall out at the last second, usually due to the US release. That seems to be the number one thing. Or holding it up for maybe a Venice or Toronto premiere.
So, this year the big one was Raw, which was the cool film out of Cannes which is fucking great. We kind of had it and then we didn’t have it, and so that was like, “Shit, okay.” That happens every single year. That was going to be our late announcer.
Visit the Incredibly Strange section at NZIFF for full screening details
