Phil Grabsky’s widely acclaimed doco In Search of Mozart (2006) was broadcast in over 25 countries, screened theatrically at cinemas around the world, and, in Australia and New Zealand, made it into the top 50 list of all-time highest grossing documentaries (excluding IMAX). The veteran UK filmmaker’s latest feature, In Search of Beethoven, may well be one of the most extensive and exhaustive biographical films ever made about a classical musician. Clocking in at 139 minutes, the film (now playing at selected cinemas) details Beethoven’s life from birth to death, discussing his musical output in immense detail and analyzing the romantic myth that he was a heroic and tormented figure. Grabsky collaborated with some of the world’s most prestigious orchestras to film a whopping 55 separate performances and over 100 interviews. He also sat down for a chat with Cinetology towards the end of a comprehensive international promotional tour.
The subjects that you’ve dealt with, certainly in the last couple of films, inherently carry a high art cache. So when you go to a funding body – either a television funding organisation or a film funding organisation – how much harder is it in your opinion to get a documentary funded about Mozart or Beethoven than it is, say, to get funding for a reality TV program, or something that sells more easily to a wide audience?
When my wife and I decide to pay off our mortgage I will do a series called Pets Falling Over. Or Pets From Hell. Or Pets and Police Chases. I know how to pay off the mortgage and that’s what I’ll have to do.
Is that a promise? Can you guarantee that?
No, I can’t. I’ll tell you a true story though. About 10 years ago a TV station in the UK wanted to work with me to get into factual program, documentaries. They said “we’d like you to develop ideas for us.” So I wrote up three ideas which were quite sensible, useful, valuable ideas. Maybe it was even more than ten years ago because I remember faxing through the proposals. I got on very well with the commissioning editor and as she was going through I said as a joke “If you don’t like any of these proper ideas I will do Pets From Hell.” This is a true story. The phone rang about five minutes later and she said “thanks for those ideas, can you do me a page on Pets From Hell?” I said “it was a joke!” and she said “oh…”
A couple of months later I told the same story to another commissioning editor to another channel and I was saying “oh god, what’s happening to broadcasting? What’s happening to television?” I went through the whole thing about Pets From Hell and he said “that’s a great idea.” I didn’t do the series but there then was a series called Pets From Hell. To answer your question, I’d like to move away from the idea of high art. At yesterday’s screening we had more under 30s, there were youngsters, there were elderly people, there were all sorts. These are dramatic, humorous, visionary, arresting, clear and accessible films…I guess the common link between my films is that I’m interested in creativity, and there is a disjunct between what I am interested in and what television is interested in. They pay lip service to culture and art but if you look at their schedules – and you don’t even need to look that carefully – there are tonnes of location location shows, cooking shoes, reality shows, shows about teenagers put together in different environments so that they’ll basically kiss each other and all the rest of it. That stuff is what television feels it has to do, and it’s partly because the advertisers force them towards that 16 to 24 audience. But I had 16 to 24 year olds in my audience yesterday. You can create an audience. If parents won’t take their kids to see an opera then these people will miss out on one of the great artistic forms. I don’t have a wealthy background, you know…for me opera is just something else. It’s not elite. I’m the same with classical music.
10 min – bit about poetry, delivery method has changed
You’ve now made two very detailed documentaries about classical musicians: In Search of Mozart and In Search of Beethoven. I’m guessing the next one is going to be In Search of Britney Spears?
(laughing) Again, if I need to pay the mortgage. It would be very interesting to get a commission like that. I was just in Hollywood and by the by talked to a manager and an agent. They both saw Beethoven and I liked it and it would be funny if they came to me and said “you know what, we represent X, could you do an In Search Of and approach it in exactly the same way? I mean frankly, even if you did an In Search of Michael Jackson – I don’t want to offend anybody but he still wouldn’t be a patch on Beethoven. So where that leaves Britney Spears..I mean she’s great for what she does but that’s the thing, that’s the point in the way of Beethoven. Just step back for a second and then re-engaged with exactly what he did, it is extraordinary. The music is unbelievable. Michael Jackson, he could dance, he could sing, but be realist about it – he is not Beethoven. He is not Mozart. In fact he is not a patch on many of these great composers, and that is not me being elitist. That is me having a value judgement about extraordinary art.
I have to say, watching In Search of Beethoven, I was very impressed and surprised by how extensive, exhausted and compressive the documentary is and how quickly it moves. You shot 55 performances for the film, you interviewed 100 people. Was this a nightmare to collaborate in the editing room? I imagine the job of editing it would have been monolithic.
It wasn’t a nightmare but it was very very hard. It was creatively extremely challenging but I enjoyed that. We had 150, 200 hours of material. It’s not so much the bulk of the material, it’s more, well, you filmed an entire symphony – which bit do you use? And what are you trying to say at that point and how much weight do you give it? Why have you chosen that particular sonata out of the many that he wrote? Who do you want talking about it? What are they going to say about it? How are you going to visualise it? Are you going to show them playing it or are you going to cut away to location shots or natural images? Again, a parallel with these great artists is that you just work and work and work. It is false to believe that with Mozart and Beethoven it just came out of them. They did work and rework, Beethoven more than Mozart, but Beethoven’s music in some senses is more cerebral. The great thing is I don’t put a deadline on it. My wife tries to put a deadline on but I just keep working at it and working at it and I have to see the thing developing. Sometimes it’s a bit like building a house and suddenly realising that you’ve got the structure wrong, and it’s hard to go back and rebuild the steel frame. Half the job is the editor…he gets what I want to do and he makes it better. I feel a real responsibility to do it well.
Did you set out to make the mother of all Beethoven movies? Because that’s how it feels.
I set out to make the very best Beethoven film that I could. It’s not that I’m competitive with other things that have gone before. I have tried to get hold of other documentaries and feature films and, you know, I will never in a million years make a film as good as Amadeus. Amadeus is brilliant. It’s a work of art. It’s full of mistakes and myths and legend. There isn’t anything like that in Beethoven…There’s a lot of very average work, generally speaking, in television and I think the Beethoven films I saw kind of fell into that category. Mine’s only one approach, you could look at Beethoven in many different ways. I’m willing to be criticised for the approach I take, which is straight forward: begin at the beginning, end at the end. So it wasn’t that I was trying to outdo anybody else, it was just that I wanted to do a really good job. Getting into cinemas is hard work and it doesn’t drive much revenue in our direction. But enthusiasm with which the audience are receiving the film really is fantastic…The audience are more enthusiastic for Beethoven than they were for Mozart, which is interesting and great. It does mean that when I do question and answer sessions I can’t get out of the cinema until 1am.
In terms of theatrical releases for these films, obviously they are never going to open in your massive multiplexes, they are never going to have hundreds of screens. So when you’re raising finances for these films, where does the financial side of the pitch come from? Do you make most of the money back when you air documentaries like In Search of Beethoven on TV or when they are released on DVD?
First of all there’s been some interesting developments with this film, in that in the United States and in Canada we have had interest from chains and we are having to think about it. I love the independent art houses cinemas. They are the place for these types of films. Digital projection and so forth means the quality is going up enormously in two years. These small cinemas are jumping into many gaps – not only are they taking on from where television should but they also offer a fantastic resource for the community. They are places for people to meet.
For me a good independent cinema should have a good cafe, should have good cake. Maybe they should have little concerts from time to time or photographic exhibitions. So there is always some reason to drop in, even without seeing a film. So I really want to support those by having my film play there. On the other hand, if I get a release – which has been talking about in the States and in Canada – in 100 cinemas, and each cinema plays it for a week and it does reasonably well – then that can be quite significant. My experience with distributors however – Australia excluded, because the distributor here is very good – is you often never see a penny. This film still hasn’t really driven much revenue in our direction. So to answer your question, I am still dependent on television presales but it’s not that lucrative, they don’t pay a great deal anymore. Some foundation assistance – I’ve been doing in 20 years, I have some contacts with foundations who support what I do – and DVD. The DVD is becoming increasingly important and our DVDs have extras, we spend a lot of people on them. Six extra languages, deleted scenes, full movements, interviews. Sometimes the DVD is longer than the theatrical version.
I’m assuming that one of the best parts of making the In Search of documentaries is being exposed to so quality music? For such a big appreciator of classic music, gaining access to so many talented musicians must be a real pleasure.
I feel extremely rich because I am in the middle of the world’s greatest orchestras. Literally I’m in front of the conductor and between the conductor and the cellos and the violins. I’m in the middle revolving around taking shots. I’m next to the world’s best pianists. I am two feet from their hands. Actually, that sounds weird.
(laughing)
I mean I am right next to them and I think “what a privilege” and I genuinely want to share that privilege, because you don’t have the chance to spend three years tracking these people down. In the same way you meet lots of filmmakers and want to share your conversations with your audience, I meet musicians and I want to share that. That’s why the film uses close ups and is very kind energetic and the interviewees are talking to the camera – trying to get the audience completely involved in it, as though they have done what I am doing.
I don’t envy my more affluent colleagues who are doing the reality shows. I’ve got someone who does the celebrity island stuff and I’m not interested.
Not interested in collecting pay checks from Pets From Hell? Not even for the mortgage?
Imagine if that was released. “Grabsky formatted Pets from Hell!” People would just think it was funny. I would think it was funny. I’d actually make up t-shirts. People often say to me “well, what have you done that I know?” I say “In Search of Beethoven” and they say “uh-huh.” I saw “The Boy who plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan” and they say “er, er, er…” Imagine if I said “Pets From Hell.” They’d say “oh yeah! I watch that every Saturday night with my family! That’s fantastic!” That would be dispiriting.
You’ve recently travelled through the U.S., Canada and New Zealand promoting In Search of Beethoven. How long have you been on the publicity circuit for?
I feel like Noah actually – 40 days. Pure chance, but it’s a 40 day trip, which is the longest I’ve been away from my family ever. Even when I go to Afghanistan to film, which I do more or less once a year, that’s usually only two and a half weeks. It’s not enough to make a film, which is two years work. You’ve got to distribute it. You’ve got to put the hours in and actually get out there. I quite rightly have been very protective of my family time on previous films and that probably does have an impact on how successful the film is. With (In Search of) Mozart I came and did Australia and New Zealand. With Beethoven I felt I wanted to get out there and really push it and do a lot of interviews, a lot of press – talking to distributors, talking to publicists, newspapers, blog sites, people who collate all the information and the charts. Maybe it’s a lesson from studying Beethoven, who is not dissimilar to Mozart in that they were commercial animals. They are absolutely not liking the music for pleasure, or because they have to. It’s not flowing out of them and then someone else takes it away and distributes it, sells it, performs it. Mozart virtually wrote nothing that wasn’t for a commission and Beethoven was a little bit different but not enormously so. You have to understand economics and commerce to understand why they wrote what they wrote, when they wrote what they wrote.
Reaching the point at which you’re able to pick and choose between jobs is a great thing, isn’t it? Especially in your industry.
Yeah, but there comes a point where your pride just takes over. And it may not be the most sensible thing to do financially and commercially but you just say no, I’m not doing it. You’re not insulting me. I think if you understand that the things Beethoven and Mozart most wanted was to be respected, to be treated with respect, then you’re starting to uncover a key into their biography. And again I think that’s true of creative people today. If I go into a broadcaster for example and they offer me 40 percent of what I did the film for last time – and bearing in mind I’m a writer, producer, director, cinematographer, so I’m already coming in cheap if you like, doing four roles – then I feel they are being disrespectful and at that point I walk out. If they are respectful and say ”look we’ve lost our major funder, would you consider doing it for a little bit less?” and they are treating me with respect then I’ll talk to them. If I feel they’re just trying to rip me off, I’m off. And that’s exactly how it was 250 years ago. Read More »
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