The new head of the Irish Film Board hopes he can help Ireland emulate thesuccess of Australia's blockbuster-making film industy, writes MichaelDwyer
These are uncertain times for the Irish film industry, as a shadow looms over the Section 481 tax-incentive scheme, which is due to expire at the end of next year and may or may not be renewed or amended by the Minister for Finance. It might not seem the best of times for a 32-year-old Irishman to give up a job he loves in the Australian film industry to become chief executive of the Irish Film Board, but that is exactly what Mark Woods has done.
"I had a terrific time in Australia, having been there since I was quite young," he says, settling into his first interview since starting his new job this month, "but I thought for the last few years about what it would be like to come back to Europe as an adult. Ireland and Europe have changed drastically since the late 1980s. I had been back frequently, and there's a very different energy here now. Equally, though, I wouldn't have been crying into my coffee if I stayed in Australia.
"The film board is that increasingly rare but ever-important thing: an independent film fund. The idea of running an independent film fund that is also the national agency of the country was really exciting to me, and to do that in the country where I grew up was irresistible to me. To be able to seek out another Magdalene Sisters or another When Brendan Met Trudy, that is exciting. I also like the opportunity to take those skills I've learned on independent co-financing in Australia and expand them into other sectors, such as animation and documentaries, where I haven't worked before."
When the subject turns to the future of Section 481, Woods jokes that his predecessor, Rod Stoneman, left at a very opportune time, then continues: "I come from the land of film support from federal and state governments in Australia via tax schemes, subsidies or quotas. You look at what's happened in Australia with that range of support. It's really borne fruit, with a thriving inward production sector that's seen the likes of The Matrix, the Star Wars trilogy and Mission: Impossible II shooting there, and that's all underpinned by a really robust indigenous film-production sector."
He says that, coming from that background, he understands the value of government support. "I also understand quite clearly," he adds, "what Jack Valenti [the head of the Motion Picture Association of America\] said in Dublin last week: there are no film industries in the developed world that operate without some level of state support, barring Hollywood and Bollywood.
"Some of the incentive schemes in many other countries are actually modelled on or influenced by the Irish scheme. That is a testament to the support from the Irish government for the film-production sector. I completely support the published comments of our Minister, John O'Donoghue, that Section 481 has made a very important, positive impact on the Irish film industry and on the economy of this country.
"Surely Ireland would want to retain its competitiveness with the likes of Australia, New Zealand and Canada in attracting inward productions that have such an impact on the economy and are such an employment generator. We wouldn't want to do anything that would lead us to fall behind in our attractiveness and our competitiveness relative to those other countries, after all that has been invested in building up a vibrant and viable local production industry."
Over 10 years in Sydney Woods observed the international film industry from the outside, as Australian correspondent of Variety, the film industry bible, and then from the inside, as head of acquisitions and investment for the Showtime and Encore film channels.
He was born in Dublin, growing up in Blackrock. His mother is Australian, and when he finished secondary school, at Blackrock College, he went to Sydney. It was 1988, towards the end of a decade of emigration for young Irish people.
"Ireland was a different country then, and it was part of the national mindset that moving to another country was something you would consider doing. I wanted to experience something different, and Australia certainly delivered on that. College education was free, which was a big incentive at the time. I ended up in Sydney and did an arts degree. Sydney was everything I wanted it to be. It truly is that cliché: a land of opportunity."
He was Variety's Australian correspondent for six years, covering the entertainment gamut - film, television, theatre, music - from the creative side to the business side. "I got to meet everyone, which was good, and to have some wonderful experiences." He adds cautiously: "I'm not a very good interview, because I keep thinking of when I was a journalist."
Given that Variety is the most powerful and influential film trade paper, did he find being that honest in his coverage would result in bruising some fragile egos in Australian film production? "Yes, basically," he says. "The first entertainment-related coverage I did was for a magazine called B&T - Broadcast & Television. I found that the media buyers rolled with the punches, taking the good with the bad.
"The first thing I learned very quickly at Variety was in dealing with producers, in particular, and I won't say egos, that's probably too severe, but their emotional frailty, which was something I hadn't come across before. That whole thing about producers often spending 10 years and mortgaging their house to get a film made. If you wrote something saying that their film has questionable commercial prospects or whatever, people would ring you up and take it incredibly personally. That was a lesson to learn, coming from the dry business of journalism into a paper like Variety."
And a good lesson to learn, I suggest, if you are taking over as chief executive of the Irish Film Board, a body that can put noses out of joint by turning down the financial applications of producers and directors, as invariably happens in the board's selection process. Woods tactfully directs his reply towards his experience working for the Showtime channel in Australia. "Working for Variety was invaluable training for Showtime. You're running this large fund and you're making both commercial and creative judgments, and you're making them on behalf of a company that's owned by four studios - 20th Century Fox, Columbia, Paramount and Universal - as well as a cable system, Liberty Media. The decision-making process at Showtime was quite rigorous, and even though we got to take a lot of risks it's fair to say that we had to package the films in such a way that the board felt comfortable with."
Showtime, a 24-hour channel devoted to first-run films, is the flagship of the two channels operated by the Premium Movie Partnership in Australia. The other, Encore, shows old films. "Showtime premieres 300 movies a year; about 140 came from the studios and 160 were independent movies, and that was what my department was responsible for sourcing. Of that 160, about 130 would have been international independent productions, and the job for me and my deputy was to travel and find them and to close the deals on them.
"We also ran our local content fund. By government regulation we had to spend a certain sum every year on commissioning and financing new independent movies in Australia, through various means: equity participation, pre-licensing or completion funding. The number varied, but we would have had 12 to 15 a year. Depending on the arrangement, we would put in anything from 10 to 25 per cent, but sometimes up to 80 percent."
Of course, some projects fared better or worse than expected. "Success has many parents but failures are orphans, and that was the same at Showtime as anywhere else," he says. "We were lucky. We had a string of films that were either very commercially successful or truly culturally memorable and won lots of awards. The thing about independent co-financing, whether through Showtimeor the Irish Film Board, is that anything is possible."
Woods cites Rabbit-Proof Fence as "the textbook example of everything that's unpredictable and everything that's possible in independent film co-financing." The film marked the return home for the Australian director Phillip Noyce after a series of blockbusters in the US, including Patriot Games and Clear And Present Danger. A moving and rightly angry drama, it delivers a damning indictment of a shameful episode in Australia's colonial past, the true story of three young Aboriginal girls who, in 1931, were taken from their families for assimilation into white society. The film charts their brave attempt to escape over a gruelling 1,200- mile walk home.
"Who would have thought," Woods asks rhetorically, "that this Aboriginal-themed film with three girls wandering their way across the desert was going to become the highest-grossing Australian drama of 2002 and was actually going to become the most profitable film that Showtime ever invested in?"
It was a difficult film to make, he says. Noyce had to work on a budget far smaller than that of any film he had made in two decades, and there were problems in shooting in the desert and working with amateur actors; also, Showtime had half a dozen funding partners.
"It's fair to say, looking back on it, that the six co-financiers struggled to come up with a common management approach to the film, and it spent more than a year in post-production. But it was perhaps the most memorable experience I will ever have, working with an A-list director on content that you realised was going to become one of those seminal films.
"And it all changed for us about halfway through post-production, when Miramax decided to buy the film for many millions of US dollars, based on seeing just three minutes of footage at Cannes. So before the film was even released we had our money back, and then it did well on release and scored some rather sizable television sales. It was one of those rare films that ticks every box: it was important culturally, it was a commercial success and it will stand the test of time."
Woods's job with Showtime took him around the world, on shopping expeditions to the key film festivals, and he says he kept a close eye on developments in the Irish film industry, which was struggling to survive when he left for Australia in 1988, two years after one administration shut down the Irish Film Board and five years before another reinstated it.
"In the acquisitions side of the job at Showtime we had a very active tracking system, so I was familiar with what was happening here," he says. "I bought a lot of films from here for Showtime: The Magdalene Sisters, Song For A Raggy Boy, Conspiracy Of Silence, The Most Fertile Man In Ireland, The Last September, The Crooked Mile . . . "
As he takes up the reins at the body that helped make those movies happen, he expresses a philosophical approach to expectations and perceptions of success for independently produced cinema. "If an Irish film or an Australian film doesn't top the box office in every other territory I don't think it's fair to say it's not a success," he says. "It just depends on what the objectives were the film-makers went into this cultural exercise with - and that's what I think independent film- making and independent co-financing is: a cultural exercise. You shouldn't let the mathematics or the spreadsheets stop you. You should just crunch your deals and crunch your figures in a way that lets you get on with what you've got to say."
