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An interview with one of the men behind Dean Spanley
New Zealand born movie producer Matthew Metcalfe came to be in the movie business in a most unusual way, which is detailed below. I caught up with him recently at a local coffee shop for some words about his current project, a wonderful film called Dean Spanley that stars heavyweights Peter O’Toole, Sam Neill and Bryan Brown and to get his take on the Oscar buzz.
First off how did an ex-infantry solider with a degree in management and applied mathematics end up in the movie business?
“I grew up in Australia and went to university in New Zealand as a foreign student and I did management and applied mathematic for a very simple reason, that they were hard and I wasn’t very good at them. It was proving that I could do it. I had applied to the Royal Australian Navy to go to the Naval College and they gave me a provisional acceptance, which means you are accepted on the provision that you do at least one year of college. That’s why I went to university. After I graduated, I tried one year of using my degree, which was effectively working in the financial management area and oh my god I hated it so badly. It was just awful. So I got out of it as soon as I could. But as twists of fate go I had a female friend at that time that was an usher at a theatre and had a boyfriend that was a writer. Since I was also writing at that time, she suggested we get together and talk. We met for coffee and had this long conversation about films and how much we loved Tarantino and Rodriguez and the like. He was actually writing a screenplay for a short film and didn’t really know how to get it made. I thought that side of things felt like the army to me, organizing things and corralling things and I thought I could do that!”
How did the project Dean Spanley come to you? Had you read the novella, My Talks with Dean Spanley already?
“No, how it came to be was there was this actor named Noel Trevarthen, who lived in this place called Kawau Island in new Zealand and he was a mate of a guy named Vincent Ball, a very well know Australian actor who was a mentor to me. Vincent introduced me to Noel. One day I was visiting Noel on the island and he threw this short film script down on the kitchen table. It was My Talks with Dean Spanley, short film version. After reading it, he asked me what I thought of it and I said I loved it but what could I do with it? I hadn’t done a feature film at that stage but it stayed with me for years. To tell the simple truth, years went by, fast forward five years and then one night I woke up in the middle of the night and thought yes, My Talks With Dean Spanley could be made into a feature film! And then I tore my house apart trying to find the script. It then took me over six months to track down a copy and when I finally read it again I said to myself what am I meant to do with this? So I then tracked down Alan Sharp and through what he called ruthless flattery got him to develop it into a script for a feature film.”
Peter O’Toole’s performance was amazing, was he in mind for the role of Horatio Fisk from the beginning?
“No, the only person we always had in mind was Sam Neill (Dean Spanley), the other roles to be honest, we didn’t think about them for a long time. I was so focused on just finding a way to get the project made. O’Toole’s name came up early as it would, He was always the dare to dream kind of guy. We sent it out to him and didn’t hear anything back for over three months, we’d actually written him off. Then believe it or not after those three months I was in Northern Iraq doing a doco for Japanese TV and when I checked my message on the sat. phone, there was a message from Peter O’Toole’s agent saying if the role wasn’t cast they were still interested!”
O’Toole now has this fragility on screen that is very mesmerizing and it played perfect for his role, were you on set for the scene where he transforms after the last talk with Dean Spanley?
“Absolutley.”
I got very emotional at that moment in the film. I’m sure you’ve seen the dailies and the film at various stages of completion, when you saw the final cut for the first time were you still able to react to it emotionally?
“I got choked up before the final cut. The first time I saw an assembly, this was in the middle of production, I got choked up for about twenty minutes. It was a double choke up, one I got genuinely choked up and two it was the feeling that this is going to work. There is a point in all projects where you know you either have a diamond, a gem but not a diamond or you’re just polishing a turd to be blunt. About halfway through, it become pretty clear what you’ve got and at that moment I remember knowing that we had an absolute diamond. It was always going to be great but from then on in it was going to be about how great.”
Was that last scene with the dog in the garden always in the script?
“Absolutely, it was pretty much word for word from the script.”
If I’m not mistaken, this was your first period piece, did that create any special problems?
“Well you know England is the home of period English drama and they have a real industry going for that kind of stuff. So all that stuff was readily accessible, I’m actually looking forward to doing more of these types of films. I really love those Merchant Ivory kinds of films.”
In the industry at the present that seems to be so many ways a film can make money. Domestic takings, international takings, hotel screenings, airline screening, cable TV, DVD sales and rentals and free to air TV. As a producer do you figure these things out in the budget?
“One of the misunderstandings of the film business is when people ask about making a film for an audience and I say actually you don’t make a film for an audience, you make films for buyers. That’s kind of how it works. You are making films for buyers and territories. So you don’t really do your sums for on usage, you do it for certain territories and its value as a package and therefore you set your budgets accordingly. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it wrong. Evaluating a film is notoriously difficult.”
Especially when you consider how people relate to film on such an emotional level, that’s hard to quantify.
“To give you an example, Warner Independent Pictures in the states thought that Slumdog Millionaire was nothing and wanted to send it through to DVD sales. The old cliché that nobody knows anything is honestly a true one.”
Dean Spanley came out too late for Oscar consideration for this year, as a producer, what can you do to lobby for its consideration to the academy?
“When it comes to the Academy Awards, it comes down to who owns it in the US, who has bought it. So I can lobby the company that has bought the rights to release it in the US but even then as a producer you have to be aware that people are often just being polite to you. It’s a very self-interested business. If they think it’s got a chance of an Oscar, they will lobby for it with or without you pushing it.
So they are an entity on to themselves?
“Excactly.”
From the art side, what is your actually take on the Oscars?
“I always have to answer these question carefully because I pimp myself out to the possibility of one day actual winning one but what I think is the Oscars hold a certain amount of magic but it’s now going to another level. It’s almost like it’s transcending art now, it’s starting to reflect society more and what you are seeing in awards like the Golden Globes and BAFTA are quite purist, whereas the Oscars are now about not what the industry sees as the best but what they would like to think is the best. How they want this industry to see itself.”
Rob Hudson
www.deanspanleythemovie.co.uk
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