A hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money by most standards. But to a filmmaker, it’s basically peanuts.
For the past four years, the luxury watch brand IWC Schaffhausen has awarded $100,000 (Dh367,213) to one of three competing directors. To be eligible, they must be a citizen of a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) country, in advanced stages of development of a feature-length fiction film, and have a producer attached to their project.
The winner gets $50,000 up front and another $50,000 when they start principal photography. If production doesn’t begin within two years, the IWC has the right to withhold the second half.
Last year, Kuwaiti director Abdullah Boushahri won for his script The Water, which tells the story of a drought that overcame Kuwait City in the early 1900s, before the discovery of oil. Iconic Kuwaiti actress Hayat Al Fahd agreed to star in it. Boushahri plans to rebuild old Kuwait by creating entire villages and mud houses from scratch. Architectural, cultural and historical accuracy are important to him.
He puts a price tag of up to $3 million on the production — the “biggest movie budget ever, in the history of Kuwait”. So $100,000 seems like a nominal contribution towards that. But Boushahri says without the IWC’s recognition, he wouldn’t be where he is today, gearing up to start pre-production with the support of his government.
“It lifts your spirit and makes you keep going. If you go to any investor and tell him, ‘I have a $100,000 in’ … it will definitely convince them to come on board,” he said.
At a private gala where he was announced the winner, Boushahri had his picture taken next to screenwriter and brand ambassador Marc Forester, as well as English actress and jury head Emily Blunt. This alone made him more marketable.
“You can’t imagine, when I have my presentation [to investors] and I show me receiving the award at Dubai International Film Festival, and having these people stand next to it, and the certificate with all their signatures. Oh my God, you can’t imagine. People will say ‘wow’. People will support you... It’s like having the top people in the world, in the industry, in Hollywood, in the cinema business, pledging this project and saying, ‘This is one of the best projects in the Middle East.’”
This year, IWC competitor Layla Kaylif, from the UAE, is developing her first feature film. The Letter Writer is a coming-of-age story set in 1960s Dubai. Layla has budgeted $400,000 for the initial stages of the project. Realistically, she says, they’ll need at least a million to make the full movie. (Qatari director Khalifa Al Muraikhi, competing with his film Sahaab, predicts the same amount.)
If Layla wins the prize money, she plans to make a short with the first $50,000, because she doesn’t want to “risk the whole production” by jumping into an underfunded project.
“You try and shoot a feature film on a shoe-string budget, which sounds like a lot of money on the outside, but it’s not,” she said.
“It’s a period film, so there’s going to be [the cost of] dressing the locations. There are location fees, producers. You have to finance the production; you have to pay a producer for two years of their life. And then [there’s] post-production.”
Ideally, she wants to film in the UAE, but thinks she might have to recreate Dubai in Puerto Rico to save costs. Puerto Rico has become a popular shooting location in the past five years, particularly for Hollywood; the Puerto Rico Film Commission offers up to 40 per cent tax credit on productions that meet a $100,000 minimum spend requirement.
“If I shot in Puerto Rico, it would be a little slap on the wrist,” Layla said. “I’m trying to be diplomatic about this subject, because I think people are doing their best. But for example, if I want to close off the [Deira] Creekside and shoot for two weeks, they’re going to charge me a fortune.”
According to the Dubai Film and TV Commission (DFTC), “the sole entity authorised to issue shooting permits in Dubai for the purpose of media production”, it would cost Layla Dh2,500 to shoot at the Creekside for up to 30 days, as well as Dh500 to process her application.
Filmmaking costs can include compensation for cast, crew, travel, equipment rentals, shooting permits, post-production and CGI.
In 2011, it cost $378.5 million to make the most expensive film in Hollywood, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. It grossed over a billion dollars. (That same year, Paranormal Activity cost $15,000 to make and grossed $193 million, though it’s largely considered an anomaly.)
Home-grown features
In the UAE, only a handful of home-grown features have had the opportunity to release in cinemas within the region. City of Life was the first in 2010. Its production budget was about $5 million, according to student reports from Zayed University, where director Ali F. Mostafa spoke. From A to B, his 2014 film, cost $2.5 million, as gleaned from a panel discussion at last year’s Abu Dhabi Film Festival. Sea Shadow, a 2011 film by Nawaf Al Janahi, cost $1 million, according to the film’s Wikipedia page. Djinn, an American-Emirati horror film, cost $5 million, or so says an article in the Guardian.
tabloid! contacted Image Nation, a production company in Abu Dhabi that helped finance all of the above films, except for City of Life, which was privately funded. They would not share budgets or box office takings. CEO Michael Garin said the company “has a policy not to release the financial information for its productions. We like to focus our successes on the number of high-quality films and television series we produce each year.”
Thus, they also did not provide numbers for Zinzana, a psychological thriller directed by Emirati filmmaker Majid Al Ansari, which releases in cinemas on December 10.
“Even if I knew [the budget], I don’t think I’m allowed to say it,” Al Ansari said. “It’s not a Hollywood budget. It’s a good budget for the region. It’s not like we could do a Hollywood kind of budget, because that’s unrealistic. We don’t have the market for it.”
A ‘Hollywood kind of budget’ might refer to, say, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, which filmed in Dubai in 2010, supported by the DFTC. The production cost was an estimated $145 million. That could finance 30 locally-produced films, at $5 million a pop. Furious 7, part of another mammoth franchise, filmed in Abu Dhabi in 2013. It was supported by twofour54 and Abu Dhabi Film Commission, which offered the production their 30 per cent rebate as an incentive. The film’s budget was $190 million, which could finance 38 local films.
Hollywood producers are able to spend that kind of money because they’ll have the chance to recuperate it when their films are distributed worldwide. In the United States alone, there are over 39,000 cinema screens. The most recent statistics on the UAE, displayed online by Unesco in 2010, counted 255 film screens across the country.
Mission: Impossible ended up making $694 million globally. Furious 7 made $1.5 billion. In contrast, Djinn, which released two years ago in the region, broke a local record on its opening weekend in theatres by grossing over Dh1 million ($272,279). That would only cover about 5.5 per cent of its production cost.
Still, progress is being made. Eight years ago, Image Nation didn’t even exist. Five years ago, no UAE film had made it to the big screen. Last year, the now-defunct Abu Dhabi Film Festival opened with a screening of From A to B, an Emirati film, for the first time in its eight-year history.
Before Layla started scriptwriting, when she was more active making music, she used to think production budgets were colossal, too. Now she’s begun to experience first-hand the intricacies of creating a successful full-length movie, because “sometimes, when you think about it, making a film is like creating a little world.” And while $100,000 might not be enough to mould an entire universe, it can certainly help with setting up the foundation.
