The new reelism

Graeme Mason brings overseas experience and a business focus to the chief film commission role. Photo / Mark Mitchell

What makes a film a New Zealand film? The new chief executive of the New Zealand Film Commissionâ€" who is, well, not a New Zealander â€" leans further forward in his chair as he considers the question.

"If you look at The Lord of the Rings ..." Graeme Mason begins, but I interrupt.

"That's not a New Zealand film," I blurt. "It was only made here".

"Or even Narnia, but certainly more The Lord of the Rings," Mason continues, ignoring me, "Peter [Jackson] used New Zealand as a character in that movie. You couldn't have had a better tourism thing - I and many other people decided to come and pursue other things about New Zealand [because of LOTR]. So to me that's a New Zealand film. Ditto The Piano."

Mason, a short-ish Australian, continues learning forward in his chair to emphasise his point. He's actually been perched, a little awkwardly, it has to be said, on the edge of it for a whole hour.

We have chosen the faux deco lobby of Auckland's Heritage hotel for what feels something like a job interview, with me the chap from HR and he - though he'd actually started full-time two and a bit days before - the bloke trying to convince me he's the one I should hire.

For a man who is now arguably the most powerful in the New Zealand film business, he appears an unprepossessing sort in the flesh. He's dressed not in a power broker's suit but in a casual uniform of sport jacket, blue jeans, white shirt open to the second button and black loafers. His grey-flecked hair is receding slightly, but he sounds and looks more youthful than his 47 years. There's a little touch of the Bohemian too; on a string around his neck is a small silver Buddha from Thailand - he's not Buddhist, it's from a charity he supports-and on the thumb of one hand is heavy silver ring given to him by his partner, Ross.

Yet his breezy, almost anti-bureaucratic aspect belies, I discover, his earnestness, a serious passion for his new job â€" and the serious depth of his experience in the business of film.

Indeed, in his answer to the question of what makes a film a New Zealand film he reveals a large part of why the commission's board has hired him, a foreigner after all, rather than a local to replace long-time CEO Ruth Harley. "The LOTR and The Piano are, maybe, not perceived as New Zealand films in New Zealand," Mason concludes, "but globally they are ..."

It is this - the bigger picture, the global view - that Mason brings to this job we're discussing his suitability for. His task will be to deliver New Zealand films not only to New Zealanders, but hopefully to the rest of the world.

"He's an international person," says the commission's chairman, David Cullwick.

"He's got a hugely important network which can be brought to bear for the good of the New Zealand film industry - [and his contacts are] extensive, high-quality and genuine."

Mason fell for the movies as a child. Born in 1962 in Sydney to a university lecturer mother and a father who was ordained in the Anglican church before becoming deputy registrar of the University of Sydney, Mason spent his formative years in the semi-rural beauty of New South Wales' Blue Mountains.

He was, he says, an adventurous child, so incredibly active that his family called him "Tigger", after the much-loved Winnie the Pooh character.

"When I was little we didn't have very much cash and it was a big experience to go to the movies. I can remember vividly the brightness and the fully saturated colours ... and the feeling of being in a room when the lights went down and the curtains pulled back.

"For me, really, it was the idea of sharing something â€" but in silence, in a big room. My dad was ordained, so the only other thing that we had like that was going to church. But it was, of course, a different thing," he says, then laughs.

The academic atmosphere of the family perhaps made it inevitable that Mason would get himself a good education, but he admits to having difficulty making his mind up about what that good education might be.

"I'd actually enrolled in medicine initially, but then deferred and ran away to England for a year. I deferred another year, but swapped into arts and law â€" by then my father was getting a bit nervous that I was never going to come back to Australia at all."

He did return and enrolled in a third course, a communications and media degree at the then NSW Institute of Technology.

"The communication course was perfect for me because it did cover things I was already very interested in, which were film and television. I came back and did that degree and I think it really did set me up for the confidence to go off and try lots of different things."

His CV is indeed extensive and filled with many jobs, including a variety of roles at movie studios Polygram, Universal and at the British television network Channel Four. Since quitting Australia for England for a second time in 1989 - after working in television documentaries - he forged a career in ... well, I tell him I'm not quite sure what it is he's been doing in film and television.

It is fair to say that he has not inhabited the alleged sexy part of the film business.

He's worked the business end â€" but what is it, in plain English, he's spent the last 20 years doing?

"The one-liner on me is I'm in a very lucky position: I'm half-creative and half commercial. I understand the idea of how the creative process happens because I've been involved with it. But also I come from the business side of raising the money. Then it's about retailing, to put it in regular terms."

Those who have seen Robert Altman's The Player or watched Kevin Spacey chew the scenery in Swimming With Sharks-both films are masterpieces of black comedy, by the way - will have a certain view of what it means to be a movie studio executive, something Mason became in the early 1990s. In 1992, he joined Polygram Filmed Entertainment - he spent the previous year with Manifesto Film Sales which was subsumed into Polygram - as Europe's only movie studio hit its stride. Mason, who rose during his seven years there from sales executive to a senior vice-president, acquired rights for or oversaw the production of a string of 1990s buzz films, including The Usual Suspects, Trainspotting, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and the Muhammad Ali documentary When We Were Kings.

"I was there for the ride of Polygram. I was lucky enough that I went from selling with them ... and then I flipped into doing acquisitions rather than selling. My brief was to augment or supplement what the [Polygram film] labels were bringing in."

From Polygram he went - though still based in London - to Hollywood studio Universal where he was president for acquisitions for three and half years.

Hollywood, Mason says, is as vicious as its reputation. "It's like the most cut throat environment where there is this enormous pressure on you to succeed and achieve."

A typical day would mean rising after perhaps just six hours' sleep, checking his BlackBerry - he was among the first to own a "CrackBerry" - before reading all the daily film trade magazines like Variety. "The industry runs on this incredible adrenalin. You would need to immediately work the phones and check what's happened in the rest of world while you've been alseep."

Attending events like, say,the Sundance Film Festival, held every winter in Utah, are far from glamorous if you're a studio exec rather than star. "Everyone thinks it must be great, you ski and you laugh. But if you're really in the business of buying or selling or putting something together, the snow is an inconvenience that you've got to run through."

Much of your life as a studio exec is spent in fear, he says, and the dread is not what you know about but what you don't.

"It's all encompassing. Literally, it's terror. I do remember very clearly getting a call at about one in the morning [at Sundance]. I'd gone to bed, I was sharing this condo with the rest of the [Universal] staff and getting a call from a Hollywood agent that there was a secret screening of a documentary [he can't say which one] which had been going to screen but got pulled. We got called to this secret screening and we all had to turn up in this darkened cinema at two in the morning and of course the one person who hadn't picked up their phone wanted to kill themselves the next morning because they hadn't seen it and all the rest of us had."

Mason says he had a "fabulous" time at Universal but says such a lifestyle can be "unrealistic and unhealthy", something he hints was part of the reason he left the studio to spend a year consulting before joining Britain's Channel Four, a commercial TV network which is also government-owned and has a public service remit, similar to the film commission. During his five years at C4 he was head of media projects - he was the essential link between the creative and commercial divisions - before becoming its manager director for rights.

A man's CV can speak more than it says. Since December 2006, Mason's CV reports he worked as executive

producer for small film company, Scarlet Pictures, but also, and rather suddenly, that he was now living and working not in London but in, of all places, Phuket in Thailand, involved in his partner's landscape architecture business. At the same time he was developing a children's multimedia project called "The Book and the Bear". What this particular change seemed to say was that he'd pretty much fled the television and movie business and went bush. Was he burnt-out?

"There were personal issues. There were ill-health issues in my family [his mother] and I wanted to be closer, and my partner, who is a Kiwi, was living in Thailand, working there [in his own landscape business]. So suddenly doing these incredible hours, running around the globe and doing all this stuff was feeling a little hollow. I wanted to move back in this direction [in the world] as it were."

Mason says there were "several opportunities" in the film business that came his way during his two years in Thailand but it wasn't until the Film Commission job came up that it felt right.

"It's one of those things that I can't describe any other way [than] it felt emotionally and professionally a good thing for me to do. I was very keen on the idea of living in New Zealand. I'd visited here a lot but I'd never lived here.

I wanted to come somewhere where there are different cultural groups. I did miss that in Thailand ... from a multicultural city like London to be in a more or less monocultural society."

The New Zealand film business and the commission itself were no strangers.

In Mason's many incarnations the Film Commission had often been a conduit for introducing him to people in the local industry. "So I've got first-hand experience [of the commission] from the other side."

Mason arrived in New Zealand from Thailand at 2.30pm on April 3. By 4pm he was at his desk at the commission overseeing a staff of 19, a budget of just over $15 million and with the brief, as the commission's ponderous vision statement has it, "to ensure the continuing momentum of New Zealand's national cinema".

The job - which earns its holder, according to the commission's 2007-2008 annual report, between $230,000 and $240,000 - is a mix of good cop/bad cop.

Part defender of the faith, with a responsibility to help foster the film industry, the CEO is also ultimately the person who will say "no" to a lot of people.

Interestingly, Mason is related to commission board member Wendy Palmer (she's his partner's sister and she took no part in his appointment, Cullwick stresses). But here's the most interesting thing about putting Mason in the job:

whereas Ruth Harley - who was in the job for a decade - can be seen as an arts bureaucrat (she'd headed NZ on Air before going to the commission, and has gone on to head Australia's equivalent of the NZFC), Mason is an altogether different film beast. He is a business guy, which makes one wonder whether his appointment suggests a sea change in the commission's approach.

"Certainly you've picked up something that we thought was appropriate," says Cullwick. "We were headed more that way."

Which was why the board waited until after the country went to the polls in November before recruiting Harley's replacement; National had signalled before the election it would be reviewing the commission and its enabling act, now 30 years old â€" though this has yet to get underway and no terms of reference have yet been released.

"Where you've had a long-standing CEO, the board often steps back and reflects on things that it would like to change a bit, or that the world has changed, and so you're not going to try to replicate that person. We looked for skills Ruth had and some she didn't."

The industry, too, seems generally, if tentatively, positive about Mason's appointment, even if he's yet to make a single public decision.

John Barnett, head of South Pacific Pictures (maker of Shortland Street, Outrageous Fortune and the films Whale Rider and Sione's Wedding), has been critical of the commission in recent times, most recently suggesting it treated the local industry "like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them on bullshit". However, he is upbeat about Mason's appointment. "He comes from a commercial environment. He's got international experience and that's a good thing."

Richard Fletcher, the head of major industry body the Screen Production and Development Association (SPADA), believes Mason's range of contacts will be "incredibly helpful, particularly in the current market where the dreaded R-word is having an effect".

Mason believes this too, and strikes a note of optimism despite being just days in the job - and being faced with a government review, a global recession and the commission's new funding model which came into effect last July leaving the commission's film production financing for 2008/09 and beyond "substantially" diminished.

"One of the many advantages we have is the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the local film community who, often in the past, were making things on a shoestring.

Whilst we don't want to have to give them teeny budgets, it is [possible] that we have to work out the scope of our ambitions slightly differently. But we can do that much more easily than a [Hollywood] studio can.

"You can't make the huge $120 million blockbusters for much less than that, there's very little room to move. Whereas we're making films in small dollar amounts which we can probably, maybe, if they're good, still get out."