Schuyler Weiss is not long back to his home on Australia’s Gold Coast and so he is still mulling over the takeaways from his trip to the 29th Busan International Film Festival when he sits down to talk. The experience certainly sounds like an eye-opener.
The Oscar-nominated producer of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis was making his first visit to South Korea for the event – which bills itself as Asia’s largest film festival and which ran from October 2-11. He was on hand to join a panel that discussed the launch of Frontier Economics’ MPA-supported research paper Policy + The Rise of K-Content 2024 while also taking part in workshops hosted by both the Chanel x Busan International Film Festival Asian Film Academy (BAFA) and the Korean Academy of Film Arts (KAFA).
Those roles allowed Weiss to tap into trends within the Korean film industry while lending his own experience – and talent – to initiatives that look to unearth new generations of movie-makers from across the region.
Weiss says the trip was both refreshing and exhilarating, and the onus is on him now to spread what he has learned among his peers while putting what he learned into practice in his role as managing director at the Gold Coast-based Bazmark studio, where he also works with Luhrmann and his creative partner Catherine Martin as a producing partner.
There’s also the looming release of the Weiss-produced feature How To Make Gravy, set for a December 1 release on Binge and based on a song by the iconic Australian musician Paul Kelly that has, since its release in 1996, grown to become the country’s unofficial Christmas anthem.
As we chat via video call, it becomes quickly apparent that BIFF has left Weiss inspired and also introspective in comparing the fortunes of the industry he witnessed in South Korea, and the one he helps drive back home.
How was your first trip to Busan, and what have you been thinking about since returning to the Gold Coast?
I thought it was fantastic. It was fabulous to see this for the Korean industry, of course, but really Asia-wide, it felt like such a magnet for the whole industry, and I was embarrassed to be one of the few Australians because, you know, everybody seems to turn up for it and I thought that the loss was entirely ours. Australia and South Korea have a co-production treaty. I understand it’s been used zero times. I haven’t drilled into the details, but whatever the benefits of that reciprocity are, investigating them is a new goal of mine.
What were your key takeaways regarding the panel on the Policy + The Rise of K-Content 2024 paper?
Well, what didn’t surprise me was the finding that restrictive government policy on quotas and that kind of thing end up being counterproductive and actually lower the tone of the whole industry, but supportive policies and supportive investment while also being open to international content at the same time is a winning formula. That’s something that I believe, too. I think that international production and domestic production can help each other. We can stand on the shoulders of a lot of international activity. But there doesn’t seem to be a clear direction on that [in Korea], which surprised me.
What else did you learn about the nature of the Korean market?
It isn’t so much directly connected to government policy, but I hadn’t realized Korea was still very much a movie-going place, and 50 percent of what they go to see in the movie theaters are Korean films. In Australia, that rate is about seven percent. I don’t even know how to begin to learn from that yet, but I want to because I want to understand what they might be doing that we’ ‘re not doing. Is it just that they’re making better stuff? Or what cultural circumstances might we be able to emulate, whether in Australia or abroad? I think Korea is a real beacon for how to preserve your content creation.
In your experience, what have been the benefits of Australia’s incentive schemes?
I think they have impacted the facilities that we have and are continually building, as well as the crew’s skills. Having just gone from making a big production that is absolutely an Australian movie, in Elvis – it was written by Australians, directed by Australians, yeah, but nonetheless, it is a Hollywood job, too – going from that to making a small movie like How to Make Gravy which is a small-budget, independent Australian film with a first-time director, I was very much aware that. We had people on the crew who have the experience of these huge movies, and they’re bringing that experience to bear on our plucky little film and eager to do so not just because the big Hollywood movies helped pay the mortgage but also because they were just excited. They’re Australians. They’re excited to work on something local and elevate the movie.
Can more be done?
I think sometimes, amongst the producing community in Australia, there’s a bit of a zero-sum fallacy about international productions somehow cannibalizing the industry or something like that. I just don’t subscribe to it. I look to it very much with an “all boats rise on the same tide” attitude. I would like to see Australia – specifically Queensland but Australia generally – further develop post-production. Okay. I think we’re a hyper-competitive shooting location these days, but we have a lot of productions that shoot, and then we never see them again. And I think our post-production industry is underdeveloped and, in some cases, regressing. We should cultivate a post-production industry to have more of the process happening in Australia and develop those skills as well.
Can you talk a little bit about the time you spent with the young filmmakers involved in the BAFA initiative?
I think a big takeaway from the whole thing was that it’s no accident that [BAFA] is held in Korea because the storytelling feels so authentic there and so indicative of its place. As an Australian filmmaker, I’m constantly aware of the fact that we can still often be chasing what we think is real, what we think we should make, and what we think people want to watch. And so, when you sit down, and you’re hearing a pitch from a filmmaker from Myanmar talking about something so specific to his personal life experience and to the world of Myanmar, and yet you’re fighting back a genuine emotional reaction to the humanity and the story – that shows the power of authentic storytelling. It was a special experience meeting these filmmakers from all these different parts of Asia and seeing them tell these beautiful, often really special stories.
Does piracy continue to threaten your business, and what more can be done to mitigate against it?
As an audience member, the only thing I can offer is that continually improving the user experience for official, legal content platforms remains the most effective bulwark against the proliferation of illegal, pirated ones. There is undoubtedly an ethical dimension to the issue as well, but it feels like it ultimately plays out in the arena of consumer behavior. People became comfortable paying to legally download digital music on iTunes and later stream it on Spotify, rather than acquire it from myriad illegal hosts, not because of some grand moral stand, but first, because increasingly effective policing of those sites made them harder and harder to reliably access and, in the end, because iTunes and Spotify are just…better! I would say the same goes for where people go to download and stream movies and other kinds of content.
With How to Make Gravy coming up, how is there a weight of expectation in dealing with something such a part of the fabric of Australian society?
Absolutely. We just had to embrace that, but that challenge was exhilarating. We did have the support of songwriter Paul Kelly. He very much had all he had to say on the subject in a brilliant four-minute song, but he’s definitely our audience member-in-chief, so that helps alleviate some of that pressure. We’re aware that everybody thinks they know what that song is about, so we hope people will make room in their hearts for this version. A prison Christmas movie feels like a pretty Australian thing – a man and his need to find his way back to his family is a feeling we hope is universal.
What are your thoughts about the current state of the Australian industry?
I sometimes feel like we’ve lost our way a little bit from the authentic Australian voice. It might be my generational bias, too, because the first Australian movies that I saw growing up in the early 90s were Strictly Ballroom, Muriel’s Wedding, and Priscilla [Queen of the Desert]. Those were just so Australian. They had this wonderful irreverence and color, but they also were deeply human and dealt with big issues. Priscila was this absurd road trip, but really, it’s also about someone’s relationship with themselves and their own identity and his son, and he picks up these other people who are struggling to claim their place in the world. It’s a very deep movie. I hope that How to Make Gravy will feel like perhaps a distant cousin across a few decades of movies like that.
Was there a key takeaway from the whole BIFF experience?
Coming a long way back to what we discussed earlier, they’re doing something right in Korea, and Parasite is as Korean as Muriel’s Wedding is Australian. So, my goal for myself, and my kind of clarion call to everybody else, is, whatever you want to make, let’s make things that are rooted in the way we make our own way through the world as Australians. Let’s present that.
For more interviews with filmmakers and producers taking big swings in Asia, check these out:
From “Kill Bill” to Martin Scorsese to “Shōgun”: Producer Eriko Miyagawa on Her Hero’s Journey
From Mumbai to Batam: The Unexpected Journey of Dev Patel’s “Monkey Man”
Benetone Films Co-Founder Kulthep Narula on Taking Thailand’s Film Industry to the Next Level
Pioneering Producer Auchara Kijkanjanas on Animating Thailand’s Entertainment Industry
Featured image: The Kim Family (Woo-sik Choi, Kang-ho Song, Hye-jin Jang, So-dam Park) in Parasite. Courtesy of NEON CJ Entertainment
