Mike Figgis at the ICA - the baffling new world that awaits the movies

Heard Mike Figgis on 'Start the Week' talking about the very different future that awaits movies. He elaborated later that evening at the ICA. After a week of working on loglines, synopses etc for my novel adaptation and finally submitting them to the traditional Hollywood system this weekend, I was not sure that I wanted to hear what he had to say. But Figgis and his ideas turned out to be strangely heartening and quietly inspiring - even if what he had to say about Hollywood was absolutely damning.
"Film", said Figgis, "is a very over-rated, shallow medium that humanity has taken to because we worship our own image - and the sight of that image blown-up on a screen is irresistible to us."

He recalled his own early experiences of making big money in Hollywood and having the sense that one day he would be 'found out'. And he talked of film studios the size of Bideford "actually owning bricks and mortar to produce the kind of crap they are currently churning out." And of studio execs who, like bankers, had no sense of reality when it came to money - a loss of $200,000,000 barely registering with the head of one major studio.

But Figgis is convinced that the era of celluloid is over 'romantic debates about it are a red herring.' Digital film has changed everything -and there is no going back. Soon we will be rethinking everything about our experience of film - its length, where it is shown, who makes them, performs in them and how they are funded. "We are living in sci-fi world right now,' contiinued Figgis. "The cork came of the bottle and the genie popped out so dynamically," that we are all still dealing with the implications.

Figgis echoed something that I have been hearing since October. People in the arts are feeling a sense of relief over the financial collapse. We sense (or perhaps just hope) that a cleansing will come about from the sudden lack of money. Bloated industries like Hollywood studios will be forced to change if they are to survive.

In the meantime, he advised the rest of us who, thanks to digital photography, can now make a small film to 'get a space - preferably a space that is kind of fun. Run your film for a few showings - get the crits and public in' and let the thing build organically. With the internet there are more and more opportunities to connect and make money.

I agreed with everything he said. It felt like a refreshing new way to tell stories. On the tube on the way home, I still felt excited by this new vision. It is, as Michael Rouse, a Canadian film-maker friend says, a matter of learning to let go of the "great producer/distributer/agents/parental guide (mental state) God that even the most ardent atheists and agnostics bow and pray to". My Canadian friend is right. Figgis is right. But this new way will require immense imagination and energy. Back at the house, at midnight, I found myself checking to see if any of the big West Coast agents had reacted to my script.....
Rouse, in the meantime is making a movie about jobs in the environmental sector and has struck out on the route advised by Figgis: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/129902