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Film-making gets a Czech reality

12.4.2007 - The Times

Autor: Fran Yeoman

FRAN YEOMAN VISITS THE THRIVING BARRANDOV STUDIOS IN PRAGUE, BUT FINDS THAT NOT ALL IS PERFECT IN THE HOLLYWOOD OF THE EAST

Three flags were flying from the roof of the Barrandov film studios in Prague. One of them, the Czech standard, was easily explained, for Barrandov is the pride of the country’s movie-making and the studio that snatched Bond from Pinewood with Casino Royale. The other two were French and American, in honour of films shot at the facility. Soon, though, it would be all about the Stars and Stripes alone. Disney’s Narnia bandwagon has rolled into town, and there is little room for anything else.

As filming of Prince Caspian, the £130 million sequel to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, got under way this week, the Disney epic had already taken over most of the Barrandov complex. A forest had sprung up in the largest section of the brand new 4,000 sq m Max stage, and seven of the other ten on-site stages had become parts of C. S. Lewis’s fantasy land. The costume department had lent some of its 260,000 pieces to the production, and the workshop was busy finishing off the cornices and pillars that will grace Narnia.

Prince Caspian is being co-produced by the Czech company Stillking. It would seem to be the final proof that the republic’s film industry has escaped the shadow of the past.

Before Max, the last major stage-building programme at Barrandov had been the brain-child of Josef Goebbels, who saw the Nazi-occupied and virtually unbombed Prague as an ideal place in which to churn out propaganda films. His expansion plans were realised, but the war ended before the results could be put to much use.

Then the Iron Curtain came down, and for four decades little was made at the nationalised studios — other than the Oscar-winning Amadeus in 1984 — that was widely known in the West.

The Velvet Revolution of 1989 opened up a new world of possibilities for Barrandov. However, its new owner, the Moravia steel company, showed little interest in it and tried repeatedly to sell the studio before a group of minor shareholders, led by the present chairman, Vladimir Kuba, saw its potential and set about realising it. Boosted by the Czech Republic’s entry into the EU, Barrandov is now competing with Pinewood for custody of the next Bond film, while Prague is being described as “the Hollywood of the East”.

Much has been written about the cheapness of filming in the Czech Republic, but those involved in it prefer to stress the top-class services available in Prague. Here, Kuba says, a producer can find everything from a multilingual crew to state-of-the-art visual effects: “Here you are able to shoot a movie from the development to postproduction,” he says.

The latter is offered most successfully by UPP, a wholly Czech-owned firm that has just completed work on Francis Ford Coppola’s first film as a director for ten years, Youth Without Youth.

Vit Komrzy, who established UPP in 1994, agrees with Kuba that without quality, cheapness will never lure the world’s top directors: “Of course people expect some economic advantage, but mainly they talk about the quality,” he says, pointing to his firm’s use of traditional techniques — matte painting and model-building on the recent Perfume, for example — as well as ultra-modern digital animation.

“American producers have a certain budget and they are prepared to spend it,” he says. “The question isn’t: ‘Can you do it cheaper?’ It is about what extra can you offer for the same money.”

Both men believe, though, that the clock is ticking on the Czech Republic’s role as a bargain film-making destination. EU membership has already raised wages and prices, and the country’s planned adoption of the euro in 2012 could be a death knell for cut-price Prague production.

The question of tax credits — the mantra of film-makers everywhere — has inevitably raised its head. The Czech Republic is lagging behind some of the other new EU states on this. Hungary’s generous 20 per cent tax credit lured Steven Spielberg there to make Munich in 2005, and Komrzy points angrily to the 20 per cent rebate recently introduced in Britain, as well as Ireland and Germany. “Everyone in Europe says the market is free, but it isn’t true. I understand that each country is trying to support its own industry, but don’t talk about opportunity for all because there isn’t.”

Knowing that tax credits are probably here to stay, he has joined in the industry-wide lobbying of the government for a Czech equivalent. Kuba has done likewise, and is hopeful that his efforts will soon pay off in the form of both increased subsidy for native films and tax incentives for inward investment: “I am an optimist. I hope we will get these two things from summer 2008. In two to three years all members of the EU could have a tax incentive law.”

But over at the ornate offices of the ministry of culture, his optimism appears misplaced. Jaromir Talir, the vice-minister, says that while the Government is considering a limited expansion of its extremely modest domestic film fund, such a law failed in parliament last year and “it is not clear whether the new law will be accepted”.

He says the ministry is occupied with more traditional forms of culture such as its Unesco-listed castles, which have helped to fuel a boom in tourism. Furthermore, 25 per cent of its budget goes on paying the country’s priests. As a result, while Gordon Brown offers lucrative rebates to the UK film industry — Prince Caspian is likely to receive these, despite the Barrandov shoot, because the visual effects and other postproduction work will be carried out in the UK — the Czechs must navigate the unknown waters of EU capitalism without a governmental life-raft.

Is this short-termism and stupidity on the part of the nation’s leaders who fail to see movies as a serious business, as Komrzy alleges? Maybe. But Zdeneck Novak, head of the culture ministry’s bureau of international relations, paints a more complicated picture. “What you have to understand is that 19 years ago all the film-makers wanted to be out of state control,” he says. “If the Government tried to be involved, people would say they were like the Communists.”

Gordon Brown might be accused of Stalinist tendencies, but in Britain that is a joke rather than a politically fatal, deeply painful slur. Czech film-making may be enjoying the most prosperous chapter in its history, but behind the scenes its growth is still hampered by the past.

Born with the Barrandov brand

Amadeus (1984); Mission: Impossible (1996); A Knight's Tale (2001); The Bourne Identity (2002); Alien vs Predator (2004); Hellboy (2004); Oliver Twist (2005); The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005); Casino Royale (2006)