Monster baby

By Deborah Hill Cone, March 28, 2007 @ 11 pm

Idealog March/April 2007, page 32. Photograph by Mike Clare

Forty million killer sheep and four million terrified Kiwis—one simple idea has transformed the life and career of Jonathan King, director of schlock-horror film Black Sheep. Now King is courting Hollywood and turning down scripts world-wide. Just don’t ask if he’s the next Peter Jackson

Four million people, 40 million sheep—and the sheep get pissed off. It’s a 12-word idea that any one of us could have conjured up over a few beers and a barbie. In fact, I reckon I already have, sometime in my student days. But how many of us would take that simple idea and put four years of our lives on hold to cajole investors, producers, actors, distributors and the special effects genii at Weta Workshop to join you in the $10 million quest of turning it into a big screen reality?

And you’ve never made a feature film before.

Okay, so Jonathan King had already created a short film, shot ads and made music videos. And it has been his dream—since the closing credits of Star Wars in 1977—to make movies. But where many would have stopped short, overcome by the practicalities of mortgage, family and fear of failure, King ploughed on to complete his debut feature about genetically-modified killer sheep.

Now the chickens are coming home, so to speak.

Black Sheep premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last September and opens in New Zealand this month. The low-budget hit was at the centre of a mini-bidding war for US rights and sold around the world to big-name distributors like the Weinstein brothers and Mel Gibson’s Icon Films. The day Idealog calls, King is preparing to leave for the Festival of Fantastic Film in France. By the time you read this, he may have nabbed top prize.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHMyVljAP_A

The Black Sheep trailer

King has had a whirlwind series of meetings in Hollywood including chats with producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, founders of Miramax and producers of titles such as The English Patient and the two Kill Bills. He has signed with über-agent Robert Newman whose client list includes Danny Boyle, Guillermo del Toro and Baz Luhrman. He’s also been sent a lot of scripts to read.

It’s far too early to say of course, and we’d hate to put the mockers on him, but let’s just take a stab: Jonathan King is hot.

Part of the confidence in King’s future comes from the end result: a hilarious, yet genuinely scary movie with convincing acting and terrific special effects. A larger part comes back to King himself. In the industry, Black Sheep is known as a high-concept pitch; you can tell it to anyone and they will get it immediately. But while many other would-be moviemakers this side of 40 are in love with the romance of the auteur and see something almost heroic in emulating tricky customers like Quentin Tarantino or Vincent Ward, from the day he had the Black Sheep idea King was determined to be pragmatic about the business side of the venture.

“A lot of people think being a director is a licence to be nuts and a wanker, but you only get one shot at it and the people who are investing in it want to get their money back,” King says matter-of-factly.

“I think it’s fair to say that Jonathan has possibly done more damage to the Japanese tourist market in a two-hour film than could have been thought possible.”

His approach as a neophyte director was more like a businessman stalking a key client than a theatre luvvie waxing lyrical about his vision. Of course, an idea with a-ha! value was essential to get a foot in the door, but it was only the beginning, and King lined up his proposal as thoroughly as an inventor testing a gizmo before trying to sell it.

“I had written all sorts of scripts but this was the best one; horror is quite hot at the moment. It’s a good genre—there’s always an audience, they don’t lose as much money and it’s an easier sell than a sensitive drama about the human condition,” King says.

Like any business idea, potential investors wanted to know whether the finished product would live up to the idea. “I knew it needed a script behind it, so I wrote the script and said ‘Read this, I’m not even going to tell you what it’s about.’”

That approach snared King the film’s ‘star’—not an actor, but Richard Taylor and his team at Weta Workshop. (Another useful thing about horror films is that people seldom go to them to see their favourite actor—who is bound to end up dead anyway.)

Genuinely funny and scary: are we witnessing the birth of a brilliant career?

Taylor is a fan: “We all knew from the outset that Jonathan was going to be fun to work with and had a great script in hand. But it was an added delight to discover an incredible skilled and focused first-time director in the same package. Jonathan has taken the woolly jumpers of the pastureland of New Zealand and turned them into psychotic meat-munching carnivores. I think it’s fair to say that Jonathan has possibly done more damage to the Japanese tourist market in a two-hour film than could have been thought possible.”

An unlikely backer, Korean energy company, Daesung Group, put up the last key part of the film’s budget partly because its head, chairman David Kim, is a film buff himself. The Film Commission also got on board with money and marketing support.

“The way Black Sheep successfully brought in Weta and Richard Taylor as its ‘star’ was a terrifically good strategy,” says Film Commission chief executive Ruth Harley, who also praised the fact you could “tell the story to anyone anywhere and they’d get it”.

The three-year process of getting the film to the screen involved an arduous weighing-up of time and cost, while having a small budget meant less time for preproduction and shooting to get the effects King wanted. As the film depended on filmgoers suspending disbelief and buying into the idea that sheep are vicious, it was critical that the effects were credible, even if the premise was zany. Getting Weta was a coup—not only for its star power, but because King wanted to make a film that was genuinely scary, without resorting to big-budget computer-generated special effects. “I never wanted a puppet sheep to look like a puppet sheep,” King says.

But he was determined to work within the budget constraints because King says he wants part of his personal ‘brand’ to be that he is known for making a film which he delivered on budget and on time and which sold as well or better than targeted.

“At the end of the day, being the director of a film is standing in a paddock 12 hours a day having 70 other people doing what I say because I’ve got to come up with the goods—and I firmly believe part of that is being responsible for the money. It’s no good shooting three-quarters of a film and then running out of money. I thought River Queen was three-quarters of a film stuck together with a voiceover. How does that satisfy your vision? I will probably get in trouble for saying that [but what matters is] getting a chance to do it next time.”

Budget constraints meant sometimes he had to just move on from a scene, despite not having got everything he wanted, or risk running out of money. “I saw the first assembly [rough cut] of the film and thought ‘I am so fucked. I will never work again; I will be assassinated by the investors’.”

He pulled himself together, especially because he knew that any film emerges only after weeks in the edit room. “The key to our puppet effects was that they look amazing for a few seconds—or even just a few frames—and like, well, puppets the rest of the time. But when you find those frames, combine them with other action, sound effects, music and the momentum of your story, you have living, dangerous creatures. When I showed the film to Peter Jackson even he said he often couldn’t tell what were puppets and what were real sheep.”

Ah, Peter Jackson. King is emphatic that Idealog should resist the temptation to make any silly comparisons with that other low-budget, schlock-horror filmmaker from Wellington, who is closely associated with Weta Workshop. Black Sheep premiered at the Toronto Film Festival’s legendary Midnight Madness series, the place where Peter Jackson’s early films, such as Bad Taste and Braindead, were screened to much acclaim.

Early mood illustrations created by Weta Workshop

So here’s the official line: Are you the next Peter Jackson? No, stupid question, please move on.

Since Black Sheep premiered King has been to LA three times and done a lot of talking, but he’s well aware that it’s a long way from the odd person calling you “the next Peter Jackson” to actually being it.

“One good thing about Hollywood is that when you arrive on the scene people seek you out and ask ‘What else have you got?’ Of course it costs them nothing to do that, but if you do have the genius idea they can say they were in on it at the beginning.”

King downplays his connection to the industry’s moguls, however, saying he met Harvey and Bob Weinstein “for about four minutes” at the American Film Market in Santa Monica, after the deal for Weinstein to distribute the DVD in the US had been signed.

“Harvey was exactly like you would expect him to be. He said ‘You’re a sick man’ and I said ‘Thanks’. Then he asked me what my next thing was and I told him one idea I’ve been working on. And then he pitched it to Bob in front of me. They said ‘We should have that’ … but talk is cheap in Hollywood. Still, that positive interest is exciting and, I think, productive.”

King, the son of the late historian Michael King and connected to the McKay King advertising dynasty, is no mean schmoozer himself. He and writing partner Matthew Grainger have their own company, Index Films, and are busy working their own projects. As well, they recently wrote the script for upcoming Robin Scholes-produced feature The Tattooist, that they took over from an existing treatment. “Four words were good in it: ‘Samoan tattooing horror movie.’ We threw everything else out.”

They are also working on an idea with noir novelist Chad Taylor. “I’d love to shoot a Hollywood movie but the bad thing about blockbusters is there are more people breathing down your neck than more modestly-made films. I’m almost certain I’ll do something here [in New Zealand] next.”

King is reluctant to talk about the personal cost of pouring his life into Black Sheep; his wife Rebecca Priestley is a PhD student and science writer and the couple have a five-year-old daughter and three-month-old twins—born in the midst of the global flurry over Black Sheep’s release.

Wasn’t the project harrowing?

“Nah! Making movies is all my dreams come true. I count my blessings every day.” He does admit it took a long time to achieve those dreams. “There’s a point where, to make a feature film, you need to put all of your eggs in that basket—creative, financial, personal and emotional—at a point where there is still no guarantee that the project will happen. That was a very stressful period, but at the same time I knew this was my shot at what I’d dreamed about since I saw Star Wars at ten. I had to go for it with everything I had.”

“I saw the first assembly [rough cut] of the film and thought ‘I am so fucked. I will never work again; I will be assassinated by the investors’.”

Early signs suggest King’s career has been dealt a mega-boost. Canada’s largest daily paper, the Toronto Star, singled out Black Sheep the day before the festival, amused by the stunt of having sheep walking down the red carpet; overall, the media have loved it. But the real test was whether an audience would agree.

“There is a point early on in the film where Oliver [Driver] gets his ear bitten off by a little sheep. People laughed and clapped and then you know they are onboard for the rest of the film. At Toronto when people cheered [film festival programmer Colin Geddes] turned around and grinned at me as if to say ‘See, I knew it would work.’”

Richard Taylor says Black Sheep may impact on more than King’s career. “I doubt that many of us, having experienced the comic genius of Black Sheep, will ever be able to look at out fleecy friends in the same light again. We are all excited about what Jonathan will have to offer next from a truly wonderful debut film outing—we know there’s going to be a wonderful cinematic treat for us all.”

Buying up mental real estate

Sharks have it. New York City has it. Harry Potter has it. So do killer sheep. As screenwriter Terry Rossio explains: “Let me take a last sip of Diet Coke, lick the cheesy yellow Cheetos gunk from my fingers, turn up the Rolling Stones, settle down in front of my Apple computer and type out for you the following words of wisdom: Mental real estate is the most valuable real estate in the world.”

Mental real estate is especially prized in Hollywood, coveted more than beachfront access, a penthouse suite or a foothill view of city lights.

“If you own some mental real estate you could be set for life,” Rossio claims.

So what the hell is it?

Rossio describes mental real estate as something which punters immediately recognise: an idea that has already been embedded in their brain. (And since he made up this piece of jargon, I guess it’s his definition that counts).

Mental real estate could be a person, place or a thing; but whatever it is, when you are presented with it, bingo, you’ve got it.

King Arthur’s Legend has it, pirates have it, the Amazonian jungle has it, Bond has it, World War II has it—and so on and so on.

“If you recognise the thing I tell you, that means it’s taking up space in your head—tangling up a few billion neurons—residing on a chunk of mental real estate,” Rossio tells film students.

That means you don’t have to start from scratch explaining what your idea is about. A bit like stereotypes really, but it’s also the thing that reassures investors that your film is going to immediately resonate with audiences. It’s also the one that makes it quick to pitch. Stars have mental real estate which is why the famous pitch—“What if Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger were twins?”—took less than a second to register.

Of course some mental real estate—Indiana Jones, Die Hard, Lord of the Rings—manages to move out of the slum neighbourhood of ‘sequel’ into the posh gated community of ‘franchise’—where everyone wants to be. King knows New Zealand owns a bit of moviegoer grey matter. But on the monopoly board of mental real estate we are not in Mayfair or Park Lane.

Don’t try and make us own car chases or rom-coms; we don’t.

“There has to be added value to the story. If you go to see a cop thriller or a romantic comedy and it happens to be set in New Zealand, it doesn’t add much value,” King says.

The mental real estate owned by New Zealand might include farming, rugby, yachting, Maori culture, and now Lord of the Rings.

It is going to be hard yakka convincing a moviegoer in Orange County that New Zealand owns the mental real estate to techno-thrillers or big budget musicals. But Babe meets Braindead? Now you’re talking.

We all know that forehead-thwacking feeling you get when you hear someone’s great idea; the cruel con-trick of creativity where you could swear the idea is so simple that you think you could easily have thought of it yourself.

The reason it seems so simple is because it neatly combines already familiar ideas in a new way. “What we fed into it was what people overseas knew about New Zealand, including all those Kiwi-isms about sheep shagging.”

Oh, that.

Originally published in Idealog #8, page 32