December 9, 2009

FNB Innovators: Laurent Touil Tartour

This week FilmNewsBriefs had the pleasure of speaking with Parisian filmmaker Laurent Touil Tartour. We discussed his series, “Urban Wolf,” and creating content with new technologies for new mediums using inspiration from the past’s greatest filmmakers.

FilmNewsBriefs: How did you decide to embark on the “Urban Wolf” story and tell it they way that you did with surveillance cameras?
Laurent Tartour: It started out of a bad experience with my last project in France. It was a big budget film for which I was hired as the screenwriter and director. It was to be my first feature film and after many years of preparing and writing I had a creative disagreement with the producer. The studio insisted I make the changes but I thought they would be harmful to the film so I decided to quit the project. The project was ultimately made with someone else but bombed at the box office, which made me more content with my choice to follow my instincts and step away from the project.

After this experience it became very difficult for me to make another feature film in my country. The word of mouth in the industry was not good and the studio was bad mouthing me which made me very paranoid. “Urban Wolf” was created out of this paranoia. There’s a nice quote from Alfred Hitchcock, “The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them.”

FNB: How did you raise funds to make the project?
LT: I always worked in the industry. I made my first short film at the age of 17 and then I took positions as Assistant Director, Assistant Editor, Assistant to the Producer, knowing that I always wanted to be a director but knowing I needed to work in each different department of the filmmaking process to learn the entire process. At first, based on those previous experiences, I went to the typical financial sources and they couldn’t get a grasp on the project since it wasn’t a typical feature film,  TV series, or TV movie. It was more then two years ago and the term “web series” wasn’t used yet.

I had the idea that because it’s mainly a digital project, why not go to people that invest money in start-ups? I called some of my friends that are angel investors in Paris. I cooked dinner for them, and planned an evening together and after only 10 minutes, all of them decided to finance the project.

FNB: Were you able to tell them how you wanted to monetize the project or give a return on their investment?
LT: I did, but it was about two years ago. What’s funny is that now that the film is completed, the actuality of how we’re monetizing is very different then how I initially imagined.

FNB: How did you initially think you were going to monetize and how is that different from what’s happening?
LT: I told them, and what I believed then is to give the film for free in an ad supported environment, like revenue share from YouTube. At the time and even today, I don’t think anyone has found the business model. At the time I really had to use my imagination. One of the largest studios in Hollywood will now be the distributor of the project and the business model is completely different. They will invest a lot of money in the marketing and distribution and it will be a worldwide release. The result of all of my efforts to make this the best film possible resulted in a much larger recoupment then originally imagined.

FNB: I’m a little confused. You keep referring to the project as ‘the film’ but I was introduced to this project as a web series. Did you shoot a feature film and then release it in 4-minute episodes?
LT: It’s probably the most important question for you to ask because it’s the reason I’ve loved working on this project so much. You know from the very birth of cinema, the format for movies always resulted from the available technologies. If you go to 1891 when Thomas Edison invented the kinetoscope. Films were one minute, two minute maximum. At the time the inventor of cinema, Thomas Edison was convinced that movies were meant as a singular experience, not like it is today in a cinema. When they started to make it on big screen, people came and it was then that they began to make longer films. Of course now we have  TV and  MTV which continues to change everything with the rhythm of the movie, etc.  Cinema is a relatively new art form and its format always evolves with new technologies.

I was always influenced by storytellers like Kubrick or even James Cameron, for me it’s great what he did for Avatar, since he created a new camera to shoot his movie. For me I feel it’s part of my role as a director to focus on the technology I am using to tell my story. That’s why I didn’t do the movie the regular way. I didn’t write a regular script for a regular movie, I wrote 15 four-minute scripts. Each episode was an entire movie with a three-part structure. With a beginning, middle and an end. And the entire 15 episodes also have the three arcs of a film, five episodes per arch. Together, they form a whole story.

FNB: Did the process of shooting this film change?
LT: From the beginning the project was multi-format so we wanted to make sure we had the best quality possible.

FNB: For the next project are you going to explore a new subject matter or continue with this series?
LT: Initially, Urban Wolf has been conceived in five seasons. I wrote 75 episodes all together. The entire story fits within these parameters and I’ve really tried to make something new and interesting for the audience. The main thing now is to shoot the second and the third season, and then the final two.

FNB: Next I wanted to discusses how you made this project for a global audience …
LT: It was intentionally made for the global audience. Coming from France, not being an American director, this idea came originally out of something form Michael Eisner. When he launched his web project called “Prom Queen,” which was the first time I had heard of this kind of web series. It was a free/ad-supported series, which is where I came up with my original concept for monetization. I read an interview with Michael Eisner on Wired Magazine talking about the film, but it was pretty much impossible for me to see the film in Paris due to geo filters. That’s where you can decide which countries have access to your content based on licensing rights. When I discovered that I don’t have access to “Prom Queen,” I was disappointed.

I’m a real believer of the Internet revolution for international socialization, so we have free access to information all over the world for anybody. I think it’s a revolution. I found a friend who’s kind of a hacker, who was hired as a consultant to “Urban Wolf” because it is part of the story, hacking. And I asked him to help me watch the first episode of “Prom Queen.” I wondered why no one in Paris has any interest in “Prom Queen” and it was because it was in English and no one could understand it. In France, they don’t speak English. There are very few people in France that can watch a movie from beginning to end in English and understand it without subtitles.

FNB: How did this effect your decisions in making “Urban Wolf”?
LT: Language is a big barrier and that hit me. That is the thing I like the most in my art form is crafting a story without dialogue. From the time when I was a teenager, what fascinated me with silent movies was that it was an art form for a global audience. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton made for a global audience. It was like music, when Mozart or Beethoven wrote a symphony it was also for the global audience. The greatest movies since the birth of the sound process were movies that don’t rely on the dialogue to drive the narrative. For example 2001: Space Odyssey is about a three hour movie and there’s less then 20 minutes of dialogue. Another movie is “Once Upon A Time in the West” by Sergio Leone is also a three hour movie and there’s less then 30 minutes of dialogue. And the first movie of Steven Spielberg called “Duel.” It’s really one of the greatest movies and so impressive what he was able to do in 1971. He was one of the first to inverse the chronology of media because it was a movie of the week and it was so successful on TV that they decided to release it in theaters internationally. From this, I decided to make this film non-verbal, because it’s a more difficult challenge and it forced me to be more creative. It was also a way to prove to the industry that I have story telling skills. I thought making a “non-verbal” film for the internet medium is the greatest place to make a film for the global audience.

FNB: How did you choose the four-minute episode length, was that meant for mobile?
LT: Yes, since they make movies based on the current technology I took into account that mobile is a viable place to view content. I adapted the length for this medium. I also made a few days of tests with my team, DP, etc… I wanted to see if I shoot the film the way I wanted to, how it would be experienced on a very small screen. And that’s why I decided not to use at all camera movement in “Urban Wolf,” only steady shots. If you use camera pans, it’s awful on mobile and a shaky cam, which is a trend in movie making for action films, on the small screen it makes you sick. That’s why I used steady shots. But since I had to stay within those parameters, it forced me to challenge myself on making a successful action film without camera movement. I came back to Sergei Eisenstein and his rules for editing. We created the rhythm of the film based in the edit and not the camera movements, which is how I was able to achieve my goal.

FNB: It’s good to hear you speak about what works and what doesn’t work on the small screen, since there really are no guidelines for this medium
LT: Yes, since we’re pioneers. We create our own rules. I made the film alone and got to make it exactly the way I wanted to, which is rare for a filmmaker. The result is 100 percent what I had in my mind two years ago. I’ve been very lucky to have such a positive response from Hollywood toward my movie but now I have the power to say, “I don’t want to work with you,” since they only have the power to distribute it. It’s easier for them, less risk. I retain the control of everything, since I won’t sell the film, I will only license it. So this is truly the new monetization model. We retain the ownership of the property since there will be future seasons, a video game based on the story both online and console, and there will be a comic book. We only license the content for each medium and territory. This is the best monetization option possible. It’s like the one they made for Spider-Man but we didn’t create a franchise with $300 million, but with budget of a web series. It’s great that we can make great films with small budgets because we have such wonderful digital tools that are free to use. You can be an unknown filmmaker in Paris and make a film that not only reaches Hollywood but the entire world.

FNB: As a final question, what do you think was most important aspect of this process?
LT: We were selected at many different and important festivals. We started at Comic Con, the Independent Film Festival and at the AFI Digi Fest. We won awards and won award for best TV drama over all the entries. Even the president of the Independent TV Festival said for the first time of the festival the award was presented to a film that wasn’t a TV movie. Because of all of this, the studio came to us and recognized that there can be an art form in web series.

Links:

Facebook Fan Page for Urban Wolf: Click Here

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