Back to results Interview : At last, Magic Show Writer/director/lead actor Andy Conlan on bringing his low budget feature film The Last Magic Show (formerly The Magician) to fruition, with a release slated for the end of May. How did you find the post process? You had the shot a good deal of film when we interviewed you mid-2005, so I guess one can presume it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing...? I think we’d finished shooting by late 2005, with digitising of the film at the end of that year, so I had the footage available to me early 2006. I’d spent several months worrying about shots I hadn’t gotten, so hadn’t seriously started editing until then. I was also working unusually long hours, which prevented me from doing anything on the movie, but the actual editing process was very fast. Not counting the blocks of time I was on deadlines for paid work, editing the film took maybe a few weeks in total and it was finished enough near the beginning of the year to start talking to composers, one of whom, Nick Marsh, started working on pieces of music, many of which ended up in the final soundtrack. Kahra Scott-James of Entirely Sound started the very long process of recording ADR around the beginning of June. Because we’d shot the vast majority of the film on location, the sound was almost completely unusable. The only people whose dialogue was not replaced are Tim Raby, who played the theatre presenter, and Alexander Anderson, who’d passed away and whose performance I didn’t want to re-record with another actor. Every other member of the cast had to come back in and re-record their dialogue, a process that took several months (until the end of 2006, I think) as we had to coordinate our schedules. Once the dialogue was recorded and mastered, Kahra was able to start working on the sound design while [DoP] Duncan [Cole] was grading the images using Final Cut Pro. This part of the process took us into 2007. At this stage, I still didn’t have a score, apart from separate tracks for specific scenes. I was introduced to Luke Fitzgerald, a musician who’d just arrived from Melbourne. His music ended up being the last piece of magic that the movie was missing. I’ve always been a huge fan of movie soundtrack music and had these huge ideas for the perfect soundtrack for The Last Magic Show – which is partly why after a year I still didn’t have a score. This could be another part of my answer to the first question, but my visits to Luke to listen to each piece of music he’d composed was like rediscovering the film all over again. The music is commented on a lot and it’s true to say that Luke revitalised the movie and took it to a much higher level. Even more incredible is that he managed to create an emotive soundtrack that surpassed my own ideas after only a few short discussions and viewing the scenes from a rough version of the film. In terms of the actual time spent working on the film, post took about four months full time, 18 months on the calendar. There were large gaps in between the different stages, during which we couldn’t work on the film for different reasons. It’s lucky that it did take that long though, because I’m so happy with the soundtrack. The Last Magic Show screened at the 2007 Dances With Films Festival in Los Angeles. Was that a useful experience? It was a real eye opener being there and well worth the trip. I would definitely recommend to any filmmaker that if they’re not going to get into one of the major A-list festivals to which the studio heads and buyers travel, having a festival screening in Los Angeles would be very beneficial, as they could base themselves there for a little while during that time and try and meet people. Of course, any pre-conceived myths about what Hollywood might be like are very quickly smashed once you start doing this. One of my Los Angeles publicists, Mickey Cottrell, who also repped filmmakers like Vincent Ward early in his career (“tell Vincent I said ‘hi’”), said The Last Magic Show was “far too eccentric a film” to be a career starting product for Hollywood. Others there told me that if I really wanted a career as a mainstream Hollywood filmmaker, a movie with guns, violence and tits would be a much better calling card than a sombre, art house drama like the one I’d made, which I don’t have a problem with at all. So yeah, it was a real reality check not for the film, but for my direction in general, something that I recommend for anyone who is serious about a career as a director. I also found some of the attitudes there to be much more relaxed than those here. Industry people were surprised to hear that my involvement as writer, director and actor were such issues for people here, with some going as far as saying that such an attitude was “so provincial”. Of course, if one is, as they described it, a “triple threat”, it would be better to have more guns, tits and violence in their film than The Last Magic Show has. I understand you’ve had some test screenings – how has that process helped you shape the final film? The version of the film that screened at Dances With Films was 100 minutes long. There were a few comments about the pacing and length, including one from one of the judges at Dances With Films, who said that these things influenced them in awarding The Last Magic Show a Special Jury Prize rather than the Grand Jury Prize. I was already aware that the film had to be shortened to make it faster and more palatable. I’m not one of these directors who is attached to footage, no matter what we went through to get it and was keen to chop more out of it. Even though I have to admit I’ve made a very idiosyncratic film, the fact is I still wanted a theatrical release and very much wanted audiences here to like it as much as the audience in Los Angeles had. We had a test screening late 2007, with a slightly shorter version of the film. This was partly to find out to which demographic the film appealed. Up to this point, apart from the nice audience reaction I’d gotten overseas, I still didn’t know if general audiences would like it, which is really who I want to be making films for. Anyone who’d seen or commented on the film had seen it with some preconceived notion about it. What I wanted for the purposes of the test was a balls-out screening with complete strangers who were going to see the film without knowing anything about it at all, something every independent filmmaker should do, in my opinion. I wanted “the people” to decide if it deserved a theatrical release. So the publicist, Gina Dellabarca, invited people from the Academy Cinemas database, making sure that each audience member was going to fit the criteria of non-involved. I hid in the projection booth during the test screening and came down afterwards when most people had left. Executive John Davies of Arkles Entertainment beckoned me over and showed me three piles of questionnaires, one very fat, one thin, one thinner. “Put your hands on these piles,” he said. “Which one of them do you think the fat pile is?” “Ah shit, the ones who hated it.” “No,” he replied, “they’re the ones who liked it or loved it. The thin pile are the ones who said it was okay. The thinner pile are the ones who didn’t like it or hated it.” For somebody who wants to move from eccentric art house filmmaking to completely mainstream movies, possibly with guns and tits and violence, pleasing the majority was all I’d hoped for, so I was pretty happy with that result. I do have two favourite questionnaire responses. One person, in response to the question “Who does the lead actor remind you of?” wrote “Buster Keaton”. I want that framed. My other favourite is from somebody who walked out of the screening and wrote that one of the reasons was she thought the film was “wierd”. I can’t argue with her having left – clearly I had failed in my attempt to entertain that particular financial consultant for whom written language is such a challenge... After the test screening, John, who’d been sitting in the audience during the screening, told me what parts of the film the audience responded to and at which points they seemed to go cold, which confirmed my own ideas about what should change. My theory was that if the audience already enjoyed the film, making a few more cuts to improve the pacing could possibly increase the audience’s enjoyment. As a result, the final version of the film is 85 minutes in length. What advice do you have for indie filmmakers who might be contemplating embarking on making an ambitious low budget feature like The Last Magic Show? I was going to say “don’t”, because it’s quite a silly thing to embark upon (I still want to make a nice little independent film with a tiny cast and crew) but I didn’t listen to anyone, so... • Storyboard every single shot of every single scene meticulously and don't fall into the indie trap of thinking you don't have to write a script that doesn't adhere completely to traditional movie structure. That goes triple for thinking you don't have to write dialogue because the actors can just “workshop it or improvise”. • Remember the advice I was given in Los Angeles and make a film with guns and tits and violence if you can, and if you're shooting digitally with no name actors, it still has to have something different about it to set it apart – possibly the sheer amount of the above. • Be prepared for the fact that it might take the next three years of your life, possibly two-thirds of them being for post-production. I laughed when somebody said that to me back in 2004. I waited over a year for the perfect music, which is something you shouldn't be afraid to do for any element of your film. So what’s happening with the release of the film? The release was actually a surprise. The festival screening was last July and the test screening was near the end of the year. Despite the result from the test screening, there was still doubt about whether it was going to be released theatrically. After not hearing about it for a little while, John sent me an email saying that it’s going to be released via Rialto Cinemas’ digital screens in May (the film will be projected using a streaming digital file). He’s also set up a simultaneous date at The Paramount Theatre in Wellington, which means the film will be in the four main centres. The film will open on Thursday 29 May at Rialto Newmarket, Christchurch and Dunedin, as well as the Paramount in Wellington and continue for the first two weeks of June. What’s your pitch to the NZ audience? The Last Magic Show’s the kind of movie that doesn’t often get made here. If you’re a filmmaker or interested in indie cinema, you might want to see it from that point of view – to see what can be put together with what we had. If you like New Zealand film, then my previous statement stands – it’s a story that could be set anywhere but inevitably has the themes that are present in many of our films. If you just like watching fairy tale-style romance movies, this is an example of that genre. It’s basically a new take on classic themes that have been present in cinema for nearly 100 years, one that acknowledges them and adds a few new elements that hopefully will be entertaining. • For more from Conlan regarding The Last Magic Show, including his original 2005 interview, see www.onfilm.co.nz. © Copyright Onfilm magazine May 2008 All material appearing is copyright and cannot be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher. Please contact the copyright officer: Ph 0-9-845 5114, Email copyright@mediaweb.co.nz.	Username Password Keep me logged in on this computer Forgotten your password? Enter your email address and we will email your password to you:

Interview : At last, Magic Show

Writer/director/lead actor Andy Conlan on bringing his low budget feature film The Last Magic Show (formerly The Magician) to fruition, with a release slated for the end of May.

How did you find the post process? You had the shot a good deal of film when we interviewed you mid-2005, so I guess one can presume it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing...?
I think we’d finished shooting by late 2005, with digitising of the film at the end of that year, so I had the footage available to me early 2006. I’d spent several months worrying about shots I hadn’t gotten, so hadn’t seriously started editing until then. I was also working unusually long hours, which prevented me from doing anything on the movie, but the actual editing process was very fast. Not counting the blocks of time I was on deadlines for paid work, editing the film took maybe a few weeks in total and it was finished enough near the beginning of the year to start talking to composers, one of whom, Nick Marsh, started working on pieces of music, many of which ended up in the final soundtrack.
Kahra Scott-James of Entirely Sound started the very long process of recording ADR around the beginning of June. Because we’d shot the vast majority of the film on location, the sound was almost completely unusable. The only people whose dialogue was not replaced are Tim Raby, who played the theatre presenter, and Alexander Anderson, who’d passed away and whose performance I didn’t want to re-record with another actor. Every other member of the cast had to come back in and re-record their dialogue, a process that took several months (until the end of 2006, I think) as we had to coordinate our schedules. Once the dialogue was recorded and mastered, Kahra was able to start working on the sound design while [DoP] Duncan [Cole] was grading the images using Final Cut Pro. This part of the process took us into 2007.
At this stage, I still didn’t have a score, apart from separate tracks for specific scenes. I was introduced to Luke Fitzgerald, a musician who’d just arrived from Melbourne. His music ended up being the last piece of magic that the movie was missing. I’ve always been a huge fan of movie soundtrack music and had these huge ideas for the perfect soundtrack for The Last Magic Show – which is partly why after a year I still didn’t have a score. This could be another part of my answer to the first question, but my visits to Luke to listen to each piece of music he’d composed was like rediscovering the film all over again.
The music is commented on a lot and it’s true to say that Luke revitalised the movie and took it to a much higher level. Even more incredible is that he managed to create an emotive soundtrack that surpassed my own ideas after only a few short discussions and viewing the scenes from a rough version of the film.
In terms of the actual time spent working on the film, post took about four months full time, 18 months on the calendar. There were large gaps in between the different stages, during which we couldn’t work on the film for different reasons. It’s lucky that it did take that long though, because I’m so happy with the soundtrack.

The Last Magic Show screened at the 2007 Dances With Films Festival in Los Angeles. Was that a useful experience?
It was a real eye opener being there and well worth the trip. I would definitely recommend to any filmmaker that if they’re not going to get into one of the major A-list festivals to which the studio heads and buyers travel, having a festival screening in Los Angeles would be very beneficial, as they could base themselves there for a little while during that time and try and meet people.
Of course, any pre-conceived myths about what Hollywood might be like are very quickly smashed once you start doing this. One of my Los Angeles publicists, Mickey Cottrell, who also repped filmmakers like Vincent Ward early in his career (“tell Vincent I said ‘hi’”), said The Last Magic Show was “far too eccentric a film” to be a career starting product for Hollywood. Others there told me that if I really wanted a career as a mainstream Hollywood filmmaker, a movie with guns, violence and tits would be a much better calling card than a sombre, art house drama like the one I’d made, which I don’t have a problem with at all.
So yeah, it was a real reality check not for the film, but for my direction in general, something that I recommend for anyone who is serious about a career as a director.
I also found some of the attitudes there to be much more relaxed than those here. Industry people were surprised to hear that my involvement as writer, director and actor were such issues for people here, with some going as far as saying that such an attitude was “so provincial”. Of course, if one is, as they described it, a “triple threat”, it would be better to have more guns, tits and violence in their film than The Last Magic Show has.

I understand you’ve had some test screenings – how has that process helped you shape the final film?
The version of the film that screened at Dances With Films was 100 minutes long. There were a few comments about the pacing and length, including one from one of the judges at Dances With Films, who said that these things influenced them in awarding The Last Magic Show a Special Jury Prize rather than the Grand Jury Prize. I was already aware that the film had to be shortened to make it faster and more palatable. I’m not one of these directors who is attached to footage, no matter what we went through to get it and was keen to chop more out of it. Even though I have to admit I’ve made a very idiosyncratic film, the fact is I still wanted a theatrical release and very much wanted audiences here to like it as much as the audience in Los Angeles had.
We had a test screening late 2007, with a slightly shorter version of the film. This was partly to find out to which demographic the film appealed. Up to this point, apart from the nice audience reaction I’d gotten overseas, I still didn’t know if general audiences would like it, which is really who I want to be making films for. Anyone who’d seen or commented on the film had seen it with some preconceived notion about it. What I wanted for the purposes of the test was a balls-out screening with complete strangers who were going to see the film without knowing anything about it at all, something every independent filmmaker should do, in my opinion. I wanted “the people” to decide if it deserved a theatrical release. So the publicist, Gina Dellabarca, invited people from the Academy Cinemas database, making sure that each audience member was going to fit the criteria of non-involved.
I hid in the projection booth during the test screening and came down afterwards when most people had left. Executive John Davies of Arkles Entertainment beckoned me over and showed me three piles of questionnaires, one very fat, one thin, one thinner.
“Put your hands on these piles,” he said. “Which one of them do you think the fat pile is?”
“Ah shit, the ones who hated it.”
“No,” he replied, “they’re the ones who liked it or loved it. The thin pile are the ones who said it was okay. The thinner pile are the ones who didn’t like it or hated it.”
For somebody who wants to move from eccentric art house filmmaking to completely mainstream movies, possibly with guns and tits and violence, pleasing the majority was all I’d hoped for, so I was pretty happy with that result.
I do have two favourite questionnaire responses. One person, in response to the question “Who does the lead actor remind you of?” wrote “Buster Keaton”. I want that framed. My other favourite is from somebody who walked out of the screening and wrote that one of the reasons was she thought the film was “wierd”. I can’t argue with her having left – clearly I had failed in my attempt to entertain that particular financial consultant for whom written language is such a challenge...
After the test screening, John, who’d been sitting in the audience during the screening, told me what parts of the film the audience responded to and at which points they seemed to go cold, which confirmed my own ideas about what should change. My theory was that if the audience already enjoyed the film, making a few more cuts to improve the pacing could possibly increase the audience’s enjoyment. As a result, the final version of the film is 85 minutes in length.

What advice do you have for indie filmmakers who might be contemplating embarking on making an ambitious low budget feature like The Last Magic Show?
I was going to say “don’t”, because it’s quite a silly thing to embark upon (I still want to make a nice little independent film with a tiny cast and crew) but I didn’t listen to anyone, so...
• Storyboard every single shot of every single scene meticulously and don't fall into the indie trap of thinking you don't have to write a script that doesn't adhere completely to traditional movie structure. That goes triple for thinking you don't have to write dialogue because the actors can just “workshop it or improvise”.
• Remember the advice I was given in Los Angeles and make a film with guns and tits and violence if you can, and if you're shooting digitally with no name actors, it still has to have something different about it to set it apart – possibly the sheer amount of the above.
• Be prepared for the fact that it might take the next three years of your life, possibly two-thirds of them being for post-production. I laughed when somebody said that to me back in 2004. I waited over a year for the perfect music, which is something you shouldn't be afraid to do for any element of your film.

So what’s happening with the release of the film?
The release was actually a surprise. The festival screening was last July and the test screening was near the end of the year. Despite the result from the test screening, there was still doubt about whether it was going to be released theatrically. After not hearing about it for a little while, John sent me an email saying that it’s going to be released via Rialto Cinemas’ digital screens in May (the film will be projected using a streaming digital file). He’s also set up a simultaneous date at The Paramount Theatre in Wellington, which means the film will be in the four main centres. The film will open on Thursday 29 May at Rialto Newmarket, Christchurch and Dunedin, as well as the Paramount in Wellington and continue for the first two weeks of June.

What’s your pitch to the NZ audience?
The Last Magic Show’s the kind of movie that doesn’t often get made here.
If you’re a filmmaker or interested in indie cinema, you might want to see it from that point of view – to see what can be put together with what we had.
If you like New Zealand film, then my previous statement stands – it’s a story that could be set anywhere but inevitably has the themes that are present in many of our films.
If you just like watching fairy tale-style romance movies, this is an example of that genre.
It’s basically a new take on classic themes that have been present in cinema for nearly 100 years, one that acknowledges them and adds a few new elements that hopefully will be entertaining.

• For more from Conlan regarding The Last Magic Show, including his original 2005 interview, see www.onfilm.co.nz.

© Copyright Onfilm magazine May 2008

All material appearing is copyright and cannot be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher.

Please contact the copyright officer: Ph 0-9-845 5114, Email copyright@mediaweb.co.nz.

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Interview : At last, Magic Show

Writer/director/lead actor Andy Conlan on bringing his low budget feature film The Last Magic Show (formerly The Magician) to fruition, with a release slated for the end of May.