Interview with Jason Wood

homeIt’s day four of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and I’m walking down to the Palais des Festival with Jason Wood. Jason is the Artistic Director for Film at HOME, a brand new £26 million arts complex in Manchester. It opened three weeks ago, and is an amalgamation of two companies: The Cornerhouse (the independent cinema you’ll recognise from Take One articles such as our interview with Ben Wheatley and our coverage of the Viva Festival) and the Library Theatre Company. 

Jason Wood: HOME is fairly unique in that it’s a venue committed to challenging, provocative and stimulating culture, as well as entertainment culture. It has five cinema screens, two theatre spaces, and also a one thousand square foot visual arts gallery. It’s a genuinely cross-art venue, and the idea is that all the various artist mediums will exist there within their own right, but there’ll be five or six times each year where they all come together and have a dialogue with each other.

It’s quite an exciting opportunity, and I’m responsible for all the film content and also co-responsible for the artist film and video initiative we have with Sarah Perks, our Visual Arts Director. I’ve only been at HOME now for three months; prior to that, for five years I was director of programming at Curzon Cinemas, where I was also involved in acquiring films for Artificial Eye.

Jack Toye: It seems to me that what you’re saying is the film industry in Britain can exist outside London. It’s not just the London-centric industry that the mainstream press seems to describe?

JW: Yes, that’s really important to me. I’ve had a good run of jobs, and I know we’ll go onto my connection with Cambridge in a bit, and the person who started me off in my career was Tony Jones. I’ve always respected and admired Tony. There’s not many people left like him. He’s a maverick, and we need more mavericks. But before that I worked in independent film distribution, and I realised films such as BOOGIE NIGHTS, LEAVING LAS VEGAS, and Harmony Korine’s first film GUMMO. The point you made about London is important.

“I don’t think art should be for the rich. Art should be for everybody.”

I think there’s a number of things happening that are making it very hard for people to have access to wide culture in London. The first reason for that is that there are too many films being released in a given week. Last week, there were twenty-three films released. But even more important than that, I think the independent sector (not just in London) in the whole of the UK is carved up between two commercially-driven companies who seem to have moved further away from their remit of showing art house or specialised film. The other major problem in London is the rising ticket prices. The average ticket price in a West End arts venue now is around £18.

JT: That doesn’t sound so cheap…

JW: It’s completely unaffordable, and I understand that these companies need to make money, but I think that what they’re in effect doing is ghettoising these specialised films and making them a province for the rich. I don’t think art should be for the rich. Art should be for everybody.

JT: And is HOME going to do something different to that? Will it have a more affordable price structure?

JW: HOME is going to be completely different. Obviously there is a dichotomy between London prices and non-London prices, but when HOME opened, we retained the ticket price that we had at Cornerhouse. So the most expensive ticket price to see a film at HOME is £8.50. That’s actually even relatively cheap for Manchester. If you want people to come and discover new cinema, you have to entice them. One way that you don’t entice people is to make it so prohibitive that they’re not going to come. Someone might take a chance on a film for £8.50 on a film by Roy Andersson or Miguel Gomes, but it’s unlikely they’re gonna take a chance if they have to pay up to £22 in some situations. It’s not an affordable business model. It does mean that only people of a certain class and financial situation can afford to go to these films. To be blunt, I find that reprehensible. I don’t feel that people can have access to the kind of cinema that they deserve if they can’t afford to go and see it.

JT: Are you going to be a trendsetter through HOME in the next year ahead? Maybe we’ll see a lowering of ticket prices if HOME is a runaway success?

JW: I’d love to say yes, but the answer is no. These independent, but commercial independent operators in London, I understand they’re running businesses, but they’re running on a capitalist model. While they can make as much money as they can by charging the highest ticket prices they can, and while they have audiences that can and will pay that… you have to understand that under the capitalist business model, they’re going to continue to do so.

“… there’s a sense that Manchester is becoming the destiny for culture, as opposed to London.”

What you would hope is that they might introduce some initiatives, like off-peak ticket prices, but the reality is that the ticket price in the West End, at a time when most people can go, which is after 6pm, is beyond the reach of most people. What I think is interesting at the moment, and HOME isn’t alone in doing this, there are other, what used to be called RFT’s, Regional Film Theatres, which are also being competitive on their pricing, and taking a stand for culture as opposed to commerce. Mark Cosgrove has got a very good quote: “you have to decide if you want to be in the business of culture, or the culture of business.”

JT: That’s Mark from Watershed in Bristol right?

JW: Yes, and I think he has a very succinct point. What I think you will see, and it’s one of the reasons I joined HOME at this time, is that there is a general sense that culture is in its last embers in London and the West End, and people are looking to the regions. If you look at Manchester as a city, it is a very vibrant and exciting time to be there. There’s a lot of creative industry. There’s an awful lot of funding, which has led to a real vibrancy. I believe that will the affordability, there’s a sense that Manchester is becoming the destiny for culture, as opposed to London. You’ve got the Manchester International Festival. There’s so much going on there.

JT: Is this a political move? Is this funded from Central Government, which isn’t putting the money into London to make it affordable, but is choosing to fund these “Northern Powerhouses” that they were going on about before the election?

JW: Yes, there is an element of that. Also, if you look back at Manchester, it has always been a political city. In many ways it held the birth of socialism with Engels, who lived in Manchester. There’s always been a sense that Manchester has been very politically active and class conscious. It was interesting looking at the colour charts and Manchester stayed entirely red. That’s one of the things that drew me to it. It meshes with my political beliefs.

In general, there is this real drive to put on art which is stimulating but also not to make it niche, not to make it exclusive. We want HOME to be a venue where everybody feels that they’re welcome. I was also finding in my last role that it was becoming more and more difficult to show these more challenging films, because audiences weren’t responding to them, for reasons we’ve touched upon, pricing, surplus of choice, the rise of the home cinema format. My job became pretty much a lone battle to be honest.

JT: It’s definitely inspiring to hear someone talk about a different business model to the ones we take for granted. I wish you the best of luck with it all. Maybe we could move on to how you come to be staying in the Cambridge Film Festival apartment at Cannes? What’s you’re connection to the festival?

JW: Well, as I said, Tony gave me my first job. When you work with Tony there was an unwritten rule, that in a couple of weeks in July (the old date of the festival), you’d give up your life and work with Tony on the festival. What I used to do was write film copy, I used to do some of the programming in a light sense, but for my sins, I am quite a good public speaker. So I used to do the majority of the Q&A’s. I remember we had Michael Winterbottom, Timothy Spall, Patrice Chéreau, Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater. I’d host the Q&As and I’ve always stayed interested in what Cambridge does.

“What HITCHCOCK TRUFFAUT did was re-affirm my faith in cinema.”

I came to Cannes very late notice this year. I wasn’t going to come, for the first time in twenty years, because HOME, although it’s open, it has its official launch next weekend on May 21st. I really didn’t think I could spare the time to come to Cannes this year. Given my experiences here this year, I kind of wish I hadn’t. So last minute, Tony was very kind and offered me what I thought was going to be a floor, but it turned out to be a bed, so I’m very grateful for that. It’s great to have met the rest of the Cambridge gang! There’s a festival in Brighton which Tim Brown and my wife, Nicola Beaumont work on called CineCity. It’s a tremendous festival, and again what tends to happen in the UK is the established festivals like London and Edinburgh, are the ones that tend to get the attention in the media for good reasons.

But some of the more satellite festivals which have done good work for a long time, have continued to stimulate and push boundaries like Cambridge, Glasgow and CineCity. I always think a lot of the most interesting stuff is being done at these festivals. The retrospective that Cambridge does, the archive films, they’re pretty un-paralleled.

JT: We try our best, thank you! Has there been a favourite film you’ve seen at Cannes so far?

JW: I really liked the HITCHCOCK TRUFFAUT documentary. I thought it was exceptional. Absolutely exquisite. What that film did was re-affirm my faith in cinema. I was also a very big fan of the Arnaud Desplechin film, MY GLORY DAYS. Desplechin is almost an unfashionable director who I don’t think has been rated as highly as he should be. Certainly not in England, where not all his films have found distribution. This new film, the third in a trilogy of the same character, played by Mathieu Amalric, one of my favourite actors, I just thought was beautiful. Desplechin has a really playful approach to the medium, screen wipes, characters talking to camera. But he does it in a way which is fun, and irreverent and playful. They’ve been the two highlights for me. Every year in Cannes, I treat myself to a Cannes Classic, and last night I went to see A LADY FROM SHANGHAI.

JT: That must have been amazing! It’s been restored, hasn’t it?

JW: Yes, it’s a 4K restoration and Park Circus very kindly invited me along. It looked exceptional on the big screen. I think people forget what a great film it is. When it came out, it wasn’t highly regarded, but some of the use of camera angles in that film, and the set piece in the aquarium, with all the fishes and sea creatures backlit, to take on gargantuan sizes. There’s this sequence in which Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles are talking in front of a conger eel, which looks about three hundred feet long.

JT: And it looks best like that on a big screen, not on a tablet or smart phone?

JW: Yes, I do think ideally, the best place to view a film is in a cinema with a communal experience. I don’t think tablets are ever going to replace that.

JT: Agreed. Well it’s been a lovely stroll down to the Palais with you. I hope you have a lovely last day at the festival, and thank you for taking the time to talk to us at Take One!

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