Matt Johnson: There's insane underrepresentation of women creators at any level at Telefilm. It's just happening at the most insanely low percentage if you look at a per-dollar amount that it's mind boggling. And a part of what I was saying way back in December, January in the press, is the system is incredibly broken and I think that we're basically just funding the same creators over and over again and we're not getting anywhere culturally—like we're not actually creating a good groundswell of new Canadian voices. And Telefilm can say, "Oh yeah, we're going to change, and we're going to start funding more female-driven projects and female writers and female directors," but what they won't tell you is that the fund that they're going to allocate to do that is like a two or three million dollar fund. It's like their absolute smallest fund. So on a percentage level, nothing's going to change. How does this work?
Every single one of the production companies for the country, once you've made a movie you start getting development funding automatically. You get automatically approved and development funding is basically money to pay writers. For us, because we're as small as you can get, we get something like $15,000 or less a year. And so I thought, oh why don't we just make an active decision to intentionally give this money to somebody that Telefilm would never in a million years give this money to? Which is a first-time female writer/director. You're basically talking about a forgotten class for Telefilm. They're never going to give that person money. So if we do it, even though it's basically no money and not going to tip the scale at all, hopefully we can set a bit of an example for other production companies who have real money. Like Serendipity or Rhombus, or like any of these major, major companies that are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars, or millions of dollars in development. And as they start saying, "oh yeah we can all take the same initiative," that's going to make a huge difference. And then all of a sudden we're going to see a whole new generation of voices. I know that sounds very doom and gloom, but if something doesn't change at the funding level, these workers are never going to be heard. It just seems so obvious that unless you sort of have the resources on your own to take this risk, how could you? You're going to ask a bunch of first-time filmmakers with no experience, because that's usually how it works, to risk up to $100,000 of their own money trying to make a first feature? Why do you think it still operates that way?
I can only draw my conclusions because of course these are not the types of things that Telefilm are going to openly admit to. I think it's because they maybe have a fear that the members of parliament are going to cut the funding for their program if they aren't doing the same marquee movies every single year. Maybe, I mean it could also be that these guys are the exact same generation as the filmmakers of the companies that they're supporting and they came up together and are friends, but all this stuff is conspiratorial in a certain way, which is why I don't really like talking about it too much. We have to deal with reality here and the reality is women and minorities are not getting funded. Period, the end. So how we got here really doesn't make a difference. I don't care. I personally hate the movies that Telefilm is making and I think they're wasting a ton of money but the path forward seems so clear so why not just make this pivot? How do you choose who gets your funding?
We're going to have people submit very simple one page outlines of what they think their movie is or what they want their movie to be and it's literally just a page talking about their film. They don't talk about themselves or what their experience is or anything like that. We just want to see what their idea of the movie is. And we're going to look at them and literally just decide it's the one. There's nothing too complicated about it. And then we plan on doing this every single year until it does something. Follow Amil on Twitter.