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At Karlovy Vary Film Festival this week, the 10 participants of Future Frames – the program for young European directors – were joined by Greek director Christos Nikou as their mentor. Variety sat in on their discussion.
Nikou, who directed “Apples” and “Fingernails,” started by underscoring the importance for filmmakers of “finding their voice.” He said, “The best compliment I have ever heard about the things I’m doing is that they have a very unique tone and identity. It’s not what I’m trying to do, but it’s what somehow comes from my heart, my soul.”
“How can you find your voice?” he asked, adding that he feels “that a lot of filmmakers are trying to follow what the film funds need, and also what the festivals need.”
He continued, “I never call myself a director, I call myself a cinephile, and the reason why I’m doing this is because I love watching films.”
Nikou, who likes to watch three movies a day, said that even if he doesn’t know who the director of a film is before watching it, he’ll know in the first five to 10 minutes, and loves to discover “really unique voices, and unique identities.” He added, “That’s our goal: to create unique voices.”
He said “Apples” had been rejected by funds and festival workshops in several countries as they didn’t understand the tone of the film. “It’s a movie that is subtle. They could understand the idea, but the tone, it’s very difficult to describe it in the script, so sometimes you need you need to make a short film first,” he said.
He noted that while young filmmakers often told him they their favorite directors were people like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, what they pitched was more like “poverty porn,” which he said he found “so, so, so boring.” He continued, “I mean, come on, we can tell more interesting stories. We can tell stories that are not only about what we see, but also about what we love. So, for me, it’s very important that a filmmaker is doing films that are very close to their heart and what exactly they love watching in films.”
Nikou didn’t attend film school and is self-taught. His three favorite filmmakers were also self-taught, “so, I said, if they can do it, I can do it also. My school was the movies that I was watching.” He says that although his film taste ranges from “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” to “The Lovers on the Bridge,” the film that made him want to be a filmmaker was “The Truman Show,” which is “the movie that I feel has the perfect balance between comedy and drama, and how you can make something that is conceptual but also really grounded, and it’s an amazing prophecy about our life. I mean, it still works perfectly, and it’s a film that I really love.”
Nikou added that in the last 15-20 years, cinema has suffered from a lack of originality. “The reason is that all these stupid executives think that they know what they’re doing, but actually they have no idea, and they’re just trying to play it safe. And the thing is, we don’t have to listen to them; we have to keep what we have in our heart, and that’s the most tricky thing.”
He continued, “They always put you in boxes. When I did ‘Apples,’ I signed with a manager in the U.S., and then an agency, and the first scripts I was receiving were about memory, and I was like, ‘What the fuck? I did already a movie about memory, I don’t want to do another one.’”
Nikou underscored the primacy of the audience. “I’m not a big fan of filmmakers who are doing stuff that is for them and their friends, and they are so self-centered. I feel that you need to think about the audience, and put yourself in the position of the audience. You have to have yourself as a filmmaker and yourself as audience, and to combine these two.”
“There are filmmakers that they just want to challenge the audience and to feel very provocative, but to be honest, what I’m missing with cinema is tender cinema, and cinema that comes from the heart. It’s the easiest thing in the world to provoke. The thing is to work out how you can make something that is authentic and tender, and avoid all this pretentious stuff that is happening in cinema a lot.”
On “Fingernails,” which was picked up by Apple TV, Nikou had final cut. He recommended the young filmmakers fight for that too, while acknowledging it was rare to be granted that, especially for projects shot for U.S. studios and streamers.
On “Apples,” Nikou worked on a budget of just $250,000, but for “Fingernails,” he had $10 million-$12 million. The additional costs associated with abiding by union rules in North America, mean that the money goes further in Europe, he commented. “In Europe, we’re doing the films in a much more efficient way,” he said.
“On ‘Fingernails,’ for example, there were scenes where we had three makeup artists and three hairstylists for two people in a house, and they were just sitting there. We had 120 people in the crew, 10 people in the grip, 10 people in the electric, lighting, and you were thinking, ‘What the fuck, all these people, why are they here?’” he said.
“It’s the union rules that you have to follow there. So, the problem is that a lot of the money is not going on the screen [in the U.S.], and that’s a good thing about Europe.”
Moving focus from Greece to North America was made easier for Nikou, prior to the premiere of “Apples,” after he signed with manager Jerome Duboz, with CAA as his agency, and with Cate Blanchett as an executive producer.
“When you have an agent and a manager, and all these things are happening, they’re always arranging meetings for you with producers in the U.S., they’re asking you what you want to do next, you have a lot of Zoom meetings, you’re meeting people in person, you’re hearing a lot of things that you don’t believe, but at the same time you are trying to figure out how to stay true to your vision, how you want to tell a story, and who are the people that you can make your family somehow and continue working with them.”
Nikou confessed that he was no fan of film awards, although the prizemoney he earned from awards for “Apples” had allowed him to continue as a filmmaker. “I think that there is nothing more stupid than awards. It doesn’t make sense that we’re competing with each other in a way, because we all love films. The first awards I started getting were making me feel very uncomfortable and not happy in a way, because I was trying to realize if my ego is happy, or why they’re giving me an award right now, and why they chose it. I have been many times in juries, and juries don’t know what they’re doing most of the times, they’re going to parties until late, and they’re watching movies very early, and half of them are sleeping during the screenings.
“Many times, they’re coming with an agenda about where they want to give the award to, so it’s very tricky to be honest. There are some people that really decide with their heart, but there are also some people that don’t decide with that, so please don’t be sad if you ever lose an award. It doesn’t mean anything at all. You just have to enjoy the journey. We’re the luckiest fucking bastards in this world.”
