Articles

     Interview        Andrew Reid – October 2019, Montenegro

Northern Ireland: the home of Game of Thrones
Shepherd of talents: Giving hope to young people

Andrew Reid visited Montenegro within the British Council’s programme #PlayUK, a regional initiative which supports development of digital skills for professionals working across the creative industries sector. The programme brings cutting edge immersive technologies in the audio-visual sector including gaming and VR, helping young creatives to master not only the technical side of working with the game engines but more importantly with the creative part – the storytelling – as the core element of every audio-visual format, from advertising to film, to immersive and interactive media. British Council offered to bring Andrew Reid to the first annual conference “Montenegrin Creative Forum – Fast Forward”, organised by the Ministry of Culture in October this year to share the experience of Northern Ireland in building its film industry. Andrew also held a masterclass to film students in Cetinje and later enjoyed a helicopter tour of Montenegro organised jointly by the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Defence, to gain a personal perspective, which may be helpful while writing recommendations to the Ministry as a way of furthering their cultural strategy.
Comparable in size and stunning landscapes, Northern Ireland has a story to tell which might be of interest to Montenegro (which made it to the National Geographic’s “50 Places of a Lifetime” list and started attracting not only celebrities who can appreciate a good holiday, like Bill Gates, but also filmmakers). With one filming studio at the beginning, Belfast managed to attract the Game of Thrones producers, and become a global filming destination.
I meet Andrew at a windy Podgorica café garden, surprisingly still full of tourists (he gentlemanly heeded my plea to sit outside, so as to abide by the new Montenegrin non-smoking law). We talk about Northern Ireland’s (NI) experience of shooting Games of Thrones, their growing film industry, infrastructure and technology, but also how the filming of Games of thrones (GoT) contributed to the unprecedented development of new skills and talents.

Camera Lucida: What does it mean to be the head of production for ‘Games of thrones’?
Andrew Reid: My job is with Northern Ireland Screen, which is national Screen Agency of Northern Ireland, tasked with developing screen industries within NI: film, television, large scale productions, studio film and TV series productions, animation, entertainment TV, games, emerging talent and the development of all of those… So, we are spread very wide; we combine the economic, the educational, and the cultural benefits of screening industry, a betterment for Northern Ireland. In other words, we are trying to make NI a better place through the screen industry. We’ve been going for 22 years, having started in 1997.
As for our connection with ‘Games of thrones’, it’s an incoming production for NI, so NI Screen incentivised HBO to bring ‘Game of Thrones’ to NI. Our first contact was in 2008, so we had been going for almost 10 years. I got a phone call, I was at a Cannes film festival – I remember this very clearly – actually, leaving Cannes, I was at the airport, and the guy talked to me about ‘Game of Thrones’. At that point, it was BBC and HBO construction and this guy, who was from BBC, talked to me about this programme. I should say we’d been lobbying - that would be the polite word (for bitching) - to BBC about the lack of investments in NI, that is, they had not performed well at all, there was no drama happening in NI at all. So, in fairness to them, they finally had this big show for NI. I spent a few months going backwards and forwards with location ideas.
And then, the script came, I read what would be the first episode and I, kind of, got the idea of how big this was going to be. Because when you are communicating with someone by email and sending them location images, you are not really getting a sense of scale. So, there’re a lot of castles, a child getting thrown out of the window – wow!, incest –wow, interesting! You don’t see that often on BBC - death, sex, more incest… (smiles) So, it was clear it was going to be a bit of departure for BBC, I was surprised to see they were interested in this. That was May 2008, by the end of July, the BBC had pulled out of ‘G of T’ and it was just HBO. But to give credit to BBC, they made the introduction to the executives at HBO. Then, in Septemeber 2008, when I was in LA (doing some training), I ended up in the office of Jay Rowe & Janet Graham Borba and started pitching to Jay and, in fairness, they listened to me, but had the expression on their faces’ as if there was a button under their desk, they’d press it’, clearly thinking “who is this maniac and why would I bring my show to Northern Ireland”?! Jay and Janet have been absolutely brilliant for NI, but I remember Jay’s face being one of deep confusion. A few weeks later, we had a follow-up call with Jay & Janet and they started to ask questions what we could do in terms of locations and we had been supplying them with photographs. So, they showed it to their show runners and what we did, we introduced them to producer from NI, called Mark Huffam (he produced Mama Mia and he’s a Spielberg go-to guy in Europe, he was hugely respected). We made the connection, he was able to say “we’ll use these facilities, these locations”. So that was our connection – we delivered locations. I am not a producer, NI Screen at best makes connections, we shepherd the people, we spot an opportunity and push the right people towards this opportunity.

Camera Lucida: All episodes were filmed there?
Andrew Reid: All of them. We had the pilot all the way to the final season. When you go inside, when you are north of the wall in snow and there is a tent, the interior is filmed in the studio in Northern Ireland, when you are in Kingslanding and go inside that’s Belfast not Dubrovnik. We are the home of Games of Thrones. All the costumes, armory, props were made in Northern Ireland and shipped out to where they shoot.

Camera Lucida: What did all of this mean for Northern Ireland?
Andrew Reid: It developed us beyond all recognition. 11 years ago, when we started talking to HBO, we had a built space, not a studio, but a converted industrial space used as a studio, called The Paint Hall and a smaller level of facilities, we had maybe one good film crew. Now, we have two world-class studios with sound stages, we have the Titanic studio, and a few years ago, a new studio was built across the river, called Belfast Harbour Studios, we have a New Regency project in there right now. Because Games of thrones went on for 10 years, we couldn’t bring another show even if we wanted to, so Belfast Harbour Commission kindly built us a studio. Northern Ireland Screen also now employs over 100 trainees each year, for various shows, because we financed shows, we know what’s coming in, we schedule and place all our trainees on the shows we finance.
As head of production, I run the economic strategy and that is: physical production, financial incentives, skills development, new talent development, because one agency develops and runs all of this together, we can ensure that we extract the full value from the productions we invest in. For example, for Games of Thrones, for every £1 put in we would get £35 back, for the final season we had 1:70 ratio (£70 back for every £1 invested). That’s the economic side of things.
On the physical production side, we have developed two world-class studios, and the Government is seeing the positive returns, in other words, if you back the sector, they see the value in it. The crew-based studios are growing, we have over 800 crew who work in scripted live action production (film, television drama, comedy etc.) in Northern Ireland. We have three main post houses, enough to service what we are doing, we are involved in visual effects, too. We are encouraging fewer stronger companies, rather than doing many different things - companies that work with the existing infra-structure. We encourage the owners of these companies to develop and appreciate their staff, to work with them, rather than their staff going off and opening a separate entity. As we can’t afford to fund lots of different things, we’d rather develop stronger, bigger, well-managed companies that will grow, and not the ones that will take the profit out of each other. We have the ability to influence skills and talent development. For example, we have a director shadowing scheme for someone who has made short films to get experience on a children’s drama, or someone who has done shorts and one feature film gets a chance to work on a network drama, and then to shadow on large scale studio productions. We don’t take someone from a short film straight on to US TV show as they will get some benefit from it, but they don’t have enough experience to grasp the scale. We place directors so that they will get relevant experience that will help them land their next job.
This is a real boost not only for the established, but also for emerging filmmakers. It’s only when you look back that you see it as a real change - when you are living it, you don’t notice it fully. It’s like an old man looking back on his life and saying “oh, I remember when we did this…” Before Games of Thrones, there was a moment when we brought in a genre, a thriller-horror genre, called ‘Wilderness”, which was not a great film. Lovely people, lovely filmmakers, but the film didn’t do so well. As we are publicly funded, we make all our decisions publicly, so our decisions are about what people watch. Seeing that funding decision inspired some writers to form a Writers’ group, dedicated to just horror films. Until then they had assumed that we were only interested in films about ‘The Troubles’ about Northern Ireland. I don’t know why, that was just the assumption they made which was not at all true. So, now we are getting comedies, horror, drama a much bigger mix of films. We are aware that the decisions we make influence how the indigenous filmmakers see their opportunities.
When I was talking to your Minister of Culture he said “I want to give hope to young people”, that really struck me, as ‘hope’ is one of our watch words, too.
If we do a writing scheme, it’s not just about writing, there is always the possibility of production. And that was lacking in NI before, there was an absence of hope. There were plenty of people writing scripts, but had no hope they would actually be made. We can afford to make one first film a year, and the new talent knows what we are doing. And now, we have people queuing up. In three years’ time, I’ll be probably working with a writer/director/producer that I don’t even know yet.

Camera Lucida: Are there other big productions in Northern Ireland?
Andrew Reid: There was Krypton, a sci-fi film, that was spending 20 million GBP a year. New Regency are making a Nicole Kidman film (in preproduction), we have enquiries and regular discussions. The end game, however, is developing the indigenous skills. But it is the large scale production of Games of Thrones that changed the way we work and our aspirations.

Camera Lucida: Would you call it a revolutionary project?
Andrew Reid: Absolutely. And that meeting with Jay and Janet back in 2008 – and I probably shouldn’t admit this - but I said ‘you can probably own Northern Ireland (smiles) You will be the biggest show in NI.’ We made several promises, we guarantee to incentivise their show for several years, and not bring in any other productions while they are recruiting, so if they start their pre-production in April, from April to July, there would be no other show to compete for crew, there might be some filming, but no pre-production. So, for three years we honoured that, but in year four, the rules change. But by that time they knew what they were doing, they had a huge crew base by that stage.
The goal was to develop local skills, so Games of Thrones was hugely important for us. It’s one piece of what we are doing, but the most important.

Camera Lucida: If you describe your experience, what are your most enjoyable and challenging moments?
Andrew Reid: I didn’t work on G of T on a day-to-day basis. I was setting it up and for a few years they didn’t have problems with production. There were some problems with drones, but everyone has problems with drones. I had to deal with Civil Aviation Authority to restrict the airspace over key sets. Yes, I dealt with problems, but in fairness, there weren’t many. My favourite was watching the trainees that we put up in the early years stepping up. It’s really weird. The woman who ran the show on the ground, the producer, is called Lisa McAtacney a line-producer, who became a producer alongside the US producer Bernie Caufield, the two of them were inseparable. Lisa was of one of our trainees 20 years ago and became a producer on G of T.

Camera Lucida: It sounds like magic…
Andrew Reid: Yes, it was great to have helped her achieve her full potential and it was great when she got that job, you get that same brilliant feeling. There’s Daniel McCabe, one of our trainees, he’s now the right hand of Ronan Hill, the Sound Recordist. Because the crew is so big, there are many of them. We publish two value reports, reporting on these stories, and not just on G of T. So, that’s really fulfilling. I was a runner, a camera assistant when I was starting out, 30 years ago and Ronan, a couple of years older, was a sound recordist on documentaries, he is now a 5-time Emmy award winning sound recordist. When we had one of our (regular) lunches, he said to me “I’m thinking of retiring in a few years. What about you?” I said “Why would I retire?” We have a casting director, a make-up designer, a sound recordist… all of whom have picked up multiple Emmies that was unthinkable 10 years ago.

Camera Lucida: Amazing success for a small country
Andrew Reid: Yes, it is. I laugh when I look back at how excited I was a few years ago when someone from Northern Ireland won an Emmy, and now they are winning an Emmy every year (smiles). Those are the happy moments, seeing people succeed.

Camera Lucida: And the challenges?
Andrew Reid: Silly things. Drones. People were flying over film sets, for spoilers, because everyone wants to know what’s going to happen next, so it’s like paparazzi. There was a battle scene in one of the seasons and they had horses, children and all these things going on. It was all controlled and these people were flying drones over the sets to see what’s was going on, to sell their footage on fan sites. So we had to step in and get the Civil Aviation Authority, the police, to issue a Notice to Airmen, from commercial aircraft pilots who flew over this area to drone pilots, stating ‘you need a pretty good reason to fly over there or you could lose your license’. The scheduled airlines had to divert their flights.