The Business of Documentary - Dan Edelstyn on Re-Establishing a Vodka Empire
- Posted: 7th Oct 2011
- Category: Articles
- Tags: dan edelstyn, ukraine
by Laura Thornley
Dan Edelstyn won the Sheffield Doc/Fest Channel 4 pitch back in 2009. Since then he has been hard at work creating his first feature length documentary, How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire, which sees him take up his rightful place as vodka baron of a small village in North East Ukraine and try to import the product to the West. Laura Thornley at DFG caught up with Dan as he reached the final stages of his film, to find out just how filmmaking and entrepreneurialism fit together?
How did the project start?
The film came about [because I have been] obsessed with my family history from a young age. I really wanted to know more about where my family came from. My mum had told me stories when I was a young boy about the riches my grandmother had had in her family before the Russian revolution and how they had lost everything. They really inspired me to think and to fantasise as a young boy that I might go there and… takeover my rightful position as the baron of the Ukrainian wasteland. Also my dad died when I was three and he was the son of the grandmother. Years later, I found the manuscript that my granny had written about her life. All of a sudden I had the childhood fantasy and then the reality of a compellingly written manuscript that landed in my lap. So the combination of the two meant that I couldn’t resist travelling back to the Ukraine and bringing that long held fantasy into reality. We were going to make the film, telling my grandmother’s story using her manuscript but then I found the vodka distillery. I thought it would be nice to give it a contemporary trajectory and twist. We wanted to make it come full circle not just to be about history but to be about the future as well and the present day falls quite nicely between those two.
During a panel discussion at a DFG session called Taking the Indie Route, you said that you thought a filmmaker must be entrepreneurial in their approach to filmmaking, I wonder if you could explain this a little to me?
I was always a big advocate of just making your film, you know, by whatever means you have to. Just get out there and put it on your credit card, just borrow money and make a film. So that in a way was stage one of my own film career really, making one film after another. I think owning the means to production was important to me as well. I came out of university with an understanding of what Marxism meant, so I decided I wanted to have a sort of Marxist philosophy in reverse. That’s why I wanted to own the means of production to my own film. So I could create my own little movie industry in my bedroom. I found that making those early investments were so important because then you get to make those films, make those mistakes and gain confidence as a director and as a producer I suppose as well.
How do you feel you have been entrepreneurial with the making of Vodka Empire?
The Vodka Empire has been entrepreneurial in the sense that we have done some crowd funding and we have always been keen to have a blog. [We wanted to] create an audience and a community around the film as it’s being produced. So that community has been able to help in the making of the film, for instance financing the film – like The Vodka Club. People have been joining this and supporting us, which has given us great PR and more serious investors have… given more money to the film because they have heard about [that]. I think that the important thing is that this is about entrepreneurialism. I still think of myself as a bumbling film director who’s stumbled on this empire really. Through the process of making the film I have realised that almost all my ancestors were gifted entrepreneurs and possibly it runs in the blood. I feel like I have grown through the film to allow myself to try to be an entrepreneur.
Can you tell me why you chose to release the clips on Babelgum and if this is, in part, entrepreneurial? And would you have made this decision if you had not secured a slot with More4?
The Babelgum thing was just fortuitous really. We met them at the Channel 4 doc pitch at Doc/Fest in 2009. They just liked the project a lot and said it would fit well with strands. They offered a good licence fee for lots of clips online. Also I felt that it fed into all the stuff that we were doing. We really wanted to get clips online, I had already put clips on the Facebook group; and here we were with the opportunity to be paid to do that on a bigger scale. So it has really helped to get the story out to more people in advance of the feature film being made. I hope that there is no detrimental side to it, that people have got bored of seeing these clips or that when the main film is ready that people will think that they have seen it, because actually there is a big difference between the clips and the film. The other thing about Babelgum was that they hired a PR company to get the film put there and into the press. That was really helpful as we had no money to do it. For the last couple of years we have found that you have to take these opportunities when they present themselves. So I guess that is entrepreneurial in a sense. Trying to think what can you do, on nothing.
What risks do you think are involved in the process of trying to be indie?
We have really done this bit by bit, and built the project up. So we are always taking risks. We were hiring animators at points in the project and not knowing how we would pay them at the end of the month because the banks were stopping lending small businesses money. They wouldn’t lend to us, we had spent the money from Channel 4, there was no money left from Babelgum, but we had to finish the animations because we were trying to get the film finished. Hilary [my partner] managed to get a personal loan. They wouldn’t lend to me because I had become public enemy number one as far as the bank was concerned. The risks are still there and we still have huge debts on this project as well, so there is a financial risk element. But there is also the risk of looking like a complete twat, when you have been working on [a film] for 3 years and you really don’t want it to fail. Also I have said to the people in the [Ukrainian] village that I will try to get this brand out there and I don’t want to let them down either.
What do you think is lost or potentially at risk if the filmmaker has to be responsible for all aspects of filmmaking – rather than focusing on the specifics of actually making?
To some extent I agree that I have had to take on all these different roles but we do have a very good producer Christo Hird dealing with the finances and also Rachel Wexler as well. So they have been advising and raising money as well. Also Hilary has been making the models for the animations and we have had editors and animators. Despite that, it has been all consuming. So one minute I am starting a vodka business and then the next I am directing the animations. It’s going from one extreme to the other. But I do also think that first time director films that take two or three years to make and they put everything into them, is inspiring. They are almost a different genre of film. Maybe when you direct in the future your films will be better financed and you will have a better team pulling together and a shorter period to make them, it will be a slick production – like The Bourne Identity. You know I love those films, but they are a different production. It’s a different genre of film. I think that the films that take years to make and are from first time directors are great. It’s a film made by a filmmaker not by a corporate entity. It’s a passion film.
Can you relate this theory of filmmaker as entrepreneur to other projects you have done? Or has this project changed your approach to filmmaking fundamentally?
In a way, this project has changed my idea. The great thing about the Vodka Empire in my mind is that it lives. All the films of the past exist on a tape somewhere and they get dug out and can be shown on the screen but they don’t live beyond that. I was always interested in having a film that lived beyond that, that could have a life force beyond itself somehow. It’s such an elusive idea; it’s really hard to pin it down. That’s why the Vodka Empire has been so amazing because it is that - I will still be involved in the vodka business somehow and what we are hoping is that the film will be a trigger that sees economic relationships being forged between two places. It’s also known as a 360-degree project isn’t it, something in the real world that lives on beyond itself – but the film is the trigger for that.
How To Re-Establish A Vodka Empire screens at the 55th BFI London Film Festival in October 2011. Find out more and book here.