Evidence of meeting #45 for Canadian Heritage in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was telefilm.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Vice-President, Cinespace Film Studios
A wide array in what sense? Do you mean high-budget to low-budget?
Conservative
David Yurdiga Conservative Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB
Yes, high-budget, low-budget, and I know that many films are produced at one studio, then go to another studio. Are you more concentrated, so that you can do almost anything that a producer wants to do?
Vice-President, Cinespace Film Studios
We have three campuses in Toronto. Our largest one, in the west end where Sarah will be filming her third project, is our Kipling studio campus. It has a mix of large facilities and small facilities. So yes, we can attract a wide array of projects.
Denis Villeneuve himself came to me and thanked me, because we had a studio gap and Rhombus Media needed some creative work done on the budget. We were able to lower the studio rate to an amount that floored Mr. Villeneuve. He said, “You know, in Quebec they never would have done this for me.” That's nothing against our Quebec studio friends, but the more critical mass of space and services you have, the more flexibility you have to meet all sorts of different budgets, absolutely. Sarah's project will be the seventh project shooting concurrently on the campus, which makes it the largest studio campus outside of Hollywood.
Conservative
David Yurdiga Conservative Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB
You also mentioned during your eight-minute presentation that there are some capacity issues in the industry. Can you elaborate on that?
Vice-President, Cinespace Film Studios
Yes. Because the vast majority of our clients are in television, and because our clients are very successful and are typically renewed season to season, they'll leave their sets up in the studios during that two- or three-month time period during which they're waiting for renewal or are waiting to transition from season two to season three. This means that we don't have studio vacancy gaps anymore, don't have empty studio space anymore. All of our studio spaces in Toronto are now full of episodic and television production.
This means that if a young Canadian producer were to come to me right now and say, “If you have an empty studio space for a month, I could shoot my entire film”—and we've done that historically, in the days when we had 65% occupancy rate—I could not help them.
What I referred to in my remarks was that if a system were in place with Telefilm whereby we could be compensated for blocking out a week or a month of studio time for that Canadian producer, then the economic loss to turn away CBS or NBC or Fox or one of my other U.S. clients in order to hold that studio space for the Canadian producer would not be so huge for me.
That's the capacity issue I was referring to. We don't have studio space available that we can discount for Canadian producers to take advantage of to put more quality on the screen, as Mr. Villeneuve did—and the movie, Enemy, turned out to be fantastic.
Conservative
David Yurdiga Conservative Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB
Here is another question for you. Over the last 10 years we have seen more and more Canadian television series coming online. Is the film industry being put rather towards the back door? Do they have to wait, or do they not get fair or equitable time in the studios?
Vice-President, Cinespace Film Studios
Unfortunately, the way it is right now.... Instead of highlighting the fact that they get less equitable time, I would say that there are fewer feature films being produced in general. The volume is down. This was triggered by the Hollywood majors trimming their slates. Because so many movies were getting slaughtered at the box office, they decided to be more selective.
It's happening domestically as well, so we're not getting the number of calls we used to get for feature films, plain and simple. As a byproduct of more episodic production, unfortunately we are finding that we're turning away the feature films that do come calling for space, because there is not enough to go around.
Conservative
David Yurdiga Conservative Fort McMurray—Athabasca, AB
Thank you.
My next question is for Mr. Waddell. I hear a lot about pirating. Is this affecting the Canadian film industry? Is there a big, negative impact?
National Executive Director, Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA)
Well, sure, piracy is a huge issue. It's an issue not only in Canada but also right around the world. What piracy does is defeat the economics of production and distribution. When people are stealing product, they're not paying for it, and the suppliers, the producers, the studios, the technicians, all of us suffer—the performers, the writers, everyone. People need to be paid for the work they perform, and that goes all the way down the line. Piracy is a huge issue, and whatever actions can be taken to combat piracy in the film industry are welcome.
We should take a lesson from the music industry, which was slow in picking up and providing an alternative to downloading. They put in iTunes, finally. Similarly in audiovisual production there should be a legitimate alternative at a good price point so that the pirates—well, it's not just pirates—the citizens who see the option of downloading an illegal, bad copy of a film will prefer the alternative on iTunes or Maple Pictures and buy a legitimate copy at a reasonable price, but a good-quality product.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gord Brown
Thank you very much. We really appreciate all of your contributions, including to our past studies. If you have any further contributions, please get them in to us as soon as you can. We're going to start work on our draft report very soon. Thank you
We will briefly suspend.
[Proceedings continue in camera]