David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz on At the Movies
What are some of the other things you've been
doing since you retired from presenting "At the
Movies" last year?
I write every week for the Australian newspaper, so
that I still have to see at least a couple of films a
week. I don't have to see as many as I used to,
because we used to see 5 or 6 films a week. Now I
can be more selective, which is good, because there
are so many bad ones that I don't want to see... and
various other bits and pieces, such as the French film
festival which I'm patron of, I did some work for the
Sydney film festival this year, and various things like
that... I'm also trying to write another book. I've
written three books to date, now I'm trying to write
another one which will be about Australian cinema,
sort of an encyclopedia of Australian cinema since
1990 - and that's going very slowly because I'm so
busy with all these other things. I don't know whether
that book will ever be finished, but I'm maybe halfway through it...
And you recently returned from a tour of Europe?
I've been asked to program film screenings on cruise
ships - and it was an interesting challenge to show
more interesting films on cruise ships, so that's what I
was doing in Europe recently. It started in Barcelona
and stopped at various ports in France, Italy, Greece
and Turkey - finishing at Istanbul. Next year I'm
doing one that goes from Sweden to Russia and
Estonia, Finland, Denmark and Holland...
You were the patron of the French Film Festival
earlier this year with Margaret Pomeranz. What
were some of the highlights of this year’s edition?
To be honest, I didn't think it was a particularly great
selection of films this year. The thing about France is,
they make a lot of films, and they have an amazing
system there - it's the only country in the world that
has this system - whereby every single ticket you buy
to go to the cinema in France, no matter whether its a
big American film, whether it's Mission Impossible,
there's a tax on the ticket. I can't remember exactly
how much it is, but let's say it's 10 per cent, and that
tax goes into a fund for French cinema.
So in other words Hollywood films (in every country
they're the most popular films, I don't know why but
they are) are subsiding in a way, not only the
production of French films, but the distribution and
promotion of French films. The Americans hate that
but it's been in place since the end of the war. The
French cinema is very, very healthy because it's got
this sort of huge subsidy, and they make a lot of films.