John Barker, director of the raucous film Bunny Chow, is looking at the Hollywood sign from his Rooseveldt Hotel window as he answers my question about feedback from the American Film Institute screening.
“America has its certain formulas,” he says. “They wanted to see more stand-up in the movie, but we wanted to make a film about what inspires comedians and what happens around the stage [as opposed to on it].
“But there was a good response. Everybody laughed in the right places and even the parts with no subtitles, they could get. It’s a universal comedy.”
In between monitoring the screenings, Barker has been popping over to the American Film Market (being convened nearby), meeting representatives from New Market Cinema, distributors of films such as Monster and Stander and Sundance’s Lab programme, in the hopes of securing United States distribution and having the next Dog Pack Films feature, The Dictator, developed by the Lab.
Bunny Chow — which is partly a road movie about a crew of comedians going to a gig at Oppikoppi — developed from the aftermath of the Pure Monate Show (PMS), which was also directed by Barker. Seeing that the nucleus behind PMS — David Kibuuka, Joey Rasdien, Salah Sabiti, Kagiso Lediga and Barker — had virtually no track record in making movies, attempts to get funding for their bigger-budget projects, such as The Dictator, met with rejection until they decided to change tack. “The guys were struggling to get work on TV and so on and I just said, ‘Guys, if we don’t shoot this film now, we’re gonna break up,'” says Barker.
The night before the trip to Oppikoppi last year, the sponsor who had donated about R10Â 000 pulled out, forcing contingency plans to be made. “John hooked up his wife’s credit card, but the movie was made with pretty much nothing. It was a car running on fumes,” says Lediga, the co-producer, who also stars in the film. “If we hadn’t done it ourselves, we’d still be looking for money.”
“In retrospect,” adds Barker. “It gave us more drive and more resolve.”
Using the formula they perfected with PMS, the crew plotted the narrative tightly (there was a 70-page script for Oppikoppi), leaving the dialogue open for improvisation.
“John wanted to see real emotions and real language, and since he was working with comedians, you know, that’s their strength,” says Lediga. “Even in PMS, we’d have reams of scripts, but the best stuff was always improvised. We honed that energy and made it into a full-length feature.”
Un-PC one-liners, the frequent street intellectualism that drives comedians, its black-and-white tint and the off-the-wall score (composed by Joel Assaizky) give Bunny Chow its charm.
The debauched scenes at Oppikoppi were shot first, with the rest of the preceding acts built in later. The shooting alone — 18 days stretched out over several months — was an arduous stop-start process. But, as Lediga says, “a lot of heads came to the table once the meal was made”.
A great deal of post-production went into creating the sleek, finished product. The editing, done by Saki Bergh of Terraplane, took a further six months because, as Barker puts it, “there was no money and I had to do another drama series to stay alive”. Swedish post-production company Republiken did the final sound mix and the digital format was blown up to 35mm in New York.
Cameron Bailey, the international programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival, who is in contact with the DV8 Films team, picked up the movie while it was still being edited.
Bobby Allen of MTV Europe spoke to Joel Phiri after seeing promotional material of the film at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. “It’s a contemporary film with a hip and urban soundtrack and they want to associate with these things,” says Barker of the MTV Films endorsement of the movie. “It’s a film with a lot of integrity, one we can appreciate. It just show you what can happen when you stick to your guns and you don’t compromise.”
With the digital age making it easier for filmmakers to profit, the crew at Dog Pack Films plan to remodel the way filmmaking is approached in the country, in a way not dissimilar to Nollywood. “We want to go to Atteridgeville and we want to go to Soweto,” says Lediga, with his tongue in his cheek. “The locations are cheap and the people want to act. It has to be financially viable for investors to want to jump to it. We can’t be making R5million movies for theatrical release, considering our cinema audiences.
“You talk to a lot of filmmakers and a lot of them have this highbrow attitude like, ‘When are we going to get over Leon Schuster.’ But you take away Schuster and there is no industry. People don’t realise that these Scorsese types were from [Bmovie producer] Roger Coleman’s backyard, with a car-chase scene here and a titty-shot there. We need to be able to make some movie about a taxi driver, and make it with all the elements that will work for the people. From there we can get some system going. There’s space for everybody as long as we can get people to the cinema.”
Bunny Chow opens this year’s Cape Town World Cinema Festival, happening from November 14 to 21. For a full programme go to www.sithengi.co.za