Mandy Griffiths
What will you get when you watch an Australian documentary narrated by a Kiwi (Russell Crowe) about the French wine industry and their relationship with China? Name checked by Robert De Nero as one of his two favourite films at the Tribeca Film Festival, “Red Obsession” follows not only the journey of red wine as it became more valuable than gold, but the global shift of power from East to West, told over one ‘vintage of the century’.
Or as one French wine maker said, ‘it took a bunch of Aussies to make the first amazing film about Boardeaux’.
Debuting on Australia screens 15 August, Mandy Griffiths sat down with co-writers/directors Warwick Ross and David Roach to talk wine, Chinese stereotypes, sex toy magnates, and impressing Francis Ford Coppola.
Congratulations on the film, is it exciting to be at this point where everyone can see what you’ve been working on?
David: It is it’s thrilling. Filmmaking takes such a long time, it’s like writing a novel, you’re in your own little world and you have to be, you have to be in that bubble, and then suddenly you pop out of it and it’s like ‘oh people like what we’re doing.’ [laughs].
And I understand it was quite a quick decision to do the film.
Warwick: Andrew Caillard, who unfortunately isn’t here because he’s in Japan at the moment, is a very well-known chap in the world of wine, one of only 300 in the world who’s a Master of Wine, and one day on an airplane and we happened to bump into each other and we had this discussion about wine and film, and he knew I was a vigneron and a filmmaker so he was like ‘hey you’ve got to do something, you know, get off your backside. And so by the time we landed in London there was the genesis, the embryonic of this story about Bordeaux and China and that was pretty fascinating. David and I got together and we fleshed it out a bit more, and we had another meeting with Andrew in February of 2011 and at that stage we were saying ‘we think there’s something in this Andrew, we like the idea, but we need you to open all the doors of the Chateaus otherwise there’s no point doing it’. And that put the pressure on Andrew actually I think he started getting a little scared at that stage. But David and I said it would probably take us six months to raise the financing, write the outline, get it ready and pull a crew together. And Andrew just said ‘you guys don’t get it. You need to be there in three weeks’.
And six months is probably quite a short time to get a film together…
Warwick and David: Yes!
Warwick: And all of a sudden it was three weeks, and David and I kind of looked at each other and thought how on Earth are we going to do this? So I kind of took the plunge and financed it myself. I sort of worked it out and thought okay it’s going to cost me this much and we’ll do it this way, and the more David and I spoke we realised – we’re from feature film making – so turning our hands to a documentary we both needed it to feel big, we wanted to make it for the big screen. It’s going to be a cinema experience and if it’s a cinema experience it needs to have a certain structure, a certain feel, a certain weight and shape to it, and that meant we had to use some of the best cameras in the world. So it was the Arri Alexa camera that they used to shoot the Bond films. In fact when we interviewed Francis Ford Coppola in Hong Kong he goes [puts on American accent] ‘Are you guys using an Arri Alexa?’. And the first ten minutes of the interview was all about the camera, about the lenses we were using [laughs].
Is he a fan of the Arri Alexa?
David: Yes, yes most filmmakers are.
Warwick: Scorsese uses it; he used it to make “Hugo”. A lot of them are and we used it to make the film, and you don’t know where the story is going you. You have an idea and you dive into it and follow the leads. It’s kind of like this paper chase, you get to a certain point and open the next note and it says ‘you now have to head to China’ and you go ‘Great!’
It’s like Game of Life, only it’s “Game of Wine”.
Warwick: Yes! You follow the leads you know, and it took us to one part of China, and then we met Demei Li, that great winemaker in China that won the Decanter wine award and then he said you have to come with me here, and then you have to come with me to Xinjiang if you really want to see what is going on. Now Xinjiang is out near Kazakhstan. Near Afghanistan, and we were look ‘okay, fine’. So yes we had to move quickly, I financed it myself to a certain point, and we started filming, and the excitement kind of led us from there.
Well that answers my next question which was did it all go according to plan, to the outline you had prepared?
David: With documentaries you never quite know how it’s going to turn out. You always start off thinking you know what the story is going to be, you convince yourself yes there is a story, otherwise it’s too hard, you know, don’t go, and we had convinced ourselves there was a story here, as Andrew had said it was a perfect storm in the wine world. What was unfolding right at that time was a series of events that had never happened in the same way before ever. So we thought we knew what we were getting ourselves into but we realised the story was going to take off in a different direction. And it kept doing that. First it was about wine. And then we realised actually it’s about business. Then we thought you know what it’s actually about money. And then actually it’s about China!
It’s about power.
David: Yes it’s about power and the themes started to get bigger. And in the end it was really about the shift of economic power from the East to the West and what that means.
Yes I thought wine worked surprisingly well as a microcosm for the shifting power, changing of the guard. It’s been around for a long time we know the Ancient Greeks and Romans loved their wine, which is what I always liked about them, and these days it still goes to the top of the food chain.
David: Yes and going back to your first question, you sit in the editing room for months and you never know quite what you’ve got, and then to see audiences in Berlin and Tribeca, Sydney and Melbourne and around the world, actually get it, and these are audiences that are not necessarily wine buffs, they’re just people who like a good story, and that was the telling moment for us when we got that reaction. As you said, it’s about wine, but it could be about all kinds of things, the themes are big enough for a general audience to get into.
Personally I love red wine…
Warwick: Good girl [laughs]
When I was studying I worked as the host at Number 8 Restaurant and Wine Bar at Crown, and I don’t know a lot about wine but they have 888 wines on their wine list so I did get a little spoiled for taste – cleanskins didn’t quite taste the same after that – but one of my favourite parts was one of the Chateau owners saying ‘I’m not a great wine maker I’m a great wine drinker’, and that they’d all had at least a bottle of wine each just for lunch, and I’m like ‘I need to move to France this is amazing’. But it was a great cinematic experience, and it looked incredible. Just the insight into China generally people would really appreciate. They do things differently there and I thought it was fascinating the way they talked about latching onto brands because it was easier for them to comprehend than the wine industry as a whole. You met some really interesting people from China, in particular a Sex Toy Magnate which I believe was his official title – I wonder if he has that on his business card – how did you come across him?
Warwick: It’s tricky to get through to a lot of these people as you could imagine I mean where do you start? But the world of wine is interestingly connected and the world of these elite wines is more intimately connected. Andrew knew someone in Sydney who’s tied to the hierarchy in China and he knew of this bloke, in fact they had been to these wine dinners together, very fancy wine dinners and they’re pretty incredible. So he said you just have to meet Peter he’s a really interesting guy. And it took about six months to tee up that interview because every time we were going to be near him he wasn’t there, and even on the day we weren’t convinced it was actually going to happen because he was sending a big black car to pick us up from the hotel and the car didn’t arrive at 9, didn’t arrive at 9.30, and we’ve got all our camera gear going ‘this is great’. And all of a sudden it turns up and we pile in the back and head across the border from Hong Kong to China and pretty soon we’re at his factory. He didn’t speak a word of English but he was such an enigmatic character. And as soon as I walked into his living room with that table that he sits behind and he’s got that huge stone tablet covered in little tea pots and little carvings of mythical creatures all over the place. The hanging baskets and the empty bottles of Lafite even in his bedroom…
You couldn’t have designed a better set.
Warwick: I couldn’t have! And when I saw that white cat and he picks it up and starts stroking it, I’m looking at him going ‘if this guy isn’t a Bond villain then I have no idea what a Bond villain looks like’ [laughs]. So I said let’s just get a shot of him stroking the cat.
So I assume you must have quite a passion for wine as well otherwise you wouldn’t be making the film…
David: Well interestingly enough Warwick is a vigneron and he knows more about wine than I will ever know. When I started making this film, I was like you, I love a glass of red wine but I don’t know too much about it. I’m a drinker! Warwick makes beautiful wine in his Portsea Estate label. We talked about this at the start of the film and we thought – if we’re going to make a film about wine it should be more for people like me than people like Warwick otherwise you tend to make a film with a very narrow focus, and people who don’t know about wine will feel that it’s full of jargon and wine bores. So you don’t need to know anything about wine to get the film.
Absolutely and I think it gives you a great appreciation for what goes into making the wine. But I do think even for the wine experts it provides a bigger picture that perhaps they haven’t thought about before so I thought it struck a really good balance there. As the prices skyrocketed and it became more a of business transaction with these ‘perfect vintage seasons’, people buying the wine to sell off later instead of stocks, is that heartbreaking to think that all these wines are stuck in cellars and not being enjoyed?
Warwick: Yes, when we were talking to Gary Bloom in London who talks about trading wine – that they’re these inert objects and that’s the way he looks at them. When something becomes a commodity, to us it loses the soul. It’s just like steel or iron ore, and where’s the delight, the charm and the romance, it all just evaporates – almost literally evaporates – when these things are put in the cellar. They never see the boxes of wine they never even see what the bottle looks like. They sell it and they make a profit and they move on. As David said ‘when a wine becomes too valuable to drink’ – and in fact you coined that even though you’re giving credit to other people –
We’ll set the record straight here.
David: You heard it hear folks.
Warwick: And I thought that was a really great concept – when something becomes too valuable to drink. And that propelled us to study that whole area of commoditisation of wine. That was fascinating and one thing we found really interesting was that the people that are investing in buying those wines, spending all that money and storing them in the cellars and making a profit, are the Westerners. The Chinese, they don’t do that. The Chinese will spend the equivalent amount of money on those wines but they pull the corks and they drink the wine. I think in many ways the Chinese pay greater respect to the wine because they do that than their counterparts in the West. And a lot of people have this prejudicial view of the Chinese – you know they’ve got terrible palates and they wouldn’t know wine if they fell over it –
Put Coke with it…
Warwick: Yes put Coke with it and some of those stories are true of course they did actually happen. But the fact that they show that much respect to the wine – that they will spend a fortune on a bottle but they will pull the cork and drink it and share it with their friends. A number of people have told us about the high regard they hold the Bordeaux wine makers. They didn’t know them and they never met them but they treated them like an artist. They are like the painter of a wonderful paining, they create this wonderful wine. We never heard that sentiment in the West!
David: It’s interesting that you think these two cultures – the Chinese and the French – are such disparate cultures. And as we made the film we started to realise that they’re not that far apart at all. They’re both obsessed with food for example, they’re food based cultures, they love their food. And they’re both very proud cultures. And as Warwick said as we start to get into these collectors, they have the same attitude to the Bordeleau as the French do. The French really respect their wine makers. And the Chinese have that same attitude. That was another thing that was eye opening for us. A lot of the time people would say to us that you can’t drink these big bodied French wines with Chinese food. And the Chinese would say ‘what do you mean Chinese food?’ Because there are all kinds of Chinese food – there are 1.4 billion of them! It’s like saying that you can’t drink these wines with Western food. Western food can be anything. So it’s breaking down that cultural stereotyping was an important part of the process of making this film.
I love the point that’s made that the Chinese are quite fearless. Yes there are a lot of billionaires and millionaires around now but they’ve built that in a short time, they’ve come from nothing and they’re not afraid to start again because they’ve done it before.
Warwick: What about that tower that was built in 15 days? I don’t think anyone believes that the time lapse on that was real. But it was. An entire tower in 15 days.
And the Chateau owners in France obviously are very protective of their heritage brand and would be naturally cautious about doing anything to jeopardise that, I imagine Andrew would have been a big part in getting you access to them, but were they still a bit resistant about being a part of the film?
David: Well they were and specifically to documentary makers. I mean a lot of people want to make films in that area for all kinds of reasons, and there has been a BBC documentary, and lot of people want to take the angle of Beautiful Bordeaux, and that’s fine and they’re happy to be a part of that. But if a serious filmmaker comes along and says ‘we want to spend some time here and really get into the heart of your industry’ they are a bit suspicious. “Mondovino” had been through and a lot of people love that film and that’s fine, but from the Bordeaux point of view they don’t trust filmmakers so much after that experience. So our secret weapon was Andrew Caillard. Andrew is treated with so much respect over there. But even with him we found we could get access to them, but for the first round of interviews with pretty much all of them, as soon as we turned the camera on it was sort of corporate speak: very measured, very controlled, well mannered…
Warwick: And well-rehearsed.
David: And you’d look at the footage afterwards and say, well you know what, we can’t use this. So it was a process of going back, and once they realised we weren’t going away – for one – and two we weren’t just filmmakers with handicams. We had serious equipment. We wanted to make this story and make it look beautiful and tell it the way we wanted to tell it. They started to respect us and our approach because it was similar to their approach. We were all about quality. In the end, they didn’t control us, we could shoot what we liked and they allowed us to tell the story we wanted to tell. And from that point of view we have an enormous amount of respect for the Bordeaux wine makers now, because we’re not uncritical of the industry. We’re objective – we didn’t tell the story they wanted us to tell. And when they finally saw the film – which was very nerve wracking for us – they really liked it even though it was critical. One of them said ‘it took a bunch of Aussies to make the first amazing film about Boardeaux’ [laughs]. And we were thrilled to hear that.
After screening at the Berlin and Tribeca film festivals, “Red Obsession” opens in Australia on 15 August. Find out more at http://www.red-obsession.com/
