A brutal battle ensues between Nazi soldiers and resistance fighters under the leaden sky, and in the din — replete with explosions — the cattle in a neighboring village trample away in fright. But it’s all an illusion on the site of Defiance, a World War II action flick recounting the story of a Jewish resistance movement in the Polish-Belarussian forests. The $50 million production, set for 2008 release, was a major victory for Lithuania, a country of 3.4 million, which beat out bigger Poland and Romania as potential shooting sites. Eastern European movie sites are fighting for Hollywood cash with nearly as much ferocity as the fake battles in the movies. As producers Ed Zwick and Pieter Jan Brugge explained, while searching for ideal sites, they looked for a setting that had thick forests and an urban landscape nearby. „We actually explored the location on the Google Earth to see how the forest was accessible to the city center,” said Zwick, producer of blockbusters like The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond.
An economic boon
The two found no adequate settings around the Polish capital, Warsaw, and Romania’s forests are high in the mountains and too far away from Bucharest. So they chose Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. For the post-communist economies of Eastern Europe, international movie production is a bonanza. Foreign movie productions brought some $76 million to the Czech Republic in 2006, according to Dusana Chrenekova, spokeswoman for Barrandov Studios. Bogdan Moncea, marketing director of Castel Film in Romania, said foreign film studios over the past five years have injected more than $183 million into the economy. This year Castel Film produced Adam Resurrected, a Holocaust-related movie directed by Paul Schrader and starring William Dafoe and Jeff Goldblum, as well as Mirrors, a thriller starring Kiefer Sutherland. But times have changed. In the early 1990s, Eastern European cities could entice Hollywood producers with a simple combination of Old World charm and significant cost savings. Now they must dangle technology, experience and even tax reductions in order to lure the multimillion dollar productions.
In Hungary, the government has approved a huge tax break for movie productions, and the Romanians may follow suit. Competition among premier Eastern European locations is stiff, and each studio does what it can to entice foreign productions — particularly now that the region has become considerably more expensive.
It all comes down to cost
Ramunas Skikas, director of the Lithuanian film studios LKS, agrees that the final decision often boils down to money. „Most of us (Eastern European countries) offer similar scenery and quality of services, but the one thing that makes up filmmakers’ minds is the production cost,” Skikas said, adding that costs in Lithuania were 20% lower than in competing Eastern European countries. But as countries like Hungary and the Czech Republic catch up with Western Europe in terms of prices, government support can mean the difference — which is why Hungary now offers filmmakers a 20% tax rebate. Incentives like these show to what extent countries are willing to go to keep producers returning and why filmmaking is here to stay.
„In the digital age, production traveling is a given, and films will be made where they can best be served,” said Iain Smith, producer of Cold Mountain, a movie that was impugned by Hollywood filmmaker unions for being filmed entirely in Romania even though the subject matter was the US Civil War. „In this, Eastern Europe has taught the western nations a huge lesson,” he added. Both Zwick and Brugge said filming in Lithuania, which ended in October, had been an emotional experience, and that they would recommend the Baltic state to other producers. „In Hollywood everything is more about the logistics — how to get the coolest plane or the coolest car for a film, whereas here often you have to make things and the physical skills (of) people are extraordinary in some cases,” Brugge said. „Being here has restored my faith in film-making.” (chron.com)
