5 Minutes With… Nathan Price

It’s not often that you get the chance to get stuck into the mysteries of the universe, quantum physics and the Dao De Jing during an interview, but when LBB’s Laura Swinton caught up with Park Pictures director Nathan Price that’s exactly what happened. The director, best known for his comedic eye and ambitious set pieces, has come on quite a journey since growing up on a sheep farm in the southernmost tip of New Zealand. He’s studied physics, then broadcasting; he helped found a post house and drew a cloud in Lord of the Rings; he’s been featured in the Saatchi New Director’s Showcase and has won numerous awards. Now he’s living in Paris, wowing the European market with his work for the likes of Cadbury, Royal London and T-Mobile. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that the down-to-earth, thoughtful Kiwi with his head in the stars has an expansive view on life. 

LBB> You started out studying physics at university before transferring across to broadcasting communications and filmmaking. Why did that happen?

NP> When I was at high school I was good at the science subjects but I was also doing improvised comedy and we were in a theatre group. 

The thing is coming from somewhere in the most out of the way part of the most out of the way part the world, I didn’t know anyone who was a filmmaker. Theatre was what you did in the evening as a hobby; it wasn’t something that someone would do professionally. It just wasn’t even on my radar. You think ‘well I have to do a job to get some money’ and I thought about being an engineer. And then I thought, well, I like the idea of building a bridge but the rest of it sounds a bit boring. Physics is exciting because it’s about uncovering the answers to the universe and I always liked these big questions. Coming from a farm in Invercargill, you have a lot of time to think about all of these big theories because there’s no one there to talk about. When I went to university I did physics and it was exciting and everything, but I was also doing literature papers and film papers. The literature papers on Joseph Conrad and TS Eliot were the first things that made me go ‘oh wow, you can do these big questions in another way’. 

The comedy thing had always seemed unserious and foolish, but I loved it. I really loved being a part of it. And all of a sudden I realised you can do these artistic things that are about the big questions. They are about how the universe works, but from a human perspective. That was what I was missing from physics; it was all about the universe and quantum physics but what was missing in that was the human. Without that, it’s sort of meaningless. I did film papers the next year and started to watch all those screwball comedies that I loved and I realised that this is what I wanted to do. At that point I dropped out of the physics programme and moved over to the film and broadcast department.

LBB> But that separation between art and science is quite counter-intuitive in a lot of ways – they’re far more similar than the education system acknowledges, and when they come together the results can be amazing.

NP> Many physicists – certainly in my department – are the fruitiest people I know. I think it’s the same big desire, that big love of the world. On the scientific side of things, art is a repeated process of hypotheses. You try something out to see how it affects the audience. That’s a scientific process. Scientists are really creative people – you have to come up with a crazy idea to test. If you don’t have that idea, you don’t get anywhere. I’ve been very much a man of both worlds and I very much enjoy that. 

There’s a bit of a problem with the Western tradition – going back to Plato, separating the world into perfect ideas and then there’s an imperfect, messy world, whereas I think in the Eastern tradition there’s much more of a cross over. They’re a lot more comfortable with that.

LBB> Well, philosophies like Daoism are interesting in that respect.

NP> That’s when you get to quantum physics. The Dao talks about ‘the nameless things’ and it’s very much about how things aren’t necessarily how you perceive them and that they’re complex and they are what they are. When you really get into it, things are even more complex than that, they exist in many dimensions. A lot of physicists are really excited about the Dao because of that. The only thing that bothers me when I read the Dao – and I still read it, I read it a couple of days ago – is that someone has basically come up with the answers to everything. That was two and a half thousand years ago… and it didn’t save the world. It seems that humanity is destined to repeat the same mistakes because the answers are already there. They’ve already been written down. Each generation just has to learn on its own.

The nature of paradox is another crossover. Somebody’s strengths are usually their weaknesses. You can trust somebody, but at the same time keep in your mind that they might be having you on. It’s such a mature thought, being able to keep two opposing ideas in your mind. On a film set I want to be perfectly planned, but nature’s going to have its own way as well and I’m going to have to give into that. When Daoists talk about a rock, they don’t just say ‘I’m going to carve it and I’m going to make a deer’. They ask the rock what it wants to become. They see where it’s already got to and then bring it out.

LBB> On a really obvious level I can see how understanding physics and maths can be so helpful with things like post and VFX, when you’re trying to create a world and you need to understand gravity and mechanics and optics. How does that knowledge help in a live action context? Does understanding mechanics help when shooting live action and does that knowledge help on a more a more philosophical level?

NP> I think they’re two different things. One is a more logistical imagination. The technical stuff definitely helps. A big thing with shooting is ‘how do you get this camera to go from here to here’. When we shot the Samsung Coliseum spot we couldn’t afford to build much of the set, so we built a quarter of the stadium. I had to imagine all the other shots and I had to keep all that in my head, which was a bit of a bit of a mindblower. I didn’t have enough cast to go all the way around either. There’s that mechanical side of it, and the mechanics of the camera rig and the stabilisation of cameras. But it’s not like the complex maths I used to use, like spatial stuff, which is a lot more useful when you’re doing 3D. 

But managing a shoot is a different thing. It’s very much about a human inspiring lots of other humans. If you have a lot of very talented people, it’s all about getting them to go in the same direction. And there’s a scientific element to producing because you have to reduce what you want to to its simplest form so everyone can really get it. And, going back to the Dao, you realise that you have to let the process produce its own results. You can’t really tell it what to do – you have to create the conditions for it to work. I think the thing that probably differentiates my productions in some ways is that there’s a few big set ups or sometimes it’s all done in one take – and that involves keeping a lot of balls in the air at once. 

LBB> And with these big, one-shot spots like T-Mobile or State Insurance, what sort of pre-planning do you do? What’s your starting point? 

NP> It’s really just a process of building up. It’s fun. There’s a lot of mechanics involved but it’s more like a big stage show. 

It usually starts with me playing the music, walking down the street, singing it, doing all the different parts to see how far I’ll get. With the T-Mobile one, I’d walk and read out a bit of the script and walk some more and then measure it out on the floor. Then I can figure out what needs to happen at which points. We usually convert that into a 3D animatic which helps us build a set around the movements that I’ve worked out. Then there’s a little bit of back-and-forth and we start having a discussion with the set builders.

LBB> It’s interesting that you try to put yourself in the actor’s shoes.

NP> I’m a really big believer in process. As with the rock, you’ve got to let it become what it’s going to become. If it’s all going to run together, all the bits need to fit. 

There was a point in my development as a director where I realised you can’t always get what you want. You draw storyboards or whatever and you turn up and it doesn’t turn out because you can’t get all the bits in the right places. And then, after a while, you can achieve that. You can get exactly what you want. But that’s boring. And after that you think, ‘how can I become better than I was?’. And that’s about bringing all the bits together and seeing how they run together and letting it evolve in a way that’s beyond you. It’s really about pulling on everything: nature, the location that you find, the crew, the actors’ imagination. Then it becomes something bigger than I could ever do by just drawing little storyboards. I think that’s a big step in becoming a director.

You asked about getting in the actors’ shoes – well I think it’s about starting from the ‘inside’ of the thing, particularly with those things that are about the mechanics of the staging, getting from here to here. If the set’s not in the right place, you won’t be able to move it on the day, so that’s where you have to start.

LBB> And at the pitching stage, where do you start?

NP> I read the script, play with it in my imagination. It’s kind of the same thing – I run it and see what looks good and what looks a bit boring. There’s an expansive stage of research where you try to find everything you can that could possibly be inspired by the script and then at some point you have to write a treatment and pull it back in. You’ve also got to talk to the creatives and get a feel for what they want to get out of the film emotionally. Often the structure’s not quite right; for example there’s a hero but there’s not enough opposition within the story to show what kind of hero they are. There are little structural things that you can change. Maybe if we delay a piece of information until the end people will be more interested because they want to find it out. 

LBB> Before you were a director you did a lot of work in VFX. How did you get into that?

NP> I had done science and physics and had done a bit of computer science with that, and would programme microprocesses as part of the physics degree. A friend of mine from the Broadcast School had gone off to join a visual effects company, and because I had that science background and also a film background he just called me up and asked me if I wanted to do it. I said ‘no’, I want to be a director. A week later he said, ‘what are you talking about? This is an amazing company; no one’s going to give you a job as a director.’

Most of it was me and him driving around with big road cases. It was the most successful commercial production company in New Zealand (Silverscreen) and we were the in-house effects guys; we were all there was. All the directors were doing this amazing effects stuff and they wanted us to be on every job so we would go from city to city, figuring it all out and going on shoots and working too much…

We did it for two years and I did a 72-hour day one day. It wasn’t uncommon to do at least 24-hour or 30-hour days. One day they added two huge big effects sequences a week out from the end of another job. And it was only me and this other guy! I was the 3D department, the back-up flame guy and the guy who did the rendering and the tape operator. By the end of that week I was rendering, but the machines weren’t very reliable so I had to get up every two hours and check them and re-start them and go back to sleep. I woke up in the morning and had this horrible leg cramp and woke up screaming and the client had come in and seen me wailing and I just thought ‘this is too much’. I was limping for a week and I think I quit not long after that.

My boss said ‘you can’t quit, you should be the boss’ and I said ‘I can’t be the boss, I’m 23!’… and then he convinced me to stay. We separated off into our own post production company [Oktober] so we could do work for other production companies and we added all these other guys and built a 3D team. It became quite big, so then after a year or two when Lord of the Rings came out they needed effects shots to get their edit done. They were just comp shots for an edit initially and we started putting them together. And I ended up doing a cloud on Lord of the Rings. And they stole a bunch of my guys.

LBB> So when did you make the leap to directing?

NP> I did VFX for two years and I did the management stuff for two years – and we were doing really well. Stuff was coming in that didn’t have a director attached. Agencies wanted pure animation stuff and I ended up doing them. One did really well and ended up in the Saatchi New Directors’ Showcase. But being a manager at 23 is tough. I was really good at getting people on board and reading things creatively, but the other management stuff, like balancing people’s feelings, managing people who were ten years older than me and all the stress that brought got to me. I always wanted to be a director so it was a good way for me to scoot out.

LBB> And you live in Paris now. When did you move there?

NP> We moved about three years ago. My girlfriend and I lived in Berlin for a while and moved back to New Zealand. We did a pretty good run of work that year in New Zealand and then decided to move back to Europe. I had been to France for half a day, it seemed romantic… so we moved to Paris. We were getting to a level where we were pretty high in the game in New Zealand and I wanted to see if we could crack it where the big boys are. You can’t really do that in New Zealand because of time zones. People really need to see your face and you need to build relationships.

We met Park in the US on the way through and met Stephen [Brierley, Park Pictures EP] when we got through. That was all part of that.

LBB> Your most recent project was the Royal London spot that features a time-travelling Welshman. Can you tell me a bit about that?

NP> It was for the British market so it was really interesting to find out which accents were funny and who annoyed who because I didn’t really know. It’s interesting doing something for a different culture and trying to get into it. British comedy is very big in New Zealand as well so it doesn’t seem too far removed from what we like.

LBB> And when you were younger you did a lot of improvised comedy too – is comedy your favourite genre to work with?

NP> I don’t think it’s necessarily a ‘genre’ that I like to work in; I think it’s just part of how I see the world. I do have an idea about ‘dumbness’. I don’t like things being too pretentious – that’s a Daoist thing as well. He’s always going on about how dumb he is. If you’re too serious, it’s a bit like ‘come on, you’re trying to sell me insurance’. I think the thing with dumbness is that it’s fun, entertaining, it’s going to be a bit silly, but you’re still saying something. I think I love comedy because I see the world in these terms. There are still serious things to talk about but I think it’s better to laugh about them than it is to not. 

LBB> Do you have any favourite comedians or filmmakers that do that really well?

NP> There’s lots of people. At the moment I’m really enjoying David O. Russell. I just saw American Hustle and his three last films. They’re dramatic films with a lot of comedy in them. He does them really quickly and you can tell he’s a very process-orientated guy when he works with his actors. He gives them a lot of room to create something. I love the Coen Brothers, I love Judd Apatow. ‘This Is 40’ was, I thought, brilliant for taking something so banal as what love is like mid-way through a marriage, when there’s not that fresh romantic comedy any more. For him to be able to capture that in a way that’s entertaining is amazing. And he does a lot of improv around the gags in a scene. He’ll do a scene with the gag he thought would work and then he’ll do four or five other gags and he’ll use multiple cameras in a really nice way.

In New Zealand, there’s the Flight of the Conchords boys who are friends of mine. It’s always inspiring when you see guys like that doing really well. I did a stage show with them where I was editing. It wasn’t as Flight of the Conchords but it was a live movie and it was their concept. They were doing the ‘movie’ on stage and we were filming it and projecting it, but there were weird things happening on the side. To see those guys do as well as they’ve done is inspiring. It shows what one can maybe achieve, even if you are from the back end of the world. 

LBB> Do you have any ambitions yourself outside of commercials? Have you got any projects that you’re working on?

NP> Yeah. I don’t know exactly what they are but I’m working on things. I would like to make some feature films where I can bring together my big thoughts on the world and what I do as a filmmaker, and try and make something that comes from a personal voice. I’m still trying to figure it out. I think I’m a relatively good filmmaker from a technical point of view and as a commercial director, but then it’s like ‘what do you want to say to the world?’ That’s a tricky thing. And then you have to figure out what stories are best suited to that. Watch this space, hopefully. But then you never know. You never think you’re going to make it. I certainly didn’t think I would be a filmmaker when I grew up in Invercargill. And then you’re like ‘wow this is so amazing’, and then I’ve made a couple of big ads in London and that’s even more amazing. Things have just kept getting better so hopefully it will happen. And hopefully they’ll be funny and good and people will want to see you.