“It’s Not About The Finished Work, It’s About The Process”: Interview With Phil Grabsky, Producer & Writer of DEGAS: PASSION FOR PERFECTION

One of the grand allures of cinema is its ability to transport us to different worlds and experiences from the comforts of our theatre seats. Just this weekend, audiences can escape into the amazing interiors of The Continental Hotel, the Pokemon-filled hub of Ryme City, or even the apocalyptic wastelands of Avengers: Endgame. This extends to documentaries as well, offering us glimpses into people, places and parts of the world we may never visit, which is one of the main attractions of the highly successful art-film series Exhibition On Screen.

In collaboration with the world’s greatest museums and galleries, Exhibition On Screen offers international audiences highly detailed and researched profiles on history’s most beloved and prolific artists, often based on current exhibitions of their work, whether it be Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent Van Gogh and more. These iconic displays of art are finely curated alongside expert interviews, candid behind-the-scenes access of museum maintenance, breathtaking world-capturing photography and dramatisations, all neatly delivered within well-polished, informative packages that are accessible for all audiences; young or old, amateur or historian of the arts.

Executive Producer and Director Phil Grabsky is the award-winning pioneer behind the series, who has been making documentaries for over 30 years now for both television and film. With Exhibition On Screen, he became the main original force of bringing exhibition-based art films to the cinema, with his work shown in over 1,400 cinemas in about 60 countries. The series’ latest instalment is Degas: Passion for Perfection, part of its sixth season and about to make its Australian debut, focusing on the life of famed French artist Edgar Degas (who I’ll refrain from referring to as an impressionist, because as the documentary responsibly informs us, it was a label he explicitly rejected).

I had the chance to talk with Phil Grabsky about Degas: Passion for Perfection, the inception of Exhibition on Screen, the importance of art and art history in today’s world, casting actors for biographical roles and the challenges of creating profiles on these historical figures.

Our interview began mid-conversation, as we talked about Phil’s films.

Alex Lines for Film Inquiry: These are pretty important documents of these artists, there’s a timeless quality to them.

Phil Grabsky: One of the reasons I kind of moved away from television because television – which has changed a bit – is always about one moment and then it disappears. I tend to view the films more like books, which is, if they’re good, then they have longterm value. Books written hundreds of years ago are as fresh or as valuable today as the day they were written.

We’re now on our 23rd and 24th feature films – something like that – and we’ve got plenty planned as well. It’s been a very busy 10 years. The season that’s coming out now in Australia has Degas, Young Picasso, Rembrandt (the Encore) and Van Gogh & Japan. It’s a really strong season.

When and how did the Exhibition on Screen series begin?

Phil Grabsky: We had become the biggest independent producer of arts films for television in the world, but it was a constant struggle to persuade arts commissioning editors – even when they had the title of head of Arts – to make them understand why they should be making these films, why they should be going out peak times, why they should repeat them, etc. Television kind of lost its way a little bit about 10-15 years ago, it started to lose its public service ethos.

On one hand it was a bit of frustration on my part about that, on the other hand, there was a complete revolution, technologically-speaking, in the cinema. When we did some films about composers, which did do very well in Australia, they run for months in the cinema, it was around about that time that you were still releasing films on film, which is very expensive and very, very difficult.

Then you had this digital revolution which has completely changed things. You had the possibility  of distributing films on satellite, which is what live opera does. It affects the quality a bit, so we don’t personally use that route, but we now deliver our films on a hard drive to almost 1,500 cinemas around the world. The cinema themselves have also improved their screens, their projectors, their audio, and these new hard drives mean you’re basically seeing what I see in the edit suite, which has never been possible before. I’d go so far to say that the technology doesn’t need to improve. It’s like you wouldn’t think I need to improve oil painting. I need to improve the clay that I use when I make a sculpture. Cinema now is as good as it needs to be, which is fantastic. But it also means that there’s much more choice for an audience, because now, not only can you see the Hollywood blockbusters, but you can seek theatre, opera, art.

But when I first had this idea back in 2009, people thought ‘It’s weird, who wants to go to the cinema to see an art film?’. When we did that first one on Leonardo, that was a huge success and that’s all the cinemas need to see. Once we are screening in a country, people just want more and more, so we limit ourselves. We think there is a limit to not only what we can produce, but what the audience can watch in a year. We limit ourselves to four or five films a year, then it’s really a question of which films do we make? Because there’s a lot of choice, galleries come to us with ideas, we are always generating ideas and the audience has ideas too.

The main other thing was, if you have these big screens in high definition, it is also a wonderful way to engage with art for a couple of reasons; One is, for those 85 minutes, I’m asking you to turn off your phone, not to chat, not to be eating your dinner. People really like the fact that they can really engage with these artistic biographies, seeing this art in high definition, in a way you just wouldn’t normally see it.

We want people to go to galleries. We’re encouraging people to go to galleries. If you can see a painting face to face, great, but most people can’t see these paintings face to face. Most of our films are based on exhibitions – not all of them – and most people can’t get to these exhibitions. We’re big in Colombia. I suspect most of our audience in Columbia have never been to any of these exhibitions, maybe a handful. It’s a massive amount of work for us, but the reaction we get from them all is great, I have to say Australia has always been one of our most enthusiastic audiences.

In Degas, one of the experts says, in regards to his work with female models, that “when you’ve got a good model, the work’s half done”, is this something you believe when it comes to picking subjects for your films?

Phil Grabsky: Cinema’s all about storytelling. Even though we have the same Australian audiences that are very loyal, that understand that we are Exhibition On Screen, deliberately look out for Exhibition On Screen films, I still think that people are drawn to the name of the artist and the sense of, well, what’s the story you’re going to be? I think you’re right. I think that it is important. I mean we always spend quite a lot of time before we start on – even when we’ve chosen an exhibition or chosen artists – on what the story is.

It’s sometimes a bit unpredictable. Last year for example, I thought Hockney would do better, it didn’t do as well as I thought, but Cézanne: Portraits of a Life did much better than I expected, I mean, you’re never quite sure, you know. For Degas, I was surprised at how well it did. He seems to bring in a whole new audience and people went to see it more than once, which did surprise me a bit.

We self-finance the films, so we have to be a bit careful. I think you’re right, I think the choice is very important. It’s also a question of the balance across the season as well. I mean it would be strange if you slated four Impressionists for the season. We always try to have a balance and that includes sometimes doing a more challenging artist even though it might take us 10 years for that film to break even. We want to be doing Leonardo or Bosch from 500 years ago. Hockney or Freud is coming up next year – more contemporary artists – but it is important who we choose.

In an ideal world, the audience would come to see an Exhibition On Screen film irrespectively, they would just say, ‘Oh, I like Exhibition On Screen, I’ll go and see if it even if I don’t recognize the artist’s name’. I think even a brand that’s been going longer than us, like NT Live, people are going to choose on the basis of what the story sounds like, whether they’ve heard of the author, whether they’ve heard of the actors. That’s just symptomatic of the fact that we, as you know – I’m the audience as well – have a lot of choice. We have a slightly older demographic, so they might have a bit more time, but still there’s plenty for people to do – we have to really be cautious.

When it comes to piecing each film together, how much research comes from the exhibition itself, and how much from your own production team?

Phil Grabsky: I’d say that at the moment, when we first started, the first season was all exhibition films and gradually it was always the intention to build in a way that’s it’s now half and half. When it is a film that’s based on an exhibition, we absolutely very early on we get the draft catalog, we talk to the curators, we talk to the institution and we try to glean as much information as we possibly can about what their story is or what their exhibitions are about.

For us, it’s always an excuse to make a biography. Our films are biographies of artists or on an occasion, a particular painting or a particular period, then we go off and do a lot of our own research. What always makes me happy is when the curators and the directors of the galleries come to see our film and afterwards they say “We’ve not noticed that before”. What also happens is that we’ll go off and film the biographical footage before the exhibition opens and often they actually put clips from our film into their exhibition. I just had an email yesterday about doing that. Another example of this was when the original Cézanne film was on in London,  they had the show on at the National Portrait Gallery, but they had clips from our filming in the show to give people a sense of where he worked and lived in France.

David Bickerstaff directed this one, with you taking a producing and co-writing credit. What was your involvement with this entry?

Phil Grabsky: David is Australian and I’ve known him now for 30 odd years, we’ve worked together a lot. He directs two films a year for Exhibition On Screen. Absolutely brilliant. We work very closely together on all of our films; we go on shoots together, co-write together. With my own films, I like to write on my own, but I’ll always ask David’s opinion.

We have slightly different skills, such as he edits his own films and I don’t, I always use my editor. On the other hand, I produce all the films and he’s lucky that he doesn’t need to get involved in that. I can just tell him what the budget is and he’ll just go off and make the film. One of the things I like about David is that his background is in fine arts. He was a painter when I met him and I got to know him and I gave him a job within Seventh Art Productions, which gradually led to him directing films. He is at heart an artist and I think that comes through in the way that he approaches his films, the way he shoots and edits his films. But we do work very closely together, for example, with my Leonardo film, he’s helped me shoot, he watches the films and gives me comments.

What are your earliest memories or thoughts on Degas’ work?

Phil Grabsky: Almost by accident, I spent most of my 35 years making documentaries, doing biographies – the very first film I made was a biography. I’ve made some very big history series for the BBC and the Discovery Channel and others and I found that a really useful way of breaking down a historical period is to look at a specific person. For example, I did a series for the BBC, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, it was a massive subject, it’s 1,500-2,000 years of history. The way that I did it was I chose six biographies to look at and then I start on each biography, one of the first things I do is to write down what I think I know about each one and then all the questions or things that I don’t know.

My view is that we’re all intelligent, we’re all equally intelligent, the only difference is the amount to which you’ve been exposed to certain areas, cause your parents was your schooling or you know, how much time you’ve spent, for example, learning about an artist or composer. We’re all equally capable of learning, it’s just giving it the time.

Many people will think they know about Mozart or Picasso or they might have a vague knowledge of the name, but actually, when you sit somebody down and say, ‘Well, what do you actually know about Degas?’ I can pretty much guarantee you, even people who are interested in the arts, who declare themselves to be interested in the arts, will probably have a paragraph’s worth of knowledge. And that’s fine, because my job is to start from that point of view and say, okay, this is what he really was, this is why he’s important.

I’m no different, for me Degas was Ballerinas or going back a bit now, I was aware of some of the horse racing pictures as well. I knew him as part of the Impressionists, obviously having made art films over the last 35 years, I’ve come across him quite a lot. One of the key things to understand about the Impressionists is that they’re all very different and some of them didn’t like that term, some of them objected it. But now, I am now able to look, at an impressionist painting that I’ve not seen before and tell you whether it’s Cézanne or Degas or Caillebotte or a Manet or a Monet or a Van Gogh. Somebody in the film says that he thinks that Degas was among the greatest of all impressionists – maybe even the greatest – certainly hugely important. What our film shows you is just his passion for perfection.

How every single day, and it’s true for other artists, he woke up motivated, to try and get better. That’s something that I think is inspiring. I mean, that’s true of me too, every day I get up and I think, ‘Well, I’ve got to do these emails today, I got to learn a bit more about audio, I want to go and take some pictures of the local river or whatever it might be’. He was just the same, but he was also hugely significant. Then you start looking and you start seeing paintings in the film that you’ve not seen before. Sculptures that you might not have looked at that closely before, so you will come away with a much greater sense of who he was; complicated, rounded, influential.

For us, the starting point for this film was an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam. Maybe some people in Australia have not heard of the Fitzwilliam, but it’s the Gallery Museum of Cambridge University. It’s one of the oldest museums in Britain and because of donations, they have the biggest collection of Degas’ work in the country, across the genre. They decided to do an exhibition which is just focused on his passion for art as a whole, it’s a beautiful exhibition. We decided to film the exhibition and use that as our springboard to look more closely at him, the artist.

In the documentary, it’s mentioned that a lot of that collection came from these paintings and sketches that he never intended to show anybody. Is there ever any issues with displaying pieces of art that the artist themselves never wanted out there?

Phil Grabsky: That’s another interesting question, isn’t it? If an artist paints something that they don’t really want people to see, should we show them? It’s like diaries and letters, you know when you write to wife (or vice versa) a personal letter, should you read it a hundred years later? Often, one of the first places I go to with films is correspondence, whether it’s Mozart and Beethoven or whether it’s Picasso or Degas. It’s a tricky one, but I think ultimately my view is that I want to make the best possible film I can, you’ve going to be responsible, you’ve got to be balanced, but if those paintings are now out there to be seen, if those letters have been published already, then some family member presumably has taken the decision to release them, then I’m going to use them.

I’ll be responsible about it and careful about it. I mean Degas is very interesting because one of the key things with these artists, you have to understand the economical context. To properly understand my work as a filmmaker or your work as someone who writes about film, you have to understand the financial context. So if you are from a very wealthy background, that will give you freedoms different from somebody who is having to work day shift as the receptionist at a hotel, for example. Same for me, my ability to raise funds affects what I can do. With these artists, to really understand why Manet painted the way he did or Renoir or Van Gogh, you have to understand their financial background, as when they had financial security, it allowed them to be much freer.

Renoir didn’t really want to paint family portraits, he did it because he had to earn money. Van Gogh painted flowers in vases because his brothers said to him, ‘You know, there’s a market for that’. Degas had a financial security that basically allowed him to just focus on his art. That’s a bit strange in some ways, if I make film, for me it is hugely important that people see it, I would find it really troubling if I made a film and the whole benefit of it was just the process of making the film, but I didn’t really care about it, that it was an anathema to me.

I work every single day. I work to make sure that our films are seen. We’re constantly upgrading our website so people can go and download films I made 20 years ago. In fact, some of my most popular films on Amazon, for example, are the art history films we made 20 years ago. Degas is not the only one, but he’s a bit unusual in that he just has so much, and again, there’s a really interesting bit in the film where it talks about his beautiful ballet sculptures and someone comes to Degas one morning and he’s melted one right down, and he says it’s not about the finished work, it’s about the process. I think that’s part of his passion/obsession. Because he wasn’t really answering to the market, I mean he did engage with the market a little bit, cause it wasn’t really answering to it, it did allow him to be utterly as devoted and passionate about what he did.

Luckily for us, when he died, his artwork was well looked after. It’s fascinating with these artists, it’s tempting sometimes to finish the day they die, but looking at what happens to their work after they died is the reason we have the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, which has so much Van Gogh because he hadn’t sold his work, his brother had so much of it. Whereas Monet, who was hugely popular in his own lifetime – we made a film about this – there was this dealer who was crossing the Atlantic and selling all of his paintings in America. Now if you want to see Monet, you’d have to go to all these extraordinary museums in the states, so it is just part of his character.

When creating a profile for each artist, what is the process for picking their voice and on-screen actors?

Phil Grabsky: It’s something you have to be quite cautious about, if you do it badly, you’re in real trouble. I’ve never had any inclination to make feature films – dramatic feature films – I always argue that true life is interesting enough, I don’t need to make it up. I’ll give you an example, last night on the plane I watched the new film about Van Gogh, At Eternity’s Gate. I’ll say publicly that our film about Van Gogh gives you more insight into him than that film does. What that film does is it just tells you a well-worn story, because it’s more dramatic to have him be this slightly crazed guy.

That’s what the film pedals. Whereas Van Gogh was, broadly speaking, different to that. It underplays just how much he studied, I mean there’s a couple of scenes of him visiting galleries, looking at paintings, but he looks at them for like five seconds and then moves on. Van Gogh was like Degas. He was passionate and he’d go paint a painting for days. He knew how to paint in other ways, but he was very thoughtful about it – and you know, there’s no real evidence that the kids shot him.

I mean, you often see in films Van Gogh walking through a field of sunflowers – well, fields of sunflowers didn’t exist, well they weren’t a crop in those days. I think a documentary filmmaker has to question everything, analyse everything, then you get a greater sense of the truth. When you’re making feature films, you have to dramatise, you focus on the sex and the drugs and the alcoholism, but actually these things can get exaggerated. Amadeus is a wonderful film, but it’s 180 degrees from the truth, there’s so much myth.

If you are then going to pick an actor or actress, you need to be very careful with it. I think David does it particularly well, the actor he chose for Van Gogh I thought was extraordinary. With Degas, the question is, what is the point? Why do you do it? Well, sometimes it just helps the audience connect with our story. He spends a lot of time casting. He can see past the pictures in spotlights – how they are going to look made up with a beard or without beard? We’re always very cautious about how much of it we use, they don’t speak, so they’re just seen writing, smoking, painting, whatever it might be. I think the answer is to be cautious and judicious with it and not do it too much.

If I was a little critical of the Degas, I’d say that you’re a bit hamstrung because we only have the old Degas. What always interests me – and why I just did this film that’s coming out later Young Picasso – in some ways, it’s the first 25 years that are the most interesting. By the time an artist is 25, in most cases, they’re pretty well formed. And it’s always like, why him? That’s the whole premise of the Picasso film, why is this little kid from Málaga at the age of 26-27, is he painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and becoming one of the significant artists of the 20th century? There’s a little bit of a danger when you focus on an older artist.

It can be a bit distancing. With the impressionists, because of the arrival of photography, by the time it arrived, they were older men, so the only photographs you have with them are as older men, broadly speaking. But again, I think David does it quite well. It’s pretty clear that this is him as an older man, either in real time or remembering something from the past. In our 23-24 feature films we’ve done so far, I think we’ve only done this four times.

As we’re in the midst of a generational shift, one more reliant on technology and social media, what role do you feel art, and its history, plays in today’s world?

Phil Grabsky: I’ve spent the last 20 years being an evangelist of the arts, I’m not the only one of course, but the amount of conversations I’ve had with, as I said earlier, commissioning editors at television stations who even had the title head of arts, trying to explain why they should commission a particular series or put it out big time, how it’s not only about responding to a clearly existing audience, it’s also about trying to develop an audience.

My son might not want to listen to Mozart, but then when you play some Mozart, then they like it. We’re doing our children a disservice if you don’t give them the opportunity to understand how great these great composers were, at least try all these great artists out. These people I make films about are among a relatively small amount of people who are the best example of what we as humans are capable of. You know, whether it’s Mozart or Degas, these are extraordinarily creative people.

We focus on the biography and there’s plenty in there. You know, whether you’re a sportsman or a nurse or whatever, the passion and the application of these artists is inspiring, I think. There are those people that you meet who say, oh, I’ve got no interest in the arts or the arts is not for me, it’s what other people do. I’ll always have a conversation with them because we are all interested in the arts. We will have pictures on our wall, we all make choices about our cars or our clothes or even the wallpapers on our phones.

Instagram’s fantastic. The beauty of people’s photographs that they post are absolutely brilliant. We have an Instagram page and I love it, we post a picture and we get immediate responses from Mexico and Venezuela and New Zealand. It shows that people are very creative and very artistic and I think that’s in all of us. I think that, again, because of our upbringing, our parents or our schools or what’s on television is hugely important. Sometimes you might think, oh, it’s a bit elitist, it’s a bit posh, no, it’s absolutely for everybody.

I don’t care who you are, you can look at Degas paintings or sculptures and appreciate it. I think the art world is a bit guilty actually of talking in terms which makes it seem like I don’t understand what they’re talking about, I don’t get it, especially with contemporary art, it was that sense of, well, you’ve gotta be an insider to really appreciate it or going the other way and being really patronising, so like “Selfie day in the Gallery”, as if that’s the only way that ordinary people can engage with is by taking a selfie, bullshit.

I don’t care who you are, you could be a bus driver or an opera singer, your ability to appreciate a Degas is the same, it’s about how it’s communicated to you. That’s what I want to do with these films, is to be as democratic as I possibly can, to make them for everybody. I used to say to my 8-year-old son, but now my 17-year-old son or my case, my very elderly parents or even my brother for example, he’ll claim to have no interest in art, but when I get him to sit down and watch the films, for me, when he tells me he’s enjoyed them, that’s like one of the biggest ticks I can get, because he’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, I didn’t know anything about Degas but it was really interesting!’.

Or this happens a lot when people say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s encouraged me to take up paints or it’s encouraged me to visit my local gallery’, it is very important to me to encourage people. To talk about generational change, I guess generation changes happening all the time, I do think there’s plenty of reasons to be a little bit pessimistic at the moment. But the thing that keeps me optimistic is the younger generation. We have a long term project in Afghanistan, half populations is under 20, and they have no interest in war or fighting or the Taliban and Isis and the rest of it. I see that kind of generational change and I think it has a lot to do with mobile technology, it gets a lot of criticism, but actually in some ways it’s very liberating and I think that those kind of changes are happening, in say places like Saudi Arabia and other countries.

When I went to the states recently, I turned up to Washington on the day about half a million kids were marching to have some more gun control. All the whole environmental movement too, when I was at school, I have no memory of talking about environmental issues or gender issues. I don’t remember talking about charity very much or getting in trouble if we made some silly racist accent. These are all things that my kids are much more aware of and I just want to encourage them at the same time to also be really engaged with art. What I will say as well, is that if you go to a gallery on a Saturday morning, there’ll be plenty of young people in there. I think the big failing has been that television has kind of dropped the ball, but I think cinema is picking that ball back up.

For my final question, If someone was to do an Exhibition On Screen documentary about your work, who would you like to direct it?

Phil Grabsky: Well, that’s interesting, my initial response would be to say David Bickerstaff. It is quite interesting because it’s quite hard to summarize someone’s life in 85 minutes and I do sometimes think about what would be the key moments in my own life. But if I was then to watch the film, I wonder whether people would’ve gotten that. For example, in my first 18 years, there are absolutely key moments or key people, where by the time I was 18, I was determined against a lot of opposition, to be a photographer and I of course can identify where that comes from.

I guess I’d want somebody who would ask the right questions. Filmmaking for me is about asking the right questions. It’s about being curious and asking questions. My mother’s English Christian, my father is American Jewish from the Bronx and I was born in New York, but we came to England when I was one. It’d be easy for someone making a biography on me to say ‘Born in New York…’, but then ignore that, when actually having that kind of wisecracking New York father, having that sense of being slightly different from the other kids in my class, being born in New York, is actually quite important.

I would have to say after doing these films together, I’d want David. The only thing I would say is I probably wouldn’t want him to get an actor, because you know, I’d be a little nervous about who he’d choose. We’re doing this Freud film (Lucian Freud) and we are working with the person who was his studio manager and an artist in his own right David Dawson, and we did talk to him about showing some footage of a recent one man show, by a wonderful British actor called Henry Goodman who played Lucian Freud. He said that would be uncomfortable because no matter how good he is, he’s never going to be the Lucian that I knew. That would be tricky to watch a film about yourself where someone else is playing you.

Film Inquiry thanks Phil Grabsky for taking the time to talk with us.

Degas: Passion For Perfection opens in Australian cinemas on 6th June, 2019. Details about upcoming Exhibition On Screen Films, session times/locations and past entries, can be found at: www.exhibitiononscreen.com