Since I’m getting ready for the New York Film Festival, this year’s Tribeca Film Festival already feels like a long time ago. However, even when film festivals are long over the great films remain stuck in my memory. One of the top documentaries I saw at Tribeca this year was Red Obsession, which explores recent developments in France’s famed Bordeaux wine region and the fallout when its world-renowned and expensive wines became a fad amongst China’s wealthiest citizens in recent years. Red Obsession is fascinating whether or not you have a taste for wine, because as much as it is about wine it is about economics, politics, and cultural differences. The documentary is saturated with fascinating information (check out my review here), and is tied together by smooth narration by Russell Crowe.
I had the opportunity to speak with Australian filmmaker Warwick Ross, who directed the documentary. What was wonderful about our conversation is that not only did he provide insight on the film, but he added a lot of information about recent developments in the Bordeaux wine industry since the documentary was completed.
Q: What was it about the international economics of the wine industry that drove you to want to make a documentary about it?
For me there was an intriguing element as soon as I knew that China was involved. I was born in Hong Kong and raised there until the age of ten. My dad is Canadian but lived in China for forty years, most of his business life, and I also make wine. I’m a filmmaker, I’m a winemaker, and I have a fairly strong China connection, so I think it was those three elements rather than the pure economic side of it because at that stage we didn’t know too much about it, I have to say. It was during the course that year that the rise and fall happened. We had no idea that the fall was going to happen. We knew that the prices that were about to be set might be the ones to break all-time records, but we didn’t even know that. Once that had happened, everybody started talking about greed and avarice and that the Bordelais were putting all their eggs in one basket in focusing on China exclusively to the extent that their traditional clients like America and Britain were dropping away. It was kind of a heady mix of all these interesting things, but we didn’t know the outcome when we dived in so it became more economic as the story unfolded.
Q: The Bordeaux wine region is in a many ways an extremely exclusive industry and your documentary focus on what many might consider a controversial period its history. Did you run into any issues with accessing or investigating the industry?
We did, and that was despite having Andrew Caillard, who ended up becoming our associate producer. In the beginning he was just an acquaintance who became a friend and is very highly regarded in the wine industry. He is a master of wine, and there are only three hundred of those in the world and he happens to be one of them. He knows a hell of a lot about Bordeaux and offered to unlock the gates to get past the gatekeepers of all of these great châteaux so we could interview these people. But even he had some difficulty. I think that a film called Mondovino, which I’m sure you know of, that came out a number of years ago, which at least from the Bordeaux point-of-view did a bit of a hatchet job on Bordeaux and a lot of the Bordelais. The people we wanted to interview were extremely gun shy and it took us quite a while to get their confidence, which really only happened after the second or third interview. We ended up doing with most of our people about five interviews over the course of fourteen months. So it took quite a while to develop trust. Once we developed the trust we got franker and most honest answers from those owners of those châteaux, and in fact there was one châteaux – Château Latour – which was the hold out. That took us the most part of ten months asking and applying to finally get a “Yes” there. I think that really came about because we managed to get an interview with one of their most famous clients, Francis Ford Coppola, when we were in Hong Kong, and that was about ten months into filming. Once I secured that interview I went back to the CEO of Château Latour and said that we managed to interview one of your most famous clients which was a terrific interview, would you consider giving an interview yourself? I’d like your input, your perspective. We suddenly got a “Yes” from him. But it took a long time to get to a lot of these people and to get to them to the depths that I really required.
Q: Where there any concepts you wanted to work into the documentary but were unable to because of that resistance or the ever-changing ongoing economic narrative?
We interviewed something like ninety people, of whom maybe thirty got into the film, so the bulk of the people we interviewed didn’t get in. There were so many themes that presented themselves during the course of filming, many of which I was absolutely fascinated by, like the political side of China and the food safety issue in China, where people are dying every day from counterfeit food. Children are dying from drinking adulterated milk powder because it’s not milk powder it’s chemically-created powder that is sold on the market and ingested by these kids. So many aspects that were touched on, particularly of our Chinese interviewees, that I found so interesting, but we began to lose focus. It was difficult enough to keep focused in the film with all the themes that we touch on. It was kind of tricky to keep wine as the focus and not skew off into some economical analysis of Chinese history [Laughs]. There were many, many themes, a lot of which that were raised by those Chinese interviewees, which probably need to be held for other documentaries.
Q: Were there any documentaries that you found especially inspirational for creating this documentary?
We referred to a lot of documentaries during the course of this: Inside Job, which of course I love, Enron, Client 9. None of them are wine documentaries as you can tell, but they all have a fantastic narrative arc, really interesting, driving narratives. Really important to me, because this was the first documentary I ever made because I’m generally a feature filmmaker, that I lend a feature film structure or perspective to this particular film. I’m not sure in the future whether I would be influenced to go in other ways or to do things differently, but certainly this one I felt very strongly that very traditional three act and the rise and fall of something. Not that I knew that it would fall, we didn’t have any idea – so that was a godsend, really – but when having all that footage in the cutting room those films were kind of inspirational for me. Also, Mondovino was inspirational really even though it’s an entirely different film – you know, handheld and two hours twenty minutes long I think it is – so very different. But the thing I liked about that film was although it was about wine it was about something completely different from wine. That was really important to me. I did not want to make a “wine documentary” because there have been so many of those and they sort of end up being analyses of acid, tannins and all that stuff and they end up Brahms or Vivaldi playing over the top. I got to say, I was terrified of falling into that trap and had to keep reminding myself that was not the film I was making here. In fact, one of the very first things I did was I started playing music to myself at home because I felt that the right music would put me in the right frame. I listened to a lot of soundtracks and Peter Weir. I love Peter Weir’s films, yeah he’s an Aussie, but I just love his use of music. So I listened to a lot of his soundtracks and I also went to films like The Social Network, which has a gorgeous soundtrack, and American Beauty of course, which is referenced an awful lot by filmmakers because it’s a gorgeous score. I played a lot of that stuff over again and again until I was really infused with that tone because the tone of the film was really important to me.
Q: Have you continued to follow the wine industry after you finished the documentary, and do you have any ambition to make a follow-up documentary?
It would have to be a pretty interesting follow-up. I think it’s pretty hard to beat the dynamics of world events and the world of wine in the twelve months that we filmed. A lot of people have nudged me and have given me a wink and said, “I guess the next one is going to be about Burgundy and India” [Laughs]. Certainly the Burgundians have approached me and said, “Gee, how come you made a film about those guys and why not about us? We’re much more interesting than they are!” But it would need to have an overlay of something else happening at the same time. At the moment, because I don’t see anything different happening in the world of wine than what we already explored, the answer is probably no, but I’m open to it. Certainly what’s happened since we finished filming is that the prices of Bordeaux have continued to tumble in China, which is interesting. That 2012 En Primeur that we finished the film with, it was the 2011 vintage being presented, the volumes of sales dropped by sixty percent, and the actual prices on those wines dropped by up to fifty percent. Well the En Primeur that just finished, which was April/May, just a few months ago, those volumes of sales dropped again and the prices dropped again, so they’re down in total something around 75-80 percent over two years, which is pretty extraordinary.
Q: How did Russell Crowe get involved as narrator of the documentary?
Russell was on the top of my wishlist right from the get-go as for narrators. The list had some pretty interesting people on there I got to say, but Russell was always right at the top. I just wanted that voice of Maximus [Laughs]. That voice to me was so powerful, intriguing, and authoritative. Anyway, it turned out that a young guy that ended up being my executive producer on the film, his family knows Russell quite well and I put it to him to ask Russell. He asked Russell, who said to show him what we put together so far, so we showed him a cut of the film which he loved. He committed to it and said he’d do it for whatever we had in the budget, but I need some time and at the moment the most difficult thing is time because he was doing Noah, he was Superman’s dad, he was doing Les Miserables, and I think he was the mayor of New York (in Broken City) roughly all at the same time. So to try and squeeze in the narration was pretty tricky, but we managed to find a few hours.
Red Obsession will be available on VOD and other On Demand platforms in the U.S. on September 6 and Canada on September 27. For a list of theaters where it will be playing, visit the documentary’s Facebook page here.
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