The country that heavily stocked the cast of Hollywood’s golden era—think Bela Lugosi, Tony Curtis and Zsa Zsa Gabor—is looking to climb back into the industry’s spotlight. And even if the first film under production at Korda, Universal Pictures’ “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army,” isn’t quite the ticket, officials hope it will mark the start of a cinematic renaissance. Certainly Sandor Demjan, the millionaire Hungarian developer behind the €91 million venture, is thinking big. Within five years, he reckons that the studio could double in size—and double again within 10 years. “I hope in time we are going to see Oscar-winning films made in Hungary by Hungarians,” he says.
Other countries in the region have similar ambitions. Since the collapse of communism, Western moviemakers have been looking East for low-cost locations. Now the competition for their business is really heating up. The acknowledged leader in the region is the Czech Republic, whose world-class studios provide a backdrop for about 30 international films a year. Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman were recently in Prague to shoot the thriller “Wanted,” as was the cast of “Prince Caspian,” the latest of the “Chronicles of Narnia.” But neighboring countries are horning in. The hills of Romania doubled for rural North Carolina in the 2003 Oscar-winning film “Cold Mountain,” and Bulgaria has turned out a stream of action movies for the Western market, including Brian De Palma’s “The Black Dahlia.”
Those could be just the prequel. New facilities, money and financial lures are transforming the filmmaking business in Eastern Europe and Russia, threatening Czech dominance and unsettling the major studios of the West. In Bulgaria, work begins shortly on an overhaul of the newly privatized Boyana Film Studios, which is slated to build 13 soundproof stages as well as camera-ready street scenes of England and New York to lure foreign filmmakers. In Russia, work is underway on the new Thema Production studios in St. Petersburg, modeled on the Warner Brothers spread in Los Angeles and supposedly capable of handling four major films simultaneously. “Right now we get the feeling that there’s a queue of Western directors just waiting at the door,” says Mikhail Dunayev, boss of Systema Mass-Media, the company behind the Russian project.
To be sure, the versatile photogenic qualities of these cities are a big draw. “[St. Petersburg] can look like Venice, Holland, the America of the 1920s or Versailles,” says Dunayev, and Budapest has stood in convincingly for Buenos Aires and Munich. But it’s the bottom line that really counts. The Russians claim their prices for such things as lighting engineers or carpenters are 40 percent lower than in Western Europe and half those in Los Angeles; in Bulgaria, the margin is even greater. “Let’s be honest: the difference in cost can be 60 to 70 percent,” says David Varod, the Israel-born producer behind the Boyana studio.
That’s a powerful lure at a time when the strength of the pound sterling has forced the U.S. movie industry to reconsider using prominent British studios like Pinewood. Since Hungary’s Parliament approved a hefty tax break for moviemakers in 2004, annual spending on film production in the country has quadrupled. “The crews in Hungary were superb and we could find everything that we needed, but in the end it was the tax break that really counted,” says Leslee Udwin, a British producer who recently completed filming “Mrs. Ratcliffe’s Revolution,” a comedy set in ’60s East Germany, in the country.
Such generosity has rattled the competition. “The writing is on the wall,” says David Minkowski, head of film production for Prague’s Stillking. “The Czech Republic now needs to adapt if it is to survive as a major film destination.” Eastern studios are also feeling heat from the West, where governments are seeking new ways to keep their filmmakers home; earlier this year, Germany launched a dedicated “film fund” to supply grants worth up to 20 percent of production costs for locally made movies. And Britain tweaked its tax system in 2006 to benefit the native film business.
To be sure, filmmakers face a complex set of equations when choosing a location, including such factors as language, weather and technical skills. Savvy directors who want the one-stop shop—where everything from props to postproduction workshops are close at hand—are still more likely to settle for a big British studio. “What we can offer is a sense of security,” says Julia Hillsden of Pinewood Studios, where the James Bond and Harry Potter series are filmed. “If you make a film here you can be sure it will be done on time and on budget.” Opting for an unfamiliar facility represents one more risk in an already risky business. Hungary might want to hold off on building that budawood sign—if only for the moment.
