Producer, Chris Ihidero, in this interview with Naij.com’s Michael Abimboye talks about the problems of Nigeria movie industry, Nollywood, his career so far, producing Shuga series and his coming Story Story workshop.
Chris Ihidero
You have been a movie producer for a while, what are the challenges you have faced in the course of your career?
I actually haven’t produced any movie apart from my two short films. What I have done is to write, direct and produce for television. As you know, I produced Shuga (series 4), which is perhaps the biggest drama series in Africa. It’s been interesting but I guess that I have had the good fortune to have been trained by and worked with Amaka Igwe for eight years, which prepared me for anything I wanted to do in the line of production either as a writer, a director or a producer. There will be challenges as there are challenges in film industry anywhere in the world. So those challenges have been there. Challenges around availability of skills and technics, availability of artists and crew who are up to a certain standard and all of that. But that you find in any and every film industry across the world that your work as either a writer or a producer is to transcend those challenges and be able to do what you have to do.
How do you think Nigeria can overcome these challenges?
I think that sometimes we have the wrong focus concerning how our industry has to move forward. I think we are paying too much attention to money and too little attention to skills, technics and capacity. And by that I mean we have major problems in the industry. Distribution is a major one. We still have too few cinema screens. DVD distribution is near impossible because of piracy; the biggest marketers are the biggest pirates. The kind of third party money you make from Africa Magic or Iroko TV or any of those things is still pretty small but that is how it is anywhere in the world. So, because you are not making good money from DVD or cinema you want Africa Magic to pay you 100,000 dollars but they don’t pay like that anywhere for anything anywhere in the world. It’s not a “Nigerian thing” or that they hate Nollywood, it is just that content is expensive. Although, you have to pay a certain amount for content anywhere in the world. If we shift our focus a bit and then of course, President Goodluck Jonathan was very magnanimous to Nollywood. He was actually the first president that gave the film industry some attention, but, in my own opinion, the resources were not utilized in the best way they could have. I think that we could have spent a lot more of that money in and around sorting issues of distribution, around piracy, around intellectual property rights rather than give money to people to make films or what they called capacity building, which included taking 40 people to America, giving someone money to go to UCLA. That is not capacity building in my own opinion.
Why are more people not making short films?
Short films are hard to do. It’s not a Nigeria problem. They are hard to do anywhere in the world just as short stories are hard to write. Go and read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, you would know immediately she is not a great short story writer. There are a couple of short stories in that collection that are fine but none is mind blowing like what you will find if you read Purple Hibiscus or Half of a Yellow Sun or Americanah. When you have 400 pages to tell a story, it’s easier than when you have 10 pages. I make short films because they help me tell my. Perhaps that is one of my strengths as a writer, and director, the ability to tell stories in a short form. When we did Big Daddy in 2011 for instance, I just had strong opinions about rape. I wanted to say something and I wrote the screenplay and directed it. It was nominated for several awards but we won two and now it has almost half a million views on YouTube. That is probably Nigeria’s most watched short film ever.
Are you currently working on any short film?
As a content producer, you are always working on stuff. I have screenplays I am working on, some that are completed. I told myself I wasn’t going to shoot anything this year, I was going to write a lot and spend my time preparing my Story Story masterplan.
What is the workshop, Story Story, all about?
Story Story is an intervention project that seeks to help storytellers tell their stories better; in a nut shell, that is what it is. It is an attempt to help young story tellers tell their stories better. When I say young, I don’t mean in age. I mean, you may have been 40 years old and you wrote your first story last week and that is fine by me.
You doing this in partnership with the British Council?
I am not doing it with the British Council, I am doing it at the British Council. They have been gracious enough to offer us their training space for use. But the British Council is not paying for it or paying us anything for it but they have offered their training facilities for us to use.
What do people stand to gain from attending the workshop?
If I can help tell people their stories better, then I would have succeeded. If I ask you to name your best 10 Nollywood films of all time, I am sure six to seven of them would be old films. You would mention old films because those guys knew how to tell our stories. What has happened now is that we have digital technology, we have access to cameras, we have access to better sound, our pictures are clearer, our sounds are better but our stories suck. Why do our stories suck? Because our new storytellers don’t have something the old guys had. A lot of those old guys grew up in an environment where stories were important. They had grandfathers who told them stories. They were bred on the NTA soap tradition, which was very strong on stories. They read their books. Remember, at that point in Nigeria, we all read similar books. If you attended school you must have read Akin the Drummer Boy, Pot of Gold, Eze Goes to School, all those things. So, we had similar experiences. Now, it’s very diverse. A lot of people make film because they are making films. They have become film makers because they were film watchers.
What next after Story Story?
Next year is going to be interesting, God willing. I have got a couple of films lined up. I may be directing my first Nollywood film in February. I am producing for television. I’m consulting as well. We are doing Story Story. We are running True Nollywood Stories (TNS), which is one of the products of my media company, Pinpoint Media. We are doing other things. One of the interesting part of Story Story has been funding. I wanted the class to be free. I want the class to cost participants nothing.
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Source: naij.com
Shuga Producer Talks About Nollywood’s Problem, Read What He Said
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