ACTING & FILM SCHOOL

Lights, Camera, Action: A Career in Films

From the International Herald Tribune - In France, film schools are springing up and providing jobs for graduates, despite the tough job market, says Jeffrey Goldberg, international section chief for the Paris-Cherbourg school Eicar. Goldberg admits that the film industry is probably not expanding as fast as the mushrooming film school community, but says the advent of digital video in the 1990’s has revolutionized the whole business. “Although students will not be handed $4 million to make a film when they leave,” he says, “there are huge opportunities in documentaries, television commercials and music videos.”

While Goldberg says the industry used to be concentrated in New York, Paris, Los Angeles and Bombay, now “the money comes from everywhere, and in Europe many films are cross-border coproductions.” Eicar, whose intake into the international section has jumped from 12 in 2003 to 60 in 2005, is no exception to the boom. Goldberg says his section’s advantages include the fact that it offers English-language teaching in France, “the cradle of cinema and the ‘ooh la la’ culture,” as he calls it, and that the fees are relatively low. A Bachelor of Fine Arts in film directing costs about €8,500 ($6,316) a year, while a Master of Fine Arts degree costs around €14,500 a year. Teachers are all professional filmmakers, says Goldberg, “because it is a question not just of understanding the craft, but of doing it.” One new phenomenon this year is that more than 50 percent of applicants are American. “There have always been a few, but never this number,” says Goldberg. But numbers and cash tell only part of the story. Eicar prides itself in the quality of its teaching and of the films that its students produce. “I have been told they are among the best from any school in the world,” he says. Students work part of the time with 35-millimeter film, and all leave with a professional-standard cassette or DVD of short films they have made and an original feature film script to show prospective employers. New to the international program next autumn should be courses in cinematography and sound.

Another vital ingredient is keeping up with the exponential change in technology, says Goldberg. Eicar, which moved its main campus to a renovated 19th-century former military hospital in Cherbourg in November 2003, is always up-to-date with the latest innovations in equipment and software. “New products come on the market every month, and we have to be there,” says Goldberg. The New York Film Academy also has a hands-on teaching approach, according to its owner, Jerry Sherlock. “We are flexible, and believe the way to become a filmmaker is to learn to make films,” he says. “The student is the client and we take our lead from them.” Since students do not necessarily have the time or cash to spend on a yearlong course, the academy offers intensive courses of five or six days a week over two to four weeks to some 4,000 students each year, says Sherlock.

Instead of students paying $100,000 to $150,000 for a three- or four-year course elsewhere, the New York Film Academy’s bill is more likely to be somewhere between $1,500 and $27,000.

The academy, which Sherlock created 13 years ago, now has nine schools, some part-time, others full-time. Six are in the United States and three are in Europe - in Paris, Florence and London. But one of Sherlock’s regrets is that demand from the French is so limited.

“French people love American films, but we get very few students from France, and don’t understand why - we wish we did,” he says.

“We would love to be able to establish a year-round school in Paris, but that is out of the question under the present circumstances.”

B.C.