Talent Analysis
Behind The Scenes Behind the camera many key creative roles within the Dutch production scene are held by women. Geoffrey Macnab investigates. On the afternoon I speak to her, Jany Temime is celebrating her birthday. Not that she has much time off. The veteran costume designer is hard at work on Skyfall, the new James Bond movie. (She has been collaborating with designer Tom Ford in coming up with the perfect suit for Daniel Craig’s Bond to wear.) Prior to 007, Temime was busy dressing George Clooney as an astronaut for Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity. She also spent eight years working on the Harry Potter series and has recently been very involved in Hogwarts business, planning the costumes for the new Harry Potter theme park outside London. In terms of international credits, the French-born Temime is one of the Dutch industry’s most successful exports. Thanks to her work on Oscar-winning Dutch movies Antonia’s Line and Character in the late 1990s, she quickly established an international reputation. Alfonso Cuaron had seen Character. When he was recruited to direct Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, he insisted on hiring Temime to do the costumes - and she stayed working on the Potter series for eight years. “I got Harry Potter... and that was it!” she remembers. “It also corresponded to a time of my life when the kids were grown up and out of the house and I could do a little bit more what I wanted to do.” Line producer Mardou Jacobs, who runs the aptly named company No Fear Productions, is
another leading figure in the Dutch industry ready to travel wherever her job takes her. “My kids are almost grown up and so I can go anywhere. My obligations at home are almost zero - so let life start!”
the world and the very best sound man too but if they hate each other, you get a very lousy film.” On Rudolf van den Berg’s Tirza, Jacobs was working in Namibia. On Van den Berg’s next film, the Second World War-set Süskind, she was in Romania. In both places, she was obliged to work with local crews. She talks of the “gut feeling” that helps her determine which crew members to hire. She has worked on many occasions with very strong-willed male directors, among them the late Theo van Gogh and Paul Verhoeven (whose reality TV project The Entertainment Experience she recently line produced).
Jacobs acknowledges it was “not particularly easy” to establish herself as a line producer. “You have to negotiate between the director, the producer, the DoP, and all the heads of department. Negotiation is always better for women to do than men.” She speaks of the “fluency with which we (women) can work in between all those egos.”
“My obligations at home are almost zero - so let life start!”
“People like Theo (van Gogh)...in public situations, they’re a pain in the ass but in private, to work professionally with, they’re absolutely not. Rudolf van den Berg - he’s not an easy man as well (but) they know very well what they want.”
Line producers, she cautions, can’t afford to have big egos. If they did, they’d be caught up in constant feuds. Instead, they need to be flexible and pragmatic.
Verhoeven likewise is easy to work with. “If I come to him and say to him, “OK, Paul, I need to talk to you, he’s not the kind of spoiled kid that starts arguing. Together, we find a solution.”
In her college days, Jacobs studied psychology - a perfect grounding for working in the film industry. “Everything felt very familiar,” she reflects. She started in the business as a runner and worked her way up. Thanks to her time as location scout and production manager, she already had a very clear idea of the difficulties facing every department during a shoot.
Brought up as “a flower power kid,” Jacobs wasn’t in the slightest bit startled by Van Gogh’s tendency to make outrageous statements. “I was raised that you could say anything without it being held against you.”
Simone Galavazi is the only female sound engineer currently working on feature films in the Netherlands. Her credits range from glossy, mainstream thrillers like Loft and Dossier K to documentaries and TV dramas - and she also moonlights for several months a year as a deep sea diving instructor. She says that being underwater, when you can hear little other than the sound of your breathing, is the perfect antidote to the noise and commotion of a movie set. When she didn’t succeed in her original ambition to become a vet, she turned direction “180 degrees” and went to the Film Academy instead, quickly beginning to concentrate on sound. “In feature films, the key functions are mostly (done by) men,” Galavazi notes. Earlier in her career, as the only woman on an often all male crew, she had “to run harder, be better, do more things more often than the other sound man to get as much respect.” Now, like Mardou Jacobs and Temime, she is established at the top of her profession, working abroad as well as at home. As Temime puts it: “it’s very funny because the Dutch export everything. They export their butter and they export their technicians!”
As for making the step from line producer to lead producer, she’s not in a hurry. “I can be a good producer as well but it’s hell finding the money - and I love spending the money... and, at this moment, there are way too many producers anyway in Holland.”
When she is putting together a crew, Jacobs makes sure she meets all the technicians first. “One of my specialities is that I like to find people who can work together. What I always say is that you can hire the very best DOP in
Simone Galavazi Helena van der Meulen
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Mieke de Jong
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