April 18, 2002

The Island of Everywhere

by Daniel Rosenthal, The Times of London

Malta has been the location for films as diverse as Gladiator and U-571

What do the following have in common: the bustling quayside of 19th-century Marseilles in the new screen version of The Count of Monte Cristo (see review, page 10) ; the bloody Colosseum combat in Gladiator ; and the capture of a Second World War German submarine in the North Atlantic in U-571 ?

Full marks if you knew that all this action was filmed on Malta. Add the forthcoming Guy Ritchie-Madonna movie Swept Away , a Julius Caesar mini-series and several commercials and music videos to the tiny island's list of recent credits, and you can appreciate why in recent years Malta has built a reputation as the Mediterranean's mini-Hollywood.

So how did this former British colony, just 16 miles long, with a population of about 400,000, come to attract such a disproportionately large quota of major projects? The answer lies in one word: water.

In 1963 a British special-effects specialist, Jim Hole, was working on a Viking saga, The Long Ships , when a storm off the Spanish coast destroyed the production's floating sets and models. Surveying the debris, Hole decided there must be safer, more controlled, ways to film on water and created the perfect alternative at Rinella, on Malta's eastern coast. There he and a young Maltese construction manager, Paul Avellino, built a shallow-water tank 300ft wide. The tank blends seamlessly with a clear horizon, so directors could give audiences the illusion of seaborne action taking place miles off the coast without relying on back projection.

The newly-opened Malta Film Facilities welcomed its first client, the Cold War drama The Bedford Incident , in 1964, and movies with wet, if not always watertight, plots began flowing steadily towards Malta. Murphy's War, Orca: Killer Whale, Raise the Titanic (for which Lew Grade spent $1 million building a second and much deeper shooting tank), Cutthroat Island, White Squall, U-571 and Swept Away have all used Mediterranean Film Studios at Rinella.

Producers initially drawn to Malta for the tanks quickly recognised its other assets: a superb climate, easy access from major European cities and English-speaking craftsmen available at extremely competitive rates. Above all, the cliffs, coastal inlets and medieval architecture of Malta and its twin island, Gozo, offer unspoilt locations that are a major draw for period dramas such as the $38 million Count of Monte Cristo .

Its director, Kevin Reynolds, and production designer, Mark Geraghty, had toured the Italian and French coasts in search of a location which could pass for the Marseilles of 1814 but found every skyline “blemished” by 20th-century buildings. “I was pretty sceptical that we were going to find anything even approaching the look we needed,” Reynolds says, “until we saw Malta.”

He and Geraghty chose the 300-degree panorama of Dockyard Creek, in the Grand Harbour, as the perfect stand-in for Marseilles. They then visited other locations and ended up shooting on Malta for five weeks instead of one as originally planned. The 17th-century cliff-top fort on Comino Island doubled as Château d'If and a carnival scene set in Rome was filmed in a medieval square at Mdina. “Malta is a fantastic place to work,” Reynolds says.

Film and television brought at least $4 million into the Maltese economy in 2001, yet some on the island argue that Malta should be generating far more from movies and television.

According to Malcolm Scerri-Ferrante, the managing director of the Producer's Creative Partnership, which provided location support for Monte Cristo and Swept Away , two major problems need to be addressed.

“First, we urgently need to build a large sound stage,” he says, “because people are coming here almost exclusively for exterior location work.”

Most large-scale features visit Malta before or after using European studios such as Rome's Cinecittà (which housed U-571 ) or Ireland's Ardmore Studios ( Monte Cristo ). However, several producers have told Scerri-Ferrante that they would gladly spend longer on Malta if a sound stage enabled them to use the island as a “one-stop shop” for studio and location work.

“It's even more important that we develop financial incentives for international producers,” Scerri-Ferrante adds, citing the successful tax-relief scheme for films that are shot in Ireland. “Dr George Hyzler, the minister responsible for film-making, favours financial incentives but has so far failed to win the backing of the Nationalist Government. Without them, we will continue to lose productions to other, more film-friendly countries.”

Of equal concern is the fact that Malta continues to service the needs of other countries' film-makers while its handful of native screenwriters and directors struggle to raise even minimal budgets to tell Maltese stories. This situation persists despite considerable efforts by Malta's most successful expatriate director, Mario Azzopardi, who has made more than 200 hours of episodic drama for American television.

Three years ago, Azzopardi was the driving force behind the creation of Maltese Falcon Productions, a state-backed, $10 million film fund. It was supposed to co-finance three or four low-budget Maltese features a year, but one of the two principal backers, Mid-Med Finance, withdrew its $6 million commitment after it was taken over by HSBC. Soon afterwards Azzo-pardi, frustrated by the snail-like progress, quit as the fund's development and production chief.

Deprived of its champion, the fund remains dormant, and the only feature-length Maltese film completed in recent years is the micro-budget ensemble drama Genesis (2001), shot on digital video. The island's size does not excuse the dearth of production; Iceland has a population of 250,000 and yet, thanks to considerable state subsidy, makes four or five features each year. Until Malta's aspiring film-makers gain access to state and private finance, the island seems destined to retain its decades-old classification on the world cinema map as a tourist destination rather than a creative centre.