When Baywatch Star David Hasselhoff visited Dubai recently, he revealed that he was in the country raising funds for his next movie, Hour Man Hoff, which will partly be filmed in the UAE.
He has also just finished shooting another film, which also received funding from the UAE.
"I've just finished filming Killing Hasselhoff, which was financed by Image Nation out of Abu Dhabi," he says. "It's a fairly low budget but it's got a great script and it's got good actors in it, who are all doing it because they love the script."
The movie tells the story of a man who tries to win a celebrity death pool –in which contestants wager on which famous figure will die next – by hiring a hit man to take out 1980s and 1990s TV star Hasselhoff, who plays himself. The film features a host of celebrity cameos, including pop star Justin Bieber and wrestler Hulk Hogan.
We caught up with Image Nation chief executive Michael Garin to find out how the Abu Dhabi producer came to be involved with such a star-studded movie.
“It’s our film,” Garin says. “We’re the producer. We worked with [regular Image Nation US partner] Hyde Park, who did the physical production but this started with us. It was two years ago, when David was here for the Abu Dhabi Film Festival and pitched us the idea, and we were interested in producing it.”
Image Nation brought Hyde Park on board as the movie was shot entirely in Los Angeles.
“For these kind of projects, we’d only do it with a US-based partner because shooting in the US isn’t our area of expertise and even if it was, we don’t have the physical presence there to do that,” says Garin.
“When we do our own projects such as this it’s important to understand that we act in pretty much the same manner as a Hollywood studio would. We assume all control, creative and financial, including final cut and all the distribution decisions.
“So we had input into the script and the casting – and the involvement of David and Ashok [Amritraj, Hyde Park founder] really helped there, with their celebrity contacts. It was the perfect partnership because everybody brought something.”
The film is now in the final stages of post-production, and Garin has high hopes for it.
“The film will be presented at the Toronto Film Festival [which runs from September 10-20],” he says. “That’s where the sales and marketing of the film will be done.
“We already have a high degree of interest based on a sales reel we’ve put together. We’ve had a high level of interest from several US theatrical distributors from that but we’ll wait until Toronto.
“It’s hard to make a film that people want to buy, and that’s what we’ve done here, so it’s essential to make as much money from it as possible.
"I really think this film can do well, because it's right in the same sweet spot of the movie industry as a film such as The Hangover. It's edgy, it's not the kind of film people would expect to see coming out of this region, it's got David Hasselhoff, cameos from John Woo, Justin Bieber, Hulk Hogan. It appeals to a really broad spectrum of the audience."
It’s interesting to hear Garin note that the film is unusual for the region, but the veteran producer has a sound logic.
“The only reason we do international productions is to make money to subsidise and support all of our local efforts,” he says. “We’re not here to send a message or promote Abu Dhabi with these international films. We are here to give opportunities to our young filmmakers to work on projects they wouldn’t get on their own, but the driving force is that it allows us to fund everything we do here in Abu Dhabi.
"This summer we're sending six Emirati high-school students to New York University as an introduction to filmmaking. It's the Killing Hasselhoffs that pay for that. If we didn't do it, somebody else would and the world would be exactly the same.
“So yes, we have a very different rationale for our international activities than we do for our domestic ones.”
The success of films such as Killing Hasselhoff will not only fund Image Nation's existing activities, but hopefully lead to many new ones.
“If you look at the New York programme this summer, we had more than 40 really high-quality applications,” says Garin. “It was so hard to pick the final six. So we’re considering, in future, running an introduction to filmmaking programme here in Abu Dhabi for high-school students, because if it was here, every one of those kids could have been accepted. So much of the programme’s cost is air fares and accommodation, we could put that money into the programme here and have 50 people.
“So that’s where we see things heading, depending on the students’ experience in New York.”
cnewbould@thenational.ae
