Photo: Adam Hollingworth
THE SUN-HERALD NOVEMBER 24
At 34, Troy Lum is one of the world's most powerful and youngest film executives, writes Erin O'Dwyer.
Troy Lum is ever so slightly uneasy about his success. It's clear even before I reach his Elizabeth Bay apartment. I pass through two video-monitored security gates, but inside I find him dressed in a T-shirt and fraying jeans.
Lum's rented bachelor pad is similarly enigmatic, hardly what you would expect from a man voted one of the 50 top film executives in the world by Hollywood Reporter.
The spacious one-bedroom apartment overlooks the water but inside the furnishings are sparse - a comfy lounge, a small flat-screen TV and state-of-the-art Redgum stereo. There is no home cinema, no movie posters. The art on the walls is by friends and the bookshelf is unpretentious. There are expensive free-range eggs alongside a pile of dishes Lum has done himself.
"I've spent a lot of time undervaluing success, being embarrassed by success," says the 34-year-old head of independent distribution company Hopscotch Films. "I'm not sure if it's an Aussie thing or typical of where I grew up. You are constantly trying to bring yourself back down to the pack, holding yourself back in the way you deal with success."
Lum is not exactly a rags-to-riches story. It's more suburban middle-class kid done good. He grew up the middle son of immigrant restaurateurs, in Carlingford in Sydney's west. He went to school in North Rocks, before completing a degree in business. As soon as he finished, he was on a plane to London. He travelled and waited tables for 18 months, before deciding it was time to come home.
"I was starting to have that quality about me of someone who wasn't going to do anything with my life," he says. "I was enjoying it a bit too much."
At the time, Lum was a passionate reader and an aspiring novelist. When he found publishing too difficult, he wrote a letter to Dendy - "because that's where I went to see all those movies". His letter arrived on the day someone resigned and he was hired as personal assistant to boss Lyn McCarthy.
What came next is the stuff of dreams. When Dendy was bought by a public company less than three years later, McCarthy quit. Lum quietly stepped into her job. He was just 24.
"It still flabbergasts me," he says. "I was so young."
By then his talent for buying films was so well known that the appointment barely raised an eyebrow. It was a trio of films - Amelie, Buena Vista Social Club and The Blair Witch Project - that made his name. The risky decision to buy Amelie from script, before it was even cast, paid off. He paid just $60,000 for the distribution rights. It made $8 million at the box office.
It was this uncanny intuition that attracted the interest of film distribution veteran Frank Cox. In 2002, the pair launched Hopscotch Films along with Dendy marketing guru Sandie Don. The company has gone on to become Australia's leading distributor of independent films, bringing hits such as Bowling For Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and German award-winning The Lives Of Others to our screens.
Lum's interest in script development has also seen him involved in producing Australian films such as Somersault and the Bra Boys. He is the executive producer of Mao's Last Dancer, directed by Bruce Beresford and due out next year.
"I've just seen the first cut," he says. "It's wonderful."
Lum saw his first foreign film trying to impress a girl. It was the French-Canadian classic Jesus Of Montreal. "I don't know if I was moved so much by the film as I was seeing her being moved by the film," he says.
"After that we saw Cyrano De Bergerac, Cinema Paradiso, My Life as a Dog ..."
It was the golden age of art-house cinema and Lum lapped it all up. These days he sees 150 films a year and goes annually to festivals in Cannes, Venice, Toronto and Berlin. He is not starved of good cinema but laments that the lines between art house and mainstream have long since become blurred.
"Pure art-house movies they don't work as well as they used to," he says. "In the old days, Like Water For Chocolate would play for 16 weeks and Baraka would play for two years.
"Now if it's not working that first weekend, you're off the screen. It's about making as much money as you can as quickly as you can and not giving the audience the chance to find a film."
So what makes a film work? Lum looks for a compelling story and an emotional connection.
Sometimes he gets it right, more often he gets it wrong.
"You have to make hay while the sun shines," he says.
"My biggest bummer was Death At A Funeral. Frank loved the movie, he thought it was going to be huge. I absolutely hated it; I thought it was really puerile."
In fact, the film was the biggest independent release in Australia, making $12 million at the box office.
"It just kept going up and up," he moans. "I would come in every Monday and my heart would sink. It wasn't because I begrudged anyone else success. I just felt so bad for Frank. It's still a gut business but you really need those other opinions."
These days, Lum rarely goes to the movies except for work. In his down time he watches sport, plays club footy and reads. Few of his friends are "film folk". If he does go with friends to the flicks, it's to see the latest blockbuster. He loved Health Ledger in The Dark Knight and rates The Lives Of Others as one of his recent favourites.
Lum attributes his easy-going nature to his parents. His father emigrated to Australia from Fiji when he was 19 and built the family's restaurant, the well-regarded Satasia in Balmain, from virtually nothing.
"Mum would wake up in the morning and cook us dinner for that night then go out and work all day," he says. "We saw my dad mostly on weekends. As we got older we all worked at the restaurant.
"I only stopped working there about five years ago. I was running Dendy and I was still working at my parents' restaurant."
By then, it was for enjoyment rather than out of obligation. Even in the early days he would serve a table, then sit down to chat. Balmain in the '80s was an arts hub. Publishers and writers became his friends and he became passionate about film and literature. It was a way of defining himself in suburbia.
"In Carlingford in those days it was about not rocking the boat too much, not being too different," he says. "I don't think I wanted to be different. But I just felt different and I was interested in different things."
Lum admits he buys films he does not love, simply because he must buy 20 films a year.
"Like a food critic, I've become really fussy about what I like," he says. "I can count on one hand the number of films I really like in a year.
Caramel, a Lebanese chick flick still showing after two months in Sydney, is a case in point. It was bought by Sandie Don, not Lum.
"The critics love it, the audiences love it. I just thought it was OK. It just wasn't for me. It's dangerous to buy films that only you like."
Still, when I press Lum about those beautifully rare and obscure films, he admits he has bought them all anyway. Even a small budget Italian-made drama called Birdwatchers about the plight of indigenous tribes in the Amazon jungle.
"Maybe I'm not as capitalistic as I thought," he says.
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