The last time I talked to Ross Garland was in the Gatesville mosque in Athlone. We were on the set of Confessions of a Gambler, the movie of the Rayda Jacobs novel in which Garland was producer and Jacobs was playing the lead. Upstairs about 300 women and children were whispering and coughing as we watched the compulsive gambler unburden her soul to the imam.
Today, in a bright new Long Street hot spot, Garland explains how using real people was one way of keeping within that movie's tight little R2m budget. Barter deals and product placements were other ways, and most of the cast and crew were on basic salaries.
HOW HE CHILLS
 When he's not running, riding his bike, or doing weights in the gym, he's watching big broad comedies, blockbusters and obscure arthouse movies
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"Economies of scale is the sustainable way to make films," he tells me between mouthfuls of a huge, light, paper-thin rice-and-lentil pancake called a dosa, all the rage in New York now, and eaten in bits, with chunks of chicken and butternut in coconut. "Along with keeping budgets low, you have a slate of movies to offer investors to minimise risk: six properties at R5m each rather than one at R30m."
What seems to gives Garland the edge over a lot of the local industry's equally passionate filmmakers is his legal, financial and academic background. It's so impressive it leaves you wondering whether this personable 32-year-old producer of U-Carmen eKhayelitsha isn't punching a little below his weight with his newest projects - Big Fellas, the silly-buggers road trip going as a black economic empowerment satire (whose cast includes M-Net Idols heartthrob Colin Moss and tabloid bimbette Minki van der Westhuizen) and Spud, the schoolboy romp whose hero's nickname refers to the size of his genitalia.
"Spud is the best-selling novel in SA history. I'm tapping into the broader end of the market," is his rationale, based on the success of Leon Schuster's slapstick at the local box-office.
A Rhodes scholar who studied law at Oxford, where he was an Oxford blue in cricket, Garland graduated from Natal University as the top final-year law student, went on to be admitted to the Cape Bar, and then joined Lehman Brothers Investment Bank in New York, where his clients included AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, Sony and Disney.
"It was these big Hollywood conglomerates that first showed me the model for rational film investing. Sony, for example, would present seven films to investors as a way of diversifying risk. The more movies on your slate, the bigger your chance of getting the blue sky hit that brings in the unique returns - like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which was made for US$5m and grossed $250m in US cinemas alone."
He ran the New York Marathon but stayed in the city for only two years. "My first day at work was September 11 2001. Lehman Brothers was across the street and I watched the second plane fly into the building."
That was the beginning of the recession. Eventually it became a fight to survive. Back home, things were bubbling in the industry which had been his real love ever since his Oxford Revue days, acting and writing sketches for the company that produced Monty Python, and touring Japan with the Oxford Dramatic Society. He still acts and writes. He's written himself the part of "an idiotic movie producer" in Big Fellas.
Married for a year to Suzannah, a fashion designer, and now living in Green Point, he's engagingly self-deprecating about his mountaineering feats: "When I went up Kilimanjaro there was a pensioner going up backwards to raise money. Mt Fuji? It's climbed by 10 000 Japanese every night."
He's optimistic about local industry opportunities: the re allocation of movie funds by the department of trade & industry in June, the abundance of new movie properties and the cost-cutting potential of the digital cinema screens. But his own current three projects are still hovering. Confessions and Big Fellas are in the conversations-with-distributors stage. And Spud has still to find a 13-year-old who will wow the world.
