The small meeting room on the second floor of HAU 2, venue for a lecture called The Heart of the Matter- Emotions versus Intelligence, was filled to capacity and understandably so. SOURCES 2 (Stimulating Outstanding Resources for Creative European Screenwriting), working in partnership with the Berlinale Talent Campus, had brought an award-winning storyteller, scriptwriter, film consultant and a grand old man of film to do justice to the topic. Dick Ross delivered. By the end, Ross, 90, winner of the European Script prize for THE RED APPLE TREE and producer of THE LATE LIZ, left the audience with a strong sense of the importance of the filmmaker/audience relationship in filmmaking. Africiné spoke with Ross after the lecture.

You stressed the need for filmmakers to devote time to certain audience expectations. Won't this be a hard sell for young filmmakers who have to meet deadlines?

Ross: Yes, it is a problem. If the young filmmaker is helped to talk about his work in relation to how people react to it, he or she will very quickly learn if that will work with an audience. Young people are dying and desperate to make films, and we that are older tend to say that they don't care what they make. But they do care. It's just that they are not being helped to come to that analysis which is: 'who are you talking to?'…. The audience have expectations not only of content but the way it is delivered. What you have to say has got to matter.

How do you determine that you have achieved that change in attitude?

Ross: I think it is at the point where you have to say to a young storyteller: 'what is it about this story that you think I care about?' That is a killer of a question. They must learn to answer that question, and once they have learnt to answer the question, then they are really writers.

Do you have any stories in the works?

Ross: I am writing a script at the moment. I have been a year and half writing it. I told them I will write it in two months and I am a year and a half into it. I am pretty old and it takes me a longer time to do it.

By Shaibu Husseini