Screen October 2014

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Issue 1778 October 2014

Iceland

Scaling new heights ■ Eli Roth’s Chilewood ■ BFI London Film Festival ■ Busan

LEADER

The big event

O

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So is that bad for films? As the UK box office drops in admissions and grosses, exhibitors are glad of any good news and most are embracing event cinema. Distributors may have more mixed feelings — if your indie film is kicked off prime Saturday night slots because of opera or theatre that makes the fight to stay on screens week to week even tougher.

Some distributors do see event cinema releases as cannibalising their audiences and in some cases that’s true, but others see smart business opportunities.

As Universal’s Niels Swinkels says on page 4: “We are exploring future opportunities that will help grow our market share in this growing business.”

Universal also saw the ‘eventisation’ of another of its catalogue titles presented in a remarkable way when Secret Cinema’s run of Back To The Future finished with a tally of $5.5m (£3.37m). Secret Cinema is not just kids playing dress-up, it’s a powerful force in connecting films to audiences that might not otherwise go to a cinema. Fox Searchlight also discovered the benefits, with The Grand Budapest Hotel’s UK grosses boosted healthily by its Secret Cinema offering.

Among independent distributors, Picturehouse is an industry leader in event cinema as both an exhibitor and distributor. It now releases more events than traditional films and what it learns from events can be applied to film releases, such as the live offerings connected to theatrical runs of A Field In England or 20,000 Days On Earth.

With the UK in the box-office doldrums this year, any bright spot should be celebrated. Event cinema offerings are getting audiences into cinemas that might not otherwise go, and the hope is the experience encourages them to go s back and watch more films, too. ■

Keaton first to the punch in Oscar race

Screen International is part of Media Business Insight Ltd (MBI), also publisher of Broadcast and shots

Michael Keaton in Birdman

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verpowering the sound of ballet shoes hitting the stage might have been the sound of jaws hitting the floor. On the morning of September 30, the UK industry awoke to the news Universal’s Billy Elliot The Musical — Live was top of the UK box office. A theatrical showing of a West End musical had beaten the likes of Denzel Washington’s latest action title The Equalizer.

The fact a live broadcast of a musical that opened nine years ago led the box office on $3.1m (£1.9m) is something that might have shocked industry players even five years ago; a decade ago the idea would have been laughed at. Now, event cinema’s first weekend leading the UK box office is confirmation of what a major force alternative content has become (both creatively and financially) within the film industry.

And it’s also revolutionising the live events industry. I saw Stephen Fry Live: More Fool Me at Royal Festival Hall on October 1 and he frequently referenced the event cinema crowds across 300 UK sites and a host of other countries (Picturehouse Entertainment distributed via satellite). You have to wonder if an event like this would have even been done as a one-off in London without the potential to connect to further audiences.

At our own Screen Awards (to be held October 23 in London), we’ve added a category for best Event Cinema Campaign. The shortlist of nominees shows just how diverse event cinema’s offerings have become: André Rieu’s 2014 Maastricht Concert, Monty Python Live (Mostly), Nymphomaniac One Night Stand, RSC’s Richard II and D-Day 70 Years On. Each of these was successful financially and creatively and shows appetites are growing for alternative content.

Even with Gravity a tough act to follow from last year, Birdman proved to be the perfect opening night film in Venice — topical, starry and exciting film-making.

Because of Venice’s boutique programme size (compared to the Toronto behemoth) everyone was raving about this film for days. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s directing and Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography were stunning. But the loudest buzz was about Michael Keaton’s ‘comeback of the century’ — his performance was a revelation and he’s assured a best actor Oscar nomination (if not a win). My inner nine-year-old, who really loved Mr Mom, is very pleased at this development.

A very different performance that wowed me in Toronto was Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything. This young actor has previously impressed with more of a cool vibe in his performances but he brought real humanity to Hawking and lifted the role above impersonation. Redmayne’s career immediately goes to another level with this film.

October 2014 Screen International 1

Contents

SCREEN INTERNATIONAL OCTOBER 2014

www.ScreenDaily.com

Issue 1778 October 2014

28 Iceland

Scaling new heights www.ScreenDaily.com

■ Eli Roth’s Chilewood ■ BFI London Film Festival ■ Busan

October 2014 cover image Oblivion, shooting in Iceland, Territory Focus, p37

International correspondents Asia

37

26

Liz Shackleton lizshackleton@gmail.com Australia Sandy George +61 2 9557 7425 sandy.george@me.com Balkan region Vladan Petkovic +381 64 1948 948 vladan.petkovic@gmail.com Brazil Elaine Guerini +55 11 97659915 elaineguerini@terra.com.br France Melanie Goodfellow +33 6 21 45 80 27 melanie.goodfellow@btinternet.com Germany Martin Blaney +49 30 318 063 91

23

50

screen.berlin@googlemail.com Greece Alexis Grivas +30 210 64 25 261 alexisgrivas@yahoo.com Israel Edna Fainaru +972 3 5286 591 dfainaru@netvision.net.il

October 2014 Analysis

Korea/deputy Asia editor Jean Noh +82 10 4205 0318 hjnoh2007@gmail.com Nordic territories Jorn Rossing Jensen +45 202 333 04 jornrossing@aol.com Scotland Allan Hunter +44 (0) 7904 698 848 allan@alhunter.myzen.co.uk Spain Juan Sarda +34 646 440 357 jsardafr@hotmail.com UK Geoffrey Macnab +44 (0) 20 7226 0516 geoffrey@macnab.demon.co.uk Subscriptions Screen International Subscriptions Department, 3 Queensbridge, The Lakes, Northampton NN4 7BF Tel +44 1604 828 706

4 Chain of events

Lee Yong-kwan on this year’s festival; plus a look at the Asian Project Market

The UK’s burgeoning event cinema sector

23 Tokyo plays it cool

8 A clean slate

TIFF’s focus on Japanese exports and Asian links; plus an interview with Daihachi Yoshida

Report from Screen and Broadcast’s Restoration & Archive Forum

26 The London look

People

Clare Stewart, director of BFI London Film Festival, on the new programming approach

10 Favourite U.N.C.L.E

Feature focus

Steve Clark-Hall on his 50 years in the business

12 picking up the pace Emu Films’ Mike Elliott makes the move from AD to producer

Festivals

28 Big talent, small screen Netflix and Amazon Studios

30 inside chilewood

Baltasar Kormakur and Agnes Johansen talk about their production outfit RVK Studios

42 A cool dozen Screen profiles a dozen of Iceland’s key players to watch and finds out what’s next for them

Screentech 47 Lighten the mood Christie Digital enhances the cinema experience

49 Taming technology Future innovations at France’s Screen4All event

Regulars

Eli Roth helps drive a genre boom in Chile

50 reviews

Territory focus

The hot films from San Seb, Venice, New York and Toronto including Birdman, Magical Girl, Gone Girl and The Imitation Game

E-mail help@subscribe.screendaily.com

16 driving force

Screen International ISSN 0307 4617

The lowdown on Abu Dhabi Film Festival

All currencies in this issue converted according to

18 Busan’s higher calling

37 ICELaND: taking the plunge

exchange rates that applied in October 2014

Busan International Film Festival director

The territory’s filmic draw

2 Screen International October 2014

40 Scaling new heights

56 ask the experts Talent to be stuck with in an elevator

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11/09/2014 14:16

IN FOCUS EVENT CINEMA

Artful audiences Opera remains king in terms of number of event cinema shows, with 44 last year, but theatre is increasingly popular and accounted for the largest slice of the box office in 2013: $11.7m (£7.2m) from only 14 events; some 40% of box office.

3D is not a major audience incentive, and while live shows remain the gold standard, recorded events are increasingly popular.

Secret Cinema also remains an ever-popular brand in the UK, with this year’s Back To The Future event drawing ticket sales of more than $5.7m (£3.5m) for its site-specific installation.

Exhibitor-distributor Picturehouse continues to be a market leader in the space, distributing six of the top 10 highest-grossing alternative content events in the UK this year and screening more than 100 events in its cinemas: “Last year, event cinema accounted for around 15%20% of our gross box office,” reveals Marc Allenby, director of distribution at Picturehouse Entertainment.

“The market has been initially dominated by high-art content — opera and ballet, then theatre and, more recently, the museum exhibition shows,” he explains. “The opera audience in the UK is sustaining rather than growing dramatically,

4 Screen International October 2014

Monty Python Live (Mostly)

Getty

I

n late September, Universal’s Billy Elliot The Musical — Live became the first UK box-office number one for event cinema, taking $3.1m (£1.9m). So while the UK and the global industry comes to terms with a tough 2014 at the box office, event cinema — despite its relatively small contribution to the big picture — continues to represent a highly robust and successful growth area.

Event cinema grossed some $29.1m (£18m) at the UK box office in 2013, more than double its 2012 total. By early September this year, the sector accounted for gross receipts of more than $37.2m (£23m). It is increasingly a go-to for those unable to attend the live event due to sell-outs, cost or location.

That growth looks set to continue as the UK is at the forefront of the sector’s global boom, fuelled by voracious and loyal audiences, plus commercial and indie exhibitors and a growing band of traditional and specialist distributors keen to take advantage of the bankable, high-return business.

The number of industry players in event cinema is increasing. The UK’s Event Cinema Association, launched in late 2012, now has more than 50 members. In step with the growth, the Screen Awards (October 23) has also added a new category for best event cinema campaign.

Chain of events As the UK’s event-cinema sector flourishes, Andreas Wiseman explores growth areas and potential for cannibalisation of film-going but theatre seems to buck that trend, partly because of the freshness of the content and the big hits that come on a regular basis.”

The National Theatre (NT) has been quick to develop its offering, now reaching 500 screens in the UK and 1,500 worldwide. The theatre sells content directly to larger chains and has an important partnership with Picturehouse. “NT Live started out losing a small amount,” explains David Sabel, head of digital at the National. “However, it has developed into a profitable series. We haven’t made a loss on a broadcast in two years.

Sometimes the gain is small, sometimes the shows take millions.”

NT Live’s global broadcast of War Horse in February took more than $4.4m (£2.7m) in the UK alone. Four productions have grossed more than $1.6m (£1m) in the market this year.

That’s big business, especially compared to more modest boxo ff i c e t a k i n g s fo r m a ny acclaimed smaller films.

“In the early days we were having to bank on productions that had a star actor or which were famous plays,” says Sabel. “Six years down the line, we’ve built a loyal audience that are prepared to take more risks. We still do the big-name shows, but we can be more adventurous in our programming.”

‘Soon you will be able to watch the top teams in the Champions League football in cinemas’ tim richards, vue cinemas

(Left) Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary episode, The Day Of The Doctor, appeared in cinemas

Re-releases are becoming more and more important. Frankenstein — starring Benedict Cumberbatch — will get its third annual re-release this month. “It has improved its performance each year partly because the distribution has grown but also because the awareness around the brand and the show has grown,” says Sabel.

The company’s theatrical success has led to its first theatrical acquisition in the shape of Rufus Norris musical London Road (a former NT production) and a growing number of UK partnerships. “We’re increasingly working with Picturehouse and non-traditional venues such as film societies and village halls that have invested in satellite equipment,” adds Sabel. “We’ve grown our output each year and our aim is to make at least 10-12 productions in the next 12 months.”

Studios are also keen to grow their footprint in the space. “We are already looking beyond Billy Elliot,” says Niels Swinkels, managing director, UK, Universal Pictures International (UPI). “With Helen Parker’s UPI acquisitions team we are exploring future opportunities that will help grow our market share in this growing business.”

New types of content are also rapidly emerging. “In broad terms we’re seeing growth away from the high-art space to more popular culture events,” says Allenby. Picturehouse-distributed comedy show Monty Python Live (Mostly) grossed $2.6m (£1.6m)

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in July. “This is a direction the whole genre will likely embrace,” he predicts.

TV will become a more regular presence in cinemas, with BBC Worldwide’s 50th anniversary episode of Doctor Who, The Day Of The Doctor ($10m worldwide), having paved the way.

Popular music is another growth area.

“We’re getting more ambitious in the music and TV space,” says Yogita Puri, director of content at event cinema specialist Arts Alliance. “We’re increasingly developing and commissioning our own content in that space.

We know what works for us and are able to bring together the right directors and bands.”

The company filmed and will distribute a concert film from boyband One Direction, One Direction: Where We Are, later this month, including bonus interviews — a growing feature of event content.

Beyond the inbuilt audience Despite the opportunities, there remain challenges. “There is not a huge marketing budget behind alternative content, so at the moment it tends to be content with inbuilt audiences that becomes successful,” says Allenby. “That’s a barrier to entry for some content owners and distributors. People are also riding on the back of well-publicised successes that make it appear quite easy and that there’s a huge industry here to move into.

I don’t think it’s as simple as that.”

Some independent distributors are also left

War Horse

‘Last year, event cinema accounted for 15%-20% of our gross box office’ Marc Allenby, Picturehouse

frustrated by the added clutter. “It’s a reality that alternative content takes away from screens that films would otherwise be shown on,” one indie distribution expert tells Screen.

“Operas have previously taken out my two evening shows on a Saturday night. But what can you do? They might make more that night than your film does the whole week.

You can’t blame exhibitors for playing what customers want to see.

“Alternative content is adding to the digital TV-like nature of cinemas at the moment,” the executive points out. “With near 15 films released each week, fewer people are watching each film. There’s so much choice. But

UK Event cinema in numbers 2013 Type of event

Number of events

% of events

Box office

% Box office

Average WPR*

Theatre

14

12.6

$11.7m (£7.2m)

38.3

198

Opera

44

39.6

$7.8m (£4.8m)

25.7

93

Film/documentary

10

9

$3.6m (£2.2m)

11.7

101

Ballet

17

15.3

$3.4m (£2.1m)

11.3

100

Exhibition

6

5.4

$1.5m (£900,000)

5

135

Classical concert

8

7.2

$1.5m (£900,000)

4.9

83

Popular music concert

8

7.2

$810,000 (£500,000)

2.9

116

Comedy

4

3.6

<$160,000 (£100,000)

0.2

78

Total

111

100

$30.5m (£18.7m)

100

111

Source: Rentrak/BFI Statistical Unit. Note: Figures/percentages may not sum to totals due to rounding. *Widest point of release

Event cinema releases Title

Distributor

Release date

Date-range gross

War Horse — NT Live 2014 (theatre)

NT/Picturehouse

Feb 21

$4.5m (£2,747,673)

Billy Elliot The Musical — Live (theatre)

Universal

Sept 26

$3.1m (£1.9m)

Monty Python Live (Mostly) — O2 London 2014 (comedy)

Picturehouse

July 18

$2.2m (£1,349,992)

Skylight — NT Live 2014 (theatre)

NT/Picturehouse

July 11

$2.1m (£1,302,221)

The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time — NT Live 2012 (theatre re-release)

NT/Picturehouse

Aug 31

$1.8m (£1,097,780)

King Lear — NT Live 2014 (theatre)

NT/Picturehouse

Apr 25

$1.6m (£1,003,217)

Coriolanus — NT Live 2014 (theatre)

NT/Picturehouse

Jan 24

$1.5m (£955,415)

Andre Rieu’s 2014 Maastricht Concert (concert)

Cinelive

July 18

$1.4m (£858,957)

Sleeping Beauty — Royal Ballet, London 2014 (ballet)

Royal Opera House

Mar 14

$1.1m (£705,565)

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ticket prices are rising and that’s masking the plateauing audiences.”

One specialist distributor also recognises that exhibitors are getting tougher on exhibitor-distributor splits.

Predictably, commercial exhibitors, as well as independents, see only growth in the sector: “We believe this will be a steeply growing part of our business,” says Tim Richards, CEO of Vue Cinemas. “It’s still only several points of our box office, but the growth we see is very exciting. It’s only in the past 18 months that circuits have been fully digital and you don’t see the full potential of alternative content until you are fully digital.”

Richards counters the argument that films lose out. “This doesn’t take time away from movies. Some 70%-80% of the time, cinemas are dark. This creates a tremendous opportunity for us and distributors [to screen live or recorded events].”

Another potential growth area is in live sports screenings. To date, Vue has shown Formula 1, rugby, tennis and the football World Cup. “The holy grail of alternative content is something that is regular,” adds Richards. “That hasn’t happened with sports yet, but it will. Soon you’ll be able to watch the top teams in the Champions League in cinemas.”

Going global As players consolidate gains in the UK, those companies are now increasingly looking to international markets to fuel growth.

NT Live has just filmed its first non-UK production — the Broadway production Of Mice And Men starring James Franco and Chris O’Dowd. Distributed by BY Experience and Fathom Events, the NT Live cinemacast will hit 700 screens in the US and Canada alone.

Mark Foster, CEO of Arts Alliance, which books events into cinemas in 67 countries, says: “More people will see Royal Opera House productions next season in cinemas than they will in the Royal Opera House.

This season we sold about 750,000 tickets for opera around the world, equalling the number sold for the opera itself. Next season, cinema tickets will be close to one million.”

Monty Python Live (Mostly) was another success story, having recorded audiences of 330,000 in 52 countries. “In most instances we were dealing with exhibitors directly, not using sub-distributors,” says Allenby. “We are building up a global network.”

“It depends on the content, but eastern Europe and Latin America are significant growth areas,” says Grant Calton, CEO of distributor Omniverse Vision. “Ten years ago, Romania had hundreds of screens, now the market has 8,000 screens. That’s extraordinary growth. China is growing but alternative content is subject to quota regulations.

We’ve just signed a VoD deal in China and are likely to get more involved in that market s in the next 18 months.” n

October 2014 Screen International 5

Richard Keyser

IN FOCUS RESTORATION & ARCHIVE FORUM

BBC Studios and Post Production Digital Media Services’ Kevin Shaw

RRMedia’s Matt Bowman

BFI’s Charles Fairall

Cinelabs’ Adrian Bull

A clean slate Opportunities are opening up to restore classic assets on new formats — but film restoration is an art form in danger. Ann-Marie Corvin reports from Screen International and Broadcast’s Restoration & Archive Forum

I

‘‘

f there’s been a gold rush in film archive then it’s kind of passed me by,” says Paul Collard, vice-president of film and digital services at film processing company Deluxe Digital.

While there have been a few showcase renewals in the US, such as Sony’s 4K restoration of David Lean’s 1962 classic Lawrence Of Arabia, the main drivers for restoration of archive in Europe are commercial — the Blu-ray sell-through market and broadcasters looking to release TV classics on new distribution formats — or cultural, from national institutions and trusts that find the money to achieve a handful of significant projects.

Deluxe, for example, recently completed full Digital Intermediates (DI) restoration of the 1927 silent film The Battles Of The Coronel And Falkland Islands for

8 Screen International October 2014

the British Film Institute, which is set to feature in this year’s BFI London Film Festival archive gala together with a newly composed live score performed by the Royal Marines Band.

According to Collard, it is these signature projects that are alerting content owners of all sizes to the possibilities of archive. Why keep it locked away in a dark basement when it can be restored digitally and accessed by millions, thanks to new VoD platforms?

“Previously when restoration was carried out on film there would only be a handful of prints but the spread and reach and contribution and knowledge to understanding these clips is now in huge demand,” Collard says.

The BFI’s ongoing Film Forever initiative also looks set to make some of

the nation’s hidden celluloid treasures even more accessible. It wants to help content owners ‘unlock’ 10,000 UK film and TV titles and is offering an $8.1m (£5m) digitisation fund through its Film Heritage Fund. The fund’s second phase opened for applications in September.

However, restoring content to its former glory can be a painstaking and lengthy process. In the commercial sector, BBC Studios and Post Production’s Digital Media Services division recently carried out a detailed scene-by scene restoration of 1970s police series The Professionals for the ITV network, to be released on Blu-ray.

While the team was fortunate to be able to work from the original 16mm negative for most of the four-season show (a key reason that ITV selected this

particular project for restoration) the average 50-minute episode took around one week to complete — longer still in the many instances where dust had contaminated the film.

“Some episodes took 10 days, and that’s not just one person but 10 days of a team of between three to 10 people working it,” says Kevin Shaw, lead technologist for BBC Studios and Post Production Digital Media Services.

According to Shaw, retaining a balance between the original artistic intent while bringing it up to modern standards is key to restoration.

“The Professionals was intended to be a gritty show — an antidote to glossier offerings such as The New Avengers — and this affects restoration. If it is intended to be a bit grainy then you don’t

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Supported by

(From left) BBC Studios and Post Production Digital Media Services’ Kevin Shaw, AP Archive’s Luke Smedley, Cambridge Imaging Systems’ Tom Blake, Channel 4 and Digital Production Partnership’s Kevin Burrows and moderator George Bevir, of Broadcast

Commercial strategy The proliferation of distribution platforms in recent years has increased the demand for content.

Meanwhile, search and restoration tools are improving, and new formats such as UHD and 4K open up the possibility of restoring a whole host of content to a new level across numerous distribution channels.

You can almost picture old news footage of 1950s UK prime minister Harold Macmillan springing to life from the vaults, famously announcing: “You’ve never had it so good.” But the reality is not quite so golden and there are steps to consider for the average indie trying to get the money required to commercialise an archive.

According to Dock 10 head of business development Emma Riley, content owners would do well to start by assessing how much it costs to store its current content and how much of it is worth keeping.

“There are companies out there holding onto warehouses of unlabelled content because they’ve had it drilled into them that they mustn’t throw anything away. It’s costing them six figures a year to store,” she says.

Riley is working with film researchers and producers to advise companies on maintaining their content, which often starts by putting a value on it.

Restoration: Gold, Silver or Bronze standard?

Film-processing firms tend to offer three types of restoration: ‘bronze’ would typically be a traditional telecine service; ‘silver’ includes a DI scan using automated restoration tools; while ‘gold’ includes all of the above plus more individual scene-by-scene grading and frame-by-frame restoration (as received by new theatrical releases).

“The problem is that the clients always want gold even if they’re paying

remove all the grain. Leave some in so it still looks like film and not video. And if there are hand-held cameras, don’t stabilise it too much so it looks like it’s been locked off.”

These are the skills that Simon Marbrook, head of restoration at Premier, thinks are often overlooked by clients when it comes to the budget.

“You have to know what to restore and what not to restore, and have some understanding of the original filming techniques and formats that were used.

There’s a huge knowledge and skill in that, but trying to convince people it’s an

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for bronze and when the passion is there you can’t compromise; if there’s something offensive to the eye, it needs to be removed,” says Matt Bowman, commercial director of RRMedia.

According to BFI head of conservation Charles Fairall, prioritising which footage will be awarded gold treatment as part of its Film Heritage initiative involves “a matrix of all the available resources against time, budget and expectation”.

art and that they need to pay for it can be challenging.”

Shaw adds that there is a danger these skills will disappear altogether in time, as a new generation of technicians move towards a file-based background.

However, BFI head of conservation Charles Fairall hints that funds will be released through the Film Heritage initiative to ensure key film restoration skills are maintained. “My work is about releasing content but equally retaining and understanding the technologies and skills needed to maintain and restore s archive,” he says. n

Dock 10’s Emma Riley

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October 2014 Screen International 9

INTERVIEW STEVE CLARK-HALL

The Man From U.N.C.L.E

Favourite U.N.C.L.E Steve Clark-Hall, recently honoured at the Production Guild Awards, tells Michael Rosser about his 50 years in the film and TV business

F

rom small independent productions to blockbusters such as Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes and the upcoming The Man From U.N.C.L.E, British producer Steve Clark-Hall has experienced highs and lows over a career that spans 50 years.

Marking his contribution to the industry, which also includes teaching up-and-coming talent and regularly speaking at London’s National Film and Television School, he was recognised at the first Production Guild Awards on September 27.

“It’s a little embarrassing… I just boss people around, but I’m thoroughly honoured,” Clark-Hall tells Screen as he takes a welcome break from a budget meeting.

He lives up to his humble reputation, veering between modesty when talking about successes such as Calendar Girls and entertaining with a dry wit when asked about failures (“The only thing I have ever heard that makes sense is that nobody knows anything”).

When his career in film production began in 1988 with Jim O’Brien’s war romance The Dressmaker,, Clark-Hall already had more than 20 years in television under his belt.

In 1964, after being fired from a local newspaper in Portsmouth “for not being able to

10 Screen International October 2014

spell” and a small film company in London — “I get fired a lot, by the way” — he joined the BBC before moving to Scotland in 1972 to set up his own production company, Siddhartha Films. “I was a bit of a hippy in those days so named it after Indian stuff. I didn’t understand it but it sounded good,” he deadpans.

Opportunity knocks The company managed to survive on training films and commercials until Channel 4 started up in 1982, which effectively launched the independent production sector in the UK and resulted in Clark-Hall moving back to London, where he made long-running series including magazine show Years Ahead. With his partner, Mairi Bett, they renamed the company Skyline Films, which they still run today.

‘We need to be challenging old farts like me to come out with new stuff’ Steve Clark-Hall, producer

Guy Ritchie collaboration Sherlock Holmes

Clark-Hall’s first foray into film — The Dressmaker — came through his relationship with writer-director John McGrath, with whom he worked on political activist miniseries Blood Red Roses. “That really got me going in drama, which was always the first love,” he recalls.

Following a string of features in the 1990s, including Derek Jarman’s Edward II, Margaret’s Museum starring Helena Bonham Carter, and Alan Rickman’s directorial debut The Winter Guest, Clark-Hall hit the jackpot in 2003 as a co-producer on Calendar Girls.

The feelgood film starring Helen Mirren, about a Women’s Institute group that raises money for a local hospital by posing for a nude calendar, made nearly $100m at the worldwide box office.

“It was a terrific cast and Nigel Cole is an incredibly talented director,” says Clark-Hall, who worked with Cole previously as line producer on Saving Grace (2000). “I’ve wanted to work with him again but we’ve never managed to pull it off. Those two films were some of the happiest experiences I’ve had working with a director.”

Lucrative links It was while working on his next film, Man To Man, that the producer first began his fruitful relationship with Guy Ritchie.

“I was on a night shoot in Edinburgh and I got a call out of the blue asking if I wanted to do a film called Revolver with Guy Ritchie, so I said, ‘Alright!’,” he recalls.

“The way it works is that Guy and [his producing partner] Lionel Wigram are the creative motor and I’m paddling away underneath, trying to make the mechanics of it work.”

The collaboration has been lucrative.

Following Revolver and RocknRolla, ClarkHall co-produced Sherlock Holmes, starring Robert Downey Jr, and executive produced the sequel, which have together made more than $1bn at the global box office.

He is next producing Ritchie’s 1960s spy reboot The Man From U.N.C.L.E. “It’s great and it’s going to be huge. That’s all I can say right now,” says Clark-Hall.

“We’re just embarking on our sixth movie together, Knights Of The Roundtable: King Arthur,” he adds. “That will be challenging to make but it’ll be great, too.”

As for the future, Clark-Hall is optimistic.

“Production in the UK is very good at the moment but I want us to get more people trained in the business,” he asserts. “We’ve got to keep our talent pool fresh and replenished. If we don’t, we won’t be challenging old s farts like me to come out with new stuff.” ■

» The inaugural Warner Bros Leavesden Studios Contribution to the Industry award was chosen by an industry jury ahead of the relaunched Production Guild Awards. Clark-Hall is vice chair of The Production Guild. www.screendaily.com

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INTERVIEW MIKE ELLIOTT

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he old adage goes that you wait ages for a bus and then several come along at once. The same can be true of film-making.

“We’re hoping to keep it a regular service,” laughs Mike Elliott, producer at London and Manchester-based Emu Films, whose first two features, Catch Me Daddy and The Goob, debuted this year at Cannes and Venice, respectively.

Elliott knows the industry better than many first-time feature producers, having spent the best part of 17 years plying his trade as one of the most respected assistant directors in the UK. The Yorkshire-born producer has collaborated with the likes of Michael Winterbottom (on six films), Lynne Ramsay, Matthew Vaughn, David Mackenzie, Jane Campion, Pawel Pawlikowski and Lars von Trier (including an unconventional interview process for Manderlay that involved drinking schnapps and swimming in the nude).

Transferable skills The skills and contacts he gathered while assistant directing have proved invaluable during the transition to producing. “The connections I made while AD-ing have inevitably helped,” he says.

“As an AD, you have to learn how to deal and work with directors to help them achieve what they need to achieve. You have to be on the same wavelength as the DoP and director, and make sure you’re enabling them in the right way.

“The skills you bring are more to do with the physical production. Your comfort zone is the shooting. The difficulty is in the development period. On the floor you’re making decisions all day; you can mark your achievements. In development there’s a totally different mindset. Added to that, if you’re not independently wealthy, financially it’s a challenging transition.”

Elliott launched Emu four years ago, going into business with colleagues from his early career, Jim Mooney and Walli Ullah, both Emu company directors.

The outfit got its feet wet on a number of shorts including Screen Star of Tomorrow 2014 Chris Foggin’s Friend Request Pending, starring Judi Dench, plus Chris Connatty’s Connected.

Meanwhile, former Emu producer Hayley Williams introduced Elliot to buzzed-about young music-video director Daniel Wolfe. “I had a gut instinct that he had something to say,” Elliott recalls about Wolfe, who directed Catch Me Daddy. “He seemed someone who would do something very interesting

12 Screen International October 2014

The Goob

Emu picks up pace Emu Films’ Mike Elliott talks to Andreas Wiseman about the challenges — and rewards — of making the transition from respected AD to feature producer with that idea [of a girl and her boyfriend on the run from her family].”

Emu caught Wolfe — another Screen Star of Tomorrow — as his career was on the rise.

The director had recently made a successful video for musician Plan B and would go on to make a viral hit promo for French band The Shoes, starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

Elliott came into his own during the production process of Catch Me Daddy, which faced what he describes as “good, old-fashioned nuts-and-bolts” AD challenges. “There was an unexpected hiatus at the beginning of shoot, which meant we had to stand the crew down for a few weeks. That was nervewracking. Then we got hit by the biggest snowfall on record in that region.”

But the film’s fundamentals were strong.

Partners included Film4, StudioCanal, the BFI, LipSync and Screen Yorkshire.

Guy Myhill’s debut, The Goob, a coming-of-age drama set in the beautiful but desolate fenland bayou of East Anglia, was shot as part of the iFeatures scheme just a few months after Emu wrapped on Catch Me Daddy.

“Both films feel like properly authored work,” says Elliott.

“That’s what we’re interested in

pursuing. If there’s a legacy from my AD days, that is it — the desire to work with strong, distinctive voices.”

Both films are now in contention for the best first feature award at the BFI London Film Festival, and are due to be released in 2015.

‘If there’s a legacy from my AD days, it’s the desire to work with strong, distinctive voices’ Mike Elliott, Emu Films

(Left) Catch Me Daddy

Next up Emu is now in development on a Daniel and Matthew Wolfe thriller set in China, which Elliott describes as a “Graham Greene-esque story of a British man who unravels in a dystopian Chinese cityscape”, and is planning an early 2015 shoot on Johnny Harris’s The Ballad Of Jimmy McCabe, a semi-autobiographical story about the actor’s previous life as a boxer.

The latter will see Elliott return to his AD connections with Revolution Films on board as co-producers. Director Thomas Napper and actors Ray Winstone and Michael Smiley are attached. Other development projects include Myhill’s next film and a project with playwright Anthony Neilson.

Elliott, Ullah and Mooney (the London office also includes development staff Thomas Hardiman and Laia Senserrich) now have their eyes on company growth.

Emu was recently boosted by a Creative England Enterprise Fund grant, which will help bring another producer into the company, s specifically on the TV side. ■

www.screendaily.com

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Festival focus ABU DHABI

T

his year’s Abu Dhabi Film Festival (ADFF) will enjoy the rare opportunity of opening with the world premiere of a local film: Ali F Mostafa’s From A To B, which follows three young Arab expats on a road trip from Abu Dhabi to Beirut.

Directed by an Emirati, the film was co-produced by Abu Dhabi’s twofour54 and Image Nation and brings together acting and producing talent from around the region. The film is significant in that it marks a milestone in Abu Dhabi’s efforts to build a self-sustaining film industry in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), of which the festival is also a key component.

“I believe we’ll see more feature films emerging from the Emirates, especially now that Abu Dhabi has aggregated its film-making institutions, making life easier for film-makers,” says ADFF director Ali Al Jabri. “From A To B is a good example of institutions working together.”

Just like the Gulf ’s other film hubs Dubai and Doha, Abu Dhabi has recently been through a process of deciding how best to serve its local communities of filmmakers and audience, resulting in big changes for ADFF, which enters its eighth edition this year (October 23-November 1). In 2012, the festival joined Abu Dhabi’s other film-related institutions under the umbrella of twofour54, with Al Jabri, previously director of the Emirates Film Competition, taking over as director.

While Image Nation remains separate, it works closely with twofour54.

Now in his third year at the helm, Al Jabri feels the festival has proved its mettle in terms of bringing world cinema to Abu Dhabi and supporting local filmmakers. “Attendance is up every year.

The audience now feels ownership of the festival and we’ve consolidated our reputation globally as an event that is focused on films and film-makers,” Al Jabri says.

“It makes our life easier as we have more submissions and film-makers approaching us.” The number of submissions increased by 12% this year to 2,032 titles.

International reach Meanwhile, ADFF’s development and post-production fund Sanad has become a major force in funding regional production, supporting more than 100 projects since its launch in 2010. Many of these films are securing berths at major festivals. Of the eight Arab films that played in Toronto this year, four were supported by Sanad — Naji Abu Nowar’s Theeb, Ghassan Salhab’s The Valley and documentaries The Wanted 18 and Iraqi Odyssey.

Theeb premiered in Venice’s Orizzonti section where it picked up the best director prize. All four films will play at ADFF. “It’s not just about funding, Sanad

16 Screen International October 2014

From A To B

‘The audience now feels ownership of the festival and we’ve consolidated our reputation globally’ Ali Al Jabri, Abu Dhabi Film Festival

Abu Dhabi’s driving force Abu Dhabi Film Festival (Oct 23-Nov 1) brings the best in world cinema to the region, while its Sanad fund has put local film-makers on the international stage. Liz Shackleton reports also facilitates networking for producers,” says ADFF programming director Teresa Cavina, adding that the festival’s co-production meetings will be expanded this year. “It’s also become a stamp of quality. European funders will prioritise projects Sanad is involved in.”

Many Sanad-supported films also end up in the ADFF programme, competing alongside international films rather than screening in a separate section, which the festival feels is important. In the Narrative Competition section, Egyptian filmmaker Ibrahim El Batout’s Cat will

Theeb

compete with Berlin Golden Bear winner Black Coal, Thin Ice, Cannes’ best screenplay winner Leviathan, and Venice winners Hungry Hearts (best actor and actress) and Tales (best screenplay).

Theeb and From A To B (not supported by Sanad) will play in the New Horizons competition for first and second narrative features, alongside films such as Cannes’ Grand Prix winner The Wonders and Venice special jury prize winner Sivas.

El Batout’s highly anticipated followup to Winter Of Discontent is also a world premiere, as are three Arab films in the

Documentary Competition — Merieme Addou and Rosa Rogers’ Pirate Of Salé, Nadine Salib’s Um Ghayeb and Sounds Of The Sea from UAE’s Nujoom Al Ghanem.

Director of Arabic programming Intishal Al Timimi notes that the festival is more focused on discovering Arab cinema, particularly through Sanad, than insisting on screening it first. “We have good relationships with film-makers and help them to screen at major festivals. But if they don’t go elsewhere, they come to us.”

A growing part of the festival’s Arabic programming are its special programmes, which have included retrospectives of Algerian cinema and debut films of Arab film-makers. This year the festival is screening 10 features and four shorts from Arab diaspora film-makers, including Merzak Allouache’s Salut Cousin! and Karim Traidia’s The Polish Bride. “It’s important for the young generation to discover these films as there are no libraries or archives of Arab cinema,” says Al Timimi, adding that the festival has been working on new prints.

ADFF closes on a crowd-pleasing note s with Disney animation Big Hero 6. n

ADFF 2014 HIGHLIGHTS ■ Opening film From A To B ■ Closing

film Big Hero 6

■ Competition sections Narrative

Competition, New Horizons, Documentary Competition, Emirates Film Competition, Short Film Competition ■ Other awards Showcase Audience Choice Award, Our World Award, Child Protection Award ■ Special programmes Francois Truffaut retrospective, Arab Diaspora (showcasing 10 features and four shorts from overseas Arab film-makers)

Big Hero 6

www.screendaily.com

Busan International Film Festival focus

festival focus busan

Busan’s higher calling Lee Yong-kwan tells Jean Noh about Busan International Film Festival’s role in the international industry, the diverse, new voices of Asian cinema and the festival’s focus on safety and stability

I

n its 19th year, Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) is continuing in its mandate to showcase new Asian films while putting an added emphasis on safety and stability. The festival opened October 2 with the international premiere of Chen-Zer Doze Niu’s Taiwanese film Paradise In Service. It will close on October 11 with the world premiere of Lee Bo-Cheung’s Hong KongChina film Gangster Pay Day. BIFF will screen 314 films from 79 countries, with 98 world premieres and 36 international premieres. The 12-film New Currents competition comprises world and international premieres, including one from Asian Film Academy (AFA) alumnus Abu Shahed Emon — the Bangladeshi film Jalal’s Story.

The fest is showcasing Georgian women film-makers and New Turkish Cinema, while also launching a Cinekids programme. New awards include the Daemyung Culture Wave award, which will give a Korean independent film $20,000 cash and $100,000 towards distribution costs.

In a country marked by the shock of the Sewol ferry disaster of April 2014 — largely attributed to endemic safety and administration issues — which resulted in more than 300 people dead or missing, Busan is also making safety a priority.

BIFF festival director Lee Yong-kwan gave Screen the lowdown on this year’s festival.

What’s your main focus at the festival this year?

The most important thing is safety. It’s part of audience service and something we have to make sure to take care of as we go along. Last year, Busan experienced a typhoon during the festival. This year, [Korea] had a very shocking safetyrelated incident. I think BIFF’s crisismanagement capabilities have improved. We didn’t have a single accident last year despite the typhoon. We were able to show how we’ve matured in that sense, and will build on that stability for a safe festival.

Has the festival budget been affected by the economy?

Busan Metropolitan City and the central government continue to support us in a

18 Screen International October 2014

and the far reaches of Asia. For example, countries like Georgia and Vietnam that show how their industries have grown since the influence of socialism has decreased.

How does the Asian Film Market fit into that?

It actively supports international sales and meetings for festival films. More serious buyers and sales agents are coming and we’re shaping a fully fledged market that will help films get more confidence on the international stage.

Are you making any special preparations for your 20th anniversary?

We’re very happy to see the organisation is running smoothly at 19 years of age.

Rather than looking for extraordinary things to do outwardly, we’re figuring out what has been lacking and are trying to make things more stable and mature.

Busan Cinema Center

stable manner and we don’t have any special problems. We were affected a little by the World Cup and Asian Games in terms of sponsorship. We tried to get a bit more than last year, factoring in prices and payroll costs, but the festival budget is roughly the same — about $11.5m (won12bn).

What trends are you seeing in Asian cinema these days and how does BIFF reflect that?

Whether we’re talking about commercial films or independent films, the subject matter has become diverse, and the size of films has started to match their [creators’] imagination. We’re seeing more diverse films as developing nations

are growing and changing culturally, economically and politically. If you look at the titles in BIFF this year, you can discover this in films from all around

‘The subject matter of films has become diverse, and the size of films has started to match their creators’ imagination’ Lee Yong-kwan, BIFF

Who are some of the guests you are most looking forward to welcoming this year?

We have so many honoured film-makers and stars attending, and it’s important for us to have them meet with audiences. I’m looking forward to Zhang Yimou, who’s bringing Coming Home, and our Asian Filmmaker of the Year Ann Hui, who’s bringing The Golden Era. Also, AFA is celebrating its 10th year — results have been tremendously good — and a lot of alumni who are active in the film industry are returning to Busan.

I’m looking forward to meeting with them and discussing the future.

Tokyo International Film Festival (October 23-31) has announced a major Asia push this year. Has that affected Busan?

Previously, Tokyo has been known to be dependent on [local] importers, but the festival in recent years has been making more efforts to select good films. In a way, we’re competitors and in another, we’re well-intentioned companions.

A lot of us from BIFF, with [founding and honorary festival head] Kim Dongho and I, will be attending Tokyo this year to cultivate our new relationship and see how their programming has s changed. n

www.screendaily.com

festival focus busan

Going to market This year’s Asian Project Market includes a strong showing from China among the 30 projects. Jean Noh reports

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ontinuing its tradition of selecting established auteurs and up-and-coming filmmakers, Busan’s Asian Project Market (APM) this year welcomes directors such as Brillante Mendoza, Pema Tseden, Vimukthi Jayasundara, Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit and July Jung.

As part of the Asian Film Market, which runs October 5-8 this year, APM will run October 6-8 at Busan Exhibition and Convention Center (BEXCO).

Select group This year’s APM received 235 submissions for a total of 30 final selections. That is 14 down from last year, although organisers say they saw around 10% more projects from Asia and a small rise in international co-productions.

“Last year we had an excessive number of Korean project submissions — more than 70. I think this was a secondary effect of the Korean film industry’s slump that lasted until 2012.

This year, it’s been normalised and we had 45. Mainstream commercial films can get funded by the mainstream

Alive was an APM selection in 2011

Korean film industry now that it’s back on track,” says Asian Film Market director Jay Jeon.

Organisers estimate the number of APM participants will go up about 10% this year along with overall Asian Film Market attendee numbers. Jeon says that in addition to large numbers of European sales agents, the market is set to benefit

from the recent South Korea-China co-production pact.

“We’re seeing a strong wind of Chinese companies eager to find co-production projects,” he says, noting Chinese internet video platforms Youku and iQiyi have quickly become sponsors of the market as well.

Thai critic and producer Donsaron

Kovitvanitcha, who will be at APM with The Master, says it “is a good meeting point for Asian film-makers to get to know professionals in the Korean film industry and film-makers around the world who participate in Busan International Film Festival”.

He adds: “Asian Project Market is a very important event during the Asian Film Market and a very important event of Asian cinema.”

Several previous Thai APM selections such as Aditya Assarat’s Hi-So and Nonzee Nimibutr’s Queens Of Langkasuka have been completed.

Of previous APM selections that have come to fruition, this year’s Busan attendees will be able to see 13 films including Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s The President, which premiered in Venice, and Park Jung-bum’s Korean film Alive, which screened in Locarno and Toronto.

In addition, the world premiere of Partho Sen-Gupta’s India-France co-production Sunrise, will compete in New Currents alongside Wang Wei Ming’s Taiwanese film (Sex) Appeal, which is making an s international premiere. n

‘APM is a very important event during the Asian Film Market and a very important event of Asian cinema’ Donsaron Kovitvanitcha, producer

APM 2014 Official Project List Blue Sunset (S Kor-Aus-Fr) Dir Shin Su-won Prod Francis Lim Clair-Obscur (Turk-Fr-Ger) Dir Yesim Ustaoglu Prods Marianne Slot, Titus Kreyenberg A Copy Of My Mind (Indo) Dir Joko Anwar Prods Tia Hasibuan, Uwie Balfas Diamond Island (Cam-Fr) Dir-prod Davy Chou Prod Charlotte Vincent Doggy And The Gastronauts (Serb-Ger) Dir Dusan Milic Prod Undine Filter Dora (working title, S Kor) Dir July Jung Prod Kim Jiyeon Edge Of The World (S Kor) Dir Sohn Soopum Prod Park Jooyoung

20 Screen International October 2014

The Family Ground (working title, The Killer (Chi) S Kor) Dir Pema Tseden Dir Yeon Sang-ho Prod Sangye Gyamtso Prod Lee Dong-ha Learning To Build A Fire (Phil) The Flag (Pal) Dir Hannah Espia Dir Firas Khoury Prod Giancarlo Abrahan Prod Hany Abu-Assad The Long Excuse (working title, Fowl (Phil-Fr-Ger) (Jap) Dir Brillante Mendoza Dir Nishikawa Miwa Prod Larry Castillo Prod Nishikawa Asako Full-Moon Party (Viet-Fr) Dir-prod Dang Di Phan Prod Thi Bich Ngoc Tran

Lotus Position (HK-Chi) Dir Liu Shu Prods Isabelle Glachant, Liang Ying

Hair Of The Dog That Bit You (S Lan) Dir-prod Vimukthi Jayasundara

Mantra — The Song Of Scorpions (Switz-Ind-Fr) Dir Anup Singh Prod Saskia Vischer

In The Beat Of Night (Iran) Dir Mohamad Ahmadi Prod Shohreh Golparian

The Master (Thai) Dir Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit Prods Soros Sukhum, Donsaron Kovitvanitcha,

Cattleya Paosrijareon, Attaphon Nabangxang My Happy Family (Georgia) Dirs Nana Ekvtimishvili, Simon Gross Prod Simon Gross No Land’s Man (Bang-India-USAus) Dir-prod Mostofa S Farooki Pokarekare Ana: Yeon-Ga (S Kor-NZ) Dir Song Il-gon Prod Sebastian Dong Hun Lee, Catherine Fitzgerald Samui Song (Thai) Dir Pen-ek Ratanaruang Prod Raymond Phathanavirangoon, Arunee Srisuk, Rasarin Tanalerttararom The Science Of Fictions (Indo) Dir-prod Yosep Anggi Noen Prod Edwin Nazir

Side Hero (India) Dir Vasan Bala Prod Guneet Monga Sixty Nine (Chi) Dir Zhang Chi Prod Hu Guipu, Wei Yang, Angie Henle To All Naked Men (Fr-Turk-SyrNeth) Dir Bassam Chekhes Prod Behrooz Hashemian The Two Kings (Thai-US) Dir Nonzee Nimibutr Prods Henry Ko, Sandra Gaviria Unexchangeable (S Kor) Dirs-prods Roh Gyeong-tae, Lee Woo Vapour Of Smoke (US-S Kor) Dir Lee Isaac Chung Prod Eugene Suen, Samuel Gray Anderson

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Kabukiza Theatre

the transmedia possibilities of Japanese content.

“We believe the animation business in Asian countries will grow and hope this bears good ripple effects in our affiliated content market TIFFCOM,” says Shiina.

Tokyo plays it cool Tokyo International Film Festival (Oct 23-31) adds new venues and an increased focus on Japanese exports and Asian links. Jean Noh reports

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he 27th Tokyo International Film Festival (October 23-31) has had increased backing from the Japanese government, which is advancing its ‘Cool Japan’ initiative to promote local content abroad. The festival is set for a major Asian push while at the same time showcasing Japanese animation, with an emphasis on promoting Japanese culture to the world.

Yasushi Shiina, director general of TIFF and TIFFCOM, says: “One of the important themes of this year’s festival is to raise the profile of TIFF internationally. As key initiatives, we are showing animation films by acclaimed Japanese directors and also holding unique events such as the special event at Kabukiza Theatre, centre of a Japanese traditional performing art.”

In addition to Kabukiza and its already established Roppongi Hills venue, TIFF has also added Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi and other venues across the city.

Endeavouring to create a more festive air, TIFF will this year also host film-related musical events and food stalls throughout its run. Actress Miki Nakatani, whose credits include Memories Of Matsuko and Ring, has taken on the duties of ‘festival muse’ this year, and will be on hand for key events.

The festival is also adding the Wowow viewer’s choice award for the Competition section this year. Broadcaster Wowow will give a $10,000 cash prize to the winner.

In addition to more ambitious programming from across Asia, TIFF has announced that for the next seven years, UniJapan and

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the Japan Foundation will hold film culture exchange projects linking Japan and other Asian countries at the festival.

These projects include a Spirit of Asia award to be given to a film from the Asian Future section for up-and-coming directors; and Crosscut Asia, a showcase of Asian films focusing on particular countries, film-makers, actors and themes. This year’s inaugural Crosscut Asia will spotlight new Thai films.

Japan Foundation Asia Center and TIFF will also co-produce a series of omnibus films called Asian Three-Fold Mirror, which will each have three up-and-coming directors from Japan and Asia producing a triptych of films on a single topic.

Animation focus Known as the only man Hayao Miyazaki would ever acknowledge as his apprentice, Hideaki Anno is to be honoured with a showcase of more than 40 of his works as animator, director and producer. These include films such as Nadia: The Secret Of Blue Water, Ultraman and films from the Evangelion series.

The festival is also boasting a Pikmin short movie premiere in 3D. The short animation is produced by Shigeru Miyamoto — regarded as ‘the Spielberg of video games’ — senior managing director at Nintendo and producer of games such as Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong and Pikmin.

The Pikmin animation film is the first that ties in with the Wii game and also illustrates TIFF and TIFFCOM’s initiative to promote

‘One of the themes of this year’s festival is to raise the profile of TIFF internationally’ Yasushi Shiina, TIFF and TIFFCOM

TIFFCOM growth As part of Japan Content Showcase 2014, which comprises markets for music, film and animation, TIFFCOM will run October 21-23 at the Grand Pacific Le Daiba hotel in the Tokyo Bay area.

“This year, TIFFCOM has sold out its booths more quickly than ever, which means it is recognised to be a more important market than ever before. TIFF/TIFFCOM will strive continuously to be a strong gateway for the Japanese films to promote to the world,” adds Shiina.

Exhibitors signed up this year include local companies such as Toho, Toei, Gaga, Kadokawa and Shochiku. Overseas exhibitors include CJ E&M, Finecut and M-Line Distribution from South Korea; Double Edge Entertainment and Central Motion Picture Corp from Taiwan; Media-Corp TV from Singapore; and GMM Tai Hub from Thailand.

Haruko Watanabe, international sales manager at Gaga, says: “As the market attracts more and more buyers over the years, it is an important fall market for us. We can see buyers who are particularly interested in Japanese content and buyers who are skipping the American Film Market.”

She adds her voice to the consensus that although there are still complaints about the market’s relative distance from the festival’s main venues and the lack of shuttle buses, TIFFCOM’s market screenings of festival programming and convenient accommodations for overseas guests have been working s in its favour. ■

TOKYO 2014: FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS ■ Opens with the world premiere of Disney animation Big Hero 6, directed by

Don Hall (Winnie The Pooh) and Chris Williams (Bolt).

■ Closes with the world premiere of Parasyte, a live-action adaptation of the

Japanese manga, directed by Takashi Yamazaki (The Eternal Zero).

■ Special screening on October 27 of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights at

the historic Kabukiza Theatre, with a kabuki performance by Ichikawa Somegoro to precede the film.

October 2014 Screen International 23

©2014 ‘Pale Moon’ Film Partners

INTERVIEW DAIHACHI YOSHIDA

husband and starts an affair with a university student. The more time she spends with him, the more she is tempted to use her clients’ money, until she finally graduates to full-blown embezzlement.

Produced by Ikeda Fumitsugu for Shochiku with Robot Communications as the lead production company, Pale Moon is the only Japanese film in Competition at Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF), where it receives its world premiere.

Shochiku will release theatrically in Japan on November 15.

Pale Moon

Shooting for the Moon Director Daihachi Yoshida tells Liz Shackleton about Pale Moon, his story of a housewife embezzler, the only Japanese film in Tokyo’s competition this year

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n contemporary Japanese cinema, the combination of a strong director, star and bestselling novel, manga or TV show is a sure-fire way of getting a local studio behind you. Not all of these packages are successful creatively, but in the case of Daihachi Yoshida’s new project, Pale Moon, none of the three main elements could be accused of being bland or predictable.

Based on a novel by Mitsuyo Kakuta, Pale Moon stars Rie Miyazawa, one of Japan’s leading actresses, who won awards for her nuanced performances in Yoji Yamada’s Twilight Samurai and Kazuo Kuroki’s The Face Of Jizo, although more recently she has been focusing on theatre.

Kakuta is an award-winning female author whose books such as Woman On The Other Shore and The Eighth Day portray the lives of women in their mid-30s to 40s and how they grapple with the expectations of Japanese society.

Yoshida has also won a string of awards for his off-kilter comedy dramas, starting with his international breakout, Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers!, about three siblings descending on their home town following the death of their parents, which premiered in Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2007.

He confirmed his edgy signature style with black comedies The Wonderful World Of Captain Kuhio (2009) and Permanent Nobara (2010), before directing his best-known work to

24 Screen International October 2014

date, The Kirishima Thing (2012), which won the best film and director prizes at Japan’s Academy Awards. Less comedic than his previous work, that film took a wry, perceptive look at the various cliques in a high school, where the social order has been overturned following news the star athlete has quit the volleyball team.

Yoshida says his new film also adjusts the drama to comedy ratio: “There might seem to be fewer recognisable elements of comedy and a more serious tone than my other films. However, you’ll find that it deals with the theme of the relationship between society and human beings more radically than my previous films,” he says.

Adapted from Kakuta’s novel by TV writer Kaeko Hayafune, the film follows a housewife (Miyazawa) working in a bank, who feels neglected by her

‘I liked Pale Moon because it’s a reflective hard-boiled story’ Daihachi Yoshida, director

Strong platform “The producer held the film adaptation rights for the novel and offered me this project,” says Yoshida. “I liked it because it’s a ref lective hard-boiled story about a woman who doesn’t quickly judge black from white and follows her will as well as her impulses.”

Yoshida adds that he had been hoping to work with Miyazawa for some time, but the opportunity had not arisen as the actress was working mainly in theatre. “Luckily, when I offered her this leading role, she had shifted her interest back to movies,” he explains. “What I really appreciate is her overwhelming ability to express subtle emotional changes with gestures and facial expressions.”

He also has high praise for the young actor who plays her lover — Sosuke Ikematsu — who started out as a child actor in The Last Samurai and has been working steadily since: “He’s outclassed other young actors these past two years in respect of both quality and range.”

Yoshida says he is proud to be premiering Pale Moon on home turf at TIFF, which he also regards as a strong international platform to launch the film, but acknowledges it has been difficult for Japanese dramas and comedies to travel overseas in recent years.

“It’s due to the mindset on the production side,” he says. “It obviously won’t work if you make the domestic market the highest priority and do international business with leftover resources. I think trial and error will continue but I’d like to get involved in this s matter as much as possible.” ■

FACTFILE: DAIHACHI YOSHIDA ■ An award-winning

commercials director, Daihachi Yoshida made his feature debut in 2007 with Funuke Show Some Love, You Losers!, revolving around a dysfunctional family living in the countryside, which premiered in Critics’ Week at Cannes.

■ He followed his debut with 2009

conman comedy The Wonderful World Of Captain Kuhio, about a grifter who seduces women under the guise of being a US Navy operative. The film won three acting awards at Yokohama Film Festival.

■ His 2010 film, Permanent Nobara, was also a black comedy, this time about a woman moving back to her home village with her daughter following

a divorce. It won the Netpac award at Korea’s Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival (PiFan).

■ Yoshida’s most recent film, highschool drama The Kirishima Thing (2012, pictured left), won a string of awards including best film, director and editing at Japan’s Academy Awards; best editor at the Asian Film Awards; and the Netpac award at PiFan.

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Getty

FESTIVAL FOCUS LONDON

Tom Hanks at last year’s closing night film, Saving Mr Banks

The London look Clare Stewart, director of BFI London Film Festival (Oct 8-19) tells Michael Rosser that a revamped programming approach is paying off

A

fter two years of change at BFI London Film Festival, director Clare Stewart has been able to focus almost solely on building a strong programme for its 58th edition with an expanded team.

“I feel squarely here now, almost proper British,” laughs the Australian, who joined from Sydney Film Festival in 2012 and immediately went about reshaping LFF. The changes were pretty significant, shortening the festival from 16 days to 12 (this year running October 8-19), spreading its reach into new venues across London, grouping the programme into themed categories and introducing competition strands to raise the event’s profile and build interest.

The revamp worked and the 2012 edition recorded a 12% boost in audiences. Last year, audiences rose again — from 149,000 to 151,000 — as restoration films and shorts were added to the themed strands, which include Love, Debate, Dare, Laugh, Thrill, Cult, Journey, Sonic, Family and Experimenta.

“That meant we got bigger and younger audiences for restorations and shorts, which is very exciting because one of the roles I take very seriously is that we are here to excite the audience of tomorrow about all cinema,” says Stewart.

The programming team, each of which see between 500 and 800 films a year, has also been given a helping hand over the past 12 months by “advisers” for each strand.

“We have been working behind the scenes on how you take a different programming approach,” says Stewart. “As well as having our pool of international advisers, who are regional specialists in terms of international

26 Screen International October 2014

cinema, we also now have advisers who take responsibility for researching and looking in-depth at what is out there for each of the individual strands. Tim Robey is our Love tsar; Damon Wise has the Thrill section, for example. It means our net goes a lot wider.”

The result is around 250 features and 148 shorts.

Beyond the capital Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game will open the festival. The Second World War drama, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as codebreaker Alan Turing, will be shown simultaneously at cinemas throughout the UK alongside live red-carpet footage and interviews with the film’s creators.

The decision to take the festival’s flagship films beyond London’s borders has proven popular, not just with audiences but also with distributors.

StudioCanal has 13 films at LFF, including The Imitation Game. “It’s great that we’ve got the opening night, we’re really excited about it,” says StudioCanal UK CEO Danny Perkins. “We know the film is a crowd-pleaser so it’s great that we’re able to seed that excitement across the country and not just in London. It’s a huge platform for the film.”

Perkins also applauds the competitive element of the festival, which includes the Official Competition, the Sutherland award in the First Feature Competition and the Grierson award in the Documentary Competition. “It’s a further opportunity to discuss the films.

‘We are here to excite the audience of tomorrow about all cinema’ Clare Stewart, BFI London Film Festival

The Imitation Game

That’s what we need, debate around our films,” he says.

Official Competition also features The Duke Of Burgundy, the latest film from Berberian Sound Studio director Peter Strickland, sold by Protagonist Pictures.

Strickland will also be at LFF with concert film Björk: Biophilia Live, which he codirected with Nick Fenton and which will receive a gala premiere as the lead film of the Sonic section. He also had made a one-minute contribution to Experimenta portmanteau The Film That Buys The Cinema.

“It’s been 18 years since I last had a film at the LFF [short Bubblegum], so it’s a case of three buses in a row after such a long gap,” the Budapest-based UK director says.

“It’s a great springboard for a film’s survival, especially those that have yet to find distribution,” says Strickland of being selected by LFF. “It’s a litmus test of sorts, which can be terrifying as you never know how an audience will react.”

A further notable aspect of this year’s festival is the strong presence of women directors. A total of 53 features and 47 shorts are directed by women, including the world premiere of Carol Morley’s The Falling in Official Competition.

However, Stewart says there is more work to be done. “I can put hand on heart for both myself and Tricia Tuttle, our deputy head of festivals, and say this is a personal passion as well as a political one. But I don’t want to overstate it either. In festival terms, it’s about 20% of the overall programme.

There’s still a long way to go in giving women equal footing in terms of directing bigger productions.”

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Rising talent at BFI London Film Festival Monsters: Dark Continent Dir Tom Green First-time feature director Tom Green takes on the sequel to Gareth Edwards’ breakthrough sci-fi film. Damon Wise, Thrill strand adviser at BFI London Film Festival, says: “Tom Green seems to me to have a great sense of fearlessness. He is undaunted by the scale of such an ambitious project, which he has tackled with a confidence and energy that reminds me of the young Tony Scott.” Green previously directed two shorts and television series, including teen superhero drama Misfits, which won a Bafta for best TV series. The 34-year-old is a graduate of the National Film and Television School.

The Lost Aviator Dir Andrew Lancaster Australia-based Andrew Lancaster won acclaim for his debut Accidents Happen, starring Geena Davis, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in 2009. His second feature is a documentary about his infamous great uncle, the UK aviator Bill Lancaster, a celebrity in the 1920s who went on to be charged with murder. LFF programmer Edward Lawrenson describes the film as “an absorbing blend of historical detective story and family movie”. Talking of director Lancaster, he says: “The film delivers on the promise revealed in Accidents Happen and earlier prize-winning shorts.” Lancaster’s third feature will be drama The Quiet, which is currently in development.

The Lost Aviator

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in the idyllic English countryside, to the stark verisimilitude of the First World War battleground.” Kent’s TV credits include BBC mini-series The White Queen, heist drama Inside Men, supernatural drama Marchlands and TV film Margaret.

The Falling Dir Carol Morley

Monsters: Dark Continent

The Town That Dreaded Sundown Dir Alfonso Gomez-Rejon The feature debut of Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, born in Texas on the US-Mexico border, is a genre-savvy horror that draws inspiration from the 1976 serial killer classic of the same name. LLF programmer Michael Blyth says: “It’s a film that gives horror remakes a good name, and you can’t say that very often.” GomezRejon has directed several episodes of American Horror Story, having previously worked with co-creator Ryan Murphy directing teen musical Glee. He has also directed second unit on award winners

The Town That Dreaded Sundown

The Silent Storm

Argo and Babel among others. GomezRejon is in post on his second feature, an adaptation of teen cancer novel Me & Earl & The Dying Girl.

Testament Of Youth Dir James Kent UK TV drama director James Kent makes his first move into film with an adaptation of Vera Brittain’s beloved First World War memoir. LFF director Clare Stewart says of Kent: “I was impressed by his ability to extract such compelling performances from emerging talent and also his effortless rendering of the film’s dramatic shift from the first flush of lyricism

Testament Of Youth

Following her breakthrough documentary Dreams Of A Life, Carol Morley returns with a 1960s-set coming-ofage drama that explores what lies behind a mysterious fainting outbreak at a rural girls’ school. BFI deputy head of festivals Tricia Tuttle says: “The BFI has been an ardent supporter of Carol’s work from her early shorts and first doc feature, The Alcohol Years. The Falling is a typically bold, personal film that explores female experience and identity. I was struck again by how brilliantly she uses music and colour. There are echoes of Picnic At Hanging Rock, but this is uniquely English.”

The Silent Storm Dir Corinna McFarlane UK writer-director Corinna McFarlane makes her fiction debut with the story of an enigmatic outsider (Andrea Riseborough) living on a remote Scottish island, who finds herself caught between her minister husband (Damian Lewis) and the delinquent who is sent to live with them. Tuttle says: “It’s remarkable how confidently MacFarlane directs two of the world’s top actors, and she has made a real discovery in the gifted newcomer Ross Anderson.” McFarlane’s first film was documentary Three Miles North Of Molkom. She is currently working on s screwball sex comedy Monk’s Apartment. ■

The Falling

October 2014 Screen International 27

feATure focus n NETFLIX AND AMAZON n ELI ROTH’S CHILEWOOD

Big talent, small screen Netflix and Amazon Studios have made waves by innovating and working with top international film talent.

On the eve of MIPCOM, John Hazelton reports on the companies’ game-changing original programming

T

hree-and-a-half years ago, when Netflix made its headline-grabbing entry into the original programming business by ordering — without the security of a pilot and at a reported cost of $100m — two full seasons of drama series House Of Cards, it was the sheer size of the commitment that caught the industry’s attention.

But the deal also suggested the US internet streaming service was open to material with non-US roots (the series was to be based on the UK political drama of the same name) and keen to work with talents from the feature film world (star Kevin Spacey and director David Fincher both also serving as executive producers).

Since then, Netflix and streaming rival Amazon, whose own push into original programming began early last year, have opened their doors even wider to companies and talents from the film and international arenas.

Netflix, now with 50 million subscribers in 40 countries, has ordered two seasons (with a third to come) of horror series Hemlock Grove from Gaumont International Television (the Los Angeles offshoot of the French film giant) and signed multi-series programming deals with Marvel Studios and DreamWorks Animation. More series with film or international pedigrees are in the Netflix pipeline (see box, right).

Amazon Studios — whose original series are available to more than 20 million Amazon Prime subscribers in the US, UK and Germany — is getting drama Bosch from Fabrik Entertainment, one of the Los Angeles companies in Germany’s Red Arrow group. And Amazon’s latest round of series pilots includes several projects with notable film-makers attached (see box, right).

Straight to series Producers who are already working with Netflix or Amazon see the streaming players as direct competitors with US pay cable channels HBO and Showtime and basic channels such as AMC and FX, working on similar budgets and offering comparable talent deals. Where the streaming players differ from each other and from some of their

28 Screen International October 2014

Bosch

‘I am a firm believer that the viewers are the best judge of whether the show is good or not’ henrik Bastin, Fabrik

cable rivals is in how they select and shape their original series.

As it did with House Of Cards, Netflix has so far ordered its projects straight to series, bypassing the traditional pilot process.

In its deal with DreamWorks Animation, Netflix has gone further and committed to three-season runs for 13 animated family shows, many of which will feature characters from DreamWorks Animation movies.

Having that commitment, says Margie Cohn, DreamWorks Animation’s head of television, is “a great way to do very costeffective production and to lure the best talent — because who doesn’t want to have a secure job for that amount of time and know their creative vision will reach fruition and not be cut off after a certain number of episodes?”

Amazon Studios, by comparison, not only orders pilots, it streams them online to the public and uses viewer feedback in deciding which projects go to series.

While some producers and talents find

the public voting system nerve-wracking, others welcome it.

“I really, truly love it,” says Henrik Bastin, CEO of Fabrik, whose noir drama Bosch won a 10-episode order from Amazon after going through the process. “I’m a firm believer the viewers are the best judge of whether the show is good or not. Countless times we’ve been in a position where we’ve produced a pilot or a script that we thought was something an audience would love but it’s been killed because of internal politics or a change of heart on programming.”

During production, according to producers and film-makers, both Amazon and Netflix are relatively hands-off.

“You feel more like you’re making a small independent feature than traditional television,” says Sharon Hall, (Left) Puss In Boots heads to Netflix

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Territory focus

Reviews

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Iceland has seen a recent boom of Hollywood films shooting in the territory. What’s the big draw?

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president of film company Alcon Entertainment’s fledgling TV division, whose Hysteria is one of Amazon’s latest pilots. “This was a script we developed internally, Amazon read it and loved it and gave one round of notes and off we went. And they have encouraged us to break convention if we feel that it benefits the piece.”

World War Z director Marc Forster, who made his TV debut as director and executive producer on another current Amazon pilot, Hand Of God, has a similar story. “They were fantastic collaborators,” Forster says. “Before shooting we basically discussed cast but nothing creatively. They left me alone.”

In some ways, the streaming services and programme makers with theatrical and international backgrounds may be particularly well suited to each other.

Where storytelling technique is concerned, the practice of making entire seasons of a series available simultaneously for binge viewing — which Netflix has done with all its originals and Amazon is trying for the first time with comedy Transparent — has creative implications that should fit the abilities of film writers and directors.

Stream teams Where corporate synergy is concerned, companies with international scope could make a good fit with the streaming services.

Bastin says Amazon was the right home for Bosch partly because the series is based on Michael Connelly’s bestselling Harry Bosch novels, “so Amazon being a big seller of his books was a great deal for both the series and also for the underlying IP”. But the deal also worked because Red Arrow is an international distributor and was able to invest in Bosch and retain the rights for the series outside the Amazon territories (US, UK and Germany).

“Amazon is a very interesting candidate for production and distribution entities like us,” Bastin says, “because we want to bring something to the table financially and retain a piece [of the project].”

Marco Polo

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TV with A Film pedigree Coming to Netflix King Julien and Puss In Boots Animated

Hemlock Grove

‘Who doesn’t want to know their creative vision will reach fruition?’

Margie Cohn, DreamWorks Animation

Hand Of God

Going forward, links between streaming services and film and international companies could increase as the former expand their international reach.

Netflix’s expansion this year into France and Germany has led the company to order Marseilles, an eight-episode series produced

by Paris-based Federation Entertainment created and written by Dan Franck. In the UK, Stephen Daldry and Peter Morgan will team for Netflix’s The Crown.

As streaming services grow, they could use programming with a theatrical pedigree to help attract new subscribers. Cohn says of the Netflix deal: “The DreamWorks brand and the library was important because DreamWorks markets its movies worldwide and our characters are known and beloved.

“If you are trawling through a brand new service looking for content that might compel you to subscribe, knowing that a company you already have an attachment to is making shows [for the service] is a big s advantage.” n

family shows set to debut later this year that centre on characters from DreamWorks Animation features — the lemur from Madagascar and the cat from the Shrek films.

Marco Polo The Weinstein Company is producing this drama, shooting in Italy, Kazakhstan and Malaysia with an international cast including Lorenzo Richelmy and Benedict Wong, about the adventures of the 13th century explorer.

Narcos Wagner Moura and Jose Padilha, star and director of Brazilian feature Elite Squad, reunite for this 10-episode drama, produced by Gaumont International Television and set to debut early next year, about drug trafficker and politician Pablo Escobar.

Sense8 Due later this year, this sci-fi series, whose plot is being kept under wraps, is produced by Georgeville Television and marks the TV debut of Andy and Lana Wachowski, sibling directors of The Matrix and its sequels.

Amazon pilots The Cosmopolitans Whit Stillman

(Metropolitan) wrote, directed and produced this romantic comedy about a group of young US expats searching for love and friendship in Paris (where the pilot was shot).

Hand Of God Director Marc Forster (World War Z ) makes his TV debut on this drama about a powerful judge (Ron Perlman) who suffers a mental breakdown and goes on a vigilante quest guided by what he believes are divine messages.

Hysteria A drama, written by Shaun Cassidy (American Gothic) and produced in collaboration with Alcon Television Group and Universal Television, about a neurologist investigating a strange illness — linked to social media — that spreads through a Texas town.

Really Comedy from writer-director-star Jay Chandrasekhar (Super Troopers) about four suburban Chicago couples trying to hold on to what remains of their youth.

Red Oaks Directed by David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) and executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, this coming-of-age comedy is set at a country club in 1980s New Jersey.

October 2014 Screen International 29

Feature chilewood

Aftershock

Welcome to Chilewood Eli Roth and his Santiago-based partner Nicolas Lopez talk to Jeremy Kay about how they are reinventing the rules of film-making and turning their energy and ideas into a genre boom in Chile

E

li Roth was not happy about the way things went down after the release of his breakout horror film, Cabin Fever, way back in 2003.

The little-known film-maker had created what would become a phenomenon, a $1.5m-budgeted primal scream that reinvigorated the US horror genre and went on to gross more than $21m through Lionsgate and a lot more on the small screen.

Roth was marked down as one to watch and turned out to be an astute observer himself, resolving early on to exert maximum control over his work as the avalanche of meetings threatened to engulf his life.

“People are stagnant in LA,” Roth says over the phone as he prepares to board another plane. It is mid-September and he and his Santiago-based partner, Nicolas Lopez, are about to receive the inaugural La De Dios award at Fantastic Fest’s Latin American genre co-production market in Austin, Texas.

“In LA, they sit around waiting for the big pay cheque and make a movie once every three years. I want to be like Woody Allen and make movies every year and never stop.”

30 Screen International October 2014

The trip to Austin, will mark a homecoming of sorts, neatly paralleling the sense of belonging Roth has found with Lopez, the wünderkind with whom he has collaborated on the likes of Aftershock and the largely unseen The Green Inferno.

Two years ago Lopez brought Aftershock to the festival, hot on the heels of its Toronto world premiere. Now, the partners are all over Fantastic Fest: collecting the award, delivering a keynote speech about their selfstyled Chilewood venture and attending three sell-out screenings of their new world premiere, The Stranger.

Chilewood is a creative notion that encompasses Spanish-language films made through Lopez’s Sobras International Pictures and English-language titles in association with Roth, who describes the partnership as “creating movies in Chile for the world”. True to their word, the partners are churning out globally minded genre fare at a rate that would make Allen himself begin to feel his age.

Since the 2012 US premiere of Aftershock in Austin, the Chilewood factory has pro-

‘I want to be like Woody Allen and make movies every year and never stop’ Eli Roth, film-maker

duced The Green Inferno, The Stranger and Knock Knock, the Keanu Reeves starrer and one of the hit international sales titles in Cannes last summer for Voltage Pictures.

During all this, in between shooting days and wrap parties and pitch sessions, Lopez has continued to make Spanish-language fare for Chilean audiences.

These films are only distributed theatrically in Chile before Netflix’s exclusively negotiated international streaming window kicks in three months later.

Roth has been no slouch either, championing the likes of Netflix original series Hemlock Grove and taking regular trips down to Santiago.

Venture south How the Boston-born genre king came to become a frequent visitor to Chile lies in an origin story suffused with frustration and adulation. Rewind to 2004-05 and an impatient Roth, bristling with ideas, was trying to marry Hollywood’s best practices with his own copious energy in the most costeffective manner.

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body liked and I got offers to make movies in the US.” There was a reason Roth and Lopez shared cinematic taste and spoke the same language: they are peas in a pod and neither has the patience to play by the old rules.

“I asked myself, ‘Why does everything [in Hollywood] take so long?’,” says Lopez.

“I sold one script and they paid me a lot of money but they never made it.”

Lopez was trying to get a rom-com about superheroes off the ground. It was called Santos and captured the attention of several studios. But the process dragged on and he eventually took an offer from Spain’s Telecinco to make it, slashing the budget from $40m to $6m and shooting in Chile.

Santos languished in post for three years and flopped when it finally opened in Spain in 2008. “I was 25 and thought my career was over,” says Lopez. “My company invested in the movie and we had to pay off debt and we had to lay off people. It was a nightmare.”

“I thought, ‘There has to be a better way to make a movie’,” he says, adding that he is always looking for the next production centre. “So I went to Prague to shoot Hostel and it was a great experience.”

By this time Lopez, a household name in Chile due to his TV work and a long-running witty newspaper column he had written since the age of 12, had just scored a local hit with his feature directorial debut, the comedy fantasy Promedio Rojo.

“Most of the movies people made in Latin America were about poor people with guns,” says Lopez. “All the movies were showing a version of Latin America that had nothing to do with my Latin America [where] everybody had wi-fi and iPods and was watching movies on IMAX. “My first movie was about that. I wanted to make a movie that had more to do with John Hughes than City Of God.” He wrote to Roth to say how much he Fever The older film-maker admired Cabin Fever. attended a screening of Promedio Rojo at the 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival and invited Lopez to see an early cut of Hostel.

Through Roth, Quentin Tarantino got wind of Promedio Rojo and cited it as one of the funniest films he saw that year. Hollywood came knocking.

“Eli and I liked a lot of the same movies,” says Lopez. “Besides my awful accent we talked the same language; we were very fluent in geek. We kept in touch.

“Then I went through the craziness of having this movie that every-

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(Top) Eli Roth and Nicolas Lopez on the set of Knock Knock and (above) The Green Inferno; (below) Fuck My Life

costly lessons Roth too had faced challenges. On his return to the Czech Republic to make Hostel: Part II, which would come out in 2007, the strong euro meant it was no longer cost-effective to build sets that resembled the US. Several years later he would find himself producing The Man With The Iron Fists in China, another locale that required considerable production outlay.

“Nicolas had been telling me to get out to Chile,” says Roth. “I went down to Santiago and couldn’t believe how similar it was to LA in terms of geography and architecture.

It looks unbelievably American and has the same coast and foliage and streets. It looks like Santa Barbara.”

By this time, around 2011, Lopez had reconfigured his approach following the Santos debacle. “I knew I wanted to make movies but in the new economy I had to do it in a different way. So I went from making one of the most expensive movies in Latin America to one of the cheapest.”

He bought new equipment and with funding via product placement from brand sponsor Lopez raised $200,000 in a month.

He embarked on a 15-day Santiago shoot on Fuck My Life (Que (Que Pena Tu Vida Vida), a comedy inspired by what was at the time his shambolic private life.

The film beat The Social Network to number one at the local box office and stayed there for three weeks, eventually spawning a hit trilogy. “Because we owned the movie and didn’t have to pay anybody back, suddenly I made more money than if I’d had a big movie in the US.” Roth loved the look of the trailer. “We started talking about it and I said, ‘Eli,

fuck Hollywood. Let’s make a movie like this.’ He asked me if I was interested in horror and I said of course I was.” The inspiration for their first collaboration was at hand.

On the first day of production on Fuck My Life an 8.8 magnitude earthquake hit off the coast of central Chile.

“I told Eli about the quake and he thought it would be an amazing movie and I said I already had the name, Aftershock. He flew to Chile and we partied for a week. He fell in love with the country and the people.”

Shaking things up Roth, Lopez and his regular writing partner, the Uruguay-born Guillermo Amoedo, cowrote Aftershock in early 2011 as a vehicle for Lopez to direct.

While they waited for financing to come together, the Chilean wrote Fuck My Wedding (Que Pena Tu Boda), the sequel to his comedy hit.

With private investment secured and FilmNation on board to pre-sell international rights at Berlin’s EFM in February 2012, production on the sub-$2m Aftershock began in Chile in January 2012 starring rising local talent Lorenza Izzo from Fuck My Wedding.

“Aftershock became our experiment to see if we could make a movie for the world,” says Roth. “We didn’t want it to be a Latin American movie. We wanted to make a straight-down-the-middle genre movie that looked great and was for audiences worldwide.”

The film premiered in Toronto later that year and Dimension acquired US rights, eventually releasing in May 2013.

The touchpaper had been lit. “I bullied Eli to stop producing movies for other people and make his movie [The Green Inferno],” says Lopez. “We wrote the script in one month before we shot Aftershock and in May 2012 I was shooting the third part of the trilogy, Fuck My Family (Que Pena Tu Familia) and in October we started shooting The Green Inferno.”

The US-Chilean Amazon-set cannibal film marked Roth’s return to the director’s chair for the first time since Hostel: Part II five years earlier. “There was nothing like it,” he says of the experience.

Even the unresolved postponement of the scheduled September 5 US release through Open Road — sparked by an issue with the film’s financier Worldview Entertainment over the P&A commitment — cannot dampen Roth’s passion for Chilewood.

“We went on a trip to Peru with Miguel [Asensio Llamas, producer],” says Roth.

“We found a village that was completely cut off from society. But we found a team of Chileans and Peruvians and went and shot in the Amazon.”

The Green Inferno stars Izzo and filmed from October to December 2012. “Every day, »

October 2014 Screen International 31

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FEATURE CHILEWOOD

to get to the village, we had to drive one hour along a dangerous mountain road and take motorboats for one-and-a-half hours.

“Filming with the villagers, there was nothing like it. And there’s nothing that looks like the place. The last person [to go near the area] was Werner Herzog on Aguirre, The Wrath Of God and we went even further up the Amazon.”

The experience was revelatory. “I knew I’d found this incredible team of creators [on Aftershock],” says Roth, referring to Lopez, Amoedo and Llamas.

After The Green Inferno the quartet would also collaborate on Knock Knock. “When the three of us [writers] combine on a script, we can do it in under three weeks. Writing on my own takes me three months.”

Beyond horror Next, Lopez filmed Best Worst Friends, the sequel to Promedio Rojo. Then in 2013, with backing from the Chilean government, they shot The Stranger, Amoedo’s passion project and feature directorial debut.

“I wanted to get The Green Inferno sequel going,” says Lopez. “Eli went to Los Angeles to write it. We watched this movie called Death Game, this lost movie from the ’70s that was never released, so I told Eli we had to remake it.

“In January [2014] Eli came to Chile and we spent two weeks with Guillermo and wrote the movie, and that movie is Knock Knock.” They cast Keanu Reeves as the lead in the psychosexual thriller alongside Izzo and filmed in April, with Chile standing in for the LA county enclave of Calabasas.

The project is in post and Roth declares himself excited by his latest directorial

The Green Inferno

effort. “It’s my first non-horror movie. I wanted to make something like an early Polanski movie or a Verhoeven movie. All the majors are sniffing around it now.”

The post-production is taking place in a mansion that Lopez purchased in Santiago, which operates as the Sobras International Pictures headquarters. Lopez inhabits a top-floor apartment and the building often serves as a haven for visiting friends and collaborators.

“This year we will have done five movies,” says Lopez. “If we make four a year, one is in Spanish for the local market and three are for international audiences.

“It’s like a monkey throwing darts — to hit the target you need a lot of darts. Budgets will range from $400,000 to $10m. We don’t want to go higher. With more money

‘It’s like a monkey throwing darts — to hit the target you need a lot of darts’ Nicolas Lopez, film-maker

comes more problems and more people making decisions.”

Coming up next are The Hive, Chilewood’s biggest project to date based on a sci-fi screenplay they wrote with none other than David O Russell, as well as found-footage horror Lake Mead directed by and starring Jessica Chandler. “The idea is to make these movies at a price,” says Roth. “The industry is so risk-averse but you need to find ways to make them at a price so they look like theatrical films and can compete with Guardians Of The Galaxy.

“We always want to make a profit and if one turns out to be a hit that’s great but if not, you’re always making money.”

He chuckles. “This is only the beginning.

The audience is turning global. We’re very s excited to be at the beginning of this.” ■

CHILEWOOD HIGHLIGHTS Spanish-language titles Promedio Rojo 2004 Director/writer Nicolas Lopez Producer Miguel Asensio Llamas Santos 2008 Director/writer Nicolas Lopez Producer Miguel Asensio Llamas Fuck My Life (Que Pena Tu Vida) 2010 Director Nicolas Lopez Writers Nicolas Lopez, Guillermo Amoedo Producer Miguel Asensio Llamas Fuck My Wedding (Que Pena Tu Boda) 2011 Director Nicolas Lopez Writers Nicolas Lopez, Guillermo Amoedo Producer Miguel Asensio Llamas El Crack TV movie, 2011 Directors Nicolas Lopez, Guillermo Amoedo Writers Nicolas Lopez, Guillermo Amoedo Producer Miguel Asensio Llamas

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Nicolas Lopez Presents Special Forces (Nicolas Lopez Presenta Fuerzas Especiales) 2014 Director Jose Zuniga Writers Nicolas Lopez, Sergio Freire, Rodrigo Salinas, Diego Ayala Producers Miguel Asensio Llamas, Nicolas Lopez Best Worst Friends (Mis Peores Amigos: Promedio Rojo 2) 2013 Director Nicolas Lopez Writers Nicolas Lopez, Guillermo Amoedo Producer Miguel Asensio Llamas Fuck My Family (Que Pena Tu Familia) 2012 Director Nicolas Lopez Writers Nicolas Lopez, Guillermo Amoedo Producer Miguel Asensio Llamas

English-language titles Aftershock 2012 Director Nicolas Lopez Writers Nicolas Lopez, Guillermo Amoedo, Eli Roth Producer Miguel Asensio Llamas The Green Inferno 2012 Director Eli Roth Writers Eli Roth, Nicolas Lopez, Guillermo Amoedo Producer Miguel Asensio Llamas The Stranger 2013 Director Guillermo Amoedo Writer Guillermo Amoedo Producers Miguel Asensio Llamas, Nicolas Lopez, Eli Roth Knock Knock 2014 Director Eli Roth Writers Eli Roth, Nicolas Lopez, Guillermo Amoedo Producer Miguel Asensio Llamas

The Stranger

October 2014 Screen International 33

LIFE IN A FISHBOWL Director Baldvin Z

Producer Icelandic Film Company

Icelandic submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar Official Selection Zurich Film Festival

PARIS OF THE NORTH

Director Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson

SALÓME

Director Yrsa Roca Fannberg

Producers Kjartansson, ZikZak Filmworks Int’l. sales Pascale Ramonda

Films from Iceland

Int’l. sales Films Boutique

Producers Skarkali, Estudi Playtime

THE GRANDAD

Director Bjarni Haukur Thórsson Producer Thorsson Productions

CITY STATE II BRAVE MEN‘S BLOOD

SUMMER CHILDREN

FÚSI

ÁSTRÍDUR 2

THE CLIFF DEPTH OF DARKNESS

TRAPPED

Director Dagur Kári Producer Sögn / RVK Studios Int’l. sales BAC Films

TV series

Director Olaf de Fleur Producer Poppoli Pictures Int’l. sales Celluloid Dreams

Director Gudrún Ragnarsdóttir Producer Ljósband Filmworks

GRAVES & BONES Director Anton Sigurdsson Producer Ogfilms

Director Silja Hauksdóttir Producer Sagafilm 10 × 25 min, 2013 Nominated for PRIX EUROPA Award in the category Best European TV Comedy

Icelandic Film Centre / Hverfisgata 54 / 101 Reykjavik / Tel. (+354) 562 3580 / info@icelandicfilmcentre.is

Director Reynir Lyngdal Producer Pegasus Pictures 4 × 60 min, 2014

Directors Baltasar Kormákur, Baldvin Z, Óskar Thór Axelsson, Börkur Sigthórsson Producer Sögn / RVK Studios 10 × 60 min, 2015

Autumn 2014

Upcoming films

Best Nordic Documentary 2014

ICELAND TERRITORY FOCUS The cast and crew of Land Ho! shoot at Blue Lagoon

Taking the plunge Iceland has seen a recent Hollywood boom with projects such as Noah, Game Of Thrones and The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, and local talents are also thriving despite funding challenges. Wendy Mitchell looks at the filmic draw of this unique island nation

T

om Cruise, Ben Stiller, Kit Harington, Darren Aronofsky, Ridley Scott, the Wachowskis, Christopher Nolan — not just a rollcall of Hollywood’s biggest players, they are also fans of Iceland.

The Nordic country is certainly going through a boom of inward investment, thanks to projects

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such as Interstellar, Oblivion, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, Game Of Thrones, Noah, Thor: The Dark World, Prometheus, Jupiter Ascending, The Fifth Estate and Sense8 shooting in Iceland. Star Wars: Episode VII is also said to have recently shot in Iceland, although the production will not comment offi cially.

So what is the attraction for the studios to bring such big projects to this tiny island nation that is closer to Greenland than to Los Angeles?

There is some precedent — Clint Eastwood was a pioneer in shooting his 2006 Flags Of Our Fathers in the country, back when the local currency was stronger and the rebate »

October 2014 Screen International 37

Daniel Gylfason

n OVERVIEW n RVK STUDIOS n HOT TALENTS

territory focus iceland

only 12%. And Nolan started his love affair with Iceland during 2005’s Batman Begins.

Now, the country can offer the practicalities of a 20% tax rebate, experienced production service companies, a depressed local currency, a skilled, hardworking and non-unionised crew base and added post-production offerings. Green energy is efficient and cheaper, and the geographic location between the US and Europe is also a strength.

Added to all those practical benefits, much of the motivation to shoot in Iceland is creative — Iceland’s landscapes look like nowhere else on Earth, and there are highly varied locations within short drives.

Stiller’s production took advantage of a range of Icelandic landscapes — shooting for Greenland, the Himalayas, Afghanistan and Iceland itself. “The landscape creates such amazing, stunning imagery for a movie,” Stiller has said. “I was blown away by the experience.”

Iceland on the map “I have been going to Hollywood for 10 years and now they know Iceland so much more,” says film commissioner Einar Hansen Tomasson. Fox was comfortable to let Mitty shoot there because it had been pleased with Prometheus, for instance.

TV is also a growth area, and not just for visiting productions such as Game Of Thrones or Sky’s Fortitude, says Kjartan Thor Thordarson of Sagafilm. He says local series such as his company’s The Court, The Night Shift and The Press are seeing more interest in sales and remakes — akin to the trend from Israel with Homeland and In Treatment. He says: “I think we’ll see much more of a spotlight on Icelandic projects outside of Iceland than we’ve seen before. I do feel the change.”

Baltasar Kormakur’s RVK Studios is planning Iceland’s largest-ever TV project, the 10-part Trapped, with partners in Germany and France. Plus producer and production services company Truenorth is also developing a Viking adventure series as a feature film trilogy or TV series. Leifur B Dagfinnsson, Truenorth’s founding partner and chairman, hopes it could be for Iceland “what The Lord Of The Rings was for New Zealand”.

The 20% rebate on any local expenditure, administered by Film in Iceland, is secure through to the end of 2016. It has to be revalued by the government every five years, and the locals are hoping it will be boosted to a more competitive level of 25%. The benefits of tourism related to projects such as Game Of Thrones or Mitty should be another factor to convince the government to continue and boost support for the sector.

Dagfinnsson, whose Truenorth worked on films including Oblivion and Mitty, says in an understatement: “Business has been really good for the last three years; 2012 was exceptional, when we had Oblivion, Noah, Mitty and Thor all in the space of eight months.”

He even dreams of a trial of a 30% rebate.

38 Screen International October 2014

A stunt double for Tom Cruise on the set of Oblivion

“We will go way back in the line if we don’t build on what we’ve done. If the krona gets stronger then we’d definitely need to increase the tax rebate.”

‘Baltasar Kormakur is a powerhouse…

Through him we have this window from Iceland to Hollywood’ Einar Hansen Tomasson, film commissioner

Local highlights It is not just the studio projects that are growing the Icelandic industry. Local talents are pushing ahead with interesting projects despite tough financing conditions following government cuts to the budgets of the Icelandic Film Centre (IFC).

Laufey Gudjonsdottir, director of IFC, notes the funding “was cut drastically this year, back to post-crash level”. Film funding now stands at about $3.8m (¤3m) per year, less than half what it was a few years ago.

“It’s a small country but there’s a minimum you need to run a production professionally, and that’s a challenge at these levels,” she says. There has been strong lobbying all year by the film community and the hopes are now that the government will increase the funding again.

Olaf de Fleur, an Icelandic director who sold his sci-fi script Revoc to Summit, says Iceland is a good base to be a film-maker, but much of that is down to the steady funding of the recent past. “The story training I’ve gotten in Iceland has been a blessing, and that’s thanks to the film fund here.”

IFC funding is especially stretched because it needs to cover new voices and established talents, as well as shorts, animation and documentary. Gudjonsdottir is hoping to see film funding levels raised back up

to $8.8m (¤7m) per year to keep the industry at a healthy level.

Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, the Oscar-nominated veteran director and producer, produced Benedikt Erlingsson’s debut feature, Of Horses And Men, which was Oscar-shortlisted. Fridriksson says backing new talents cannot be forgotten, even with budget cuts.

“It’s difficult for young directors to come out unless they’re imitating Hollywood crime stories,” he says.

Hilmar Sigurdsson, chairman of the Association of Icelandic Film Producers, reiterates: “The big challenge in local film-making now is stabilising the film fund… We produce fewer films now and also the long-term planning is unstabilised. We need that sustainability in the industry.”

Film-maker Dagur Kari sums it up well: “In terms of talent we’re doing great; in terms of money it could be better.”

He says the government should see backing film “as not just support but as investment, for every krona you put into film you get it back five times”.

Connecting globally Iceland continues to actively co-produce as well, working on recent titles such as Finland’s The Grump, Denmark’s The Shamer’s Daughter and Palestine’s Eyes Of A Thief.

Plus, more independent US and European film-makers are choosing to tell stories in Iceland, with one example being US directors Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz with Land Ho!, which has become a festival hit

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Elizabeth McKee

Darren Aronofsky on the set of Noah

On the set of Prometheus

The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty

and secured a US theatrical release (it launches on DVD and VoD on November 4).

Julius Kemp, whose Kisi co-produced The Grump, adds: “We cannot bring much money to the table but we have to want the talent or else it doesn’t work. The Grump wanted an Icelandic composer, for instance.”

Hlin Johannesdottir of Land Ho!’s local production company, Vintage Pictures, agrees that, especially when local funding is limited, “connecting internationally is a priority… to be a successful business, we need collaboration with other countries”.

Mikkel Jersin, who produces Runar Runarsson’s Sparrows (see page 42), has opened an outpost of Denmark’s Nimbus Film in Iceland to work on projects by Runarsson and other local talents. “We have many ideas for the future,” he says, noting the “crews are very talented and artistic and hardworking, and will work 12 hours a day”.

Snorri Thorisson, whose company Pegasus has managed Game Of Thrones’ Icelandic shoot for the past three seasons as well as Sky/Tiger Aspect’s new Fortitude, agrees that hardworking crews are a big draw. “Everyone is willing to put in 150%,” he says.

If there is a posterboy for local and global success, it is now Baltasar Kormakur.

Tomasson says: “He’s a powerhouse. Having him doing these big Hollywood movies helps us. Through him we have this window from Iceland to Hollywood.”

Of course, the Icelandic industry is not just about one man’s work, and with every Hollywood project that comes to Iceland,

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‘If the krona gets stronger then we would definitely need to increase the tax rebate’ Leifur B Dagfinnsson, Truenorth

Game Of Thrones

Kormakur can see the whole industry maturing. “The energy is buzzing. Each project brings new people to the table… Now we can actually call it an industry. It’s layers, we’re doing different things, there’s more local films, there’s Hollywood films, there’s big TV, we can now do visual effects of scale.”

Iceland’s independent film-makers agree these Hollywood projects help their local industry. There may be the occasional scheduling challenge because crews can be working year-round, but that is a small price to pay for the stability these projects afford local crew, and the expertise it grows.

Building on success So where can Iceland go from here to keep up the momentum?

A boost to the 20% rebate would help across the industry, and certainly IFC’s funding needs to be reinstated to healthy levels.

There is also a call for a studio facility to be developed in Reykjavik; local government is already scouting disused industrial spaces for such a project. Dagfinnsson notes: “I see an opportunity for collaboration from Pinewood or Leavesden to do something here.”

Iceland also needs to keep up its offerings compared to eastern Europe, adds Thori­sson: “It’s hard to compete on some costs — we import timber, for instance. Adding a studio to the backdrop we have would be great.”

Even with cinema-going at a healthy five-plus visits annually per capita, there could be more audience development for specialty films.

Managing director Hronn Sveinsdottir

admits it can be an uphill battle running Iceland’s first arthouse cinema, Bio Paradis, established in 2010 in Reykjavik and backed by the professional associations. “It’s like growing a market from scratch,” she says.

Bio Paradis will host a second major film festival for Reykjavik, launching in February 2015. Fridriksson is among the creative talents backing the event, called Stockfish.

Sveinsdottir says of the new festival: “We want to establish and create real connections with the international industry.”

Meanwhile, Reykjavik International Film Festival (RIFF) celebrated its 11th edition in September with guests including Mike Leigh.

RIFF director Hronn Marinosdottir notes that 30,000 tickets are sold each year, representing about 10% of the entire country’s population. “A lot of young people attend. It’s important to get them hooked on good films.”

Another area for improvement is the support for women producers, directors and writers. There are some bright spots here with Anna Maria Karlsdottir producing Gudrun Ragnarsdottir’s debut feature Summer Children, or Hlin Johannesdottir and Birgitta Bjornsdottir working on Asa Helga Hjorleifsdottir’s The Swan.

Overall there is a positive mood in Iceland.

Baldvin Z, who directed this year’s local boxoffice hit Life In A Fishbowl, sees parallels to how the music scene grew. “The Sugarcubes did something to Iceland and now we have this special place for music. Maybe we’ll get that for film-making as well — it feels like s something is happening.” n

October 2014 Screen International 39

TERRITORY FOCUS ICELAND

W

hen Baltasar Kormakur was starting his filmdirecting career — in 2000 with the hit 101 Reykjavik — there were not enough local role models for the kind of career he wanted to build. He had to look abroad for inspiration.

“Working Title had a model where it had managed to break out in England and across the pond. It wasn’t that I wanted to repeat that business but it was something I could look to,” he remembers. (Coincidentally, he is now a frequent collaborator with the UK powerhouse on projects such as the forthcoming Everest.)

“There are footsteps of directors from England who have become big directors on the world stage. In Iceland, there were no such footsteps. And not even many from Scandinavia.”

Now Kormakur has taken those steps himself and built something of a small empire in Iceland. He launched his production company Blueeyes in 1999 (producer Agnes Johansen joined in 2002), which rebranded and grew into RVK Studios in 2013 with big ambitions that are now being realised. “The way the world is changing, we’re able to do more work from Iceland, we can open it up,” he says proudly, sitting in RVK’s spacious, industrial-chic offices in a former steel factory near Reykjavik’s old harbour.

One ambition was that Kormakur would continue to work on his big US and international films but from his base in Iceland when possible — his films, 2 Guns, Contraband and now Everest, are being post-produced at RVK’s sister company, RVX. With its launch, RVK also set out big ambitions in international TV production. This autumn, the company starts shooting Trapped,, a 10-part crime series that has European partners on board.

Expanding his global career while keeping true to the Icelandic spirit has been Kormakur’s MO throughout his career, which has spanned acting, theatre and film. “During my acting days, in the ’80s or ’90s, the idea of

RVK SLATE HIGHLIGHTS ■ Everest Kormakur’s epic mountain

disaster story will be released by Universal in autumn 2015 ■ Fusi Dagur Kari’s next feature, now in post ■ Viking Kormakur’s long-gestating passion project to shoot as a big-budget epic as soon as 2015 ■ Mules Borkur Sigthorsson’s debut feature, to shoot in 2015 ■ Silence Of The Grave Kormakur’s sequel to Jar City is in development.

Everest

Scaling new heights Film-maker Baltasar Kormakur and his producing partner Agnes Johansen talk to Wendy Mitchell about building RVK Studios, a Reykjavik firm that has global ambitions while staying true to its local roots success after making local films was to become a baddie in a Bond film or something. The usual idea was to leave your home and become someone else. That didn’t tempt me. I could go there and do the work with the intention of also coming back and building something here.”

Climbing Everest As part of that ambition to build locally, Kormakur also established RVX with visual-effects veteran Dadi Einarsson, a long-time creative at Framestore London who opened Framestore Iceland in 2008. The pair bought out Framestore’s stake in 2012 to form RVX, which now works on Kormakur’s projects (such as 2 Guns and Everest) as well as third-party work — from commercials to TV and films.

The company can lay claim to bringing visual effects of a global standard to Iceland.

“Baltasar sees this as a major cog in the wheel,” says Einarsson. “He had (Left) 2 Guns

40 Screen International October 2014

the shared vision to build the business here… he also sees VFX not just as an end-point vehicle but more of a creative collaboration from the beginning.”

RVX currently employs about 50 people and is deep into its work on Everest.

The mountaineering epic, set for a September 2015 release, shot for 80 days in Nepal (on the foothills of Mount Everest), Italy (including at Cinecitta and on location in the Dolomites) and the UK (including at Pinewood Studios). The project is made with Working Title Films, Universal Pictures, Cross Creek Pictures, Free State Pictures, Walden Media and RVK. The story follows a climbing expedition on Everest that must fight for survival after a severe snowstorm.

“It’s the hardest shoot I’ve done and I’ve done some tough ones like The Deep,” Kormakur says with a laugh.

He shot at the highest possible altitudes without putting cast and crew in danger. “You have the real stuff, and then you intertwine more [CGI]. I describe it as working with hair extensions instead of a wig.” Taking the cast up real mountains was important, “so they could all have that feeling of being high up, not just imagining”.

“It’s both epic and character-driven,” Kormakur adds. “But it’s really about people and the scale of the nature and

the mountains; it’s not really about heroes and the storm.”

The cast features Jason Clarke, Jake Gyllenhaal, Josh Brolin, John Hawkes and Keira Knightley.

The saga continues There is another big film in the pipeline, Viking (Vikingr), an original story that takes inspiration from classic Icelandic sagas. It has been a passion project for Kormakur for more than a decade, and he now has the clout and connections to make it happen on a large scale. Working Title came on board in 2011 and a studio partner could be confirmed soon.

‘Doing something of scale on your home turf is the ultimate’ Baltasar Kormakur, director

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“The idea of doing something like that here, with our own production company, on your home turf is the ultimate,” he says. “It’s shooting something that belongs here on that kind of scale.”

Yet Kormakur is not ignoring smaller works. He finished Icelandic-language shipwreck story The Deep between Contraband and 2 Guns, and he still plans to make Jar City sequel Silence Of The Grave.

RVK is also working on other directors’ projects, such as Dagur Kari’s Fusi (see page 44) and commercials director Borkur Sigthorsson’s debut feature Mules. Johansen says of Mules: “It’s about two brothers in the aftermath of the economic meltdown who choose very different paths — the older brother is very driven and a nouveau riche guy living beyond his means, the younger becomes involved in petty crime.”

Sigthorsson impressed the industry with his award-winning short Come To Harm in 2011. Kormakur says: “I’m always on the lookout for supporting talents that I believe in. Borkur has the potential to break away from just local success and film festivals.”

RVK has also optioned the screen rights for Icelandic epic novel Independent People, Halldor Laxness’s classic social-realist story about farmers in the early 1900s.

Kormakur does not plan to make features only for the small Icelandic market. “I don’t want to build a local comedy that won’t go anywhere. Jar City is a good example — that was a hit here and it also travelled very well. These films do have a life in the international market.”

TV growth The other move into the international market is with Iceland’s largest TV project, Trapped. RVK recruited TV veterans Sigurjon Kjartansson (head of development and head writer) and

‘Ten years ago, nobody was interested in Scandinavian programmes, now it’s the most popular stuff’

FILM SERVICES IN ICELAND

Agnes Johansen, producer

Magnus Vidar Sigurdsson (managing director) to build the TV slate, which includes anything from Iceland’s Got Talent to animated kids’ show Hulli to a new show based on CCP video game EVE Online.

Trapped is a 10 x 58-minute series that is commissioned by Icelandic public broadcaster RUV and has partners including ZDF, France 2 and France 4.

It starts shooting this autumn and will have directors including Kormakur, Baldvin Z and Oskar Thor Axelsson.

The story is about a local police chief (Olafur Darri Olafsson from The Deep and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) investigating a murder after a body washes up on the shore of a fjord. The murderer could be among the ferry passengers trapped in the town during a storm.

As Johansen notes, a US deal for the series is in discussion now: “Ten years ago and before, nobody was interested in Scandinavian programmes, now it’s the s most popular stuff.” n

20% REBATE ON ALL PRODUCTION COSTS T +354 511 1510 Info@Truenorth.is Truenorth.is

The RVK Studios headquarters

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October 2014 Screen International 41

territory focus iceland

Sparrows

A cool dozen Despite local budget cuts, Iceland’s directors and producers are preparing a slew of exciting projects.

Wendy Mitchell talks to 12 of the country’s top talents Runar Runarsson The debut feature from Runar Runarsson, Volcano, selected for Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2011, was described as the coming-of-age story of an elderly man entering a new chapter in his life.

Now his second feature, Sparrows, is a teenage coming-of-age story about a 16-year-old boy who has been living with his mother in Reykjavik and is suddenly sent back to the remote Westfjords to live with his father.

“It’s such a decisive time in our lives and there’s so much contrast during these years. You still have your innocence, yet more and more you are confronted with the reality of life,” the

‘It’s important to have an emotional link to whatever I am trying to portray’ Runar Runarsson, film-maker

42 Screen International October 2014

writer-director says. “Transition periods are dramatic. There’s so much at stake.”

Sparrows shot for 27 days this summer at locations in the Westfjords including Flateyri and Isafjordur. The region is extraordinarily beautiful but has its own hardships. “Most of the towns are quite worn. The boom years have never reached them,” he says of the fishing villages. “This area has been struggling for survival for quite some time. The fishing industry has been going downhill.”

Runarsson did extensive preparation for the film, including several weeks of location scouting followed by meticulous storyboarding. “For me that’s a necessity to have the plan, so you can be able to improvise and problem solve. I really think the better you are prepared you can adapt to something like capturing a beautiful light coming through.”

Shooting in the remote Westfjords had its challenges and benefits. “We are so far up north, so there are costs.

When you need a lot of extras, there aren’t that many people around,” he says. “But also, people here are so helpful… If you need an iron, you just go to the next house and borrow one. People are so warm.

“We’ve had a lot of help from the community. For instance, if the fish factory was making too much noise [for our sound] they’d kill the electricity for us.

Everybody chips in.” Craft services went local as well, with freshly caught fish on the lunch menu.

Like all his projects, Sparrows has personal ties for Runarsson. “The hunting scenes in this film are based on my own childhood. So more or less everything I write about is based on first-hand or second-hand experience. It’s important to have an emotional link to whatever I’m trying to portray.”

Mikkel Jersin produces the IcelandDenmark co-production for Nimbus Film, with co-producers Pegasus (Iceland) and MP Film (Croatia). The film, budgeted at about $1.9m (¤1.5m), should be ready in time for Cannes.

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The story follows a troubled nine-yearold girl sent to her relatives’ countryside farm for the summer. She develops a close relationship with a farmhand who is in his early thirties. “He never crosses any boundaries but we feel scared for her… She’s the narrator but she doesn’t understand everything that’s going on,” the writer-director explains.

The film could shoot in summer 2016.

The director does not want to limit herself to Icelandic projects — she also has a New York-set script — but, she says, “I felt strongly that I wanted to make an Icelandic film first. My hope with The Swan is that it can travel. It’s an Icelandic story, in some ways, but it’s a human story.”

The project has already been presented at Berlinale Co-Production Market and Jerusalem International Film Lab, and it has French and German partners on board.

Paris Of The North

Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson followed up Either Way (the buddy movie remade

by David Gordon Green as Prince Avalanche) with another wry comedy, Paris Of The North, which had its world premiere at Karlovy Vary in July.

The story is about a recovering alcoholic, working as a teacher in a small village, who he receives an unexpected visit from his immature father.

Bjorn Thors, Helgi Bjornsson and Nanna Kristin Magnusdottir star in the Iceland-France-Denmark co-production, which shot in Flateyri in the Westfjords.

“I have a couple of scripts that I’m very excited about at the moment,” Sigurdsson says of his future projects.

“One of them I’m writing myself, and

Hilmar Sigurdsson Hilmar Sigurdsson and Gunnar Karlsson had worked at CAOZ, the company behind 3D animation Legends Of Valhalla: Thor, before launching animation production outfit GunHil in 2012.

Their company is now at work on another big animated feature, Ploe:

Ploe: You Never Fly Alone

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Valdis Oskarsdottir Autumn Lights

it’s a comedy drama about the fear of flying. The other one is a script by my friend and collaborator, Huldar Breid­ fjord, who wrote Paris Of The North. It’s a drama-thriller about a dispute between neighbours in a quiet suburban area in Reykjavik over a tree, which gets very out of hand.”

You Never Fly Alone, written by Fridrik Erlingsson, about a bird whose family migrates to warmer climates before he learns to fly. He deals with the harsh winter by making new friends. The project is supported with development funding from the Icelandic Film Centre and the MEDIA programme. Ploe, which also has German studio Trixter on board, is set to release in 2017. Germany’s ARRI Worldsales has already sold to 30 territories. GunHil is also working on animated TV show Space Stallions.

Asa Helga Hjorleifsdottir Columbia University MFA graduate Asa Helga Hjorleifsdottir is currently planning her first feature film, The Swan, adapted from Gudbergur Bergsson’s famed novel of the same name.

The book had been a hot prospect for years, with some international A-listers pursuing the rights, and Hjorleifsdottir had started working on the script during an adaptation class at Columbia. “The writer is very protective of his work, but he liked it,” she says. Hlin Johannesdottir and Birgitta Bjornsdottir from Vintage Pictures will produce; the new company, which also worked on festival hit Land Ho!, tested the waters by producing her award-winning short film, Love Story.

For many years, Hjorleifsdottir had been a fan of the ‘visceral’ feel of The Swan: “There were so many things about it that made me think of going into filmmaking in the first place,” she recalls.

Valdis Oskarsdottir is the acclaimed editor of international hits such as Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Festen and Finding Forrester. More recently, she edited Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River. She is also a writer and director in her own right.

“I’m working on two scripts now; both have a comedic streak,” Oskarsdottir says. “Trash & Sophie is about two girls who incorrectly get lots of money in their bank account and the mafia wants it back.” Mystery Productions will produce alongside Germany’s Alec Schulmann.

“The other one [365 Days] is about a 40-year-old taxi driver living with his grandmother. We follow him from the age of 10 until today in flashbacks,” she explains. “He’s driving a taxi so he doesn’t have to make decisions, he just takes people where they tell him. But then a girl turns his life upside down.”

Oskarsdottir is also editing three features: Daniela Amavia’s Beautiful Now; Autumn Lights, about a US photographer

»

October 2014 Screen International 43

Magni Agustsson

territory focus iceland

Dagur Kari Dagur Kari is now putting the finishing touches to Fusi, his first film shot in Iceland since his lauded 2003 debut, Noi The Albino. “In my films, I’m always dealing with the combination of humour and tragedy. Fusi is no exception, but this time I’m maybe working in a more realistic tone,” the director explains.

The story came to him in one day.

“I was waiting for my flight at the airport and started observing the ground service people moving about in their small, toy-like vehicles. I was fascinated by how adulthood and childhood kind of melted together in this scenario. That led me to a main character who is a grown up and a child at the same time.

“It’s a character study. Fusi is a man in his 40s, still living with his mum in a home that hasn’t changed since he was a kid. The mother’s new boyfriend has an ambition to push Fusi out of his childhood bubble, and most importantly out of the home. This sets Fusi out on a journey.”

He wrote the part of Fusi with actor Gunnar Jonsson in mind. Kari had

Fusi

watched him play the sidekick in a popular TV satirical comedy series. “For many years I dreamt of seeing him in a dramatic main role.” The actor, he says, “is a natural talent”. They did not have to discuss much. “He had a profound understanding of the character, and I felt that to analyse it verbally would do more harm than good. Most scenes he nailed in his first take. He was incredibly concentrated and prepared, and yet flexible and able to react spontaneously.”

Fusi marks the first time Kari has collaborated with fellow Icelandic director Baltasar Kormakur, who produces for RVK Studios alongside Agnes Johansen (Denmark’s Nimbus Film co-produces).

“Baltasar is obviously a really experienced director and producer and it’s a privilege to be in dialogue with someone who has such insight into both the creative and the practical process.”

Kari has been editing, on and off, for more than a year and a half. “Baltasar and

visiting Iceland; and Iceland-set Back (Bakk), directed by her son, David Oskar Olafsson, with Gunnar Hansson.

Oskarsdottir is also keen to get back in the directors’ chair. “I really like being on set. I like being out with other people,” she says with a laugh.

Baldvin Z Baldvin Z followed up his popular feature debut Jitters with interconnectinglives drama Life In A Fishbowl, which set box-office records in Iceland and was also selected for Toronto’s Discovery section (where it sold well for Films Boutique). It now represents Iceland in the best foreign-language film Oscar race.

His next title will, like Jitters, be a teenage story. “It’s a love story between teenage

44 Screen International October 2014

Life In A Fishbowl

girls, but it takes place in a bad environment — they are 15 years old and they are injecting medicine. It’s an ugly world here in Iceland that nobody wants to talk about,” he says. “We have this newspaper where they print photos of missing people. And I started seeing the same 15-year-old on this page, again and again. Iceland is not a big place. How can you go missing 15 times in one year?

“I started talking to these people and finding out what’s going on with them and it interested me. It’s a love story of these two girls and it’s also a story of these families.”

That will shoot in 2016, meanwhile in 2015 he will also direct three episodes of the big-budget TV crime series Trapped, which is spearheaded by Baltasar Kormakur.

Skuli Fr Malmquist Zik Zak Filmworks, launched in 1995 by Skuli Fr Malmquist and Thor Sigurjonsson (who now also splits his time with Denmark’s Scanbox), is certainly an Icelandic company with an international outlook.

While still working on films such as Paris Of The North or local comedy Harry & Heimir, they also spent the summer working on US director Craig Zobel’s Z For Zachariah, which shot in New Zealand with a cast including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Chris Pine and Margot Robbie.

“We have a few other projects in that kind of range,” Malmquist says. “We have always put an emphasis on international productions as well as local ones,

Agnes really understand my process.

We realised it was a ‘slow-food’ kind of film — it should not be rushed.”

Fusi is planned for launch in Iceland in February; Bac Films handles sales on the Iceland-Denmark co-production.

Kari is also busy as head of the directing programme at the National Film School of Denmark. “It’s a bit hectic with the film in post,” he says. “But I find it really inspiring to teach. I’ve learned more being a teacher for one year than a student for four.”

however even more so now because of cuts in Iceland.”

Zik Zak’s forthcoming productions include Solveig Anspach’s The Aquatic Effect, co-producing with France’s Agat Films. Shooting starts in November on the story of a man pretending to be a swimming instructor while he looks for the woman he loves in Iceland.

Zik Zak is also producing Oskar Thor Axelsson’s I Remember You, an Icelandiclanguage ghost story adapted from Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s novel; plus Isold Uggadottir’s feature debut And Breathe Normally, an immigration story about an African woman who is detained in a hostel near Keflavik International Airport.

The company’s documentary projects include Katja, Tjorvi Gudmundsson’s 10-years-in-the-making study of a girl living on the streets of Kiev.

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Julius Kemp

Gudrun Edda Thorhannesdottir Producer Gudrun Edda Thorhannes­ dottir of Duo Productions — a Screen International Future Leader of 2013 — is working with writer-director Kristin Johannesdottir on her ‘film comeback’ Then And When, My Love, set to shoot in 2015. Johannesdottir was in Cannes in 1992 with As In Heaven, but has since been concentrating on theatre.

“She’s so clever, she’s had time to develop as an artist,” says Thorhannesdottir. The plot concerns a woman who spent seven years in prison for supposedly murdering her lover. When she is released, she confronts him.

Thorhannesdottir is also working with Arni & Kinski, commercials and musicvideo directors, on their debut feature, War Is Over. The cinematographer will be Spring Breakers’ Benoit Debie.

The cast will include Jean-Marc Barr and Hilmir Snaer Gudnason, and co-producers are Anne-Marie Mackay for Wondros, Orian Williams for Orian Films and Gunnar Carlsson for Anagram. The film, set on the Westman Islands, is about a blind boy who suffers after gaining his sight.

Brave Men’s Blood

Olaf de Fleur Olaf de Fleur’s City State “stand-alone sequel”, Brave Men’s Blood, comes out in Icelandic cinemas this month. He says it is the “same tone” as the first film but on a slightly bigger budget (still less than $1m). “The reason for the sequel is that I

David Oskar Olafsson Mystery Productions, founded in 2006

by David Oskar Olafsson and Arni Filippusson, has credits including festival hit Metalhead, Either Way (remade in the US as Prince Avalanche) and Valdis Oskarsdottir’s features King’s Road and Country Wedding.

This summer, Mystery (working alongside Los Angeles-based Ashley M Kent) shot Angad Aulakh’s Autumn Lights, about a US photographer (Guy Kent) who meets an enigmatic couple while on assignment in Iceland.

Olafsson and Gunnar Hansson direct Back (Bakk), a road-trip comedy about two old friends driving in reverse gear around Iceland to raise money for charity.

It is editing now and will be delivered in early spring. Olafsson is developing

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thriller Broken with writer Ottar Nordfjord, who is also writing horror film Una for Marteinn Thorsson to direct.

Kevin Donovan’s Dire, from a script by Johann Evar Grimsson, is likely to star Joey King and to shoot in early 2015 in the US. The supernatural thriller is about an abused 13-year-old girl who invents an imaginary friend who is an ancient carnivorous dire wolf.

felt something in my chest that had to come out,” he says.

Darri Ingolfsson (Dexter) leads the cast; Celluloid Dreams/Mongrel Media represent sales rights. Meanwhile, New Regency bought remake rights to crime thriller City State with James Mangold attached to direct.

De Fleur, whose diverse credits include Berlinale 2008 award-winning Philippine transsexual story The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela, is very much a rising star overseas — Summit bought his big-budget sci-fi script Revoc, and he will direct that film in English.

The story follows a man who is an alien interrogator working after aliens invade Earth. “I’ve always been a sci-fi fan. I let myself think very freely,” the writerdirector says.

De Fleur, repped by WME, is also a producer through his busy company, Poppoli Pictures.

“We have been developing the script for almost three years. It’s a really good and intelligent supernatural thriller,” Olafsson says.

Mystery is also working on an English-language remake of Norwegian film It’s Only Make Believe, working with Brad Turner (24, Prison Break) and Jessica Petelle.

Valdis Oskarsdottir, Olafsson’s mother, is also writing and directing family drama 365 Days, and will direct Listen, about a deaf musician who finds music that saves her at an abusive school. Oskarsdottir has also written Trash & Sophie, about two girls caught in a mafia heist.

The company is also working on TV projects including drama Prisoners, about a women’s prison in Iceland, to be directed by Metalhead’s Ragnar Bragason.

Julius Kemp and Ingvar Thordarson’s production companies Kisi and the Icelandic Film Company are having a busy year working on local low-budget films, several bigger co-productions and the year’s biggest box-office hit in Iceland.

Kisi is helping on NFTS graduate Asgrimur Sverrisson’s first feature, Reykjavik, a small-budget, black-andwhite feature. “It’s a romantic drama about relationships,” says Kemp of the $100,000-budgeted project.

Another interesting low-budget feature is Snaevar Solvason’s comedy, Albatross. “He shot the film himself and showed it to us. It was really good so we’re trying to help him now,” Kemp says. The story is about a city boy who moves to a remote town on Iceland’s west coast with his girlfriend. He starts working at a golf course and, when the girlfriend dumps him, he is stuck with his co-workers for the rest of the summer.

“It’s a buddy comedy,” Kemp adds.

Kisi has already had a hit year as producer of Baldvin Z’s box-office smash Life In A Fishbowl. “It may be an Icelandspecific story but it’s universal,” Kemp says. “There’s pain in all the characters’ lives, and people can really relate to that.”

Indeed, the likes of Darren Aronofsky have publicly praised the film. They plan to reteam with Balvin Z on his next film about teenage drug addicts (see page 44). The company is also preparing for a 2015 shoot on Aku Louhimies’ The Ambassador, a comedy about an egotistical Icelandic poet who gets into trouble at a festival in Lithuania. The outfit also co-produced Toronto selection The s Grump by Finland’s Dome Karukoski. n

Reykjavik

October 2014 Screen International 45

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Screentech n Christie Digital n Screen4all

Christie’s 6P 3D laser projection system

Lighten the mood Christie Digital’s offerings for an enhanced cinema experience include its new 6P 3D laser projection system that ramps brightness up to 2D levels, as well as the Vive Audio speaker system. Adrian Pennington reports

T

o revive the stagnant box office for 3D ticket sales, exhibitors should invest in new technology that presents films at their true brightness.

That is the argument being put forward by studios and equipment vendors, notably 20th Century Fox and Christie Digital, which jointly demonstrated Christie’s new 6P 3D laser projection system at screenings of Life Of Pi and Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes at the IBC show in Amsterdam in mid September.

The supposition is that some films screened using existing 3D projection systems do not throw enough light to the screen and can exacerbate feelings of nausea contributing to the global attrition of 3D ticket sales.

“If audiences are asked to pay a premium, they had better get a superior experience, not an inferior one,” says Don Shaw, senior director, product management, at Christie. “There are a number of technical limitations with current 3D systems resulting in lacklustre quality, the most serious one being restricted light levels that amount to only 10%-30% of those achieved for 2D presentations.”

Backing the 6P system, film-making innovator Douglas Trumbull says the lack of

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screen brightness was one reason he retired from directing films after 1983’s Brainstorm.

He showed the experimental short UTOFOG on the system at IBC. “I didn’t want to spend three years of passion on a film only to see it wasted on appalling presentation,” he says. “If we get high brightness, high colour depth, high frame rate and high resolution, we can get back to making spectacular, immersive experiences that TV will find impossible to replicate.”

Christie’s laser technology has been in the works since its Japanese parent Ushio acquired laser technology specialist Necsel in 2010. Dual projector heads deliver six specific primary colours, rather than broadspectrum white light, to ramp up light efficiency for 3D projection on a par with 2D. Dolby 3D glasses have been tuned to exactly match the wavelengths output from the projector. “We believe this is the future of 3D cinema projection and that it will be a key element in boosting 3D box-office revenues around the world,” Shaw adds.

In fact, the value of the global 3D cinema market edged up by 2%, to hit $7.4bn in 2013 (according to research from IHS) but the

‘If audiences are asked to pay a premium, they had better get a superior experience’ Don Shaw, Christie Digital

average split of box office retained from 3D screens per title dropped to 41.4% last year from 52% in 2012.

Fox has backed laser exhibition, vowing to master its 3D releases at 14 foot-lamberts (fL), the same light levels as 2D and a substantial improvement on the 4fL or 6fL possible with existing 3D digital projectors. Other studios are reportedly making the same move.

“Laser has the potential to change the economics of the exhibition industry but we can’t yet see the viability until technology costs come down,” says David Hancock, senior principal analyst for cinema at IHS Technology.

Richard Nye, cinema sales director for Christie EMEA, admits the cost is “significantly more expensive” than conventional projection systems but says the technology can be scaled according to screen size and brightness.

“We built the system using laser modules each of 4,000 lumens [a measure of light generated by the projector] up to a maximum of 96,000 lumens so that theatre owners have the choice of adding or taking away individual modules depending on their requirements,” says Nye. “We can also help with finance packages.”

Exhibitors would also lower their costs over time by not having to buy replacement Xenon lamps, while power consumption is also reduced. The main pitch to exhibitors though “is about taking your principal largeformat screen and making it the best movie theatre in your city”, argues Shaw. “It adds immediate value to customers and could be marketed as delivering greater colour and light than has ever been seen before.”

By putting its marketing dollars into 6P, Christie hopes to steal a march on competitor Sony, which has amassed 18,000 installs of its 4K projection system but has yet to commercialise a laser technology (laser solution rivals include Barco and NEC, the latter of which targets smaller screens).

Sound progress Laser illumination is one of several technical advances under evaluation by studios and exhibitors to enhance the cinema experience. Immersive sound is another.

Christie introduced Vive Audio this year to support next generation formats Dolby Atmos and Auro 11.1, as well as commonly used 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound. It is a set of surround and screen channel speakers, subwoofers and amplifiers that can be designed to boost a theatre’s listening area up to four times that of conventional audio systems.

“We designed the speakers with Atmos in mind and together with Vive this helps deliver a more natural sound to the audis ence,” says Shaw. n

October 2014 Screen International 47

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Screentech Screen4All

S

creen4All, a new event dedicated to technological innovations disrupting the worlds of film, TV and new media, launches on the outskirts of Paris this month.

“It will anticipate the innovations of tomorrow and after tomorrow and what’s going to happen to the ecosystem of cinema, broadcast and new media due to these new disruptive technologies,” says founder Stéphan Faudeux, director of French events company Advance Rapide, which is spearheading the event.

“We’ll look at how film, TV and new media professionals can use these new innovations at every step of the image chain, from production to distribution, to their advantage,” he adds. Topics on the agenda at the two-day forum (October 28-30) in France’s National Dance Centre in Pantin, will include multiscreen content distribution, ultra HD, overthe-top delivery, gaming and funding.

Shift in focus The event is born out of Advance Rapide’s 3D-focused conference and expo — Dimension 3 — which ran in Paris for seven years up until 2013, and a multi-screen production training programme — the Screen4All Campus — that the company piloted in November 2013.

“Although Dimension 3 also looked at other technologies such as 4K and Ultra HD, it was principally devoted to 3D. The 3D technology hasn’t taken off as we had anticipated — it’s still confined mainly to Hollywood blockbusters and hasn’t really been embraced in France or the rest of Europe. We decided we needed to reframe the event,” says Faudeux of the new focus (Dimension 3 becomes a smaller part of Screen4All).

Key events include Ultra HDay, examining issues related to the adoption of 4K Ultra HD; Gear Up, for companies interested in investing in audio-visual projects using new technology; Dimension 3 — The Big Festival; and The Demo Zone. A second edition of the Screen4All Campus will also take place during the festival (see box, below).

“We haven’t ditched the 3D element completely, Dimension 3 — The Big Festival will

Last year’s Dimension 3 conference, now reframed within Screen4All

Taming technology France’s Screen4All event (Oct 28-30) aims to stay one step ahead of future innovations across film, TV and new media. Melanie Goodfellow reports showcase some of the best independent productions, documentary, shorts and student films shot in 3D or 4K,” says Faudeux.

“Gear Up will look at what kind of funding is out there for projects using innovative production or distribution technology and talk about how to draw up a business plan. We’ll touch on state funds as well as crowd-funding, and speakers will also include representatives of banks and private family funds,” he adds.

Screen4All Campus The Screen4All Campus builds on an event piloted in November 2013 and aims to teach participants how to master multi-screen production from the development stage to distribution.

Tutors will include independent film producer Peter De Maegd of Brussels-based Potemkino, whose credits include innovative projects such as Where Is Gary? and the participative drama series The Spiral; Margaret Dunlap, writer and co-executive of the award-winning The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and ‘transmedia architect’ Djamil Kemal,

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whose credits include In Memoriam and Alt-Minds.

“The campus talks the participants through how to produce content across multiple screens. It is continuous training aimed at professionals already working in the audio-visual industries who want to get up to speed with the latest practices and developments,” says Stéphan Faudeux, CEO of Advance Rapide.

“Last year a lot of TV people attended but we also had a few participants from the cinema world.”

‘We’ll touch on state funds as well as crowd-funding’ Stéphan Faudeux, Advance Rapide

The sidebar will feature talks on the European Union’s new Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, which has some $101bn (¤80bn) of funding available over seven years, as well as a roundtable examining why it is difficult to generate private investment for IT projects in France.

Workshops over the two-days include a presentation of France’s state-backed RIAM fund, aimed at research and innovation in the audio-visual and multimedia sectors; a discussion on how companies can use big data to target users more effectively; and an event called ‘How to create your own Netflix in 10 points’, looking at how the arrival of the US streaming giant in France could change the distribution scene.

Faudeux is expecting some 1,000 professionals to attend the inaugural edition.

Participants signed up include French digital science body Irisa/Inria, 360 video specialist VideoStitch, German 3D company KUK Film and Hong Kong post-production house Digital Magic, along with digital media service providers and consultants such as Mesclado and Arkena, which help content producers s with today’s multi-screen environment. n

October 2014 Screen International 49

REVIEWS Highlights of the month’s new films in Review. For full reviews coverage, see Screendaily.com

san sebastian Reviews in brief Marshland Dir Alberto Rodriguez. Sp. 2014. 105mins

Marshland (La Isla Minima), a strikingly hand­ some period cop drama from Rodriguez, places two mismatched detectives in the Andaluz swamp­ lands, where they lead a hunt for a serial killer.

Although set against the backdrop of civil unrest in the wake of Franco’s death, Marshland still treads some familiar ground, most recently worked over

by TV’s True Detective. The lowlands of Guadal­ quivir river, as shot by cinematographer Alex Cata­ lan, untie the film from its genre moorings to produce a striking form of Southern Gothic. The detectives may plod through the tropes but this vibrant milieu could connect with genre audiences.

Fionnuala Halligan CONTACT FILMFACTORY ENTERTAINMENT info@filmfactory.es

Automata Dir Gabe Ibanez. Sp. 2014. 109mins

A strikingly slick and intriguing sci-fi thriller, Iban­ ez’s film, which premiered at San Sebastian prior to a US release, tackles the thorny issue of the devel­ opment of robotic intelligence, with Antonio Ban­ deras (also a producer) playing an insurance agent who unearths dark secrets behind robots who are developing independent capabilities. Set 50 years into the future, Automata is a blend of I, Robot and Blade Runner, and is at its best when making good use of its bleak, future-city backdrop to present a disturbing world. More of a film-noir thriller than an out-and-out sci-fi adventure, it is driven by an impressive performance by Banderas as the tor­ mented but determined hero.

Mark Adams CONTACT MILLENNIUM ENTERTAINMENT www.millenniumentertainment.com

Silent Heart Dir Bille August. Den. 2014. 98mins

This intimate family drama about assisted suicide is shot almost entirely inside a muted Danish country house over a mid-winter weekend. Even when the family does escape for a brisk walk, the grey seas provide little relief from their bleak plight: that once they leave on Sunday night, their terminally ill mother (Ghita Norby) will kill herself with the help of their doctor father. With its female perspective, squabbling siblings, mental illness and a deadbeat boyfriend, Silent Heart can feel like the gloomy Euro relative of August: Osage County.

Director August does shoot a few rays of light into the dimness, but the film’s overall tone is as relent­ less as its matriarch’s advancing disease.

Fionnuala Halligan CONTACT LEVELK

www.levelk.dk

50 Screen International October 2014

san sebastian International film festival

Magical Girl Dir/scr Carlos Vermut. Sp-Fr. 2014. 127mins

The confident and impressively talented young Spanish director Carlos Vermut’s inky-black Magical Girl is a jar­ ring and compelling, if low-key, work of cinema. There is a lot swimming around Magical Girl’s dark depths, and the film delights in constantly shuffling, crabwise, out of easy reach. It won San Sebastian’s Golden Shell for best film.

Vermut presents a riveting mix of off-key humour, formal bleakness and tired, twisted souls who walk in the footsteps of Saura and Bunuel. It is a modern noir involving blackmail, masochism and murder, set against the backdrop of recessionary Spain.

Magical Girl (the title refers to Japanese anime but also the shadowy woman at the centre of the story) is Vermut’s second film, although his first, the cult Diamond Flash (2011), was not released theatrically. Magical Girl is ambitious, clocking in at 127 minutes, and it is not without its flaws, particularly in the final act.

Yet Vermut has a definite cinematic voice: he paints his film in colours that call to mind Haneke, Tarantino, Lanthimos and, clearly, the formidable Spanish cultural canon (the first few minutes alone make reference to Lorca and La Colmena). But Magical Girl has a tone of its own — dark, silky and pleasingly unpredictable.

The tension of the Spanish recession lurks as a backdrop and is clearly a driver but, even though he structures Magical Girl like a chess game, Vermut’s main characters are no predictable pawns. They play out their parts in a sterile-looking, stylised film, with three plot strands ebbing and flowing. Although it involves a dying child, blackmail and torture, Magical

Girl nevertheless has a well-defined sense of humour.

Spanish acting veteran — if not legend — Jose Sacris­ tan is the first of Magical Girl’s three main characters to make an appearance, but he is the last to tell his story.

Following his intriguing prologue, Luis (Luis Bermejo) and his 11-year-old daughter, Alicia (Lucia Pollan), take the stage. Alicia, who likes to call herself Yukiko, is dying of Leukaemia and obsessed by the anime world.

Next is the unforgettable character of Barbara (Barbara Lennie), a severe, damaged beauty (she looks like a young Marina Abramovic) who lives a life of spoiled luxury under the care of her controlling hus­ band, Alfredo (Israel Elejalde). She will accidently come into contact with Luis, who swims into waters where the big sharks prey.

Magical Girl has some fantastically original moments. Alicia declares she would like to try a ciga­ rette and a gin and tonic, and her father complies — it is funny but it is very sad, given this will be her only opportunity. Throughout, Vermut’s musical choices are strategic, with Manolo Caracol’s gypsy lament, La Nina De Fuego (Burning Girl) making a repeat appearance, alongside Erik Satie’s haunting Gnossiennes. Sound effects are sparse, but in the case of a growing chorus of cicadas, suddenly terrifying. Magical Girl is an exciting project, in which Lennie’s intense, unhappy performance strikes a keynote.

Fionnuala Halligan CONTACT FILMS DISTRIBUTION info@filmsdistribution.com

www.screendaily.com

Love & Mercy

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Bill Pohlad delivers an impressionistic biography of The Beach Boys’ musical chief Brian Wilson See page 52

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu teases the best from Michael Keaton in the story of an actor at a creative crossroads See page 54

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Reviews in brief John Wick Dirs David Leitch, Chad Stahelski. US. 2014.

136mins

Keanu Reeves successfully reinvents himself as an ex-assassin forced out of retirement by the shen­ anigans of Russian mobsters, in this lovingly nostalgic shoot-em-up from stunt pros-turneddirectors Leitch and Stahelski. John Wick — which builds on a relationship forged 15 years ago on the set of The Matrix, where Stahelski was Reeves’ stunt double — is the perfect vehicle for the pair to explore their knowledge of car stunts, gunplay and close-quarter combat. Reeves executive produces the film, which premiered at Fantastic Fest, and it should score big with action audiences thanks to a franchise-worthy lead character, stylish aesthetic and old-school action techniques.

James Marsh CONTACT LIONSGATE

www.lionsgate.com

Two Night Stand new york film festival

Dir Max Nichols. US. 2013. 86mins

Gone Girl Dir David Fincher. US. 2014. 145mins

Ostensibly a serpentine cat-and-mouse thriller that will leave many viewers looking askance at their spouses, David Fincher’s guileful Gone Girl should transcend its aura of adult sophistication to become a major hit.

Awards prospects are less certain for the long-antici­ pated adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestseller. Ben Affleck will grab some voters’ attention as the ambigu­ ously glib Nick Dunne, however, and Rosamund Pike’s dynamic turn as his wife, Amy — the ‘gone girl’ — should belatedly make a star of the gifted UK actress.

Flynn herself wrote the screenplay, boldly condens­ ing the narrative, though rumours she supplied a new ending were exaggerated. The initial focus is on Nick, who runs a bar with his twin sister Margo (Carrie Coon) in North Carthage, Missouri, which was bought with what was left of Amy’s trust fund.

Called home by a neighbour, Nick calmly surveys the damage in his and Amy’s ‘McMansion’ and calls the cops to investigate her absence. Detective Rhonda Boney (Kim Dickens), as dry as her name, and her taci­ turn partner, Jim Gilpin (Patrick Fugit) search for the missing piece — Amy’s corpse — they need to charge Nick with homicide.

This sets up a standard police procedural that promptly loses momentum — all of Gone Girl’s appearances proving deceptive. Flashbacks introduced

by Amy’s sardonic diary entries, perhaps narrated by her posthumously, reveal her parents (Lisa Banes, David Clennon) had ransacked her childhood for their series of books about an idealised girl, explaining her subsequent pathological need for control and the wrath

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she unleashed on men who threatened it. Neil Patrick Harris has a key part as the creepiest of the ex-boy­ friends she burned.

Amy and Nick’s perfect-seeming marriage was a cha­ rade, despite their enduring sexual chemistry. Writers who lost their jobs in the recession, they had left Man­ hattan to nurse Nick’s dying mother in his home town.

They had attempted to sustain the unrealistic personas each had originally projected onto the other, but Nick was far from a confident dreamboat and Amy latterly feigned her dutiful helpmate-cum-wild-mistress image.

The film thus emerges as a damning metaphorical anal­ ysis of marital role-playing.

Less visceral in the main than most of Fincher’s films, save The Social Network, Gone Girl is stylistically restrained but for a few poetic touches. Jeff Cronen­ weth’s camera prowls when it needs to, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score is muted.

The accusations Flynn is a misogynist must be bal­ anced with the consistent empowering of women of variable moral hues. Excepting Tyler Perry as Nick’s hotshot lawyer, Gone Girl’s men scarcely rule the roost.

Joining Pike, Coon (excellent as Nick’s secret sharer who gives voice to his conscience) and Missi Pyle and Sela Ward’s TV journalist viragos, Lola Kirke steals sev­ eral scenes as a cunning white-trash floozy while con­ troversial UK-American model Emily Ratajkowski passes muster as the lone submissive female.

Graham Fuller CONTACT 20TH CENTURY FOX

The prospect of spending a couple of days in the delightful company of Miles Teller and Analeigh Tipton proves not to be enough to sustain a fea­ ture film in Two Night Stand, a perfectly pleasant, utterly disposable romcom. The stars’ flirty rap­ port is easily the highlight of Nichols’ directorial debut, which charts what happens when a latenight booty call between strangers is unexpectedly extended after a freak blizzard maroons them in the apartment. Two Night Stand will hope to capi­ talise on Teller’s next-big-thing status, but that has yet to translate into big box office.

Tim Grierson CONTACT ENTERTAINMENTONE www.entertainmentone.com

Good People Dir Henrik Ruben Genz. US-Swe. 2014. 90mins

“Good thing I have a master’s degree — it comes in handy,” says James Franco’s character in Good People. It is meant as a sarcastic rejoinder to the fading fortunes of the landscape designer, but it tracks as a reminder of the fallback benefits of the actor’s off-screen education — and the accrued goodwill of a filmography stocked with much more interesting fare. Franco is but one of a quar­ tet of recognisable actors who slog their way through cut-rate material in this personality-free crime thriller. Mechanical until it decides to aban­ don any pretence of sense in a pulpy third act that hints at the deranged fun the film could have had, Genz’s English-language debut is a stillborn dud.

Brent Simon CONTACTs MILLENNIUM FILMS www.millenniumfilms.com

October 2014 Screen International 51

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REVIEWS

Toronto Reviews in brief The Theory Of Everything Dir James Marsh. UK-US. 2014. 123mins

A love story full of romance but also wisdom about how passion can fade or be redirected The Theory Of Everything tracks, with a fragile beauty, the relationship between famed physicist Stephen Hawking and his wife Jane. Led by stellar performances from Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, this drama may occasionally flirt too heavily with ‘prestige picture’ preciousness but on the whole it is an absorbingly lovely and sad recounting of a marriage that was not built to last, despite its participants’ best intentions. Commercially, audience awareness of Hawking will help, as will the presence of rising stars Redmayne and Jones. Do not discount the movie’s chances of being a preferred date-night attraction for the arthouse crowd, with crossover potential a decent possibility.

Tim Grierson CONTACT UNIVERSAL PICTURES INTERNATIONAL universalpicturesinternational.com

The Equalizer Toronto International film festival

Dir Antoine Fuqua. US. 2014. 131mins

Tangle with Russian mobsters and you could do worse than engage the help of Denzel Washington’s everyman hero with a secret past. Fuqua’s violent updating of the popular 1980s television series that starred Edward Woodward as a skilled former government agent turned saviour of oppressed ordinary folk is a smart 1970s-style revenge action drama — sort of Taken crossed with Death Wish — that may be short on humour but makes up for it with liberal bloodshed. It is all rather leisurely paced as Fuqua takes his time to develop Washington’s seemingly genial but stoical character, and when things get moving in the last third he delivers action a-plenty.

Mark Adams CONTACT SONY PICTURES

Nightcrawler Dir/scr Dan Gilroy. US. 2014. 117mins

In Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal gives a gutsy performance as a morally slippery Angeleno who stumbles into the shadowy world of night-time freelance news videographers. Unfortunately, Gilroy’s tonally bold directorial debut cannot quite pull together its differing ambitions, resulting in a story that is not entirely satisfying as a dark character study, amoral thriller or curt commentary on the sensationalism of local TV news. The film will benefit from Gyllenhaal’s modest box-office appeal and its thriller trappings. But because the likeable star plays a quietly sinister, unstable man, Nightcrawler may suffer in terms of word of mouth. Still, praise for the actor’s controlled turn may make this movie an attractive counterprogramming option for those who want to avoid the late-October glut of horror films.

Tim Grierson CONTACT SIERRA/AFFINITY sierra-affinity.com

52 Screen International October 2014

Love & Mercy Dir Bill Pohlad. US. 2014. 120mins

A more conventional biography of Brian Wilson would attempt to shape the vast arc of his troubled life into a pleasing mix of highs and lows, tears and triumphs.

Love & Mercy takes a different, more impressionistic approach, focusing and contrasting two key periods from his life; the rich success and optimism of The Beach Boys’ best years in the 1960s and later in the 1980s when an unstrung Wilson was far from the limelight and at the mercy of a domineering, unscrupulous therapist. The result lacks some of the fine detail and context one might have liked but still emerges as a fitting salute to Wilson’s restless creativity and a touching celebration of the love that would prove to be his salvation.

Lingering affection for The Beach Boys’ joyous soundtrack to the sun-kissed promise of a 1960s summer, respect for Wilson’s journey to hell and back and impressive performances from Paul Dano and John Cusack should all help generate sufficient audience interest for a solid theatrical life, although Love & Mercy lacks the more obvious crowd-pleasing elements and carefully packaged emotions of a Ray or a Walk The Line. The one thing that Love & Mercy absolutely nails is the importance of the music. There are numerous scenes that testify to Wilson’s painstaking devotion to creating the most original and multi-layered pop music the world had ever heard.

In the more contemporary scenes, a middle-aged, heavily medicated Wilson (Cusack) meets car saleswoman Melinda (Elizabeth Banks) and starts a romance that places the musician on a collision course with Eugene Landy, the controversial therapist who had been appointed Wilson’s legal guardian and taken control of every aspect of his life. Paul Giamatti’s sinister turn as this blustering, manipulative figure makes

Landy one of the villains of the film along with Wilson’s callous father who seems determined to crush every ounce of spirit in both the boy and the man. Wilson quietly reveals that he has almost no hearing in one ear because of the childhood beatings he received from his father.

The film’s sound mix is vital throughout, creating the impression of how exhausting it might have been to be Wilson, with his mind pictured as like listening to a radio where you cannot control the volume or stick to the same station.

Dano really catches the look and spirit of Wilson with his wide-eyed stare, sudden passions and relentless drive to give expression to the voices in his head.

He also sings beautifully. Cusack does not look like the older Wilson but does a fine job with a character defined by his secret smiles, broken sentences and sweaty paranoia. It is one of his best performances in some time and Banks is exceptionally good as the warm embodiment of a normality and common sense that had long been absent from Wilson’s life.

The film has its flaws: each part of the story has the potential to be a movie in its own right and cutting between them sometimes seems to slow the momentum, and even at two hours you do not feel you learn enough about Landy. Also, with the exception of Mike Love, the other Beach Boys rarely have a voice. However, if the film feels a little disjointed and elusive that would seem a deliberate attempt to mirror Wilson’s fractured state of mind. Closing titles bring the story up to date, explain the fate of Landy and show the real Wilson doing what he loves most: making music.

Allan Hunter CONTACT CAA

filmsales@caa.com

www.screendaily.com

Toronto Reviews in brief Phoenix Dir Christian Petzold. Ger. 2014. 98mins

Petzold’s collaboration with the actress Nina Hoss reaches a new level of intensity in Phoenix, a moving drama set in the rubble of post-war Berlin.

Calling to mind both Alfred Hitchcock and Carol Reed, this is an intimately staged story of identity and loss in which Petzold compels the viewer into a suspension of disbelief that is fully rewarded with a powerful finale. Phoenix is surely set for a steady arthouse run in all markets and could widen Petzold’s fanbase from Barbara and Jerichow into something approaching The Lives Of Others given the right opportunities and awards notice. Even though it references a lengthy cinematic canon (culminating in Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In), the deliberately low-key and beautifully observed Phoenix should be influential and duly referenced in its own right.

Fionnuala Halligan CONTACT THE MATCH FACTORY info@matchfactory.de

The Judge

Toronto International film festival

The Imitation Game

Dir David Dobkin. US. 2014. 141mins

Dir Morten Tyldum. US-UK. 2014. 114mins

Coolly intelligent with a dry wit to match, The Imitation Game tells its story with a minimum of fuss; an approach that is appropriate for the temperament of its main character. Less a biopic than an old-fashioned Second World War drama without the combat, the film recounts how brilliant, aloof mathematician Alan Turing helped crack the Nazis’ coded communications, which was a key moment along the way to an Allied victory. Featuring a fleet of strong performances, particularly from Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game is not exactly scintillating but its slow-burn suspense is plenty pleasurable.

The Imitation Game will throw itself into the awards race, opening November 21 in the US (it is the opening night film of the BFI London Film Festival). When it comes to the Oscars, The Weinstein Company will probably push Cumberbatch’s star turn, but commercially co-star Keira Knightley may be as important.

Lack of awareness in the US for Turing’s contributions to UK history may keep grosses small, which is why strong reviews are key to raising the movie’s profile.

The film intercuts between three time periods, showing Turing at school, during the Second World War and in 1951. The most crucial of these periods is the span of years during the Second World War when Turing is working for the UK government to crack Enigma, Germany’s sophisticated military code machine that many thought was unbreakable. If Turing and his team can decipher the Nazis’ secret communications, then there is a chance Hitler’s forces can be stopped.

Based on Andrew Hodges’ biography Alan Turing: The Enigma, The Imitation Game goes a long way on Turing’s awkward charm. Haughty but passionate, Turing is not that far removed from another character Cumberbatch plays, Sherlock Holmes. But Turing is

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hiding deep childhood trauma, which explains the flashbacks to 1927: in these glimpses from boarding school, we see what made him so withdrawn and why he chooses to name his code-breaking machine Christopher.

Turing is not working alone against the Nazis, however. He is paired with, among others, cocky chess champion Hugh Alexander (played by a suave, tart Matthew Goode) and Joan Clarke (Knightley), a beautiful local woman who shocks the men with her quick mind.

Even better is the unlikely courtship between Turing and Joan. A product of an era in which unmarried women in their 20s were considered old maids, Joan is feeling pressure from her parents to find a mate. Turing volunteers for the job of husband. However, this is not because he is in love with her — he is a closeted homosexual — but because he values her intellect and inquisitiveness. It would not be accurate to describe what Cumberbatch and Knightley have as a ‘rapport’ as their characters are too peculiar and obstinate to share anything so warm, but their pairing makes for an amusing, off-kilter centre to the film.

Unquestionably, The Imitation Game has a tasteful reserve that can sometimes make the story feel like it has been encased in amber (Oscar Faura’s cinematography is a rich canvas of greys and browns). It is at its most lively when Turing is in his element, quickly scribbling equations or quietly thinking by himself, but the film-makers’ attempt to ‘explain’ the genius through a Rosebud-like symbol is less persuasive. The mystery of Turing’s inner life is too complex to crack.

A nicely intense family drama with a dash of courtroom action thrown in for good measure, Toronto International Film Festival opener The Judge is given gravitas and emotional heft by suitably driven performances. But while moving and thoughtful in places it never really finds the balance between the two genres, feeling at times like a John Grisham book muddled with a sub-plot that reaches for real dramatic edge. The film fares best when it comes to Robert Downey Jr and Robert Duvall’s conflict as the estranged son and father who are brilliant at locking horns but terrible at expressing their true emotions.

Mark Adams CONTACT WARNER BROS

Haemoo Dir/scr Shim Sung-bo. S Kor. 2014. 111mins

Produced and co-written by one of Korea’s most prolific film-makers Bong Joon Ho, Haemoo is a bleak but superbly orchestrated character-driven feature based on the true story (made into a stage play) of a group of fishermen who smuggle 25 Chinese-Korean immigrants aboard their boat — ending in bitter tragedy. The film’s dark narrative appears to have been too grim for local audiences given its rather disappointing theatrical run; it generated an underwhelming $11.4m for a highprofile summer release. But this engrossing feature from debut director Shim, who also co-wrote Bong’s widely acclaimed Memories Of Murder, is set to be warmly embraced overseas following its international premiere at Toronto International Film Festival, with audiences set to be treated to what is arguably South Korea’s strongest commercial film so far this year.

Tim Grierson CONTACT THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY

weinsteinco.com

Jason Bechervaise CONTACT FINECUT

finecut.co.kr

October 2014 Screen International 53

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REVIEWS

Venice Reviews in brief The Cut Dir Fatih Akin. Ger-Fr-It-Rus-Pol-Can-Turk. 2014.

138mins

German-Turkish film-maker Akin takes on the Armenian genocide in a sprawling historical epic that is both a politically committed atrocity drama and a Western-tinged émigré odyssey. Owing a declared debt to Elia Kazan’s America America, this lavish seven-territory co-production stars A Prophet’s Tahar Rahim as a father looking for the twin daughters from whom he was separated during the persecutions of 1915. The Cut is a tribute to oldfashioned film-making values in its confident widescreen look and cast-of-hundreds historical reconstructions: every frame declares war on cinematic austerity. And yet, despite the heady sweep through 10 years and two continents, and the (surprisingly muted) emotional catharsis of the quest plotline, it leaves us feeling short-changed.

Lee Marshall CONTACT THE MATCH FACTORY info@matchfactory.de

Manglehorn Dir David Gordon Green. US. 2014. 97mins

venice film festival

Manglehorn shows director Green’s ability to tell a familiar story in an impressively off-kilter manner, charting the story of a reclusive Texan locksmith and his tenuous relationships with the few people he allows close to him. Though well performed and engaging at times, Manglehorn ultimately flatters to deceive, following an entirely predictable route while somehow hinting at moments of intrigue that never emerge. It certainly succeeds in its sense of understated unsentimentality, frustrated romanticism and gently left-field moments of humour, but after the director’s recent films Joe and Prince Avalanche — and the high-profile casting of Al Pacino — expectations will be high for this rather quirky story of loneliness and longing.

Birdman

Mark Adams CONTACT WESTEND FILMS

www.westendfilms.com

Black Souls Dir Francesco Munzi. It-Fr. 2014. 109mins

Though far from prolific, Munzi has made a name for himself in Italy as a director to watch since the release of his debut, Saimir (2004). This tough, dark Calabrian Mafia tale confirms his promise, and has to be the first of his three features to stand a good chance of notching up serious international sales, thanks also to some fine performances by an under-the-radar cast and the director’s sure control of tone and pace. Comparisons to Gomorrah and Romanzo Criminale will be made, but only because those are the two most recent organised-crime films that travelled much outside of Italy; yet Black Souls (Anime Nere) belongs more to an introspective strand of Italian Mafia genre.

Lee Marshall CONTACT RAI

catia.rossi@rai.it

54 Screen International October 2014

Dir Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. US. 2014. 119mins

A magnificent and enthralling film that fits into no easy genre bracket, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance) — to give its full title — is a technical tour de force, a beautifully performed and smartly scripted black comedy that will leave its audience keen to head back for more, perhaps just to work out how Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu staged some of the film’s more striking moments. Plus it finally offers the talented Michael Keaton a role that shows off his range and charisma, and one that should see him in contention when it comes to awards season.

While apparently traditional — it is the story of a successful middle-aged actor at a creative crossroads and investing all he has on a risky Broadway show — Birdman (set to open in the US on October 17) is a real delve into the mind of a man who is battling internal and external forces (from his ego and dark imagination through to troublesome fellow actors) as he tries to pull together family, career and his own fragile sanity.

What helps give the film its intriguing edge is that Inarritu attempts to present the story largely in real time, meaning long and complex takes, extremely clever cutting and intricate staging.

Keaton stars as former cinema superhero star Riggan Thompson, who hopes that staging an ambitious Broadway play (he has adapted a Raymond Carver short story, funded the production and also directs and stars in it) will revive his career.

Haunted by his Birdman character (in more ways than one: he hears Birdman talking to him, is distracted by the Birdman 3 poster in his dressing room and simply wants to move beyond his Hollywood past), he hopes treading the boards will legitimise him as an artist.

When one of his actors is injured in a freak accident as opening night looms, he finds a replacement in the form of loose-cannon actor Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), who is guaranteed to sell tickets but has a reputation for trouble. Shiner is in a relationship with the play’s lead actress, Lesley (Naomi Watts), but Riggan’s best friend — and the show’s producer — Jake (Zach Galifianakis, playing things pretty straight) knows his profile will help sell tickets.

Riggan must deal with Shiner’s massive ego; the gentle demands of his girlfriend and co-star Laura (Andrea Riseborough); worries about his fresh-fromrehab daughter, Sam (Emma Stone); visits from supportive ex-wife Sylvia (Amy Ryan), as well as trying to convince famously barbed theatre critic Tabitha (Lindsay Duncan) not to savage his Broadway debut.

The play that Riggan mounts at New York’s historic St James Theater on 44th Street is based on Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, with the story reflecting Riggan’s own search for love and acceptance. The theatre — from its weaving corridors to its roof-top views — is a vital character in the film, as are the teeming New York streets and dingy bars when the characters make brief trips outside the venue.

Keaton is superb as the tormented Riggan. Clearly the fact he played Batman in Tim Burton’s films carries resonance, but he has a rare ability to blend comedy and drama as well as being a great physical performer, at ease with the complex shooting style of the film.

Mark Adams CONTACT Fox Searchlight Pictures www.foxsearchlight.com

www.screendaily.com

venice Reviews in brief The Look Of Silence Dir Joshua Oppenheimer. Den-Indo-Nor-Fin-UK. 2014. 100mins

Oppenheimer’s astonishing documentary, The Act Of Killing, was a critically acclaimed Bafta winner and Oscar nominee, and justifiably so: edgy, inventive, sly and angry, it staged a surreal national drama of buried truths by persuading perpetrators of a wave of government and armysupported massacres of ‘communists’ in Indonesia in 1965 to re-enact their atrocities. The Look Of Silence returns to the same subject matter, but presents the point of view of one victim’s family. It is a less flashy exercise, and far more intimate, finding its dramatic core in a soft-spoken optometrist who asks tough questions — with the excuse of giving eye tests to the perpetrators — about the murder of a brother he never met.

Lee Marshall CONTACT CINEPHIL

philippa@cinephil.co.il

Tales Dir Rakhshan Bani-E’temad. Iran. 2014. 90mins venice film festival

A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence Dir/scr Roy Andersson. Swe-Nor-Fr-Ger. 2014. 101mins

The final part of Swedish auteur Roy Andersson’s ‘Living’ trilogy — which took the Golden Lion at Venice — is a magnificently droll, compassionate, melancholic reflection on the absurd human comedy. Cast in the director’s by-now-familiar fixed-camera style, with a washed-out colour palette that runs the gamut of beiges, greys, pale greens and blues, the film presents 39 meticulously composed tableaux vivants that range from simply observed moments of life to elaborate dreamlike fantasies featuring dozens of extras in period dress.

It has been seven years since You, The Living (Du Levande) — and 14 since the first part of the trio, Songs From The Second Floor (Sanger Fran Andra Vaningen) — but for fans of Andersson’s deadpan humour and unique style, it will have been well worth the wait.

Even those who dismiss Andersson’s more recent oeuvre as akin to a series of Monty Python sketches scripted by Ingmar Bergman are given something new and more substantial to chew on here in the form of a sad comic pair of novelty-item salesmen who give A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence (En Duva Satt Pa En Gren Och Funderade Pa Tillvaron) a narrative backbone and represent one of Andersson’s greatest character creations to date. They look sure to take their place in the pantheon of comedy double acts, somewhere between Laurel and Hardy and Waiting For Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon. Another novelty, in just two of the scenes, is an attempt to embrace not just human fallibility and pettiness but the extreme cruelty of genocide and animal experimentation.

A few of the 39 scenes are grouped into clusters — such as the ‘Three meetings with death’ at the begin-

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ning, one of the finest involving a cruise-ship passenger who has a heart attack after paying for his meal at the self-service restaurant. What do you do with a dinner that has been paid for by a man who is now dead? The living continue to ask such questions, and it is the tension between the trivial and the infinite that gives Andersson’s film such power.

Other vignettes involve a plump flamenco teacher molesting one of her male students, a sea captain troubled by a cancelled appointment, two lovers smoking near an open window, and a talent night at a school for children with special needs. Whenever we see a character on the phone, the same line is repeated to their unknown interlocutors: “I’m happy to hear that you’re doing fine.”

With full support from funding bodies that have sometimes shunned his work in the past, Andersson was able to dedicate four years to designing, storyboarding and shooting the film in his own Studio 24 facility in Stockholm.

The absorption pays off in a work that joins Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner in using cutting-edge, high-definition digital technology, which is a first for Andersson, to push back the boundaries of painterly composition in cinema. Sure, it is a sedately paced experience, akin to a slow walk through a gallery in which every artwork merits a long, cool look. But it will still be one of the arthouse highlights of the year for cineastes in many territories.

Lee Marshall

From the same production company that made last year’s festival favourite Fish & Cat, multilinear arthouse melodrama Tales (Ghesseha) sees exp­ erienced Iranian director Bani-E’temad mining characters from her previous films to create a mosaic of downtrodden lives in contemporary Tehran. Some segments work well and it is refreshing to see themes such as domestic abuse, drug addiction and workers’ rights being aired so openly in an Iranian film. But although characters from narrative strands overlap, and though you do not need to be familiar with the director’s oeuvre to appreciate it, Tales remains more of a loose shortstory collection than a filmic novel. Its vignettes lack the tight thematic cross-struts of, say, Short Cuts or the pressure of place created by the confined location of Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten. Lee Marshall CONTACT NOORI PICTURES

www.nooripictures.com

The Price Of Fame Dir Xavier Beauvois. Fr. 2014. 114mins

In French, this would be called ‘une fausse bonne idée’ (a false brainstorm). Take the almost forgotten incident of two destitute immigrants stealing Charlie Chaplin’s coffin a few days after the funeral and asking for a ransom, and reconstitute it. Beauvois (Of Gods And Men) obviously did not intend to render the original details exactly as they were, but adapt them in a general manner. Yet without either the touch or the pace needed to deal with a mix of comedy and social drama, all he can do is drag his feet for almost two hours, tacking on a happy ending in the best Chaplin fashion.

The film sees Beauvois change pace after a series of distinguished achievements, but he falters as the film bears the hallmarks of a sad melodrama without a shadow of a smile to alleviate it.

Dan Fainaru

CONTACT COPRODUCTION OFFICE sales@coproductionoffice.eu

CONTACT WILD BUNCH

www.wildbunch.biz

October 2014 Screen International 55

ASK THE EXPERTS

We ask festival and awards season experts…

‘Which actor or director would you like to be stuck with in an elevator?’

Compiled by Andreas Wiseman

andreas.wiseman@screendaily.com

“Bill Murray.

I have no idea what might happen, but the more I think about it, there’s nothing more I’d like to do right now than to find myself stuck in an elevator with Bill Murray.”

“Salma Hayek. Why? Well, who wouldn’t want to be!”

Jeff Harrison managing director, Umbrella Entertainment

“Probably Julianne Moore, because Maps To The Stars just came out in Germany, and I hear great things about Still Alice. I wonder what she’d say if I told her the first film I remember her in is Body Of Evidence!”

David Kwok head of editorial content, Viewster Julianne Moore in Maps To The Stars

56 Screen International October 2014

Hugo Heppell head of investments, Screen Yorkshire

“I would love to be stuck in an elevator with Peter Strickland. I’m a big fan of his films and was blown away by The Duke Of Burgundy, which I saw in Toronto. I would thank him for bringing so much beauty and audaciousness to his art. I would then probably give him a hug and run away as soon as the door opened.”

Nathalie Jeung sales executive, Le Pacte The Duke Of Burgundy

“Knowing that Ellar Coltrane from Boyhood kept Richard Linklater company for 13 years, I’m confident we could find something interesting to chat about for the 30 minutes we were in the elevator.”

Ryan Kampe president, Visit Films

ALISSA SIMON Palm Springs International Film Festival

“Without a doubt, Mike Leigh… I haven’t had the chance to speak with him in years. When I was a curator at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, I organised a retrospective of his work. He could also give me suggestions about my other passion, London theatre.”

Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood

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