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From the "People" Archives:
by Eugene Hernandez indieWIRE's conversation with Tom Bernard and Michael Barker continues... iW: Look at a year like this year, in the National Board of Review's top 5 foreign films, you did have of them. And you are having success with "All About My Mother" now, which is a great movie. And "Run Lola Run." But I'm wondering how you feel the marketplace for foreign films has changed, and if it's any more challenging, and maybe Miramax has elevated levels of expectation with the way it handles their films. Barker: First of all, I think one of the reasons we have this distinction in foreign language films, is because no one else is doing it to the extent we are. But our major bread and butter are not foreign language films. You look at "The Winslow Boy," you look at "The Opposite of Sex," "The Spanish Prisoner," all these English-language pictures. Something that I'm very sensitive to seems to be something that our competitors have always said, "Oh, they just know how to do foreign films," which I find pretty shocking. But as far as the foreign film business in the last ten years, the reason there's been a major downturn in the foreign language film business is three-fold. One is, the ancillary values on foreign language films, subtitled films, can never begin to approach the ancillary values on an English-language film that does the same amount of business, it just doesn't happen. And what that means is, companies that are very ambitious, and companies that are very aggressive, they don't think it's worth their while because the ancillary upside is never going to be as big as it would be in an English language film. Our view is, profit is profit. It's good, whether it's little or big, it's good. You may not get that incredible breakthrough in the ancillaries that you might get with an English-language film, but when the right film comes along, it's worth having. It adds to your library and it still generates profit. The second thing that has greatly effected this downturn in foreign language films over the decade is the American independent film movement. Ever since "sex, lies and videotape" and the Sundance Festival made big noise, the press have spent a lot of the energy that they used to spend on foreign language films as far as profile to the public, they've diverted it to American independent pictures. I think now, at the end of the decade, the American independent pictures are going through a trend where, (a) they are ceasing to become American independent pictures, they're being made by studios now, from "Three Kings" to "Magnolia" to "Go." Those are made by studios now so they're not really the same kind of thing. And (b) the individual foreign language pictures have gotten better artistically and are more accessible to the audience. And so you have films like "Central Station" or "Life is Beautiful" or "All About My Mother," or this film we have "East West," that have commercial value. But (third) it's still a business that you have to pick and choose, you know. If you look at Premiere Magazine, we're thankful for any coverage we get for foreign language film in Premiere Magazine, or New York Magazine, and even when they love the film, they won't give you the space that would be given to an English-language picture. iW: There's so much talk about digital and internet distribution and all these changes that people are looking at as the new decade starts. And you are working at a company that is a technology company Barker: We are really proud of being with this company, because when you are looking at the DVD. and we have a relationship with Sony Classical Music, and you look at the video and so forth, the quality of the technology and the quality of these materials are just the best that you can get. And I think everyone including us has gotten into marketing on the internet and looking to the future. Tom Bernard: We're not looking towards downloading our movies right now. DVD is certainly where we want to go. And I don't see the theaters that we do business with buying the machinery to be able to take a satellite beam to project a film, because it's prohibitive. So I don't see that technology is going to change the way that we do business in the theatrical distribution world right now. It may be for the big multiplexes, but those aren't really the types of theaters that we play in. And I don't think it's going to be cost-effective for us and I don't know how the filmmakers are going toReally, when it's said and done, is Woody Allen going to be happy with his movie being digitally projected on the screen? He doesn't even like the new stock that Kodak has. We're filmmaker friendly and I think a lot of it is going to have to do with what the filmmakers want and how they feel about it in the future. It never ceases to amaze us every year when we find something new. A new way of marketing a film, a new spin, a new theater, a new way of using the media to promote a film, whether it's MTV for "Run Lola Run." [Looking over at Michael Barker]I think you should ask Michael how he's seen the business change from 1990 to now? Barker: Well, I think, it seems like there are so many independent companies and so many independent companies serving the so-called independent picture. But the fact of the matter is, there are very few that serve them well. And there are very few now where the agenda is to serve the film, the particular film and the particular filmmaker. The agenda in the independent world that used to never be there, is [all about] things like market share, which is to us crazy. But now you have independent film companies concerned about their market share in the independent world. Bernard: There's internet sites that cover the independent film scenethe information on the independent film has, I think put it into the same pool [as Hollywood], it's being dealt with in the same pool as commercial film, which is I think just different kinds of movies. And the easier that information is available to the guys making the decisions in the theaters, the worse it is for independent film, and the harder you have to fight. So the technology has become the enemy of the middle-level, non-blockbuster independent film. iW: So you would question indieWIRE in covering the independent business from a more traditional perspective? Or as a business? Barker: You know, the definition of independent is muddy. Yesterday, the National Board of Review created this category of honoring independent films, and four of them are studio films [laughs]. "Election," "Go," those are studio-financed films. What's the definition of independent now? Bernard: I think what's great about indieWIRE is it's a place where people in the independent world can keep track of that world. It's the only place that covers the crazy world, or the undefined world that anyone says they're in, of the independent business. The players and what's going on. That's why we've always supported it since the day it showed up. iW: Even if we include Miramax sometimes? (laughs)
Barker: I've got a difference between 1990 and now. When you do all these interviews, when you talk to all these people like me and Tom and Bingham, these were all people who were here ten years ago. And the thing that we all had in common, even if we competed, even if there were petty squabbles, was a love of film. A background deep in the history of film. We all have it. In 1999, there's a new kind of executive that is very different from us, that deals with their company like they're a law firm, an accounting firm or deal with libraries as a Wall Street entity. And there's nothing wrong with that. That is an important way to deal with it as a business, and it's an important way to thrive financially. But philosophically, it's a different type of character. And now you've got both. So that group from the 80's did come from a sense of film history, and I don't know where those guys came from in the 90's. Bingham was a film programmer. If you look at those guys from the past who survived, I think even Bob Shaye was a programmer at Columbia [University]. Bob and Harvey were rock and roll concert guys. That's what they did at the University of Buffalo, rock concerts. I first met them when they were trying to sell a Paul McCartney concert film called "Wings." That's when they showed up on the scene, in the late 70's. So all these guys you're probably talking to have that sense of film history, and there's no sense of history in the new companies. I think they have sense of legal. They are all very proud to tell you that they are lawyers also. "I run a film company and I'm a lawyer too." Bernard: In hindsight, a couple of things I thought were significant over the 90's after "sex, lies and videotape"One, that movies in the 90's technically became much, much better. And I think they also, in a sense, became a lot easier to make. If you had a script and found some money, you could hire very competent technicians to make your movie for you. Whereas in the 80's, the unions really prohibited their constituency from working on independent films. That was one of the beauties of Sundance, because you had a lot of union employees that were tired and bored of working on the run-of-the-mill studio fare, and you'd find that a lot of movies came out of this sort of primordial soup of filmmakers hanging out at Sundance where maybe a cinematographer would shoot something under a different name, or a gaffer, a line producer, would work and not put his name on the credits. And it was a real coup to be able to get somebody with those skills. And it got to a point where it was a real problem with the unions. I think the unions negotiated, and I don't know with who, but they set up the east coast contract with unions where you could get union personnel to work on low budget pictures at a lower rate, which made the best technicians in the world, from New York and LA, affordable. And I guess one of the results was that the studios were sort of butting heads with the unions and taking them head on. And so one of the ways that they had to keep getting the union constituency to work, since the studios were pulling their pictures, was to figure out how to get them to work on these independent films. So they could still suck the dues out of people and people could still make a living, rather than just the few that had been on the roster the longest. iW: Right, because there are only a certain number of studio films made? Bernard: And each year, depending on how the studios are negotiating with the unions, there's more or less. Take them from the West Coast and put them in New York when you're negotiating with the West Coast unions and visa versa. And now with Canada taking a lot of the product away, the independent film scene is a very viable way to earn a living in New York, and even LA and some of the other cities. Even Pittsburgh now, which used to be the sort of non-union Canada area. So maybe you're someone that's got a script and you've got an uncle that's going to give you a million bucks, all of a sudden you have a movie that has great technical qualities, whereas in the 80's it was a much more interesting person who made an independent film, because not only did they have to find a good story, they had to really work their way through the production of it with really amateur technicians or actually take over a lot of those roles. And I think they had a unique look because of that. And I think that added a lot to the message, because somehow the struggle to get it made effected the style of the film and the story of the film. Because it was a real collaborative effort, and it was very difficult to do. So I think you really had to be a determined person to make a movie in that time period. Whereas what I think has happened now is there's way too many movies with not much to say. So that's one aspect I wanted to cover.
iW: Someone the other day said that debating the definition of an independent film is actually a reductive discussion because it ends up being more damaging than helpful, to try to determine or define something, whether to classify it as independent film or whatever else. Bernard: You can debate what a movie is or what it isn't and every person will have a different interpretation. But the type of business that the film is generated by and the type of distribution system that the film goes through I think can be defined. And there's a studio distribution system, a studio publicity system, there's a studio-style accounting structure and there's a studio-style business that owns and distributes the movie. And I think you can look at a company like Strand or Artistic License, or what October was before it was bought by Universal, the way that we do our business, and say that these are companies that have an independent style and distribute the movies in an independent way. They all try and do things in a way that is really not the norm. And when you see an independent film go out on 300 screens the first week and they know they're going to add 600 in two weeks and they've got their media buy in place, and the release is over in one month and they're on to the next movie, that's part of the studio system. iW: We're seeing all the year-end top 10 lists right now, and looking at some of the movies that are making it on that list, one could say that some of these movies are in the category of the more independently-minded films that are coming from studios, whether it be a movie like "American Beauty" or "Three Kings" or "Magnolia." Some of these movies from bigger companies that one might say have more of an independent spirit, if that's a fair term. Bernard: Well, you can maybe say these movies have more of an independent spirit, but basically, they were people who lived in the independent film distribution world that have now been absorbed by the studio system. If you look at "Three Kings" or "American Beauty" or "Election," these are studio-made films, and these are filmmakers who used to work outside the system that are now working within the system. iW: As an executive at a distributor of specialty films, what does that say to you, though, in terms of what you expect the marketplace to be like for the kinds of movies that you would distribute? Does that create competition for you? What kind of situation does that create for you being the head of Sony Classics which has this mandate to make smaller films, release them in a smaller way and make the money back on each film. Bernard: It's twofold. One, because they go through the studio distribution pattern, they don't play in the theaters that are the theaters that play specialized movies or independent films or alternative cinema. You're not going to see "Three Kings" or "American Beauty" at the Angelika Film Center. It's not going to play the Sunset 5 in LA. In fact, "Being John Malkovich" went out into a lot of commercial theaters, from what I understand, Gramercy wouldn't let it in the Toronto Film Festival because they didn't want to ghettoize the picture as a specialized picture. And they're playing the commercial screens. So it certainly doesn't hurt a company like ours because the screens are still available, and what happens is that as these movies continue to play the multiplexes, the specialized audience that want to venture into that sort of commercial zone, it leaves room on your move-overs and your secondary runs. You talk about these movies from these guys, "Three Kings" and "American Beauty," there's not a lot of guys out there operating these days like John Sayles, who is his own man and does it on his own terms. iW: Jim Jarmusch. Bernard: Yeah, Jim Jarmusch, Pedro Almodovar, even people like Christine Vachon, Todd Haynes, these are people who operate on their own terms and refuse to be compromised. And they probably could make a lot more money if they could be absorbed by the studio system, but what seems to be the 90's is the way "sex, lies and videotape" went, from independent distribution right into the studio system with the director. They're good movies, they're just not their own man. And you have to make compromises when you start to go and make movies for the studio. You don't have the independence to say, "This is what I want to say, this is the character I want, this is the actress I want to hire, this is the message I want to get in this story, I'm not going to hide it or skirt around ." There's compromises to be made, and I think that in the last decade there were a lot of movies that were made where those kinds of comprises didn't have to be made in the independent world. But I think the people's motivation now on a whole is they want to go work for the studios. They're chasing the dollar. The market of Sundance. iW: Some of the filmmakers who work in studios still maintain what they want to, however. Bernard: Well, to an extent. There's compromise that has to be made, that's all I'm saying. And certainly they can work within the studio and make an interesting movie, but they do make compromises. Whether it be on cast, because if the studio is going to commit a certain amount of dollars, they want a certain level of cast, because then they're covered in the ancillary area. There may be areas that the script goes that may be taboo. Look at the Weinsteins, they're not allowed to release "Dogma." iW: So, how does it work with you guys if you're involved with a film at the script stage and you if you work with someone like a John Sayles or a Pedro Almodovar. Or even a Woody Allen. Bernard: Well, Woody Allen, we bought the way everybody else does, sight unseen without the script. But with Pedro Almodovar on "All About My Mother," we got the script, we said, we like it, we want to buy it, and Pedro made the movie. And we bought part of the territory. We don't interfere. We follow the same theory that the old United Artists, Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow and Bill Bernstein and Mike Medavoy did when we had our first job and we were at Orion. Once the script and the director are set, and the movie can be made for the budget that they wanted, then we step aside and let the artist do their work. We feel that if you've got a good script, you need a good director to breathe life into it. And so that's when we'll start talking to someone, when they've got a director and a script. And we don't want to interfere in the creative process, like, "We're going to fix it for you, recut it for you." That's not how we do business. And if someone says, this is the person we want to be in the movie, great. If we don't like it, we won't invest in it. But the last thing we want to do is influence the director's vision. | |
