With the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger days away, CAA Media Finance co-heads Roeg Sutherland and Sarah Schweitzman and FilmNation CEO stopped by Deadline’s Zurich studio where the three weighed in on the merger, the state of the indie ecosystem post TIFF’s first market and why “optimism is important.”
“I don’t know what the future holds, I don’t know what David Ellison’s plans are for the combined company in the future,” said Basner. “But what I do know is when we actually just do the work and we express our taste, we create an environment when a filmmaker can go and deliver on the purest vision of their film and work like hell to make sure it reaches people all over the world, we tend to have great success regardless of what’s going on around us.”
Schweitzman, who has been co-head of CAA Media Finance for nearly a year, said that “optimism is important because it’s an artistic pursuit that we’re all dedicated to.”
“If you look at all of the movies coming off of Telluride, Venice and Toronto, the movies are so good this year,” she said. “They’re so different, they’re so diverse. When you watch a movie like La bola negra, which has had such success and has such a big voice, that maybe wouldn’t have had such an impact five years ago. And then you look at a movie like The Debut or a movie like Elsinore, all of those movies are so good and they’re so different and so unique. As long as we’re able to continue that, it’s not going to matter about the consolidation because it will necessitate other companies to build and create more opportunities for those movies to be seen.”
Sutherland stressed that a bigger “problem” in the independent production space is the amount of production that has exited U.S. shores to shoot in more tax-friendly nations such as the UK, Canada and Australia.
He noted that the proposed 20% U.S. federal tax credit “is going to bring business back in a big way and there will be an opportunity there for banks, for foreign sales companies, for below-the-line crews and for production in general.”
The trio, who had just come off the back of their first TIFF market experience, all reflected on the market and its viability in the film calendar with Sutherland stressing that people in the film business “really don’t like change”.
“We always want to be back to a time that we were not a part of,” he says. “So, the introduction of a market is always a challenge.” He added that Jason Momoa project Copperhead, which Black Bear sold internationally, sold “beyond expectations.”
Schweitzman said: “We did take 19 packages to Toronto. That’s pretty significant considering it was the first market there and they are movies that are ranging from high octane action thrillers that are more populous fare, to smaller, filmmaker-driven fare as well.”
She added: “We felt it moved with the times and moved with where we are in the marketplace.”
Basner, who was the recipient of this year’s Zurich Summit Game Changer award, reflected on the success of his 18-year-old sales-production-financing indie powerhouse FilmNation.
“We started the company in September 2008 and a month later the entire business plan was garbage because of the financial crisis of that time,” he said. “So, it brought into the DNA of the company the idea of rewriting the business plan every single day and being ready to change and pivot on a moment’s notice for something that comes at you, either big or small.
“The lessons we learned at the beginning have definitely helped us with a lot of the changes we have seen whether it’s the fall away of DVD sales to Covid to the labor strikes we had a few years ago and now consolidation. It’s always been in the fabric of how we approach everything: to just be ready for change and to continue to change ourselves and not wait for things to come after us.”
Sutherland said that Basner’s survival skills were down to his “impeccable taste.”
“He’s at the forefront of sales and he not only just reacts to what the market wants from him, which of course he’s going to do because he’s a businessman, but he uses his position in sales to be able to determine what the market actually needs.”
Check out the full conversation above.
