SPECIAL PRESENTATION: BLINDNESS

Director: Fernando Meirelles
Writer: Don McKellar
Producers: Niv Fichman, Sonoko Sakai, Andrea Barata Ribeiro
Exec Producers: Simon Channing-Williams, Gail Egan, Akira Ishii, Tom Yoda
Production Companies: Rhombus Media, 02 Filmes, Bee Vine Pictures
Cast: Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, Danny Glover, Don McKellar, Maury Chaykin
Distributor: Alliance Films

‘Producers of Hollywood blockbusters aren’t that important,’ says fiercely independent Toronto producer Niv Fichman. ‘Generally, they’re traffic cops running interference for the studios. I just couldn’t do that.’

In the past two years, however, the Rhombus Media president has produced three films – Silk, Passchendaele and Blindness – with combined budgets of $75 million – no small feat in Canada. And his signature has become international and creative financing.

The financing of Passchendaele, the $20-million TIFF opener, however, was solely Canadian. ‘I designed the crazy financing,’ says Fichman, ‘but [director/star] Paul [Gross] really executed it’ through his personal charisma (see story, p. 4).

On the international side, the $25-million Silk (TIFF 2007) and the $30-million Blindness, a special presentation at this year’s TIFF, are both trailblazing coproductions with Japan along with third countries.

Blindness, featuring a Don McKellar script based on Portuguese author José Saramago’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, also involves Brazil as a copro partner. Boasting an international cast, it tells the story of a city afflicted with an epidemic of blindness, and is helmed by Brazilian Oscar nominee Fernando Meirelles (City of God).

Fichman’s TIFF experience – and his 50th birthday – will also be iced with a retro screening of his 1993 award-winning feature 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould in the Open Vault program.

When asked why he is drawn to terrifying topics such as a gruesome First World War battle (Passchendaele) and an apocalyptic vision of the future (Blindness), Fichman says his motives are personal.

‘I need to work on a creative basis with the director, or I’d be miserable,’ he explains. ‘I don’t draw the line at the subject matter, or genre of the movie. Where I draw the line at is the way in which I work.’

Fichman sees himself as a provocateur. ‘I’m the one who provokes the writer or the director to get at ‘er through every phase,’ he explains, ‘in the writing, in the budgeting, in the filmmaking, in the editing. It never ends, you know?’

Case in point is a more polished Blindness at TIFF, after feedback in Cannes in May, where the film premiered to mostly unenthusiastic reviews.

‘We never made a print,’ he explains, ‘so it was really easy to go back and make a bunch of changes, and it almost didn’t cost anything. What people will see in Toronto is the new adjusted version of Blindness, not the one they saw in Cannes.’

But before it ever arrived on the Croisette, Fichman says Blindness itself was nearly blindsided by the Canadian government. Sonoko Sakai, producer on the Japanese side, was able to bring $15 million to the table – half the film’s budget- with no strings attached, but things on this end got bogged down in red tape.

Fichman blames Telefilm Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage, which officially approves the international copro deals and triggers cheques being issued once Telefilm gives a project a thumbs-up recommendation. He says the current two-tiered structure – which the Canadian government has said it will review – has led to a ‘vacuum of accountability’ in the Canadian system.

The result, according to Fichman, is that ‘Telefilm has a rogue department that theoretically does not answer to its own higher-ups.’

‘When you call Heritage,’ he explains, ‘they say ‘We don’t do the analysis – that’s being done at Telefilm.’ So you never know who’s actually making the decisions.’

Fichman would like to see ‘transparency in the system so you know what you’re dealing with.’ He says there needs to be a point person.

‘Telefilm and the Department of Canadian Heritage are fully aware that the Canadian coproduction framework needs to be updated,’ says Brigitte Monneau, Telefilm’s director, international coproductions.

‘This modernization will have to be done in concert with all Canadian industry players so that the needs of creators and producers are addressed; this will not obviously be a matter of accommodating individual needs or projects,’ she explains.

One factor that further complicates copros with Japan is that Canada has an MOU (memorandum of understanding) with the country, rather than an official treaty, which effectively says the Canadian government also acts in Japan’s best interests.

Fichman says that because the Japanese were happy with the structure, he was baffled by Telefilm shying away from green-lighting the film.

‘I don’t exactly know who [Telefilm] was protecting and why,’ says Fichman. ‘It was a situation where we were offered three and a half times more money from the Japanese investment company than we were from the maximum of what Telefilm could give us. Where was the impetus there to stop that and say, ‘We are protecting the interests of the Japanese, because the MOU between Canada and Japan states that all of the decisions be made by Canada.’

He adds that the Japanese interpret that the MOU is favorable to Canada, as Canada can call the shots.

‘So,’ he says, ‘who on the Canadian side was saying, ‘We’re going to take that to an extreme and overly interpret it, and pretend that we’re the Japanese and use the Canadian criteria – which is a creative participation, financial spend, all of those things that Canada is very strict about – on their behalf?’ when the Japanese themselves were saying ‘We don’t care.”

Eventually the matter was resolved, Telefilm came on board, and Blindness was produced, yet the situation ultimately required a diplomatic letter from the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs supporting Fichman’s stance.

Although it worked out for Fichman and Blindness, and the film will have a splashy North American launch at TIFF, the producer thinks copro regulations need updating.

‘There have to be rules,’ he says, ‘but they have to be interpreted more loosely, reflecting the current industry globally.’