The more than seven-year journey for Durga Chew-Bose’s film adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse culminated in its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last week – a project that came close to never happening, according to its producers.

“For so long, Bonjour Tristesse has been this big mountain at the end of the path,” Katie Bird Nolan, co-founder of Babe Nation Films, tells Playback Daily. “Now we’re at the top of that mountain looking down, and it’s been incredible.”

Nolan and fellow co-founder Lindsay Tapscott fell in love with Françoise Sagan’s once-controversial 1954 coming-of-age novel years before launching their company, saying they envisioned a fresh, female-centric take on the story of a teen girl living on the French Riviera whose world crumbles when her late mother’s friend appears. They also knew there was more to the story than the one told by Otto Preminger in the 1958 film.

Securing rights to the book was one of their first orders of business when they launched Babe Nation Films in 2016.

“We felt the story could be better told through a young female team because Françoise Sagan was 18 when she wrote the book,” says Tapscott. “So we sent a cold email to the publisher asking if the rights were available, and that kick-started a three-year process of them saying no.”

Eventually, Nolan showed up at the door of the publisher’s office in France and asked to go for coffee. She convinced them to give her six months to find a writer and present an adaptation to consider for an option. They were fans of Chew-Bose and her 2017 collection of essays, Too Much and Not the Mood, and thought she’d be the perfect fit.

What they didn’t know was that Chew-Bose had recently been inspired to re-read her copy of Bonjour Tristesse following a film screening in New York. She got writing, but she also wrote a letter to Sagan’s son, Denis Westhoff, who held rights to the estate.

Nolan and Tapscott say that Chew-Bose’s correspondence warmed Westhoff for their eventual meeting with him at the Louvre while they were in France for Nolan’s wedding.

During that lunch, Westhoff, an executive producer on the film, finally agreed to give Babe Nation the rights.

“He’s always kept a closed door because others wanted to do something that was in the same vein as the Preminger adaptation,” says Tapscott. “What he liked about ours was that it was fresh and different. He said we reminded him of the energy of his mother, and that was something we wanted to do with this adaptation.”

With the rights in place, the long road to financing began. During that time, Babe Nation renewed the rights three times, briefly losing them when post-pandemic financing fell through. At that point, they were given another year to get the film to camera.

Elevation Pictures boarded in 2021 to help piece together what became the final coproduction and financing plan.

“Once we came on board, we became their partner,” says Christina Piovesan, Elevation’s head of production. “We talked through strategy, agreements, the financing deal points and the business deal points. We helped close the executive producers in terms of strategy and advisement. And then we helped them manage all of the business affairs and ensured that the production was on-site and successfully financed and papered.”

Initially, the team envisioned Bonjour Tristesse as a French coproduction, but according to Piovesan, it made more sense to structure it as a Canadian-German coproduction with a service component in France.

“The French tax credit is more robust as a service… unless you’re shooting in the French language, which we weren’t,” she explains.

Piovesan had previously worked with Benito Mueller and Wolfgang Mueller of Germany’s Barry Films, and they boarded as co-producers. Telefilm also anchored financing under its Production Program. The team raised additional funds through France-based sales agent Film Constellation, and an angel investor rounded out the $6 million budget with private equity.

The production went to camera in the south of France in May 2023 with a cast including Lily McInerny, Chloë Sevigny and Claes Bang.

Earlier this year, Film Constellation launched official sales at the European Film Market in Berlin. Babe Nation and Elevation confirmed the company secured a pan-European international release, with details still to be announced.

Back in North America, TIFF serves as the film’s official launch pad, with the goal of securing a U.S. distributor and partner. A Canadian theatrical debut will be announced at a later date.

“There’s a huge push,” says Piovesan. “TIFF is hugely important to us and its support on this film is crucial in helping get it sold.”

In the meantime, Babe Nation has a few more projects in the pipeline, including a handful of projects with Chew-Bose.

“This project has cemented our trio with Durga,” says Nolan. “We really feel the three of us had a journey over the seven years [making] this movie. We did all of this together. It started with a cold email—a shot in the dark. And then it became a special union.”

Image courtesy of Elevation Pictures