Developing a strong commercial roster in Canada is no easy task. Maintaining a delicate balance between the best interests of a production company’s local talent and the international directors they represent, prodco execs, producers and sales reps are faced with hard decisions every time a board comes over the fax machine.

Do you offer the job to a well-established director a young creative team would stand on their heads for, or to an up-and-comer who would benefit greatly from the job, but who the creative team would likely refuse?

Toronto-based Radke Films executive producer Edie Weiss says she and her team can take on any job thrown at them, but that it took a period of trial and error to arrive at that position. Leading her shop into its 10th year, Radke’s roster of Canadian directors includes Martin Shewchuk, Mark Mainguy, Phil Brown and First Cut winner Matt Eastman.

‘We started out going after bigger directors and found that some of those directors weren’t really used to working in the Canadian market,’ Weiss says. ‘We had these incredible directors that no one could afford, and realized that in order to stay in this marketplace we had to be a premium company that offers great directors who can also work in the price range, whether Canadian or American. It was a huge challenge to recreate ourselves.’

Today, she says, despite Radke’s extensive roster of foreign talent, she and the sales team push the Canadian directors first whenever possible, and if a U.S. director is brought in for a job, he or she is made to utilize the local crew and talent. Weiss says her Canadian directors like the idea that the shop doesn’t have a bias toward its imports.

‘These guys feel like we are totally keeping their reels hot, current and alive in Canada, instead of grabbing a whole pile of directors, not shaping them, and having them all flounder,’ she says. ‘We’ve reshaped our roster and made a conscious decision not to represent directors who aren’t willing to come here or don’t resonate in the Canadian market. We focus on the U.S. directors who work as if they were locals. We invest our efforts into their careers as well.’

James Davis, executive producer at Toronto’s Untitled, says another important facet of maintaining a happy roster is making sure there is little overlap in terms of directors’ strengths.

‘You want to avoid conflicts with over-duplication of directors with certain styles,’ he says, pointing out that some other shops might choose to market themselves in a narrower vein. ‘We’ve had some really accomplished directors approach us about joining, but there have been too many similarities between some of our visual directors, such as Robert Logevall and John Mastromonaco.’

Davis admits that a few years back Untitled (then Jolly Roger) was thick with visual-minded directors, but he has managed to correct this over time. With a roster that now includes David Tennant, Curtis Wehrfritz and Wayne Craig, Davis says he, like Weiss at Radke, has a director to fit any genre (save comedy/performance, which he says will be rectified soon), and prefers his roster small.

‘The reason it is a tight roster is for good career management, and it is a balance of good Canadian directors,’ he says. ‘We put a lot of personal time into this. We line produce about 80% of the work and we do all of our own sales, so if we doubled our roster we couldn’t keep [the shop] this size. We would have to add significant overhead. This is a manageable size and we can actually focus on the directors that we represent.’

Toronto-based Big Film Company president/executive producer Dave Greenham reps a balance of veteran directors and what he calls ‘fresh’ faces. On one side, he helps manage the commercial affairs of veterans George Willis, Chris Sanderson and Alan Marr, and on the other he guides the greener Park Bench, Ron Murphy and Jeff Siberry. He feels as though he has the right director for not only every project, but every budget as well.

‘I don’t think there is any point to having 10 directors all at $8,000 to $10,000 a day on your roster if you are getting boards coming in the $50,000 to $100,000 range,’ he says. ‘You have to balance out your roster.’

With two U.S. affiliates to draw from, Greenham says the idea of bringing in talent from outside Canada is sometimes necessary given the demands of some creatives. Although he says it’s sad that work often does not end up going to Canadian directors, he admits the talent from the U.S. is often quite good. In this slow period, he has also noticed a virtual stampede of Canadian commercial houses affiliating with U.S. shops, expanding rosters that are not being fully utilized.

‘Shops are staying busy, but the volume compared to last year and years prior is way down, and a lot of [companies feel] these mergers are really out of necessity,’ he says. ‘It’s sort of like an army that says, ‘We aren’t winning the battle, so let’s get more troops. We may not need them, but let’s get more.’ ‘ *

-www.radkefilms.com