‘We have to work miracles’

The average Canadian producer spends approximately four years in development on a feature film: wrangling with writers, kneeling before funding agencies, praying for tax incentives, wining and dining talent, badgering unions for deals, cajoling directors, dodging bill collectors, huddling with accountants, wooing distributors – all in the hopes of getting their film made. And if they do leap through all the hoops and get it on film and into theaters, is there any money to be made?

‘No,’ says producer Richard Sadler, of Montreal-based Films Stock International, who produced last year’s top grossing Canadian film, Louis 19, le rois des ondes (King Of The Airwaves), which brought in $1.8 million at the box office in ’94. ‘Unfortunately, that’s a fact, and it’s even sadder when you have made what everyone considers a hit like Louis 19. You keep expecting there will be something from somewhere, but it just doesn’t come in a small market like Canada. There’s just no way around it,’ says Sadler.

According to Telefilm Canada, the average Canadian feature film pulls in a domestic box office of between $150,000 and $200,000. And Canadian films represent a mere 2% to 6% of the screen time occupied in Canadian theaters. Sad figures indeed, and not much in the way of encouragement for feature filmmakers.

‘The only way you can make money at all is by selling it in foreign territories,’ says Sadler. ‘You certainly cannot do a film in French – or English for that matter – and expect money to come back on it. There’s just no way. And since I did a coproduction with France on Louis 19, my coproduction partner has the more lucrative France and Belgium territories to sell, so what’s left is all the other foreign territories.’

‘Ironically,’ says Sadler, ‘if the picture is a big commercial success in Quebec, it is often more difficult to sell in the other major markets of Germany and Italy because they tend to purchase films that are more ‘arty.’ In the case of Louis 19, while it is a very funny farcical comedy, it certainly has no intellectual pretensions.’

A further difficulty, he says, is that comedies traditionally do not travel well because every country has its own brand of humor.

How does he intend to deal with the limitations of a small market and increasingly tighter budgets?

‘Although I have usually done my films in coproduction, I will have to do more now rather than less. It’s one of the realities because I cannot raise enough money in my own market, and in Canada we don’t have any stars so we have to find high-concept types of films. We need to always be on the top of the surf.’

Market realities naturally influence the kind of film you choose to make, says Sadler.

‘Now before I make a film I have to have a very clear marketing plan. I need to know when and where I am going to release it and what type of publicity I will use. On Louis19, we ran a publicity campaign four months prior to the opening and had a very clear marketing strategy, so that when we hit the market we were operating at the max.’

Part of that strategy, he says, was using well-known actors for small roles in the film, knowing he could capitalize on their names through media coverage.

‘Before the release of the film, almost everyone had heard of the title, knew the theme of the film and some of the actors involved. This is the kind of campaign you must wage if you are to compete with American pictures,’ says Sadler.

‘When you hit the screen and the films next to you at the cinema are Schindler’s List and Mrs. Doubtfire, that’s your competition, and it’s terrible when they already have $100 million in box office behind them, have been promoted for six months, and everybody has heard of them. So we have to work miracles.’

It’s those kinds of obstacles that make many in the production industry question why one should even bother to make films for the Canadian theatrical market.

Sadler chalks his motivation up to eternal optimism. ‘I’m a religious person,’ he quips. ‘There’s probably a hundred reasons to not do it, and far fewer reasons to keep doing it. But the main reason is because I love features, and somewhere along the way I might find a film that, even if it doesn’t do so well here, it does better worldwide.’

He cites as an example Four Weddings and a Funeral. ‘That’s the same kind of picture we can do in Canada. I’m not dreaming every night about doing this, but it’s part of the game to be at the right place at the right moment with the right subject.’

He says he almost broke through on his first feature, Comment faire l’amour avec un negre sans se fatiguer (How To Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired). The film chalked up more than $1.5 million in foreign sales and had good box office results in Quebec, but it was never released in English Canada.

The main problem, he says, was ‘when we hit the u.s. market we had a scandal because the New York Times (in an attempt to be politically correct) didn’t want to publish an ad with the full title. For a couple of days we had all the media covered, but our small u.s. distributor did not capitalize on it by making more prints.’

When you luck out, Sadler advises, ‘you’ve got to be prepared.’

Currently working on his next film, a psychological film noir thriller entitled Caboose, Sadler insists that the key to making money on any Canadian feature film lies in choosing the right subject.

‘You must have something that people want to see. With people now spending more than $8 to see a movie, you need to tell them why they should see your picture over all the others out there. You need to talk about things people can relate to in their own lives.’

Alexandra Raffe, ceo of the Ontario Film Development Corporation and producer of one of English Canada’s most successful films, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, and White Room, and executive producer of The Lotus Eaters and I Love a Man in Uniform, was less definitive on the question of whether there’s money to be made on Canadian features.

‘Yes and no,’ she says. ‘I’m someone who made money. Mermaids recouped, everybody got their money back and we lived off it.

‘But that said, there are two kinds of films: the government-financed model where a substantial amount of the money comes from funding agencies and where typically the world rights are owned by one company. That very often is a smart move in terms of getting the film out there to be seen, but the cost elements don’t come through unless the damn thing is a break-away hit with a low enough budget in relation to its potential market.’

‘The film has to work,’ she says, ‘which means striking a chord, hitting a zeitgeist, and having all the luck in getting out into theaters. So yes, you can make money, but let’s not kid ourselves, it’s a long shot.’

The other model she describes is rooted in the international marketplace: ‘They are less artsy and not without merit; however, they’re less auteur-driven and more commercial.

‘There are deals that can be made if you have the right kinds of elements in your movie,’ says Raffe. ‘It doesn’t have to be schlock, but you can get an hbo licence, several Canadian broadcast licence fees, and you can get it made.

‘But I think the key words for financial success are ‘for the market.’ Some people get upset with the ‘market’ word, but if you use the word ‘audience’ instead, you come up with a word less offensive to the art side of the industry. If you make a film with nothing other than your audience in mind, (you should ask yourself) what will they understand, what will they get out of it, will they care about the characters?

‘If I see another application with the target audience down as between 18 and 40 I’m going to choke. Who isn’t in there? A producer should really know who their audience is. Is it teenage boys from 18-22 or women in their 30s and 40s? Then as you work with that material and realize you can’t be all things to all people, as well as keeping your budget coherent and practical in that market niche, you stand half a chance.’

Getting theatrical distribution in Canada is becoming increasingly difficult for producers, says Raffe.

‘The reality of the international marketplace has made distributors a great deal more wary. That combined with the shrinking of the Distribution Fund and the tightening of Telefilm’s commitments has meant more strings attached and less money available to distributors, so now there are far tougher expectations of return.

‘There’s also less money in the marketplace, and since every project they (distributors) pick up is a long shot, now there are fewer distributors,’ says Raffe. ‘The whole marketplace is increasingly about globalization and international reach, so understandably the little distributors find it very difficult to survive in the international marketplace at all.

‘And yet on the other hand, it’s the little guys that have the patience and lack of overhead that can make it affordable for them to spend a great deal of time and energy creating a great campaign for an art film with no stars. It’s become a catch-22.’

Despite the poor box office showings for most Canadian films, Raffe contends the quality of Canadian films – along with their reputation overseas – has improved substantially over the last decade.

‘When you compare the box office from Canadian films to that of foreign films – recognizing that those represent only the best from those countries – they don’t fare much better. Yes, it’s still an exception to get a film like Exotica that does over a million in box office in Canada, but we definitely make far less of the open-and-close variety.’