Independent movies must be bolder and cheaper if they’re to cut through and help stabilize the business, Working Title co-chairs Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner told a packed audience during a London Film Festival industry talk this afternoon.
The pair were joined on stage by BFI CEO Ben Roberts, who moderated the talk and whizzed through a series of detailed questions about Bevan and Fellner’s decades-long work together at Working Title. Roberts asked the pair for their take on the current indie biz, and they had some advice for filmmakers working independently on smaller budgets.
“Films need to cost less money and they need to be bolder in that space,” Fellner said.
The longtime producer used the example of Coralie Fargeat’s Cannes winning pic The Substance — which Working Title produced — to illustrate his idea, telling the audience that the movie has convinced him that “if something is really out there, people are interested.”
“We will start to make more films under 15 million dollars and try to be really bold and attract people to the films and bring people back to the cinema,” he said.
Bevan added: “There’s a real shyness at the studio level in terms of original movies and you can understand why the way economics work.”
He continued to say that he and Fellner now see the under 15 million feature project as a “real opportunity for new talent and directors.”
“We just made a new film up in Manchester that completely falls in that category and is one of the most energetic movies that we’ve done for a while,” he said.
Bevan and Fellner have co-chaired Working Title since 1992. Their credits include pics like Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo, Notting Hill, Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. The company had grossed over $8.5 billion globally. The company is at LFF with Blitz, the latest feature from Steve McQueen, which Bevan described as “pretty big” in scale. He also praised Apple — which backed the pic — as a “great partner on the movie.”
“It was oroiginally going to be a film that Steve developed with New Regency. But after the pandemic it wasn’t clear how much money a theatrical distributor could put up for an original movie, which is less these days,” he said. “So Apple and Amazon were the two that were originally in the ring for the movie.”
Blitz is set to debut in select cinemas on November 1 before streaming globally on Apple TV+ on 22 November 2024.
The London Film Festival runs until October 20.