Sep 26, 2013 ... Holland Film Meeting Daily 3 28-9 ... Hobbit and Skyfall as well as Luc Besson's
The Lady ... tor Jean van de Velde whose The Price of Sugar.
Holland Film Meeting Daily3 28-9 the one-stop, non-stop meeting place for dutch and international professionals sept 26–29 2013 Utrecht filmfestival.nl
On the Remake The latest round of German/Dutch dialogue, ahead of the upcoming treaty between the two countries, will focus squarely on content, with specific emphasis placed on remakes. A closed session in the morning will offer professionals from both sides of the divide the opportunity to examine material that would make co-pro collaboration both creatively and financially satisfying. This afternoon’s The Meaning of Remakes public session in the Karel V will be moderated by director Jean van de Velde whose The Price of Sugar opened the festival 25 September. It will focus on two Dutch remakes of German films, Pim van Hoeve’s 2003 success Liever Verliefd (from Christoph Schrewe’s Sex Oder Liebe, 2000) and Mark de Cloe’s Mannenharten, (due for release in November 2013), a remake of Simon Verhoeven’s Männerherzen (2009). Van de Velde’s interest in remakes was piqued after the world premier of his highly successful All Stars in 1997. The next day Belgian director/producer/distributor Jan Verheyen contacted him to say he would like to Jean van de Velde remake the film more or less scene by scene, but for a Belgian audience and using recognisable Belgian stars. “So we gave him the rights to use, or exploit, the screenplay, and he made it within a year. And it was an even bigger success in Belgium that it was in Holland. That was amazing,” comments Van de Velde. All Stars spawned subsequent English, Spanish, German and Italian remakes.
All Stars
the screenplay that was the problem.” Hence, the new policy of supplying ‘bullet-proof’ scripts for remake, whose quality was assured by their boxoffice success in their home territory. Subsequent successes included Vet Hard (2005), debutant Tim Oliehoek’s remake of Danish Lasse Spang Olsen’s Old Men in New Cars (2002) and Pim van Hoeve’s Liever Verliefd, which will be discussed today. While some purists at the time decried the practice as being anti-cinema, Van de Velde continues to advocate for its adoption as standard policy. “As a writer, (having a remake) in other countries is a very fulfilling thing… A local box office success is a prisoner of its language but when it is remade it is suddenly liberated. And as a producer and a writer you get some money for the remakes.” Nick Cunningham
Feeling Gruvi
Johnson spoke to the HFM daily ahead of the event: “What we want to show is what happens within an online campaign when it is handled by a distribution company and we make the point that in actual fact, with things like social media and online, we have the ability to Ben Johnson start that audience build-up early in the campaign, right back to script-writing phase if needs be,” he stressed. “Given how complex promoting films is to distributors, to turn up at the their doorstep with a finished product and an international online community numbered in the tens of thousands, then it is going to be an evermore interesting proposition, so the onus will switch to the producers to actually start producing these communities in the run-up to creating their films. We think that we have pretty compelling evidence that if you get the right kind of groundswell for a film, then the benefits to film sales at the end of the day can only be positive.” NC
Digital Film Library Jan van Nassau Room
09.30 – 11.00
Netherlands Production Platform Presentations and Round Table sessions (Dutch projects) Maria van Hongarije Room
11.30 – 13.30
NPP Individual Meetings Maria van Hongarije Room
13.00 – 14.30
Lunch Invitation only. Restaurant de Refter
14.30 – 16.30
NPP Individual Meetings Unico van Wassenaer Room
17.00 – 18.00
Gruvi Film Marketing Workshop Maria van Hongarije Room
17.30 – 01.00
Drinks, dinner and awards City Sense
Ido Abram, NPP moderator and Director of Presentation, Education and Communications at EYE Film Institute, spoke to the HFM Daily yesterday after the first day of Platform pitches: “I was very happy with this year’s selection which is very varied, with all kinds of different genres – arthouse films, cross-over films - most of them with a huge international potential. And I was really proud of the pitches today. They were done not only on time but the producers were able to bring the core of each project into the spotlight. The industry people in the room very concentrated room, and were really interested to hear about each project and to explore the possibilities for partnerships. In terms of prospect for each, that is of course hard to say. These are difficult times, but qualitywise the projects deserve it. The selection is hand-picked and I think for the majority of projects there really is an existing market, but let’s hope that people are brave enough – financiers, funds, producers – to pick up these new projects and not just play on the safe side.”
There was, he argues, a very pragmatic reason for adopting this practice. “I had these young first and second time directors often struggling with poor quality screenplays, and it was very hard to see within their movies their director qualities. They were struggling so much with their screenplay you’d think that they couldn’t direct, but it was
NPP Project Focus
Eisenstein in Guanajuato
Greenaway has always felt a fascination for Sergej Eisenstein, explains Wolting, as indeed has she for Greenaway. His graduation piece at art school was a series of painted stills of Eisenstein Peter Greenaway films. Likewise, at film school Wolting was an avid student of Greenaway’s works such as The Belly of an Architect and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover.
09.00 – 20.00
Ben Johnson and James Hobbis of Danish-German online marketing agency Gruvi are in Utrecht today to give a workshop on the role of social media in the marketing of films. Successful titles that the pair have worked on include blockbusters such as The Hobbit and Skyfall as well as Luc Besson’s The Lady and Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.
The experience got him thinking. There must be a plethora of local successes across Europe whose international career is limited by the local language in which they were shot. So in his role as intendant at the Netherlands Film Fund (after the turn of the millennium) he went on a Europe-wide search to isolate these local successes and to begin the task of revamping them for the Dutch market.
On paper it looks like a dream match – one of European cinema’s most celebrated and cinematically articulate auteurs taking on one of the medium’s founding fathers, the whole package put together by innovative Dutch production powerhouse Submarine. And so it may well prove, with Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato set to commence shooting in November. Following the casting of Finnish actor Elmer Bäck (The Spiral) producer Femke Wolting is in Utrecht to try and close the finance by securing a Scandinavian coproducer.
Today at the HFM
The film deals with ‘10 days that shook Eisenstein’, when he settled in Mexico following a disappointing, if well-intentioned, trip to Hollywood (he was there as a guest of Charlie Chaplin). In Mexico he commenced a short-lived but passionate love affair with his guide that was to have a profound effect on his later work. “Peter has the idea that Eisenstein’s first three films were academic and conceptual exercises, which were of course very successful in Russia,” Woltingh stresses. “Then after he visited Mexico he only made three more films, and those films are much more about people and emotions. The idea for our film is that he became a changed man in Mexico, and I thought that was a very beautiful concept for a feature film.” Greenaway previously worked with Submarine on the documentary Rembrandt’s J’Accuse…! “We really enjoyed it,” Wolting underlines. “I think it’s great how he has such immense energy – he is still so young at heart with such a passion for filmmaking that you don’t even see within most young filmmakers. That is the best thing about working with him.” NC
NPP Project Focus
The Fear of God Simon de Waal, director of 2013 NPP project The Fear of God, may be one of The Netherlands’ most popular thriller and screenwriters, but that’s not his day job. Half the week he is a detective-sergeant in Amsterdam’s homicide division. “Yes, he spends four days as a detective and three days writing and directing scripts for me,” points out project producer Dave Schram of Amsterdam-based Shooting Star Film Company. De Waal’s story of a hoodlum who immerses himself into a community of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and who is then followed there by an undercover detective on his trail, is based on true Dave Schram events. “It is so interesting because Simon knows all the details as he is reading all the internal reports,” Schram continues, “and finally he wrote up his idea.” According to the producer, what makes the story doubly intriguing is the extent to which the
men – tough, violent and uncompromising - are unnervingly affected by their new pastoral, and forgiving, surroundings. “It’s a real psychological thriller between these two guys,” Schram stresses. “And when you see the movie it will change your whole vision about what is good and what is bad. Everybody has some good within them, and of course some bad too.” The film is budgeted at approximately €2.2 million with just under a quarter of the finance in place. Schram would like to leave Utrecht with a German co-producer, as he did in 2008 with Sonny Boy, directed by his wife Maria Peters. “For me, this sounds like a reasonable aim,” he says. “And Germany is not very far away from my own home where I have a family, and I don’t want to be for half a year abroad.” He further revealed that The Fear of God has received a very high level of support from Dutch broadcaster AVRO. NC
See filmfestival.nl/profs_en/news/ for online news coverage of the Holland Film Meeting and Dutch industry, and interviews with leading Dutch professionals.
