CAA’s Media Finance Co-Head Roeg Sutherland took a break from deal-making – bar replying to one call on stage – to give a keynote for the Cannes Marché du Film’s Investors Circle event on Sunday.
The packaging supremo is Cannes this year with 33 projects in the market and another 13 films in the festival. He suggested that the duration of the Cannes market had doubled since his early days of attendance.
“Cannes unlike most festivals has gotten longer and longer. Usually, a festival starts on a Thursday and by Tuesday, you’re out and it’s done. Cannes used to start on the Thursday and would finish on Tuesday. Now we show up on Sunday, and it goes on for 10 days. So, it’s a pretty exhausting process,” he said.
He said his was in part due to packages becoming more complex, which in turn was a result of the collapse of soft money in the U.S., and films having to look elsewhere for finance.
“People complain that’s it slower and I’m like it’s only slower because it’s much more methodical. It used to be you’d go to Georgia to get a 30% tax rebate. It was cut and dried. It was very easy to structure a movie,” said Sutherland, adding he did not want to comment on President Donald Trump’s film tariff proposal.
“Now you have to do international sales. You’re probably not going to get a domestic pre-buy. That market’s much, much harder than it was before. They want to see footage. They want to see what the movie is going to look like. So, you have to find an equity investor. The good thing is that there’s a lot of money out there, and people are still very excited about cinema, so getting an equity investor is not that much of a problem.”
“But then the puzzle begins. You don’t really have soft money in the United States anymore. You want to shoot a movie in New York, but the New York tax credits aren’t getting paid out. Georgia, I think it’s been three years that they haven’t been able to pay out their tax credit. So, you have to be creative. You have to go Serbia for New York and then pick up shots in New York. And it takes a lot more organization. It used to be you’d walk away from a festival and say, ‘We’re done now.’ Now you walk away from a festival, and you have a lot more work to do.”
He heaped praise on the state-backed film funding systems of countries such France, Italy Germany, suggesting they enabled new talent and more difficult films to emerge in a way that was close to impossible in the U.S.
“It’s much more difficult to get new voices to emerge in the United States right now, just because the implications of what we’re dealing with,” he said.
He cited mainstream rom-coms, action movies and thrillers, and anything “Jason Statham wants to appear in”, as the types of movies withstanding the headwinds, for streaming and theatrical.
I don’t watch Reacher… but that’s what people want to watch so for that business, it’s very easy. For the auteur driven business, which is what I’m interested in, it’s trickier, but there’s still a way of getting it all done.”
Quizzed on the potential for a nationwide film incentive in the U.S., Sutherland said it would be “amazing” but unlikely to happen in the next three years, implying while Trump is in power.
One cause for optimism was the strong performance of distributors such as Mubi and Neon over the past 18 months.
“We thought we would be stuck in a streamer world forever. It feels like that isn’t true. Mubi found an older audience, Neon found an older audience,” he said. “By this time next year, there will be four new domestic distributors, theatrical distributors that either release Lionsgate type movies, or Neon movies… two are very close to launching.”
Commenting on the ongoing trend of talents launching their own production companies, Sutherland said he actively encouraged this strategy.
“You have to own your IP, running a company is not for everybody. Everybody wants to have a company. Everybody thinks it’s a great idea, but it’s actually an incredibly difficult job. It’s something you have to live on a day to day basis, and it’s tough.”
He pointed to Knives Out, which he worked on and was produced by director Rian Johnson and producer Ram Bergman under their joint banner T-Street Productions, as an example of where it made sense.
“It was really important for them to control their IP because they knew that they were creating a universe, and they wanted to make sure that whatever, wherever that universe sat, that they controlled it,” he said.
