Certain helmers can attract financing, but balancing a bare-bones budget with auteur integrity can be tricky.

In the movie business, the label “art film” isn’t always a deal-breaker.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at Cannes, where films that might seem obscure to your average Hollywood studio executive rack up worldwide presales and receive the kind of attention devoted to Brad Pitt strolling down the Croissette.

Consider some of the filmmakers in this year’s lineup: Sofia Coppola, James Gray, Alexander Payne, Roman Polanski, James Toback. They’re not exactly synonymous with blockbusters, but in the realm of global film financing, their names attract coin — at the right budget and with key cast attached.

Producers and financiers say the principal ingredients to getting these movies made are much the same as they were in the past: packages that yield foreign presales, securing locations that provide soft money and tax incentives, and foraging around for ways to cover the risk against the lack of domestic distribution.

“For better or worse, we’re still playing the same numbers game we were 10 years ago,” says Anthony Bregman, a producer on Bennett Miller’s John Du Pont project, “Foxcatcher,” which sold internationally at last year’s Cannes Market.

A crucial part of auteur-pic financing strategy, according to Greg Shapiro, producer of James Gray’s “The Immigrant,” is to make the movies “for the absolute lowest price possible without compromising the integrity of the fi lm. Seems a natural and obvious thing to do, but it is usually very difficult in practice. Budgets naturally go up, not down.”

With “The Immigrant,” Gray was fortunate to have a relationship with foreign sales shop Wild Bunch, which took on a fair amount of risk for the foreign rights. That still left a sizable gap in financing that “nobody wanted to fill,” says Shapiro, “until we happened upon Worldview Entertainment.”

Worldview, which provided backing for three films in this year’s official selection (“The Immigrant,” “Blood Ties” and “All Is Lost”), is one of several relatively new financing entities, along with Everest Entertainment (last year’s “Mud”) and Black Bear Pictures (which also backed “All Is Lost”), that have been bullish about the high-end indie space. Another is Annapurna Pictures, which has backed such pics as “Lawless” and “Killing Them Softly,” which competed at Cannes last year, as well as “The Master,” “Zero Dark Thirty” and upcoming “The Grandmaster.”

“We’ve been able to structure these (pics) so they make sense financially,” says Worldview CEO Christopher Woodrow. “But if you’re not partnering with a studio and you’re planning to sell domestically, you need to make it for a price where the domestic gap is achievable.”

Many insiders suggest that equity financing is on the rise, with high-networth individuals looking for areas to invest outside the stock market. Woodrow also suggests there’s some indication that hedge funds and investment banks are coming back. “But it all comes down to the quality of the product,” he says.

FilmNation’s Glen Basner agrees. “In the specialty film world, you can still do healthy presales,” he says. “There just has to be a compelling case to a distributor, and that could be a filmmaker, an actor, a subject matter or a producer with a great track record.”

Basner cites Coppola’s “The Bling Ring” as an example. “Sofia has existing relationships with Pathe and the Japanese distributor Tohokushinsha, so we came onboard, and bought a chunk of the world, and the film was put together in true independent fashion,” he says.

Similarly, Danish maverick Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest, “Only God Forgives,” was also forged as a result of the fi lmmaker’s track record, even before his 2011 pic “Drive,” says Cecile Gaget, head of Gaumont Intl., which financed the film along with Wild Bunch and Swedish fund Film i Vast.

“We had a director with really faithful distributors, a high concept and a very reasonable budget,” says Gaget. “And that’s exactly what the market wants.”

While U.S. majors have largely abandoned the auteur-driven pic, producers say there are plenty of new domestic companies — A24 (which bought “The Bling Ring”), CBS Films (the Coen brothers’ Cannes entry “Inside Llewyn Davis”), the Weinstein Co.’s

Radius division (Refn’s “Only God Forgives”) and even HBO (Steven Soderbergh’s Cannes pic “Behind the Candelabra”) — to keep auteurs and their producers in business.

Every once in a while, “with the right director and the right price,” says Albert Berger, a producer on Alexander Payne’s Paramount-backed “Nebraska,” even a Hollywood major will finance a maverick vision. FilmNation is selling the pic internationally.

Many pieces of “Nebraska” ran contrary to the impulses of a normal studio, admits Berger, citing the film’s black-and-white cinematography, actors with no foreign sales value and shooting in non-rebate states. But Payne’s resume and script were clearly the attraction, adds Berger — along with a compromise on the film’s budget.

“There’s a number that the studios have in mind, and the number we have in mind, and you come to a consensus,” he says.

Even so, Berger says such pics are never easy to fund. “A lot of these types of films don’t add up on paper,” he adds. “But they are the movies that ultimately stand out.”

Anthony Kaufman – VARIETY – MAY 16, 2013

Actors Sam Worthington and Myles Pollard made the part-surf, part-drama flick Drift over a packed 32 days in Western Australia.

He is a bone fide Hollywood star, the face of the Avatar and Clash of the Titans
franchises and an emerging producer, but Sam Worthington knows he is still
learning.

Take the incident outside an Atlanta bar late last year, when he was handcuffed and
pepper-sprayed after an altercation with a bouncer.

”I was an idiot,” Worthington says. ”If I show you the photo, you’ll understand why.”

The former NIDA student, who now lives in Hawaii when he is not making films
around the world, scrolls through his phone to show a scary-looking shot of him as a
character called Monster in the coming Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie Ten.

”I learnt not to go out in Atlanta, which is primarily a black town, looking like that -
with swastikas on me and ‘world Aryan race’,” he says. ”I forgot that I was looking
like that. So as I was going up to a bouncer, it kind of got out of hand.

”You suddenly realise the thing I have to learn from this is to take my tattoos off and
take my earrings out and I’ve got a bald head and I look quite intimidating.”

Once a promising but limited tough-guy actor, Worthington showed he could really
act in Somersault, opening himself up as a farmer’s son struggling with his sexuality.
When he graduated to bigger movies in Hollywood, he showed his action chops in
Terminator Salvation, Avatar and Clash of the Titans.

”The whole world went a bit upside down when Avatar hit,” he says. ”I call it running
with the bulls. Jason Clarke [the Australian actor from Zero Dark Thirty] and Chris
[Hemsworth from Thor] are doing it at the moment. You run with the bulls. You take

all the movies that come your way because of the fear you’re never going to work
again.

”I’ve got to the point now where I can put the brakes on. I can do movies that are
smaller. I don’t have to be the pretty boy running ’round with the short skirt and the
rubber sword any more.”

And one of those smaller movies shows that even if Worthington is still learning at
36, he is prepared to pass on his Hollywood experience to Australian friends.

When one of those friends, former McLeod’s Daughters star Myles Pollard, asked if
he wanted to be in the surfing action-drama Drift, Worthington was only partly
interested.

The two surfing buddies, who auditioned for NIDA together in Western Australia
then went through the country’s leading acting school in the same year, had long
talked about making the definitive Australian surf film.

While Worthington liked the sound of Drift, which Pollard was producing and acting
in, he had no intention of starring alongside him in the film.

”It could have been quite easy to phone up his mate who does Hollywood movies,
have his mate sign on and you get your money,” Worthington says. ”I refused that. I
said, ‘No dude, you’ve got to build a base around you. Go find a bigger producer, go
get yourself directors, develop the script.’

”It would have been too easy to do that and we don’t work that way as mates.
Amongst us boys, we forge our own way.”

It was a tough-love decision that Pollard now calls ”the biggest favour he could do
me”, encouraging him to learn the business of producing.

Shot around the rugged south-west of Western Australia, Drift is that rare thing: an
Australian surf film with not just spectacular wave action but an engaging story. It
centres on two brothers, Andy (Pollard) and Jimmy (Xavier Samuel from
Anonymous, A Few Best Men and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse), who launch a
backyard surfwear business in the 1970s. It’s a fictionalised version of the origins of
labels such as Billabong, Quiksilver and Rip Curl before they became international
brands, with a story of a family’s struggle to survive after moving to a new town and
facing conflict from a local bikie gang. Worthington plays a surf photographer who
arrives in town in a hippie-style bus.

”It happened here in our backyard,” Pollard says of the rise of the big surf brands.
”These backyard companies became world-beaters on the world stage. I don’t think
that’s been told in a feature film.”

While Drift suggests Pollard has the looks and talent to have his own international
career, he admits to lacking confidence when he tried the Los Angeles audition
circuit after McLeod’s Daughters.

”Myles has got a son,” Worthington says. ”He goes, ‘The primary thing is, I want to
do a movie that my son can watch down the track and be proud of something that his
father did.’ That sold me.

”Then you look at the story and it’s about family who are struggling and get their
dreams come true. Not to embarrass my mate but this is Myles’ dream coming true -
almost parallel with the guy in the movie’s dreams coming true.

”Him and his character had that great crossover, which makes Myles’ acting way
more honest and believable because he’s feeling it for real. That was something I
wanted to help endorse.”

Another former NIDA student from the same year, Morgan O’Neill, wrote the script
and co-directed Drift with Ben Nott.

Pollard says producing Drift was like a university degree, especially when the shoot
ran up against time constraints for lack of finance.

”We had a 38-day schedule,” he says. ”We had to reduce that to 32 because of the
lack of finance. Ripping six days out of the schedule was pretty rough. We were
shooting quicker than telly. So to be in the water as an actor, freezing, I had little
escape from that because I knew just how valuable the time was and how long we had
Sam for.

”It was stressful but pressure makes diamonds.”

Worthington is also moving into producing, starting with a TV series on the
journalists covering the Gallipoli World War I campaign to commemorate the 100th
anniversary next year, and two movies too early to announce – ”but they’re big” – in
the US.

”We’re doing a thing with [director] Phil Noyce as well, which I’m in because I liked
it that much. But the rest of them aren’t vanity. ”That’s what I think is the key: you’re
doing it from a place where you’re paying it forward almost;

it’s much more interesting to produce it.”

The surfing movie is a tough genre to crack, Worthington says. ”I said what you
should do – and Morgs and Myles agreed – was get proper professional surf
photographers who have shot Taj Burrow’s movies and actually been out in Grajagan
in Indonesia and places like that. Get those guys because the cinematography in a lot
of surf films is a land [director of photography] in the ocean trying to prove himself.

”But if you get the guys who live in the ocean, who know how to photograph the
waves and photograph surfing, that really helps.”

Being around so much surf sounds an ideal film shoot for two surfing buddies but
Worthington says six-metre to nine-metre swells in the middle of winter were often
perilous. ”We know we can hold our own but there were waves where you were
nervous,” he says.

”Even bobbing around in a 20-foot swell in the horizon, I’ve never been that scared
in my life. But I understand the ocean – I know that I’m not going to die. I have
enough trust in myself being able to read where the swells are coming.

”I said to Myles, ‘Let’s just go out there and take it on. It’ll seem more real for an
audience.”’

Drift  opens in cinemas on May 2.

Garry Maddox – SMH – April 21, 2013