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Pathé Pictures
Pathé Pictures
Just over a year after being awarded £33 million as one of the three new Lottery- funded film franchises, Pathé Pictures now has its entire first slate of produc- tions in front of the camera, including a £6.5m version of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, co-starring Rupert Everett, Julianne Moore, Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver and Jeremy Northam.
It has been a very speedy baptism for the company’s head of production, Andrea Calderwood, who only took up her new post at Pathé inFebruaryafterbeingsnaredfromherpre- vious job as head of drama at BBC Scotland. In that capacity with which, for the past year she also combined duties as an executive producer for BBC Films, Calderwood oversaw an awesome range of product from Mrs Brown and Invasion Earth to The Crow Road, Hamish Macbeth and Looking After JoJo.
But it’s clear she relishes the altogether bigger stage offered by an ambitious Anglo-French player blending an intriguing mix of public and commer- cial monies. And, says Calderwood, “given the breadth of Pathé ’s distribution interests, which go from specialist to the mainstream, this seems a very good place to be because there’s a commer- cial imperative but with a cultural incentive, too.”
Pathé Pictures is a partnership of six suc- cessful British producers, three leading European distributors (Pathé Distribution, France’s AMLF and Germany’s Tobis) and a quartet of financiers, including Barclays Capital, Le Studio Canal Plus, Coutts Bank and, of course, Pathé itself.
The producers are Simon Channing-Williams of Thin Man and Image Films, Norma Heyman of NFH, Lynda Myles (Pandora Productions), Sarah Radclyffe (SRP), Barnaby Thompson (Fragile Films) and Michael White (MW Entertainment). Jake Eberts, whose Allied Films helped finance movies like Driving Miss Daisy and Dances With Wolves, is chairman of the new company.
Alexis Lloyd
In total, Calderwood, 33, has about £20m available annually to invest in production of which one-third comes from the Lottery monies [the £33m award is spread across six years] while the rest comes from the Pathé Fund. The aim, she declares, is “to make four to six films a year with average budgets of between £2m and £7m. Another thing which makes Pathé special among the franchises is that it’s able to invest its own development funding as well - that’s just over £1m. We can also access Arts Council development funding as well, but haven’t done so as yet.”
She quickly points to Pathé ’s first three films as “perhaps a model for what we are trying to do.” An Ideal Husband [not to be confused with a lower-budget, modern-dress version of the same source material also in the pipeline] is being directly co-produced by one of the franchise part- ners, Fragile.
The Ratcatcher, a wry look at first love and family rivalry set in 70s Glasgow, is by debu- tante feature writer-director Lynne Ramsay, twice a Cannes Jury prizewinner for her shorts, including this year’s Gas man. Calderwood asked Sarah Radclyffe to become involved as executive producer “because I thought it sensi-
Andrea Calderwood
ble to marry her expertise to a first-time film- maker. So that’s another way of involving our franchise producers.”
Then, finally, there’s The Darkest Light, writ- ten and co-directed in the Yorkshire Dales by Simon Beaufoy, who scripted that massive recent
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