Michael Cerenzie – The Devil’s Advocate
By IFQ Critic Todd Konrad
Perpetually taking risks and trusting his instincts, film producer Michael Cerenzie has been considered a maverick in the independent film community for some time now. His continued insistence on bringing to the screen projects that push the edge artistically and presenting them as purely as possible without studio interference is paramount. While producing independent films is never an easy affair, Cerenzie continues taking chances that others would consider crazy and comes up with gold. His most recent example and success is Sidney Lumet’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (represented at the 2007 Cannes Film Market by Capitol Films). One of his latest projects, Black Water Transit directed by American History X helmer Tony Kaye will be at the 2008 Marché du Film, courtesy of Capitol Films. In addition, Cerenzie recently announced the creation of a new genre arm within his company CP Productions, alongside co-partner Christine Peters, to co-produce ten films over the next three years with the aid of a hundred million dollar fund. With much of the productions planned for shooting in Mississippi and surrounding areas, the intention is not only to take advantage of state tax credits but help boost local economic growth post-Hurricane Katrina. Cerenzie recently spoke with IFQ discussing various aspects of his career, philosophy, upcoming projects, and his reasons on why Cannes ’08 could be one of the best years ever both for the festival and market. Here are some brief comments from that conversation.
IFQ: The majority of your films like Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead have received much of their buzz from the festival circuit. Briefly, what are your thoughts on the film fest scene in general and in particular Cannes itself in regards to its prominence both in terms of culture and economics?
Michael Cerenzie: I think it’s detrimentally important, specifically this year, given the fact of the writer’s strike and how Sundance was really a dead situation. Also Berlin was a letdown for a lot of people—on both sides I think, for the buyers just the amount of product that was available. This year, especially, I expect Cannes to be very, very important not only as a festival but also as a market. I think it’s going to be one of the biggest years they’ve had in a long time. From a film point of view, I think it’s extremely important, especially for a lot of the types of films that I personally make with the filmmakers that I work with. It’s probably still to me the most important festival. And I’m Canadian, a Torontonian, so I love the Toronto Film Festival but you’re dealing more with a pure marketplace than actually a competitive screening environment. So from a buyer’s perspective and from a sales perspective, [Cannes] is probably the most important festival when you’re talking about film.
IFQ: In addition to your initial collaboration with Sidney on Devil, you and he have signed a three-picture production deal. Could you discuss either specific projects or ideas you two are interested in tackling as well as what you hope to achieve through it either creatively or professionally?
MC: To me, [Sidney] went toe to toe with every other filmmaker around this year. So what happened was I saw what Sidney was doing [during the shoot] and called Paul Parmar, a very dear friend of mine (a private equity investor, producer and a very intelligent human being) who has been very instrumental in a lot of the pictures I’ve made. We sat down and I said, “We should do something on a bigger scale with Sidney.” He immediately got behind it and we made a three picture deal actually before we were finished shooting The Devil based just on the dailies.
It’s a multi-picture deal and the budgets are somewhere in the 15-25 million dollar range. We were very excited to make that deal with him. We felt that all he needed was material because with actors he is probably one of the most brilliant actor directors alive. The next picture we’re doing is a film called Getting Out and it’s the first screenplay that he’s actually written totally on his own. The way that happened was a deal existed where I would send him screenplays and he would send me screenplays as well. We would mutually agree on what we liked. I sent him a dozen screenplays which he read and we discussed at length and he sent me half a dozen as well. It wasn’t that we were disagreeing over them; we wanted to make sure that the next picture was a departure, one that would have legs and that could really branch out into being more of a studio picture but with all the ‘Lumetisms’ in it.
The film is about a man who is in jail on a manslaughter charge but is a good guy basically. He’s someone who made a mistake in his past and when we meet him he’s in seven years on a ten-year stretch. It starts with a big opening brawl in the jail yard with two guys killing each other and one of them is our guy. We find out that he is someone who’s never fallen in with a group within the prison system so he has no protection. He’s a guy who’s either fighting for his life every day or trying to create a scenario where he’s feared enough to allow him to survive. But he’s stuck and we get the sense immediately that he’s not going to make the ten years, the odds are against him. It’s a three character piece; the second character we meet is this prison psychiatrist who’s helping coach our guy for his parole hearing on the following day. What happens is the night before the hearing the character gets involved in a fight, is thrown into the hole and shows up for the hearing beat-up. He ends up being voted against by the psychiatrist in a swing vote and is denied parole. We don’t understand why in the beginning but we soon discover though our protagonist that the psychiatrist can set up a new parole hearing and get the guy out of jail soon. The psychiatrist will get our guy out of prison once a week into a men’s program that he runs with the jail system but the catch is our guy is supposed to keep track of the doctor’s wife and kill her. It seems straight ahead but it’s anything but that. Ultimately it’s about this man who’s not a murderer being faced with a dilemma where the only way to leave prison is to commit a murder. It really becomes about his fight for redemption and finding his own freedom.
IFQ: It’s interesting to see that even now with the success Devil has garnered that you still abide by a philosophy that seems driven more by taking artistic risk rather than simply trying to capitalize financially—be they with either smaller projects or tent poles. It’s an attitude that’s commended but not necessarily shared in the larger Hollywood community.
MC: Well, it is but…even if you look at the Academy lately with Oscar films these days in the last five or six years things have changed so much. You’re seeing more and more basically indie films dominate the Oscars. I think that it’s an exciting time and it’s funny because everyone talks about the golden age of the ’70s. You know, when there was Mean Streets, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Woody Allen was exploding and [John] Cassavetes was still making movies along with a lot of the European filmmakers. And I think today, to be honest, I look at Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages, Once, and Todd Haynes’ film [I’m Not There], and Julian Schnabel, the Coens, and PT [Anderson], and think this will be looked back upon as a similar moment in time.
I think that’s what happened, at least for our company. We’ve put a huge focus on continually looking for independent financing on a global scale now. I raised about a quarter billion dollars in the last two years to make movies independently. Purely independent of the studio meaning that the way we would make a picture like Devil is that instead of going to a studio and looking to get a minimum guarantee upfront, we would find an equity partner. The partner would then take the place of that minimum guarantee that the studio would normally give you. We’d bring them in and say they’d put 30 percent in equity and then they’d be in first position against the North American rights when it was sold. We would make the rest of it out of the foreign [sales] and then we’d just go and make the movie. We might sell the movie before we start shooting, when we got some footage or on the festival route. It would all just depend. I think the festivals play a very key hand for us on a lot of levels even if we’ve already got our distribution. I just think that it’s a combination of keeping to your vision of wanting to hear unique voices and trying to bring them to life.
I think it comes from my roots in theater where the writer has so much value and power that I wanted to recreate that idea in film. To give as much autonomy to the writer or writer-director that I was working with, I always combined my own belief system with the idea that if I could raise money and bring finance to the table, we would have more autonomy and be able to do what we wanted to do. Keeping it as pure as possible without sixteen thumbprints ending up on it is a problem with many studio films today. So it’s a combination of gut and feeling and to quote Sidney, “Are we all making the same movie?”
IFQ: Variety recently announced your optioning of Arthur Herzog’s novel Vesco: From Wall Street to Castro’s Cuba: The Rise, Fall, and Exile of the King of White Collar Crime. What is it about Vesco’s story in particular that made you interested in tackling it as a film?
MC: We’re really excited about this one; this guy was a really interesting cat. He’s over in Cuba right now, and I’m actually going to go see him. But that book has everyone in town calling me about it. It’s really exciting right now where we’re getting pitched major A-list guys because it’s a big movie the way we want to do it and I’m thinking “God, Sidney would just…Sidney…how do we do this?” [Laughs.] So that’s the next one where I’m putting a lot of my attention on right now.
For the complete exclusive transcript of this interview, go to www.independentfilmquarterly.com.