Table of Contents

Introduction

Peter Aalbæk Jensen

DENMARK

Tim Bevan

UK

Jan Chapman

AUSTRALIA

Legacy

Michael Balcon

UK

Lorenzo di Bonaventura

USA

Ted Hope

USA

Marin Karmitz

FRANCE

Legacy

David O. Selznick

USA

Kees Kasander

THE NETHERLANDS

Jon Kilik

USA

Bill Kong

HONG KONG

Legacy

Dino De Laurentiis

ITALY

Jon Landau

USA

Andrew Macdonald

UK

Edward R. Pressman

USA

Legacy

Erich Pommer

GERMANY

Lauren Shuler Donner

USA

Jeremy Thomas

UK

Ron Yerxa & Albert Berger

USA

Legacy

Alexander Korda

HUNGARY

Glossary

Index

Picture Credits

Introduction

A producer’s role isn’t easy to define. It’s a multifaceted job that requires the wearing of many hats, and can vary dramatically depending on the film, and where and how it is being made. Over the years, perhaps one of the few things that has been clear is that those who carry the full credit of “producer” are the only ones eligible to receive the Academy Award for Best Picture. But even that’s been challenged recently. The old caricatures of cigar-chomping magnates of the Darryl F. Zanuck variety persist in the public imagination. As do the myths of the original über-producers: the penniless immigrants from Eastern Europe who eventually made it big in Hollywood, such as Adolph Zukor and Samuel Goldwyn. Watch Michel Hazanavicius’ Hollywood-set silent movie The Artist (2011) and you’ll see the familiar archetype of the producer reinvoked in the shape of the calculating Al Zimmer (John Goodman), who decides that silent star George Valentin is past his sell-by date and that the public wants “fresh meat.”

The control freakery and creative interference of MGM’s “boy wonder” Irving Thalberg is part of movie lore. Thalberg had a hand in everything, though he famously never took a screen credit as “producer.” Working firmly within the studio system in its heyday, Thalberg may seem a long way removed from the producers interviewed for this book. Nonetheless, his qualities—taste, tenacity, and vision—remain as important in the film world now as they were in Culver City in the 1930s.

One part mountebank, one part magician, the producer is the ringmaster who keeps the circus going, reconciling the creative and financial demands of his collaborators. Producing requires audacity, as well as shrewd money minding. Oscar-winning British producer Jeremy Thomas (The Last Emperor, 1987) says a producer is someone who is able to “flash the cash.” A producer is a confidence man or woman. They are selling an idea. It’s the producer’s faith that convinces the creative team they’re actually capable of making the movie and the backers that it can be brought in on time and budget. A producer must have a Napoleon-like flair for logistics, an eye for talent and the balance sheet. They must have enough charm to woo investors, combined with the flintiness to strike tough deals—while also having a keen instinct for marketing. However, the context in which producers work can vary enormously, impacting their scope of autonomy and responsibility to different degrees.

For the last few decades in Hollywood, many of the biggest producers have had “studio deals,” generally supplying office space on the studio lot, development funds, and production financing. Though these types of producer deals have been scaled back radically in recent years, a producer on the level of Jerry Bruckheimer (housed for many years under the Disney umbrella) hasn’t been required to cobble together the money to finance his films for quite some time. Meanwhile, the American independents, who work chiefly outside of the studio system, must have detailed knowledge of things such as bank loans, completion bonds, tax incentives, and the international sales market.

In Europe and throughout most of the rest of the world, film producers operate very similarly to the American independents. They’re responsible for gathering their own financing, but also have more flexibility in the types of material and collaborators to work with. One European producer interviewed for this book gives a fabulous example of the stark difference between independent and studio worlds. Andrew Macdonald, the producer of British hits Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996), recalls his first experience of making a US studio film with a sense of bewildered irony. When he saw the contracts, Macdonald was startled by how much power the “producer” seemed to have. It was only after more careful perusal that he realized the “producer” referred to in the legal documents wasn’t him at all. The studio was the producer. He was just an employee, albeit one with a “producer” credit.

On the other hand, in the world of independent production, where films rely on small armies of financiers, the various producer credits can multiply at an alarming rate. There are executive producers, co-producers, associate producers, and assistant producers working alongside the “producer.” On one recent European co-production that screened at the Venice Film Festival, a well-known director joked to the press that he hadn’t even met many of the producers listed on his film. Some had come on board to enable the production to take advantage of various European soft-money schemes.

On Oscar night, the question of who produced the Best Picture can take on an added urgency. For example, when Paul Haggis’ Crash was in the Oscar limelight in 2004, a ferocious battle broke out between the financiers and producers over who should have been credited. Lawsuits were flung around between the contesting parties and the controversy reverberated for years afterward. The dispute underlined just how elastic the concept of “producer” had become.

In the French system, where the cult of the auteur still ensures that directors retain the pivotal place in the filmmaking process, producers are generally seen as functionaries. They’re not the ones with the vision: they’re the handmaidens to the directors. For example, the name Georges de Beauregard doesn’t loom large in film history. He produced many of the key films of the French New Wave—Breathless (1960) and Contempt (1963) among them—but posterity hardly acknowledges that fact. Yet the names of his directors—Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Rivette—are vaunted and widely known.

In complete contrast, the British film industry always has always been driven by producers. From Ealing Studios’ boss Michael Balcon, to Chariots of Fire (1981) Oscar-winner David Puttnam, and Working Title Films’ luminaries Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, the names of the producers have often eclipsed those of the directors. Their distinct imprint has been felt on the work too. The plaque left behind when Balcon quit Ealing in the mid-1950s stated: “Here, during a quarter of a century, many films were made projecting Britain and the British character.” Puttnam’s films tended to be humanistic epics: large-scale movies shot abroad, such as The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986). And Bevan and Fellner worked on both sides of the pond, churning out edgy indies, as well as popular British film series, including the Bean and Bridget Jones’s Diary movies.

The producers interviewed for this book come from varied backgrounds. Hong Kong producer Bill Kong (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000) moved sideways into production after years in exhibition and distribution. Los Angeles-based Lauren Shuler Donner (You’ve Got Mail, 1998; X-Men, 2000) started out as a camera operator in television. Jeremy Thomas was an editor. Danish maverick Peter Aalbæk Jensen (Europa, 1991; Breaking the Waves, 1996) was a former rock music roadie and promoter who wanted a quieter life. Andrew Macdonald was an aspiring director who realized while shooting a short film that he was doing everything a producer is supposed to do: securing the budget, finding the locations, hiring the talent. Although some of the interviewees have passed through film school, most make the point that their skills can’t be learned in an academic context. They’re not like directors, editors or cinematographers, who have specific creative and technical crafts to master. In fact, producer Jon Landau (Titanic, 1997; Avatar, 2009) says he’s still learning on every film.

These producers invariably have extraordinarily close relationships with the directors with whom they work. Whether it’s Landau with James Cameron, Aalbæk Jensen with Lars von Trier, or Macdonald with Danny Boyle, the producers act as partners. Another trait they share is a strong sense of optimism. They believe fervently in the vision of the filmmaker and never doubt, in spite of all the obstacles in their way, that the movie they’re working on will be completed and will triumph. Some have their magic recipes for making films. Finance them through pre-sales and you can have your budget covered before you start:

That was Thomas’ formula when he was making epics such as The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky (1990). A formula which doesn’t work as easily today. Aalbæk Jensen is a master at co-producing and accessing finance from regional funds and tax shelters. What the producers tell their investors the film will cost and what they tell the foreign distributors isn’t always the same number. And both parties know it.

A flair for showmanship is another quality many possess. They use the major film festivals to put their movies in the international shop window. Some may not have access to studio-level marketing budgets, but they know how to get their projects to stand out. If these movies are in competition in Cannes or Venice, they’re able—at least for a few days—to compete on equal terms for press attention and red carpet hoopla with the Hollywood majors.

Some of the producers interviewed here come from filmmaking dynasties. Kong’s father formed Edko, Hong Kong’s leading independent exhibition chain. Thomas is the son of British director Ralph Thomas and grew up around the film business. He remembers being given a wind-up Bolex when he was 13 and making home movies. Landau’s parents, Ely and Edie Landau, were producers (The Iceman Cometh, 1973; Hopscotch, 1980). Macdonald is the grandson of writer Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes, 1948; 49th Parallel, 1941) and nephew of businessman James Lee, who ran British company Goldcrest.

What also unites these producers is their absolute cinephilia. They’re passionate about movies. As Macdonald enthuses, “If someone wants to be a producer, I always say, ‘Watch as many films as you can.’ If you don’t know your stuff, forget it.”

These producers have had to adapt to the circumstances of the era in which they’ve worked. There have been various sea changes in the film business over the last half-century. One of the biggest came in the 1970s, when producers and financiers such as Dino De Laurentiis pioneered the financing of films through the discounting of distribution contracts. Combined with the rise of the video market, this opened the way for independent companies such as Hemdale, Carolco, and Cannon to prosper. It also saw the emergence of a flamboyant new generation of producers—figures like Cannon boss Menahem Golan (famous for signing contracts on napkins with filmmakers from Godard to Sylvester Stallone) and Hemdale’s John Daly, the son of a London dockworker who went on to back such movies as Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), and Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986) and Platoon (1986).

At the same time, a new kind of US independent cinema was emerging led by filmmakers including Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, and the Coen brothers. Unlike their European counterparts, these American filmmakers couldn’t rely on soft money or state subsidies. Their producers were therefore obliged to make sure that the films—however idiosyncratic and visionary they often were—recouped their budgets. There was evidence that European and American producers were beginning to work in very different ways. As New York indie champ Christine Vachon once put it, “I have met several filmmakers who’ve had largely subsidized careers who don’t think that an audience is important. In American filmmaking, audience is the be-all and end-all, you could argue too much so, but if there is not a continual dialogue between filmmakers and their audience, the work becomes a little flaccid.”

Of course, the idea that European producers were somehow shielded from harsh commercial reality is exaggerated. Danish producer Aalbæk Jensen notes in his interview with typical gallows humor that the first feature he produced, Perfect World (1990), sold 69 tickets in Denmark and was a complete and utter commercial flop. Although he had received some state subsidy, he also had sunk his own money into the movie, and the result was that he was driven into bankruptcy with personal debts of about $350,000 that took him many years to pay off. Thomas considers the negatives to the films he has produced as “the family jewels.” He still owns them. However, many other producers have had to sign away rights to their films simply in order to get them made.

European producers of the last few decades were also inspired by their American counterparts. That “can-do” spirit epitomized by films like Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Todd Haynes’ Safe (1995, produced by Vachon), Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), and the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple (1984) was emulated across the Atlantic by movies such as Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), Boyle’s Trainspotting, and Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998). European production and sales outfits like X-Filme, Wild Bunch, and Figment Films showed much of the same swagger as the trailblazing US indies.

Lines became increasingly blurred as US studios set up their own specialty arms in the 1990s, and relative fortunes were paid at the Sundance Film Festival for distribution rights to indie films. In 1993, game-changing independent distributor Miramax, run by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein, eventually sold to Disney. And European producers began to work ever more closely with the studios. For Europeans, the economic logic is as daunting as it has ever been. They know they will not be able to recoup the budgets of their films in their domestic markets alone. That’s why they need to co-produce and make sure their films are distributed abroad. “The great thing about studios is that they are distributors—the best distributors in the world,” Macdonald notes, explaining why European producers are often so eager to throw in their lot with US majors, regardless of the loss of control and ownership that may ensue.

Working Title Films, the pre-eminent production company in the UK, used to be owned by PolyGram Filmed Entertainment (PFE), a European would-be studio that hoped to build a distribution network to match that of the US studios. When PFE was sold to Universal in the late 1990s, Working Title Films ended up as part of a Hollywood Studio. This was the Faustian pact Working Title Film’s owners Bevan and Fellner struck: the sacrifice of independence in return for reach within the international marketplace.

Producing is an all-consuming profession. Inevitably, sometimes there’s a push back between directors and their producers. The creatives want to take charge and resent fiercely the executives pulling the purse strings. “Here am I in this fucking desert, in this fucking sandstorm, making this fucking film, whilst you are fucking your dolly birds on the fucking Riviera,” David Lean is alleged to have complained to Sam Spiegel when the producer had the temerity to question just how long Lean was taking to finish Lawrence of Arabia (1962). (Lean’s words were overheard by the editor Anne Coates, who told the story of his outburst to author Adrian Turner, when he was writing his 1994 book, The Making of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.) Spiegel had sent his director a telegram stating, “Never has so little been shot in so much time so badly.”

Periodically, directors and actors will try to throw off the shackles of their producers. The same instinct that prompted Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks to set up United Artists has inspired many other generations of filmmakers who’ve sought to go it alone. These ventures rarely work in the way that the artists might imagine.

At the same time, producers have often sought to reinvent themselves as directors. They too struggle. The fictional example of Kirk Douglas as the ruthless producer in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is a case in point. As a producer, he controls every aspect of the films he works on. His relationship with the filmmakers he hires is virtually that of a ventriloquist with his dummy. He knows everything about the business and craft of film. Yet when he tries to direct a movie himself, he makes a complete hash of it.

What remains clear is that the role of the producer will never be easy to categorize.

It constantly changes in relation to the circumstances in which a movie is being made. What is clear, though, is that the best producers remain at the center of the process, from a film’s inception to its release, keeping all the plates spinning.

With plate spinning in mind, we would like to express our thanks to the book’s editors Mike Goodridge and Natalia Price-Cabrera for their patience and encouragement. We are grateful to Melanie Goodfellow, Alice Fyffe, and Jeff Thurber for their assistance. And finally, we wholeheartedly thank the wonderful producers interviewed in this book for their time, candor, and generous spirit.

Geoffrey Macnab and Sharon Swart

Peter Aalbæk Jensen

“I think I am good at getting the right people aboard. That is more or less the only skill that I have. I face that I can do nothing myself, but at least I can bring the right people together. Who are the right people? That would be producers, financiers, scriptwriters, sometimes actors. Putting the crew and the talent together—that is my talent.”

Denmark’s Peter Aalbæk Jensen (born in 1956) is a true maverick: a former rock music roadie who moved sideways into film, hooked up with Lars von Trier when both men were at a low ebb in their careers, and has gone on to produce or executive produce more than 70 films. Aalbæk Jensen has based his career around a close working relationship with one or two directors. Alongside his long partnership with Von Trier, he has known [Danish director] Susanne Bier since film school days and partly credits her for persuading him to become a producer.

Aalbæk Jensen is a born iconoclast. He is the outsider, the man from the provinces who gatecrashed the cozy Copenhagen media world. It was striking that when he and Von Trier set up Zentropa in 1992, they based themselves at Filmbyen, a former army barracks outside Copenhagen. At the same time, Aalbæk Jensen is a skilled dealmaker who has come up with a financing model that has enabled Von Trier to carry on making films on an ambitious scale. Whether it’s working with regional funds, tapping the Council of Europe fund Eurimages, securing advances from loyal tribes of distributors, or setting up offshoots of Zentropa in countries with soft-money schemes, Aalbæk Jensen is an expert at funding movies out of Europe. Bluntly spoken, but often very witty, he has a showman’s instinct too.

Europa (1991)—Aalbæk Jensen and Von Trier’s first film together—was a critical success and they have gone onto work on such films as The Kingdom (1994), Breaking the Waves (1996), Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), Antichrist (2009), and Melancholia (2011). At Zentropa, Aalbæk Jensen has been involved in everything from Dogme low-budget films to Puzzy Power—hardcore porn movies with a feminist slant—and lavish costume dramas like A Royal Affair (2012). He describes his most important skill as being able to choose his collaborators wisely and to sniff out talent. Aalbæk Jensen has also worked with Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, Nicolas Winding Refn, Thomas Vinterberg, and Lone Scherfig. He is currently in production on Von Trier’s latest film, Nymphomaniac, which stars Charlotte Gainsbourg, Shia LaBeouf, and Stellan Skarsgård.

Europa (1991)

INTERVIEW

Peter Aalbæk Jensen

“We wanted to make a sect in a way also—to make Zentropa a place where you more or less are for a lifetime. That was important for me, for Lars, and for Susanne. That was the feeling…we were not making a film together—we were making a career together.”

“When we started with Europa, we had nothing at all. We didn’t know anything about anything, but with the next films we were building on the past—and everything is easier if you have built it before. From there, it was just a case of repeating and refining the instruments.”

“You could say my career has very much been with Lars and Susanne, two extremely loyal people who for some strange reason have chosen to be loyal to me.”

“When Lars started working with American actors and big international stars that was a new game. I wouldn’t say that we were always successful in playing that game. But I think maybe we have some advantages coming from a shitty little country in that we could behave in another way and be more frank and direct—and maybe more naughty.”

“I was quite happy about the rock-and-roll business. It was, of course, extremely entertaining and also extremely tough. I thought, okay, if everybody says the film business can be a rough business, then you should be a roadie!

Gradually, I went more into the organization, working as a stage manager on Scandinavian rock-and-roll festivals. As a spare-time project, I started to make music videos in Denmark. That was before MTV. This meant that the moment MTV entered the scene in Scandinavia, everybody was asking for music videos. We were just about the only ones with some kind of knowledge of making them. I had my own production company together with two of my friends, but it was just for fun—something to do in my spare time when I was not working with music.

Then, I entered the Danish Film School as a sound technician student in 1983. I was thinking that I didn’t have the brains for producing (a lot of people will still agree). I thought producing was about using the money cleverly—although not in a criminal sense. That inspired me, but I didn’t think I was competent enough for that.

I studied with [Danish director] Susanne Bier. She thought it was a disaster that I was studying to be a sound technician. She could see that I was not that interested in it. She persuaded me to move over to production. I switched over [courses] after two years. The last two years were in production. I was producing Susanne Bier’s student films. Of course, making films for no money was complicated, but Susanne was a great partner for me because she was also at that time quite obnoxious and didn’t have any respect for anything. However, we are still working together 28 years later. She is an extremely loyal person. I learned a lot from her.

Lars von Trier had left the Film School by then and so I didn’t know him at all.

I graduated from Film School in 1987 and went out and produced my first feature film—and I went bankrupt with that. It was called Perfect World (1990) and it sold 69 tickets in Denmark. It was just a total flop—an extreme art-house movie. We financed it with some money from the Danish Film Institute and I invested some money in it also. It took me 12 years to repay the debt. Was it a good film? Yes, but I never understood what the story was about. It was so arty farty you couldn’t understand the movie. That was maybe why it sold only 69 tickets. The director was Tom Elling, who was cinematographer on Von Trier’s debut film, The Element of Crime (1984).

Since I was bankrupt, I needed to go out and find some work just to pay the bills. I worked then as a production manager on commercials. On a commercial, I met Lars. At the time you could say that, career-wise, he was bankrupt in Denmark. He was so hated here. That was for good reasons because he was really an asshole. He was so hated that nobody wanted to work with him. Since I was bankrupt also, I think we felt we were two flops who could unite.

I owed something like $350,000. We pay very high taxes in this country and with the remaining money, I had to feed my family and repay my debts. Those were tough times.

Lars had tried to produce his second film Epidemic (1987) himself. He had also learned that maybe he wasn’t that good at producing.

I think he felt he needed a partner in business. He had spent a lot of time on projects that were not produced. He was quite frustrated and I was bankrupt. Then we did a commercial for a French transportation company. Afterwards, Lars asked me if I could help him with his third feature, Europa (1991). I thought okay, I have only heard bad things about the guy, but do I have any alternatives? No! I just jumped into it. I think he felt the same also. We felt like two drowning characters in the ocean, trying to help each other to survive.

Europa was a big production. That was before the great European co-production adventure. In Denmark, I think we made eight films a year with a lot of public support, but nobody had ever collaborated with any other country other than maybe Sweden or Norway. It was really a risky project, but we were young and didn’t know all the problems we faced. In that sense, maybe that was what made the project come through. We didn’t know all these hurdles that were involved in pulling the project together. I think I had 27 different financing partners. I didn’t have a contract because nobody had made anything like that before. I didn’t have a sales company. None of the sales companies wanted to work with us. I couldn’t even speak English, so we had to start totally from scratch. It was still thrilling.

The name of our production company Zentropa came from Europa. After the film, I thought, okay, that was it. We agreed to make one film together, Lars and I, and that was fine. Since Europa was recognized as a kind of larger manifestation of Lars’ talent, suddenly there were some bigger UK, German, and French producers who wanted to work with Lars. Even though he is a strange character and not always 100 percent easy to cope with, he is extremely loyal. The fact that I helped him with Europa when he was fucked meant that he said to these big German, UK, and French companies, all right, do whatever you want, but we have to include Peter. I don’t know that many directors who have said “no thanks” to (Constantin Film boss) Bernd Eichinger and that level of producer to be loyal to the local producer. I don’t think anybody else would have done that. You could say my career has very much been with Lars and Susanne, two extremely loyal people who for some strange reason have chosen to be loyal to me. I think they would laugh their heads off if I said I had any comments on the script. As you know, I am a guy from the provinces, a redneck from the outskirts of Denmark. I’d say this project stinks or that’s a crappy title. That is the kind of dialogue I have with Lars and Susanne. I have no sense at all of what they are doing with the scripts or what you might say is the artistic side of it. I am there to support them and to carry them in the market. They are much more intelligent than I am.

When we started with Europa, we had nothing at all. We didn’t know anything about anything, but with the next films we were building on the past—and everything is easier if you have built it before. From there, it was just a case of repeating and refining the instruments. When we started Zentropa, Lars, of course, wanted me very much to focus on his own films, but that was too claustrophobic for me. I also had the possibility of working with Susanne Bier and other directors. From there on, we needed to have staff. We needed to have an organization. Both Lars and I have always been keen that the films should be produced in an industrial framework.

When we started becoming a little bit successful, I felt that the success could be a threat also: that suddenly we could see ourselves in the media ghetto of Copenhagen, drinking cappuccinos together with the rest of the media gang. I felt we needed to do something completely different. Then we found this military base—Filmbyen—here on the outskirts of Copenhagen in a concrete suburb with a lot of immigrants and social problems. We said why doesn’t the film business move out of the inner fancy circus and then meet reality. I think that, combined with Lars’ idea of the Dogme movement, was popular at that time.

We wanted to make a sect in a way also—to make Zentropa a place where you more or less are for a lifetime. That was important for me, for Lars, and for Susanne. That was the feeling… we were not making a film together—we were making a career together.

We went down the TV route with The Kingdom (1994) because we were broke and needed to do something that could make a turnover quickly. We were trying to get Breaking the Waves (1996) financed and that was really hard because that was, at the time, quite a big budget. We needed something else to survive. Television seemed good. Both Lars and I, when we were ten years old, had seen a French black-and-white TV series called Belphegor, about a masked ghost who wandered round the basement of the Louvre Museum in Paris. That was where the idea came from for taking a big hospital in Copenhagen and putting some ghosts into it. That was the birth of The Kingdom. We made it for a fixed price. That gave us liquidity and turnover so we could get Breaking the Waves started. We treated this mini-series as if it was a feature film and sold it like that, without re-editing the television series. It was just put together in eight reels, screened in Venice and then sold afterward for theatrical release.

At that time, there was no export of Danish films and not at all of Danish television. We actually retained all the foreign rights to The Kingdom, which DR [Denmark Radio] thought had a value of zero. We were quite pissed that we couldn’t get any rights for Scandinavia—DR took that—but in the end we got the most valuable part—we got all the foreign rights.

Breaking the Waves cost around $7.5 million. One thing was to finance it. The other thing I faced was to finance the financing…to arrange the banking of all these contracts. That was a heavy problem because no Danish banks had ever gone in and financed contracts in the movie business. We had to educate ourselves in working internationally and financing co-productions. We also had to educate our banks on how to operate in the film industry.

Lars has always been very pragmatic. As long as he knows in advance, he understands when he needs work outside of Denmark, and accepts actors from other countries and is prepared to shoot in regions where it is profitable for us to be. There have never been discussions about that. You can see how awkward it can be sometimes with all these point systems there are when you are co-producing in Europe. Some of the best artistic collaborations Lars has had have been with people he has been more or less forced together with for financial reasons. Then, they ended up becoming friends and working together voluntarily.

You can be pragmatic as long as you have a director who is good at always switching the story to match the financing. Breaking the Waves should originally have taken place in Holland. We couldn’t get any money there so we thought, okay, Scotland, and especially the Outer Hebrides, was interesting in terms of what it could give to the story. I actually think it became a better film than if it had been shot in the Netherlands. Lars always creates a strange universe where it works that there are people of different nationalities.

We had Helena Bonham Carter. We were crazy about having her on Breaking the Waves, but then she pulled out. We have always had this philosophy that if someone pulls out we don’t try to persuade them to stay. We’ve always felt we can get someone else who would be better for the film. Emily Watson entered the casting session with bare feet. We were sure when we saw the first casting session that she was our “Bess” (as the character is called in the film). Of course, I follow all the ups and downs in the film. After Breaking the Waves, everything we (at Zentropa) had learned with Lars we used with Susanne Bier and Lone Scherfig, and the other great directors of our company. I thought it was quite natural that slowly the projects became bigger and bigger, and then the company slowly became bigger, with more employees. It wasn’t an overnight process and I thank God for that.

When Lars started working with American actors and big international stars that was a new game. I wouldn’t say that we were always successful in playing that game. But I think maybe we have some advantages coming from a shitty little country in that we could behave in another way and be more frank and direct—and maybe more naughty. That was a totally new game to learn. It was one thing to have all these problems and good times with the talent but—Jesus Christ!—agents and managers. That was something to learn.

To me, it’s a privilege to come from a small country. We have no national pride. We don’t think of ourselves as superior. That makes it easier for you to deal with other nationalities.

For once, we said with Melancholia (2011), we had a great film with no controversy. We agreed that Lars should surprise everybody by being nice and gentle. That was the one and only time in the company history we had a strategy! [And that strategy imploded when Von Trier infamously said, “I understand Hitler,” during a Q&A session for the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2011.] Besides that, the marketing strategy has always been improvised. It has been really fun to have it as a playground to generate stories. From stupid things like running around naked, to saying provocative things, we’ve always being able to generate a story, big or small.

Every day still feels fresh and inspiring to me. I think I am the most privileged guy in the world, to be able to make films out of Europe.

At the end of the day, producers should fight for the film and the director, and also sometimes fight against the company. Sometimes, the company should fight against the film. It’s a better position that you have an executive representing the company and a producer representing the film. That’s a better cocktail in my judgment.”

The Element of Crime (1984). Michael Elphick (left), Me Me Lai (center), and director Von Trier (right)

Susanne Bier’s Oscar-winning film In a Better World (2010)

Dancer in the Dark (2000), directed by Lars von Trier, and starring Björk and Catherine Deneuve

Dogville (2003), directed by Lars von Trier, starring Nicole Kidman

Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist (2009), also directed by Lars von Trier

Melancholia (2011), directed by Lars von Trier and starring Kirsten Dunst