Veteran indie producer Ted Hope opened Locarno’s industry symposium Thursday afternoon with a provocative keynote during which he declared: “The indie film system is fucked.”
The talk, titled Indie Films: 50 Years Of Building The Wrong Thing, began with Hope’s pointed declaration before he reassured the audience of predominantly European industry insiders that now is the time to build a new, self-sufficient indie eco-system.
“There’s a huge chance that we’ve never had before to build something better,” Hope said, adding: “And I actually think it’s quite doable.”
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Hope has made similar assessments in the past. In 1995, the producer, best known for helping to launch the careers of indie filmmakers such as Ang Lee, Nicole Holofcener, Todd Field, and Michel Gondry, published the seminal essay Indie Film is Dead. Today, however, Hope said his past thesis wasn’t quite right. At the time, he said he hadn’t realized that there has never been “such thing as a stable indie film system.”
“It might’ve been rife with biases and prejudices, but the model worked,” Hope said. “It was prey to different trends and certain people’s manipulations. That, to me, is the old indie. And that’s what we have to say is over.”
Hope added that the main business failure that has contributed to the death of old indie cinema is that industry execs often solely base their funding and commissioning decisions on the success of past projects, which has kept the industry stagnant. However, this model has been disrupted by streaming platforms, which now have much broader audiences they must cater to.
“The goal is to delight the customers, and people want to see themselves and their issues portrayed,” he said. “You cannot rely on what has worked before. But when you sit down with any buyer of a corporation that is still 100% what they’re thinking. I think that is a recipe for failure.”
Illustrating his philosophy, Hope spoke about his work producing Ang Lee’s film, The Wedding Banquet, which he said was “uniformly rejected initially for being gay and Chinese” by the industry. But when the film was eventually released and became a success with audiences, picking up a Best Internationa Oscar nom, he turned away from the Hollywood studios and used the international sales company approach as well as cash from Focus Features to fund 45 further features.
“It’s about recognizing the system, and when you do, it gives you greater freedom to start to change both the subject of your movie and your process,” he said.
Later during the session, Hope turned his attention to the two current strikes in Hollywood against the studios, one by the WGA and one by SAG-AFTRA. The producer said one of the most significant battle lines between the studios and striking workers is around the transparency of data from streamers and the studios.
“We need to own the data of the work we create,” Hope said. “If we don’t have this, we as artists and entrepreneurs can’t course correct when we make a mistake. We can’t say we didn’t connect with an audience with this film.”
Hope added that when he joined Amazon in 2015, he heard people in the company say “they would never share” viewing data with creators and producers. Hope joined Amazon in 2015 as head of the Development, Production, and Acquisitions team, and he was elevated to co-Head of Movies in July 2018. He left the company in 2020, returning to his work as an indie producer. However, he later added that he believes a shift is on the horizon, with studios softening their attitude to sharing data with artists. Hope said he thinks this will likely happen first in Europe, which the Hollywood studios and streamers will inevitably end up following.
With that said, Hope concluded that his time working at Amazon had been both enjoyable and fruitful.
“I believe in change from the inside. They’re not the enemy. I worked at Amazon. I was super happy to be there, and they treated me really well,” he said. “Every movie we made was profitable. They were successful films, even the ones people thought weren’t successful. They served the business goals of our company along the way.”
Hope concluded his keynote by saying with all of the profits raised for the streamers and studios from successful films, artists must get a cut of the backend currently enjoyed disproportionately by execs.
“Denying back-end participation is a violation of human rights,” he said. “I think this is a place for government. Sharing in the success is an absolute necessity for what we do.”
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