Bosses At ‘The Gentlemen’ Producer Moonage Talk Working With Guy Ritchie, Making Shows For Young People & A First Foray Into Non-English Language With Netflix Italy’s ‘The Leopard’
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EXCLUSIVE: An eclectic collection of upcoming projects ranging from Guy Ritchie’s debut TV series to Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Famous Five to an Italian-language series for Netflix are tied together by one constant: Moonage Pictures.
Frith Tiplady, Matthew Read and Will Gould’s London outfit has been one of the quieter British drama production houses of the past few years but is signaling itself this year with a wealth of long-gestating projects making their way to the screen, and they are buoyant in the face of a tricky market.
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Shows incoming include the Miramax and STX Television co-produced Gentlemen TV series spin-off that has seen Moonage work with Snatch auteur Ritchie for the first time, a big-budget BBC adaptation of Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, The Famous Five for the BBC and ZDF, and Netflix Italy’s The Leopard – one of the streamer’s buzziest to come from that region.
It would therefore be fair to say that the company set up in 2018 by the former Peaky Blinders producing trio is having something of a moment. Up until now, they acknowledge that they have been a little quiet.
“Our passion for the material is there no matter what it is,” former BBC commissioner Read tells Deadline at the BBC Studios-backed indie’s plush Central London offices. “If we are collectively excited about something we will work tirelessly to unlock that and deliver to a broad audience and that is what unites these projects. Famous Five, for instance, is a really big piece of IP but it felt to us like there was still a definitive version to be done.”
Tiplady notes that these projects have been in the works far longer than this new era of “market contraction” – a term uttered by Miramax TV boss and Gentlemen co-producer Marc Helwig late last year – but says the team is laser focused on the fact that the audience remains the same. Moonage also works to best utilize the strength of having two producers (Tiplady and Gould) and a writer-commissioner (Read) aboard its senior team.
“The market is still bigger than it was 10 years ago,” says Tiplady. “Yes it is contracting but that just makes us put our heads down and think that even if it might be more commercially tricky to finance things the audience hasn’t changed.”
Working with Guy Ritchie
Cue The Gentlemen, Ritchie’s debut TV series that launched full trailer yesterday and will drop on the streamer next month, coming after Moonage’s Stephen Graham-starrer Bodies comfortably entered Netflix top-10 lists globally towards the backend of last year.
The Theo James and Kaya Scodelario-starrer comes as part of Miramax’s current drive to mine film IP for TV and is a spin-off of the 2019 movie, following Eddie Horniman (James), who has inherited his English aristocrat father’s sizable estate and becomes the new Duke of Halstead only to discover that it’s sitting on top of the biggest weed farm in Europe, which is owned by the legendary Mickey Pearson (Vinnie Jones).
Moonage jumped aboard after the team was approached by Helwig, who wanted to “find a sweet spot of a show drawing from the best of Guy Ritchie movies like Lockstock in a way that Guy hadn’t done before.”
For Read, the experience was a unique one given that he is both producing the series and co-writing with Ritchie.
“When I was young his films were the films we watched on VHS so it was intimidating,” says Read. “I think he is slightly under-appreciated sometimes. Few British directors write and direct films about Britain that connect with the audience so directly and yet he has serious range, just look at [2019 musical movie] Aladdin.”
Ritchie was “fascinated with TV on an intellectual level,” Gould says, which he hopes will yield positive results. He is confident that the TV adaptation can sit within the pantheon of respected film-to-TV projects such as FX’s Fargo or HBO’s Watchmen. “What you don’t want to do is just a longer version of a wonderful movie that already exists,” he cautions. “It’s interesting which ones really stand out – sometimes it is about the angle that you take.”
Tiplady adds that Moonage often considers “what might not be the obvious” when considering IP to mine. She cites Bodies, which came from a 2015 graphic novel that “no one else was chasing.”
Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, however, was in demand, and Moonage has since assembled a crack creative team including Red Rose scribe Poppy Cogan and director Dolly Wells, while Jackson herself is closely involved with the process.
The series is about a a smart and single minded teen who investigates a murder in which a schoolgirl’s boyfriend has already been deemed guilty. Moonage unearthed a gem when casting 21-year-old American actress Emma Myers, now globally recognized for her role as Wednesday Adams’ roommate Enid Sinclair in the Netflix smash.
“As we soon as we said the name, Holly told us that deep down this was who she had in mind,” says Read. “It came from leftfield but felt inevitable.”
Deadline hears a deal with a U.S. buyer is close.
With Good Girl’s Guide and Winding Refn’s The Famous Five, the latter of which featured on the front cover of Deadline’s Mipcom Cannes magazine, Moonage has struck gold with a duo of shows targeted at young adult viewers.
At a time when public broadcasters are desperately seeking the secret sauce to satisfy this demographic, Tiplady simply says “passion and ambition” is the approach.
“We treat Famous Five the same as any other,” she adds. “The BBC weren’t looking to commission three 90-minute Famous Five films but they then just thought, ‘Well why can’t this work?’. Young people could be sat down watching this every week, like a film, with their family.”
Going beyond the English language
Speaking of ambition, Netflix Italy’s The Leopard (co-produced with Indiana Production) fulfils a long-held desire for Gould to adapt Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel, which is his favorite of all time and chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during Italian unification. Netflix is reinventing for the modern era – a Burt Lancaster-starring movie adaptation won the 1963 Palme d’Or – and the series stars model Deva Cassel, who is Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel’s daughter.
The show has been in the works for seven years and was initially conceived as English-language before the non-English language revolution spurred on by the likes of Lupin and Squid Game hit.
“The world changed while we were developing,” says Gould. “We hope this version can speak to a global audience. The ‘Europudding’ days are over and now you can do something really specific.”
While Lupin and Squid Game no doubt changed the game, there have been few breakouts of that ilk over the past couple of years.
Read ponders how shows in other languages require a “critical mass” of support to break through. “If it breaks through then everyone is talking about it but you need to hit that peak for non-English language to work.”
Tiplady praises the role not just of streamers but of European pubcasters in getting these shows out there, pointing to crucial partners such as ZDF and TF1 who have helped propel Moonage projects to screen. “European partners are realizing they need to come together with us to punch above our weight collectively,” she says. “We are having way more sophisticated conversations than we used to. It feels organic.”
The audience remains front and center for the trio of British TV drama vets, whose wares will soon be seen on a plethora of platforms worldwide.
They are trying to stay bold in the face of market contraction and hope that buyers listen to their guts and don’t follow too risk averse a path, an approach borne out in the speech made by top BBC drama boss Lindsay Salt earlier this week.
“You hope that they don’t stop backing fresh talent or new ideas,” concludes Gould. “Everything is risky in a sense. You do something that you think is a 100% good bet and it might well be a flop.”
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