International Insider: ‘The Crown’ Begins Final Tour; UK Skills Crisis Tackled; The Picture From Camerimage
Howdy, Insiders. Jesse Whittock with you to run through another week in international film and TV news.. Don’t forget to sign up to the newsletter here. And a fair warning here, this newsletter does include The Crown season 6 spoilers.
‘The Crown’ Arises A Final Time
The build up: It’s the television event of the year and it was always going to come with controversy. The sixth and final season of The Crown began yesterday on Netflix, with four episodes dropping. Final warning: Here’s where the spoilers really begin — turn away/scroll past this block if you want to remain innocent. For those still with me, there’s been plenty of trepidation around screeners, spoilers and early reviews at the Netflix end, understandably so for the most part, as the season deals with the untimely deaths of Diana Princess of Wales and her boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayed, in 1997. The crash that ended their lives has been the subject of relentless speculation and Peter Morgan’s fictional version of events was always likely to stir emotions and drive debate. In the weeks leading up to the launch, Elizabeth Debicki, who is drawing praise for her portrayal of the tragic Diana, had talked about how she approached recreating the bond between the Princess and Al-Fayed and noted how shooting the scenes leading up to their deaths was “unbearable.” Dominic West, who plays her ex-husband Prince Charles, had said the season shows the current King at “the worst period” of his life, forced to the tell his children about their mother’s passing. Baz had also gone deep-dive with director Christian Schwochow after being one of the few journalists given early access to the episodes. Inevitably, in the days before launch, there was speculation around Prince Harry and whether he would or would not watch the program’s final run. The Daily Telegraph newspaper had run a story saying he would, as he has done with previous seasons, but this was refuted late on Thursday afternoon when a source close to the Duke of Sussex told Jake he would not, due to the “sensitive nature” of the content. The show launched yesterday (Thursday November 16).
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The reviews are in: And they weren’t kind — at least in the UK, where several reviewers took particular issue with scenes involving a so-called ‘Ghost Diana.’ The Guardian was especially damning, saying the episodes are “so bad it’s an out of body experience,” despite “uniformly brilliant performances from the entire cast — Elizabeth Debicki as the queen of our hearts especially, of course.” Nancy Tartaglione collated all the reaction from the papers, magazines and review sites, primarily from the UK and from France, where the car crash that killed Diana, Dodi and driver Henri Paul happened. The French were much kinder about the season overall, with one calling it a “love letter to Diana” and praising the conversations Charles and the late Queen have with the Princess after her death. Le Figaro called the “dreamlike vision” of Diana “incredibly powerful” but “very destabilizing.” Read Nancy’s comprehensive article here.
“Total nonsense”: There was more. One source of speculation over the years has been the role Mohamed Al-Fayed, father of Dodi, played in the relationship between his son and Diana. Season six of The Crown very much paints him as matchmaker, stroking the flames of passion in the sun-soaked surroundings of the Mediterranean. Al-Fayed, a man never short on words, passed away in August but Jake tracked down his former spokesperson, Michael Cole, who shot down the plot as “total nonsense,” saying: “Mohamed was a remarkable man in many ways… but making two people fall in love with each other? That was beyond even his great talents.” Full Crown outro coverage here.
UK Production Crisis Tackled Head On
Got the skills to pay the bills?: The UK’s production sector is at a crossroads. It remains one of the most sought-after international production hubs and has arguably the world’s strongest public service broadcaster sector. However, just this week Pact has been warning that the indie film market could be set for “market failure” without government intervention and Amazon has said it could move shoots out of the country if conditions become less favorable. Meanwhile, the impacts of Covid and the U.S. labor strikes have seen thousands of frontline production workers leaving the industry altogether. Following a BFI Skills Review last year that called for urgent action, the Screen Sectors Skills Task Force was set up, chaired by former Amazon Studios Europe boss Georgia Brown. It has a remit to build a sustainable future for the production sector. Almost uniquely, Brown, vice-chair John McVay from Pact and others on their team managed to get 28 organizations — including all the major broadcasters and streamers — to candidly discuss their investments into training and skills and business models and practices. The result is a report released this week that sets out a plan for the future. Without getting into the weeds — our report here dives deep into them — the ambition is to revolutionize how the sector interacts with its talents, equipping them with the skills to transfer to other areas when times get tough and jump straight back in when the good times roll. Brown told Deadline during a briefing at the ITV offices at the media campus in London’s White City that in becoming experts in fire-fighting and problem solving, the UK industry had become “very reactionary” — a “misstep” that fails to safeguard for the future. The Task Force remains in place until 2023 to push for the implementation of its recommendations, so more to come here.
Sales of the century: Next, we go back to Pact. Three days before the Task Force report, McVay and his team released the producer body’s annual UK TV Exports Report — and the numbers made for good reading for the country’s sales houses. British TV shows made a record £1.85B ($2.25B) in 2022, a 22% increase year-on-year as finished tape sales grew 60%. More than half the revenue came from streamers, which ties with the anecdotal evidence that the likes of Netflix and Prime Video are reverting back to acquisitions to bulk out their catalogs with quality content at a cheaper price point. (Worth noting here that the streamers do not prescribe to this narrative.) However, sales into the U.S. remain at below pre-Covid levels and were par with the 11% drop seen in last year’s results. Moreover, Pact CEO McVay warned that 2022 was likely to be an “exceptional year” and that next year’s edition “will reflect the current global financial uncertainty and rising production costs.” Read on here.
Green shoots of recovery: I’ll leave talk of Britain on a positive note. This morning, we exclusively reported Rami Malek feature Amateur will be among the first UK shoots to get rolling after the U.S. labor strikes — a good sign for a troubled market.
The Picture From Camerimage
Back on the Torun bus: Cinematographers old and new once again flocked in droves to Torun in central Poland for the country’s EnergaCamerimage Film Festival, which kicked off last Saturday. However, joining them and our much-travelled reporter Zac Ntim this year was a collection of high-profile stars. Fresh off the conclusion of SAG’s strike against the studios, they were free to promote their latest projects. Ferrari actor Adam Driver received an honorary acting honor at the fest’s opening ceremony. Later in the week, he made headlines for a creative response to an audacious question during an audience Q&A following a Ferrari screening in Torun. The festival shared a surprising statement in support of Driver, which you can read here. Other high-profile visitors included Bob Geldof, who gave us a lengthy interview. He spoke about what he described as his “really bad” performance in the classic Pink Floyd film The Wall. Geldof had been in Torun to present the film alongside its DoP Peter Biziou, who is the recipient of the festival’s lifetime achievement award. “I’ve seen the movie twice, and I was embarrassed,” Geldof said, adding that he could only finish working on the film because Biziou made it “very easy.” We also sat down with Willem Dafoe, who was in town to present Poor Things. We discussed the Golden Lion-winning pic and the end of the strike. “I assume things will just go back to the way they were, but the terms will be different,” Dafoe said when quizzed on how the strike might change the industry. For our full coverage, including interviews with cinematographers such as Matthew Libatique, Ed Lachman, and Łukasz Żal, check here. Camerimage runs until Saturday.
Israel-Hamas Conflict Heightens Tensions
Stockholm sorry: The Stockholm Film Festival issued an apology this week after Israeli director and actress Aleeza Chanowitz accused the event of rescinding at in-person invite to the event in the wake of the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza conflict. Chanowitz, who had been due to accompany a screening of her TV show Chanshi, told Deadline she had abandoned her plans to attend the festival following a series of conflicting emails giving different reasons why she could no longer attend in person. One communication – which said the festival “had to take a stand” – raised particular concerns for the filmmaker and her producers at Israeli broadcaster Hot, who took the story to the press to raise awareness over the perceived disinvite. As the story started making headlines, Stockholm issued an apologetic statement saying the incident had been caused by “misunderstanding” and that it would “never refuse a participating director’s visit, nor cancel the screening of their work for political reasons.” It suggested that that the use of the “take a stand” phrase had been a lost in translation moment. “What the colleague was hinting at in the correspondence was the need for a decision —whether it be related to travel or perhaps opting for a digital Q&A.” By this time, Chanowitz had given up plans to attend, saying in a statement: “The festival’s excuse as to why they don’t want me to attend has changed three times, which makes me feel that they aren’t being honest with me. I don’t think I’ll be going because I don’t feel very welcome anymore.”
ARD accused: The reverberations of the Israel-Hamas conflict were also being felt at Germany’s second biggest broadcasting network ARD this week after it was accused of censorship for pulling Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir’s 2017 comedy-drama Wajib from its schedule. Wajib had been due to air on ARD’s flagship channel on November 19, in a slot programmed months ago as part of a double bill on the theme of fathers and sons alongside Danish director Anders Østergaard’s hybrid work Winter Journey. The latter film aired as planned on November 12, but Wajib was pulled, with the channel saying in a statement that it had made the decision due to concerns over its “narrative perspective” amid the ongoing Israeli-Hamas conflict. German producer Titus Kreyenberg told Deadline: “It is puzzling that ARD went on with the broadcast of Winter Journey and not Wajib, for me that’s a form of censorship.” Wajib is a gentle comedy-drama capturing the reality of Palestinians living within Israeli borders, through the tale of a retired teacher who is reunited with his estranged son, when he returns from his adopted home of Italy for his sister’s wedding. Jacir, who is one of Palestine’s most celebrated directors, said she was “utterly appalled” by ARD’s decision to pull the film. “At this dark moment in history, it is shameful that ARD would choose to suppress artists voices instead of offering a space where we can share our stories, our culture and our dreams,” she said.
Impossible situation at IDFA: The impact of the ongoing conflict was also felt at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), where tensions were high all week Our docs editor, Matt Carey, flew over from the U.S. to cover events and found IDFA in an impossible situation: saying nothing about the fighting was impossible, but saying anything guaranteed backlash. And so it proved. Read Matt’s excellent rundown of how the Middle Eastern situation overtook the festival here, and find his wider IDFA coverage here.
Easy, ‘Tiger 3’
Diwali dazzler: Bollywood star Salman Khan is guaranteed money in India, but this past Sunday — Diwali Day, when local cinema numbers are often soft — he outdid himself. Tiger 3 delivered his best ever opening day with an estimated 94 crore ($11.4M) globally with more than half of that coming from his home country. The records continued to fall as the actioner took 240 crore after three days, as Nancy Tartaglione reported Wednesday. This marked the biggest 72-hour opener for both Khan and co-star Katrina Kaif, the Yash Raj Films figures revealed. Directed by Maneesh Sharma, Tiger 3 sees Khan reprise the role of Avinash Singh ‘Tiger’ Rathore, who goes on a life-threatening crusade to clear his name after being framed as a traitor. More box office magic from Nancy here..
The Essentials
🌶️ Hot One: Julianne Nicholson and Eliza Scanlen landed lead roles in buzzy upcoming BBC crime drama Dope Girls.
🌶️ More spicy casting: Joe Dempsie and Francesca Annis (and many others) have joined another BBC drama, Showtrial season 2.
🌶️ Hot, hot, hot: Fredrik Wikström Nicastro is launching Hope Studios with an overall deal with Black Bear in place.
🎿 On the slope: A musical about Gwyneth Paltrow’s high-profile skiing trial is headed for London‘s West End.
🇺🇸 Paris to LA: Kathyrn Thal joined France’s Vendôme Pictures to expand its LA presence.
🦚 Peacock: The NBCU streamer bought British ‘cringe’ comedy Hapless.
🖊️ Signed: Made in Chelsea star Jamie Lang’s podcast network, JamPot, by UTA.
🖊️ Also signed: CJ Obasi, director of Nigeria’s OScar entry Mami Wata, by The Gotham Group.
🤝 New job: Leon Wilson was named CEO of Shine TV and Zeppotron.
🎥 Trail: For Trompoppie, an Afrikaans language mystery drama series for streamer Showmax.
Melanie Goodfellow and Zac Ntim contributed to this week’s Insider.
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