Rise Films’ Teddy Leifer, Producer Behind Cannes Doc ‘All That Breathes’ & HBO’s ‘George Carlin’s American Dream’, Talks Company Growth & Why Non-Fiction Is “Years Away From Its Peak”

Diana Lodderhose
·8 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Rise Films is nearing the end of what has been a monumental month for the London-based production outfit. Last week, HBO Max launched the company’s two-part documentary George Carlin’s American Dream, which chronicles the life and five-decade career of the comedian with Judd Apatow in the director’s seat.

The Oscar and Emmy-winning company also saw its documentary, All That Breathes, from Shaunak Sen, sell to HBO Documentary films earlier this week before it was shown in the Cannes Special Screening section last night. Last week, Deadline revealed that the company would be producing landmark Sky documentary Once Upon A Time In Londongrad with Hulu’s WeWork helmer Jed Rothstein. The NBCUniversal project explores 14 mysterious deaths in the UK with alleged connections to Russia over the last two decades.

More from Deadline

It marks the culmination of the company’s 15-year climb to forge itself as one of the key indie documentary players in the UK and, for Teddy Leifer, who co-founded the outfit back in 2007, it’s been a journey he wouldn’t change.

“When we first started Rise Films, no one was really paying attention to documentaries,” he tells Deadline. “Feature documentary producers were basically seen as hobbyists. We were neither really in the film world nor in the television world and there was a little bit of scratching the corners of both.”

The company kicked open its doors with the moving and inspiring story We Are Together, which Leifer, who is general manager of Rise Films, produced with Paul Taylor directing. The title, about 12-year-old Slindile and her friends at the Agape orphanage in South Africa, won more than 20 major international film awards including Tribeca, Edinburgh and IFDA.

Since then, the company’s productions have included the Emmy-winning The Invisible War and The Interrupters, Oscar-winning Russian doping doc Icarus, Knuckle and Dreamcatcher. It’s worked with a wide array of broadcasters and streamers ranging from Netflix to Hulu to NBCUniversal to ITV to Film4.

. - Credit: Rise Films
. - Credit: Rise Films

Rise Films

For Leifer, the decision to move into the documentary sphere in its early days “wasn’t a business decision, it was more a decision of passion”, noting that until the recent streaming boom made documentaries more widely available to global audiences, documentary producers were viewed as “bad business people.”

“But it’s good timing for us now anyway because it’s meaned that we’ve learned our skillset and we’ve had the great experience of working with some wonderful directors on a nursery slope that wasn’t perhaps as pressurized as it is now,” he says.

Indeed, the company has worked with a range of top talent including repeat business with veteran British documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto as well as reuniting with Taylor for political thriller The Art Of Political Murder, set in the murky world of post-war Guatemala. George Clooney and Grant Heslov were exec producers on that project.

Leifer’s company is bolstered by a solid in-house team of developers and producers working across non-fiction, fiction and comedy. When it comes to choosing projects, he says the company remains “agnostic” when it comes to themes.

“We’ve made a number of films with social positive impact but we’re not out there looking to make films to change the world – we’re looking to develop things that we’re really interested in with great filmmakers and with great non-fiction filmmakers,” he says. “Our current slate is broad in terms of taste but the thing that connects them is that they’re stories that fascinate us and they are all driven by director and producing teams that are first class but have different levels of experience.”

He points to his recent experience with Sen on Cannes title All That Breathes, as a key example of the types of directors and projects that cause them to sit up and take notice. The project, which won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Documentary in Sundance earlier this year follows the lives of two Indian siblings in Delhi who work out of their derelict basement to rescue and treat injured birds.

“Shaunak had a very clear vision for how he wanted to make his film and he never waivered from it,” Leifer says. “He’s been the most incredible collaborator and what you really hope for in a director is someone who has a vision and executes on it and he had that right from the start and was incredibly compelling in conversation. He’s got to be one of the brightest people I’ve ever met.”

. - Credit: Rise Films
. - Credit: Rise Films

Rise Films

This is Sen’s second feature and while Rise Films is keen to work on titles with talented burgeoning directors who can play the international festival circuit, the company also has the muscle and experience to work with more seasoned directors like Apatow.

Leifer had long been a fan of comedian Carlin, someone he considers “The Beatles of comedy – he’s as good as it gets.” A number of years ago he approached Carlin’s daughter Kelly and his former manager Jerry Hamza about the idea of doing a documentary. They had, of course, been approached frequently from various companies to do something similar on George. Eventually, Kelly Carlin and Hamza gave Leifer and his team the go ahead.

“Maybe it was the British charm or they trusted me because I kept calling them long-distance a lot so they knew I was serious,” quips Leifer. “But they understood straight away that we didn’t want to do anything hugely conventional and they knew that if they were going to work with Rise, it would be something where we would have editorial control.”

It was while working on The Art Of Political Murder with HBO when the network, who had gotten wind of the fact he was working on the Carlin doc before execs, suggested he approach Apatow to direct. “The conversation happened very quickly, they put it together immediately. It was a good match. We moved into production as quickly as we could.”

. - Credit: HBO Films
. - Credit: HBO Films

HBO Films

Once Upon A Time In Leningrad is the latest project Rise Films is shooting. It produces in association with Universal International Studios, BuzzFeed Studios and Concordia Studio. The project, which examines Vladimir Putin’s two decades in power and how it’s made the UK heavily reliant on Russian money, thereby leading to missed opportunities to contain the Kremlin.

“It’s incredibly timely,” says Leifer. “We’re very conscious of the current situation and this really does end up being an origin story.”

He notes that this increased appetite in the documentary sphere is fuelling ambition. Budgets are going up on the nonfiction space – “and so they should because the audience is there” – and there are, he says, many more interesting ways to finance films.

“It used to be that if you took a documentary film to Sundance and if HBO, Netflix or Showtime didn’t buy it, you might not recoup but there are some amazing global buyers our there and more interesting ways to sell your films,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be that you sell a film only to tiny television licences around the world if you don’t make a big, global U.S. sale. There are a lot more meaningful buyers out there right now.”

While Rise Films has had success in the documentary sector throughout the last decade, the company doesn’t work exclusively in that genre. The outfit is currently shooting its feature-length special to ITV2 comedy hit Plebs, which concludes the series’ five-season run. The show, which first aired on ITV2 in 2013, follows Marcus (Tom Rosenthal), his slave Grumio (Ryan Sampson) and, in the recent series, Jason (Jonathan Pointing) as they go about life in Ancient Rome.

Teddy Leifer’s brother, Sam Leifer, heads up the comedy division in the company, which has a clutch of projects in development.

On the drama side, Leifer says it’s a “natural progression” for the company to move into the factual drama space and its first major television drama series out the door is dubbed Thank You And Goodbye, about the phone-hacking scandals that shook the very foundations of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in the early noughties.

“We’re not really in the business of saying we need to make a feature or a drama but we look at things and ask ourselves, ‘what’s the best version of this story?,” says Leifer. “And with this story we thought, rather than doing a top to down version of it, we wanted to tell the story of the hackers at a ground level and it naturally felt like a drama.”

They’re collaborating with Saul Dibb, helmer of The Salisbury Poisonings, a hit drama for BBC One. “He’s someone I had wanted to work with for years – it’s a great collaboration.”

For Leifer, he believes that the trajectory for documentaries and their global appeal is just getting started.

“People are talking about this ‘golden age’ of documentaries we are in right now but I don’t think we are anywhere close,” he says. “I think nonfiction is years away from its peak because I don’t think we’ve seen the best work from the best directors and producers yet. The stage is set but I truly believe the best is yet to come.”

Best of Deadline

Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.