Working Title Partners Tim Bevan & Eric Fellner On 30 Years At Universal, Scores Of Hits And A Resolve To Diversify UK Film Crews: Q&A
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EXCLUSIVE: Usually content to let their logo on the front end of films speak for them, Working Title partners Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner spoke with Deadline in a prolific moment and a series of anniversaries that go beyond the 20th for their holiday classic Love Actually: They reached 30 years together at a company that turns 40 next year. The duo scored a big hit in the George Clooney-Julia Roberts romantic comedy Ticket to Paradise, and have Matilda the Musical playing in UK theaters, and opening on Netflix elsewhere for Christmas, with the Lena Dunham-directed Catherine Called Birdy released by Amazon and The Swimmers by Netflix. The latter, after playing the Toronto and Zurich festivals, has ranked near the top of Netflix’s most-watched films globally since its release.
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Donna Langley, chairman of NBCUniversal’s Filmed Entertainment Group, said that when she got to the studio long ago, she quickly raised her hand to be the studio’s liaison, having been a fan of theirs since they burst onto the scene with Four Weddings and a Funeral and then formed a sort of repertory company with many of its participants from Hugh Grant to Rowan Atkinson to Richard Curtis. “I was a young ambitious Brit without a clue of the politics and when I asked to be a key exec on the Working Title account, they all just looked at me like, are you crazy? Get in line,” she recalled. “Because everyone wanted to work with these guys behind such sophisticated English genteel moviemaking.”
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Langley said that while Working Title went from exclusive to first look awhile ago — she felt they were better when prolific and didn’t want to stand in their way — the studio can accommodate everything from Darkest Hour to Baby Driver at Universal and Focus Features. She’s not positive that Ticket To Paradise‘s $165 million gross portends a full blown return to rom-coms, but wasn’t surprised they landed the big one.
“Romantic comedies have been hit or miss, but Working Title doesn’t make generic romantic comedies; they always have a bit of fresh spin on them,” she said. Throw in the Working Title repertory elements — an uncredited rewrite by Curtis, and the pairing of George Clooney and Julia Roberts — and it was an easy yes for Langley.
Here, the Working Title partners explain their recent surge, and the keys to their longevity.
DEADLINE: How long have the two of you been at it?
TIM BEVAN: Eric and I started working together in 1992, but Working Title had been formed in 1983 to produce My Beautiful Launderette.
DEADLINE: We like to go by decades, so that means the company is about to turn 40. Before those congratulatory trade ads materialize, it does sound like the more memorable date is when you got together.
ERIC FELLNER: Tim may feel differently, but we like to think of ‘92 being what this version of…
BEVAN: Yeah. Absolutely. This situation…
FELLNER: So, let’s go with 30 years, this year.
DEADLINE: You are throwbacks to what now seems like a movie industry golden age where you made British-centric pictures with substance that succeeded or failed based on movie theater success that triggered ancillary waterfalls. The business now is about streamer algorithms and concepts over stars, and a de-emphasis on genres like the romantic comedy. So, how to explain George Clooney and Julia Roberts and Ticket to Paradise?
BEVAN: Luck, if you want one word. When Ol Parker came to us with this idea, he said, I want it to feel like a sequel to a movie that never got made. We always had George and Julia in mind, and he wrote it with them in his head. We had a hunch that, you know, in the turmoil of the world in a pandemic, and all that was going to streaming, there was a nostalgia emerging. There was something nostalgic about the movie for moviegoers of our age, and we were hoping that that would rub off on the younger audience. The other thing about George, and Julia in particular, is that a lot of younger women really liked her because they’d seen her movies with their mom and their mothers and all the rest of it.
The best part for me on this whole movie came at the premiere in Hollywood, and I saw George and Julia experience something that they hadn’t in a long time. The adulation of the crowd in an old-fashioned movie sort of way. I thought, they’re not going to admit it, but they haven’t felt that for a long time, and it’s a really beautiful thing to see. A good old-fashioned movie star moment. What has been doubly fantastic is after it played out in America, it launched on home video number one, and was number three in the cinema. The home video audience was not cannibalizing the cinema-going.
DEADLINE: You opened overseas first. How much did that help and is there something here for the industry to glean from this as it makes films for mature audiences?
FELLNER: The minute Tim and I start saying what the industry should or shouldn’t do, you should put us out to pasture. But we grew up in an age where you made movies when you just believed in the story. We believe in the story, we believe in the people making it, we believe in the actors in it, let’s go make this movie because it’s going to be great. You’re right about Working Title and Tim and I. We are kind of dinosaurs to that thought process. And now, everything we do we have to put through the streamers, the algorithm process, whether it’s with the studios, the 10-column or whatever each of them call the number process that they work out. It has to stand up and look like a sensible decision on a business level. But we still believe in that passion thing of, you know, this could be great and hopefully an audience will show.
Tim is right in that there is a little bit of luck, because who the hell knew a romantic comedy after all this time with two movie stars was going to work? But we really, really, really wanted it to work, and we are lucky enough to be in a long term relationship with a studio who also really, really, really want these things to work. They want original movies to work, and they’re one of the last ones standing who believe in cinema and are prepared to take some swings. Call it a combination of our naive belief and their desire and George and Julia showing up and all making a great film. That came together at a moment when politics is hell, the economy is hell, there’s a war in Europe, and everything is a bit messed up. So you offer people the opportunity to just go and have a good time, forget, laugh and smile, and today the people said to us they’d like to do that.
BEVAN: I think George and Julia getting out in front of the movie in such a big way helped. Audiences seeing them on various shows and just seeing the genuine warmth between them.
FELLNER: Movie star stuff.
DEADLINE: Next is Matilda the Musical, which U.S. audiences will see on Netflix this Christmas, but which you’ve opened in the UK theatrically. What’s the strategy there?
FELLNER: It’s based on the West End and Broadway musical that has been a hit for the last dozen years. Dennis Kelly, Matthew Warchus and Tim Minchin are the key team behind the movie. We saw the original show in 2010, and immediately wanted to make it into a film. It was very, very complicated because Sony owned the underlying rights because they made the Roald Dahl Matilda into a movie before. And the Royal Shakespeare Company wanted to have a holdback for a number of years so that the show could grow and live.
A number of years later, we were lucky enough to be become partners with Matthew, Dennis, and the Roald Dahl Company, Luke Kelly and Tim Minchin, and we tried to make the film with Sony. It was going to be expensive and complicated. It had hundreds of dancing children and you can only work X many hours with kids, and so it was an expensive, big proposition. For whatever reason, Tom Rothman at Sony chose to find a partner to make it with, and Netflix became Sony’s partner. Netflix financed the movie and made the movie with us, and Sony all the rights in the UK.
DEADLINE: How does that change the way the film rolls out?
FELLNER: Sony releases it theatrically in the UK and it will not come out on Netflix until the normal time, six or seven months after initial release. So the film will not be available in any other medium other than theatrical in the UK, meaning it will have had a completely clean theatrical run with no digital availability at all from November the 25th through to March 2023. On Christmas Day, Netflix will release the film all over the world on their platform other than the UK.
DEADLINE: When you’ve been doing things successfully a certain way for so many years with that traditional revenue waterfall that begins with a full-blown theatrical P&A release, what’s been the biggest challenge in adjusting to the new reality you have with Matilda the Musical?
FELLNER: This particular fashion is unique to us. We’ve never done anything like this. I don’t think anyone has actually done it like this where it’s had a full-blooded local marketing campaign. Sony will spend exactly the same as they would spend on a regular theatrical release and Netflix will do everything they would normally do in the rest of the world in their territories. It’s going to be interesting to see how it goes.
But for the filmmakers, it’s fantastic because they get the opportunity to have the massive audience that Netflix is able to put your film in front of, and at the same time, in the home territory for the IP, they’re able to have people see it in cinemas and have a secondary revenue stream coming from that.
BEVAN: In a more generic way, I find satisfaction in the traditional waterfall, because you kind of know what the numbers are. We have to accept the numbers that we’re presented by the streamers, basically. We had Lena Dunham’s film, Catherine Called Birdy, on Amazon recently. Anecdotally, it feels like quite a few young women saw that film. But I don’t know what those numbers are.
FELLNER: You don’t have your finger on it the way you do in the theater. No.
BEVAN: We might have got lied to in the old days too, but it felt like we could see through it a little bit easier. It’s a funny sort of quicksand where you aren’t actually quite certain how big the audience was for whatever it is you produced.
FELLNER: We’re all used to kind of having constant reporting. What Japan did, what South Africa did, what the UK did. Here you don’t really know what’s going on, and also because the marketing spend is so different from streaming to theatrical. You don’t become part of the conversation in the same way. It’s so hard to make an impact and raise the profile of the piece above the parapet in a way that you do when you’re a theatrical film.
BEVAN: Noise creation.
DEADLINE: Given the lack of transparency on the streamer side, what makes Matilda the Musical a success?
FELLNER: We get hard numbers in the UK, so we’ll be able to quantify it against Paddington or Les Miserables or Frozen or whatever the other big titles in the UK have been over the years, so that’ll be easy. You can look at it and go, yeah, it was a hit or it wasn’t a hit.
In the rest of the world, I think you have to…I mean, Scott Stuber and Ted Sarandos, they’ll be able to tell us because they made the decision to green light the film based on a performance metric that doesn’t get shared with us. But they will be able to tell. We’re in the dark on that too. We don’t know the answer. We very much hope that it hits their metric, but I don’t know how it’s arrived at and I don’t know what it is.
BEVAN: A lot of these things are anecdotal anyway. It’s funny, you’ve always read stats even in the old model, but you get a sense when people are talking about film and when there’s a general appreciation of it. It’s almost what happens down your own street, you bump into somebody in the corner store and they say, oh, I saw that movie, it was great. That almost always had meant more than the real numbers, and you just get a sense of, OK, actually quite a few people have seen this thing.
DEADLINE: My kids watched that Danny DeVito Matilda movie over and over to the point I could have recited all the lines. Why the enduring reverence to the Roald Dahl literary catalog that makes you excited about this?
BEVAN: It’s just a really great show with a really great story that makes you laugh, cry and smile, and it brings you joy. At the end of the piece, whether you saw it on stage, whether you read the screenplay and listened to the songs, or whether you watched the movie, it’s tough not to respond, just the way you and your kids responded to when you were watching it. The essence of it is the same thing. It’s what Roald Dahl wrote, which is just genius. A young girl stands up to power and wins.
FELLNER: I think also, Netflix has spent quite a lot of money on the Dahl estate, so it’s absolutely in their interest that this film works well.
DEADLINE: You are different than, say the animated films Chris Meledandri delivers to Universal through Illumination, or the Disney silos Marvel, Pixar and Lucasfilm. You don’t have a specific film you have to make, but you know a Working Title film when you have seen it. And the relationship with Universal that started when MCA acquired Polygram has led to an exceptionally long run between producer and studio…
FELLNER: We’re very lucky because we have a home. I’m sure a lot of people just say that because they need to say it, but you look our track record. We have had supporters at Universal for 23 or 24 years, and they have been amazing to us. They did something that I don’t think any other studio had done since the sixties, and that was, they 100% got behind a London-based production company, from the very first days through to now, and there has been Donna Langley and Jimmy [Horowitz] and I’m trying to think who else has been there with us for a long time.
BEVAN: Niels…
FELLNER: And Niels [Swinkels] in international. We’ve been working with these guys, they have been in a position of power for 15 to 20 years and with the studio for 23 years, and that puts you in a place where you can really focus on trying to build creative relationships. You can spend time and money on development. You can do all the things that is just an absolute privilege for film producers to be able to do. Tim talked about luck earlier on, and that was the lucky break we got, developing this relationship with Universal.
BEVAN: We’ve been just as lucky with the writers, directors, actors, group of people that we’ve worked with, but we’ve been in a position to be able to slightly make that luck because we’ve been resourced. We had the primo, primo relationships with the primo British talent basically. There are people we still work like Richard Curtis and Helen Fielding and Rowan Atkinson. And Emma Thompson probably wins with eight Working Title films.
FELLNER: Actually, it’s the Coen brothers with nine films.
BEVAN: And Rowan Atkinson is nine. These are very long-term relationships.
FELLNER: Edgar Wright is…
BEVAN: Five or six. Joe Wright is five. Stephen Frears is five.
FELLNER: Richard Curtis is seven or eight.
DEADLINE: Not including the Christmas movie he’s writing for Melissa McCarthy, which we revealed today.
BEVAN: Yeah, they’re all still working, as it were, there’s a sort of consistency through all that, and I guess we’re the common point for it.
DEADLINE: Universal, in that time, has changed ownership and the Richard Curtis-Melissa McCarthy thing will be done for its Peacock streaming service. With the business in shifting sands mode, when Donna Langley speaks to you, what is the thing Working Title can do to most help the studio?
BEVAN: I think it’s a consistency of production, good ideas and development so that each year we’re bringing them…there’s a big range of budget because we do a lot of stuff for Focus, is that feeds the machine, but the thing is that we are a quality label, like Chris Meledandri, and that’s the reason that we’re here 30 years later. It is because we’ve always believed in quality. Some films work better than others, but you never set out to make a dud. You always try and chuck everything that you’ve got at it, and for some reason, although Eric and I are pretty ancient, we still have that drive in us to make sure that that happens in the films we work on.
FELLNER: Ultimately, the only way that we’re going to be really help her is by delivering hits.
DEADLINE: You couldn’t be Working Title if you guys were in Malibu, could you?
FELLNER: No.
BEVAN: I think also because we’ve been around long term, they will let us take creative risks, and that doesn’t happen too often in the movie business anymore, but it’s really important that some people are doing that, because otherwise the whole thing is going to stagnate.
FELLNER: In the last three years, we have a list of films that we could actually tell you that Universal greenlit. Two of them, sadly, they didn’t make in the end because of Covid, but all of them were risky propositions and they were behind us to support them. Catherine Called Birdy, The Swimmers, Polite Society, The Substance, the untitled Ethan Coen movie, and then Ticket to Paradise. So in the last three years, that’s five or six movies, and you know, other than Ticket which does sit in a clean line of genre movie with movie stars, they were all risky propositions and Universal backed us.
Sadly, The Swimmers and Catherine Called Birdy moved studios because of Covid, which was not their fault. We were very lucky that Amazon was there for Catherine Called Birdy and Netflix for The Swimmers, but you know, as Tim says, they back original film making with original filmmakers and original stories.
DEADLINE: When you cite Covid for those two films, those streamers had to deal with the same sort of problems. What made it unpalatable for Universal?
BEVAN: The budgets went up quite a bit. It was early, early Covid days where…I mean, even in old Covid days we’re spending a ridiculous amount of money on Covid per production, considering where the pandemic is in the world. But those early days, it was really big money that was having to be added to budgets…
FELLNER: And the shutdown costs. Both of those films were five days out from shooting when we shut down, so suddenly there were millions of dollars in shutdown costs, and then we had to start up again. And then Covid costs, and it just made them unviable for theatrical…
BEVAN: Yeah, so both ended up as streamers, Amazon on Birdy and Netflix on Swimmers were fantastic in terms of coming in.
DEADLINE: My favorite of your films is Love, Actually, which has always touched me in the way in the way it helped people process 9/11. The pandemic had to be the most debilitating thing after that one. How about a sequel using that as the connective tissue?
BEVAN: We’d love it. Mr. Curtis has retired.
DEADLINE: He has. OK. Another dream dashed. You’ve got movies coming with Steve McQueen, maybe another Bridget Jones and Baby Driver. What are the things that get you out of bed in the morning with some pep in your step?
FELLNER: We’re very excited for Polite Society to come out at Easter because that’s a very exciting young Pakistani woman, Nida Manzoor, who’s made that. She made a TV show with us and has made a really good mashup genre film which I think people are going to be excited about. McQueen is one of the very best at work and the subject matter is a very British one, which is the London Blitz. For him, it’s a war movie with no soldiers in it, so it’s about what happened to ordinary people and how they weathered it. It’s a very emotional story at its heart. Apple backed it and then we got great resources to make it, so that’s about to start. So that is exciting.
BEVAN: The Swimmers, which just came out, what’s brilliant about it is you go beyond the sports story, the story of a young girl with a dream who wanted to be in the Olympics and had to overcome world events to do it. But it’s also a story about, you know, what’s going on politically in the world today with migration and refugees. It deals with major issues, but it deals with them in a very mainstream way. You can enjoy the story and then think about the politics behind it, not the other way around. So that’s exciting.
Matilda, we’ve talked about, and Ethan’s untitled road comedy has a fantastic cast of young women in it.
We made this film called The Substance which a French director called Coralie Fargeat has written and directed. She made a film called Revenge which we all loved years ago. That’s going to be coming out next year.
We’re starting to do a little bit more in TV. We’ve got some shows going next year that hopefully we can talk about soon. This year we had, as Tim mentioned, Nida Manzoor’s Lady Parts, which got nominated for a bunch of things, and Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, and we’re going to be making new series with both of them.
DEADLINE: What about the Don Winslow novella Crime 101?
FELLNER: Don Winslow is one of the great writers working today, and it’s a privilege to be able to bring one of his stories to life. It gives us the opportunity to work with the legendary Shane Salerno, which is amazing because he’s brilliant and he does more for writers than most people know.
Beyond that, we’ve got a director called Bart Layton that Tim and I have been keen to work with for five years now, since we saw Imposter. He is going to be the big director coming out of the UK in the next year or so. Imposter got Oscar nominated, and then he made a small movie called American Animals, and this is going to be his first mainstream movie, and we’re just out to cast now and hoping we can make it next year. It is the kind of movie Steve McQueen would star in if he were alive today.
BEVAN: The dead Steve McQueen rather than the live Steve McQueen.
FELLNER: It’s a great story, well told, with a fantastic end. Pure, elevated genre thriller movie.
DEADLINE: Tell me about the London Screen Academy you’ve poured yourself into for the past three years, giving chances to people who might never crack into the entertainment business.
BEVAN: The intention was to put a group of producers, Eric, myself, David Heyman, Barbara Broccoli, Michael Wilson and Lisa Bryer came together to say, what can we do? We’ve done well from this industry, what does this industry need? The production side is absolutely booming in Britain. We have brilliant crews here but they tend to be quite white, they tend to be quite male, and we felt collectively that actually we would like to do something towards trying to diversify and open up the opportunities of behind-the-camera working, and all of the jobs therein, to different sorts of people.
FELLNER: This was six years ago.
BEVAN: We joined together with some people from education, and there’s been an educational offering rather than a film business-y offering. I’ve managed to get resources from the government, the department for education here, and we started a school which is a sixth form college, so that’s 16- to 18-year-olds. So high school, basically, and the curriculum is specifically to teach skills around this. We took over a building in north London and did it up as a purpose-built building for teaching these skills. We went out to recruit students by deliberately going into areas where there was a very diverse population within the schools and where there’s a barometer of poverty, which is free school meals, where basically people were below the living wage and all of that so that they’re coming from poor families.
We started it in September 2019, and then Covid hit in 2020, so the first year students had a lot of their tuition remotely, but we’re now, the fourth class has arrived, so there’s two year groups of about 350 students in each year group, and there’s a third year group where there’s 100 of them. The first of those alumni are finding their way into the business. On the Steve McQueen film, there’s an alumni in each department, our runners are all alumni, and hopefully in five or ten years’ time it’ll have helped shake up the makeup of crews. So, so far so good, I think.
FELLNER: Yeah, and more important, the skills we’re teaching are all behind-the-camera skills, so there’s no performing arts element to it. It’s all behind-the-camera skills, and the idea is to create opportunity, is to show people from backgrounds that may not believe that this industry is for them, that the opportunity is there and the industry will welcome them with open arms. This school is designed to bring them in, teach them, and then get them ready to either go on and do further education in media and film, or go and try and get straight into the industry as trainees and entry level jobs.
DEADLINE: Is there a way to measure the success so far?
BEVAN: I think you only have to walk in there. We have exceptional people working there educationally, and our students are amazing, and the whole place is buzzing. You look around, you think, oh my God, these kids could have been in some dreadful state school not learning anything. There’s a journey here, and whether they go into the film industry or not, is you’re really changing their lives, and there’s something enormously gratifying about that. I’m sure in two or three years’ time there will be a couple of alumni who are senior in the camera department, who have come from completely the other side of the tracks and are in the business because of it, but it is…the next time you’re in London, we should take you up to take a look at it, because it’s a very humbling and stimulating place, is what it is.
DEADLINE: So it’s like a charter school, with a full high school curriculum?
BEVAN: It’s a diploma specifically in film and television, basically. They choose a pathway, either craft, technical, or post-production, and it’s a continual assessment course which is the equivalent of what they would do in high school. Our system is a little bit different. They will do math and English alongside that. This is a proper film school. And critically, critically, critically, for the students, it’s free. It’s a state school so we get a bunch of money from the government to run it like any other educational place. And we started a foundation which Eric runs, which raises money to go alongside of it. We probably get between 70 and 80% of the funding for the place from the government, and the balance comes from the foundation.
FELLNER: I run that with David Heyman, of Harry Potter fame. Because we are only three years in, there’s no student that’s kind of flown yet. In two or three years there definitely will be, but you just have to visit Working Title because we take on four or five entry-level job graduates from the school every year, and you see them come in in August, these young kids. They’re 17- and 18-year-olds, first job ever. By now, these kids are battle hardened employees pulling their weight with everybody else, and it is just a joy seeing these young people every day bring enthusiasm and energy into the building, and it’s fantastic.
And that’s happening in production companies all over the UK, and as Tim says, on various sets and movie sets and TV sets. It is starting to invigorate, but it’ll take five years, ten years before you see a real massive change. And the amount the amount of students, as Tim kind of mentioned, there’s 850 in the building at the moment over three years.
BEVAN: Luckily, starting this school coincided with a general feeling within the industry that we’re not diverse enough. Gender diversity got a whole lot better. You see many more women working in departments you hadn’t seen them work in before, but the ethnicity diversity isn’t nearly as good as it should be. But I think that’s a general feeling throughout the industry, certainly here, and actually it was the same in Australia when we were making Ticket to Paradise. I think throughout the world the feeling is, hang on a second, we’ve got to shake this up a bit. These crews are not really reflecting the society that we live in, and we’re trying to make programs and films and things that are for the society that we live in.
So I think that it’s not pushing an open door, but it’s pushing a door that’s a little bit looser than it used to be in terms of getting people to employ people. It’s not the easiest thing in the world, and one of the reasons we put such a powerful group of founders together is that we wanted the school to have fingers properly into the industry so that the industry had a proper input into what was taught at school and all the rest of it. But we were aware that we would only succeed if our students got work, and so we wanted this group of people to spread the word.
DEADLINE: The founders oversee a lot of UK production, and make hiring decisions…
FELLNER: This has been embraced by industry. I can send you a list of the names, but it is predominantly the big players in our industry who are supporting this school because, from the corporations down to some of the big individuals, they understand that change is what will keep the industry vibrant and keeping industry alive.
And also here in the UK, you know, from Disney to Universal to Amazon or Netflix or whatever, they need crews. There’s so much being shot here. There are crew shortages of epic proportions and to keep the whole show on the road, we’re going to need new people. How great would it be if those are people who are not the standard people that have been coming into the industry over the last 1,500 years?
DEADLINE: Sounds like a way to break that cycle, and the concept has spread beyond the UK?
BEVAN: Yes. Eric pitched George Clooney our school and we both pitched Bryan Lourd, and Bryan waved his magic Bryan wand and managed to get things going.
FELLNER: Yeah, but it was George and his partner Grant Heslov. George heard about it from us and went, that is a great idea, I’m going to do it. And all credit to him, he has. Bryan knew a little on the education system in the Los Angeles area, and it was very serendipitous. They’ve put together a brilliant board of people in a similar fashion, they were kind to include us, and we have given them access to all of LSA’s resources and curriculum and teaching skills. They’ve drawn what they wanted from there, and yeah, I was lucky enough to go to the opening of it, the Roybal High School for Film and Television in Downtown LA when they launched it a few months ago. It’s fantastic, and hopefully it will create a wave of change.
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