Working Title Films co-chair Eric Fellner has admitted he didn’t understand just how “full-on” body horror The Substance was going to be.
The industry giant spoke with fellow chair Tim Bevan at a BFI London Film Festival event on Tuesday, where they were probed on the highlights and failures of their careers, as well as the vast success of “cultural Britishness” with films like Bridget Jones, Notting Hill, Love Actually and Darkest Hour among their impressive slate of productions.
Most recently, Working Title Films made The Substance with Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, which has racked up an impressive global box office total of over $24 million. “[Coralie Fargeat’s] script was really, really good,” Fellner said, explaining that after seeing Revenge (2017) he traveled to Paris “a few times for lunch” with the French filmmaker to persuade her to choose Working Title for her next film.
“I personally didn’t totally understand just quite how full on it was going to be,” he admitted. “But I think it’s a good thing. It’s definitely brought people to the cinema, which is great. And for a company like Mubi to be bringing people to cinema, it’s fantastic because it shows that both — streaming platforms and theatrical — can coexist and can work well together.”
Working Title co-chair Eric Fellner.
The pair spoke of the particular “cultural Britishness” seen in films such as Bean or Four Weddings and a Funeral. How have they managed to capture it so perfectly? It was luck, mostly — they had happened to come across a group of very talented Brits who, crucially, did not want to make the jump to Hollywood.
Bevan said: “We met Richard Curtis, we met Rowan Atkinson, and we met [Bridget Jones author] Helen Fielding in a very short space of time. And they all wanted to stay here [in the U.K… We were lucky.”
The Substance was a lesson learned for the pair: “It made us realize that if it’s really out there, people are interested, they don’t get turned off,” Fellner said, agreeing with Bevan that more under-$15 million films should be getting made. “Films need to cost less money, and they need to be bolder in that space.”
The BFI London Film Festival runs from Oct. 9-20.
