Through their company Boulderlight Pictures, producers JD Lifshitz and Raphael Margules has been involved in several of the most surprising and original genric films over the past ten years, from the very unpredictable horror girl ”Barbarian“To the blood-thinking and relentlessly intense-but still great fun-thriller” Becky “and its sequel. Their latest film, “Companion“(Co-produced with Roy Lee and” Barbaric “director Zach Cregger), is their most entertaining yet, an unclassifiable mix of sci-fi, Rom-Com, Horror and Action where the author director drew Hancock maintains his tonala high -wire act from beginning to end.
Lifshitz and Margules have succeeded in maintaining a career that produces original films that do not always have obvious friends – something that can make their films difficult from a marketing point of view – by keeping their budgets sufficiently modest to enable their directors of maximum creative freedom. “Many people say:” You have to rule in filmmakers, “Lifshitz said to IndieWire.” That’s the opposite, you have to let filmmakers know that they can be ambitious. Everyone on the set must be physically safe, but the movie should not feel safe. should feel radical. ”
According to Margule’s words, the producers try to be “responsibly ruthless” and keep their budgets at a level where the films will not make an effort against their resources but can take chances because the financial risks are low. “Balancing the two is a challenge, but extremely important to us,” he told Indieview. The approach paid a lot of time on “Barbarian”, a movie that gathered ten times its budget not by playing it safe but by giving the audience something they have never seen before. However, the producers acknowledge that the path to getting such films funded and released is not always smooth.
“We have had the experience several times to take something out and everyone who forwards it, and then after it is a hit who everyone says they want their version of it,” Lifshitz said. The challenges of producing original materials are worth it for Lifshitz and Margules, but because it allows them to make the types of films that made them want to get into the business in the first place. “I don’t make movies for the Soho house, I make movies for the 12-year-old me,” Lifshitz said. “We just want to be as genuine for our interests as we can be.”
For Margules, this means producing “premium pulp”, films that provide satisfaction with the genre but at a high artistic level. “I think the connective tissue between many things we do is that it feels dangerous,” Margules said, and as long as an audience is maintained filmmaker can get away with radical experiments in form and content. “As long as you don’t have them, you can play with structure. You may have unconventional characters. ”
Paramount at the beginning of the 1970s and New line In the 1990s under Michael De Luca (who in a nice piece of Serendipity now is an CEO of Warner Bros. who monitors “companion”) is for Lifshitz model examples in studio regimes that monitored smart, available entertainment for adults. “On New Line, whether it was ‘SE7’ or ‘Boogie Nights’ or ‘Dumb and Dumber’, these movies were all commercial,” he said. “Broad doesn’t have to mean bad. “The Godfather” was a broad populist movie. ‘Rosemary’s baby’ was a wide populist movie. One of the big problems now is that people make movies for managers instead of the audience. Or for their Väng Group. ”
Lifshitz points to “The Brutalist” as the type of movie he would like to see more of. “That movie is an audience picture,” he said. “It’s never boring and it cost $ 10 million. It is a responsible amount of money. For me, I always want to spend only enough money so that we are not creatively back and we can go crazy and have the independence of a certain type of movie to really swing for the fence. ”
In Margules’ mind, “companions” have the widest conceivable appeal, although the trick is that the surprises that the film is due to make it extremely difficult to market – how to communicate entertainment with a film Without giving away the turns that make these pleasures possible? The fact that there is no other movie like “Companion” adds the challenge. “We couldn’t point to another movie and say,” It’s like this and that’s why this, “said Margules.” More than any other movie we’ve ever done, it stands alone. “
Given that the same thing could be said for most of Boulderlight past production, including its latest Netflix-hit “Woman of the Hour”, Margules has great hopes for “Companion”, which he and Lifshitz hope that people will support in the theater Not only for themselves to serve reasons, but since they are involved in the theater experience in any form – IMAX, DCP and even 35 mm, the format “Companion” will play on Quentin Tarantino’s Vista Theater in Los Angeles. “We think there is an audience for these films,” said Margules, “and we have been proven right most times, thankfully. And hopefully we continue to prove correctly with ‘companions.’
‘Companion’ opens in theaters on January 31.
