Universal Cinema Film & TV Journal’s Amir Ganjavie interviewed Simon Killen of Hi Gloss Entertainment. Their conversation touches on the Australian and New Zealand film markets and the personal life challenges when considering acquiring a Polanski film.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Can you introduce yourself and tell me about your role in your organization?
Simon Killen (SK): Hi Gloss Entertainment is a distributor for Australia and New Zealand territories, and it distributes all rights. It’s existed now for 11 years. I’ve been doing the job of acquisitions and marketing films for nearly 20 years now. Our determination is to have a roster that is very interesting, as entertaining as possible. We search for a kind of a crossing point between art and commerce.
The market like everywhere in the world is very Hollywood dominated, but we look for the small very specialist niche areas which we can capitalize on. That’s what we do.
(UM): Do you have any kind of definition of a good movie, a movie that when you are watching you say that, “Okay it’s a movie that fits with my ambition, it’s good for the audience in my territory, and I should get it.”
(SK): It’s completely instinctive and everybody who does this job, everyone who watches films knows you get that feeling often quite quickly. There are some times when you get a feeling like a tugging, like a pulling that you must have this film, you would be crazy not to try and acquire this film. It doesn’t happen very often, that feeling. I can probably name on one hand the times when I have thought, “This is unquestionably a hit film, which I should be bidding for.”
What I like about the business always is the mystery, and the not knowing, what’s going to happen, what’s going to change, how audiences are going to perceive a film. I quite enjoy being wrong, being proven wrong, whether it’s to the good or to the bad. There’s something human about audience decisions, audience support that we can never completely predict.
(UM): I heard from a festival programmer that Australia is very complicated in terms of marketing films and in terms of people’s anticipation.
(SK): Well, the Australian market is unique in that it has a good mixture of audience potential. It has the traditional English colonizers who are quite aged now, but there’s still a lot of people clinging to the English perspective of entertainment. We have the Italians who are very strong here, the Greeks, even the Persians because we run a Persian Film Festival and an Arabic Film Festival.
Persian, Arabic and Iranian film festivals, plus the normal film festivals, plus there’s sometimes a release window, so I think that in Australia, the art house market seems to be reasonably strong, and I’ve been advised by people in the business that a lot of that has to do with the enthusiastic attendance of educated older women.
(UM): That’s interesting because in Canada, I realize that the art house market is not very good. It’s very dominated by Hollywood, and people very rarely go to watch Canadian films or art house.
(SK): Films come and go, it’s like a tide. A tide goes out and the tide comes in. At the moment, it’s a very healthy time for middle budget creative Australian cinema. It’s been a good year, a number of films have made some impact, not a huge impact, but some impact and given all the practitioners the opportunity to go to the next step. In previous years, it hasn’t been so healthy for Australian cinema and also what’s considered Australian cinema, something like Mad Max, which is shot partly in Australia.
It’s so much Hollywood money and Hollywood drive, but it’s hard to feel that it’s part of the Australian market, but it is, technically it’s an Australian film shot in Australia, so when you have a Mad Max film, the annual box office for Australian cinema is very, very high. When you don’t have one, it’s obviously going to be much, much weaker, but by the same token, that gives you the opportunity to look at a few more different perspectives. I think another thing that perhaps separates, or delineates the Australian market from the Canadian is that we have a lot of bookers, and cinema owners, who are really keen on supporting art house cinema.
They will support a film more than perhaps cinemas or theaters that are more influenced by American box office terms and policies. They’re much more flexible with supporting local distributors and local filmmakers, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. I don’t know how much that impacts on the wider market.
(UM): In terms of the venue, you mentioned that theater owners provide support. Do they provide, for example, a good price for the art house different from the regular price?
(SK): It’s absolutely critical to have multiple screens to enable bookers to move films around according to audience desire, and we are very lucky to have some good, strong multiplex art house dedicated places. Many art-house screens also offer discount days, and I believe these are critical.
(UM): In terms of the movies that you are supporting, are you usually picking up movies that have a good run at the festivals?
(SK): I’ve had a much better degree of success acquiring things off market, smaller markets or speaking to producers, speaking to sales agents. Like I said earlier, we tend to survive with a lot of niche content, so we had documentaries from Turkey about the cats in Istanbul, which was a very, very successful film called Kedi, and that didn’t do the market circuit, other festival circuits. We’ve had documentaries about cycling that have been very successful because cycling is very big in Australia.
If a quality production is made, we can market it. We can find a market for it here, but it’s all about the quality of the project, so I’m screening every day, constantly looking, talking to people, wanting them to show me what’s coming up so that I can make a decision, because for a smaller distributor, it’s quite competitive in the Cannes market.
(UM): Is the Australian market open to controversial filmmakers, for example, would you consider acquisition of Polanski movies or Woody Allen movies?
(SK): Very good question. I screened the last Polanski film, AN OFFICER & A SPY at Venice in 2018, and I thought it was an absolute masterpiece, BUT I knew from the agent that the English-speaking territories were not interested. I raised the potential with my staff and family, I said, “Look, the Polanski is great, and I really want to buy it.” The pushback I received was immediate and quite non-negotiable. So I could not make an offer. I have to respect my key people’s positions.
I believe Woody Allen’s new film, COUP DE CHANCE, is going to play Venice this year, and has been acquired for Australia. It will be interesting to see how it will be received. I think there is always some softening of people’s positions over time, but it’s hard to predict.
(UM): In terms of acquisition, are you looking to elements like diversity in them of gender or race?
(SK): Another excellent question. I have tried. Certainly balance is very important, and so that’s partly driven by the festival circuit here, because the French and the Italian films are very well supported by a national art house festival through one of the cinemas, but also, I mean, again, it doesn’t matter what I focus on, I always come back to an instinctive decision. I would love to have more female filmmakers for sure. I’ve bought Clare Denis films in the past and just recently bought a film from Mexico by Lila Aviles called Totem, which I’m very excited about.
It’s a superb piece of filmmaking, and it helps balance out. I accidentally have a roster of old masters and released films by Paul Verhoeven who’s 84, and Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO – he was 84 when he made this film.. It just happens that way, but again, it’s because they’re the films that are in the market, so I can only assess what’s put in front of me. I would certainly, as a person running a company, personally like to have an international representation, and have a broad gender spread as well.
(UM): In terms of COVID, the impact that it had on the distribution, did it change the structure of your distribution? I see that in Canada, for example right now some of the distributors have online portions, as well as the live experience, so I’m just curious, what was the impact of COVID long term on the structure of your distribution?
(SK): Yeah, we reacted similarly to Canada and the distributors had the online element, and the cinemas had the online element, which turned out to be a very stop gap measure. It’s certainly for the cinemas, I can say universally, all the cinemas that were running online options have shut them down now. It just became a nightmare because there was little money. It was difficult for us, difficult for them, and people had come back to the cinemas, so they dropped that pretty quickly. I haven’t seen a huge increase in digital income, it’s been a steady increase for 5 years now.
Oddly COVID drove sales up of DVDs, which we have a lot of home video, and there was a really strong lift in DVDs during COVID sales, and that’s fallen right off again now, and I think that theatrical numbers are not perfect, but they’re much better than they had been after the return from COVID.
(UM): Going physically to the place and seeing a colleague is more important or more useful than online?
(SK): Yeah, I would say that, but then I have a colleague here in Australia who’s a very successful distributor, and she won’t travel anymore because she says it’s so easy to do it online. She’s been around for a long time, she knows everybody, she doesn’t need to, and to be honest the success that she’s having proves her point very well indeed.
(UM): To what extent does the age of the audience influence your acquisition decision?
(SK): I think it depends. The cinemas are very much beholden to the content that’s being provided, so obviously this week for the first time in memory, there’s been a cinematic worldwide event (Barbenheimer) with two major releases in an attempt to bring everybody back to the cinema all at once, which has happened. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but in Australia a lot of distributors rely on children’s content. Animated features still have huge impact at holiday time.
Super Mario Brothers was a gigantic success I believe. There wasn’t so much happening in the adult market because perhaps people were worried that the older people weren’t going back, but because COVID has dropped this giant interruption in the process, it’s always hard to make a clear judgment about those things, and now the writer’s strike is going to do the same thing again. There’s going to be another big interruption in the production process, so just when you thought you could make realistic predictions again, we’re going to lose a year of Hollywood.
(UM): How important is a star when you are getting a movie?
(SK): I certainly concern myself with the content first by far, so most of the films that we release tend not to have stars per se in them. We picked up a film in Cannes called Good Time by the Safdie Brothers in 2017, and that starred Robert Pattinson. To me, Pattinson was incidental to the film itself, which was a terrific film. He was a strong part of the reason the film was so energising, but when I bought it, I wasn’t focussed that I bought a film with a star in it. Now, eight years later, watching all the residual income that comes through generated because of Pattinson, I suddenly understand the importance of a star, but it took that lesson to teach me that it does make a huge difference if a star is in your film.
(UM): In terms of marketing strategy, I’m thinking about Barbie, they are creating a kind of event and not just focusing on the movie itself. I’m just curious if you are using different kinds of strategies right now to bring people to the cinema, and if yes, what kind of innovation or what kind of new approaches are you using for marketing purposes?
(SK): We always have a specific marketing angle for each film, otherwise we wouldn’t compete in the market. When we released Benedetta, the Paul Verhoeven film about a nun in a convent, we created fantastic candles using church prayer candles and sent those out to cinemas, and they used those for promotion and display. We relied upon a certain amount of controversy about the film, which in the end kind of backfired. Turns out in Australia and New Zealand at least, it wasn’t controversial, and people are quite happy to just walk past lesbian nuns these days.
I suppose that was in a way like Barbie, we had something very identifiable we wanted to communicate to people, same thing with Kedi a film documentary about cats in Istanbul, we knew we had several markets aside from just the online market, that we could speak to cat breeders, pet shops, and we just had this huge amount of support, which we built up over a period of months before the release by sending people flyers, and sending them social media tools to share.
If you are releasing a film that’s benefiting them, social groups tend to be happy to share information. For instance, we recently released a film called EO, which is about a donkey, and so now I know dozens of donkey breeders as a result of releasing the film, and it was a fascinating process.
(UM): I imagine you are also using the new social media like TikTok or stuff like that more. I feel that the distribution strategy has changed a lot in recent years.
(SK): For sure. We don’t use TikTok because our films are targeted to a much older audience, we’re certainly looking at it, but we use Instagram and Facebook predominantly, if we have something that’s going to be for a TikTok audience, we will do that, but yeah, we’re a little bit old fashioned in our social media choices right now.
(UM): Does the government in any way support distribution of art house movies?
(SK): No. We look with great envy at the support that cinema owners have, that the producers have in some countries abroad. There is support in Australian film production for sure, but not for distribution of art house and not for cinemas.
(UM): Even when you distribute Australian content, there is no policy to support distribution of Australian content versus international content?
(SK): Yeah, no, look, there was a little bit, which came through Screen Australia after COVID, yes, but there was so much money coming from all government levels after COVID to put energy back into the market, so there was certainly some campaigns that came through Screen Australia, but in general, not as far as I’m aware. I don’t distribute Australian content because I am focussed on international content, it’s always been my passion. I’m not anti-Australian for a second, but I just don’t go to the Australian markets, and I’m very habitual about going to Berlin and Cannes and Venice.
(UM): How is the relationship between your company and the Australian film festivals, like Melbourne Film Festival or other festivals?
(SK): It’s perfectly fine. I’ve been attending the Melbourne Film Festival for 40 years, and I’ve been working with them for 20 years, so that will never change. I think that the major film festivals have really had some huge challenges to adapt to, not least being COVID. But even without COVID, there are the major city film festivals, but then Palace Cinemas have their own film festivals dedicated to Spanish, French, Italian. And these festivals, which began as quite small festivals are now very, very big, and they run for in some cases 6 to 8 weeks, and this takes up a lot of the festival audience energy.
The whole theatrical calendar is populated with festivals, so that puts pressure on the major film festivals, and it also puts pressure on the day-to-day art house cinemas, because the question is, are people developing a habit where they’ll go and just see French films at the French Film Festival? Things are also changing all the time as festivals, cinema chains and programmers adapt.
(UM): You mentioned that you also distribute movies in New Zealand. How is the situation different in New Zealand compared to Australia?
(SK): New Zealand’s been much harder, because they had some really tough restrictions. The market was not as strong a market at the best of times, and they really have struggled to come back to anything like the numbers they had beforehand. It’s getting much better there in New Zealand, but it was very, very difficult for them. I’m not quite sure about the exact numbers and comparisons. I don’t really like to think about COVID anymore, but it was very hard for them.
(UM): Is there good support for art house in New Zealand?
(SK): 10 to 15 years ago, New Zealand continued to be really healthy for British cinema because they have a lot of ex-British people there, they have a larger percentage of all older British immigrant population, and that’s kind of fallen away a little bit now. They’ve got a very strong or they have had a very strong local film business with Taika Watiti with his various projects, which has led other people to get some space in the market as well, so I think that New Zealand is constantly reinventing itself culturally.
A lot of indigenous cinema has now been given platforms in the country, which wasn’t so much the case before, but yeah, I think when we release a film that comes out of the festivals, we expect a certain level from New Zealand, which certainly after COVID we were not getting anything like what we expected, and now it’s getting a little bit more back to what it was.
(UM): I met you first at the Cannes Film Festival. I’m wondering what other major festivals you are attending, and is there any kind of festival that you’re particularly following in terms of acquisition or very relevant for the Australian market?
(SK): Everybody goes to Cannes and that’s just a given, and then you build around that. I certainly go to Berlin when I can, because I think that the market in Berlin is great. The festival has been disappointing for some years, I think they’re making changes there to try and change but in terms of the actual festival at Berlin, it’s been hard work for a lot of years, I know they’re already cutting back on the amount of content they’re screening, which is a good start because I think it’s a very common habit with festivals, particularly with digital, to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
There’s a point at which you get so big that you’ve lost your reason for existence. Sometimes the center of a film festival gets lost, so I’m very happy for anyone reducing what their screening. It was done very successfully here at the Sydney Film Festival under Claire Stewart about 15 years ago, where the actual volume was cut right down so that there’s more discussion about what is existing in the film festival.
There are some festivals that work well and have a very healthy attached market to them, and Rome has one, Cannes the best by far. Berlin is excellent, San Sebastian has a small one. You kind of have to balance out where you’ll travel to in terms of screenings or in terms of meetings, and Cannes is still by far the best for all of those things.
(UM): I wonder if there’s anything left that you feel might be interesting for our audience to know about distribution in general.
(SK): There’s no guide for how to be a film distributor, you usually just learn on the job. It’s a very varied role, and it has lots of ups and downs. Licensing a film is a gamble and always will be a gamble. For us, it’s about finding excellent quality films where we think we can reach an audience. Every film is different, every audience is different, and no-one can know for sure if something is going to resonate. But that’s the challenge and the thrill.
As we discussed earlier about watching a film that you know will be a hit, most of the time that doesn’t happen, so you have a film that you consider is of an excellent quality, and you consider that there’s an audience for it, but then you then have to prove that.
To get to that point takes money and time. It takes strategies, but that’s the very best part of the job when a strategy works, and that brings a great deal of satisfaction and happiness and hopefully it brings you some money as well, so that you can go and do the same thing again. It’s very much a rinse and repeat, we’ve had this fantastic success in Australia with EO, and we are now seeking the next film that might generate an equivalent level of interest.
You search, sometimes it comes quickly, sometimes it takes a long time to come. It’s a difficult business, but a really rewarding one when it works.
© 2020-2023. UniversalCinema Mag.