Niv Fichman on the set of Blindness Niv Fichman is not your average producer. With 30 years of experience in the film industry, Fichman has his name on over 200 projects, including feature films, documentaries and television series. In addition to the Oscar he took home for THE RED VIOLIN in 2000, Fichman also won seven Emmys and numerous other awards during his career. His production company Rhombus Media, based in Canada, is now celebrating its 30th year after the release of their new film BLINDNESS, starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. Fichman, who calls himself “an old-fashioned movie theater kind of guy,” has a lot to say about producing, financing, and promoting… and that unusual night in Chile. F.A. How did you get involved in producing? N.F. I started a film company (Rhombus Media) with two friends after graduating from York University in Toronto. We all started out as directors really, as most film students do. And it became clear that somebody had to do the producing part of it. So I started producing their films. We’re still partners, celebrating our 30th anniversary in a couple weeks. F.A. Would you say that it is easier to finance a film now than it was 20-30 years ago? N.F. I wouldn’t say financing is easier now. I think when I first started in this business, some things were a lot simpler. There were a lot fewer places to go for financing. People knew each other personally and in a completely different way than they do today. When you went to a film festival, you bumped into all your friends. These days, market realities are very different from the way they were back then. I finance feature films now, but I used to finance TV programs back then, and they are two completely different processes. On the TV side, it was easy, because we made very specific kinds of films about music and performing arts. We were able to go to public broadcasters in Europe, Japan, and PBS in the US. There was one person who ran that area, and that person was able to make decisions about money. So you went to present a project and they said, “I’ll do that” (laughs). Just lasted like five minutes, and these days sometimes it takes years to finance a project like that. F.A. So where do you go when you’re financing feature films now? N.F. It depends on what kind of film it is and on what the budget level is. For a film like Blindness we just did, we started off financing in each of the co-producing countries, so we raised money from our own countries either through government funds, local distributors, or banks in individual countries. Then, we were able to get Focus Features involved as a world sales agent. And through all of their hard work, which was based on selling a Fernando Meirelles film with Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, they were able to sell the film a year before we made it. They sold it in Cannes 2007, and the film premiered in Cannes in 2008. F.A. What are your thoughts about online promotion and how a feature film benefits from it? N.V. I think it’s fantastic. You can reach pretty much everyone individually these days. Before, the only way to reach people was through ads on newspapers and TV. You tried targeting a specific TV channel or a specific program that would have the same demographics as your potential audience for your film. Online, people come to you, because they are interested. The motivation comes from the consumer as opposed to the person who is trying to sell a product. So it kind of revolutionized how films are being marketed. I’m very interested in this area and being able to promote films in more specific ways. F.A. Did you use online promotion with Blindness? N.V. Yes, it was very different in each place. The thing about film distribution is that it’s not worldwide. Blindness was released by different people in different countries. Although the films was sold internationally by Focus, it was released in the US by Miramax. Miramax used quite a lot of online promotion, but they also did a lot of traditional promotion as well. They put a lot of ads on TV and posters all over the cities in the US, etc. Other countries used a lot more online promotion, which turned out to be quite successful. They had all kinds of promotions. In Chile, for example, they had a whole bunch of people meet on the night of the premiere, but they didn’t announce what the premier was. They just had people meet at a certain place, and then they were all blindfolded and led down the streets in a way that they are in the movie. Then, they found themselves in the cinema, and all of a sudden there was the premier of the movie. And they didn’t even know that that’s what it was. So stuff like that is very innovative and interesting. F.A. What do you think about distributing a film online? N.V. I’m still an old-fashioned movie theater kind of guy. So I don’t know if I’ll be able to change that, because I’m from that generation. I’m a strong advocate of cinema and kind of a communal experience of watching movies. It is a completely different experience watching a movie on the big screen with people around you than watching it on your computer screen. These days you can even watch a movie on your wristwatch or something, and that’s a sad way of watching a movie, because there are so many other distractions. I think movies are meant to be experienced in an environment where you can absorb them fully. Because I worked both in TV and movies, I have quite a strong delineation between what to make for a movie that’s meant for the theater and what to do for a TV program that’s meant for TV. It is unfortunate that some people’s work never get to be shown in a theater, but as a producer my aim is to make movies that are meant to be shown in movie theaters, and I made a conscious decision not go get with the times on this one issue. About the producer: Niv Fichman has 30 years experience and over 200 feature films, documentaries, and television series to his name. He recently released Fernando Meirelles' adaptation of Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago's BLINDNESS, written by Don McKellar and starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover, and Gael Garcia Bernal; as well as Paul Gross' World War I romantic epic PASSCHENDAELE. Fichman has also previously produced directors such as Francois Girard, Olivier Assayas, Guy Maddin, Don McKellar, Peter Mettler, Peter Wellington, Kevin McMahon, Marc Evans, as well as his partners at Rhombus, Larry Weinstein and Barbara Willis-Sweete. Feature films include THE RED VIOLIN, THIRTY TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD, LAST NIGHT, THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD, CLEAN, SNOWCAKE and SILK. Selected television projects include SLINGS & ARROWS, YO-YO MA: INSPIRED BY BACH, SEPTEMBER SONGS and LE DORTOIR. Awards include an Oscar for THE RED VIOLIN, seven Emmys and numerous Genies, Geminis, Golden Pragues as well as a Golden Rose of Montreux and a Prix Italia. Interview by Eren Gulfidan. Contact: www.filmannex.com/erengulfidan