What recession? British producer Keith Griffiths has a plethora of intriguing projects on the go, discovers Geoffrey Macnab.
It’s over 30 years now since Keith Griffiths produced Chris Petit’s cult film Radio On (1979), one of the few 'road movies' in British film history. Now, Petit’s new road movie, Content, is a world premiere in Rotterdam’s Spectrum. Griffiths is again the producer. No, he says, Petit’s latest film shouldn’t be seen as a direct follow-up to its celebrated predecessor, which was co-produced by Wim Wenders.
“Chris sees it more as a coda to Radio On: ambient rather than narrative,” Griffiths muses, adding that the technology and the way Petit makes his films has changed dramatically since the late 1970s. Rotterdam audiences, Griffiths suggests, have always been open to “the rather bold, ascetic, essay form” of Petit’s recent film work, much of which has been seen at the Festival. Here in Rotterdam, the prolific Griffiths, who runs Illuminations Films with ex-IFFR boss Simon Field, has many other projects to pitch and discuss with potential partners.
Griffiths is partnering with Peter Strickland, the award-winning director of Katalin Varga, on his new Italian-set horror film, Berberian Sound Studio. This is about an unassuming sound engineer from Dorking Deepdene, England, who ends up working in a sleazy Italian post-synch film sound studio around 1970. The conceit is that we never actually see the grisly horror film he is working on but only hear it.
The project has already received development funding from the UK Film Council. Griffiths is starting to draw together co-production finance, and hopes that the film will begin shooting by the end of the year. The dialogue is in Italian and in English.
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Another Griffiths-produced film, Robinson In Ruins (Patrick Keiller’s follow-up to his two celebrated 1990s films London and Robinson In Space) will be ready by the summer. Also due to be delivered this summer (and a likely candidate for Cannes) is Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul's On Uncle Boonmee: A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Griffiths is collaborating again with the Quay brothers on their new Bruno Schulz feature adaptation, Sanatorium Under The Hour Glass, a feature combining live action and animation that will shoot in Poland in late 2010 or early 2011.
Meanwhile, Griffiths is also an executive producer on Simon Pummell’s multi-platform CineMart project Brand New-U (which is being produced through Janine Marmot’s Hot Property Films). He is also exec-producing Patience, a new “essay film” about revered German writer W.G. Sebald, the author of Austerlitz, who died in 2001, being put together by Grant Gee and Gareth Evans. “The man, history, memory and utopia” is how Griffiths sums up the project.
These may be tough times for many UK producers but Griffiths, who has “30 years of contacts”, consistently manages to put challenging new work into production. He is optimistic, too, about future prospects. Public funding body the UK Film Council is in the midst of an overhaul that will see its three current production funds merged into one. He is full of praise for the UKFC’s current development fund under Tanya Seghatchian (“she and her team have absolutely turned their way of working around”). “Potentially, providing they (the UK Film Council) pick the right people to lead the Fund, I am quite encouraged”, Griffiths reflects. “I am very positive…but if none of that team get the jobs, I am not so sure!”
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