Wednesday, December 01, 2004
French? Schmench!
Jody posted about A Very Long Engagement below: my comments won't fit in the comments section, so:
It's a question of money. 2003 Productions made the film; it's a front for Warner Brothers. The French government throws a lot of money into homegrown productions, Warner established 2003 productions to get some of that cash. There may or may not be other subsidies for American productions shooting in France, but the money 2003 wanted was reserved for wholly French films. Whether France should direct resources toward wholly French films is an arguable proposition, but Jeunet got his money ($47 million) to make this movie 100% from Warner. In fact, funding for the film was announced two days before creation of 2003 Productions--it was Warner Independent's biggest budget for a French language film ever, & so Warner corporate wanted to do everything possible to see that the movie made as much as possible.
Still not 100% sure about 2003 being a trojan horse? Here's Variety's lede when 2003 productions was created (6/19/2003):
"Attempting to go where no U.S. major has gone before, Warner Bros. is setting up a French-led production house to tap into Gallic state subsidies."
Warner gamed the system & lost. Interestingly, Oliver Stone gamed the system and won: Alexander got French subsidies. The difference: Stone got some of his money from Pathe, a real-deal French production company, and Stone's mother is French (though I don't think he has dual citizenship). Not that French subsidies kept Alexander from being a big, $200 million dollar pile of flaming crap.
I'm sympathetic to the French in that more and more American companies are making "foreign" films: HBO made Maria Full of Grace (which is a-1 excellent, and Fine Line distributed it), it was written and directed by an American, using a half-American crew, but to watch it you'd think it was Colombian through and through (they shot in Ecuador, actually: Colombia got nothing, except a new star; if I were the Academy I'd give Catalina Sandino Moreno the award for sure).
Think of it this way: building Z4s in South Carolina employs a lot of Americans, but you wouldn't say it makes BMW an American car company, or the Z4 American.
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