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With a rhythm that would make former Beatle and former company owner George Harrison nod to the beat, England's HandMade Films gave its AFM debut performance with class and style presenting their first two features, both from first-time directors. The company was Britain's most prolific indie film producer through the 1980s and was bought by Canadian-based Paragon Entertainment in August of 1994. After 18 months of dormancy -- and six years without a produced film -- the revitalized HandMade got respectable attention for its Intimate Relations, a stylish true tale of sexual obsession, hypocrisy and murder in 1950s Britain told with a bold, black comedic edge from first time writer/director Philip Goodhew and starring Julie Walters and Rupert Graves. A number of big foreign territories sold early in the AFM with Fox Searchlight coming on board to buy out most others, including the United States. Not bad for the company's first production since 1990. HandMade's other AFM world premiere, the haunting Sweet Angel Mine is helmed by first-timer Curtis Radclyffe and stars Oliver Milburn, Anna Massey and Alberta Watson (Spanking the Monkey ). Company executive Hillary Davis, who was with HandMade before the Paragon purchase, gets animated when she explains that trailers of the two new films sparked quite a bit of interest when they were shown at MIFED in October 1995 and generated a lot of heat around the premieres here at the AFM. Now that buyers have seen the finished product, signed deals and licensed the films in most territories, Davis grins when she characterizes response to the films at the AFM as "extremely positive."
Funding for HandMade projects is as varied as its upcoming slate of films. Intimate Relations came to the company with only the script and Julie Walters attached. Sweet Angel Mine came with script and cast and was eventually co-produced by four separate entities: Mass Productions and Imagex, Telefilm Canada, Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, and British Screen. HandMade seeks to produce three or four films next year and every year after that. Davis is pre-selling four projects currently in pre-production, including The Wrong Guy, Yanqui Dollar, The Assistant and Photographing Fairies.
The Wrong Guy is an action comedy Davis describes as a cross between The Fugitive and North By Northwest but with an irreverent twist. Production begins May 20, 1996, on this $8 million feature with North American distribution already in place through Buena Vista Pictures. David Foley from The Kids in the Hall stars and the film is helmed by first-time feature director David Steinberg who has previously done episodes of Seinfeld and Friends. Yanqui Dollar is a noir thriller set in contemporary Mexico and starring Maria Conchita Alonso. The picture is budgeted at $6.5 million and is scheduled to begin production in June 1996. The Assistant is an adaptation of Bernard Malamud's period drama about 1930s New York and will star Max von Sydow under the direction of writer/director Daniel Petrie Sr., who recently helmed Kissinger and Nixon. Finally, Photographing Fairies is a supernatural drama set in early 20th century England adopted from Steve Szilagyi's novel by writer and first time director Nick Willing. The $8.5 million budget is a bit high for a directorial debut, but the participation of executive producer Mike Newell (Four Weddings ) goes a long way to making the film a go project and attracting a strong cast.
Of the announced slate of pictures, Davis says "they all maintain the tradition of quirky, off the wall, intriguing" pictures that made HandMade a household name in the 1980s and may serve to do the same toward the end of this decade. Each adds tremendous value to a catalogue that includes great films such as The Life of Brian, Nuns on the Run, Private Function, U.K. cult favorite Withnail and I, and Mona Lisa. Paragon and HandMade will soon be online, joining the throngs of entertainment companies existing in borderless cyberspace.
