Bevan's billion-dollar brain

Tim Bevan, film producer, has a knack of backing movies that make lots and lots of money. The former backstage worker on a Kiwi soap has come a long way, reports RUSSELL BAILLIE.



Go on, Tim Bevan, big-time London film producer and former clipboard carrier on 70s Kiwi soap Close to Home: now that you're basking in the billion-dollar success of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Elizabeth and Bean - impress us. What's the biggest cheque you've ever written?

No, Bevan, isn't about to feed any financial voyeurism.

Well, only a bit. Instead, he offers the story of the "most fortuitous" cheque he's signed. It was to one R. Curtis for sterling 30,000 (about $97,000), a payment for the screenplay of The Tall Guy from a box-office profit that probably shouldn't have existed.

Bevan says he had managed to put the film together with some British television money.

"And, very strangely, the film showed a profit - it shouldn't have done from its commercial release. So I got a profit cheque from the people who funded the film, for sterling 100,000 or something, and it was at a point in life when we really needed that money.

"But Richard Curtis was a profit participant, so I wrote a cheque to him ... and in return Richard sent me the screenplay for Four Weddings and a Funeral.

"I've done every film that Richard has touched and just entered into a seven-picture deal with him. That sterling 30,000 cheque was worth a billion dollars at the box office, because his next three films - Four Weddings, Notting Hill and Bean between made them made a billion dollars."

(Cue cash-register sound effect.)

The reason we're the first entry in Bevan's diary today - the rest include the first meeting of new film-funding body the British Film Council, then awaiting the Los Angeles test-audience results of an adaptation of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity - is his imminent return to these shores for a bit of advice.

Queenstown-born Bevan grew up here, the son of English immigrants since returned home, and served his 70s screen apprenticeship at the National Film Unit. He is talking at the Screen Directors and Producers' Association's annual conference in Wellington tomorrow.

So what's he going to tell a New Zealand film industry likely to be feeling very good - the conference is titled Small Country Big Picture - about itself?

"Well, I've worked predomin-antly in an English-language territory that is not Hollywood and I believe that New Zealand is on the cusp of some interesting things happening in film. Hollywood has discovered it and there are some big Hollywood movies going in.

"That provides the infrastructure for everything else. The trick is for the local industry to springboard off that."

Any thoughts on what sort of movies we should be making here?

"The most liberating thing for me was producing Four Weddings - when you suddenly discover you don't have to make a state-of-the-nation or a frock flick, and you are allowed to make a film that just entertains.

"Every decision we have since made has been influenced by that. Who would have thought that a film about a Queen of England [Elizabeth] could have gone out and made $US100 million around the world?

"But if you take the right attitude to it, it can."

(Cue cash-register effect again.)

So, define that right attitude.

"We looked for a genre, we thought of a way to turn the frock flick on its head all the way through making Elizabeth. In some aspects we failed but we succeeded sufficiently to find an audience."

A quick career recap. After his time as a production runner on Close to Home, Bevan headed to England, where in the early 80s he found work at Video Arts, John Cleese's corporate-training-video production house, working alongside Charles Crichton, the veteran director of the Ealing comedies.

Along came the music video and he started his own music-video company in 1983, which evolved into Working Title films, its first feature being Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette.

Working Title's years as a independent helped deliver British films like Wish You Were Here and those of offshore mavericks - like Tim Robbins' satire Bob Roberts and New Zealander Vincent Ward's Map of the Human Heart.

That tradition continued - Bevan has been executive producer on the Coen brothers' films The Big Lebowski, Fargo, and The Hud-sucker Proxy as well as Robbins' Dead Man Walking.

"I think they like us because we are 5000 miles away," Bevan says with a laugh of his relationship with the American left-fielders. "I think Tim and the Coens are honorary non-Americans so they are certainly standing outside Hollywood. In a way it makes sense that the leading European player is the one they would come to."

Working Title became "an autonomous satellite" of the PolyGram entertainment group in 1992. But recently, American entertainment giant Universal took over PolyGram - Working Title also signing a long-term deal with the corporation - meaning there is no longer a British or European-based major distributor of films, raising fears in Britain of further Hollywood homoge-nisation.

Bevan doesn't see it that way.

"Funnily enough, we've done quite well out of it. I was the first person through the door into the PolyGram film thing. It was at the end of the 80s, Sarah [Radclyffe, his Working Title co-founder] and I had probably made 10 to 15 movies and I thought, 'Jesus, this is ridiculous - we have all these movies, half of them are complete crap, we are making things before we are ready to and we're broke. All our houses are on the line and we need to find a white knight.'"

Bevan says the Universal deal has meant he can concentrate more on the creative-relationship side of the business, having to worry less about where production funding is coming from. Anyway, he's long stopped calling himself a "British" film producer.

"No, international film producer, because I realised it was an international business and if you didn't make a million-dollar movie for a million-dollar audience, or a $40-million movie for a $40-million audience the only way you are going to find either is on a global basis."

But he's not a filthy-rich international film producer, says the 40-year-old. Not yet, anyway.

"Hitherto, believe it or not, it's been pretty altruistic. The charge and buzz has been getting the films made, taking risks and all the rest of it. But we realised, signing up [the Universal deal] for another five years, that because it is a young person's business we needed to extract something from it as well. So, that said, we'll probably make a batch of dud movies that make no money, by sod's law."

Well, there seem to be some solid bets in Bevan's future, many of them literary. There's the much-loved-by-blokes Hornby book, an adaptation of its female equivalent, Bridget Jones' Diary from Helen Fielding's bestseller, book-club favourite Captain Corelli's Mandolin and, best of all, a live-action version of Thunderbirds.

On the phone, this garrulous doer-of-deals comes across as a little bit Brains, a little bit Virgil. And he makes his high-risk business sound like quite a game - one that he enjoys playing immensely.

"Listen, I'm jaded by the game, to be quite frank. I like making the movies that I want to make and I'm picky enough to put some pretty big movies together that nobody else on Earth would do."

Ker-ching.