Zygi Kamasa: How to build a movie business

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1:17That's a trailer for the film Giant, which will be released in the UK in January 2026, and is about the former boxer Prince Nassim Hamid. It's one of the first films to be financed by True Brit, a new film business founded by Ziggy Kamaza. True Brit will focus on investing and distributing British-made films. But how do you build a new business in the film industry?

1:48This is the Business Leader Podcast, and I'm Graham Ruddick. In this episode, we're going to speak to Ziggy Kamaza about building True Brit. Ziggy Kamaza used to be the chief executive of Lionsgate UK and Europe, and then went on to be the boss of Marv, the movie business founded by the filmmaker Matthew Vaughan. Marv is in the top 10 of business leaders of Growth 500, the collection of the fastest growing businesses in the UK. Now Ziggy Kamaza is building his own business. So let's talk to him about how to build a business in the movie industry, and also how to find and make a great film.

2:25i've been involved in the film industry for 30 years now i started off as a producer of british independent films but quickly segued within a couple of years to in the late 90s into launching my own distribution company then it was a company called red bus and actually we got some seed funding from uh cliff stanford who had launched demon internet in the 90s and you remember demon uh it was one of the early uh sort of isps i remember being on the front of fulham football club shirts right yeah with charlton yes and again that was really focused on distribution of all sorts of movies there wasn't specializing in british movies which we're doing now today and uh that was very successful very quickly our first big success was bend it like beckham which we co-produced and distributed and what was interesting at the time was you know we didn't have a focus we we were distributing all sorts of movies american films big small british and it became quickly apparent to me being based here that there was something about british independent films that had just a home appeal the if it's going to work anywhere it's going to work in the uk marketplace i sold that business to lionsgate with my my partner at the time was a businessman called simon franks we launched it together and sold it to lionsgate in 2006 and lionsgate asked me to stay on to run their UK business and they expanded to running all of Europe for them so I was CEO of Lionsgate for 15 years and that was a very big organisation but I always drove the business to have a division that specialised in British independent film you know we did big movies like Hunger Games and La La Land and I grew the business in Europe to over 500 million a year in revenue when they bought us we were doing 20 million so it was a huge expansion period for Lionsgate but I always had a focus on British films because I'm British and I live here and we had a lot of independent successes and when I looked back each year on the profitable divisions within my organisation over which I managed the British section was one of the most profitable which people don't think there normally is profitable section in British movies but I was always able to do that year in year out proportion to the investment return on investment and the income stream we generate in the library we were building was significant in British movies.

4:41So cut to 2022, 21, 22, sort of post-COVID, we're in a world where cinemas have been shot for a year. Obviously, the whole world suffered through the whole COVID lockdowns. And during that time, the streamers had grown hugely. Amazon, Netflix, and then in the US, HBO and AMC and Max and various companies, Paramount Plus, all started expanding their home offering and I really felt that there was an opportunity that people are going to want to go back to cinema but to do that I wanted to specialise and that's really where I focused on what I'd done for some 20 plus years and taking my experience at Lionsgate I really felt there was an opportunity to to focus exclusively on being the best of British focusing on movies and stories and when people ask what is what does it constitute to be a British movie it's really what the consumers see it's the british uh facing stories about characters whether it's biopex historical or just stories set here in the uk with english characters and british characters and uh very quickly we we went out for some fundraising and raised some funds from a music group 360 who fully backed me and so we launched 2023 um throughout my career i've shown how you can successfully make money on British independent Phil.

6:00It is a portfolio approach to business investing in British movies. I think sporadically movies will lose money. That's a fact. You have to accept that. When we were fundraising in 2021, 2022, we were talking to some finances out of the city and various business investors who had never tackled Phil before. And when I explained the The first reaction is very much, film too risky, right? Very volatile, can't make money out of it. You know, surely you can't make that a profitable business. And actually, I sort of compared it a bit more to similarities, not quite identical to sort of private equity in startup businesses.

6:40Each film is a startup business. They come to us with a business plan, which is the script. The management is the producer, the director, the actors are all part of the management team that make that project. But any one startup business could fail. That's the nature of the movies is they can fail and not make a big return on this investment at all and lose your money. But if you build up a portfolio and that's really what we do at True Brit, we invest in six, seven British movies every year. We're only two years old, literally next month, and we've already backed 30 movies. So we're well on track for hitting what we set out to achieve.

7:16And we're building a portfolio of movies. Each one is slightly different from one another. and we balance that portfolio with different genres different sizes and uh hope that within that portfolio there's going to be some very decent successes there's gonna be some that we may lose money on that's the nature of what we do but you know we're we're balancing it well enough to hope that overall the portfolio makes us a lot a lot of money go back and do my research i noticed a lot of people commented on how you this unique mix of a filmmaker and an entrepreneur i think that's something that matthew vaughn said he obviously worked with at marv which did you want to be first because is it right when you initially left university you would you were trying all sorts of different things in terms of IT and importing businesses so was it entrepreneur first then filmmaker second yes entrepreneur first I think I I set up a computer business in second year of university assembling desktop pcs in 1990 in 1991 kind of when the sort of mail order business pre-internet it was mail order business and and I built that up and by the time i did my third year of university i studied and ran the business by the time i left and graduated in 1991 i had 18 people working for me um selling computers mail order we actually ended up having some problems we started importing parts of the hardware from taiwan um and i was 22 years old i sort of didn't literally know what i was doing but but i kind of had that vision of trying to do something to sell and create and grow and um we suffered because we bought loads of uh taiwanese product that was actually either faulty or fake or wasn't what they were set out to be and because you're dealing with my naivety I didn't know at that time you know you buy something from Taiwan you bring it over here you spend a hundred thousand pounds on these products and then you can't really there's not a lot of recourse to go back there so that business thrived very quickly then failed but as every entrepreneur probably has probably told you you know failure is part of the history of being an entrepreneur I then had a components business where I ended up importing components and selling it to other people making pcs um so i've always been an entrepreneur i've always enjoyed that and it was you know through the 90s uh but i loved film it's a passion of mine it's a hobby of mine like many people to to watch and i devoured every kind of film that i could lay my hands on went to cinema two or three times a week and i felt having spent three four years you know pretty successfully for for a young person in own business on my own creating success business I thought how do you marry that with film which is why I started off actually producing some independent films and again I took a business approach to it I was one of the first crowdfunded films in the mid 90s because again I was trying to come up with entrepreneurial ways how do you raise money money funding raising is hard on an individual film someone came from with this idea or a script I liked it was actually based on a Tom Hardy uh a short story called the Scarlet Tudyk it was a period film period films are very in vogue in the 90s you know Merchant Ivory were thriving and I thought okay we could do this for a low budget and I got 400 people to give me between one and two thousand pounds and raised half a million pounds and produced a movie that sort of insight there's very few entrepreneurs and business people like that in the industry there are more today but over the 30 years I've been around there's been very few so it definitely that route in first but it was in doing that with film that I quickly discovered that individual films are volatile they really are but was there a way of actually creating a breadth of multiple films i that's my idea of a portfolio and i looked at what the studios had done for decades since the 30s and 40s and 50s in the us and all the big companies across europe they are successful because they build that portfolio and that's what led me to launch red bus uh in 1998 with time of franks was to really take what i'd learned as a producer but with a business entrepreneurial mindset and going okay let's now invest in other people's movies and create you know we were doing at the time 10 12 movies a year when you then came to sell up to lionsgate how did you feel about going to work as part of a bigger business how did you adapt to that yeah it was interesting we we had a um a deal that involved an earn out which which you know many many entrepreneurs are used to you know it's part of selling a business they want you to stay on in two years and initially I'd said okay I'm gonna do the two years and I'm gonna move on to my next business venture and actually I I credit our CEO of Lionsgate in the US uh who's still a CEO now a man called John Feldheimer who himself was very entrepreneurial he'd built Lionsgate from from the mid-90s from scratch pretty much and he's a veteran television film executive prior to that anyway in the US he very much inspired me by saying look he wants entrepreneurs in his business he didn't want to lose me and he said look and and as I mentioned earlier we had a 20 25 million pound revenue when they bought us he said what you need to do to grow what if I give you autonomy what I give you independence and I give you a budget you know and I explained to him I didn't I've never worked for anyone this is my first job effectively working for someone else it was my business and it was my team in London so I did feel very personal to the team I built here and John was great it was literally for over a decade it was very much tell me what budgets you need this year and show me growth and that's how I grew it from 25 million to I said we had 400 million revenue within 10 years purely by him giving me that autonomy so in some ways it felt like my business I also had very strong share options in the overall group the share price grew massively obviously they were listed on New York Stock Exchange, so that I benefited in the growing of my European operation, which actually became a big success story within the overall group.

12:55And yeah, that autonomy mattered to me. I think most businessmen talk about that, right, as being able to run your own business and making your own decisions. And I think that really worked with me, had it not been the case. And I had friends over the years who'd sold businesses to other companies, both inside film and outside film. And within two years, they're out because the management take over and they want to run you like an employee john didn't do that with me and and and and really gave me autonomy so yeah it really helped which is why i stayed so long i think just going back to the sale why did you decide that was the right time to sell the business i think it was a period of consolidation to some degree in the industry why did you feel that you wanted to to sell i think because as an independent at the time you know we'd had some successes we'd had big successes like bender like beckham we'd we'd done some genre movies and horror movies and some thrillers and they've done really well I think however the market is this industry and like many industries constantly changing it's changed again since I launched three years ago uh as a new company true brit and as a result we we went actively looking to sell they approached us they wanted to launch a UK business and so they approached us and we knew them we'd actually bought movies from them to distribute here they're an American distributor like us but much bigger and had a much bigger library and a lot more capital.

14:14And so it grew from that where they said, okay, well, if we're going to launch, we could be your competitor and therefore you won't get our movies or we could buy you. And I think any entrepreneur looks at exit opportunities. And it was a very lucrative deal for my partners and I. We had original investors who were still involved with us. It also thrived very well from the sale. So it was really an opportunity to take an exit. And Simon stayed barely six months and then went on to do many different things. He has another company. He kept the Red Bus brand. We changed to Lionsgate UK and he has a company called Redbus Ventures.

14:46He's very successful in launching multiple investments in other businesses. And I love film. So as I said earlier, I wanted to stay on. Wasn't sure if I would, but in the end, because of the support of Lionsgate, it was just a great entrepreneurial opportunity. Entrepreneurs love creating and love that, but also many do look at multiple exits. There's nothing wrong with that at all. As you have heard, this is not the first time that Ziggy Kamasa has built his own business. Given his experiences since the 1990s and his time working with a big company in Lionsgate, how much has he learned about what it takes to succeed?

15:20It's a huge difference, I think. I mean, again, the market has changed. Experience counts for so much in any business. I think that's why also I wanted to specialise in picking. On the one hand, you could argue that my own business is quite niche. It's a boutique distributor financier of exclusively British films. There is an element of that, and I think that is true to a point but I actually see it more that we want to excel in what we do rather than specialise in something that's small. British movies have always travelled brilliantly internationally even back in 2002 when we released Menderly Beckham you know we were one of the main partners in that we grossed 15 million dollars here at the cinema but the movie grossed 90 million worldwide so we were barely 15 of the global box office so our movies that we create here these small little gems that we can make a lot of money in the uk can travel massively internationally so i think it is a global business and i think i really want to do what i feel is the best for the british movies i'm supporting here focus on creating the best of that content and hopefully creating hits that can really travel i'll come on to sort of picking and looking at movies in a bit I just want to talk to you about team because you quickly built another team here what do you look for when you're building a team what skills that really stand out to you again now that obviously helped a lot the experience I've had and because I knew a lot of the team who now work for me I you know again I wanted to be very specific with skills and experience depth of experience across the team pretty much I've hired one or two executives from each of my competitors for the last 20 years that's often a smart way of doing it you know pick pick the best of what they did at their various companies so i have executives from e1 from studio canal from lionsgate and as well as other companies universal as well it was knowing what they did in their field and being brilliant at it and and and wanting to work you know they've all worked at much bigger companies as well those are big those are the bigger companies i picked but they were smart entrepreneur in their own way i love to keep people on autonomy because i want people to thrive and people like autonomy in their jobs but i also need to make sure that i know they know what they're doing and so my team's someone who I individually I've known for a while even before we had True Brit and I knew I could trust so yeah it's a relatively small team but but very very strong and very very experienced at what they do.

17:43That bridge that you've talked about between business and film what what's in that gap why do people sometimes not bridge that? I think because it is still seen in some ways as highly risky and as an art form it's a mixture of of of reasons and it's expensive it's not like the music business where you can go out and make an album for i don't know 50 000 pounds right can't make a movie for that well i think people can try by the way you can it's just they're just it's just tiny with no cast and and and it's just an expensive medium number one but it's a creative art form and i think that's the piece that over the 30 years that i've talked to business people and investors and and partners in the in in in business generally it scares people that that there's an artistic side to it where really you're beholden to creative executives or creative managers directors writers where actually the end result could not might end up being not what you want i think with a lot of businesses if you're selling widgets or computers or whatever you are you know what the product is you can create the product you make it that and you either sell lots of it or you don't with a film production and this is the case from the experience i've had i've i've you know apart from the probably exec produced over 70 british movies and i've released and and and been involved in over 300 films in distribution from throughout my career it's actually still quite difficult to determine which one's going to be successful and which one's not you can have a terrific director a great script great cast put it all together reasonable budget and then he can still come out and you're just sitting there scratching your head after 18 months of production and going well that's just not very good and you try and fix it you can only do things like reshoots where you go back and do more filming but that's terrifying for business people and i think that side of it is is one thing that puts off a lot of people which is why it has a reputation that individual films can be disasters yes they can but like i said that's my analogy of doing talking about startup companies so can startup companies you can have a brilliant management team with a great concept raise 10 million for a startup business that can go belly up two years later can run out of cash and just not generate the business that it needs that's the way you need to look at movies is yes it's risky but therefore don't invest in one invest in a portfolio and that's what true distribution and that's what true brick does it's really about that building a portfolio which hopefully doesn't scare investors too much how does that then affect your decision making when you're coming to look at which movies you want to invest in i think then And what we try and do, I joke because it's sort of true, but not really true, that I'm sort of like a hedge fund manager as well.

20:19In part in what I do, I'm trying to balance my portfolio with different mix of rather than stocks and companies, it's films. So I would be silly if I went long in one genre. So if I said I'm going to make 12 horror movies now the next two years, that's that's increasing my risk. So what I'm trying to do is balance my portfolio of investments of the 13 films we've already done in two years. You know, I've got I have got three horror movies. I do think there's an opportunity for Britain to be the premier horror movie production company in business in the world. But I've got comedies. I've got thrillers.

20:54I've got dramas. I've got a Christmas musical coming out in four weeks. It's about balancing it because there's such a big audience in this country to see who wants to see movie and they don't all want to see one genre. and I think that's that's just being hopefully what I consider myself to be a good business manager is understanding that your product has to diversify and you have to build a balanced portfolio of a mixture of assets each film is a different is an asset and finding out ones that some will pop and some others won't and and trying to mix it up with different genres of course if certain genres work better at a period of time you can react and maybe go long in a certain sector but never go too long on anything how would you get comfortable with with the setbacks and failures particularly when you touched on there about putting together all ingredients that's not a good movie what about when you think it's a good movie and then it still is a commercial failure yeah and that can happen too that it's it's it's it's not easy business don't get me wrong um i think if you make a good movie though to that point specifically over the years the times that have made a good movie that have failed is quite rare it does happen yes does it generate the success you want no so in other words it's not a failure so I don't even lose money I just don't make as much as I hoped you know it can it can I can put an investment of many millions of pounds into a into a project across marketing and and cost and it's a good movie and it then as I said doesn't quite achieve its number I still get my money back I still make a small margin I just not the huge success the ones that hurt the most are where you put several million pounds into a movie and it's just not very good or you sort of know it's not very good but you still release it you still try and drive some business into it and sell it and it tanks and that hurts it does hurt you have to just pivot and just accept and and and try and avoid those uh obviously you want to avoid the problem is it's a two-year process that's the other issue is that you don't know at the start you have to go through that two-year exercise of making it and again even during that even during that two-year process but several of my team oversee that process with our partners because we lend you know collectively we've got 30 plus years of experience across my whole team of being able to advise and consult with directors and filmmakers we're very we're very active in our productions you know coming back to my analogy of a startup business we don't just have a seat on the board and sit there and take a board meeting with them you know we actually get involved in the production we guide them we watch edits we we use our experience saying how do we make the most commercial product here and it is a product even though it's a film by the way when when i call it a product filmmakers sort of balk at me they say you know it's not a product it's a film it's a creative art form and i and i get it it is a creative art form but it's still a product you still got to take something for make it for a price and sell it for a price plus x otherwise you don't make a margin so it is on i am always trying to think of it like a like a business product but yes it hurts you just have to balance everything and and and try and make everything you can to avoid those ones where they really really damage your bottom line and you lose money you mentioned that it's often a two-year process so in those early days what are you looking for in a potentially winning project i think again every film has to have experienced team around them so the experience of the writer director the director is key in films director is probably the most important role ahead of actors so you know i have a film called christmas karma coming out in five weeks uh which is from grinda chada who directed bendelai beckham i've known her 25 years we had a lot of success for that film obviously she always brings a sort of diverse indian bollywood twist to all her boobies that's her style and that's what we did with bendelai beckham very successfully she came to us with this idea and and so she as the driving force behind that was the reason we wanted to do it we we loved the script which she'd written very commercial it's a musical she got gary barler from take that to do the music with shaznay lewis from all saints um so had a lot pedigree she was going to get an all-star cast so so the element those are the team behind it and that's really crucial you have to have an amazing story in a script that you think also people want to see because you can have all the other things you can have you know gorinda could have come to me and and and said i want to make this you know i want to make a 90 minute movie us staring at a tree in a wood and i'd go that's not a commercial grinder you know and and and so you have to have something that's commercially viable that she thinks is viable but we also agree and i've had that conversation with filmmakers in the past who have brought us ideas that they think obviously my example of a tree was exaggeration clearly but but they've come up with things that they think are commercial and i read them and i don't think they are and I so I pass on many more than I than I accept obviously uh and invest in you know we probably probably reviewed probably in two years about 150 British projects to do 13 so it's around one in 10 we invest in and and that's probably quite high ratio could be maybe even close to 200 that we've reviewed so there's plenty we reject because we have to like the management team the production team like the script like the story and then and then of course the final piece is the cast you know nick love came to me uh on the film we did called marching powder um he'd had a lot of success 20 years ago uh with football factory and and the business where he'd kind of launched danny dyer on onto our world 20 years ago and he'd been working on on tv for about 10 years and hadn't made a film for a long time and he came to me and he said look i'm going to go back and do a film with danny again and it's going to be a subversive outrageous comedy uh set in the football hooligan world but not quite and a bit different at football factory and and and dan is going to star and i thought those are elements that give me you know confidence that audiences want to see that that was released in march this year was a huge success for us so i think if you have an instinct of what will sell right which is experience and instinct is a mixture of both with a great management team with actors who you think audiences want to want to see then then hopefully they'll work how did you find the fundraising process for the business in a positive way easier than i expected because i was aware of the difficulties i'd set myself 12 months to do it i started roughly in sort of april a march april 2023 and built my business plan and put it out together to sort of go and and and get my investors and already by july i had the commitments from 360 zero my my partners and i had several offers as well uh some for path funding it some for putting putting a kind of a group invested together and then obviously 360 for fully funding our business because again i think when i when i went out there there was a definitely an initial case it's film this sounds risky and i think it was really just explaining the model and and how you build it as a sensible business with a balanced view on your film you don't take too much risk on any one individual project you spread it out all the things we talked about then investors actually found it really interesting because what's why do investors go into private equity venture capital because of the upside because if a if a company you know thrives out of 10 companies a private equity you invest in it could you could make 7x 8x 9x you know we made as an example without giving the actual numbers we made probably on bender like beckham 30x on our investment now that's at the top top end because that became an iconic movie uh and global i'm not i'm not suggesting we're going to do that in this slate but it's possible that's my point the great thing about the business when they hit they really hit you know those are you know ben la beckham was really a unicorn in that regard those are very rare but i think there's still a business where you can get 2x 3x 5x your investment uh maybe even 10x and that's the way you want to run the business look look for the ones that give you a solid return look for the ones to make sure you don't lose too much and on disasters, trying to avoid those as much as you try and win the winners.

28:42And as a result, by pitching that to investors, they warmed to it very quickly. Obviously, you were looking for funding. What else were you looking for from an investor? I think it was funding, obviously, first, but I think any business that had areas in media, understood media. So obviously 360 or actually a music management business. I didn't know much about that side of the business. Mark Gillespie is the head of that company and he's a personal music manager of people like Calvin Harris and a number of DJs and a rap called Kid Cudi and they have a big roster of clients and I thought well actually that's interesting because everything that we do in our movies has soundtracks everything we do on soundtracks has individual singles and has artists on them and it wasn't I didn't search for music as an investor it just so happened they loved my business proposal on film and I'm definitely trying to find more things to do with them on the music side so that was secondary so any investor that's coming to me it doesn't have to be dual aligned doesn't have to be just it's about the money plus there's a sector of their business that aligns with ours but it helps and that's really where 360 we're a great partner several other offers we had uh were purely financial from from totally non-media non-film organizations who loved the idea of the business model and liked the upside and like my balanced approach to it what did you learn from your period working with marvin and matthew vaughan so matthew is is a uh you know iconic filmmaker in this country he's made some of the great British movies he or if you look at all his films go right back to Lockstock Two Smoking Barrels and the movies directed from Kingsman, Lair Cake is always a Britishness to them so we made the film A.D.

30:16the Eagle together when I was at Lionsgate about the ski jumper you remember with Hugh Jackman and Taryn Edgerton he produced it we co-financed it and that was in 2015 when I was at Lionsgate and we hit it off very well and we were friends since then and it was really as Covid hit I sort of felt I'd run my course at Lionsgate and he came to me very quickly after COVID started and sort of said, look, I just think there's going to be a change in the business now. Cinemas are sharp. We should do something interesting and fun. So I joined him for within the three years where we produced several movies.

30:46And that was really interesting insight into how he put together much bigger movies, much bigger British movies that he would do. His Kingsman films are$100 million movies, way bigger than anything I've done in my career myself. So it was really interesting working with him on that side of it. and he understands distribution very well uh marv and matthew are a small shareholder in in in true brit you know it was really some of the idea i had for true brit came from a conversation with him where he and i would sit there you know kind of when we're still working on some of our movies together and he said where are those great british movies like full monty or billy elliott ben delhi beckham where is the next lock stock two smoking barrels or where does the funeral what what you know why are filmmakers not making that and that sort of got me thinking more and more and so he was very supportive of me when I launched and and that's why he's still a shareholder did you still have that burning desire to do your own thing because Marvin as you said just did very well I mean it was you you grew revenues very quickly while you were there and I think yes not just in film but in UK business overall it was one of the fastest growing businesses yeah no it very much so but I it wasn't my business respect to Matthew he's had he's owned it since he's launched in 1999 and 2000 so he's had it for 20 years before i joined and he owned and he's also very smart he owns the copyright to all his films so he has a very very very very smart business uh but you're right i'm an entrepreneur and and i i think we we toyed with us doing true brit as partners fully partners where you know he'd do some more funding on it but in the end as i went out to the fundraising 360 came in very aggressively he said like you know what it's good you go 360 i'll stay a shareholder we're trying to find some british movies we can do together you know he he you know he's obviously produced stuff as well he's directed like rocket man he produced which is another big hit so we're going to definitely find something to do where we can he'll produce it and then i can distribute it but it was really interesting insight because it's just a different perspective of the film industry that i've not worked in i think every experience is useful a big part of ziggy kamaza's success has been identifying the film projects with real potential but that has also meant saying no a lot and sometimes this has meant turning down movies that went on to become big hits some of it is taste it's it's as subjective as that and it's whether or not you believe it's going to be successful and they believe it is and you just disagree over it's the principle and that's taste every filmmaker every writer has to be passionate about what they've written they have to be right um and and if you said to me i'm gonna make a a movie about a young boy in the north of England who falls in love with ballet you'd go that's ridiculous that's not going to work who's ever going to go see that oh and there's going to be a mining crisis set behind it by the way where his dad's a miner he's out of work you're going okay that just doesn't make sense of course Billy Elliot was a huge success and was beloved and spawned stage musical etc that disagreement is subjective there's always someone who believes in something there's always someone who doesn't it's my job and my team's job to review these things and go okay what is the potential of these things and you have to take some risks it is a high risk business because you never sometimes never know quite where they're going to come from same with ben delai beckham and gorinda's been saying this recently she's doing press for christmas karma coming out and she's been very vocal saying that the the 25 years ago no one wanted to back ben delai beckham they said it was girls football and it wasn't the day of today with the lionesses and not only that it was an indian girl wanted to play football you know she got rejected everywhere and we were one the few companies that said, look, there's something about this that just feels fun and energetic.

34:16Of course, we were proven right. And I've had others that we thought the same that failed. But you have to go with that instinct, which I think is also quite entrepreneurial. Why does an entrepreneur think that they can build a business around a product or whatever and sell it? It's just that instinct of going, I think this is going to work. And that's really what we're trying to do with all our movies, pick things that we just think this is really unique, it's original, well we've not seen it before you know the last thing i'm trying to do are derivative films that just copy others they have to have a twist on something that someone hasn't done before for similar reasons i'm presuming that films will come across your desk that you'd say no to that end up becoming hits elsewhere very much in the same way if you're in venture capital private equity sometimes a business will come across your desk you say no to it and it turns out to be a success somewhere else very much so very much so and they hurt they hurt i wish i'd done them i want to do all the successes but you have to learn from them and and and and i you know you'll look back and go okay so why do we say no to it i'll have a post-mortem of those i won't sort of try and ignore those first of all i would say by the way i think it's still great for this industry if there are british movies that work elsewhere because success breeds success so i think that's positive i'm never jealous in the sense i want i don't want them to fail no i want all british movies if i pass them to work because that helps all of us that'll bring more investment into our business that will create more industry jobs and and me we could all thrive off the back of that and and build the audience audience if audience see a great british film they want to see another one next year so so i don't mind it from that perspective but i'll definitely have a post-mortem to try and analyze what was it about the film at the time and and sometimes sometimes you just don't know um you know we passed on slumdog millionaire back in the day at lion's gate we just fell you know kind of quite dark half-stained india in hindi weren't quite sure what it was of course Danny Boyle made a stunning movie and it won best picture Oscar and took a fortune so you know there's loads of stories of that I'm not alone in that business where where studios have passed on movies and they've been a success elsewhere you just have to really review everything carefully to the best of your ability that's all you can do what did you learn from that case um similar point which is that I think you have to just analyze everything really carefully I think the element that the piece that you've got to bank on sometimes, as I said earlier about the filmmaker is a director and Danny Boyle is such a brilliant director.

36:41I think you know loved his early moves and shallow shallow grave and train spotting 28 days later and amongst many of his successes and therefore I think to elevate what on the page might seem to you as risky or ordinary there's something definitely that a great director can elevate it and just make it way more on screen that sits on the page because that's their vision and so sometimes you have to believe in the vision of the filmmaker that certainly was it was a good lesson for us but there's been others You know, sometimes there is no lesson. And sometimes the story just feels too small for you.

37:16You'd never have done it, but ends up being a big success. You know, again, Billy Elliot was one of those films. I think quite a few people passed on and eventually work in title made it with Universal. And that was a huge success. Last question. How would you summarise the state of the film industry today? And I appreciate that. It's a very broad question, but you touched on that post-COVID world of cinemas. Obviously, since then, the streaming companies have continued to grow. what does it all mean for where the industry is today um i think it's constantly changing and i think that's something that's never stopped for 30 years right 20 years ago people said it was hard it's still hard it's never easy because it's volatile and because you have failures as well as hits um i think what's been happening uh the positive and i'm i'm generally a positive person i wouldn't be an entrepreneur if i wasn't i think the positives are is that audiences love film continually that's never going to go away it only grows I think uh they want unique films they want original films you know we constantly do research to find our audience habits are they love the cinema at the moment this is the highest grossing year since covid it's obviously really depleted the first couple years post covid the biggest years in sort of cinema history were 2018 and 2019 we're not quite at those levels yet but we're not far behind so the cinema audience is growing people want to see things and the one the two things that they've come out all research we do when we talk about the british public is they want to see more original stories bottom of this by the way is is less superhero movies which is not surprising so too many of those they like them to an extent but there's too many of them um and then number two behind original is british movies so the state of the industry is starting from there are the consumers right and i think if there are consumers then there's a business that's the way i look at it from a pure business point of view um i think the industry itself sometimes struggles to have to cater for that audience i think there are organizations like the bfi who are very strong and i support them generally and they are there to support the early filmmakers i think that there is more they could do to support commercial filmmaking i think you know coming back to one of the earlier questions we discussed about that crossover between art and business i think yes it's art but i think i want young filmmakers to be thinking about it okay how do i get audiences to see my movie don't just make a piece of art or a piece of film that they think is commercial and hope people come and see it make films with an audience in mind you know again quoting matthew vaughan him and guy ritchie when they did lock stock to smoking barrels well that's what they said they said we want to do a sort of gangster movie that no one's ever seen before because we think people want to see it it's driven by the audience and i think the industry itself could do more to do that and the funders like BBC Films and Film 4, again, both terrific at what they do.

39:55I can't critique them because they have a budget each year to support British independent film, but I think they could do more to make more commercial films. Does the consolidation of the US studios concern you, and could it make it more difficult to win films and scripts that you like? No, actually, the consolidation I think could be good for us in the independent space, because I think there'll be less competition, and what they will do is, you know, with Paramount allegedly is bidding for Warner Brothers. as an example right already Fox is owned by Disney that's already one less player but if Paramount bought Warner Brothers what are they going to focus on you're going to see more Top Gun you're going to see DC Comics you're going to see more of the big movies so what that means is everything in the smallest space which is where I where I excel and where we focus on is going to be more opportunity because they're not going to want to be making those they're going to make just the one they're going to vent because they'll they'll have the IP they'll have the comic book they'll have the TV series the spin-off they want to create worlds and that's fine that's a great business for them that's not what we do uh so i think the the mid-level or the lower level storytelling cinema which by the way has a huge audience for it that's what what drives our desire to make those kind of movies they will be made less by the u.s studios if there's a consolidation you've been listening to the business leader podcast with me graham rudick Our producer is Anushka Tate.

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