Working Title Heads on Going From Rom-Coms to Body Horror With ‘The Substance’: We ‘Didn’t Totally Understand Just How Full-On It Was Going to Be’
“The Brutalist” was one of the buzziest titles to come out of the Venice Film Festival, pushing filmmaker Brady Corbet immediately into many Oscar predictions lists for best director. Many might not be aware that, 20 years earlier, Corbet was the teenage lead star of the film “Thunderbirds.”
This cinematic fact was revealed on stage at the BFI London Film Festival in something of a rare public talk by the heads of Working Title, Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.
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Despite being arguably the U.K.’s best known and most successful production company — whose more than 150 films have landed more than 300 Oscars, BAFTAs and Golden Globes combined — the two were asked to discuss their failures and the lessons learned along the way.
“Thunderbirds” — based on the cult sci-fi TV series — was among the flops mentioned, making just $28 million from a budget of $57 million.
The fault with that film — according to Fellner — was that instead of focusing on one of the company’s main target markets, the U.K. or the U.S., “we thought, let’s making it for two territories, the U.K. and the U.S., and it fell right in the middle.”
As Bevan noted, however, “Thunderbirds wasn’t our worst film.” That accolade, he said, went to the very first film they made after becoming part of Universal, Sally Potter’s 2000 “The Man Who Cried,” which boasted an impressive cast including Cate Blanchett and Johnny Depp.
The first test screening, he noted, was being watched over by then Universal chair Stacey Snider, “just hit double digits.. we probably got 11.”
Fellner added: “They’d never seen that before, so it was probably new territory for them.”
“The Man Who Cried” scraped home $1.8 million.
“Sadly failure is part of the process of life,” explained Fellner, who said the trick was to “just get up and keep going. Don’t rest on yours laurels if you’ve done something good, and don’t wallow in misery when you’ve done something bad. Just keep going.”
What the two had learned, especially from their failures, was that “if you spend too much thinking about it, it just stops you from being able to do something else.”
He added: “However brilliant we may be perceived to be. Ultimately, we’re not. We’re just trying to do things. If you go to the table occasionally you win, and we just keep going to the table.”
Working Titles frequent winning trips to the table have, of course, involved their numerous hit rom-coms with Richard Curtis in the late 1990s and early 2000s, both the “Johnny English” and “Bridget Jones” franchises, and prestige dramas such as “The Darkest Hour” and “The Theory of Everything.” Bevan noted that their early success can be put down to the relationships they’re forged with Curtis, Rowan Atkinson and “Bridget Jones” author Helen Fielding.
But among the company’s most recent table excursions — which includes its first film with Steve McQueen in Apple TV+’s London Film Festival opener “Blitz” — is something rather different and somewhat un-Working Title: the extreme and gory body horror “The Substance.”
Although the company may not be known for its horror, Fellner insisted that they were “genre neutral but director positive… that’s what attracts us to material.”
It was after seeing Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature “Revenge” that they knew they wanted to work the rising director, so Fellner made several trips to Paris to persuade her team up with them on her next film, which would become “The Substance.”
“So we went into it believing in her and believing in the script,” he said. “The script was really, really good, although I didn’t totally understand just quite how full-on it was going to be. But it definitely brought people to the cinema, which is great.”
“The Substance” has proved to be a major hit, especially for wild, bloody R-rated film not to everyone’s tastes. It’s already Mubi most successful release of all time, having earned almost $12 million domestically for a global haul of more than $24 million.
For Bevan and Fellner, old hands in an ever-changing industry, “The Substance” offers a prime example of where the opportunities now lie in the independent film world, where exciting and bold new filmmakers can exist in the sub-$15 million space.
“‘The Substance’ for us had made us realize that if it’s really out there, people are interested, they don’t get turned off,” said Fellner, adding Working Title would “start to make” more under-$15 million movies. “And try and be really bold and do things that can attract people to want to talk about the films and get back to the cinema and tell their friends, ‘Oh my God, you’ve got to see this film.’ That’s what we need.”
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