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Hollywood may be grappling with painful change but for Roeg Sutherland, co-Head of CAA’s Media Finance department and its International Film Group, the disruption represents an opportunity for the independent film sector that he has supported for the past two decades.
“If there’s true disruption in the marketplace, it means that not enough movies are being made by the studios. There are still slots to fill and there’s always someone who wants to watch a movie,” Sutherland told the Zurich Summit on Saturday.
“If the studios are making less movies, that means we get to make more movies, and then we get to sell them. There’s a real opportunity for us to have a real impact on the market.”
Sutherland was speaking in an onstage conversation at the Zurich Film Festival’s annual industry conflab ahead of receiving its Game Changer Award, celebrating his work getting hundreds of movies over the line.
Speaking to FilmNation Entertainment Founder and CEO Glen Basner and Deadline’s Co-Editor-in-Chief Film Mike Fleming Jr, Sutherland gave a candid and lively insight into his journey to becoming one of the key movers and shakers in the independent film financing world.
He revealed he had never been tempted to follow his parents, Donald Sutherland and Francine Racette (who was in the audience), or half-brother Kiefer Sutherland into acting. Brothers Rossif and Angus are also actors. Aside from a self-described lack of talent for acting, he said his late father’s attitude to the process of moviemaking had also played its part.
“My father would always say, ‘As an actor, you give 100% of yourself’… he refused to watch his movies, because he felt like only 50% of what he would give was actually on the screen,” said Sutherland.
“That was interesting to me, I realized that I was much more interested in controlling the whole, rather than controlling the part. So that was my way of justifying not acting, even though I would have never gotten a job as an actor.”
His roster of jobs before finding his calling at CAA, ranged from movie PA to film editor and an extremely brief stint as stand-in for Marlon Brando.
“That lasted all of 35 seconds,” he recalled of the latter gig, revealing Brando had kicked him off the set for talking while the actor was trying to learn his lines between takes. It was bruising experience, given Brando had been one of his life long idols, in an admiration instilled in him by his mother.
Sutherland credited his father’s agent Ron Meyer with giving him his first break in CAA’s legendary mailroom.
“It felt a little strange. My parents didn’t particularly love agents. Growing up, the community of actors and artists around them weren’t at dinner, shall we say, celebrating agents,” he recalled. “I thought they were sending me to prison, but it turned out to be the best experience I ever had in my life.”
Even then, Sutherland said, it took him time to find his “spot” at the agency.
“I was supposed to be in the talent department, but I was not a natural fit. And truly what we do, the independent, international stuff, didn’t really start until around 2005, or at least, didn’t start to flourish, because everything was being made by studios,” he explained.
“I was thrown into a department that was mostly a servicing department for clients who had a project that they wanted to do when they weren’t working on a big studio movie. But then the business evolved after the economic crisis in 2006 and a lot more of these movies were left to people like us to go figure out financing on.”
Some two decades later, CAA Media Finance is the go-to for many producers trying to put together an elevated independent project.
Glen Basner, Roeg Sutherland and Mike Fleming Jr at the Zurich Summit
Long-time collaborator Basner suggested 60 to 70% of the independent films successfully released over the past 20 years, had been supported in some shape or form by Sutherland and the Media Finance team. Sutherland runs the division with fellow Co-Head Ben Kramer, also a perennial figure at major festivals and markets and who steers the dealmaking and operations with Sutherland.
“That’s maybe true,” Sutherland said of Basner’s estimate, “but it doesn’t come from our group, it comes from our clients and we’re lucky to represent some of the best people in the world that give us the ability to deliver the packages that you finance. We’re great middlemen,” Sutherland responded.
None of it would be possible without long-time trusted financing partners such as Basner, AGC Studios CEO Stuart Ford or international sales maverick Vincent Maraval, he added.
“Our purpose is to make sure there’s a healthy ecosystem in the marketplace, to make sure that we take care of our clients and that we set up movies in an appropriate way, that not only respects their needs and their desires, but also the needs and desires of the film financing community with international distributors and whoever may be financing,” said Sutherland.
“Sometimes it’s worldwide deals. For the most part, it’s piecemeal, with a foreign sales agent being part of it, and selling off international territories, bringing in an equity investor, making sure that the equity investor is in a safe position if they go into making a movie without having distribution in place.”
Sutherland said pulling together the finance for early films in his career such as Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke, and Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, had been part of his learning process.
“When you’re that young and don’t know how anything works, and kind of learning on the fly, you just kind of trust the process. You don’t over complicate and overthink things,” he said.
“Vincent Maraval told me, ‘We’re going do The Wrestler.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, we’re going to do The Wrestler.’ Now, I would ask him about 400 questions about how much he can pre-sell, how much we’re going to be able to borrow against the territories that he doesn’t presell, and where am I going to be able to find them at four o’clock in the morning when we need to sign a deal?”
A big part of the learning curve, said Sutherland, was learning to roll with the punches that arise in the process of pulling a project together.
“It’s like the movie Force Majeure. The avalanche is going to show up at some point in time, and then it’s a question of whether you run off the balcony or, you stay there and protect your family,” he said.
Looking back at the raft of films CAA Media Finance has helped to bring to fruition over the past two decades, Sutherland said he and his team would never seek to take credit for a film’s existence.
“We help the community get the tools to understand how to sell it, but it doesn’t happen because of us. Take Black Swan, very difficult movie to set up, but its genius is Darren Aronofsky and Natalie Portman. Sometimes, it takes a little bit of help to get people to understand what the director’s vision is and for them to connect with it. But ultimately, we’re just facilitators.”
He suggested that Black Swan had gotten lost in translation in the conversations between the director and the financiers. The issue had been that the screenplay read like a drama, while Aronofsky’s vision was for it to be a psychological thriller.
“It wasn’t on the page, so people didn’t see it automatically. They’re like, ‘Is he going to tell us it’s a thriller and then deliver a drama?” recalled Sutherland.
He filled the gap in the budget through producer Brian Oliver, who had raised $8 million from Louisiana-based investors at the time.
“He’s like, ‘Roeg, I’m going to make four horror movies.’ And I’m like, ‘No, you’re not, you’re going to do Black Swan,” recalled Sutherland.
“That worked well for him,” he added, saying Oliver had made $70 million on the back of his investment, after the film grossed $329 million worldwide.
Looking at more recent history, Basner recalled how Sutherland had spearheaded the virtual Cannes market, with Maraval, when the physical festival had been shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
“What were we supposed to do? Lick our wounds and say, ‘Oh God, the business is dead. We can’t create content’,” he said. “People were stuck at home. We had to figure out a way to get movies made. There’d never been a better time for us to sell movies. The only way we could do that was to create these virtual markets.”
“We would have weekly phone calls with 500 people on it. We were like, ‘How are we going to reorganize ourselves, and how are we going to make it exciting?,” he said.
Sutherland added that the success of the initiative had been down to the fact that the entire independent community had come together.
“The only way that we succeed is when we work together. When we work against each other, nothing good happens. When my entire team comes together and works with the entire independent community and we all come together, that’s when we’re successful.”
Roeg Sutherland at the Zurich Summit
