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EXCLUSIVE: It takes a certain kind of confidence to take a finished indie film to market with no presales, but if that completed film is a $24 million Spanish-language musical directed by a French auteur about a Mexican cartel leader that transitions from male to female, you’d better hope your sales agent has a backbone of steel and the experience to deliver.
Enter The Veterans co-founders Vincent Maraval and Kim Fox, who both arrived at this year’s Cannes Film Festival tasked with selling Emilia Pérez, the genre-defying musical from festival darling Jacques Audiard, which was competing for the Palme d’Or with just one key territory sale to France (Pathé) on the balance sheet.
“We knew it would be difficult to presell quickly because there were so many obstacles,” Maraval tells Deadline of the Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofia Gascón-led project. “Initial feedback from some distributors was that the project was too weird. There were obstacles in the language and the concept but we think Jacques [Audiard] is a major director and so we believed until the end that the film would be strong. Going into Cannes, we had seen footage so we knew what we had, but you never know how the market will answer.”
“Never before have I gone to a market feeling so strongly about a completed movie that had not sold anywhere,” says Fox. “That’s not the way I’ve historically operated. I’ve always pre-sold. That’s always been the mandate. Emilia Pérez just further solidifies our position in the marketplace and how we approach movies in that when we say we’re going to do something, we actually do it.”
The stakes were particularly high for this project, which was produced by Pascal Caucheteux and Grégoire Sorlat’s Why Not Productions. Financed in part through the French system via soft money, investment from French distributor Pathé and from its Pay-TV deal with Canal+, there remained a gap of $10 million. Maraval, who had a long history with Why Not having sold a number of its titles throughout the years, found two key partners to put in the equity: David Taghioff’s Library Pictures International and Saint Laurent Productions, the film production company of French fashion house Yves Saint Laurent.
“For us, the first step was to find financing for the gap and then we would sell the project for them,” says Maraval. “We probably could have presold it very quickly if we didn’t have to cover a $10 million gap, but we were there for them not to lose money but make money. But it was a big gamble to have that gap and come to market with almost zero.”
But it paid off. Following the film’s world premiere at the Palais des Festivals (which ended with an 11-minute standing ovation), Fox says the phone “started ringing and never stopped.”
“We were in the office at the crack of dawn the next morning to put together the puzzle pieces of the best companies and most ambitious companies that wanted to tackle this and take it on.”
They ended up locking $16 million of sales for Emilia Pérez, including a high-seven figure deal to Netflix for U.S. and UK rights, and the project won the Cannes Jury Prize while its main actresses shared the Best Actress Prize. The film is France’s official submission for Best International Feature at the Oscars this year and Netflix is giving the film a big awards push, which Maraval notes will continue to help the film’s prospects. “It’s been a profitable experience for everyone,” he says.
Fox says: “We went into Cannes really knowing what we had but then to get in the room for the premiere and see the response, it was just the most amazing professional experience of my career.”
Emilia Pérez, while a shiny success story for the indie film market, is just one piece of the greater puzzle for The Veterans, which has gone from strength to strength over the past seven years.
The company completed more than $100 million in sales in Cannes this year – a staggering figure in today’s fragile ecosystem – with projects like Jason Statham starrer Mutiny, an action-thriller directed by Plane’s Jean-François Richet, and Walter Salles’ directorial comeback I’m Still Here scoring big territory deals at the market.
The company also handled international sales for Luca Guadagnino’s Venice competition title Queer, starring Daniel Craig, while San Sebastián saw the world premieres of two of its other titles: Audrey Diwan’s Emmanuelle and Johnny Depp’s second directorial effort Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness. Additionally, filming began this year in Budapest, Hungary, for the female-led action-thriller Ballerina Overdrive, starring Uma Thurman and Lana Condor. The Veterans, we can reveal, has sold all of international to Amazon for the latter.
For Maraval and Fox, it’s a slate that is reflective of their taste and the kinds of films they want to be reputed for delivering: a blend of commercial and quality action titles with eclectic and smart arthouse fare for the international theatrical and streaming marketplace.
Veterans assemble
In 2015, Wild Bunch co-founder Maraval was keen to set up a sales company in the U.S. to package and sell third-party projects with a focus on English-language titles. It was the same year that Wild Bunch had merged with Germany’s Senator Film, to become pan-European film group Wild Bunch AG. Maraval and his Wild Bunch co-founder Brahim Chioua still had majority ownership of their standalone international sales company Wild Bunch International and, in 2019, CAA Media Finance bought the remaining 20% stake from Wild Bunch AG. That company is now called Goodfellas.
Maraval ultimately ended up launching LA-based outfit Insiders in 2015, with an aim to sell and package indie films with budgets above $15M, giving third-party financiers the opportunity to become equity owners in the company. Why Not Productions was an original investor in Insiders, says Maraval, as the company was looking to move into English-language films at the time. Emilia Pérez draws a nice full circle on that relationship this year.
Maraval also had a good relationship with prolific producer Marc Butan after working together across two James Gray titles – We Own the Night and Two Lovers. Butan, it transpired, was also keen to form a similar sales company through which he could launch his own productions.
Butan had been working with Annapurna and ex-QED sales exec Fox, who had a wealth of experience selling big-budget, high level English-language fare. He suggested she and Maraval meet.
“The connection was very natural and very quick because we had a lot of shared experiences, being in the business for a long time,” said Maraval. “When you work with someone who has done the same job that you’ve done for so long, you know quickly what’s good, what’s wrong and how it works.”
“I was a little intimidated, frankly,” says Fox of meeting Maraval for the first time. “But the second we sat down it was like an immediate connection, and we got along right away. It was like I had known him for years and it’s been that way since. It’s very seamless.”
In 2016, Maraval’s Insiders and Butan’s MadRiver Pictures consolidated their foreign sales operations to form IMR International with Fox at the helm. Since then, there have been a couple of rebrands: IMR became Mad River International in 2019 but when that created some confusion in the marketplace as the company also handled sales for third-party producers as well as Butan’s productions, they ultimately decided on The Veterans in 2022.
“We thought it was fun and, unfortunately, quite accurate,” quips Fox. “While this is the name that sticks, our goals, our operations and the projects that we go for, and support haven’t changed at all.”
The company now focuses on seven to eight projects per year that are “special and original.” Maraval and Butan are both shareholders in The Veterans and collaborate on projects frequently such as Mutiny and Gerard Butler starrer Plane, both of which Butan produced.
Past Veterans titles have included Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, Audiard’s Sisters Brothers, Michael Keaton starrer Worth, Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here and David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lakeamong others.
“I wouldn’t say there is one kind of film we like but we are probably a bit snobbish,” says Maraval. “We like high profile and quality themes. We don’t do things only for a commercial reason. Of course, it needs to have a commercial appeal, and it needs to have an economy. But the first step when we discuss projects together is, ‘Did we like the script? Do we like the director? Do we like the package?’”
The two tastemakers have a unique relationship in that Fox’s commercial sensibilities balance well with Maraval’s prestige and European sensibilities and connections. They consider themselves well positioned to bridge the U.S. and Europe in terms of distribution, filmmakers, talent and producing partners.
Maraval admits that one of his biggest frustrations while working at Wild Bunch, was being unable to do the kind of higher end films that Fox was selling while at Annapurna and he says that films like Mutiny or Plane are “actually very close to my taste in cinema.”
“At Wild Bunch, we were a bit limited to arthouse,” he says. “We did some genre and some things that were closer to the cinema that I like but we couldn’t afford them, and also, we weren’t a U.S. company. With Kim, we have similar taste in terms of quality, but she has the experience in valuing that type of film that I don’t have.”
Conversely, says Fox, it’s been Maraval’s deep industry relationships that have brought the company access to films like Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here.
“I would have never seen that kind of film before our association together,” she says. “I had been to a Cannes premiere maybe twice before and now, it’s derigeur. It’s part of what I do every year when we’re in Cannes, so it flows both ways.”
At present, the pair say their slate tends to be around 30% high-level action titles, with 70% across arthouse films and lower-budget genre titles like Ballerina Overdrive. “We would love to have more big action films, but there are fewer available on the market,” says Maraval.
The relationship with Mad River, notes Fox, is “very crucial” to their selling of bigger commercial projects, that can often be challenging to put together. “They’re expensive relative to the marketplace but they are quite pre-sellable.”
Going into AFM, the company will be launching sales on a number of key titles: Adam Driver, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong starrer Paper Tiger from director James Gray; Theo James starrer The Hole; Lear Rex, starring Al Pacino as tragic monarch King Lear alongside Jessica Chastain as his villainous, power-hungry, oldest daughter Goneril; and Jim O’Hanlon’s ensemble comedy Fackham Hall, starring Thomasin Mackenzie, Katherine Waterston, Emma Laird, from an idea developed by UK comedian Jimmy Carr.
The Goodfellas equation
For Maraval, who sits across both The Veterans and Goodfellas, the difference between the two international sales operations is clear in that Veterans operates not just as an international sales agent but also facilitates packaging projects.
Goodfellas, meanwhile, co-finances the films they sell and focuses largely on international projects. Led by head of sales Eva Diederix, that company works across a larger number of projects per year (15-20). “With Goodfellas, it means that there are films where we bought the international rights and we are reselling it – we don’t work for third parties,” he says. “We work for ourselves.”
He recalls when Wild Bunch took international rights for Oliver Stone’s 2016 project Snowden, which was financed by a third party. “Selling Snowden was taking all of our time, and we were not selling the Goodfellas [Wild Bunch] titles and that’s why we decided to create Insiders,” he says. “It’s a different job to put a movie together for a third party or a producer versus selling things when you have time, or you control the rights.”
While both Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here have elements that might suggest they would fall under the Goodfellas banner, these were different cases in that Maraval and Fox found the financing for the titles. “That is not something that Goodfellas does at all. They never work with a financier – they purely sell their own line-up.”
Looking ahead Maraval and Fox say they want to keep making the “high level quality films” from directors like Audiard and Salles. “My only desire is to assist ambitious producers and unique filmmakers to create the films of their dreams by bringing them our knowledge of the international marketplace and corresponding financing solutions.”
Fox adds: “For the future, we will continue with the development of quality and commercial films. We feel pretty bullish and excited about what’s next.”
