Photo Credit Jim Sheldon

Honeydripper's director John Sayles and producer Maggie Renzi speak with Jane Green over at Film Publicity Help. Following is an excerpt of the conversation:

FPH: Did you envision from the beginning, while making the film, or even before script completion, that you would use the self-distribution model?

JS: It’s been a long road. We spent about a year looking for money for the movie and when I say we, I mean Maggie, and we didn’t get anywhere. It had a script that’s a good script, it’s a $5 million movie, that never changed, so people knew the scope of it. Danny Glover attached himself right away, so Maggie was able to use his name as the lead, and nobody was interested. So that’s when we started thinking in that year, and of course in the last part of the year, we also realized the cotton was gone. You can’t shoot the movie if the cotton isn’t in the ground, and so we’re going to have to wait a whole other year before the cotton comes up again, that we’re going to have to do more of this ourselves, including, it turned out, finance it totally ourselves. And if you’re going to finance it totally yourself, you’re left with an awful lot of control over how it’s being released.

MR: Especially because of our experience on Silver City, which we also ended up funding ourselves, and then we sold it to a distributor, and the distributor dropped it, basically, after a disappointing opening. So I felt very sure from the time we decided we were going to fund the film ourselves, which was fairly early on, that unless something major came along to dissuade me from this, it looked to me like the very best way to do this was to create a new distribution company, because we’ve worked with so many over the years, and there wasn’t a single one of them I would have gone back to and said “you’re the right one”. There are a handful we haven’t worked with, but I think a lot of them have the same fundamental issues. So no, I was sure from the very beginning, I remember talking about it before we went up to the Toronto Film Festival, which was our international premiere, with the team, just to say “I promise you I will be open minded if someone comes up to me and says here’s 10 million dollars and we will fulfill everything you’re talking about” and that person never stepped forward.

I think a part of it is we’ve set the bar so high now for distributors, it’s different from the way they’re working. There’s a scene in the movie when Danny Glover’s character is waiting for the train carrying this guitar player who he thinks is going to come and rescue his club and his finances and his marriage and everything else and Keb Mo’s character is sitting there smirking at Danny Glover’s character while he’s waiting for the train, and says to him “nothing on that train gonna change your luck, Tyrone”. And that’s the way I really feel about distribution. I got a good look across the landscape that I’m quite familiar with because we’ve been doing this for a long time, and I thought there’s nobody there that’s going to change our luck, we’re going to have to change it ourselves.

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