FEATURE FOCUS ■ INTERVIEW: ALEXANDER RODNYANSKY east/west A One of the biggest fi gures in the Russian
entertainment arena, Alexander Rodnyansky has turned his sights to the US. With his fi rst English-
language fi lm in competition at Berlin, he spoke to Mike Goodridge about his ambitions in fi lm
lexander Rodnyansky got in touch with Billy Bob Thornton when a Rus- sian reporter thought they would make a good match. They met, liked
each other, and Thornton introduced Rodnyan- sky to his manager, Geyer Kosinski of Media Talent Group (MTG). It did not take long for Rodnyansky to decide
to back Thornton’s next fi lm as a director, Jayne Mansfi eld’s Car, which has its world premiere in competition here on Monday. He and Kosinski produced the film, which features Thornton, Robert Duvall, John Hurt and Kevin Bacon. Kosinski also introduced him to another cli-
ent, director DJ Caruso (Disturbia, I Am Number Four), who visited the set of the Thornton fi lm in Atlanta. After many conversations, Rodnyansky came on board to produce Caruso’s long-cher- ished fi lm of the young adult novel The Goats, which is in post-production. The success of the relationship between Rod-
nyansky’s AR Films and Kosinski’s MTG led to the recent formation of a $120m fund which will see the two companies developing and produc- ing up to six US fi lms over the next two years. And Rodnyansky has teamed up with Sergei
Bespalov’s Los Angeles-based Aldamisa to form AR Films US, a fi nancing and production company whose fi lms will be sold by Aldamisa International. AR Films US’s fi rst two fi lms are Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills and an unti- tled Renny Harlin thriller set in the Ural Mountains. But if you think Alexander Rodnyansky, who
is Ukrainian, is another foreigner about to be taken for a ride in Hollywood, you’re wrong. Rodnyansky is a titan in the Russian entertain- ment business, a film producer and director with distribution and festival operations as well as a background revolutionising the TV land- scape in the post-communist era. He has produced some of the most notable
Russian films of the last decade, including blockbusters such as Fyodor Bondarchuk’s 9th Company and The Inhabited Island (and the currently shooting Bondarchuk epic Stalin- grad) as well as art films from Andrei Zvya- gintsev (Elena), Alexander Sokurov (The Sun) and Alexander Mindadze (Innocent Saturday), and international productions such as Nana Dzhordzhadze’s A Chef In Love and Regis Warg- nier’s East/West, both of which won Oscar nominations for best foreign-language fi lm.
Russian-US slate “When I decided to focus exclusively on fi lm in 2009,” Rodnyansky explains, “I realised very fast that Russian movies have a basic weak- ness, which to some extent is the same as most European movies — they don’t sell outside their home country. Even if it’s a very successful fi lm in the Russian market or a genre movie or a fi lm by an internationally famous auteur, it’s just hard to see these fi lms crossing the border. “But once the budgets of Russian films
started to grow, it became comparable to pro- ducing independent fi lms in the US, so I decided to go to the US and explore the opportunities of making fi lms there. That’s why I set up a com- pany able to produce fi lms in the US that could be distributed in my part of the world.”
■ 22 Screen International at the Berlinale February 12, 2012
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