| Tougher Climate Calls for More Ingenuity |
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| with Alexandra Raffé | |
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Page 1 of 2 If Alexandra Raffé were making her first feature film today instead of 20 years ago, when she produced the hit I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, she'd do it totally differently. Sheila McCarthy as Polly in I've Heard the Mermaids Singing The mid-80s, says Raffé, a veteran producer who is the principal at the Toronto-based production company Savi Media Inc., was the era for idiosyncratic, independent art films. The international appetite for them was huge, and the Canadian funding plentiful. As well, English Canada had just realized that it needed to foster independent film and was prepared to take risks to reach that goal. More new films are vying for fewer screens Today, says Raffé, there's little money, no international market for art films, and more new films being released vying for fewer screens. She says that if the odds against Mermaids succeeding were 1 zillion to one in 1986, today they would be 9 zillion to one.  Theatrical Poster for I've Heard the Mermaids SingingMermaids was Raffé's first film and the second for Patricia Rozema, who wrote the script. The two started with a loan of $5,000 from Andre Bennett at Cinephile, a distribution company specializing in esoteric films. That enabled them to put together the $365,000 budget for the film, made up of deferred fees, about $150,000 from Telefilm and about $100,000 from the Ontario Film Development Corporation (OFDC). Raffé says with a laugh that the OFDC was so newly minted that her application was number 003. (She went on to be the OFDC's chief executive from 1994 to 1998, and to develop a national program at the National Screen Institute to help filmmakers make their first features.) Continued... |
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