CAA’s Roeg Sutherland on Bridging Gaps, Bolstering Indie Film Market

CAA’s Roeg Sutherland looked back on his eventful career and discussed the changing landscape of the global film industry at the Zurich Film Festival, where he’s being honored with this year’s Game Changer Award.

Taking part in the Zurich Summit industry forum, where he’s been a regular for years, Sutherland pushed back against the idea of a “game changer,” at least in the film business, joking that “LeBron James can be a game changer.”

At CAA, where Sutherland co-heads the Media Finance department and the International Film Group, finding solutions for clients and ensuring films get made despite major obstacles is a big part of his job.

“Our goal, our job is to make sure that whatever happens, if there’s a pandemic, if there are two strikes, if the studios aren’t buying, if China closes down, if Russia’s at war, whatever happens, we need to figure out a way to get these movies made. And that now is changing,” said Sutherland.

He said the outfit always strives to “set up their movies in an appropriate way (…) and respects the needs and desires of the film financing community, with international distributors and whoever may finance.”

“Sometimes it’s worldwide deals; for the most part, it’s piecemealed 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 pretty safe position if they go into making a movie without having distribution in place,” he said.

Going beyond that, it’s also about filling gaps, he added. “If we feel there’s a gap in the marketplace, if there is a gap in Canada and we need help in setting up a distribution company, we’ll do that. If there’s a gap in France or there’s a gap in Germany or a gap in the United States — we’re always thinking about how do we make it better, easier, so that so that the independent film market is actually able to thrive?”

CAA’s independent international business didn’t really start until around 2005, Sutherland said. Prior to that, everything was being made by studios and that particular department 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 actually left to people like us to go and finance or to figure out financing on.”

Sutherland attributed some of his early successes to “just absolutely pure luck,” among them Darren Aronofsky’s  “The Wrestler.”

“When you’re that young and you really don’t know how anything works, you’re kind of learning on the fly. You just kind of trust the process and that it’s going to work out, and you don’t over complicate it and overthink things. I overcomplicate and overthink things now in a mercurial way; it’s much worse now. Then, I just believed what [producer] Vincent Maraval told me. He was like, ‘We’re going to 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 you could pre-sell, how much are we going to be able to borrow against some of the territories that he didn’t presale? Where am I going to be able to find him at 4 in the morning when we need to sign the deal?”

He went on to another memorable success with Aronofsky’s next film, 2010’s “Black Swan” despite difficulties in setting it up.

“‘Black Swan’s’ genius is Darren Aronofsky and Natalie Portman. And 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. Ultimately, we’re just facilitators. Some things are maybe lost in translation between someone who’s purely creative and someone that’s purely financial.”

CAA sits between both worlds and bridges that gap, he added. “Sometimes we do it successfully and sometimes we do it less successfully.”

On “Black Swan,” part of the challenge was explaining Aronofsky’s actual vision of the film.

“People were reading it as a drama, and he wanted to direct a thriller. If you read the script, it really read as a drama. If you spoke to Darren about it and his vision, it was clearly going to be a psychological thriller, and it was going to be, ‘You’re going to be out of breath the entire time,’ which is exactly what a movie delivered, except it wasn’t on the page. People don’t see that automatically.”

Sutherland then convinced producer Brian Oliver to back the film, which went on to become a worldwide hit.

Recalling his start at the CAA years ago, Sutherland said it was CAA co-founder Ron Meyer, at the time his father’s agent, who suggested to his parents a job at the company. “I was sent to the mailroom, which felt a little strange because my parents didn’t particularly love agents or speak about their fondness for agents growing up. And the community of actors and artists around them, let’s just say at dinner they weren’t celebrating agents. So I thought they were sending me to prison. But it turned out to be the best experience I’ve ever had in my life.”

A career in acting, like father Donald and brother Kiefer, was never in the cards, especially after a less than impressive performance in a musical play in college and a short stint as a stand-in a movie with an irate Marlon Brando.

“I can’t deal with rejection. I didn’t realize that in actually everything you do in life you have to deal with a level of rejection, but in acting, you’re dealing with rejection on a daily basis. You want to do something? You’re lucky to get one out of 100 things.”

CAA Media Finance‘s current and forthcoming projects include Jacques Audiard’s Cannes award winner “Emilia Peréz”; Jayro Bustamante’s cartel thriller “El Sombreron”; David and Nathan Zellner’s sci-fi comedy “Alpha Gang,” starring Cate Blanchett; Sophie Hyde’s family drama “Jimpa,” with Olivia Colman and John Lithgow; and Henry Dunham’s World War II thriller “Perdition,” featuring Sam Claflin and Rupert Friend, which it’s co-repping with UTA Independent Film Group in North America.