EMILIO FERRARI: People don’t fuck me on the set either.

EMILIO FERRARI: It’s a balancing act. I set the ground rules for this movie. It’s my way. The buck stops with me. I decide what happens, when it happens, how it happens. But I still give my keys the freedom to do what they need to do. All my keys hire their own staff. I don’t interrupt them, because they are responsible for them. So I let people do what they are good at and I don’t interrupt. But if they make a mistake, then they answer to me. Everybody pretty much knows that if they cross me or do anything there will be hell to pay. But at the same time, yeah I’m young and aggressive…

CHRIS NEUMER: …you forgot good looking. We’ll add that in later.

EMILIO FERRARI: We’ll add that in later. The thing is nobody cares about the money except for the guys whose money it actually is. All the guys who are responsible for it. My staff does it fine. They go over, they make extra money. But it’s my job and the few people I have on staff to tell me if we’re going over. I’ve been on set almost every day. If I wasn’t they would have gone over every day for sure. It’s not the director’s fault, it’s just that everybody wants to shoot more because they want it to look better, but there’s a line you don’t cross. So I’m actually on set every day at the end of each day to make sure that doesn’t happen. Honestly, it would have happened every day otherwise. It’s nobody’s fault, it just would have happened. And we’ve gone over certain days, which is okay. Because I have that all in the schedule. Also, I want to make sure I have a film so if something is missing and I don’t think they need to reshoot it, I have Brian reshoot it. As a director he and I get along really well so it’s not an ego thing for him. I’ll just sit there and tell him certain things I don’t like. You can take it or you can leave it, it’s just my opinion as a producer. I’m sitting there looking with him at the monitor saying, “Maybe this will look good.” It’s just my opinion. And he’s very good at picking things up that he thinks will help the film as a director, and that’s one of the reasons I picked him as a director. And I’m easy to work with too. He comes to me and says, “Look I want to do this, I want to do that,” and I say, “You can do anything you want as long as we don’t go over budget or it doesn’t require an extra setup or we have to move.” For example, we just changed something where we’re shooting outside. We don’t need cops, but we’re going to do it really quick. Those are the things we look at. But at the end of the day, I have to have a really good time and I have to actually like the people I work with. They don’t have to be my friends, but I have to be able to get along with them at least for that part of the film. That’s really important. I don’t want to work on a movie where I’m having a miserable time. It’s not worth it.

EMILIO FERRARI: It happens all the time. It happens all the time.

CHRIS NEUMER: It never comes through in the final project, ever. You can never, ever tell ever.

EMILIO FERRARI: I walked out of movies that I didn’t pay for.

EMILIO FERRARI: The funny thing is, I haven’t done one film where everything has just worked. Everything perfectly. Doesn’t work. The films that I make sometimes that are great to make, don’t click at the box office.

EMILIO FERRARI: I did a small independent film called I Know What You Did Last Winter which was an extreme sports film that I made with my own money. It was the most profit I ever made because I shot in 15 days with around 300 stunts. It’s impossible to do. Everyone told me it was impossible. I went all over the world and I made it and it was great and it made money.

EMILIO FERRARI: 15 days altogether.

EMILIO FERRARI: No, not together.

EMILIO FERRARI: No. I shot 15 days together in California, then I went to Alaska for 2 days then I did another 5 or 6 days all over Europe. But a movie with almost 250 stunts, people said it’s impossible, you can’t do it. But I made it and it’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever done and I actually made 90 minutes of it. So, it was very hard. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Trying to make a movie with no money with all those stunts. Making a movie about people talking is easy, you can take four locations and shoot. Trying to make a movie with 100 locations with 5,000 people with 200-300 stunts where people are getting hurt all over the world, that you need a lot of money. And I made that movie for under one million and sold it everywhere and made my money back. I’m very proud of that film. A small film. But I have a lot more movies, I haven’t really, my career is still kind of on its way, I haven’t really gotten to a point where I can pick all the movies I want. I can say, “Hey, I’m doing it now.” Now I’m starting to do that. The one I’m doing I handpicked it. I met this woman, I wrote the movie about her. It’s a true story. It deals with animal abuse. It’s a great movie that humane societies have come onboard to try to help me make it. These are the kinds of movies I like that are based on people’s stories. Comedies, I’m not crazy about comedies. I like true stories, dramas, I like stuff that makes you cry, that makes you laugh. Comedy of course makes you laugh. But those are the kinds of films that. And this one will be fun because I get along with all the actors, they’re all great to work with, which is also very important. You want to work with actors that you actually get along with and I get along with all of these actors, they’re friends of mine, we’ve hung out, which is important. I hire actors where I know their agents well. When you make a six million dollar movie, it’s good to have all of those things.

EMILIO FERRARI: Let me tell you the story, Ian is my neighbor and he’s a good friend of mine. I brought him on to do this part but he had a previous commitment with Lifetime and Lifetime would not let him out of the deal they had. Actually they were not shooting the days we were shooting but they had him on hold. He had some issues with Lifetime and they wouldn’t let him do it. He really, really wanted to do it. I spoke with him yesterday and it wasn’t his fault. He’s a good friend of mine. He would have flown himself on a private plane but they would not let him out of the deal. And that’s something that he and the producers have issues with that and he’s still pissed about it, but he wanted to do it.

EMILIO FERRARI: True. The only reason I gave him the role is because he’s a friend of mine and I thought it would help his career and he knows that.

EMILIO FERRARI: Yes. Ian’s part was really small. I didn’t think he was going to be a key in the film but he fit the role really well and I thought it would be good. Yeah he’s not really a name anymore but he’s a friend of mine and I thought he fit the part really well and the actors liked him. Heather liked him.

EMILIO FERRARI: To answer your question, no. It wouldn’t have hurt the film. It would have actually helped the film a little bit and it would have helped him a lot… which was my reason for putting him in it. It was my idea not his. He didn’t even know I was shooting a film. I called him and said, “Look I got a part for you, you want it or what?” and he read the script right away and said, “I want it. I want to come down now.” And then he said, “Just so you know I have this issue but I’ll handle it, I’ll take care of it.” But he didn’t handle it the right way and it is what it is. We have no hard feelings. We’re good friends. I see him all the time, he’s two houses down from me. But you’re right. You don’t want to put certain actors in a movie that automatically make it a B or C movie. You want to be very careful about it and you’re right. If I would have put him in one the leads, that would have been an issue. But being in one of the smaller roles wasn’t an issue. Again, a movie like this can either break out and do really well or not. There’s a fine line that separates a comedy from being successful and not being successful. And nobody knows what the reason is. When you put it together and you edit it, it either works or it doesn’t. That’s something that’s really scary about comedies. If this was an action thriller, or a drama, or a horror film I could by now tell how this movie was going to look. My sales guys would tell me, “This is what we’re going to make on it. This is the upside, this is the downside.”

EMILIO FERRARI: Yes, for Cannes. The movie actually won’t be ready for Cannes.

EMILIO FERRARI: It’s in May. I leave April 5th for MidTV, which is a television market in Cannes. I’ll have a trailer for the film by then, and then when I come back, from May 15th to May 24th is the Cannes Film Festival/Cannes Market which we have a huge presence every year. I’ve been going there for about 12, 13, 14 years. I have a lot of my sales guys go there. I have a huge library of films. I own approximately 400 films. So we sell a lot of our movies and TV shows. But for that our movie is not going to be ready. I tried but I didn’t want to rush it. So what I’m going to do is cut a 20-minute promo for the film, on film and we’ll screen that there so people have an idea to see what’s coming up. And so when we finish shooting next week Brian and I, with the editor, will pick the scenes we want to show. It’s really me picking the scenes I want to show, but I want Brian to be there to do his director’s cut. I let the editors do their cut, then I let the directors do their cut, but I have total control over the cut of the film, not because I’m the producer but because I’m the distributor. Then I go in and change something if I want to change something. And then we lock the film, get the music and all the effects in and screen it at the next market, which will probably be Toronto. So, we want to get a film like this into festivals too and get the free publicity from that and if it clicks then we’ll get a North American deal. And we’ll get the studios to look at it and they’ll screen it in their own private screening facilities and then we’ll know who wants what. And what I normally do, domestically, is that I will pretty much always sell the film to a studio. Always. Whether it’s Lionsgate, Columbia, I work with pretty much any studio, whoever likes the film. And then for foreign, we do it ourselves. We are the distributors. We’ll go to the television stations and actually sell each country separately. And then based on how the deal is in North America it affects all my foreign deals. Because everybody looks at the US and how a movie performs for how it will behave in other countries. So if I get a good deal in the US that will increase my performance in other places. This is how we do it.

CHRIS NEUMER: That’s pretty much how the business goes.

EMILIO FERRARI: Pretty much. We operate on a small level but we operate exactly how the studios do. Exactly. I have the same clients they do, they just may be less—it’s a little bit smaller… a lot smaller [with me]. But my company’s pretty much considered a place that studios actually buy from. They can only make so many movies. There are companies like mine that make the rest of the movies that they buy. Then there are guys at the bottom that make all the little, little, little stuff that you will never see. It just goes directly to video or sells foreign. It never comes out in the U.S. or if it does there will be one or two DVDs at Blockbuster. Then there are the guys in the middle that make movies for between five and twenty million dollars. This is where I come in. They can buy movies like mine cheap and then release it. They’re not spending $40 million on a movie, because that’s the minimum budget of a studio film. And I don’t have the overhead they do, so they can buy my film for a few million, take the North American rights and release it and do very well with it.

EMILIO FERRARI: Well depending on the size of the film it could be anywhere from a million to five or six or seven million.

EMILIO FERRARI: I would never say that. That’s like jinxing yourself.

EMILIO FERRARI: I would be extremely happy if I got my entire budget. That would be great.

EMILIO FERRARI: It’s more important how the movie is getting released. If the movie gets a wide theatrical release then I’ll be ecstatic. I don’t have to worry about money then because the studio’s making a killing, and I’ll be fine. If it goes directly to video, I won’t be crazy but I’ll be okay, because video is a big market too. It more has to do with how the movie is released and if they do a good job releasing the film. If they do a good job releasing the film then I’ll make my money and that’s more important to me because six million’s not a big budget. I can recoup most of that in home video if I have a really nice deal because it’s got the cast for it. It’s kind of quirky, it’s a funny comedy and it’s an R-rated film. It will never be PG-13.

EMILIO FERRARI: They’re not huge, huge heads. But good heads. And at the end of the day I cover my ass with that. Will I be able to go to cable and all that stuff? Yeah. Will I be able to go to HBO? I don’t know. HBO is one of my clients, so is Showtime, so are all those networks. They all pick and choose what they like. It’s not a PG rated film so there’s a lot of gross stuff in the movie. It’s like when they did Knocked UP or 40 Year Old Virgin, it’s got that gross humor to it. And this movie does that too. So we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. But I feel good about it, I’m excited. I go into the editing room next week. I get the composers, get the music put together and see how it looks. And then I just have to see the reaction I get out of my clients. I can tell a lot by the reaction I get out of my clients. Because the guys who come to watch my movies are the guys who make the decisions. And I don’t have to worry about the audience because that’s not my concern. My job is to sell to my buyers which are the guys who own the TV stations and the studios. Their job is to get it to the people. I make movies for guys like us, but if I have to convince the people, that’s a lot easier job. I have to convince the studios and they’re a lot harder to convince than the public. If I release the movie myself I have a better shot of making more money because I can relate to the audience. Studios are very different. They have their own particular agendas. They have their own political stuff. They didn’t want a movie, I won’t give you the name of the star, but I worked with a really big star and she had another studio film coming out and they kind of blackballed my film because they wanted that movie to be in the front. So it’s a very political atmosphere. Nobody wants an independent film to come out and do better than their film… particularly if you have the same actor. So the studios have a different agenda when they buy a film, unlike me. My job is that I want people to love the movie and go see it, whether they go to the theatre or rent it. Studios work differently. They have to go through all this political stuff that they have to go through with all the other actors and producers before they release a movie. A lot of times they have really great movies that they never release because they have issues with whomever. My job is to get a good deal for the film so that the movie actually comes out, then actually get the money up front. I’ll take less money for a better deal than more money for a shittier deal.

EMILIO FERRARI: Did you hear about Brian’s birthday? It was the first day of shooting and we had a huge scene where some chick threw a cake in his face. I don’t know if you heard about it. I was joking about it. I had this beautiful Polish model that day working and I told her jokingly to go do it and she threw it not like lightly, but hard. Like100 miles an hour. Knocked him over. And we gave him a present. It was a blowup doll. And he opened this box and a blowup doll popped out and condoms went everywhere.

CHRIS NEUMER: Well, Brian does need that.

EMILIO FERRARI: He does.

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