Lincia Daniel assesses one of the sessions held at the annual London Production Show

The entrepreneurial Robert Jones, producer of The Usual Suspects gave fascinating insight into the pros and cons of financing a film through the European co- production route. His case study was the financing of the 13million dollar movie The Serpents Kiss.

The film was an of ficial tripartite coproduction between the UK, France and Germany Most of the budget was raised in these countries with additional finance from Ireland and Eurimage - the pan-European coproduction fund. Robert chose the co-production route for creative reasons and argued that producers should find sources of funding appropriate to their artistic goals rather than compromise the integrity of their work to qualify for subsidies.

In this case, the people Robert wanted to work with happened to come from different European countries. Most European countries have points system where foreign films can achieve national status in a particular country if their nationals have a major role in these films. This creates enormous advantages for foreign producers because it enables them to qualify for subsidies outside of their home territory.

The Serpent's Kiss qualified for English nationality because Robert is an English producer; the screenwriter was English; and the post-production was located in England. The French director, director of photography, one of the lead actors and a couple of other crew members gave the film its French nationality. Robert also had a German producer on board so the film qualified for German nationality. Having established a nationality for the film in three countries Robert was successful in obtaining 3.5 million French francs (£350k) from Eurimage.

The best location for the film turned out to be in Ireland so Robert was able to take advantage of the section 35 (now section 4i31 ) tax break scheme which allows private investors to obtain tax relief on the sums they invest in films.

Whilst co-productions present obvious financing opportunities for producers, there are sign)ficant disadvantages especially for low budget filmmakers. A lot of documentation is required to set up a co- production and that means lawyers and fat fees. The legal fees for The Serpent's Kiss were expected to be in the region of £30,000 which is typical but the work involved in setting up the co-production bumped this up to about £150,000. There was at least one lawyer for every country involved in the deal!

For Robert, the main advantage of the co- production was getting access to so-called 'soft money' i.e. funds from government institutions without the burden of high interest charges in the case of money from banks ('hard money'). The second key advantage was the fact that commercial investors feel more assured about investing in films which have already attracted some financial support. Who was it that said 'money follows money'? So is it worth pursuing the official European co- production route if you have a low to no budget project? Robert advised against it if your budget is less than $5million. Realistically, with the legal gymnastics required to set up the financing and the high levels of administration the advice to low budget filmmakers is don't even go there!

However, co-productions are an important option to bear in mind if your film project naturally lends itself to working with other European filmmakers.

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