Welcome to Deadline’s Worldwide Disruptors, a characteristic the place we shine a highlight on key executives and firms outdoors of the U.S. shaking up the offshore market. This week we’re chatting with super-producer Alexander Rodnyansky prematurely of his upcoming fall pageant run. His newest title, Mama, I’m Dwelling, is premiering in Venice’s Horizons part whereas his Cannes Un Sure Regard winner Unclenching The Fists is ready to display in Telluride.
When impartial producer Alexander Rodnyansky displays on his prolific profession within the media enterprise to date, he quips that he’s “had 5 lives.” If you already know the well-respected mogul, you’ll know that he’s on the mark. The Ukrainian-born producer is behind a slew of esteemed worldwide pageant hits, with tasks like Leviathan and Loveless, from Russian helmer Andrey Zvyagintsev, each incomes Oscar nominations for Greatest International Language Movie in addition to Greatest Screenplay and Jury Prize in Cannes respectively. Rodnyansky additionally produced 2013 Russian blockbuster Stalingrad, which grossed practically $70M worldwide.
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His profession spans throughout a long time, continents, codecs, genres and political partitions from his early days as a documentary filmmaker to founding Ukraine’s first impartial tv community 1+1 to managing CTC Media, the primary Russian media firm to publicly commerce on NASDAQ. He has been a grasp at creating and packaging Russian, English, German and Arabic-language movie and TV content material via his Moscow-based Non-Cease Productions and Los Angeles outfit AR Content material.
Unafraid to deal with probably the most delicate of topic issues, Rodnyansky has spent the most recent chapter in his profession championing younger and distinctive expertise largely from, however not unique to, the previous Soviet areas. The producer took a punt on rising Russian helmer Kira Kovalenko for her second characteristic Unclenching The Fists, an earnest and intense venture a couple of younger lady’s want to flee her father in a bleak mining city in North Caucasus. That title gained Un Sure Regard in Cannes this yr and is screening in Telluride. Mubi is releasing that movie in North America and the UK.
In Venice this week, he’ll be launching one other second characteristic from a director from Caucasus with Mama, I’m Dwelling, which is enjoying the Horizons Further part. Directed by Vladimir Bitokov, it tells the story of Tonya, a bus driver residing on the outskirts of Nalchick, who’s eagerly awaiting the return of her son from Syria solely to be informed that he’s been killed in motion. Each administrators, notes Rodnyansky, had been college students at Alexander Sokurov’s esteemed directing workshop.
“My technique could be very easy,” Rodnyansky tells Deadline. “It’s talent-driven – all the time. I’m all the time eager to discover the brand new skills. I’m very open to work with the younger filmmakers. I like to assist them and provides them an opportunity and allow them to have their alternative as a result of hopefully with my assist they will obtain way more.”
The necessity to assist and convey a voice to those difficult tales appears like one thing that could be very a lot embedded in Rodnyansky’s DNA. Born right into a household of filmmakers in Kiev, Ukraine, Rodnyansky was uncovered to the business from an early age. His grandfather was a documentary filmmaker, his grandmother an actress in silent cinema. His mom was a producer and movie critic, specializing in reviewing Thirties and Nineteen Forties Hollywood motion pictures – “that’s why I do know previous Hollywood movies so nicely,” he says. “I most likely know them higher than I do know Russian motion pictures from that point” – whereas his father was a technical director.
Rodnyansky, who says he by no means felt pressured by his household to comply with the identical line of labor, was all the time extra eager about science and historical past. “I used to be obsessed by it,” he says. And when one in all his grandfather’s colleagues informed him that documentaries might be an effective way to satiate his starvation for the topics, Rodnyansky determined to enrol himself in Kiev’s Nationwide College of Movie, Theatre and Tv as a documentary director. There, he was taken beneath the wing of outstanding Soviet Ukrainian documentary filmmaker Felix Sobolev.
“He did every thing to make me interested in and obsessive about documentaries,” says Rodnyansky. “It was all about telling tales on scientific challenges, concepts and the precise exercise of the mind. It’s one thing the BBC does so brilliantly now however on the time it was a fairly recent space and I used to be a part of a brand new technology of filmmakers who had been prepared to discover these areas.”
Within the mid Eighties, when Mikhail Gorbachev launched perestroika (Russian for “restructuring”), his progressive reform of the Soviet Union, this opened the door for Rodnyansky and his counterparts to start out tackling extra political topic issues.
“It was a set off for change,” Rodnyansky remembers. “So, I began doing documentary movies on social points and difficult points, points that audiences on the time needed to see and got here to cinemas to see repeatedly. It was an incredible interval.”
It was at this level in his profession when he grew to become emboldened to deal with harder materials, a thread that has been sewn intricately via most of the tasks he’s leaned into in the course of the years. Certainly, Rodnyansky was residing in Kiev when the fourth reactor on the Chernobyl Nuclear Energy Plant erupted simply 60 miles from the Ukrainian capital. Whereas the Soviet authorities initially denied the accident, Rodnyansky had already begun filming within the catastrophe zone the day after the tragic occasion occurred. This yr he lastly launched a historic drama primarily based on the disaster, dubbed Chernobyl 1986.
“I’ve by no means modified my first preferences,” he says. “I like the tales primarily based on real-life occasions. That’s my love. I all the time needed to carry collectively the genres of documentary and fiction and I by no means did this as a director however that’s what I’m making an attempt to develop as a producer.”
Within the midst of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Rodnyansky labored as a producer and movie director at German broadcasting powerhouse ZDF. Gaining expertise within the tv house, he quickly noticed there was a niche within the market in Ukraine and subsequently moved again to his homeland and arrange the primary impartial Ukranian TV community 1+1.
“I do know it sounds ridiculously unusual to say this at present however on the time, every thing was doable,” remembers Rodnyansky. “I arrange this tiny firm and we signed a contract with the state TV in Ukraine and in a couple of months we grew to become the most well-liked [network] within the nation. I discovered myself able on the age of 33 working a serious TV community, privately-owned within the Ukraine. It was loopy.”
Whereas working the community, which he co-owned with Ronald Lauder and Mark Palmer’s Central European Media Enterprises, he continued to provide motion pictures – “round one a yr, as a result of motion pictures had been all the time my obsession” – together with Oscar-nominated Russian-French co-production East/West, starring Catherine Deneuve. Years later, he was approached by shareholders at burgeoning Russian indie broadcasting firm CTC Media to handle its operations. CTC, which was based by U.S. entrepreneur Peter Gerwe, had seen the potential of progress within the Russian market and was driving the enlargement of leisure networks within the area.
Intrigued by the potential of specializing in pure leisure and increasing the footprint of an organization in a market ripe for alternative within the sector, Rodnyansky stepped down as CEO at 1+1 and grabbed the reigns at CTC.
“I obtained exhausted with political tv and I needed very a lot to deal with one thing else and one thing completely different,” he says. “CTC was purely an leisure TV community with no information and it made me suppose critically as a result of information was such a headache in that a part of the world, and it nonetheless is. It was an incredible alternative for me to utterly deal with the manufacturing of flicks and sequence.”
Beneath Rodnyansky’s administration, CTC Media grew to become the primary Russian media firm to publicly commerce on NASDAQ and he formed it into one in all Russia’s strongest TV networks, driving its value to round $4B in 2008.
After six years, it was time for Rodnyansky to show to his ardour: making impartial motion pictures. His years in tv gave him the capital to pursue tasks he wished to champion and develop.
“I all the time felt my fundamental benefit was the power to develop,” he says. “That’s why I consider I used to be fairly profitable with tv as a result of we developed lots of unique content material. We had been doing no matter we may with a really modest funds and we had been very modern in making an attempt to provide you with some codecs.”
Since then, Rodnyansky says he’s sought out “worldwide premium content material” and his works have remained eclectic and thought-provoking. He’s a longtime accomplice of Zvyagintsev, having labored with him on Elena along with Leviathan and Loveless and is at the moment engaged on the director’s English-language debut What Occurs, a contemplation on the character of human relationships and the fragility of human life. Rodnyansky has been no stranger to English-language content material, having labored on titles akin to Jayne Mansfield’s Automobile and Cloud Atlas however remarks he feels extra at dwelling producing “motion pictures from my very own world.”
He’s additionally collaborating once more with Beanpole filmmaker Kantemir Balagov, who’s at the moment wrapping filming HBO’s The Final Of Us. The helmer’s third movie is ready to be concerning the complicated relationship of a father and son. Rodnyansky can also be teaming up with Steven Soderbergh for a brand new characteristic from impressionistic filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, dubbed NEOOONOWWW, that includes music from Philip Glass.
Just lately, Rodnyansky’s L.A.-based AR Content material banner struck a first-look cope with Apple for a slate of Russian-language and multilingual exhibits for Apple TV Plus, set each inside and outdoors of Russia, creatively led by Russian and worldwide writers and administrators. The producer says he feels invigorated by the alternatives the streamers are bringing to the worldwide market, giving platforms to tales from his neck of the woods that haven’t been doable up to now.
“I really feel a powerful demand for genuine tales, not essentially simply Russian ones, however robust highly effective tales from everywhere in the world,” says Rodnyansky. “I consider on this streaming revolution. [Streamers] have modified the so-called centralized mannequin of Hollywood content material being distributed the world over from only one place. Proper now, thanks to those platforms, worldwide filmmakers have been in a position to share their experiences cinematically on these common platforms.”
He provides: “Essentially the most thrilling factor I really feel with these filmmakers I work with is their skill to inform a narrative in a singular manner that makes you utterly establish with the characters. Audiences could don’t have anything in frequent with the individuals on the display however they really feel how difficult life is they usually could make the expertise their very own – it’s very highly effective.”