Following his onstage conversation at the Zurich Film Festival’s industry conference ahead of receiving the annual Game Changer Award, CAA Media Finance co-head Roeg Sutherland stepped into the Deadline Studio to shed light on why he feels encouraged about the independent ecosystem in the aftermath of last year’s dual strikes as well as reflecting on his long history with the Swiss festival.
“The problem in the business is not money right now – it’s really about IP and finding the right projects,” said Sutherland. “The development, the output that came out of studios traditionally has gone down significantly so we’re constantly sourcing new ideas, and a lot of the new ideas are coming out of new regions. It’s actually making it so much more exciting as a job because you go and spend time in Korea and great stories are coming out of Korea. Great stories are coming out of Scandinavia as a whole – Denmark, Sweden, specifically for me. People have a lot of affinity for Norway and Finland.”
He continued: “I think it’s harder in that there are less scripts – there are less things to package – and we have to go and self-generate a lot of it, but it’s exciting because the world has become so much less America-centric when it comes to film and people have had to really establish local businesses and they have re-established their audiences to get excited about local films. That presents new opportunities – I think it’s a good time.”
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He stressed that although the market is harder and it will take the business some time to recover from last year’s dual strikes, there are green shoots: “We have such a special job in that we get to be part of the process of creating films and television and that’s something that people are always going to need.”
Reflecting on being the recipient for Zurich’s Game Changer Award – which has been given in recent years to Sony Pictures Classics heads Michael Barker and Tom Bernard as well as former Lionsgate chief Patrick Wachsberger – Sutherland said it was “a very, very sweet thing” for the festival to do.
“I think they only did it because they are trying to tell me not to come back to the festival since I’ve been here 17 years in a row,” he quipped. “But I’m not going to listen to the message and I’m going to come back next year, and I won’t be a Game Changer anymore and it will be incredibly depressing.”
Sutherland has been coming to the Zurich Film Festival for the last 17 years and he noted how it has organically grown – along with the Summit – in the last decade.
“There’s financial institutions that are incredibly interesting out of Switzerland that made it exciting for people to be able to travel over here to be able to build relationships with them,” he said. “And in the process, what turned out as a very small thing, became a real work trip where people come from around the world, and they get to sit down with each other and spend time that they don’t get to spend at other film festivals.”
Roeg Sutherland On Why He’s Encouraged By The Indie Sector Post Strikes
