The Knowledge - Anne-Dominique Toussaint
CSB has been working for months on an exciting project with film journalist Andrew Urban of Urbancinefile. We’re interviewing film and television practitioners about their business experiences.
Our aim is to develop a deeper understanding about the history of business decision-making in film and television and to share with our audience the wisdom from the accumulated mistakes, experiments and achievements of the contributors.
Anne-Dominique Toussaint - biography
Anne-Dominique Toussaint is a feature film producer based in France. Her new feature film Caramel (released in Australia on August 21, 2008 through Hopscotch) was Lebanon’s entry for the Foreign Language Academy Awards. She has almost two decades of experience as a producer, with a long list of credits that includes the features Respiro (2002) and Mina Tannenbaum (1994).
Audio download
Chapter 1 - Producing feature films - 13 minutes
- Set up in 1989, in Paris & Brussels
- Started with brother’s film
- France a paradise for producers - a sophisticated range of incentives
- Had co-produced Respiro, went with it to Beirut film festival and met filmmaker Nadine Labaki
- She sent 15 pages of her story, Caramel, and got accepted into Paris writing workshop
- Decided to produce it - in Lebanon
- Went to Lebanon, discovered Nadine was already popular for her music videos
- Self-financed the development
Video downloads
Chapter 2 - Producing Caramel - 10 minutes
- Setting up a Lebanese company to produce
- 15 years of previous experience helped
- Half the budget from Lebanon – this to be spent in Lebanon
- Post-production financed and spent in France (total budget US$1.5 m)
- It was the biggest risk of my career
- Assessing the film’s commercial potential
Video downloads
Chapter 3 - People and projects - 10 minutes
- Selecting projects – people are always important
- Prefer debuting feature directors and writers moving to directing
- No formal business plan, but approach is cautious – and businesslike
- Look for a cohesive project
- Making 2 or 3 films a year, sometimes overlapping
- Re: Australia - open to ideas
- Independent and not relying on a single distribution partner – it’s better business
Video downloads
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