Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Every time I get seduced into prioritizing wealth then I tend to make wrong decisions.
192 Plays1 year ago
But when I genuinely enjoy what I do, then I do a really good job at it and then the financial side tends to take care of itself.
20 YEARS IN PERSPECTIVE:
I had realised that rather than trying to be someone else, or trying to fit into a system, the best thing I could do was focus on what I thought was right and follow my instincts.
We spent what probably is the best 5 years of my life and career living in Dar es Salaam, working in a nonprofit.
I had been doing stuff in order to have a better future life, rather than actually realising that this was it, it wasn't going to get any better.
I got picked up by a VC firm, that was a disaster from day one and got fired from there two years later, feeling like an abject failure at 42. I think I just read that Blair and Clinton both became leaders of their country at 42 and I was unemployed and feeling pretty sorry for myself.
The CEO was right to fire me, because I wasn't very good at what I did.
The biggest change for me over the past 10 years has been understanding the importance of sleep. I figured out that if I'm in bed reading a book at ten o'clock, tomorrow is probably going to be a pretty good day, and if I'm up at one o'clock, watching a film, it's less likely to be so.
So many things that I'm both grateful and frustrated with are the result of luck.
I admire deeds more than people
ON TOPIC: Film, film-making, Oscars and more
Someone once likened making a film to fishing with 13 fish hooks and needing to be able to pull all out at exactly the same time.
The big learning that I've had over the last 7 years is there are a lot of people who cultivate an image of being fantastic and Mr. Nice guy, and in reality are arseholes, or have been corrupted by the industry. It's like sometimes meeting your heroes and then realizing they're not nice people at all.
Most people work in this industry because of a passion for the product that they make, rather than a belief that this is a way to riches.
One of the things that I think Europe and other parts of the world have got ahead of them is to be a low-cost producer of English language content, because the Americans have just lost the plot in terms of the way they structure and the way these things cost.
The number of series that are being produced in the US today is basically 6 times the number of TV series that's been produced at the end of the 2000, and the budgets are probably 2 to 3 times the size of what they were too.
Our revenues have increased by about 1400% during that time. And that growth has been fantastic, but where it's both been felt has been at the cinemas, because cinema volumes are down. They've been one of the most steady industries over the last hundred years and have been almost recession-proof and suddenly we found a situation where that may no longer be the case.
We've changed our behaviour, so that's one serious dynamic in the industry.
Almost everyone is trying to cut costs and I think we're going to have a look at a very different industry in 5 years.
The industry needs to become much more thoughtful around costs.
In any industry where there's an extreme hierarchy, there's risk that people abuse their power.
The reason why we love our actors is because half the time we dream of being with them.
All THINGS INSEAD AND GIVING BACK
Scandinavia is an INSEAD wasteland.
That is my most treasured possession after INSEAD, is the people that I met.
References, mentions:
The black swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb), Why we sleep by Matthew Walker, Nelson Mandela, Tom Hanks, SF Studios, Sony, A man called Otto, A Man Called Ove (film), A Man Called Ove (book by Fredrik Backman, En man som heter Ove)
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
This is Republic of Insead, the 20 years later O3D podcast edition. I am Milena Ivanova and will be your host in this limited series. So, here we are, 20 years later, hopefully all the wiser, naturally smarter and as charming as ever. There were 432 of us in the O3D vintage.
00:00:25
Speaker
And certainly there are 432 unique and very interesting personal and professional stories to tell. While I cannot physically cover all, I have tried to make a selection of stories that will keep you interested and curious and will hopefully convince you to join us on campus for reunion. Welcome to the Republic of Insead Podcast Edition and enjoy the show.
00:00:49
Speaker
Here we are, I start with the entry of this guest. Though seemingly structured and process oriented, he is essentially the laziest consultant you'll ever meet. He's partly NGO meets McKinsey, partly Sweden meets Ghana. He'll go halfway around the world for love, but this past year in Europe, he was awarded the NBA most likely to be a porn star. Then the football team,
00:01:20
Speaker
that's Australian for rugby, cheated him out of the Matador award, that's award for letting opponents fly right by, although in all fairness, the same team nicknamed him Elvis and flew past LBS at the NBA Olympics. So this king presumably contributed something. In truth,
00:01:41
Speaker
He is a pseudo-international man of mystery. He is easygoing and authoritative, striking a soutre-soul-lander pose for the cameras with his rugged, unshaven stubble. He then absent-mindedly fidgets with that silver ring on his right hand. So, think of him as an intellectual, always hungry for knowledge.
00:02:04
Speaker
Or alternatively, an action-team rejectee, an Aussie weak cross-dresser, gorgeous as himself, but frankly, even better looking in a low-cut dress.
00:02:16
Speaker
There we are. I see him on the screen so I can confirm he's still going with a stubble or now it's a bit longer than a stubble. And there we are. Welcome to the Republic of India podcast. Thanks, Melina. And let's go straight into it. Well, I can confirm it's still NGO meets McKinsey and Sweden is still in play. I don't know about Ghana, but there was something
00:02:41
Speaker
There was an African pit, so why don't you go ahead and tell us what you've been up to in the last 20 years and where you've been. Sure.
Personal Life and Return to McKinsey
00:02:50
Speaker
After INSEAD, I returned to Sweden and within six months was married to Marika, who I'd been engaged to whilst at INSEAD. And since then, we've had two boys who are now 15 and 13, sixth in an airspear, and live in a house a little bit north of Stockholm. But the path there hasn't been sort of that straightforward.
00:03:11
Speaker
I went back to McKinsey after INSEAD, basically not of my own choice. The purpose of INSEAD had to be to do something else, but Marika fell ill at the end of 2003, and it wasn't the time to be uprooting and moving somewhere else.
00:03:29
Speaker
So I returned to McKinsey who'd sort of agreed to pay for my INSEAD fees on the condition that I worked for them for two years, but had absolutely no interest to be there. And a funny thing sort of happened because in my first project when I returned, I was working a couple of hours north of Stockholm and I had no way, I was so bored
00:03:49
Speaker
that basically I bought a computer game to fill my days.
Career Success and Key Turning Points
00:03:53
Speaker
And I would pretend to be working whilst on this project in the corner of the room playing this game. And of course, I still needed to deliver stuff because I was working for a client. And I became ruthlessly focused in what I prioritized doing.
00:04:08
Speaker
At the end of this study, so just as a background, I'd basically been a failure at McKinsey, I came back and I got the best staff review that I'd ever got in my whole life. It was this massive turning point in my career because
00:04:22
Speaker
I had realized that rather than trying to be someone else or trying to fit into a system, the best thing I could do was focus on what I thought was right and following my instincts. So I had this sort of meteoric McKinsey career for the next four years, and I honestly believed I would still be working there now. And then life intervened again.
00:04:44
Speaker
We had our first son. It had been a long and complicated process with IVF in order for him to be born. And he was complete and not a nightmare for the first couple of months. And my wife, who'd always been very supportive of my career, suddenly said, you know, I don't think this is going to work.
Best Career Years in Tanzania
00:05:02
Speaker
And it was sort of totally clear. So within two weeks, I quit McKinsey. And as something sometimes happens in the world, the sort of universe turned up on our doorstep.
00:05:12
Speaker
And I was offered a job to go and work in Tanzania with the Gates Foundation project. So, you know, with this six-month-old in tow, we moved to Tanzania. Marika had been, just been accepted to have her first novel written, so she was sort of somewhat flexible about where in the world she was. And we spent what probably is the best five years of my life and career living in Dar es Salaam, working in a nonprofit,
00:05:41
Speaker
and doing work that had meaning. I hadn't figured that bit of life out. Sylvia said in her podcast that it's all about the journey. I, at that point, had been doing stuff in order to have a better future life, rather than actually realizing that this was it. It wasn't going to get any better. That was the first job I remember genuinely enjoying going to work with.
00:06:06
Speaker
And it was such a sense of freedom. And I've always loved Africa. I'd worked in Ghana. The reference to Ghana is because I'd been there as a volunteer before INSEAD. And we got to one point where we were very close just to settling down in East Africa. But, you know, then life intervenes again and a couple of terrorists started throwing hand grenades in shopping malls and we had another health scare in the family and decided, you know what, maybe we should move back somewhere else.
00:06:33
Speaker
And somewhere else became Stockholm again, because I didn't really have a network anywhere else. And I was an Australian who'd worked in a nonprofit space in Africa. And quite frankly, no one was really looking for that profile. But at least within Stockholm, I could work around people.
00:06:53
Speaker
And I sort of got picked up by a VC firm that was a disaster from day one and got fired from there
Shift to Film Industry and Success in Scandinavia
00:06:59
Speaker
two years later, feeling like an abject failure at 42. I think I just read that Blair and Clinton both became leaders of their country at 42. And I was unemployed and feeling pretty sorry for myself. But in that process, again, you know, you tend to be extremely open to opportunities, at least I was. And in the middle of all this, somehow I ended up in an interview process.
00:07:21
Speaker
to run a film and TV production company. And there is no sort of sensible reason why I would ever have been in that process, except for that I happened to know the headhunter. And funnily enough, the CEO liked me. We go along really well. And suddenly I found myself running this production company of sort of the largest and most prestigious in many ways, the Scandinavian film company.
00:07:51
Speaker
And that's how I got to where I am now. And I guess basically I should say, so I'm kind of like the CEO for that division. And maybe we'll come back to that a little bit later. So it wasn't, well, so in a way your career in film was predicted, right? Just not a porn star, but there you go. That is slightly scary. Do you remember who wrote your profile? I have no idea.
00:08:19
Speaker
See, I don't remember mine either. Some people remember them, but what is scary because I've read enough of them now because of the podcast is how spot on so many of them are in like the big picture, right? Not the detail obviously, but in the big picture, it's really scary. So what did you say has been the biggest challenge for you in these 20 years personally or professionally of both?
00:08:46
Speaker
You know, I think it's always been about, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, it's been about prioritizing the journey. I think it's so easy in our sort of situation is all of us have opportunities to make tons of money. Quite frankly, Sweden is a terrible decision to make money with all the taxes and the wage structure here. But I think every time I get seduced into prioritizing sort of wealth,
00:09:13
Speaker
Then I tend to make wrong decisions. That decision to go into the VC firm was a decision that after making very little money in Africa for five years, that now I needed to get myself on a better financial footing. And I hated every single day of that job. And the CEO was right to fire me because I wasn't very good at what I did. But when I genuinely enjoy what I do, then I do a really good job at it. And then the financial side tends to take care of itself.
00:09:42
Speaker
All right. And you mentioned health a number of times. What do you do about managing stress and health? Film sounds like an entertaining thing, but in fact, working in film, as I have an inside view as well, is absolutely not fun and could be a lot of stress, right? The fun part is about five minutes of the whole experience. So
00:10:04
Speaker
Exactly. I mean, it's an incredible, it is an incredibly stressful industry, both because there are enormous risks without always the reward. And I think every, every product you make is completely unique. And so you're trying to solve problems that no one's ever thought of before. It may not be every single problem in the, in the, in the shoot, but it is at least there'll be five of them that you really need to spend some time to think about.
00:10:30
Speaker
I don't think I've cracked the health question. I think probably the biggest change for me over the past 10 years has been understanding the importance of sleep. I work in an industry where sleep is not prioritized. There's a lot of entertaining, there's a lot of parties, there's a lot of late night shoots. I figured out that if I'm in bed reading a book at 10 o'clock, tomorrow is probably going to be a pretty good day. If I'm up at 1 o'clock watching a film, it's less likely to be so.
Health Management in Film Industry
00:11:00
Speaker
And I think the other thing in this industry is alcohol, which is, you know, I behaved like, uh, Rob Chang for the first two years of my, um, of my film career and was never getting home, uh, before three o'clock. And I've also had to grow up in that respect as well. And, you know, I didn't think that's particularly, I love alcohol, but you know, I'm starting to figure out, I need to be much more balanced in the way that I deal with it. Yeah. With age. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bitch.
00:11:30
Speaker
I feel the wine during the night affects my sleep for sure. So all right. So film, film industry entertainment. Let's, let's take, take us there. How, how do films actually get made? Can you walk us through the process? Yeah, sure. So films generally take somewhere between two to five years to make. You've all heard about the films that being, you know, 15 years in the making, but
00:11:57
Speaker
If you're doing it well, it's somewhere between two and five years. And they always start with an idea. And that idea is either a story or a property that you want to exploit. And it's unbelievable how important the story actually is. A couple of years ago, there was a test to look at how stories are interpreted by different directors. And at the end of the day,
00:12:19
Speaker
you know, five different directors interpret the same story very, very similar. So if you don't have the story, you've got enough. And the story will then be turned into a short story, will be then turned into what's called a treatment, which is like a 25 page version of a script. And finally, a script, which then can be worked on for, you know, one to two years in order to get the story absolutely right, as it needs to appear on screen.
00:12:43
Speaker
And at all the time where you're sort of building up this story, you're also building up the creative team and the financing around it. If you're in the US in the studio system, there's one guy who determines whether you can get 200 million for your next Marvel film.
00:12:57
Speaker
But in most of the world, that financing is an incredibly complicated puzzle of multiple different players, all with potentially competing interests. Half of the money is going to be hard and half of the money is going to be soft from the European Union or whoever it is in order to get a film made. And once all the planets have aligned, which doesn't always happen after one to two years,
00:13:20
Speaker
then you make a green light decision and go into production. And production is a period of somewhere, on most films in Europe, somewhere between 30 to 40 days when the $4 million that you've collected in order to put this film together gets spent, about 70% of it just gets burnt in those 30 to 40 days. There's a lot of money going out. It's a military operation in terms of actually getting the film made.
00:13:48
Speaker
and it's extremely strictly controlled. And then after that 40 days, you then edit the film. And before I came into the industry, editing a film is where some of the real magic actually happens. Many great films have been looked like shit the first time they actually came, started getting cut, but the editors were able to change that into something truly fantastic.
00:14:12
Speaker
And that editing process, including layering on VFX and making the sound and the picture quality all perfect for the cinema, then takes somewhere between six to nine months. And then you have a film that's ready to be launched. And that launch now is also another whole nother part of the story, which I presume, or at least I hope Daniela talked a little bit about in her discussion. We focused on marketing there, excuse my dog, but that's the situation working from home.
00:14:42
Speaker
Because I have been involved thanks to my husband in film production and I've seen the ugly side of it of like the risks, which are there's so much, the tales are too fat and there are too many unpredictable things that can totally ruin everything. So, and you said you spend most of the money in this 30 or 40 days. And basically if an actor gets sick or if
00:15:11
Speaker
there is like a war or something you can lose all that money and then the whole thing is out the window because if you have to reshoot again next year you have to start from scratch it depends on seasons on so how do you actually manage this risk on an industry level not on a personal film level? Look I think
00:15:35
Speaker
the industry hasn't really figured, if I'm really honest, I don't think the industry has figured out risk. I mentioned earlier that, you know, typically risk goes with the reward, but in our industry, they don't actually match. Most people work in this industry because of a passion for the product that they make, rather than, you know, I'm now I'm talking outside of Hollywood, rather than a belief that this is a way to riches.
00:16:00
Speaker
So, but the only thing you can do at the end of the day is ensure yourself like hell, which so when an actor's sick, we do have insurance over that for the most part, as long as it's not COVID. And then you need to break down all those parts in order to create little ways of managing all the different sorts of risks that there are. But I haven't figured a way how to remove risk totally.
00:16:24
Speaker
It's a lot about building margins into your production so you know that when things go wrong, which they always will, that you can manage them. And I think that's where we as a sort of a commercial producer tend to be better at it. There's lots of people making art house passion projects that don't have those margins. And when they go wrong, then it's a serious financial disaster. We're still, you know, a profitable business and pretty happy with where we are, even though we live in that world of risks. Yeah.
00:16:54
Speaker
And you manage it as a portfolio. Yes, indeed. So we, in any one year, we're producing somewhere between 15 to 20 different film and TV series. And so one of them will always go wrong, maybe two. But then there's enough of them that go well that we sort of tend to balance that out.
00:17:15
Speaker
But again, that sort of individual player who's making one film every second year, that's where the sort of massive financial risk really sits. Yeah. And so what budgets, what's your total production budget per year? Or does it vary year from year? How do you? It certainly varies. I think last year we did around about 150 million euros. So you can tell, you know, the average size of our productions is somewhere between four to eight million euros.
00:17:44
Speaker
which sounds tiny by US standards, but it's pretty common in the rest of the world, basically. And, you know, the most we've spent on a production is sort of 40 to 50 million euros, but that's in another sort of category.
Oscar Nomination and Hollywood Opportunities
00:18:00
Speaker
Yeah. And should we talk about the one film that made it to the almost, well, it got nominated for an Oscar and then led to other things. So you want to... Sure.
00:18:14
Speaker
You know, in 2016, we did a film called a man, a man called Ulva, which is a Swedish film based on a best selling book. And it did incredibly well in the local box office and then became was nominated for a an Academy Award and as best foreign film, you know, and something happens. There are so many films made each year in the world, sort of thousands of films and very few of them get noticed by Hollywood.
00:18:42
Speaker
But once you are nominated, then everyone in Hollywood looks at those films. And this was a film which is about a 60-year-old man who's actually trying to kill himself, and life constantly interrupts what is happening in his life.
00:18:59
Speaker
And it's ultimately a feel-good, and it's sort of a weepy, if you want to call it that, because it's such a sort of moving story once you get to understand the background. And we just got inundated by calls from, you know, elder actors who wanted to be a part of this. Dustin Hoffman, Michael Douglas, and finally, the one that we really wanted was Tom Hanks. And, you know, if we had to pick someone to play this role of a gruff but lovable elder statesman,
00:19:28
Speaker
and he was the actor we would have chosen. And his agent rang us up and said, you know, we want to buy the rights. And we said, look, sorry, we're going to produce this ourselves. You know, if Tom wants to be part of it, we're happy to do it together. And he wanted to do it together. So for the last five years, we've been producing that film, which was released early January this year, globally, through Sony.
00:19:55
Speaker
It's a fantastic journey, but just to give you an idea of how complex this film process actually is, we had a book that had sold 12 million copies globally. We had a Swedish film that had been the third biggest at the Swedish box office ever. The story wasn't that hard to crack, but it still took us four years to get into production because we needed to find
00:20:19
Speaker
a schedule that fitted with Tom Hanks with the director that we had, which was Mark Forster, who's done a Bond film, World War Z and lots of other, you know, be nominated for Academy Awards as well. But then we had a pandemic. We needed to figure out where in the world we could shoot, which ended up being Pittsburgh in the beginning of 2022.
00:20:39
Speaker
And despite, you know, basically what is a relatively clear cut process to get it out, it still took us five years. So I have full appreciation for those Hollywood scripts that take 10 to 15 simply because there's a lot of stuff to navigate. Someone once likened making a film to fishing with 13 fish hooks and needing to be able to pull all out at exactly the same time. And that's what it feels like sometimes.
00:21:08
Speaker
Well, so the film went out, the film went out in January and did
00:21:14
Speaker
120 million at the global box office, which in today's world is fantastic news. And what that means is it sets itself up for the rest of its life, because a film, you know, makes a certain amount of money in that opening window, but it's really everything else where you can really make money. So that's, you know, it's been out on Netflix in the US, it's being sold digitally, it'll end up on Disney at some point, and then it'll keep being shown year after year, hopefully for a long, long time. Yeah.
00:21:44
Speaker
And what was the budget for it? The budget was 50 million US. OK, so it's two and a half X on box office. Yeah, well, I mean, there's a there's a bunch of money that we make our money basically back on the cinematic distribution and then the upside is with all the other windows. But I mean, you know, again, to talk about the craziness, the industry, the Swedish version we made was for 10 percent of that number.
00:22:08
Speaker
So of course, Tom Hanks costs a bit of money, but he doesn't cost, you know, $45 million. So, you know, the way films are made in the different parts of the world is very much also depending on sort of, you know, the ambitions and the style of how things are done. And one of the things that I think Europe and other parts of the world have got ahead of them is to be a low cost producer of English language content, because the Americans have just lost the plot in terms of the way they structure and the way these things cost.
00:22:37
Speaker
There you go. So, which brings us to the big picture of the industry and where it's going.
Future of the Film Industry
00:22:44
Speaker
So, AI is being talked about and a lot of things happen now on blue screen. Is it blue screen? It's a blue screen, right? The special effects and the VR. Green screen, yeah. But there's something else my husband was talking to me about, which is a graph.
00:23:02
Speaker
where they do a lot of the animation or not special effects. So can you give a bit of an overview? Are we gonna still be producing films physically 50 years from now or is it all gonna be coders doing magic and no more Tom Hanks and no more human beings involved?
00:23:33
Speaker
Why don't I take a step back before that, because obviously what's happened in the last 10 years has been this massive boom of content. If you look at the number of series that are just being produced in the US today, it's basically six times the number of TV series that's being produced, as was at the end of the 2000s.
00:23:53
Speaker
And the budgets on those are probably two to three times the size of what they were too. So you see, you know, it's been a massive expansion in the industry in the US and that is starting to filter out in the rest of the world. Scandinavia started, you know, really accelerating seven years ago. And so, you know, our revenues have increased by about 1,400% during that time. So it's been an enormous growth and that's been,
00:24:23
Speaker
both fantastic and frustrating because there hasn't been really the frustrating because hasn't been the supply of people in order to make it and it's not so much directors and actors because I don't want to say there's tons of them but there's always more actors and directors than the industry can handle but it's more the electricians the catering firms the the grip
00:24:45
Speaker
guys on set. It's all those roles where almost every part of the world has seriously been in lack of for the last five years. But it's created lots of opportunities and a glut of content. I watch TV and film for a living, and up until 2018-19, I could basically watch everything in the four markets where I'm present. But I no longer can keep up. I no longer can
00:25:15
Speaker
can watch the stuff that I need to watch. If I'm lucky, I watch one episode of a series just to understand what it is. And that growth has been fantastic, but where it's both being felt has been at the cinemas, because cinema volumes are down. They've been one of the most steady industries over the last 100 years in many respects, and have been almost recession-proof. And suddenly, we found a situation where that may no longer be the case.
00:25:44
Speaker
Of course, it was decimated during the pandemic, but since then, volumes are down somewhere between 30 to 60% on what they were pre-pandemic. And that is, of course, devastating for an industry. Because those cinema windows, like we said with a man called Otto, it's about creating a buzz around a product and a sort of urgency to watch it now. And when those are down, it sort of decimates the economics of many, many players in the industry.
00:26:12
Speaker
And I quite frankly think we got a bit lucky with Otto that just when we came out, it was okay. But there's many of the studios who are sort of panicking a little bit about the performance. You know, a company like Pixar, which we've probably watched thousands of films together with our kids, has for the last three films basically failed with their launches. And there's nothing necessarily inherently wrong with the films, it's that we've changed our behavior. So that's sort of one, you know, serious
00:26:41
Speaker
serious dynamic in the industry. And the other one is that during the pandemic, some of the studios panicked and started to try and radically change their business model. And, you know, the listeners might remember that films started coming out directly to streaming services day and date. And that has, you know, that expectation has also dramatically changed the way that people seem to think. We don't 100% understand the dynamic, but
00:27:09
Speaker
We educated basically the audience that films will come here soon, so don't stress about going to the cinema. So those two dynamics are extremely worrying and no one has figured it out. No one has figured it out.
00:27:24
Speaker
what it means. So obviously figuring that out is going to be an important part of this. And the studios are starting to back from that process. And perhaps, you know, we can reeducate the audience, you know, in the next five years or not. But I think we're in the short term, we're going to go through a bit of a bloodbath. People aren't ordering at the same amount. Almost everyone is trying to cut costs. And I think we're going to have a look at a very different industry in five years. If you go even further out and ask your questions about
00:27:54
Speaker
AI, I think at the end of the day, the industry needs to become much more thoughtful around costs. I talked a little bit about costs with a man called Otto, that didn't need to cost 50 million. But there are so many structures in place that drove the costs that we as the financiers couldn't hold back the tide. But there are a number of films now that are costing $300 to $400 million to make, which is an absolutely insane amount of money. And each of them
00:28:23
Speaker
sort of need roughly the same amount of money to market them globally. So it's an enormous amount of money that needs to come in in order for these to break even. And that's not a sustainable model. So I think where AI may play a role is in terms of helping to manage cost. How that happens is yet to be seen. I mean, AI, as everyone has talked about, are basically just extreme learning machines.
00:28:49
Speaker
So if there's currently a strike in the US, a writer's strike, which is connected in part to the issue of whether AI will be used to write scripts. And script writer's argument is, look, if AI is going to become good at this, they're going to do it by basically stealing what we've already done. So they're basically creating a fight now. And AI can't write scripts now, but I'm sure it can in five to 10 years. So that's going to be a big issue. What it's going to mean is we're going to get even more formulaic films.
00:29:19
Speaker
because it's going to work on the things that have already worked, which is generally a good strategy, short term, a bad strategy, long term in the industry. Whether we AI film actors into films, I'm not close enough to that technology. It feels like it's a long way away at the moment. I imagine what we'll end up doing is we'll split the industry in two, so we have
00:29:44
Speaker
you know, films that are still made the way we do today, which are going to be smaller cultural, you know, stories. And then we're going to have sort of studio films that are a product. And I don't know how studios are really going to make that work. Because I think, you know, if you think about what's happened with Marvel over the last 15 years, you know, that was a, the whole idea of Marvel was built on the fact that sequels always are an easier bet to make by a studio than an original film.
00:30:14
Speaker
And so what Marvel did was they created 20 sequels, which was a brilliant idea. And they've made a ton of money for Disney. But we can see that already today, the market is getting weary of that and wants something else. And we're currently in a summer where I think there are seven or eight sequel films that are being released from Indiana Jones to Mission Impossible to Fast 10 to a couple of Marvel films, a couple of DC films. And the market is not really responding to it.
00:30:44
Speaker
There you go. We still need to awaken our creativeness, for our creativity to be awakened by stories and original
Role of an Executive VP in Film Production
00:30:53
Speaker
stuff. Absolutely. So just very briefly as an executive VP of production, what does that job actually mean for the uninitiated? Yeah. I mean, in many ways, I'm just, I'm like a head of any division or company. You know, I have.
00:31:13
Speaker
50 people that work for me and they, depending on where we are in a film cycle, have someone between between 50 to 500 freelancers that work for them. So we, you know, it's a very flexible workforce in the film industry. We hire in people when we need them and then they go and work with someone else when we don't. So I do all the stuff that everyone does, which is set strategy and communicate and manage performance reviews and all that sort of stuff. But the difference is that
00:31:40
Speaker
The product that I work with or we work with is a creative product. And so I need to understand and to be able to work with it and also work with the creatives behind them. As I said, many of these creatives are passion driven individuals that are slightly crazy, not driven by money. They just want to tell a great story. And so managing them is an important part of what I do.
00:32:10
Speaker
It doesn't mean I need to manage everyone, but I do need to manage some of them. And then the other bit is having a clear head with the stories that we want to tell. People fall in love with stories in this industry and forget that there needs to be an audience at the end of the day that actually wants to look at them. And so often my role is to keep that guiding star of the audience together with some of my colleagues to say that we don't forget that as we go along.
00:32:39
Speaker
I read a lot of scripts in what I do, and day one on the job, I had no idea what I was doing. But luckily, one of the great script readers in our industry in Scandinavia was an economist who came into the industry by accident. And he gave me some tips about how to think about this, and then I've read a bunch of books since then. So I read 50 scripts a year and give my feedback on them and help them make them better.
00:33:06
Speaker
But there's also lots of people who sit and work behind that who are truly brilliant in the way that they can break down the story and understand what it needs to make it better. And my job is to sort of keep them on the rails. So you'll sometimes see me, in fact, you'll see me on almost all of our films credited as an executive producer at the end. And that's kind of a good summary of what I actually do. I sort of manage the producers and what they do.
00:33:33
Speaker
You know I have a credit as an executive producer as well. Which happened by accident because my husband lost his CFO in the production they were making a film of theirs.
00:33:47
Speaker
in 2016 and I was six months pregnant and guess who had to run the finances during production. And this is when you have to pay weekly and the money has to flow and you have to report it because it has paid financing and all of that. So there you go. I was enjoying a quiet pregnancy at the beach and then it was no longer quiet at night. So yes, the joy of this industry. Milena, I've never figured out whether there's an industry you haven't worked in.
00:34:16
Speaker
Seems you touched almost it. I'm going to read one of these days my own profile. When I read it, I was laughing. It said, you could be an investment banker or something else. And I'm like, God damn it. How did I figure it out? I've been all of this horrible. And now it's doing podcasts. There you go. Running commentary on me too. I remember I was coming to Sweden and you were telling me some stories. You did have a
00:34:42
Speaker
Yeah, we did. Me too was, I think, the end of 2017. I described a little bit earlier how the industry is, when you're filming, it's a military exercise. So much money is happening. People just need to follow orders. Otherwise, your money gets wasted. In any industry where there's an extreme hierarchy, there's risk that people abuse their power.
00:35:08
Speaker
And you know, if you add to that, that we're an industry where there are lots of people who sell themselves and their sexuality, because I'm not talking about porn, but you know, the reason why we love our actors is because half the time we dream of being with them. It's sort of a very potent mix. And I think there are lots of men in power who suddenly, you know, after being nerdy, sort of film nerds, suddenly find themselves in a position of power and don't behave in the right sort of way.
00:35:37
Speaker
I was really lucky, actually, that we'd had our own Me Too crisis a year before Me Too. The quick story is that I had a CEO who got fired for various bad behaviors, and I'd only been in the company for four months, and so I went out and started to figure out
00:35:55
Speaker
what the hell was going wrong. We had a bunch of issues, both in films that we'd done, but also staff that were still on the payroll. I got rid of those guys, as they all were.
00:36:09
Speaker
We set up some policies for how we wanted to run our productions. We started using things like, I don't know what the word in English is, sort of coordinators for sex scenes and to protect the interests of the actors there rather than letting directors get overexcited. And we became sort of the cutting edge of the industry, at least in Scandinavia. And so when Me Too actually happened a year later, I remember
00:36:34
Speaker
asking some of the sort of the leading actresses that was driving this in scandinavia and they were like you guys have already sorted all that sort of stuff out it's everyone else that needs to work.
00:36:46
Speaker
So, but, you know, there are lots of terrible examples. And it is, you know, it probably could happen in a law firm as well, but it's men overstepping the mark or falling, you know, I mean, there are also actresses and young actors who are willing to use their sexuality also get jobs as well. And so, you know, it's not falling prey to that as well.
00:37:11
Speaker
Complicated, very complicated, right? One interesting bit you want to share from us, from a set or from the... I don't know if I can really talk about those things, so without incriminating various people. I think I would say that sort of the big learning that I've had over the last sort of seven years is there are
00:37:37
Speaker
you know, a lot of people who cultivate an image of being sort of fantastic and and Mr. Nice Guy and in reality are assholes or have been corrupted by the industry. Tom Hanks is not that guy. He truly is a wonderful man who is very conscious of
00:37:56
Speaker
you know, how he appears to other and goes around and shakes everyone's hands first day on the set. And, you know, we'll come up and have a chat, you know, in that case, believe the hype. But I think there are a number of other actors which will be familiar to everyone which have terrible reputations in the industry, partly sort of encouraged by the agent network, which is is highly problematic. And, you know, and which is it's sort of disappointing. It's like sometimes meeting your heroes and then realizing their
00:38:26
Speaker
not nice people at all. Yeah, there you go. All right, let's switch gears.
INSEAD Connections and Giving Back
00:38:32
Speaker
So for now there are films and we'll still be watching films. Let's talk INSEAD. Any INSEAD connections you've had through the years or do you know only in Sweden? I've been lonely in Sweden, do you know?
00:38:47
Speaker
Every now and then someone's obviously screwing up at work and gets sent up to solve something in Scandinavia, but apart from that, you know, Scandinavia is an INSEAD wasteland. I still remember an interview actually when I mentioned I'd been at INSEAD and the guy was like, what's that? That was the CEO of one of the biggest recruiting firms and I was just like, hmm.
00:39:09
Speaker
So no, but, you know, my I have kept in touch with sort of my my gang, not as much as I'd like to. But, you know, that is my most treasured possession after inside is the people that I met. There you go. All right. And giving back in general and then in Seattle in particular, how do you think about giving back?
00:39:31
Speaker
So much to your disappointment, you probably looked at this, Melina, I've never given to INSEAD at all over the last whatever it is 20 years. I have a total failure with you and I've been meeting you in Stockholm. So there, I could be a failure as well. I think it's about prioritizing, you know, and we all need to figure out what we want to do. I'm still connected with sort of
00:39:53
Speaker
activities with Africa, which has been my passion, I guess, for my whole career. And I will do that until the day I die. Hopefully I'll have an excuse to go back and live there again.
Personal Values and Inspirations
00:40:03
Speaker
All right. Let's move to that quick round of questions. Yes. So you're ready? Yes. Proudest achievement. Sticking to my values, even though they're constantly challenged. Success for you is? The same. Happiness? Well, I'm going to say the same again. So it's all about maintaining your consistency.
00:40:23
Speaker
Biggest regret? Not sticking, not keeping in touch with more people at INSEAD. You know, I think life has gotten in the way, but that absolutely is number one. What keeps you awake at night? I'm sorry to continue on this thing, but it's when I make decisions that are not in line with my values, which we all do, and I'm sort of disappointed in myself when those things happen. If you had to do it all over again, what would you change? Nothing.
00:40:52
Speaker
wish you had known or someone had told you? I think I really wish I'd known that life, how random life ends up being. You know, I was a very earnest, you know, 19 year old at university and thought that everything could be planned out. I think that combination of changing priorities. So you heard my story, which there were a bunch of things that changed because of family decisions, but I think also how much luck plays its part.
00:41:20
Speaker
You know, I got a lot of luck dealt out to me from the beginning just by being born in the country I was with and with some of the genes from my parents, but still so many things that I'm both grateful and frustrated with are the result of luck. And that's not something that you can plan for. Food by randomness, right? Lots of us get food by randomness for often enough, right? So retirement ever or never.
00:41:49
Speaker
Absolutely. I look forward to retirement. I don't know whether that means that I'll stop doing things, but hopefully on a farm outside Stockholm with a beach house in Sydney. If you had to pick one book, everyone should read. I'm going to pick two. On that theme of randomness, Black Swan Events, which I can't remember the author of. Maybe we can figure that out.
00:42:11
Speaker
And the other one, which affected this sort of perspective on sleep, was Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, which, as I said, I fooled myself for many years that sleep was not important. And it has become a sort of total game changer for me in the last five to 10 years. I am a big fan of this book as well. But I still struggle with it because
00:42:34
Speaker
The investment banking industry, like consulting probably, it's horrible because it creates these habits and it's a habit. And I keep on trying to break it and I'm still, I definitely have a sleeping disorder because I can work until two in the morning. And the problem is that then I have to wake up at seven because there's a six and a half year old that needs to go to school and that's that. It's a hard deadline, but no negotiation there.
00:43:02
Speaker
why we sleep is a brilliant book. Most admired public person? I don't, you know, as I said, I've been sort of a little bit disappointed by the people that I've met. And so I admire deeds more than people, I would sort of say. And I still probably would go back and say in my lifetime, Mandela is the one I most admire. As I had this idea that he actually was actually a good person at the end of the day as well.
00:43:31
Speaker
I've done 17 recordings so far. You are the third one who mentions Mandela and no one has heard this answer. So there's no cheating here. So it's amazing. There you go. And most despised public person? I'm still with, you know, to toss up on the day between Trump and Putin. Last one.
Conclusion and Reunion Invitation
00:43:51
Speaker
Are you coming to Reunion? Of course. Really looking forward to it. I think I missed the last one. Well, it was in Singapore.
00:44:00
Speaker
challenging destination for a lot of people at this time of year. But October 6, this time no surprises. It's Fontainebleau, France and the Galley's at the Chateau on October 7. And I can finally officially say if you didn't figure it out who the Aussie is. And there was a giveaway in his profile because this was Tim King, Executive Vice President of Productions at the SF Studio Stockholm. And thank you so very much for your time and for the interesting
00:44:30
Speaker
lifting of the curtain behind the scenes of the film industry. Thank you so much, Tim, and I'll see you in Pompeii. Thank you, Melina. You were listening to the Republic of India 20 years later, or 3D podcast edition. It is my hope to remind everyone what an interesting and dare I say colorful bunch of people we are and how much we can contribute to each other, be it through ideas, knowledge or mere inspiration.
00:44:59
Speaker
The podcast is inspired by the original Republic of Instia the yearbook, produced on paper 20 years ago by Oliver Bradley and team. Thank you, Ollie and team for this contribution to our classes memory and for letting me continue in the tradition title and inspiration included. Creator and author of the Republic of Instia 20 years later, all 3d podcast edition. Am I Milena Ivanova original music by Peter Dondakov with help from their films productions.
00:45:28
Speaker
Stay tuned for more and remember to book your tickets for the 20-year reunion in Fontainebleau October 6th, 8th, 2023. Thank you for listening.