Sony Pictures Classics bosses Barker, Bernard shop for quality at Cannes

Sony Pictures Classics bosses shop Cannes quality

CANNES, France — Michael Barker and Tom Bernard have helped to fill the quality gap in Hollywood for decades.

At a time when some studios have shut down their specialty banners that have produced many Academy Awards contenders, the co-presidents of Sony Picture Classics continue to oversee one of cinema’s classiest slates of independent features, documentaries and foreign-language films.

Since the company was formed as a unit of Sony Corp. in 1992, Sony Pictures Classics films have won eight of the 18 foreign-language Oscars, including last year’s “The Secret in Their Eyes” from Argentina.

The company had three of the five foreign-language nominees this last time — among them 2009’s top Cannes Film Festival winners “The White Ribbon” and “A Prophet.” And since 1992, there have been only three years in which Sony Pictures Classics did not have at least one nominee in the category, with its winners including the German hit “The Lives of Others,” Pedro Almodovar’s “All About My Mother” and the martial-arts blockbuster “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”

“One of the reasons Sony attracted us is that Sony has always been a company that thinks long-term and thinks about the quality of the brand,” Barker said in an interview alongside Bernard at the Carlton Hotel, a hub for industry executives at the Cannes Film Festival.

“When you talk about Hollywood studios, it’s hard to be long-term thinkers. If you’re a Hollywood studio, you’re talking about winning the weekend for the box-office gross. We never won a weekend. We never even won a weekend with ‘Crouching Tiger.’”

Some studios phased out their independent banners as the economy turned sour, but Bernard and Barker say they never had any worries Sony management might cut them loose.

Sony Pictures Classics aims to be lean and efficient, releasing 15 to 20 films a year — more films than most mainstream studios handle — with a staff of just a couple of dozen.

“Michael and I, we’re very hands-on. We’re 25 people. We pick the movies, we pick the scripts, we make the ads, we supervise the theaters,” Bernard said. “The autonomy is what keeps it working, because it keeps the price down. When the poster’s made, there’s only a couple of people to talk about it. The art directors? You’re looking at them. So you can make a poster for 12-grand, not 112-grand.”

Bernard and Barker have been friends since 1979, after drawing each other’s names in a gift exchange for an office Christmas party when they both worked at distributor Films Inc. (Bernard gave Barker a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Great Shark Hunt,” Barker gave Bernard ice-hockey equipment).

They both moved on to United Artists and later co-founded Orion Classics, which they ran from 1983-91. At Orion, they pioneered the nurturing, small-film approach they would continue at Sony Pictures Classics.

“We decided very early on in the ’80s, when we had the opportunity to get into, like, the ‘Rambo’ business or whatever, but we decided very early on that just wasn’t for us,” said Barker, 56.

“People in the ‘Rambo’ business weren’t as fun to hang out with,” added Bernard, 58.

“One of the things I always noticed when I first started is nobody wanted to do the job they were doing. They always wanted to do another job,” Bernard said. “And I said, ‘I like this job.’ And we kept doing it, and no one bothered us. We love the films. They had an impact on the world. The movies are great, you’re contributing to important cinema being distributed everywhere. We just kept doing it because nobody told us we couldn’t.”

Along with Almodovar’s films, among Sony Pictures Classics’ domestic releases are Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” the final movie starring Heath Ledger; the martial-arts epic “House of Flying Daggers”; Errol Morris’ documentary Oscar winner “The Fog of War”; and Woody Allen’s “Sweet and Lowdown,” ”Whatever Works” and his upcoming “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” which premiered at Cannes.

The company has earned four best-picture Oscar nominees, with “Crouching Tiger,” ”Capote,” ”Howards End” and last year’s “An Education.” In the past two years alone, Sony Pictures Classics films picked up five acting Oscar nominations, for Anne Hathaway in “Rachel Getting Married,” Melissa Leo in “Frozen River,” Carey Mulligan in “An Education” and Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer in “The Last Station.”

Barker, Bernard and another Sony Pictures Classics colleague expect to see 150 to 200 films between the three of them at Cannes by the time the 12-day festival closes Sunday.

They often are busy shoppers at Cannes, where they have bought U.S. rights to as many four films at past festivals. Simple patience at a Cannes screening led to one of their early awards triumphs with 1987’s “Babette’s Feast,” a slow-moving picture with a sublime finish that they acquired when they ran Orion Classics.

“The last 45 minutes is the meal, and every distributor left. We were the last ones left for the meal,” Barker said. “We walked out and went, whoa, they missed it, and it was late in the festival, so they were tired. How were they to know this Danish film had this great last 45 minutes? So we came out, and we bought the movie. It was our first foreign film Oscar winner.”

On the Net:

www.festival-cannes.fr/en.html