“I wouldn’t survive a day in that environment.”
That’s indie distributor Neon‘s co-founder and CEO Tom Quinn‘s take on working within a major studio, let alone two combined.
In his first public appearance since taking home Neon’s seventh Cannes Palme d’Or last week, this time for Fjord, Quinn was asked at the Produced By Conference his thoughts on the mega Paramount-Warner Bros merger ahead and how that would impact Neon. This year’s Produced By is being held on the Universal lot.
“The idea of putting two of those (companies) together — how you would you feel like if A24 and Neon merged? That would be ridiculous,” he exclaimed.
Expounding on the downside of corporate versus his low overhead operation, “The amount of politicking, the layers of middle management to get to a decision. I’ve worked with these companies, been on zoom with 50 people… In no way can anyone make a decision. It all goes off into black box (after the meeting). I don’t want to work at a company like that,” said Quinn.
“The lack of competition is bad,” he added.
“Another thing that’s happening is the ‘Uber-zation’ of entertainment: the algorithm,” Quinn continued, “I don’t want to understand it, I want no part of it.”
Back in February, Deadline reported that Neon was in talks with Mike Larocca and Michael Schaefer’s Department M, that company taking a significant stake in Neon.
Quinn explained that Neon has “a cap and a ceiling on size.” Originally, when he launched the company, the most expensive film he had made in his career at that point was Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer at the Weinstein Co-owned Radius. “I thought, that seems to be a reasonable place where we can achieve our ambition, that may not be possible today.”
In regards to being a juggernaut at Cannes consistently, Quinn was modest: “I spent 20 years not winning a single thing at this festival.”
He had a few early brushes with Cannes winning success. Quinn, as a publicist, worked on Mike Leigh’s 1996 Secret & Lies which won the Palme d’Or as well as Best Actress for Brenda Blethyn, and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury; in addition to the Magnolia Lars von Trier dystopian future title Melancholia, which didn’t win the Palme d’Or (von Trier made sympathetic remarks toward Adolf Hitler, getting himself banned from the fest), but won Best Actress for its lead star Kirsten Dunst.
“At no point did I think we’d ever win a Palme d’Or for Parasite,” which Quinn bought at the script stage.
“We’ve never planned or chased the idea of, we must have a certain number for films in Cannes,” added Quinn, despite having nine films there this year, six of which were in competition.
Quinn said that Neon remains “agnostic about genre and country of origin… (U.S.) isn’t the center of the world as it relates to cinema. There are unexplored and yet-to-explore territories around the world.”
He expressed passion for filmmakers: Even if he doesn’t understand their movies or can make commercial sense of them, he’ll roll the dice on them if he’s wowed by their work. Read French filmmaker Julia Ducournau and her 2021 film, Titane, which was another Palme d’Or winner for Neon.
At Cannes this year, in addition to the Palme for Fjord, the distributor won the FIPRESCI award for that pic as well as Best Actress for both Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto in All of a Sudden.
