Oliver Marhdt Opens Up On Bringing German Cinema to America

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 16 April 2013 05:00

Written by Brad Balfour

Oliver Mahrdt, born in Germany met the late and legendary agent Hanns Wolters, who was one of Marlene Dietrich’s first agents in Berlin in the 20s and 30s, after studying directing at New York Film Academy. He started working at Hanns Wolters Theatrical Agency in 1996 and was responsible for key accounts like the Japanese film distributor  Daira for which he attended film festivals worldwide and he was responsible for acquisitions of more than 200 European and North American feature films. After the passing of the founder he became president and Senior-Agent of the company and changed the name to Hanns Wolters International Inc. to reflect the new corporate structure. 

Today, he represents among many others, the German Film Industry in the United States, as well as Canada. Mahrdt sat down with Film Festival Traveler's Brad Balfour to discuss Hans Wolter, how the distribution of foreign films is changing, and the international film festival circuit.

Q: How did you get started at the German Film Office?

OM: I was a junior partner at Hans Wolters [an office representing the German film industry abroad] in ‘96 and got my appointment to represent the German film industry in 2001.

Q: How does that work? Does Germany have a national culture office like there like Ireland?

OM: Yeah. uniFrance is our [French] equivalent. In every country there are people responsible for culture.

Q: What about film?

OM: Well we have the Kennedy Institute all over Germany and they have a film department within it… But it all ends up at the culture ministry of a country.

Q: Hans Wolter used to be a private agency until the family died off. Was the German film office merged with Hans Wolter?

OM: It’s a personal appointment and I just happened to be the boss of Hans Wolters, who’s also the representative for the German movie industry. In our corporate structure at Hans Wolters, it’s like our corporate client, and we have a couple of them.

Q: If you were not here, in NYC, would there be much an German film industry presence here?

OM: There have been before. It’s quite an old organization and deals worldwide, it’s just that the US is an important place to have someone. They closed all European offices because they say Florence is like a flight away from Munich or a drive.

Q: We know about national cinema in the sense of art films and we know about television, but it’s hard for it to distinguish itself except the rare moments where they get embraced by critics or artists, but now the whole dynamic is changed. Is it an easier area to negotiate or harder?

OM: It all depends. The devil is in the details. You have points where you go “it used to be a lot easier, over time it got more complicated.” Take a battlefield like New York for example. If you have someone working in the German book offices or the films office in New York, we all have to work together. How often is it that a German book is going be remade like The Life of Others? 

It starts with the book rights and it becomes quite interesting when you don’t have one big office to orchestrate that, but you have separate departments like film and book and all these other cultural departments that we have here. It’s hard because you don’t have someone who oversees [everything]. 

It’s much easier when you’re a small country and you have one who’s responsible for every cultural thing and then you really have your finger on it. Where we really have to make a conscious effort to meet and discuss these things.

Q: Not to mention that a lot of countries are not speaking German. So you’re up against this issue that the German speaking community has its limits. Spanish is pervasive, but there’s a sort of rivalry between Germany and Austria.

OM: It’s so unique. It’s not like a year old flare up between the German and the French. It’s interesting to see how it’s separated. Everyone has its own distribution ideas. Germany helps you with German distribution and support ideas to get German films out. France does a lot more by itself. 

We actually help American distributors release German films. The French do a lot, like they have their film series they do, then travel it through universities, which is something we don’t do. And it’s not a bad idea because they basically educate American audiences about what foreign films are.

Q: The Spanish have a chain of cultural centers -- the Cervantes.

OM: It’s interesting to see how we all have our own approach. It’s very, very hard. In the end I can always tell people that 93% of all movie theaters are a no-go because they’re all owned by studios. That means we all fight for 7% in the US.

Q: You mean owned by chains?

OM: Yes, [chains] that are owned by studios, so you can’t get into them. Then there’s the Art House Convergence, which is an association of the Independent Movie Houses, but it’s not a chain. It’s not like if you have one theater in New York that all of a sudden, oh cinemas that are independent will play your movie house. It’s a fight from movie house to movie house, not like when you produce a studio movie, and they see it’s working, you have this astronomical number of 2000 movie theaters that will play your film.

Q: Has digital distribution and the internet changed things for international cinema?

OM: With everyone cursing the internet, we really have to be happy that it exists because you can basically get any news like falls, riots, from every country fairly easily. It’s changed dramatically. In the old days I remember no one really cared [about] opening in France. Even in Germany they would say “hey, you share a border?” 

It is interesting. You don’t want people to know when they travel across the Rhine and see that the movie has been playing somewhere else for two months. You cannot afford [that]. The movie has to start the same time in all major markets, otherwise you have these glitches that are potentially damaging because you could get the copyright infringed version over the internet before your movie has opened. It’s just a drastic change from how business was done before to now.

Q: Now we have all these film societies.

OM: And they all know how to play. In the old days it was like basically New York and LA opened, and the rest had to march to that drum. Now if you have a smash hit in one of the ten major markets in the US, you might force everyone from the other metropolitan areas to follow you. That has also basically created a dog-eats-dog atmosphere that’s frightening too.

Q: But it has opened doors for you guys.

OM: For everyone. 

Q: More movies are done in Indonesia, Nigeria, and India, but now people can actually see them. There’s an audience for these things.

OM: You have direct access to these things now. If you’re interested in it, you will find it on the internet. Coming back to your first question, what I find helps us break into the US market is breakfast television with reading [scrolling] news on the bottom. With a busy screen every morning, people would be more used to watching foreign movies with subtitles. It has made things a lot easier. I really have to say over the years, it’s not like people say “I don’t feel like watching a movie” because then you’d have to say you stop watching breakfast television, which is the same thing. 

Q: You have any films in Tribeca?

OM: We have a couple co-productions. They cut it down substantially and they have new strategies, and let’s face it, right now all our major movies get finished for the fall festivals after Cannes. We have right now a break and then an onslaught of German movies in Toronto and Venice We have all these sensational  movies in the pipeline that I’m really excited about and they unfortunately didn’t get finished in time.

Q: Look at a director like Agnieszka Holland, she survives doing American TV, but she’s a master director.

OM: It’s a fascinating thing. Who would have thought that people could between television and film? In the old days it was unthinkable. Kathy Bates who wins an Oscar goes on to do a series like Harry’s Law.

Q: More actors want to get TV work now. Because they do a series for five or seven years they can pick and choose because they know they have these residuals.

OM:  It’s interesting to see how people are weighing in whether or not to make an independent movie when they don’t feel comfortable with it. If you have a series going on you can relax and say whether you do it or not. As a talent agent, a lot of people go “you should do this” and they say “…if this backfires, how damaging could it be?”

Q: Are your directors getting work in America or internationally?

OM: [Doing something like] Law and Order is not a career hindrance. It’s nice to have on a resume because you have the action and you can prove you know how to work with unions. It is different if you shoot a movie in Germany as opposed to shooting one here. It’s a totally different beast. Just trying to explain to German directors the difference between cameramen and camera operator and they don’t do the same thing.

Q: Many more international directors are making American films?

OM: It’s very easy if you have a key market like Germany. You can say the bottom line, if everything goes wrong in the US and you have a German director that will bring XYZ out of Germany no matter what, that makes people in difficult financial times like now feel more secure to take a risk with someone foreign if they can bring something else to the table. That is why a lot of people look at what’s happening in Europe. If you wanted a horror movie, look at Japanese directors.

Q: What’s happening in Germany genre-wise? Look at what Luc Besson did for France. 

OM: His company, EuropaCorp, has become a major player. Some of his stuff is nice to see, but they’re surprised how it works everywhere else, but not in Germany. The producers are looking at them confused.

Q: Do you find it difficult to get across comedies more than anything else? The one about East Germany….

OM: Goodbye Lenin. It came out here; it had a very good distributor. The luck of the draw was that Dutch dance movie that was nominated for an Oscar and it flew out. But after it didn’t work…

Q: What happened to Berlin Blues? Why didn’t that get a distributor?

OM: Sometimes I don’t understand why a movie isn’t sold either. When you’ve done this job as long as I have, you know every distributor. You know their niche, you know what they react to and what they don’t, what’s a deal breaker, and yet you have these films that you think will work, but then find out it doesn’t.

Q: You have a new opportunity with cross cultural directors.

OM: Same story with co-productions in general. What is a German movie? Right now we are fighting over what percent of the movie has to have, and that’s a healthy debate right now, if something has 5% German post-prod money, can that be sold in the US or is it taking because we have so many different movies in the film fund and we don’t have a budget high enough to good by all these movies. How much German representation is there?

Q: Who programs the thing at MoMA?

OM: MoMA. The Museum of Modern Art is picking the top German movies and I’m happy to be there, other foreign reps doing this are under fire, but I’m in a lucky position where I can say “you like it? Call MoMA.” It’s a museum and we cannot tell a museum, especially one as important as MoMA, “pick this movie because the producer is giving me a hard time on the phone.” 

This is why MOMA is so special and why we’re so happy to be in a relationship with them. I like having this regular thing with MoMA once every year where it’s a chance for us to also showcase German films. 

You have Wim Wenders retrospectives and other shows. Thank god we have a pool with a lot of people we can draw from. It’s a lucky position to be in. There weren’t always as many German films in the minds of the American public as now.

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