NEW YORK -- The frustratingly long wait for Tamara Jenkins' follow-up to her 2007 Oscar-nominated film, The Savages, seemed to finally be coming to end. She had spent two years on the script to Private Life, and secured Katheryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti to star as a middle-aged New York couple navigating the medical and emotional gauntlet of assisted reproduction. But just when the production was ready to go, the company that had developed it, Amazon Studios, stepped back, leaving Jenkins in the lurch.
Enter Netflix.
"I think 'swooped' would be the perfect word. They saved it," says Jenkins, the 56-year-old filmmaker of The Slums of Beverly Hills. "I was scared. I thought we're going to blow it. We were going to miss the window. And then Netflix said, 'We'll do it' and they said it incredibly fast."
Jenkins' Private Life (Oct. 5) is part of what may be the most extensive fall movie slate any studio has ever put together. Between September and Christmas, Netflix will release at least 25 films. There will be one or two new movies released almost every week, many of them by the most sought-after filmmakers in Hollywood.
Among them: Nicole Holofcener's midlife crisis drama The Land of Steady Habits (Sept. 14), Jeremy Saulnier's northern Alaska thriller Hold the Dark (Sept. 28), Paul Greengrass' docudrama on the 2011 Norway terrorist attack 22 July (Oct. 19), David Mackenzie's Robert the Bruce epic Outlaw King (Nov. 9), Joel and Ethan Coen's Western anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Oct. 4) and Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity follow-up Roma (Oct. 5). And that's not even mentioning a new work, the posthumously completed The Other Side of the Wind (Nov. 2), from a long-unheard-from filmmaker: Orson Welles.
A year after Mudbound became Netflix's biggest Oscar contender yet, the streaming giant's programming push (it's spending some $8 billion in 2018) is heading into this year's awards season with a wave of prestige and genre-movie reinforcements. Whether the Netflix tide will roll all the way into the Academy Awards remains to be seen. (Some, like Steven Spielberg, have suggested Netflix films, with their small, token theatrical releases, are more like TV movies and should qualify for the Emmys, not the Oscars.)
But regardless, the Netflix powerhouse fall lineup would be the envy of most any studio. It's a significant surge for a company with an up-and-down record in terms of the quality of its original films. (See: Bright, War Machine or any of the Adam Sandler movies.) And though critics have claimed Netflix releases can get lost in its sea of programming options, it will be hard to miss the Netflix movies this fall. There will be six Netflix films at the Venice Film Festival and eight at the Toronto International Film Festival.
"I usually turn it on its head and say: Look, movies are found on Netflix," says Ian Bricke, co-head of Netflix's indie film division. "And it's certainly important for us, too, that these movies are in the culture. Private Life was at Sundance, will be at the New York Film Festival, will be in theaters. It will be written about and experienced and talked about in a way that any other film would be, and can reach potentially, over a very short period of time, a really meaningful audience all over the world. To me, that's the best of both worlds."
Cuaron's much anticipated Roma had been headed for Cannes. But after Netflix pulled its films from the French festival after Cannes ruled them out from the main competition, Roma will instead hit the Venice, Toronto and the New York festivals before arriving on Netflix in December. For the Mexican filmmaker of Gravity and Children of Men, the '70s-set, black-and-white, Spanish-language Roma is a bold departure that forced Cuaron to remake himself as a filmmaker.
But as with Jenkins' Private Life, Cuaron's deeply personal film, about the Mexico City neighborhood of his youth, was never going to be an easy sell to distributors. Netflix, where original films are typically watched by millions, meant a global release far beyond the art house. Cuaron calls Neflix's support of Roma "unprecedented."
"The specialized film, the so-called foreign film market nowadays is very challenging and sometimes their resources are limited," Cuaron says. "Netflix fully believes in the film and they understand these kinds of films can have a huge audience. So now they are in a creative and aggressive way supporting the film. What they offered was absolutely compelling. I'm really, really grateful for them."
For Cuaron, making Roma, about a domestic worker for a middle-class family, was part of connecting again with the "personal journey" of cinema. He estimates 90 percent of it is based on his memories. He went to great lengths to re-create his childhood home. None of the crew or cast had a script.
"It's something that's been brewing for a long, long, long time," he says of the film.
Jenkins, too, was pulling from her own experience for Private Life. The film is partly based on the pregnancy trials of her own with her husband, screenwriter Jim Taylor.
MovieStyle on 08/31/2018