A 40-year ‘peak period’
Oscars have an affinity for Arthur Cohn. Over the past 40 years, the documentaries and feature films he’s produced have won six of the awards. The list includes 1962’s “The Sky Above, the Mud Below” (best documentary); 1971’s best foreign-language film, “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” -- which was rejected by 31 distributors -- and the 1991 best documentary, “American Dream.” In fact, the 64-year-old Swiss filmmaker has received more Academy Awards than any other producer and is the only foreign film producer with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He’s still working, hoping to find interest in three projects, including Kobo Abe’s “The Ruined Map.”
On Tuesday, Home Vision is releasing “Arthur Cohn Presents ...” ($200), a nine-disc collector’s DVD set that was created in collaboration with Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Classics, Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios, Miramax Studios and Buena Vista’s Entertainment Group. The package collects “American Dream,” “Behind the Sun,” the Oscar-winning “Black and White in Color,” “Sky Above, Mud Below,” “A Brief Vacation,” “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” the Oscar-winning “One Day in September,” the Golden Globe-winning “Central Station,” “Two Bits” and “Dangerous Moves.”
Recently the gregarious Cohn talked about the Oscars, the importance of American success and his choice in material.
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The Academy Awards
In Europe, many talk a little cynically about the Academy Awards -- “they are a bunch of 5,700 people who get a ballot every year, fill it out and then go back to whatever they do or don’t do.” This is nonsense. The big mission of the academy has been omitted and is not realized and not seen. The big mission of the academy in addition to rightly applauding good work of the year is that they have always gone out of their way to encourage films that have no hopes and no distributors and which are unknown, so the world should know that these are significant films. Without the academy and without the Oscar, nobody would know “Finzi-Continis.” Without the Academy Award, we would have made the film with a lot of labor of love and nobody would have seen it. I had the same experience with “Black and White in Color” -- I had no distributors.... and “The Sky Above, Mud Below,” I found a distributor after the Oscars.
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The American market
I have never made a film where I didn’t meditate for hours and days and months and sometimes years [over] what is good for the American public. Will the American public like that? Most European producers are satisfied that it is possible to finance a film from their own national sources and from their own film funds. You have German films that are good for Germany, but nobody subject-wise is interested outside Germany -- and the same for French, the same for Italians. They are films where the story is done for the native country. Most European producers consider America and distribution in America like manna from heaven. I learned that you could do something about it. They label me in Europe an exotic producer because I believe that America is the key.
The American market is important. If it is a success here, it is success everywhere.
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Intuition
What the films of mine have in common is at least 70% or 80% of them were done against the advice I received from the left, right and center because everybody told me don’t do them, they are not commercial.
I have to listen to my intuition, and I don’t have to listen to the right, left and center. I don’t have advisors and I don’t have readers in a sense that they tell me what to do and what not to do. The advantage is that I am responsible for me, and the disadvantage is that I have to spend a lot of time in the development of stories to make sure it is something I would be proud of.
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Films I didn’t do
When you look at film careers in this country, truly significant people much more important than me, most of them have a peak period of five years or seven years or 10 years. I don’t have that. I won the six Oscars spread over 35 years. Approximately every six years, I have had an Oscar, which is positive and negative.
Positive because it shows I have a continuous creative ability and it is not restricted to a limited span of time, but it’s negative because people think I am sleeping in between the Oscars and am doing nothing. The truth is, I have made relatively few films, 15 so far, but the greatness of my film work, if I may say that, is not only the films I do, but the films where out of my own personal integrity and my desire to remain faithful to me, I didn’t do.
The truth is, many people outside of the industry don’t realize that an independent producer has to further three ventures in order to make one successful because I don’t know how the script will come out and I don’t know the reaction to the script and I don’t know if I’ll find a good director and I don’t know if I’ll find a good actor. Then I have to look for the good location and then I have to look for right timing and I have to look for the financing. It is not possible for an independent producer to do this if he doesn’t have three projects [going] at the time.
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-- Susan King
