Jackson Lamb is the brilliant, slovenly head of an MI5 unit of misfits in the hit series Slow Horses. Tenzing Norgay is the spiritual sherpa who makes the first ascent of Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary in the new film Tenzing.
While it’s hard to imagine two more contrasting characters on screen, they share the same DNA.
It’s also shared by Saroo Brierley, the Indian-Australian author who tracks down his birth mother in the hit film Lion, and Peter Gordon, the fey medical student who wants to protect his mother in the Oscar-winner The Power of the Dog.
They all feature in projects made by Australian-British production company See-Saw Films. It “champions underdog stories” in high-quality productions, co-founder Emile Sherman says in his Sydney office, which was once his mother Gene Sherman’s Paddington gallery.
His London counterpart, Iain Canning, describes its output slightly differently. “We’ve gravitated to lots of stories about outsiders but, centrally, we just want to tell a story with integrity,” he says on Zoom.
Either way, See-Saw has become a global film and TV powerhouse since Sherman and Canning founded it in 2008 despite what the latter calls “the hell of our time zone difference”.
They met at the Cannes Film Festival when Sherman, as co-producer, was trying to finance the Heath Ledger-Abbie Cornish film Candy and Canning was working for a British sales agent.
The King’s Speech put the two-year-old company on the entertainment map when it became a box office hit, taking $590 million around the world. Then it beat The Social Network and Inception to win best picture, director and two other Oscars.
“We didn’t really know each other that well but we ended up making a film about an energetic Australian and a slightly reserved Englishman who hated public speaking, which is very us,” Canning says.
The King’s Speech was a classy historical drama with standout performances by Colin Firth as the future King George IV and Geoffrey Rush as Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue but, for Sherman, there was no way of predicting its success.
“We’re in the business of creating the conditions for lightning to strike and to then capture the benefits of lightning striking,” he says. “And you never know when it’s going to strike.”
As cinemas became dominated by Hollywood superhero movies and streaming services increasingly needed more content, See-Saw focused on upmarket projects, initially for cinema then moving into TV and streaming.
Its other films have included Tracks, Widows, Operation Mincemeat, Netflix smash The Stranger and One Life. In TV, it has had success with Top of the Lake, The New Legends of Monkey, State of the Union, Heartstopper, Sweetpea and Apple Cider Vinegar.
Sherman says they had no idea that Slow Horses would be as successful as it has been. Season six on air and two more have been commissioned.
“It sat in exactly the same category as every single other show we took on,” he says. “We believed that there was something exciting there. This was the See-Saw version of a spook story. It was a little bit weird, a little bit wonky, tonally unusual. It was a gamble because it didn’t sit in the normal bucket of the genre.”
See-Saw’s output has been so impressive thatVariety called them “tastemakers” and it described as a major coup French entertainment giant Mediawan’s buy-in of a 51 per cent stake for an undisclosed sum in shares and cash last year.
Variety said: “It will become a significant asset under Mediawan’s umbrella, having not just amassed industry-wide admiration as one of the most successful and best-known scripted label working across both film and TV but accolades including five Oscars, 13 Emmys, five Golden Globes and 15 BAFTAs.” (The latest tally is 16 Emmys and 20 BAFTAs as well as 30 AACTAs.)
It was a surprise sale given that only two years earlier, Sherman said one of the secret ingredients of See-Saw’s success had been its independence in an era of increasing industry consolidation. “We are not owned by anyone and that is really unusual when you think of the Australian landscape.”
So what’s the secret ingredient now that it’s majority owned by Mediawan?
“That we’re owned by Mediawan,” Sherman deadpans. “Iain and I … were never building the company to sell. It had been nearly 20 years and it felt like the right moment to do something different.
“Obviously realising some value out of it is important but we’d done quite well out of the company so it wasn’t entirely motivated by that. It’s a big burden to carry every day when you are solely responsible for the company and there’s no external support.”
Sherman says Mediawan, which has also bought a majority shareholding in Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and teamed up with Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment in a joint venture as part of its English-language expansion, will buy out the rest of See-Saw over multiple years.
The company now has about 45 staff and the two founders have stepped back to be joint chief executives, leaving day-to-day business to joint managing directors Simon Gillis and Ben Irving. Liz Watts is head of film and television in Australia.
Describing Mediawan’s leading executives as “proper hustling producers”, Sherman says “they want to see things happen, they want to finance, they want to help with IP” since the deal.
It seems to work for both parties, giving Mediawan another source of British-Australian production and influence on a pipeline of projects from a proven team.
It helped source international finance and co-commissioners for See-Saw’s just-finished-shooting drama series The Great White, which stars Hugo Weaving as a disgraced barrister who is drawn into the world of animal law, for the ABC and Disney+ in Britain.
“It’s just opened up the scope of See-Saw,” Sherman says. “It hasn’t changed what we’re looking for but sometimes you can do these deals and you find that you become corporatised and your taste becomes flattened. There’s been anything but that in the relationship with Mediawan.”
See-Saw now has “six or seven very senior creative drivers in the company with slates and they all have different tastes” ... “We were not selling the company to disappear. We love doing what we’re doing. We wanted to fuel the next stage of See-Saw.”
One of those creative drivers is Samantha Strauss, creator of Apple Cider Vinegar, who has adapted Irish writer Marian Keyes’ novel Grown Ups for a coming Netflix series.
Earlier this month, See-Saw announced it is teaming up with Mediawan’s Miraculous Corp to turn the French animated superhero series Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir, which screens in more than 150 countries and has expanded into a spin-off film, a stage musical, consumer products, gaming and live experiences over six seasons, into a live-action series.
It is also developing Michael Ende’s fantasy novel The Neverending Story, which was adapted for three films in the 1980s and ’90s, for a new live-action film franchise.
Also in development are a Sinead O’Connor biopic, a TV adaptation of Congolese-British writer Benedict Lombe’s play Shifters, a live-action Mary Poppins TV series and a reboot of the Lovejoy detective series.
See-Saw’s founders hope that Jennifer Peedom’s Tenzing, which landed in cinemas and on Apple TV this month, will be an awards season contender.
“It’s a very emotionally powerful film,” Sherman says. “It’s very much an underdog story, a true story, and it takes us into a different world that we haven’t seen before. Those are all the things we love doing at See-Saw.”
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