How Sam Pressman is continuing his father’s legacy with a global film slate

Producer Sam Pressman of Pressman Film is wearing many hats at AFM. He will be speaking on a finance panel, checking on international sales updates and huddling with potential partners on an ever-expanding development slate.

The company head — and son of Ed Pressman, the late independent producer who championed the early careers of Hollywood luminaries Oliver Stone, Terrence Malick and Kathryn Bigelow — is delighted the film market has returned to Los Angeles. “It’s important that Hollywood and LA stay strong and retains the position as a focused place of labour and mind power,” he says.

Which is not to say Pressman is averse to filming outside the city where he lives, a short walk from Sunset Boulevard and nearby to offices on the old Jim Henson Company Lot. He was a producer alongside Cassian Elwes on Dead Man’s Wire, Gus Van Sant’s lauded Venice entry that shot in Louisville, Kentucky at the start of the year. New distributor Row K snapped up North American rights and WME Independent continues international sales. 

“It’s a movie that [my father] would have absolutely fucking loved,” says Pressman, eyes shining. “It’s about something and feels like a movie out of the 1970s when my dad came into his own as a producer.”

Pressman was a regular on set in Japan for Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo, directed earlier this year by the impish genre specialist Takashi Miike, with Jeremy Thomas and longtime Miike collaborator Misako Saka from OLM as fellow producers alongside Nippon TV. Besides the usual jigsaw of independent film financing, a portion of development funds came from a $2m raise Pressman did on a platform run by the community finance company Republic. Neon will release in the US and Neon International continues territory sales at AFM.

Pressman approached Miike in late 2023 and calls the director an “auteur, visionary, a character of international cinema”. Miike had worked with Thomas before and enquired of the UK veteran whether the young Pressman was “a joker or a player”. Thomas responded that he was a player, and Miike committed. 

“Jeremy was a friend of my father’s and came from a different angle out of the UK and always stayed independent,” says Pressman. “It’s been an amazing partnership.” 

The Tokyo reboot stars Lily James and Shun Oguri, and is the realisation of a plan announced by the Pressmans in Cannes 2021, some 18 months before Ed died. The idea was to mine the vaults, starting with local-language remakes of the 1992 crime drama that the elder Pressman filmed with Abel Ferrara and Harvey Keitel as a flawed detective, and revisited with Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage in 2009.

Fresh takes

Now Pressman is developing new English-language versions of other library titles produced by his father, such as Brian De Palma’s 1972 slasher horror Sisters starring Margot Kidder, Joan Tewkesbury’s 1979 road-trip comedy Old Boyfriends and 1980 horror pic Christmas Evil. The slate includes the French novella Girl On A Motorcycle that Jack Cardiff adapted into a 1968 feature starring Marianne Faithfull.

“He always had a mind towards global cinema and had incredible taste,” Pressman says of his father, who introduced him to James Cagney films and Italian neo-realist cinema when he was in middle school. “The library titles give us the strength of connecting to film history and some of the most amazing filmmakers.”

Besides a close-knit team that includes COO and president Paula Paizes and development and production VP Max Loeb, Pressman’s mother, actress Annie McEnroe, works at the company. “She is head of special projects,” says Pressman. “She’s the core of our company, as she was by Ed’s side for over 40 years.”

Pressman has fingers in all sorts of pies, from TV projects at Apple to this year’s Venice VR installation Dark Rooms. He believes opportunities are ripe for independent producers. “There’s still a great hunger for great film,” he says. 

A new adaptation is in the works of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, which Ed Pressman made with Mary Harron, starring Christian Bale. Luca Guadagnino will direct and is working with Scott Z Burns on the script. Pressman will not say if the update remains faithful to the novel, although contrary to reports the lead character will remain male. But he will say this: “It’s going to blow people’s minds.” 

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