A friendship spanning four decades between Niv Fichman, the Toronto-based producer and Rhombus Media co-founder, and Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan comes full circle with the TIFF world premiere of Seven Veils.
Fichman was a film student at Toronto’s York University when he first encountered Egoyan in 1979, but the two had never worked together on a feature until now. “I attended a screening of his short film After Grad With Dad at the University of Toronto,” recalls Fichman. “We’ve had a long, long friendship.”
That same year Fichman and fellow undergraduate Barbara Willis Sweete launched Fichman-Sweete Productions. They swiftly changed the name to Rhombus Media, partnered with producer Larry Weinstein, and dived into music documentaries and arts films. They parted ways when Fichman moved into broader features, although the three remain firm friends.
For the first couple of decades, Rhombus — now in its 45th year — co-produced with partners such as PBS, BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Arte and HNK, with Fichman travelling the world to cut deals with these and other (mostly public) broadcasters. By the 1990s the producer was on the board of the Canadian Opera Company and recommended Egoyan to be a director on the 1997 TV series Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired By Bach. “That was a great experience,” says Fichman. “When Atom decided to make a film around Salome [several years later], it was natural for us to finally work together. It was just a joy.”
Opera setting
Seven Veils shot over four weeks around February of this year, when Egoyan also happened to be directing Richard Strauss’s tragic one-act opera Salome for the Canadian Opera Company at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. “It would be super difficult to [make this film] without being able to piggyback on an actual production because the orchestra is 100 people and we needed a lot of music from the opera,” says Fichman of Seven Veils, noting it is not an opera film but a film set around an opera.
When the musicians and singers were resting between rehearsals and performances, the Seven Veils production pounced. “There were only two performances a week [of Salome] for a few weeks and they had time on their hands, so why not make a film with them?”
The veteran producer of features such as The Red Violin, Enemy and Possessor has plenty of admiration for the performance by lead actress Amanda Seyfried, with whom Egoyan made 2009’s Chloe. “Amanda is just haunting and riveting and magnificent,” he says. Yet due to the actors strike, which was ongoing at time of writing, it looks unlikely Seyfried will attend TIFF due to SAG-AFTRA strike rules prohibiting talent from promoting new work except where the union has granted interim agreements to independent productions.
“I’m sure Amanda wants nothing more than to promote the film,” Fichman says. “She loves Atom and yet she’s a leader among performers in the US and stands in solidarity with the principles of the strike.”
Fichman applied in July for an interim agreement and had still not heard back two weeks before the film’s “avant-premiere” screening at the Four Seasons Centre on September 8 and official world premiere at the Princess of Wales Theatre on September 10. XYZ Films handles sales on Seven Veils, as it did on Rhombus’s Berlinale opener Blackberry. “We have purposely not sold the film yet, and the strategy is to make a big splash,” he says.
Rhombus Media is also producing The Sympathizer for HBO, directed by Park Chan-wook, starring Robert Downey Jr and based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning spy novel. Fichman bought the rights, got A24 on board and put the high-profile series together; it shot in Los Angeles and Thailand between September 2022 and May 2023 and has completed production. There is still ADR work to be done when the strikes are over. HBO will premiere the show on Max once completed.
Fichman was on The Sympathizer the entire time and, although he was in Toronto for Seven Veils’ music scenes, his Rhombus Media producers Kevin Krikst and Fraser Ash took the lead on the production.
Fichman wholly owns Rhombus Media and in all this time has never taken on investors. “That’s partially the key to success — just keep to your own financial means because then I’m not beholden to anyone,” he observes. “Of course, investment’s great and can benefit any company. I used to joke I was for sale, so why doesn’t anyone want to buy me?”
One gets the sense Fichman wouldn’t want it any other way.
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