The Brit 50: Finola Dwyer Productions

Need to know: New Zealand-born Dwyer decided to bow out of Wildgaze Films, her production company with Amanda Posey, coming out of the pandemic. The amicable parting saw the pair shut their office on London’s Greek Street in 2021, splitting the slate and with Posey retaining the Wildgaze name. 

The pair still have a few joint projects, most recently the Jack Thorne-scripted test-tube-baby drama Joy, the final film to emerge from Pathe’s since shuttered UK film arm, which came out on Netflix last year; and Jan Komasa’s The Noise Of Time, a biopic of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich in development with Beta Cinema, on which they are minority co-producers.

Dwyer always produced some projects separately under her FDP banner while at Wildgaze, including Dustin Hoffman’s 2012 directing debut Quartet, and worked as a producer-for-hire on films including 2017 Netflix title Our Souls At Night starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, on which she brought in director Ritesh Batra. She also served as an executive producer on Kate Winslet’s passion project Lee.

Now flying solo (bringing on support staff as needed), Dwyer invests the money saved from overheads into building her own slate, keeping five or six projects in development at any one time. The most recent film produced under the FDP banner is Kristin Scott Thomas’s directing debut My Mother’s Wedding, released this summer in the US by Vertical Entertainment.

Key personnel: Finola Dwyer, producer.

Incoming: Dwyer hopes to shoot two features next year: Hello And Paris starring Javier Bardem, a romantic comedy loosely inspired by Deborah McKinlay’s culinary novel That Part Was True, which will be the second feature of US writer/director Elizabeth Chomko (What They Had) and is backed by Fifth Season; and Manhattan Beach, an Abi Morgan-scripted adaptation of Jennifer Egan’s 1930s and ’40s-set mystery noir novel, developed with Film4. Sydney Sweeney is attached to star with Benjamin Caron directing.

Projects in the pipeline include Long Island, the sequel to 2015’s Brooklyn which earned Saoirse Ronan her first best actress Oscar nomination; Christopher Hampton is writing the adaptation of Irish author Colm Toibin’s novel, which is set 22 years after the events of Brooklyn, and Searchlight Pictures is on board.

There are also adaptations in the works of two debut novels: Isabel Colegate’s The Blackmailer which is set up with BBC Film, and Jennifer Trevelyan’s A Beautiful Family with New Zealand filmmaker Niki Caro (Whale Rider), a summer coming-of-age story that Dwyer describes as “Stand By Me-meets-Catcher In The Rye with a young girl at the centre”.

Finola Dwyer says: “For me it’s about trusting my instincts and following my passions while interrogating if I can get it not just made, but made well. There is a boldness and risk-taking required as an independent producer that should be celebrated. It’s important to take big swings and not play it safe, whether that be with choice of filmmaker or cast or story. More than once I’ve taken a big swing and thought, ‘This may be the last thing I do if it doesn’t work.’ When it does work, people just assume it was a slam-dunk from the get-go.”

Contact: info@fdfilm.co.uk 

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