Bafta-winning Conclave producer Tessa Ross sat down with friend, filmmaker and collaborator Edward Berger to reflect on their work together, the role of public funders in the UK and making independent films amid an increasingly challenging environment, for this year’s Paso Doble in-conversation at Rome Film Fest on October 14.
The anecdote-filled tête-à-tête explored what it means to be a filmmaker and a creative producer and how these relationships work. The event was led by curator, distributor and producer Nico Marzano.
Ross’s recent credits include the multiple-award-winning 2024 papal drama Conclave and Danny Boyle’s Venice premiere Ink through her House Productions outfit, set up after fruitful stints as the head of drama at the BBC and as director of Film4. She has executive producer credits on myriad era-defining UK films from Billy Elliot, Slumdog Millionaire and The Last King Of Scotland to 12 Years A Slave, The Lobster, Carol and The Zone Of Interest.
“What makes me fall in love with the project is the people or the person behind it,” Ross revealed. “I wish there was a science, but there isn’t.”
She believes almost all stories can be told in many different ways by many different people. “But it is always the talent of a writer or a director or a writer-director, the vision of somebody very particular, an author that makes me think I have a place in that storytelling,” she explained. “I have to have some connection with the person in order to be able to help fill in the story.”
One such connection was with German filmmaker Berger, who made his first English-language film, Conclave, from a script by Peter Straughan, for which the latter won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.
“I hadn’t made an English-language movie yet, and I was really looking for one,” Berger said. “I don’t care who writes the damn script as long as it feels personal, and Peter Straughan is one of the best writers in the world. His adaptation is much better than my adaptation would have been.”
Ross said her public funding experience at BBC Film and Film 4, where the combination of quality and purpose – the desire to reach an audience with things that matter – was key in making decisions, has never left her.
“Those muscles are very hard to lose. I wish I could lose them a bit. I wish I could say, ‘Oh, this is big and expansive and definitely commercial.’ It’s just not the place I start,” she admitted.
Ross said she loved that an idea like Slumdog Millionaire can come from an odd place that nobody wants to finance it, that the distributor wants to drop it, and it makes more money than any other film and wins eight Oscars.
But she said she believes it is harder than ever to raise the funding for independent films, even for her.
“The business is much more nervous than when I was funding films. It’s true that just because you’ve made a film that’s worked doesn’t mean anybody will trust you to do another one.
“The public money that exists in the UK for film, for a lot of the films I produce, I couldn’t make without,” Ross noted. “Conclave we made without the support of any of that funding other than tax credit but we make a lot of our films with BBC or Film4 investment, and sometimes the BFI as well.”
Those organisations are vital for producers trying to raise the money for projects by first-time filmmakers, she added.
“I’ve been working for such a long time that I think I have a habit of falling in love with things and believing in an idealistic way that it must be possible,” Ross said. “If I believe it, I must find a way of making it possible, which is probably mad, and it must mean that there are lots of projects on my [House] slate that may never happen but that I will keep on trying to make happen.”
Berger had presented Ross with Rome Film Fest’s Industry Achievement award – established to pay homage to personalities in the global film industry who, through their memorable careers, have left an indelible mark on the history of cinema – the previous evening at the opening-night gala.
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