Once I Acquired an Irish Film
Michael Open interviews Tony Safford, Head of Acquisitions for Fox Searchlight.

One of the most important routes for non-studio films into the American market in the past decade or so has been through the ‘specialist’ arms of the big distributors. Arguably the most financially successful of these has been Fox Searchlight which, it hardly needs to be said, is allied to News Corporation’s 20th Century Fox. The company’s first-ever film was The Brothers McMullen, which charted life in an Irish-American family, and other films in their slate over the years have included In America, The Good Thief, The Van and Waking Ned. Head of Acquisitions for Fox Searchlight is the enthusiastic and amiable Tony Safford. It was he who acquired Once for US theatrical distribution following its triumphant screenings in Sundance last year. We grabbed fifteen minutes of his valuable time to examine the dynamics of penetrating the American market for the smaller film.

Michael: Tell us about Fox Searchlight – its ethos and how it came about.

Tony: It was part of a wave in which the studios established their own specialist distribution divisions and it’s about twelve to thirteen years old. It’s always been filmmaker-friendly and marketing-driven, both of which are quite important and both of which are necessary for us to get behind the project. There are plenty of films that we fall in love with but don’t see a clear way into the market place, in which case we are not the best distributor. There are other films where we do see a path into the market place, but just we don’t like them as films – so we are also not the best distributor.

As far as your input into the process goes, how does your job work on a week-to-week basis?

Acquisitions forms about half of the Fox Searchlight slate. We release anything from about eight to thirteen films a year. Any less than that is inefficient, any more than that is inefficient. This allows us to put a lot of time and effort behind the films that we acquire, which is how I like to work. The acquisitions are opportunistic; they are driven by our passions and what we find out there in the world.

And to what extent does your own taste in films inform your judgement regarding what films to release?

Yes, that’s actually a good question. One of the reasons we think we are good at what we do is that we are the audience for these films. There is no disconnection between what we make and acquire and the kind of films that we like. We are equally admiring of the films of our competitors, for example. We think that Focus and Paramount Vantage have some spectacular films. We are the audience for these films and the same is true of the films that we acquire and that we produce or green-light. We know where we are and what our worlds are like, and it’s always a struggle to market and distribute the films effectively, but we do think that we understand our audience because they are ‘us’.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 121.