Producer and Cartoon Saloon co-founder Paul Young talks us through The Breadwinner and the process of making an internationally co-produced animated feature film
Out this month is Irish and UK cinemas is The Breadwinner, the third feature animation from Kilkenny studio Cartoon Saloon.
Parvana is an 11-year-old girl who lives under Taliban rule in Afghanistan. After the wrongful arrest of her father, Parvana cuts off her hair and dresses like a boy to support her family. She soon discovers a new world of freedom and danger. Drawing strength from the fantastical stories she invents, Parvana embarks on an epic quest to find her father.
CinÉireann sat down with producer Paul Young to talk about the film
CinÉ: The Breadwinner is finally in cinemas, how are you feeling?
Paul Young: I'm always a bit nervous before an opening weekend, but it's totally out of our hands now. We've done quite a bit of pushing for it and I suppose there's been a bit of a gap between when we got the Oscar nomination and the release, but we just try to cope wit that as best we can. I'm hopeful and upbeat that we will have people curious to go see it.
In terms of that release gap, did you have any say or was it all StudioCanal?
The thing is, when you are distributing a film like this, they have to start six months out. They picked the date without knowing about Oscar nominations or anything, and they've got so many films that they can't suddenly move around afterwords. I'm sure that if they could have then they would have tried to move it up a little bit, closer to the Oscar nomination. But then they have all of their other films that they are working on and that they have booked in and are ready to go. I still think that it might work out at this time of year. It's the end of the school year and there are still a lot of positive reasons for it to be released at this time of year. I suppose it is different when it comes out in the U.S. so early, but that's just the way it goes when you have an independent film. It's not just one distributor that is putting it out everywhere at the same time.
What is slightly odd about that is that it is already out on Netflix in the U.S and we were still waiting for the cinema release. It was common in the 80's and 90's to have big gaps but we've gotten used to a symmetry now for releases.
It's not as common but then our film is so independent, and it does still happen to independent films where you have different distributors for each territory. A lot of the time it is the opposite. A European film might get a release in France or the U.K or even Ireland, and then it will be a while before it hits North America, before somebody picks it up there. For us we were picked up in the U.S. early, almost first, and they set their date to try and get the nomination or to have a chance to get it.
That's understandable given your pedigree. You had two nominations already under your belt and you went for and got the hat-trick.
That was great.
The Oscar rules changed which supposedly makes it harder for
Words: Niall Murphy
22 CinÉireann / May 2018