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Through their company BoulderLight Pictures, producers J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules have been involved with several of the most surprising and original genre films of the last 10 years, from the wildly unpredictable horror flick “Barbarian” to the blood-drenched and relentlessly intense — yet grimly funny — thriller “Becky” and its sequel. Their latest movie, “Companion” (co-produced with Roy Lee and “Barbarian” director Zach Cregger), is their most entertaining yet, an unclassifiable blend of sci-fi, rom-com, horror, and action in which writer-director Drew Hancock sustains his tonal high-wire act from beginning to end.
Lifshitz and Margules have managed to sustain a career producing original movies that don’t always have obvious comps — something that can make their films tricky from a marketing standpoint — by keeping their budgets modest enough to allow their directors maximum creative freedom. “A lot of people say, ‘You’ve got to reign in filmmakers,'” Lifshitz told IndieWire. “It’s the opposite, you’ve got to let filmmakers know they can be ambitious. Everybody on the set needs to be physically safe, but the movie shouldn’t feel safe. The movie should feel radical.”
In Margules’ words, the producers try to be “responsibly reckless,” keeping their budgets at a level where the movies won’t strain against their resources but can take chances because the financial risks are low. “Balancing the two is a challenge, but extremely important to us,” he told IndieWire. The approach paid off big time on “Barbarian,” a movie that grossed ten times its budget not by playing it safe but by giving audiences something they had never seen before. The producers acknowledge, however, that the road toward getting such movies funded and released isn’t always smooth.
“We’ve had the experience multiple times of taking something out and everybody passing on it, and then after it’s a hit everybody saying they want their version of it,” Lifshitz said. The challenges of producing original material are worth it to Lifshitz and Margules, however, since it enables them to make the kinds of films that made them want to get into the business in the first place. “I don’t make movies for the Soho House, I make movies for the 12-year old me,” Lifshitz said. “We just want to be as authentic to our interests as we can be.”
For Margules, that means producing “premium pulp,” movies that provide the satisfactions of genre but at a high artistic level. “I think the connective tissue between a lot of the stuff we do is that it feels dangerous,” Margules said, adding that as long as an audience is entertained filmmakers can get away with radical experiments in form and content. “As long as you don’t bore them, you can play with structure. You can have unconventional characters.”
Paramount in the early 1970s and New Line in the 1990s under Michael De Luca (who, in a nice bit of serendipity, is now an executive at Warner Bros. overseeing “Companion”) are, for Lifshitz, the model examples of studio regimes that oversaw smart, accessible entertainment for adults. “At New Line, whether it was ‘Se7en’ or ‘Boogie Nights’ or ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ those movies were all commercial,” he said. “Broad doesn’t have to mean bad. ‘The Godfather’ was a broad populist movie. ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ was a broad populist movie. One of the big problems now is that people are making movies for executives instead of audiences. Or for their friend group.”
Lifshitz points to “The Brutalist” as the kind of movie he’d like to see more of. “That movie’s an audience picture,” he said. “It’s never boring, and it cost 10 million dollars. That’s a responsible amount of money. For me, I always want to spend just enough money so that we’re not creatively shackled and we can go crazy and have the autonomy on a certain kind of movie to really swing for the fences.”
In Margules’ mind, “Companion” has the broadest imaginable appeal, though the trick is that the surprises on which the movie depends make it extremely difficult to market — how does one communicate the pleasures of a film without giving away the twists that make those pleasures possible? The fact that there’s no other movie quite like “Companion” adds to the challenge. “We weren’t able to point to another movie and say, ‘it’s like this and therefore this,'” Margules said. “More than any other movie we’ve ever done, it stands alone.”
Given that the same could be said for most of BoulderLight’s previous output, including its recent Netflix hit “Woman of the Hour,” Margules has high hopes for “Companion,” which he and Lifshitz hope people will support in theaters not only for self-serving reasons, but because they’re committed to the theatrical experience in whatever form — IMAX, DCP, and even 35mm, the format “Companion” will play on at Quentin Tarantino’s Vista Theater in Los Angeles. “We believe that there’s an audience for these movies,” Margules said, “and we’ve been proven right most times, thank God. And hopefully we’ll continue to be proven right with ‘Companion.'”
‘Companion’ opens in theaters on January 31.
English (US) ·