Montreal Producer Eric Gozlan gets ready for his Montreal premiere July 14th

Producer Eric Gozlan could have his breakout with Beautiful Boy

 

By BRENDAN KELLY, The Gazette July 11, 2011 10:48 AM

MONTREAL – Chances are you’ve never heard of Eric Gozlan or his production and film-financing company Goldrush Entertainment. Gozlan is not a guy with a public profile, especially here in his hometown. In a chat this week at a Monkland Village café, he said he has more contacts in Hollywood than he does with folks in the Quebec film industry.

But this Montrealer may not be in the shadows much longer. He is one of the producers of Beautiful Boy, a critically acclaimed indie American flick starring Michael Sheen and Maria Bello that won a prestigious prize at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall following its world premiere there. It nabbed the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize for the Discovery program at the festival and, also at the fest, the American company Anchor Bay Films bought global English-language rights to the film in what was reported to be a seven-figure deal.

Beautiful Boy, a powerful drama exploring the aftermath of a school shooting, opens in Montreal on Friday.

Astonishingly, the film was made for just under $1.5 million, which is peanuts even compared to most homegrown Québécois films and is downright mind-boggling for a film that has a cast headed by actors of the calibre of Sheen and Bello.

Sheen is the fine, fine Welsh actor who has starred in The Queen, Frost/ Nixon and the Twilight franchise, and can currently be seen as the unbearably pedantic professor in Woody Allen’s hit Midnight in Paris. You know and love Bello for her standout role in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, and she is set for a major profile boost this fall when she hits the small screen in NBC’s remake of the classic British cop drama Prime Suspect.

I suggested to Gozlan that it must have been tough to snare actors like Sheen and Bello for an independent movie with a tiny budget and a firsttime feature director, Shawn Ku.

“It was not that hard,” Gozlan replied. “They loved the material.”

Co-writers Ku and Michael Armbruster have penned a sharp, insightful exploration not of the nightmare of a murderous rampage in a college, but rather of what happens afterwards to the parents of the school shooter.

Kate and Bill, played by Bello and Sheen, have no idea how troubled their teen son Sammy (Kyle Gallner) is until the police arrive at the door of their suburban home one day to break the news that their kid has killed a bunch of his fellow students and then turned the gun on himself.

It sounds like a tough slog, but Beautiful Boy is a remarkable film – mostly because Bello and Sheen are so good as this buttoned-down couple who are forced to shed all the defence mechanisms they’ve developed over the years and stare straight into the horror of what’s happened to their family.

The film is of particular relevance here in Montreal, a city scarred by shooting incidents at the Université de Montréal’s École Polytechnique, Concordia University and Dawson College.

“It resonated a lot with me because of the Polytechnique shooting,” Gozlan said. “My brother was studying at the Université de Montréal (at the time) and we couldn’t reach him (that night).”

Gozlan has been producing movies for several years, but until now they’ve mostly been genre, madefor-cable flicks, including several for the Syfy channel in the U.S., notably Never Cry Werewolf and Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon. He and his partners formed Goldrush Entertainment in 2008 with the notion of getting into higherprofile pictures, like Beautiful Boy. But the budget still has to be modest.

“We want to do more story-driven, talent-driven films,” Gozlan said, “but everything we do has to make business sense. For us, it’s about making the right picture at the right price.”

Oddly for a company based here, Goldrush has never shot anything in Montreal. Gozlan says they thought about making Beautiful Boy in Montreal, but Bello wanted to shoot close to home in L.A.

Since Beautiful Boy, Gozlan has produced another movie starring Bello – Carjacked, a thriller that also features Stephen Dorff. North American, British and Australian rights to that film have been sold to Anchor Bay Films.

Goldrush has also recently set up a subsidiary, Nic Nac Films, to develop 3-D animated features, and the division is already at work on the flick Davey and the Bully.

Beautiful Boy opens in Montreal theatres July 14.