What a difference a year makes. On the eve of 2010 Cannes, Bill Pohlad’s plan to build Apparition into a powerhouse specialty film distributor was dashed by Bob Berney’s stunning decision to take an out in his contract, just as Pohlad and the Apparition team were boarding flights to Nice. A year later, Pohlad is back not as distributor, but producer and financier of The Tree of Life, the Fox Searchlight/River Road film that is hottest ticket on the Croisette. Here, Pohlad addresses his experiences at Apparition and collaborating with Terrence Malick, and the increasing role that high net worth individuals play in empowering prestige filmmakers to realize their visions.
DEADLINE: Bob Berney’s exit prompted you to shutter Apparition. Will you get back into the distribution game?
POHLAD: I don’t know. I always remain open. But right now, I’m concentrating on this film, and the other productions and development we are doing. We’ve got a couple of great things going here. I always stay open to things, but there’s nothing actively going on after Apparition.
DEADLINE: You return with The Tree of Life, which probably has the highest level of wanna see of any picture here. What made you decide to fund this, and how far back does that decision go?
POHLAD: Pretty far back. One of the first things we got involved in was the Che project, when Terry was going to direct. That’s how we met. One day we went to lunch and he told me the story of Tree of Life. It was a three hour pitch, basically. It was an amazing project but I was just getting my feet on the ground with Che, which was itself a major project. Terry has a different way of approaching things that I was just getting used to. Jumping into something else with him sounded so huge and overwhelming, that I was like, uh, yeah that sounds great Terry. Good luck. He wasn’t ready anyway at that point. Neither of us ended up doing Che but we stayed in touch. He sent me the script four or five years ago, I loved it. By then, I knew Terry’s writing style, so I wasn’t shocked by it or put off by it at all. I thought it was emotional, really amazing. I committed then.
DEADLINE: Four years is a long time for a movie to get made. What is that like, when you’re also its financier?
POHLAD: The only issue was last year, when we thought we were going to be ready for last year’s Cannes. We were basically on the plane. Terry and I and we were there at the edit suite and the minutes were ticking down, when we had to be finished. And it just felt rushed. After all this time, having so much anticipation, simply in our own minds, we just didn’t want it to go out half-baked. We decided we just couldn’t do it. As for the rest of it, it wasn’t as bad as people might assume.
DEADLINE: Oliver Stone last year rushed a cut of his Wall Street sequel and he and Michael Douglas looked back on it with regret for not having enough time to present the best cut on a global stage. How much did Tree of Life benefit with more seasoning?
POHLAD: I don’t know that I can say that, at the moment. Whether it’s Terry me, or the others who’ve been in the middle of it for four years, after awhile you lose perspective. You’re doing the best you can and we made the right decision because we needed more time. How much incrementally we benefited, I don’t know. People might see it and say, you needed more time, or less time. We just tried to make the right decisions as they came along.
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