Dia Dipasupil
Sarah Jessica Parker’s latest New York-based relationship drama is more “Sax in the City” than “Sex in the City” (SATC). In “Blue Night,” which just premiered at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, the actress and fashion designer plays a celebrated lounge singer who is diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.
Yet the name and background of one of the movie’s producers, Lady Monika Bacardi — a descendant of the founder of the world’s bestselling rum brand Bacardi — sounds like it could have come straight out of SATC, HBO’s rom-com TV phenomenon that Parker starred in and which spawned two spinoff movies.
Together with her producing partner Andrea Iervolino, Bacardi runs AMBI Pictures, a vertically-integrated film production, sales and distribution company headquartered out of Rome.
Lady Monika Bacardi is the widow of Luis Adalbert Facundo Gomez del Campo Bacardi, a descendant of the Bacardi rum fortune who died in 2005. Her wealth has been estimated at $700 million. Iervolino, who at the age of 30 is 27 years her junior, has been producing movies since he was a teenager.
“We had no money, we had no trailers, no hair and make-up, all the stuff that can weigh you down and rule out locations.”
The pair has a unique strategy: Producing eight to ten quality movies a year featuring movie stars across a variety of platforms. Ever since AMBI’s first high-profile production, “The Humbling” starring Al Pacino and Greta Gerwig, was released in 2014, the company has caught Hollywood off-guard by backing a prolific slate of movies.
Lady Monika Bacardi and AMBI have produced 23 movies since 2014. Their projects have ranged from James Franco’s John Steinbeck movie adaptation “In Dubious Battle,” to “The Music of Silence,” a biopic about Italian singer Andrea Bocelli.
“Blue Night” is Parker’s second movie with AMBI after the 2015 rom-com “All Roads Lead to Rome.” (SJP also co-produced “Blue Night” with her production partner, Alison Benson.)
Bacardi told MarketWatch that each movie she produces contains a message. “The message of ‘Blue Night’ is that in any moment a family member or yourself can get sick and we don’t know when life ends,” she said. “We just have to go through it and make the best out of it.”
Bacardi pours some of her own fortune into productions but AMBI also co-partners with private investors to finance its films. In 2015, AMBI launched a $200 million movie fund, in partnership with New York-based private equity firm Raven Capital Management LLC, to finance five movies budgeted between $25-$30 million and ten movies under $10 million. In an era defined by movies being made either on a shoestring with an iPhone or with the backing of a big studio budget, AMBI charts a middle way seeking to make small movies with big stars.
Bacardi might have the title Lady of Bayfield Hall and live in Monaco, but her movie budgets are modest. “Blue Night,” which was filmed in New York for just 16 days, cost under $3 million to make.
“We had no money, we had no trailers, no hair and make-up, all the stuff that can weigh you down and rule out locations,” Sarah Jessica Parker said at the movie’s Tribeca premiere. “That didn’t matter. We had nothing but our kits and ourselves. We were changing in the backs of cars and it allowed us to be in places that typically we can’t be.”
AMBI promotes its movies through film festivals to generate publicity. “Our product is quality so we go to festivals, special events and we get awards,” said Iervolino. ”We can’t spend the same amount of money as studios for promoting a movie but by doing this quality type of project we are promoting the movie in a different way than if it was ‘Spider-man.’”
Unlike most producers of “quality” movies who hope their films benefit from word-of-mouth buzz among the arthouse crowd in East Coast and West Coast theaters, AMBI is not reliant on box-office revenue from cinemas. Most of its films play limited runs in a minuscule number of theaters.
AMBI have proven proficient at selling the TV rights and ancillary rights to its properties. A case in point is its co-production ‘”To the Bone,” a drama about anorexia starring Lily Collins and Keanu Reeves, which it sold to Netflix last year.
The privately-held company has diversified and owns an animation studio and bought the Exclusive Media Group movie library which owns the rights to properties including “Donnie Darko” and ”Memento.”
While AMBI pursues quality cinema, they are pragmatic about the brief duration their movies spend in cinemas. “Theatrical is important but for some movies it’s not fundamental,” said Iervolino. “In fact for some modern movies it’s not needed.”
“More and more we’ll see quality films in a few theaters and some only out on new platforms,” he added. “We don’t like this — we’re cinema lovers and we think in terms of the big screen — but in reality young people watch movies with their phones.”
Fabrizio Di Giulio
Bacardi echoes his sentiment. “I really love theater releases but I see the young people are changing so much, so rapidly and look at Amazon and Netflix,” she said. “They want everything right now and don’t take the time to go to movies.”
“To release the movie on a big screen costs a lot of money,” she added, “so if you have an intellectual film and want to give a message, it’s sometimes difficult in a society that wants action. The young want to see blood!”
Yet AMBI is old-school in the alliance with movie stars such as Parker, Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek and Alec Baldwin. Banderas and Baldwin will team up for their next movie to go into production, a biopic of racing driver Ferruccio Lamborghini.
“They like our projects and we work together in a straightforward way,” said Bacardi of their relationship they have built with Hollywood stars. “We have a good experience and we like them and hopefully as they continue making films with us, it means they like us. It’s like a family with Andrea and the actors and we like our family.”
The pair founded AMBI five years ago. “When we went to Hollywood I was not able to say hello in English,” said Iervolino. “She already knew five languages! So our two different ways have combined.”
Their future projects include “Moose,” a thriller starring John Travolta, directed by Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst that is currently in production, remakes of “Memento” and “La Dolce Vita” and a TV drama series based on the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow film “Sliding Doors.”
“AMBI is our baby,” said Bacardi. “The small baby became a bigger baby and now our baby has children. In the movie industry it’s very difficult but we are a team.”