Independent Entertainment, Producers Behind Harry Styles Film ‘My Policeman,’ on Company Ambitions, Future of Cinema

variety.com:

K.J. Yossman Independent Entertainment, the finance, sales and production company behind films including “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and the upcoming “My Policeman,” which is set to have its world premiere at TIFF, celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this year.

Since its founding by CEO Luc Roeg in 2007, the film landscape has undergone unimaginable change, from the ascendance of streaming platforms to the global pandemic followed by a cost of living crisis that has brought cinemas to their knees.

Despite the challenges, Independent Entertainment has gone from strength to strength, adapting to market changes while remaining true to what Roeg describes as its “creative core.” “Every decision is made around the creative basis and how the team or individuals are responding to it,” Roeg tells Variety of the company’s strategy. “I think we are very much a production-led business in the sense that whenever we get involved, even in third party projects, we are helping producers and filmmakers build their projects from the ground up, which is what we do for our own projects.” Independent run a curated slate, consisting of about six films per year. “Ideally for every market that we attend, we would like to have one or two completed films, one or two films where we have some footage to show, one or two new announcements,” says Sarah Lebutsch, managing director for international sales. “But sometimes things don’t move as fast as you would hope or something happens and the project that you wanted to announce at Berlin say has to shift to Cannes.

So there’s a lot of movement.” Included in that number is approximately one production a year, although Roeg says they are slowly looking to ramp that up. “Our own productions are the