Plan B’s Jeremy Kleiner Talks Int’l Ambitions; Bong Joon-Ho’s ‘Mickey 17’; Need For Idealism & Optimism In Volatile Market – San Sebastian

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Plan B Entertainment partners Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner play their cards close to their chests when it comes to strategy and upcoming plans.

Co-president Kleiner gave a rare insight into the company’s inner workings this week at the San Sebastian Film Festival’s Creative Investor Conference, organized in association with CAA Media Finance. “To do this gig you have to have some underlying idealism and optimism,” he said of navigating the current volatile market as a producer. “We’re working with a mix of established filmmakers and more emerging talent.

The spectrum is really wide. Whether its Nia DaCosta, Bing Liu, David Michod, Lee Isaac Chung or RaMell Ross, Bong [Joon-Ho], or Jo Kosinski on his Formula One movie, things kind of find their place but I definitely feel like the bar seems quite high these days.” Kleiner, who is marking his 20th year at Plan B and 10th year as its co-president, said there were no hard or fast rules around the kinds of projects the company gets behind. “One of the things we pride ourselves on is trying to have some kind of sensibility, or artists led way of picking projects and working, but trying to stay very present tense about it and not come up with formulas that start to limit what we do,” he said. “For that reason, we may be a little harder to define than some companies and then we do a lot of different kinds of things.

For some, that’s a weakness, we’ve always viewed it as kind of a strength.” “We’re drawn to things that maybe are a little hard to come by sometimes.