Tanya Seghatchian
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What I learned the hard way: "To try to hold on to one's rights."
There's not much that the "Harry Potter" franchise and Pawel Pawlikowski's low-budget prize winner "My Summer of Love" have in common, aside from producer Tanya Seghatchian.
It was Seghatchian who brought the little-known Brit kids book "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" to the attention of David Heyman at Heyday, and courted J.K. Rowling's agent for the rights.
Once the deal was done with Warner, she acted, in her words, as "creative godmother" to the material, working closely with Heyman and screenwriter Steve Kloves, liaising with Rowling and taking co-producer credit on the first two pics.
She was instrumental in persuading Alfonso Cuaron to take on the third installment, and was rewarded with an exec producer tag, which she has retained for the fourth film (helmed by Mike Newell).
Meantime, she formed Apocalypso Pictures to develop movies in partnership with Pawlikowski, with whom she had briefly shared an office at the BBC documentary department. So when the third "Potter" was shooting, she was adopting very different guerrilla methods to get "My Summer of Love" off the ground.
"Whilst it presented entirely different challenges to those that I was experiencing on 'Potter,' it was unbelievably refreshing to be making the two films alongside one another," she says. When the two movies went head to head for the British Academy of Film & Television Arts' Alexander Korda honor, it was Pawlikowski's pic that won the day.
"Tanya has a great sense of smell for material," Pawlikowski says. "She's carried by enthusiasm, not by love of money. There can be days when I lose faith in something, and it's great to have that energy, that dynamo pushing you forward."
Her tastes are evident on her development slate, which includes a screenplay by Lee Hall ("Billy Elliot"), about cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin; a new film from French auteur Francois Ozon; and the Steve Kloves adaptation of bestseller "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" with Heyday.
And, of course, she'll be producing the next Pawlikowski movie, which looks to be a very loose adaptation of the Magnus Mills novel "The Restraint of Beasts."
