Producer's Portrait:

«When we decided to come together, the first idea was just to produce good films», recalls Andreas Bareiss who joined forces with fellow producers Gloria Burkert and Peter Herrmann in December 1993 to set up the production company MTM Medien & Television Muenchen.

At that point in the early 1990s, it would have been too much of a risk to have focused primarily on films for the cinema. «Instead, we said that we would make good television on a high-quality narrative level in the field of 90-minute TV movies», Bareiss continues.

This strategy certainly seems to have paid off as the company's reputation in the industry was made, in particular, through its collaborations with Dominik Graf on such productions as Frau Bu lacht (1995), Der Skorpion (1997) and Deine besten Jahre (1998), and with Friedemann Fromm on Perfect Mind (1996), Spiel um Dein Leben (1997), and Zum Sterben schoen (1999).

«These films resulted from a common understanding of the film medium and film language», Bareiss explains, «about how I approach a narrative in a film and which stories I want to tell».

Most of MTM's television work has been done with the public broadcasters and, as with certain directors, the company has also built up a bond of trust with commissioning editors «because they should also share what we think and not just be the ones who do the financing».

But how does the company work in practice with three strong producer personalities under one roof?

«I think the quality of MTM is that we have three extremely different characters and we don't present competition for each other», Bareiss says. «The things which each one wants to produce come about from their own very special take on the stories and that then leads to the collaboration with the directors».

Looking back at their first ten years of activity, he admits that it would seem «that Peter has done the larger projects like The Bubi Scholz Story, Nowhere in Africa, and the projects with Guenter Rohrbach - A Handful of Grass and Fat World - , while I am more the one for melodramas and romantic comedies, and Gloria has stayed with the drama and the crime thriller. But that has just turned out that way.»

«In fact, we are like three small individual production platforms», Bareiss suggests, pointing out that before embarking on a project, all three look to see «whether it fits our corporate identity. We resisted for years from doing certain projects because they did not conform to our brand. When we set the company up in 1993, we said that we would define ourselves through our brand name 'MTM' and not through our own names. The idea is that the brand should be worth something, one should be able to trust the whole, not just the individual».

In addition, MTM is not a 'here today, gone tomorrow outfit' making the fast, easy money. «We are looking to the long term» Bareiss declares. «We have not said that we want to be profitable in five years, but are aiming instead to do this in 10 years. The kinds of films we are making have a very long lead-in time, realization in the medium term, and then exploitation in the long term».

«For example, we optioned the rights for Nowhere in Africa in 1995 and the film was released in the cinemas in 2001, and TV and video revenues will follow. All this takes time - which perhaps contradicts the Zeitgeist - but we want to create a value chain because we know that one can also show our films in ten years' time».

After having a regular output each year of TV movies, it was nevertheless quite a step for the company to then embark on tackling three features - Epstein's Night, A Map of the Heart, and Nowhere in Africa - more or less at the same time last year.

For Bareiss, though, it was a logical step in the company's development after its involvement in countless TV movies which, on the one hand, had scored with both critics and audiences and, on the other, were not that far away from many German feature films as far as their production values were concerned.

«We thought that we might possibly succeed in being able to produce popular feature films with the same demands on quality which we had made for the TV movies», Bareiss explains.

«The idea was to create a brand for the cinema and make it unmistakably clear with three films in one swoop where we see our future», he adds.

The first of the trio to open in the cinemas - Caroline Link's Stephanie Zweig-adaptation Nowhere in Africa, starring Juliane Koehler and Merab Ninidze - has developed into something of a sleeper success for distributor Constantin Film. Launched on 27 December 2001 with 229 prints, the film still had the same number circulating through German cinemas over two months later and passed the one million admissions mark at the beginning of March 2002.

As Bareiss points out, Link's film is one of those films like Chocolat or The English Patient which takes a while to find its predominantly female audience. But find it it does. The audiences for such upmarket titles tend to be spread over several weeks because a cinema visit for them is a real event which has to be specially arranged - with the booking of a babysitter and so on.

«It's not important for me to get 11 million (admissions) just once», Bareiss jests in allusion to last year's box-office hit Manitou's Shoe (Der Schuh des Manitu). «I'd like that as well, of course! But I want to produce ten films in the next ten years which each are seen by a million. I am more for stability than for speculation about a particular success».

Meanwhile, in the immediate future, MTM has projects in development which see it working with partners outside of the German-speaking area and with newcomer filmmakers.

The co-production with France's MACT Productions on Nina Grosse's coming-of-age story Olgas Sommer (cf. p.34) «is a very organic development», according to Bareiss. «Parts of the story are set in a southern country like Spain or France. Moreover, the director studied in France and is very francophile. And the German-French Film Academy and the mini-treaty in the co-production agreement were also supporting factors which made it easier for our French partner to come onboard».

For a second project, MTM will serve as the junior partner on a Austrian-Hungarian-German co-production (Dallas) to be set in Transylvania and directed by Robert Pejo. «It is a central European story with a cinematic language that comes from the center of Europe», Bareiss says and points out that MTM would not get involved in co-productions just for the sake of it «but only when a film says something we think will be of interest to our audience in Germany».

As far as working with newcomer directors, he admits that MTM has not done much in this area although the three producers are always keeping their eyes and ears open to know what new talents are coming out of the film academies.

A project now in preparation is with Kai Pieck - Ein Leben lang kurze Hosen tragen about the child murderer Juergen Bartsch - which will be made within the WDR/Filmstiftung NRW «Six Pack» initiative. And Bareiss is working with the English-born screenwriter Nick Baker-Monteys on a comedy with the working title 42 about a psychoanalyst who is mistakenly diagnosed with a brain tumor and suspects that his patients might not be so crazy after all ...