Producer's Portrait

“Big entertainment – that’s our goal and what we like to see ourselves,” says producer Christian Becker about the strategy of the Munich-based production house Rat Pack Filmproduktion he founded with Constantin Film AG, Anita Schneider and a group of screenwriters and directors in 2001.

As Becker and Schneider explain, their company’s name refers to the legendary Rat Pack of entertainers led by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin with Sammy Davis, Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop, who were friends and worked and partied together in the 1950s.

“Drawing on the original Rat Pack idea, the company aimed to bring people together who fitted well together, got on with one another and wanted to make films together,” Becker recalls.

In fact, the core team of collaborators at Rat Pack had been working together since their film school days in the mid-1990s at Munich’s University of Television & Film (HFF): “I have always worked with Peter Thorwarth, starting with his short films Mafia Pizza Razzia and Was nicht passt, wird passend gemacht and then going on to his feature film Bang Boom Bang, the feature-length version of Was nicht passt … and Goldene Zeiten. The same is with Dennis Gansel with Wrong Trip and Living Dead leading to his first feature-length project Das Phantom and now The Wave.”

“Sebastian Niemann was someone to emulate because he was two years above me at film school and had already worked with Rainer Matsutani on Over My Dead Body (Nur ueber meine Leiche),” says Becker. Their first collaboration was the TV movie Biikenbrennen – made for Indigo Filmproduktion and Becker&Haeberle Filmproduktion, the production companies Becker set up with former Kinowelt founder Thomas Haeberle after his graduation from the HFF.

“It was such a sensational feature debut that we said we would do all of our projects together from now on,” Becker recalls. They followed the TV movie with an English-language feature film 7 Days To Live aimed at the international market, produced by Indigo Filmproduktion.

Niemann and Becker came together for Rat Pack’s first big production Hunt for the Hidden Relic which was shot on location in Morocco doubling up for Israel. “This production scored the best ever ratings for a German TV mini-series on ProSieben and the record still stands,” notes Anita Schneider who is “responsible for the business and financial side of the company’s operation and keeps an eye on the budgets, while Christian is the one coming up with the ideas for our projects.”

Rat Pack began with a focus on working for German television – ranging from such TV movies as Hunt for the Hidden Relic or Blood of the Templars as well as the comedy series the ProSieben Fairy Tales and the ProSieben Funny Movies – but Becker and Schneider are aiming “to get to a situation where we can make something in English every two years, although German TV programs and feature films will continue to be our area of emphasis.”

Thus, next year will see the company embarking on an English-language remake of Hunt for the Hidden Relic, to be shot again by Sebastian Niemann with the same team and an international cast. “The story will be more compressed, nearer to the novel, more action-laden, everything bigger and louder!,” Becker explains.

The fairy tales series has worked its way through the Brothers Grimm and will now turn its attention to the Arabian Tales – with a change of production location from studio sets built in warehouses outside Prague to the Antalya Studios in Turkey. “However, we will continue to use the Czech craftsmen because they are really world class. You don’t see anything like this elsewhere in Europe.”

The work for television also enables Rat Pack to try out young writers and directors who can then progress to feature projects. A case in point is the directorial duo Cyril Boss and Philipp Stennert. “We are really proud that we have accompanied their careers from the first steps after film school,” Becker says. “At Indigo we had developed TV movies with them and they wrote a lot for the Was nicht passt … TV series at Westside (the NRW-based sister company of Rat Pack). They then wrote scripts for the fairy tales series and directed some episodes. The next step was for them to take on directing the feature film The Vexxer.”

The next project Rat Pack is planning with the duo is a feature film around the 1960s cult detective Jerry Cotton, which will be the company’s first flagship project for 2009. Becker promises “a fantastic new interpretation which will be like the way people approached Starsky & Hutch. It won’t be a parody because we take the character of Jerry Cotton very seriously but we see him a bit like Inspector Drebin in The Naked Gun. The film industry as well as the fans and readers are already all very enthusiastic.”

While the “bread and butter” TV projects keep Rat Pack quite busy, it is not idle on the feature film front either.

Last winter saw Sebastian Niemann working on the comedy Killing is My Business, Honey in and around Berlin with a cast including Rick Kavanian, Nora Tschirner, Christan Tramitz, Gunther Kaufmann and movie icons Franco Nero and Bud Spencer. Warner Bros. will release the film next spring.

“We had a great experience shooting in Berlin and Brandenburg on Dennis Gansel’s The Wave,” Becker recalls, adding that the reaction to this school drama, which has been seen by over 2.5 million cinemagoers in Germany, “was the first time that one of our productions had such international recognition. We have received invitations to many festivals, won audience awards and have prints of the film traveling around all the time.”

Meanwhile, this summer saw the company handling the production of two feature film projects at the same time: Christian Ditter’s adaptation of Max von der Gruen’s 1977 novel Vorstadtkrokodile, produced with Rat Pack’s Krefeld-based sister company Westside Filmproduktion and Constantin Film, and Michael “Bully” Herbig’s Vickie the Viking which is billed as the most expensive German family entertainment film to be produced this year.

And Becker and Schneider, together with their in-house creative producers Lena Olbrich, Nina Maag, Mathias Loesel and Simon Happ, have plenty in store for the future to keep German and international audiences on tenterhooks. Projects in development range from the vampire love story The Dawn and a war drama based on Gert Ledig’s novel Vergeltung – both to be directed by Dennis Gansel – to a plane catastrophe film and a western set during the Second World War by Peter Thorwarth.

Three feature films are also in the works with Sebastian Niemann: the aforementioned English remake of Hunt for the Hidden Relic, a big screen version of the children’s classic Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, and a sequel to his 2006 film Hui Buh – The Goofy Ghost.

“This time, it will be ’Hui Buh meets The Mummy’,” Becker explains. “After the first part was in dark woods and dungeons, the adventure’s journey will now be going to Egypt!”