Founder and CEO of U.K. production banner Good Chaos (“Triangle of Sadness”), Mike Goodridge likes prestige. But prestige doesn’t pay the bills, emphasized the industry veteran while giving a talk at the Creative Investors’ Conference at the San Sebastián Film Festival.
Speaking about the experience of producing Edward Berger’s “Ballad of a Small Player,” the Colin Farrell-starring psychological thriller playing at the Basque festival later in the week, the exec said it was a “great experience” and a “much bigger production” than what they usually tackle at Good Chaos. “We want to be doing more of those. I have prestige coming out of my ears. Prestige doesn’t pay the bills.”
“What I’m trying to do is create a company that filmmakers would want to work with because they know we’re a secure home,” he added. “That takes a while. We only really started in 2020.” As for projects in his home country, the exec emphasized the U.K. has a “great cinema legacy and every year there are fantastic new films. I’d love to make great British films, and I am planning to.”
Still, Goodridge thinks it is a “blessing and a curse” that the U.K. shares “the same language as the U.S.,” as “most technicians in the U.K. are employed by American companies.” “‘Harry Potter’ and ‘James Bond’ are British but not really. It’s U.S.. We have to navigate this path through the clutter of America,” he mused.
Goodridge’s relationship with “Ballad of a Small Player” started back in 2018. At that time, the producer was the head of the U.K.’s Protagonist Pictures, where he championed major auteur-driven films such as Chloé Zhao’s “The Rider” and Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project.” Goodridge joined Protagonist in 2012 after serving as editor of Screen International. He was working on another project with Lawrence Osborne, the author of the novel that inspired “Ballad of a Small Player,” right before he left Protagonist, and was about to become artistic director of Macao Film Festival.
“Lawrence said: ‘If you’re going to Macao, you should option my Macao story,’” recalled the exec. “I didn’t know at the time that I wanted to become an independent producer. Fortuitously, we took the book to Ed Berger in 2018, and he liked it. But then he was liking a lot of things at that point,” he quipped.
Goodridge made a point of reiterating that, even after Berger blew up internationally, winning two Oscars for “All Quiet on the Western Front” in 2023 and then becoming another major Oscar player two years later with “Conclave,” he still “stuck with this project.” “When a director becomes so popular, things come to him so spectacularly. It’s a testament to Berger that he stuck to it.”
“All Quiet on the Western Front”
Netflix
Shooting in Macao was “the biggest challenge” when it came to Berger’s latest. “Very few Western films were shot there. We had to work through Hong Kong and within Macao. It was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever had to do,” said Goodridge. His experience in Macao, where he served between 2017 and 2021, proved helpful.
“I love Macao,” he added. “It’s a very small city; it’s a city-state, so it’s very hard to build an indigenous industry. So you go through Hong Kong, and it’s not easy because they don’t know Macao either. Edward would point to a piece of land he wanted to shoot and we couldn’t find who owned the land, or we had locations we were told to steer away from because of who owned it.”
The story, largely tied to Macao’s bustling casinos, also faced challenges when it came to shooting within the busy betting centers. “Any moment you’re shooting, there is a loss of revenue to them,” said Goodridge, when explaining why they couldn’t shut down a casino for shooting. “They told us once that the high rollers could spend more money in a day than your entire budget.”
Speaking about budget, Goodridge publicly thanked partner Netflix for their support on the project. “We had looked at the value of the film in the independent market. We looked at it to get made, and it could be made for about $15 million, even with Colin Farrell. Netflix came in with more than that. It’s the kind of film you couldn’t make independently, so thank goodness for platforms.”
Good Chaos has yet another partnership with Netflix coming up, with the streamer having acquired most of the global rights to Shih-Ching Tsou’s “Left-Handed Girl.” The film, which premiered at Cannes’ Critics Week earlier in the year, is produced, co-written, and edited by Oscar-winner Sean Baker, who first brought the project to Goodridge back in 2018 after they collaborated on “The Florida Project” via Protagonist.
“Ballad of a Small Player”
Courtesy of SIFF
It has been a busy fall festival season for Goodridge, who went to Telluride with Berger and Venice with László Nemes’ “Orphan.” Now, the producer is eyeing television, even if he reiterates how often he hears it is “difficult to get people’s attention these days.”
“I’m very comfortable in the film world,” he added. “I look at an independent film and I see a financing structure right away. You see it in your mind’s eye, and you’ll get it made one way or another. However, TV is not like that. It’s about broadcasters and commissioners who usually say no, and if they say no, that’s it, and you have to abandon the project. I think there’s a lot of wastage in TV. I [also] think there’s a lot of sharing between film and TV at the moment, so I want to succeed in television.”
