“Everybody who’s in film, and you don’t need to go to a doctor to be diagnosed, we have OCD… and ADHD, so when you look at a filmmaker, you know they have one of these traits, and I have both,” declared veteran producer Sigurjón “Yoni” Sighvatsson as he opened a masterclass on his 50-year career at the Locarno Film Festival on Friday.
There was much to chew on as Sighvatsson, who is being feted with Locarno’s Raimondo Rezzonico Award celebrating independent producers, looked back at a packed career spanning more than 100 music video, feature film and TV show credits spanning features Wild at Heart, Basquiat, A Thousand Acres and Arlington Road as well as groundbreaking TV shows Twin Peaks, Beverly Hills, 90210 and Tales of the City.
He touched briefly on his rock career in his native Iceland in the late 1960s and 1970s and role in creating the country’s first modern recording studio with his brother, before focusing on his arrival in L.A. on a Fulbright Scholarship in the early 1980s to study film at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, followed by a stint at the AFI Conservatory.
Sighvatsson said the creation of Propaganda Films in 1986 with a focus on music videos, with late Steve Golin, who went on to found Anonymous Content, was born out of the fact they and most the filmmakers they met at AFI were shut out of the mainstream Hollywood system.
“We started doing music videos because they were unregulated, because the big guys in Hollywood, they were not interested in that,” said Sighvatsson, confirming that the company produced at least a third of all music videos being made within four years of its launch.
At its height it had some 50 directors on its books including Michael Bay, John Dahl, Spike Jonze, David Lynch, Antoine Fuqua and Michel Gondry.
Sighvatsson recalled that the company first connected with Lynch when he approached them for help after Giorgio Armani commissioned him to make a commercial for then new fragrance Giò.
“It was supposed to be 30 seconds. David said, ‘I don’t do anything in 30 seconds’. So, it was three minutes. Armani called to complain, and David said, ‘Mr. Armani, I’m giving you something very special. You paid for 30 seconds. I gave you three minutes’.”
The veteran producer said most those associated with Propaganda Films regarded music videos and commercials as stepping stones to cinema.
“Propaganda was not really money driven. What united us, and later what became the thing that unravelled Propaganda, was that everybody had the goal of making feature films, so everything we were doing, even though it was short form, was all a quest to do feature films, particularly David Fincher.
Every video he did was a part of something he wanted to later incorporate into some kind of a film. He had this whole list of: I’m doing this scene because one day I want to shoot somebody on a plane, or one day I want to do this, and they somehow inserted that into the videos.”
In 1988, Propaganda struck a deal with Dutch German entertainment company PolyGram, under which the latter would finance Propaganda’s feature films in exchange for a part of the profits.
He recalled how the entertainment group had turned down the opportunity to buy the rights to Bill Gifford’s book ‘Wild at Heart’, which Sighvatsson was initially trying to adapt to the big screen with director Monty Montgomery at the helm.
“Polygram didn’t want to buy the book because they didn’t want to make violent movies, so I bought the book with Monty Montgomery. We said, ‘Fuck Polygram. We love the book. Let’s just buy the book’,” he said, revealing the project got stuck again after Montgomery struggled to deliver a screenplay .
“It wasn’t going well for Monty who was trying to write the screenplay. David was trying to do another film that never got made called Ronnie Rocket, about a dwarf…a few months go by, and nothing is happening, I say to Monty, ‘Nothing is happening with the book. Every draft of the script you make gets worse. Why don’t we send the book to David? Let’s see what he thinks.’ We sent the book to David on a Friday, and he called me on the Monday. He said, ‘I love it, and I started writing the script’. And I said, ‘David, we have to make a deal’. He said, ‘There’s no deal. I’ll just write it and let me make it’. So that’s how that came about.”
Around the same time, Sighvatsson also got involved in the pilot for Twin Peaks, created by Lynch with Mark Frost, with a promise of backing from ABC, which was then under the control of Bob Iger.
“David and Mark wrote this pilot called Twin Peaks and of course when they saw it at ABC, they freaked out. There was a meltdown. They had lunch and there was food poisoning afterwards,” he recalled to laughter.
“Through continuous talks with Bob Iger, who by the way, was not very friendly. He’s a big figure today, but he was not a fan of Twin Peaks. He said, ‘I will make it, but I will only give you one and a half million dollars’.”
Sighvatsson noted it marked one of the first examples of crossover between the film and TV business, which is commonplace today.
“We were making movies, and David said, ‘I’ll only make it if I get my film team’. That was new in television, and they said, ‘Well, with your million and a half, you can do whatever you want.’ That wasn’t really true but it clear we needed to find more finance elsewhere.”
Tap into Europe was also tough with the broadcast landscape at the time dominated by state broadcasters, which were as freaked out by Lynch’s screenplay as ABC.
“They would all say, “What is this? We’re not going to broadcast this at 8 o’clock on a Sunday, no way,” he recounted.
It was then that Sighvatsson hit on the idea of tapping into VHS sales, taking inspiration from a video operation he had helped set up in Iceland to help fill the viewing gap on Thursday when the screen went dark for the day at the time.
Using this model, he secured a video deal with Aaron Spelling under his World Vision banner. ABC agreed to the deal on the condition that the pilot was not shown in cinemas. On upshot of this was that while the pilot revealed the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer in a pre-convergence, analogue world this fact did not travel.
“That’s why the Twin Peaks pilot was never shown in movie theatres in Europe and was only on VHS and wasn’t even on television.”
Sighvatsson would go on to take TV credits on Beverly Hills, 90210 and Tales of the City (1993), driving the small screen adaptation of Amistead Maupin’s San Francisco-set novels against the odds.
He recounted how he had fallen in love with the books and flown to San Francisco to meet Maupin who granted him the rights. He then encountered pushback in the U.S. over the suitability of Maupin’s book for a TV adaptation due to the fact many of the characters were gay.
“People said, ‘Sorry, Yoni, it’s gay. And I said, ‘Well, it’s not about that. It’s about people, and yeah, they happen to be gay, but they’re like us’. Nobody wanted to buy it. And again, Polygram didn’t want to buy it, and nobody wanted to buy it,” he recalled.
In the end, he turned to Propaganda’s affiliates Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner at Working Title in the UK, while attaching Richard Kramer to write the screenplay, to see if they could help. “They got ITV in the UK to come aboard, that’s how Tales of the City got made. ITV came in and decided to fund most of it, and then I got PBS to fund the rest.”
Most of Sighvatsson’s career since has focused on feature films. One of his personal highlights was Mark Pellington’s 1999 political thriller Arlington Road, starring Jeff Bridges as a history professor who suspects his neighbor Tim Robbins of being involved in an anti-government extremist movement.
The film tapped into growing fears in the U.S. over homegrown terrorists in the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
It was the first thriller about extremists in America but the key to Arlington Road was that we killed the hero. In a Hollywood film, the hero doesn’t die. That’s always the story. The hero wins,” said the producer.
Sighvatsson recounted how Sony was interested in the story and cast he had assembled but were not keen in killing off the protagonist.
“Somebody said, ‘Well, you kill the good guy. That’s not that’s not a Hollywood movie. Nobody’s gonna come. So they insisted we shoot two endings. Shoot an ending where he lives and an ending where he dies. And if the ending where he dies tests because we test the films worse than the ending where he lives, you have to use the ending where he lives because it cost 20 million the film, which was a big budget at the time. So we screened the film, and you know what? Everybody liked the ending where Jeff Bridges dies,” he recounted.
“Everybody should see Arlington Road because it’s the beginning of the right-wing extremists, and the good guy loses, which is what’s happening in America, the good guys are losing.”
Now based between Portugal and Iceland, having left L.A. during the Covid-19 pandemic, Sighvatsson continues to produce under his Palomar Pictures and has trio of projects on the go which he is keeping under wraps for now.
Asked on advice for upcoming filmmakers, Sighvatsson replied: “One thing that has always worked is just go and make your own thing. And now you can do it even on your phone… You will get there, and now you don’t need all this big system around you to get people to see visually what you do. I would say do it yourself.”
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