Edward R. Pressman‘s films were always “a little taboo, a little transgressive,” as his son Sam Pressman tells it, but he always fought to get them made, especially if that involved championing the emerging filmmakers behind them and “never giving up on them.”
That was true dating all the way back to the late ’60s, when Pressman managed to work with a litany of auteurs, including Terrence Malick, Werner Herzog, Brian DePalma, Oliver Stone, Mary Herron, Abel Ferrara, and David Byrne, to name just a few, up through the indie producing icon’s passing in 2023.
The hope is that same ethos remains true under Sam Pressman’s leadership of Pressman Film, where the younger Pressman, current CEO of Pressman Film, is now charting a course for his father’s company to keep telling stories for the next 50 years. He’s doing it through a mix of original ideas and movies that honor his father’s legacy.
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Speaking to IndieWire over Zoom from a hotel room in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was on set for the fourth movie Pressman Film has in production on this year, Pressman said “the most essential thing” is for him to be able to produce movies, and they’re “staying true to Ed’s philosophy of telling radical stories and backing filmmakers who we really believe in.”
Back in November, Pressman Film closed a fundraising offering via Republic.com, a crowdfunding and cryptocurrency platform that allows individuals to be partial investors in Pressman’s slate and share in the upside, all leveraging the Avalanche blockchain network. The company raised $2 million in operational costs from 370 investors, just enough cash to let Pressman Film keep doing their thing. It’s an unusual fundraising approach, one Ed Pressman would’ve known nothing about, but Sam said his father also wouldn’t have resisted change or innovation.
“It’s almost contrapuntal to say, ‘Oh, we’re going to stay true to his spirit and be these independent thinkers and find our fresh path while just kind of doing the same thing that he did,” Pressman said. “When he started in the late ’60s, independent film was a revolutionary technology. The idea that you could make films outside of the system was still so new. And when I think about the future of the company and how, in 2069, hopefully Pressman Film is still making motion pictures, I think we have to be excited by the new frontier, and we have to look at the new technologies that have already arrived and think about how to incorporate that into what we make for the theatrical experience.”
As part of that deal with Republic, Pressman Film is committing to having 50 percent of their slate be original properties, while the other half will be based on Pressman IP. It’s the reason the company is going back to the well for one of its most iconic films, “American Psycho,” with a new film set to be directed by Luca Guadagnino for Lionsgate.
Stop us if you’ve heard before that Guadagnino has a bunch of projects on his plate and it’s unclear which one might actually shoot next, “American Psycho” among them. But Pressman said Guadagnino was at the very top of their list for directors to re-adapt Bret Easton Ellis’ book and that it was one Guadagnino dreamed of making back when he was just an aspiring film critic.
While casting rumors have swirled, Pressman said nothing is confirmed just yet, but that hasn’t dampened his excitement. “The synergy between Luca and [screenwriter] Scott Z. Burns is palpable,” Pressman said. “I think [Patrick] Bateman is an icon of culture, and I think Luca’s vision is to make a film that is truly mind blowing, and I hope that it’s a cultural moment that people debate and discuss.”
In addition to last year’s “The Crow,” the team also just wrapped “Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo,” the next film from Japanese master Takashi Miike that follows in the footsteps of both Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant” and Herzog’s bonkers and awkwardly titled “Port of Call: New Orleans.” That film is produced by Oscar-winner Jeremy Thomas and was also the first film in Pressman’s career that he had a U.S. distributor on board, Neon, before kicking off production.
Pressman Film’s first major original title is “Dead Man’s Wire,” the first film from director Gus Van Sant since 2018, which is premiering this week at the Venice Film Festival. The film is the true story of Tony Kiritsis, a man who took hostage the manager of a loan office using a sawed-off shotgun with a wire tied from the trigger to around the hostage’s neck. Pressman called star Bill Skarsgard’s performance in the film “magnetic, transfixing, and psychotic,” and not unlike the twisted protagonists of some of Ed Pressman’s films.
The company also just set a series at Apple from “Adolescence” writer Jack Thorne, and it has a VR project called “Dark Rooms” premiering as part of Venice’s Immersive section at the upcoming festival, just one of several experiments that started with the interactive “Evolver” from Malick and Cate Blanchett. Pressman said while making theatrical films is their bread and butter, there’s more where all that came from.
“I think we’re in a moment where independent film and independent producers actually have an incredible opportunity,” he said. “There’s less films being greenlit by the streamers and the studios, and yet the global love of cinema is not depreciating. So for for an independent producer, if we make great films, there’s an audience that’s hungry for it. To me, the immediate action is, how do we galvanize community, and how do we build films that are closer in its relationship with the audience? People might not know Pressman Film, but people certainly know Pressman’s films.”
