Neon founder and CEO Tom Quinn has thrown his support behind the documentary form and confirmed the US distributor has boarded Asif Kapadia’s 70
Neon founder and CEO Tom Quinn has thrown his support behind the documentary form and confirmed the US distributor has boarded Asif Kapadia’s 70 Up, the final film in the long-running UK Up documentary series.
The ITV series began in 1964 with 7 Up and follows the same group of individuals from the age of seven into adulthood, at seven-year intervals. Kapadia will direct the final instalment, after longtime director Michael Apted died in 2021.
“It’s one of my favourite series and pieces of IP of all time. We have the last instalment directed by Asif Kapadia, and it’s beautiful,” he told audiences at a SXSW London talk today (June 4).
“We’re in the period where docs are dead, right? Non-fiction is dead? I’ve seen this three separate times,” he added. “The minute that everybody stopped buying documentary as theatrically viable films, I went out and bought Man On Wire. The same thing happened the year of Three Identical Strangers… While everybody else is snoozing on docs, I’m a firm believer in the power of non-fiction.”
Neon also acquired US rights to documentary, Once Upon A Time In Harlem, out of Sundance earlier this year.
He is excited about the crossover of YouTube creators into the theatrical space, with Kane Parsons’ A24 film Backrooms and Focus/Universal’s Curry Barker-directed Obsession enjoying immense box office success with $118m and $148m worldwide respectively (as of June 1).
“The industry focused on YouTube creators, dismissing them as something other than. For me, that certainly never made any sense. There’s a pattern you can follow here. It reminds me of movies like Primer or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, or certainly Blair Witch.”
Neon is working with Obsession producer Haley Johnson and Backrooms and Longlegs producer Chris Ferguson on a horror from Alex Ullom, who Quinn described as “the next filmmaker to pay attention to”, titled 4X4: The Event, with production set to begin later this year.
Neon, which has distribution, sales and production arms, holds multiple territories on this year’s Palme d’Or winner, Cristian Mongiu’s Fjord, which marked the seventh Palme d’Or for the company, previously winning for Anora and Parasite, which both went on to win the Oscar for best picture. The company was founded in 2017 and has grown from six to around 80 people.
On how Neon has built successful awards campaigns, he said: “We keep an aggregate score throughout the entire campaign, which we change week to week, of 80+ prognosticators across the industry. They’re not voters. And it’s a really reliable, awesome way to see where you’re building momentum, where you’re losing momentum, what your trajectory is. We’ve been doing that since I, Tonya, our first year.”
Future ambitions
Quinn said he was keen for the company to handle an international action thriller. “I’m actually an action snob. The 14-year-old boy in me just loves [it]. I bought a film many years ago called Ong-Bak, starring [Thai martial artist] Tony Jaa. I’ve never seen a film like this. It was my first acquisition when I started at Magnolia Pictures…I’m looking to recreate that.
“What is the Neon version of an action film?… You won’t know where it is coming from. The idea that it would be set in Hollywood or built as an American action film is probably the last place it will come from.”
TV is also on the horizon. “Doing what we do not just in theatre, but at home. We want to become part of your viewing habits everywhere,” he said.
He does, however, retain reservations about too much growth. “A certain amount of growth, we lose our identity. We’re at the right size now.”
On finding fresh voices, he said he is a fan of blind submissions. “I really love a blind submission. I love reading. You can very quickly tell who this individual is based on how well they write, how succinctly they write. Within three sentences, if they know who you are, and they know who they are, I’m immediately going to read more.”
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