The Ink Factory’s Simon Cornwell

The Ink Factory Co-Founder Simon Cornwell talks to World Screen about how the company has continued to find success with literary adaptations.

The Ink Factory made a big splash with its first-ever television project, The Night Manager. Adapted from the John le Carré novel, the series was a hit for both the BBC and AMC, sold widely across the world and notched up an array of Emmys, Golden Globes and BAFTAs. Next up came The Little Drummer Girl, and now the company, founded and led by Cornwell and his brother Stephen, is working on The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

WS: How has The Ink Factory evolved in the last decade since you launched it with your brother Stephen?
CORNWELL: Even ten years ago, when we were starting the business, everything was in a state of flux. My brother and I both had, from slightly different perspectives and backgrounds, a sense that, with the advent of the ability to stream video over the internet, the world was going to change dramatically. I grew up in a world where there were four or five very powerful companies that basically controlled what programming was made and what we as an audience were going to watch. From an audience perspective, the internet has brought massive democratization to film and TV, and finally, we’re able to choose what we want to watch. That said to us, even a decade ago, that brands or IP with strong recognition, actors with strong recognition and really strong storytelling were the kinds of things that new players in town were going to want to start building their audiences. And the old players in town were going to want to stop people from taking their audiences away. There has been a radical shift in power from the owners of distribution systems to the owners of the underlying films, movies, TV shows, books, whatever it is. I’d worked quite a lot in distribution in one form or another previously, and I couldn’t see a lot more mileage in that. I said to myself, if you want to prosper in the second, third, fourth decade of the 21st century, when there are so many ways for people to be able to access shows, you need to focus on making and owning really good stuff. That’s the vision we started with.

WS: Tell me about your development process, be it mining the material of John le Carré or other projects you’d like to get off the ground.
CORNWELL: It’s a combination of us saying, wouldn’t it be really interesting to find something that talks about this or tells this kind of story, and the inbound: the calls from agents or the writers. And in the best possible world, those two things combine. We say, We’re keen to do an edgy, contemporary thriller set in London, and then a great writer comes along and says, I’m interested in an edgy, contemporary thriller based in London. And you say, right, we’re off to the races! In contrast to other people, we maybe have a narrower slate—and this is partly because we work with a lot of high-end literary material, obviously le Carré but also beyond that. We ultimately get made a higher proportion of the projects that we take on than most other people. That is not because we’re brilliant; we’re no more brilliant than anybody else, we’re probably less brilliant! But we do work with material where, if you don’t get it right the first time, you don’t blame the material. You say, OK, we know what we have underneath this is very strong, let’s think about how we can look at this in a fresh way. What are the challenges we’ve discovered and how do we address them? You keep at it until you make it happen. Where you have underlying material that has that real depth to it—whether that’s in terms of the pure story of it or the human drama of it—if you don’t get there on the first attempt, you dig in and try again.

WS: Working in both film and television, how do you decide which medium to tell a story in?
CORNWELL: We began life as a feature film company. For us, it’s very important that we do both. We have people in the com­pany who know more about TV and people who have more of a film background, but we don’t divide the company down the middle and say, we have a TV division and a film division. If somebody falls in love with a book or a piece of material or they are working with a writer who has a great idea, they should feel empowered to have that discussion about the best way of approaching it. We have one project in particular where we bought it thinking we would do a feature film, and it wasn’t until much later that we decided to turn it into a series—not just a limited series, but actually a blueprint for a returning series. We go on unexpected journeys. Because we do both, at the time we acquire a piece of underlying material, we don’t have to have a fixed view.
Having said that, I think there is a lot of opportunity in film at the moment. Film is very difficult to finance in traditional ways at the levels that it used to be able to be put together, but the audience appetite remains very strong. The contrarian in me says that if we can get film right—and getting film right means working with a combination of streamers and traditional territory-by-territory distributors—there’s a big opportunity.
We are doing a lot more of everything. It is a peak media world generally. So we’re building up our TV slate, but at the same time we are seeking out properties that we think would make very good feature films. And by the way, a lot of companies—the distributors, even the [streamers]—have separate film and TV teams, and to some extent separate models for these two things. In some ways, that’s a pity, because we’re also looking at movies which would then spin-off TV series in success. In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, that would be called doing a back-door pilot, but what we’re talking about here is more than that. We’re talking a movie that, whether it goes to theaters or with a lot of fanfare to a streamer, unashamedly feels like a movie—it has movie stars in it, it’s produced with a budget and attention to detail that you wouldn’t see, even in big TV. But that doesn’t mean to say there isn’t a great TV series hanging off the back of that. Maybe with some of the same actors, maybe different actors. I think that’s a very interesting area. Although it’s one that the structure of the streamers and the big studios is not well set up to deal with. They tend to silo their film and TV operations.

WS: How do you approach bringing together the financing on your projects?
CORNWELL: We’re very lucky in that we work with a group of investors, a company called 127 Wall Productions, so they provide us with an equity financing facility. What that means is, we can put a movie or a TV show together by preselling—in the broadcast world, bringing in commissioning broadcasters, or in the film world, preselling a handful of key territories that underwrite a good chunk of the budget. You then have a smaller chunk of the budget—15 to 20 percent—underwritten by tax breaks of one kind or another. And then we’re able to write a check for the difference. And we invest that effectively against the unsold territories, against the upside. That’s always been the way of financing movies outside of the studio system. It’s a model we’ve used very successfully for tele­vision as well. Of course, when you move into a streaming environment, you’re talking a single global sale typically, or maybe there’s an anchor broadcaster in one territory and the streamer handles the rest of the world. That’s a different financing challenge. Those companies cover the cost of production—even if they pay on delivery, you can borrow against that. But in that environment, what counts is being able to finance your development slate properly and not having to go to networks or distributors at a very early stage to raise development financing.

WS: What does the new alliance with Endeavor Content mean for The Ink Factory?
CORNWELL: Our independence is very important to us. I think not being tied to a particular network or a particular content distribution method is really important. There are all kinds of benefits to strategic partnerships, and if you’re lucky enough to find a strategic partner who creates options for you rather than closes them off, like we have with Endeavor Content, then that’s a deal worth doing. Historically we’ve shied away from partnerships with people who are feeding their own platform, where that becomes a constraint in the way we do business. Our collaboration with Endeavor Content means we retain independence and freedom as a studio—but have the support and network of a powerful international business to push further into areas like the U.S. market.

WS: What else is new at Ink Factory?
CORNWELL: We announced recently that Katherine Butler is joining us as creative director. The key thing here is we’re growing the creative team. We want to broaden and deepen our slate. Katherine is coming on board to lead that process with us. That’s incredibly exciting. Overall, the world is incredibly competitive, it always is, and most of the shows I most admire, most of the films I most admire, are made by other people! [Laughs] That tells you the world is very competitive.

This interview was conducted prior to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Media companies are currently shifting their strategies in the wake of production postponements and economic trends.