Euro Production Incentives: The Co-Producers’ Perspective

PREMIUM: Jay Stuart talks to Tandem’s Rola Bauer and Starz’s Carmi Zlotnik about filming on-location in Europe, wrapping up our series on the region’s production incentives.

The globalization of television production has been a steadily growing phenomenon. The genie is out of the bottle. Hollywood is no longer a place so much as a state of mind. How wide open are the geographical possibilities? As wide as the whole world, if you take the example of Starz’s historical pirate series Black Sails. Shooting is almost finished on the second season of the program in Cape Town, South Africa. But it might have gone just about anywhere.

Starz actually did budgets for other options, including Spain, Malta, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Hawaii, and looked at Australia and New Zealand. The show is produced by Platinum Dunes, Quaker Moving Pictures and Film Afrika.

“Each possibility had a scorecard,” says Carmi Zlotnik, the managing director of Starz. “So, for example, Malta had tax benefits and a water tank, but no beaches. South Africa had benefits and beaches, but no water tank, but they built a water tank for us at Cape Town Film Studios.”

No matter where producers look nowadays, they are increasingly likely to find some form of financial inducement on offer.

“One of the main factors underlying the internationalization of production is the internationalization of production financing,” Zlotnik says. “Very few networks can do it all by themselves. Most of us put together money by selling off international rights, and that brings in all the dimensions of working with international partners, including the tax benefits and incentives. This has been true of feature films for a long time and it is increasingly true of television, and I don’t see it changing.”

Another current trend, perhaps less obvious, is that incentives are becoming more significant in the process of deciding where to shoot.

“The point of entry of our production decisions starts with the specific needs and demands from the story,” says Rola Bauer, the president of Tandem Communications. “We look at what we need in terms of look, feel, architecture and topography. We analyze how much we need to build on sound stages versus practical locations. Then we compare different countries and cities in terms of what they can offer with respect to our needs, creating a short list. From there, we look at the economic benefits of each of those possibilities on the short list and that’s when tax and production incentives start playing a role in making a final decision on where we’ll shoot or where we’ll post.

“Once we have evaluated our production needs,” continues Bauer, “that’s when support incentives play a role in making a final decision, because who is going to say no to an economic incentive in a country or city where it makes sense to shoot the show?”

After shooting two seasons of the detective series Crossing Lines in the Czech Republic, Tandem and Bernero Productions will be making the third season there this year. The show, with a budget of $3 million (2.2 million euros) per episode, is co-produced with TF1 Production and Sony Pictures Television Networks in collaboration with Stillking Films.

Tax benefits and other incentives are part of a matrix of factors in making decisions about production location, according to veteran producer Zlotnik at Starz. He also includes currency exchange rates, landscapes and settings, crew availability and technical proficiency, the acting pool, local infrastructure—which includes broadband connectivity as well as sound stages—post-production facilities and the travel distance. “We don’t have a specific points systems, but we make apples-for-apples comparisons,” Zlotnik says. “The budgets are the final representation of how they stack up, but some factors are hard to quantify.”

He adds, “Tax benefits and incentives are always important, but they do not monopolize the discussion. The landscape of tax benefits and incentives is also changing. If you look at America, sometimes states create new benefits and sometimes they abolish them, or if they have a fixed pool of finance, they run out of money. The trend is for locations to see the benefits of attracting production and then try to make themselves more competitive.”

The U.K. is now high on his list, with tax incentives that are “some of the best in the world,” Zlotnik says. On top of Da Vinci’s Demons, Starz has another U.K.-produced show, Outlander, set to debut in the U.S. in August. It was shot in Scotland, produced by Tall Ship Productions, Story Mining & Supply Co., Left Bank Pictures and Sony Pictures Television.

Incentives are still only a piece of the jigsaw. “Of course incentives are important and can be the catalyst to move a project forward, but being creatively true to and maintaining the integrity of the story is essential,” says Tandem’s Bauer. “Based on this starting point, all other decisions of where to shoot and where to post are then made.”