Reykjavík Grapevine - 15.08.2008, Blaðsíða 20

20 | REYKJAVÍK GRAPEVINE | ISSUE 12—2008
How does a pop-musician from Iceland be-
come a big-time movie producer in Holly-
wood?
Well, alongside being a pop-musician, I was also
a student at the University of Iceland where I stud-
ied English and literature. After I completed my
BA degree I was awarded a Fullbright scholarship
to go to the University of Southern California to at-
tend an M.F.A. program in Film Production. I was
there for three years, and after that I went on to
study further at the American Film Institute.
This was back in 1978, before the first official
Icelandic movie had even been made – Útlaginn
by Ágúst Guðmundsson came out in late 1978 – so
there wasn’t much of a movie industry here when
I left, but I always intended to come back. The rea-
son I prolonged my stay there was that my wife
hadn’t finished her studies. So, the idea was that
I would try to find some work while she finished
school. At the time, there were a lot of changes
in the industry. The film industry was just like the
auto industry, it was very closed – the unions con-
trolled everything. If you were not a member of
a union, you couldn’t get a job. But around 1980,
things started to change following two new things.
One, cable networks and two, home video. These
new areas were unregulated as the unions they
didn’t see them as a threat.
I was cooperating with a friend of mine I
had met at AFI, called Steve Golin, and we were
trying to develop our own films, but in the mean-
time we were free-lancing for other companies,
doing work for cable networks and other projects
that were not directly for the major studios. In
1985, Steve Golin and I decided to form our own
production company, Propaganda Films. We had
been free-lancing for a lot of companies, but there
was one company I had worked a lot for, and sud-
denly the top brass of the company decided to
quit, so there was no one left except the directors
and me. So someone suggested we simply formed
our own company. So Steve came aboard, and
that’s how we started really.
Mostly we were just in the right place at the
right time. MTV was starting out and we were one
of the first companies to get a foothold in the mu-
sic video industry. The company grew very fast,
and soon we branched out from music videos to
commercials. The advertising industry was like the
film industry, very regulated, so it was almost im-
possible to get in there. But again, the timing was
good. The advertising industry was going through
a generational shift and people were looking for
something fresh and exciting. So where was all
the fresh and exciting stuff? It was on MTV, so the
companies came looking for us. We hadn’t even
tried to break in to the advertising industry when
we were approached to do our first ads. That’s
how we started to make commercials. That part of
the company also grew very fast, and within just
a few years we were the largest music video and
commercial production company in the world.
But at the same time, the goal was always
to make films, so we used the money we were
making from commercials and music videos to
develop feature length films. The company was
becoming very prominent, as it was the leading
company in its field, so people started to come to
us with material and ideas. That’s how we met Da-
vid Lynch, and that’s when I was approached to
take on the project Beverly Hills 90210, which was
completely frozen at the time and nobody could
get it off the ground, because the TV industry was
getting so old. Aaron Spelling
had developed the series, and
he wanted to find someone
who knew what the teenagers
wanted, and he thought we
would know, or David Lynch
thought we could. So the
foundation of this company
opened a lot of doors for us.
So David Lynch had a part
to play in bringing Beverly
Hills 90210 to life? He’s not
really a person you’d think
of in relation to such a teen-
age phenomenon.
Well, David was looking for
new ways to do things. He
came to us with the manu-
script to Twin Peaks because
we were doing exciting things.
Twin Peaks was a very avant-
garde idea, but he couldn’t
get it financed through the
big networks. We managed to
finance it partially through other networks as well.
Although ABC had first rights to it, we sold the sec-
ond rights to a cable network; then we sold the
rights to it abroad and so on. This was a very un-
usual way to finance a TV production. Usually, you
would just go to ABC or any of the other networks,
and ABC bought the rights and financed the pro-
duction. There were just three networks at the
time: ABC, NBC and CBS, and if they said no, you
just couldn’t get it done. But we found other ways.
Otherwise, Twin Peaks would never have been
made. Beverly Hills 90210 was different, because
nobody wanted to buy it. That’s why the project
was at a standstill. Aaron Spelling and his people
– he had a lot of clever old guys working with him,
I think most of them are dead now – they believed
in the material, and they wanted to find someone
who could make it accessible, I don’t necessarily
want to say commercial, and they came to us after
David pointed us out to them.
In Iceland, Twin Peaks received a lot atten-
tion, because it was being produced by an
Icelander, but I don’t even remember having
heard your name mentioned in the media
here in relation to Beverly Hills 90210.
Well, one difference was that we developed and
produced Twin Peaks, whereas Beverly Hills was
brought to us. Twin Peaks was our production,
while we did Beverly Hills in cooperation with
Aaron Spelling. But I took it upon myself person-
ally to produce that project. Maybe it was just be-
cause I have always been fond of soaps and there
weren’t many people that believed in this project.
But I produced the first 30 shows of Beverly Hills
90210, while we had a lot of people working on
Twin Peaks, where David Lynch also took a more
decisive role in the production. But after Beverly
Hills started to do well, Aaron Spelling bought us
out and the show continued for nine years after
I left it.
Did these two projects turn out to be a foun-
dation for you in the future?
Well, after this, we mostly turned to making mov-
ies, so we never really built on this to become a
TV production company. We did other stuff for TV,
but nothing as big as this. It was just a question
of focus. Making movies with David Lynch and
Madonna was simply more exciting. TV was just a
means to an end really. But of course I am proud
that both of these shows are considered ground-
breaking series today.
One of the first big films you produced was
David Lynch’s Wild at Heart,
with Nicholas Cage in one
of his first big roles. Later
you did Kalifornia, with two
young actors, Brad Pitt and
David Duchovny. Is it just
luck or do you have such a
great eye for talent?
How does the saying go? It’s
better to be lucky than clever?
Some people say there is no
such thing as luck. Most of the
directors we brought in at the
early days of Propaganda Films
are some of the most famous
directors in the world today. Mi-
chael Bay, Spike Jonze, David
Fincher, and Anthony Fuqua
for example. We tried to work
with people that were on a
similar wavelength as us at Pro-
paganda, but we also had the
vision to work with people like
David Lynch, where your role is
mostly as a facilitator. You don’t really tell David
Lynch what to do. You just get people together
in a room, close the door and hope for the best.
Wild at Heart was made when David was trying
to put together a movie that didn’t work out then,
but later became Mulholland Drive. He was look-
ing for something else to do and I had personally
bought the rights to the short story Wild at Heart
for another director. At some point I started to dis-
cuss this with David and eventually I handed him
a copy of the book, and few days later he called
me and had the script ready and everything was
set in motion. Good material calls for a good di-
rector, and a good director gets good actors. If you
have the foundation, the rest follows. Today I am
producing a movie called Brothers with Natalie
Portman, Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhal, the
biggest young stars in Hollywood. That’s only pos-
sible because I had the right material. But I have
always been very interested in discovering new
talent.
There is one film on your resume that caught
my eye: Pantera – Cowboys from Hell, a roc-
kumentary with a heavy metal band. It is a
little different from a lot of other things on
your list.
We produced over 200 music videos, spanning
the whole spectrum. From Guns n’ Roses to Ma-
donna and Michael Jackson and we did a few
documentaries on music and musicians as well.
The movie we did with Madonna, Truth or Dare,
was somewhat seminal in that field at the time. It
was the highest grossing documentary in the US
until Fahrenheit 911 came out 15 years later. One
of the many unfinished projects we had was a tour
documentary with Guns n’ Roses. We did all the
videos for Guns n’ Roses in their time and there
was an Icelandic filmmaker who was working for
us, Ágúst Jakobsson, who had been an assistant
when we were shooting some of these videos and
he ended up going on the road with the band for
two years, shooting footage for a documentary.
All this material exists, but when the band split
up, Axl Rose locked it all up.
What is your favourite project?
That’s a little like asking you to pick your favou-
rite child. But, Kalifornia ranks high. And Wild at
Heart. Although, for some reason, people don’t
seem to think that Wild at Heart has aged well. I
think it has, but not everyone agrees. Many people
name Pulp Fiction as seminal movie. I think that
Wild at Heart is a lot more seminal movie. For one
thing it came out earlier and it combines all the
elements that were later crystallised in Quentin
Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. It had violence, a little
horror and blood, as well as humour. You’ll find all
those things in Wild at Heart. It has surprised me
through the years, how unkind history has been
to this movie. It is usually not even mentioned as
one of David Lynch’s best movies. People usually
mention Blue Velvet or Eraserhead, or Mullhol-
land Drive. But Wild at Heart has always been one
of my favourite projects, but I am surprised that
it hasn’t been given its due credit. The Madonna
movie was a project I worked on a lot personally.
I haven’t done a lot of horror movies, but Candy-
man was a somewhat seminal movie I did with
Clive Barker, although I don’t look at myself as a
horror filmmaker. Zidane, a 21-Century Portrait
was a very unusual project where I was very in-
volved personally, and it was unlike anything that
had been done before.
Zidane must have sounded like a crazy idea
when you were first heard it. To film a whole
football match, but only film one player the
whole time.
Yes, but the idea came from artists, rather than
filmmakers. It came out of a workshop I do once
a year in Eiðar in East-Iceland with various artists.
At first, they wanted to do a video installation, but
I said that this would only work as a film; it could
never work on a small screen. If you are portray-
ing a single individual like that, you have to blow
it up. So what’s better than seeing him up on the
silver screen? That’s what makes it exciting. When
you watch a football game on TV, you see all the
players and they are all so small, so all you can re-
ally see of the players is the jersey number. What
we wanted to do was to take something that you
see every day and show people a new angle. And
I think we did that.
The Man Who Created
the Nineties
INTERvIEW BY SveInn BIRkIR BJöRnSSon — pHoTo BY ÁSTA kRISTJÁnSDÓTTIR
Sigurjón Sighvatsson sheds some light on his career as Hollywood producer
NAME:
Sigurjón (Joni) Sighvatsson
DOB:
June 15, 1952
OCCuPATION:
Movie producer
uPCOMING RELEASES:
Brothers, The Good Heart
SELECTED fILMOGRAPHY:
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
K-19: The Widowmaker
Arlington Road
Basquiat
Kalifornia
Wild at Heart
Red Rock West
Pantera: Cowboys from Hell
Madonna: Truth or Dare
Pantera: Cowboys from Hell
Beverly Hills, 90210
Icelandic movie producer Sigur-
jón Sighvatsson is responsible for
cult movies such as Wild at Heart
and Kalifornia. He is was also one
of the most prolific music video
producers in the early years of
MTV, working with artists such
Madonna and Guns n’ Roses,
including their now famous video
trilogy from Use Your Illusion. And
then of course, there was Beverly
Hills 90210, which he pretty much
resurrected from a standstill. Is it
safe to say that few men were as
influential in creating the nineties
as we know it as Sigurjón Sigh-
vatsson? I think it is.
one of THe MAnY unfInISHeD pRoJ-
ecTS we HAD wAS A TouR DocuMen-
TARY wITH gunS n’ RoSeS. ALL THIS
MATeRIAL exISTS, BuT wHen THe
BAnD SpLIT up, AxL RoSe LockeD IT
ALL up.