The Veterans Founders Vincent Maraval & Kim Fox, Coming Off $100M In Cannes Sales, Talk ‘Emilia Pérez’ Gamble, Movie Taste & What’s Next

deadline.com:

EXCLUSIVE: It takes a certain kind of confidence to take a finished indie film to market with no presales, but if that completed film is a $24 million Spanish-language musical directed by a French auteur about a Mexican cartel leader that transitions from male to female, you’d better hope your sales agent has a backbone of steel and the experience to deliver.

Enter The Veterans co-founders Vincent Maraval and Kim Fox, who both arrived at this year’s Cannes Film Festival tasked with selling Emilia Pérez, the genre-defying musical from festival darling Jacques Audiard, which was competing for the Palme d’Or with just one key territory sale to France (Pathé) on the balance sheet.  “We knew it would be difficult to presell quickly because there were so many obstacles,” Maraval tells Deadline of the Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofia Gascón-led project. “Initial feedback from some distributors was that the project was too weird.

There were obstacles in the language and the concept but we think Jacques [Audiard] is a major director and so we believed until the end that the film would be strong.

Going into Cannes, we had seen footage so we knew what we had, but you never know how the market will answer.”  “Never before have I gone to a market feeling so strongly about a completed movie that had not sold anywhere,” says Fox. “That’s not the way I’ve historically operated.