House Productions execs talk ‘Conclave’ challenges, BBC relationship and upcoming projects

House Productions co-founder Tessa Ross is in a jubilant mood. “I have a little book,” she says. “Sometimes, I wake up jolly in the morning and say to Jules [House co-founder Juliette Howell], ‘I’m happy because I can fill a page with projects that I’m really excited about.’”

Now is most definitely one of those times. As their production Conclave continues to ride high in the awards race, the little book of new creative projects that are bubbling away in development at the London-headquartered company is positively brimming. Features in the works include follow-ups from How To Have Sex director Molly Manning Walker, Blue Jean’s Georgia Oakley, Earth Mama’s Savanah Leaf, The Thing With Feathers’ Dylan Southern, Australian Babyteeth filmmaker Shannon Murphy, and a series and feature with Richard Ayoade (the series is set to be made first).

Soon to enter production is Scrapper director Charlotte Regan’s next project, a crime series with the BBC called Mint — House hired Scrapper producer Theo Barrowclough as a full-time executive producer in 2023 — and the third season of Sherwood, with Clio Barnard returning to direct.

Ross, the former head of film and drama at Channel 4, and Howell, former head of Working Title TV, first launched their company in 2016, with the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Studios, upping its initial 25% stake to take full owner­ship in 2021. According to Ross, it has not changed their way of working “at all”.

“We feel very comfortable in that relationship, and very proud of being part of the BBC,” she says. “We have a very good relationship with the commissioning side.”

While a good chunk of House’s slate is BBC commissions, not every­thing ends up with the public service broadcaster. The Good Mothers was commissioned as a Disney+ series; Brexit: The Uncivil War was a partner­ship with Channel 4 and HBO; Six Four streamed on ITVX; Sebastian Lelio’s 2022 feature The Wonder was made for Netflix; and Oscar and Bafta winner The Zone Of Interest, which House co-produced, was a Film4-backed production.

Building blocks

Ross and Howell’s paths first crossed at the BBC in the 1990s. When Ross went to Channel 4 and Film4, Howell followed, joining as Film4 head of development. At House, Ross is naturally a bit more across film, and Howell more on top of TV. Together, they run an 18-strong team, including an office in Manchester, House North, where development executive Georgia Ince is based.

“Everyone works across both the [film and TV] slates,” explains Howell, which enables projects to transfer between mediums as they develop. The Good Mothers, for instance — an Italian-language crime drama about three women born into a deadly Mafia clan, co-produced with Fremantle-owned Wildside — was initially developed as a feature, while 2023 film The Iron Claw began as a TV series.

One project that was only ever a feature is Conclave. “Maybe there’s a whole other world in which we can go back into the Vatican and spend years there,” smiles Ross.

Adapted from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, the papal thriller starring Ralph Fiennes has been lauded with 12 Bafta and eight Oscar nominations, and has taken around $9.4m (£7.6m) at the box office in the UK and Ireland for Black Bear, and $32m in North America for Focus Features. House produced the Telluride premiere from Germany-born filmmaker Edward Berger alongside FilmNation Entertainment, which also handled international sales, including the US and UK deals with Focus and Black Bear.

Conclave has been in the works since House’s earliest days, pre-dating Berger’s 2023 Bafta and Oscar winner All Quiet On The Western Front. House chased down the book on which the film is based after reading the first three chapters, and persuaded Harris they knew how to transfer it to screen.

Danny Cohen-led Access Entertainment, a division of Len Blavat­nik’s New York-headquartered investment company Access Industries, has a first-look option to finance development for House, and Access came on board to help Ross and Howell option the book and commission Peter Straughan to write the screenplay.

Taste makers

For House, the development support from Access has been instrumental to building the business. “It’s a mindset thing as much as anything,” says Ross. “The pleasure of being a producer is to pursue the things you love, the people you love, and the projects you love. If you’re always going cap in hand, and saying, ‘Please may I…’ to any funder before you can even respond to a brilliant meeting or idea, or something you’ve read, it slows you up and makes you not sure of your own taste.

“We were both so lucky to have been buyers,” she continues. “We have had to prove that our taste might deliver to audiences, not just to the talent we are working with, to the writers or directors or producers we are supporting, but that we actually knew something was good before an audience responded.”

Despite the backing of Access and, later, other finance partners including Indian Paintbrush, Conclave still presented multiple challenges along the way, from where to shoot to the casting process.

“The balancing act takes time,” says Ross. “Do you build it in Rome, where you might get lots of benefit from the locations? But the tax credit can change in Italy, and is the architecture going to be available to you? We looked at Eastern Europe too. And then the financing — we financed it more than once. The finance fell away, and we had to start again.”

Eventually, Conclave shot in Rome in early 2023, with Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini. “Even if you have a Ralph, you still have to place people around him who have the right dates available, [and can match] the scale of needing to finance it at a certain level,” says Ross. “Though, I would argue, it’s very low-cost for what was delivered.” While she declines to comment on the exact budget, it has been reported at around $20m.

The pair aim for two or three films and two or three TV projects in active production per year, with plenty more in development. But despite their immense industry experience, and the comfort of BBC Studios and Access support, House is not immune to the harsh economic climate.

“The television landscape is very tough, not because there isn’t an appetite to make [shows] but because the commissions from the broad­casters require you to bring in so much other finance as well,” says Ross. “That has meant that saying something is greenlit doesn’t really mean it is. The process to finance is a much longer one than just getting something greenlit by one broadcaster. That has had a huge effect on everybody.”

In film, says Ross, “The appetite for the extraordinary, and the lack of appetite for the risk to deliver the extraordinary, remains the problem.”

House is also behind Andrea Arnold’s Bird, starring Barry Keoghan, which has been nominated for the outstanding British film Bafta and took $329,000 (£265,000)for Mubi at the UK and Ireland box office, not quite matching Arnold’s last fiction feature American Honey, which made $593,000 (£478,000) in 2016.

“There are amazing pieces of work that aren’t in cinemas for long enough, and we can understand why it’s so hard for distributors to take a risk and spend that money. I don’t have an easy answer,” reflects Ross. “The appetite for those films exists, but it’s about what we do to create more of that appetite.”

Howell feels “authorship” is the thread that runs through all House projects, but their tastes can flow in unexpected directions. US filmmaker Sean Durkin’s 2023 film The Iron Claw seems an outlier for the UK company — based on a true story of an American wrestling family, with US cast Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White alongside a Brit, Harris Dickinson, and shot in Louisiana. A24 produced with House and co-financed with BBC Film and Access Entertainment. (House does not have a formal first-look deal with BBC Film, even though both exist under the BBC umbrella, but Ross and Howell maintain a close production partnership with the funder.)

For House, it all comes back to relationships. Ross had been impressed with Durkin when working with him on Channel 4 series Southcliffe. “We would look for those projects because the people and the relationship make sense… It probably isn’t a natural fit for [BBC Film either], but the filmmaker is. Would we do it again? 100%.”

• Screen digital edition: February 7