Komplizen Film co-founders talk ‘Maria’, staying independent, Maren Ade’s next project

Young German film producers Janine Jackowski and Jonas Dornbach met “on the dance floor” at Hof International Film Festival in 2003 (no, they cannot remember what track was playing). Jackowski was there with Maren Ade’s debut feature The Forest For The Trees, while Dornbach was showing short film Shit Happens.

That meeting eventually led to Dornbach becoming a partner and producer at Komplizen Film, the company Jackowski and Ade formed in 1999 while students at the Munich Academy for Film and Tele­vision. Dornbach, who studied at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin and ran his own company Kinoherz from 2002-09, first worked with Komplizen as line producer on Ade’s second feature Everyone Else.

“That’s where we first thought, ‘Okay, let’s continue working together.’ In 2010 I joined them for real,” says Dornbach, who was appointed managing director in 2014, a title he now shares with Janina Schafft, who joined Komplizen last year.

The company has enjoyed an astonishing rise since Dornbach’s arrival. Its credits include award winners Toni Erdmann (2016), A Fantastic Woman (2017) and Spencer (2021), and it has worked with legendary arthouse filmmakers such as Miguel Gomes and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. It has branched out successfully into TV through Komplizen Series, overseen by David Keitsch (its first series was Skylines for Netflix in 2019).

The Komplizen model has not changed. It is still based around nurturing new talent, working with established filmmakers but always ensuring filmmakers retain creative freedom. “We have the luxury that we have good development funding in Germany, starting with the regional funds but also the federal funds,” says Dornbach.

For example, the company recently received nearly $1.1m (€1m) from FFF Bayern towards the development of The Years With You, a love story from writer/director Caroline Link; Warner Bros is also supporting the project’s development. It helps too that the company has consistently secured EU Creative Media slate funding as well as single project funding.

Komplizen earns revenues from producer fees, profits on some of the bigger films, and through the German Federal Film Board’s reference film funding scheme. This provides backing calculated on a retroactive basis, examining previous films’ local cinema admissions as well as festival and awards success. The non-repayable grants must be used for the production or release of new films.

At one stage, the principals considered setting up a distribution arm but ultimately decided against it, realising it would be expensive and risky. However, they have ventured successfully into TV production, something they felt able to do with the arrival of the streamers, which are far less rigid about formats, genres and running time than the traditional broadcasters. There is creative freedom in TV and the budgets are bigger — that, in turn, leads to more generous producer fees.

Growing profile

Jackowski and Dornbach still sit opposite each other in the Berlin office, just as they did in the early days. “The three of us [including Ade] are different,” says Jackowski. “We have different tastes but the same ethos. We all have this passion to make a good film. That’s what drives us. We trust each other and have fun working together.”

“Since Toni Erdmann, our profile changed,” adds Dornbach, offering his view on the company’s expansion after Ade’s Oscar contender grossed more than $12m at the global box office in 2016. “We are doing more films on a bigger scale and that have more crossover potential. Also, the risk increased quite a lot and now we have 17 people in the company. We have a certain turn­over to make every year. It’s true, it is risk. We are always thinking about how to move in the market, especially when the market is fluctuating.”

Komplizen is unusual in that it works with US partners (for instance, Glen Basner’s New York-based sales agent Film­Nation Entertainment) while continuing to put together European co-­productions in time-­honoured fashion by piecing together tax breaks and regional funding. “The European system is always slower than the US system where, once you have attached a certain star, then it’s happening. Here we are more slow and not so flexible,” concedes Dornbach.

The company has its own development arm with three staff members nurturing new film and TV projects. “Something we feel very passionate about is to only go out with a script once we believe it has a chance to succeed in the market. In this part, Maren is also involved,” says Dornbach.

Komplizen is one of the three production outfits behind festival favourite Maria, with Angelina Jolie playing legendary US-­Greek soprano Maria Callas in the last weeks of her life. The film, sold internationally by FilmNation, premiered at Venice Film Festival and will next play London.

Maria renews their partnership with Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain and Fabula, the company he runs with brother Juan de Dios Larrain; the latter is credited as producer on the film along with Dornbach, Jackowski, and Lorenzo Mieli through The Apartment (he has since exited the firm). The companies share the IP on the film, on which Netflix took US rights in late August.

The Komplizen partners first worked with Fabula on Sebastian Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman (2017). They got to know Larrain better when the filmmaker’s Jackie, the first of his trilogy of movies about “iconic 20th century women”, was part of the 2017 awards race alongside their own hit Toni Erdmann. That is when Larrain invited them to join the second in the trilogy, Spencer, about Princess Diana.

Spencer and Maria, which were both scripted by Steven Knight, presented daunting logistical challenges. The former, which went on to gross $25m worldwide, was made during the pandemic and in the wake of Brexit. It shot in Germany — doubling for the UK — against a backdrop of travel restrictions and financial uncertainty.

Maria faced its own set of obstacles. Larrain and Jolie had a limited window to make the film, in the autumn of 2023. Pre-production was in full flow when the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes began to bite, with the producers negotiating a waiver enabling them to carry on. In order to obtain it, however, they had to unpick the early pre-sales made by FilmNation at Cannes in 2023.

“We had to give all those pre-sales back because if a distributor was partially owned by a studio, then we wouldn’t have got a waiver,” recalls Dornbach. “It was very strict — they [SAG] checked everything.”

With support from multinational film and TV powerhouse Fremantle, which owns The Apartment, the production was able to shoot, and the same distributors who had pre-bought the film in 2023 were later able to buy it again. Maria ended up being made primarily in Budapest, with the prolific Ildiko Kemeny as the local producer and fixer.

Dornbach will not reveal the precise budget but confirms it was more than $20m (£15m). The producers were able to draw on the 30% expenditure credit available in Hungary, which also lured high-profile projects including Poor Things and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.

“We tried to find locations in Italy. It was not easy — to make Rome look like Paris in the ’70s was very challenging,” says Dornbach, explaining the move to eastern Europe. In Budapest, they found a building that worked perfectly as Maria Callas’s apartment at 36 Avenue Georges Mandel in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, where the singer died in 1977.

Dornbach’s sleuthing proved extremely useful to Larrain and Knight. The producer tracked down and filmed an interview with Ferruccio Mezzadri, Callas’s devoted former butler, played in the film by Pierfrancesco Favino. “He’s still living, he’s 91,” says Dornbach.

The former butler recounted how he and Callas’s maid Bruna (played in the film by Alba Rohrwacher) became the opera star’s most trusted protectors. They were as close to her as any family member by the end of her life. “She [Callas] needed people around her. She didn’t like to be alone, especially during the night,” says Dornbach. “They would play cards until 2am — and she always had to win.”

Dornbach acknowledges a certain initial “caution” about working with a star as big as Jolie, but she quickly won him round. “I was so impressed by how she prepared herself and how she really went for the singing. I found it courageous,” says the producer, who took his children to see Jolie when she performed at La Scala in Paris — “a goose-bump moment… the whole team of La Scala were there when we shot that scene. It was very special.”

Ade’s return

Now, as an awards campaign begins in earnest for Maria, Komplizen is beginning finance on Zauberwort (aka Magic Word), the long-awaited new feature from Ade — her first since Toni Erdmann almost a decade ago, with the plan to shoot in 2026. “She [Ade] is writing very intensely. She is working very hard,” says Jackowski.

The long-mooted US remake of Toni Erdmann has stalled for now. “It was at Paramount but there were many changes at the company and it has got a little bit stuck over there,” acknowledges Dornbach of the project, which at one stage had Jack Nicholson and Kristen Wiig attached with Lisa Cholodenko to direct from a script by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner. Nicholson and the writers are all known to have dropped out.

“[There] is a question mark [over] what will happen. The script was amazing, I really liked it,” adds Dornbach. Komplizen’s focus is on developing its own film and TV projects. The company is close to completion on Netflix-backed Delicious, the debut feature by Nele Mueller-Stöfen who is the partner of Bafta-winning director Edward Berger. The film tells a story about a German family in France who help a young woman after a car crash.

“I have read a few of the scripts she co-wrote with Eddie [Berger] and loved them. I approached her and said, ‘Don’t you want to do something on your own as a debut?’” recalls Jackowski. “It is one of the best scripts I have ever read. Psychologically, it is so cleverly constructed. We approached Netflix and they quickly came on board.”

Delicious should be ready for early 2025, but will the streamer grant it a theatrical window? “As always with Net­flix, they never promise [but] I think everybody is happy with the film,” responds Jackowski.

On the TV side, Komplizen is about to shoot The Girl Who Learned How To Kneel, a series from Hagai Levi made with Les Films du Poisson in France and Topkapi in the Netherlands. Komplizen is also developing and financing Villa Metaphora, a series based on the novel by Andrea De Carlo, which is being planned as a Germany-Italy-France co-production. The inter­national partners are yet to be announced, though fellow German outfit Beta Film is involved. The screenplay is written by Ludovica Rampoldi.

Intriguingly, Komplizen has two new projects — both adaptations of novels — set to involve Toni Erdmann star Sandra Hüller. One is international and will have Komplizen as a minority co-producer; the other is German. Both are at an early stage and not ready to be announced.

Komplizen remains as committed as ever to co-production: the firm is a minority co-­producer on Joachim Trier’s new feature Sentimental Value, which is lead produced by Maria Ekerhovd from Norway’s Mer Film.

Underlining its co-production credentials, in early 2022 Komplizen joined The Creatives, a collective of top European independent outfits that includes Good Chaos (UK), Haut et Court (France), Razor Film (Germany) Lemming Film (Nether­lands), Maipo Film (Norway), Masha (US), Spiro (Israel), Unité (France) and Versus Production (Belgium). The Creatives had a soft first-look deal with Fremantle, though the arrangement has now expired and the group is looking for a new backer. “We are sharing a lot of projects right now and we want to develop as a creative company,” says Dornbach of the production alliance.

While many other leading European production outfits have been snapped up by big multinational media corporations, Komplizen is not planning to emulate them. “We are looking to stay as independent as possible,” insists Dornbach. “So far, we have managed quite well.” 

• Should indie filmmakers embrace or avoid FAST and AVoD platforms?