Augenschein Moves Up a Level With Auteur Movies With Stars Attached

Fresh off the success of “Mother Mary,” starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Cole, German production company Augenschein is stepping up a level with more Hollywood projects and higher budgets.

The company, heading by Jonas Katzenstein and Maximilian Leo, started the year by launching “The Weight,” starring Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe, onto the festival and distribution circuit from Sundance and Berlin.

Recently, one of their high-profile projects, “Flesh of the Gods,” starring Kristen Stewart and Wagner Moura, went into production. Set in 1980s L.A., the vampire thriller is shooting in Tenerife and Germany, as well as plate shootings in L.A. Based on a screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker, it is directed by Panos Cosmatos.

Leo tells Variety, he sometimes pitches the film as “Eyes Wide Shut” meets “The Lost Boys,” and adds that it is dreamlike, almost ethereal.

Stewart and Moura will portray Raoul and Alex, a couple who “are in this almost dream-like daily routine that they try to escape from by attending underground concerts and parties and meet this enigmatic group, which turns out to be a cabal of vampires,” Leo says.

“It gets gory enough to satisfy the genre fans, but it’s also a very atmospherically dense and deep movie that will come across as very stylish,” he says. A top tier festival berth seems very likely.

The producing partners are Hyperobject Industries, Nevermind Pictures and XYZ Films. A24 pre-bought U.S. rights.

Another of Augenschein’s high-flying projects is airplane thriller “Left Seat,” starring Michelle Rodriguez and Richard Gere, and directed by Ben Younger. The film, which wrapped a few weeks ago, was shot entirely in Bavaria, and has started post-production.

Augenschein is producing the film with Jason Michael Berman, via A/Vantage, and Mandalay Pictures. Anton is handling international sales, with WME Independent handling North America.

Another star-driven project is probably going into production this summer, and two other movies are currently casting.

There are also smaller films, such as “Bloody Tennis,” which is screening to buyers in Cannes. These, Augenschein can fully finance. “Our approach is always to make filmmaker-driven material that’s financeable in this marketplace. By bringing in soft money, we can be a bit more creative and bolder in the genre approach. It doesn’t have to tick all the market boxes. So we can go for something that’s a bit riskier, because we can finance it together with the European funds, and then make interesting movies that are also attractive to actors and that can ideally have an upside, but still protecting the filmmaker from burning too much money, if it doesn’t becomes the next movie of the year,” Leo says.

“The equity isn’t over-invested and it can still work. The model is different in numbers, but not in principle. But if it’s getting to smaller numbers, we can fully finance it. That’s the major difference.”

Leo has started to see a difference since Germany revamped its film incentives. “It’s a process. The biggest change was raising the tax shelter yield to 30% – that helped and I think the insecurity that went away last summer led to a lot of German productions being greenlit. So, it’s a very, very busy summer in Germany. It also helped us. If we combine the DFFF [German Film Fund] with a regional fund, we would rather shoot in Germany than in Eastern Europe. In the projects we control, we can make it also work with Eastern Europe, but we see that we get higher quality for lower net money if we stay in Germany, also on the projects that we develop and where we control the IP.

“But, as with ‘Flesh of the Gods,’ we can also combine it [with other country’s incentives] for shooting locations with different landscapes. The Canaries, for example, are a very good landscape for a Southern Californian look, not only the climate but the vegetation and coastlines are pretty similar too. Also, Spanish colonial architecture cities that are rather growing in sprawls is something that, together with shooting second unit or plates, can really pull off this U.S. look.

“Sometimes it’s artistically super interesting, as in ‘Flesh of the Gods,’ to have a same, same but different look. In a way, for the filmmaker, it was even more attractive to shoot in a place that looks the same, but in a way, doesn’t, to create this unique own reality.

“If you shoot in Los Angeles today, you cannot control all the cars. You would have to do something anyway with VFX to revamp Los Angeles into what it was like 40 years ago. So then you can look into an alternative and look into something that does the trick in a different way. We would never shoot an Americana movie in Europe but if you shoot a science fiction, if you shoot a dream-like movie, if you have to distort the reality anyway, then it’s very interesting to look into what we could do over here [in Europe]. If it’s period, you’ll have to make the magic anyway. You have to use VFX to make it real. Then it becomes very attractive to locate the production here and find more room for the creative language.”

When Variety spoke to Leo before Locarno, he said that the financing market was quite tough. Has it improved?

“I would say it’s slightly less dire. I think that the real change is the volatility. I think North America in particular has very volatile numbers in sales, and I think also the backing of the streamers in international is just more volatile than two or three years ago. I had the feeling that in Sundance and Berlin more deals were made than last year, but it’s not back to where it was, and the volatility is still very high, which makes it very difficult for investors, and that leads to more cautious equity investments.

“Even though the market is difficult, the last 12 months has elevated us to a different level. We shot ‘The Weight’ and released it in Sundance and Berlin. We will have a premiere in Locarno. We had the ‘Mother Mary’ premiere in New York and London, and we are shooting ‘Flesh of the Gods.’ Like the other projects, it is elevating us to a new intensity in production, in volume, and we are now being approached by higher level filmmakers from the U.S. and the U.K., and we can approach ourselves more renowned filmmaker with the material that we are developing. So, for us, it felt like a new level of production, despite the bad market situation or the harder market situation.

“If you have a really strong package, there’s still very good money around to make bold movies, or you can make small movies for the indie market. It seems our budgets, ironically, have become a bit higher instead of lower in order that we can attract different filmmakers, and then we have a bigger leverage with the fundings, because it’s a spending-based system, so if you can bring in a bit more money from the market, it’s even more effective.”