Movie producer Chris Ferguson, near his office in downtown Vancouver, on July 20.Jimmy Jeong/The Globe and Mail
Keeping a secret on a movie set is never easy. Keeping one that involves Nicolas Cage is even trickier. Which was why director Oz Perkins was in such a dilemma last year during production on his new Vancouver-shot serial-killer thriller Longlegs, which has quickly become the sleeper hit of the summer.
“When designing Nick’s very particular look as the villain, we didn’t want a lot of people to see it beforehand, even the film’s financiers. I needed someone to help me preserve that essential vision,” recalls Perkins. “I knew I could count on Chris, a creative producer who’s always able to wrangle the elements and play defence.”
The Chris in this case is Chris Ferguson, head of the Vancouver-based production company Oddfellows Pictures, and easily one of the busiest film producers in Canada at the moment.
Not only can Ferguson boast of Longlegs’ remarkable financial success – the film’s debut-weekend North American haul of US$22.6-million is more than double its budget while also marking Cage’s biggest opening in more than a decade – the producer is also behind the next two films from the in-demand Perkins, and just launched a new animated series, Psi Cops, on U.S. cartoon channel Adult Swim. What’s more: Ferguson has done it all from Vancouver, an unusual perch for such a prolific Hollywood player.
“There’s a benefit from being a step away from the machinations of the industry,” says Ferguson. “I like to make movies with my friends, and my friends are here.”
It is those friendships where Ferguson’s story starts – all the way back to kindergarten, in fact, where Ferguson met Zach Lipovsky.
“Zach and I became friends, and then we started making movies together with our toys, all through elementary school and then high school, until at some point we decided this might be a possible career,” recalls Ferguson. “It was us making a million terrible short films as we learned the craft.”
After scoring a strong reception for their entry in Vancouver’s Crazy8s film festival – an eight-day marathon in which emerging filmmakers must conceive, shoot and edit a short film – Ferguson and Lipovsky got closer to the heart of the Canadian industry. Soon, the pair received support from Telefilm executive John Dippong, and banded together with Derek Lee and Clif Prowse to make the micro-budget 2013 horror film Afflicted.
“Zach had an agent in L.A. by this time, another Canadian named Adam Levine, who was passionate about what we were doing,” recalls Ferguson. “Adam took the film out and it sparked a bidding war with the best people down there.”
One of whom was producer Brian Kavanaugh-Jones (Insidious, Sinister). Soon, Ferguson and Kavanaugh-Jones were making films on both sides of the border, from the thriller Sweet Virginia (directed by Canadian Jamie M. Dagg and starring Hollywood favourite Jon Bernthal) to the forthcoming sci-fi drama Balestra (directed by Canadian Nicole Dorsey and starring British actor Cush Jumbo).
All of which makes Oddfellows, which Ferguson runs with a team of nine plus contractors who come on a film-by-film basis, a unique player in the Canadian film landscape. Some companies focus strictly on Canadian content, some on service production (that is, helping Hollywood films that are shooting in Canada to take advantage of tax perks). Oddfellows, though, positions itself simply as a company based in Canada that makes every kind of movie, in every kind of way, for every kind of market.
“There’s a frustration we have when talking with government organizations and interest groups up here, which is often about trying to figure out what kind of producer we are. I just want to make movies,” says Ferguson, who adds that it helps to have strong ties to U.S. financiers, such as C2 Motion Picture Group.
It is Ferguson’s relationship with Perkins, though, that might allow Oddfellows to take its biggest steps yet.
After Ferguson first connected with Perkins during B.C. reshoots for his 2020 horror film Gretel & Hansel – “Oz shows up a day before, walks into some random forest in Vancouver, and free-style creates some of the most beautiful shots that I’ve ever seen committed to film,” the producer recalls – the pair reteamed for Longlegs, which is also produced by Kavanaugh-Jones.
What might have been a tough sell – a gonzo Cage plays a Satanist who leads the FBI on a decades-long manhunt – garnered the largest deal out of Berlin’s European Film Market in 2023.
“Sometimes it’s incredibly hard to get money, and sometimes it’s easy,” says Ferguson. “Oz’s movies are at a place now where they undeniably click.”
Now, Ferguson and Perkins find themselves in the enviable position of having three films ready for release in the span of less than two years.
Just as Longlegs was wrapping production in early 2023, the team secured financing for Perkins’ next film, an adaptation of the Stephen King short story The Monkey. But then the Writers Guild of America strike hit, and the project stopped dead in its tracks.
“It was a real kick in the face, but after a short time being weepy about it, I called Chris to say, well, we can’t stop working,” recalls Perkins. “Maybe we make a found-footage movie, shoot stuff without a script and cobble it together? Chris thought we could do better than that, and pulled up the Rolodex that exists only in his head.”
The result would be the intimate horror film Keeper, in which Ferguson connected Perkins with Canadian screenwriter Nick Lepard and actors Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland, all of whom were members of their respective Canadian unions, unaffected by the U.S. labour action.
“We had a movie in 13 weeks,” says Perkins. “We wrapped on a Friday, and on Monday we were back in the offices to start on The Monkey, now that the strike had cleared.”
The Monkey, which also stars Maslany, will be released in February via the same trusted distributors as Longlegs: Neon in the U.S., and Elevation Pictures in Canada. Keeper will arrive later in 2025. And early next year, the team will be back together again, shooting what Perkins cryptically calls their biggest film yet.
“The whole team calls me every day to ask how can we get back together, when can we do something new,” says Ferguson with a laugh. “It’s my family.”