‘Our team sweats bullets for every movie’: How Elevation Pictures climbed to the top of Canadian film

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The year was 2014 and Canadian producers Christine Haebler and Trish Dolman had a problem: Absolutely no film distributor wanted to touch Indian Horse, their adaptation of Richard Wagamese’s acclaimed novel about one boy’s struggle through the residential-school system.

“Nobody was interested in these types of stories,” recalls Haebler. “This was still a year before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its report, and everybody turned us down.”

Everybody, until the producers met with a new Toronto-based outfit called Elevation Pictures. Formed the year before – after an era of conglomeration left one giant, Entertainment One, towering above everyone else – the company snapped up Indian Horse “without any hesitation whatsoever,” recalls Dolman. “They got how important it was immediately.”

Three years later, director Stephen Campanelli’s film premiered to strong reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival before going on to become the highest-grossing English-language Canadian film of 2018.

“Elevation screened it in fly-in communities, they got schools to send classes, they played it in festivals across the country,” says Haebler. “They knew how to get eyeballs on it.”

That eyeball-nabbing knack is one of the many reasons that Elevation has become Canada’s largest independent distributor, thriving while competitors flailed as the streaming wars raged on and the pandemic fundamentally altered the theatrical landscape. And now, as the company celebrates its 10th anniversary this month, Elevation heads into this year’s TIFF with its largest festival slate ever, earning it both the envy and admiration of every other player in this country’s sometimes insular, always fiercely competitive film industry.

Elevation’s 2023 TIFF roster mixes all manner of genres and budgetary levels, from Jonathan Glazer’s chilling Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest to Craig Gillespie’s star-packed finance-bro satire Dumb Money to Molly McGlynn’s bold Canadian coming-of-age dramedy Fitting In. But the range and volume speak to the company’s twinned tenets: creative credibility and financial reliability. Which is also an apt way of breaking down the complementary sensibilities of Elevation’s co-presidents, Laurie May and Noah Segal.

“Noah makes the deals, then Laurie handles the details,” says producer and regular Elevation partner Niv Fichman (Hyena Road, BlackBerry). “They’re independent of one another, yet they also need each other.”

Or as Dolman puts it: “Noah will make the deal, then Laurie will have to pay for it and go, ‘What?!’ They’re like an old married couple.”

May jokes that she first crossed paths with Segal at Toronto Bialik Hebrew School, a believable enough gag given that the pair’s communication seems built on a lifetime of shorthand, the two either finishing each other’s sentences or interrupting the other to correct a point. The pair actually met in the late nineties when both were at Lionsgate, where May was senior vice-president of business and legal affairs and Segal was executive VP overseeing North American home entertainment.

“We worked together, we laughed together, we punched each other out together,” says Segal.

A few career climbs and corporate mergers later, and the two found themselves together again at Alliance Films in the 2010s, around the time that eOne was hovering around looking to make an acquisition.

In Canada, then as now, there are two kinds of film distributors, which take on the P&A (“prints and advertising”) expenses of releasing a movie. There are the satellite operations of the big Hollywood studios such as Disney and Universal, and then there are the independents, which acquire and distribute everything that the majors don’t, including U.S. indie films, foreign-language productions and Canadian cinema.

After Alliance was swallowed up by eOne, U.S. sales agency CAA saw an opportunity for a new competitor to enter the Canadian market, and approached May and Segal about meeting potential backers.

So, like many film-industry success stories, Elevation’s starts in the lobby of a luxury hotel – New York’s Thompson, in this case, where May and Segal met Teddy Schwarzman, head of the California-based production company Black Bear Pictures, and son of Blackstone Group billionaire Stephen Schwarzman.

“For one-tenth of the capital it would require to be a major U.S. distributor, we could compete head-to-head in Canada with a more independent, efficient mindset. Laurie and Noah wanted to do something entrepreneurial – scrappy but high-quality, with a focus on Canadian filmmakers,” recalls Schwarzman.

Elevation arrived out of the gate with 2014′s The Imitation Game, the Alan Turing biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch that Schwarzman helped produce and which ended up winning the coveted People’s Choice Award at TIFF before grossing an astounding $14.7-million at the Canadian box office.

“The relationship with Teddy allowed them to have The Imitation Game, but you need the ability to release the movie and show that you’re able to deliver, too, and they delivered time and again,” says Roeg Sutherland, co-head of the international film group at CAA. “They’re the first place you go to in Canada.”

Not every release has been an Imitation Game-level success – in fact, the drama remains Elevation’s highest-grossing theatrical release. But May and Segal steadily built their brand on a commitment to refined taste and ground-floor involvement, helping develop projects from the script stage instead of merely inheriting U.S. marketing plans. Films that looked like tough sells – such as 2015′s Room, “a movie about an abused woman giving birth to a kid under captivity, yes, very commercial,” jokes Segal – were each treated as delicate newborn babes that everyone at the company was responsible for raising.

“We know every title is finite in its release,” says Segal, “but our team sweats bullets for every movie.”

That team, including executive VP and general manager Adrian Love and executive VP of distribution and operations Jeremy Smith, is stacked with long-time collaborators who have each built up a network of trust in an industry whose most valued currency is relationships.

“We’re always trying to find our sweet spot in terms of size – should we go up to 60 films a year and add 20 staff? But we like where we’re at, releasing a curated slate of about 40,” says May.

Crucial to Elevation’s success have been its relationships with such buzz-generating U.S. distributors as NEON (Triangle of Sadness, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed) and A24 (Everything Everywhere All at Once, Past Lives), both of which do not have operations set up inside Canada and thus need local partners.

“I’m always envious of Elevation’s slate because they’re not only working with us but also A24 and other companies,” says NEON’s chief executive Tom Quinn. “The best things that you can see on the big screen, they have access to all of it.”

Just as important was Elevation’s decision in 2016 to get into the business of not only distributing films but making them, too, hiring First Generation Films founder Christina Piovesan as head of production.

“We can’t compete with a streamer buying worldwide rights of a Sundance title for $15-million, so if we want to ensure a flow of content to distribute, we needed to have that missing piece,” says May.

This has led to a large investment in Canadian talent – Elevation has so far helped produce films by Jay Baruchel (Random Acts of Violence), Sean Durkin (The Nest) and Brandon Cronenberg (Infinity Pool) – which feeds back to the company’s original mission of supporting the domestic sector.

“As an independent Canadian producer, do I feel like they’re competing with me? I guess to a degree, but at the end of the day it’s adding value to the system, and their relationships in the U.S. open doors for all of us,” says Damon D’Oliveira, one of the producers of director Clement Virgo’s Brother, which was distributed by Elevation this past spring, going on to sweep the Canadian Screen Awards. “Look at the most successful Canadian films to come out in the past four years, and 75 per cent of them are Elevation-supported.”

Not that the game is getting any easier. There was the pandemic, for starters, which Elevation powered through thanks to its strong catalogue and experimentation with digital releases – assets and strategies which have impressed even competitors.

“Elevation has had an incredible run before and through COVID. The fact that they have come out so strong post-COVID speaks to their discerning taste and to their risk-taking acumen,” says Hussain Amarshi, president of Mongrel Media. “Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have the son of the 50th richest family in the U.S. to be the owner of the company.”

The future, though, is not bereft of speed-bumps. This past January, Lionsgate announced that it was entering into a theatrical distribution agreement with Cineplex Pictures to bring the studio’s 2023 slate to Canadian cinemas, including Cineplex venues. The deal, which includes John Wick: Chapter 4 and the forthcoming Hunger Games prequel, blurs the traditional line between exhibitor and distributor, and means that indies like Elevation face a siphoning of potential business.

“It’s tricky to comment on because we’re talking about one of our largest customers. But are we the middle men that need to be gotten rid of? I don’t think so,” says May. “Is Cineplex going to buy a movie like Indian Horse so the production can trigger the Telefilm funding and tax credits it needs to get on the screen? This is a culturally protected industry, and there should be eyes on it to make sure that it’s functioning as a healthy ecosystem.”

In the meantime, Elevation is already deep in post-TIFF release plans, which includes everything from Michael Mann’s drama Ferrari to Caitlin Cronenberg’s directorial debut Humane to Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie, the sequel to Elevation’s highest-grossing Canadian film ever at $7.6-million, developed with longtime partner Spin Master Corp.

The company is also taking a page from A24 by expanding into television, including an update of The Count of Monte Cristo set in the world of contemporary Toronto basketball from Virgo and D’Oliveira, and a series exploring undercover cops in seventies Montreal from Baruchel.

“It’s never easy to make anything, but if this business was easy, everybody would do it, because it’s fun!” says Segal. “We’re fighting against Spider-Man and Star Wars every day. If we think that our films are going to dominate the multiplex, that’s not reasonable. We have to find films that earn it. We’re the little store sitting beside the mall. People can and do go to the mall – but they keep coming back to us, too.”