By Karl Quinn
Joshua Sasse and Delta Goodrem in Love Is In The Air, the latest in a long line of low-budget rom-coms made by Canadian-born, Queensland-based producer Steve Jaggi. Credit: Netflix
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There are 13 romance movies listed on the credits page of Jaggi Entertainment, many of them featuring the same mix of cursive and sans serif script, five of them with the word “love” in the title, two with the word “romance”, and one with the word “match”. Eleven of them feature a happy, attractive, heterosexual white couple.
If it sounds like they’re following a formula, that’s because they are – and for company founder Steve Jaggi, it’s paying off in spades.
“Absolutely, there is a formula here, it’s a business, and we’re learning every time,” says the Canadian-born, Queensland-based producer. It boils down, he says, to two words: audience focused.
Jaggi’s latest is Love is in the Air, which stars Delta Goodrem as a pilot in far north Queensland and Englishman Joshua Sasse as the blow-in who inevitably wins her heart, loses it, and finally regains it despite the ill winds (including, naturally enough, a tropical cyclone) that blow through their fledgling relationship.
Steve Jaggi has made 29 feature movies in the past eight years, by sticking to a simple formula of audience first.Credit: Netflix
“Delta wanted to get back into acting, and I think she connected with the material,” Jaggi says of landing his leading lady, who was, he insists, the first and only choice to play Dana, the feisty pilot who puts community before profits. “It’s a broad-based film that’s PG-rated, and it’s aspirational, full of positive messages. I think she felt it would connect with her fans and her music.”
The biggest challenge was finding a time when she could fit it into her schedule just as she was about to embark on an international tour to mark 20 years in the music industry. “Delta is probably the top of the pyramid in Australia”, says Jaggi.
They shot a block of three weeks in north Queensland in January, then a few months later, in a break from touring, Goodrem returned for another week in Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
Delta Goodrem was ready to return to acting, and Love is in the Air provided the right vehicle at the right time. Credit: Netflix
The film is unlikely to win many awards, but it does tick most of the boxes demanded by the genre and its fans. And that, says Jaggi, is key.
“It’s important to recognise that the audience for these movies take them incredibly seriously,” he says. “There are rules, there are tropes that have to be obeyed. You have to work with filmmakers and writers who are as dedicated to the genre as the audience is.
“I think it behooves us to take the audience seriously and not be tongue in cheek or ironic when we make these films.”
Though he’s largely flown under the radar, Jaggi, who gives his age as “early 40s”, has made 29 feature films in the eight years since he spotted a niche in the Australian market for an unapologetically commercial operation. Roughly half of them have been in the romance space.
Though the genre has struggled in recent years at the cinema – the Julia Roberts-George Clooney rom-com Ticket to Paradise, which made $US172 million worldwide last year, is one of just seven English-language rom-coms to top the $100 million mark since 2010 – romance has become a staple of the streaming and broadcast space.
Netflix certainly has a crush on the genre. There are around 280 romantic dramas on its Australian site, and 240 romantic comedies. And it seems to have suddenly woken up to the idea that they can be made in Australia relatively cheaply, and sold to the world on the strength of picturesque locations like northern New South Wales (A Perfect Pairing), Airlie Beach (Love is in the Air) and, going a little further afield, New Zealand (the interactive rom-com Choose Love).
For Jaggi, the key is to make the product at the right price point. Typically, that’s around the $4 million mark. Key creatives might be first- or second-timers; lead cast might be profit participants; discipline is essential to making the whole thing work.
When it’s suggested that his model has distinct echoes of that followed by the Hollywood horror producer Jason Blum, whose Blumhouse company has enjoyed enormous success over the past couple of decades.
“If my name is next to Jason Blum’s, I’m happy,” he says.
Jaggi is an anomaly in the Australian industry, a producer who has largely (though not entirely) worked outside the government agencies. He puts that down to his training in London, where he spent a decade working for companies that made genre and exploitation movies.
“The films themselves are not so much what matters,” he says. “What matters is understanding the business behind it.”
Most of his films are financed through pre-sales to broadcasters or foreign markets, and by bank loans. “When you’re borrowing the money and your house is on the line, you’ve got to be damn sure you can pay the bank back,” he says. “If an audience will watch it, that means they’ll pay for it, and that means we can pay back the bank.”
It might seem a no-brainer, but Jaggi claims his early attempts to win the support of the agencies were met with utter disdain.
“I remember my first meeting with Create NSW, they laughed me out of the room,” he says. “I hadn’t even left the building, I’d only left the conference room, and I heard the person in charge saying they would never in a million years fund me. The same with Screen Australia. I met with them and they were just so rude and abrasive and said what I was proposing would never work here.”
Twenty-nine films later, he’s well and truly proved them wrong.
“The creative battle is always that you want to spend more than you have, but if you do that you don’t make a second film,” says Jaggi. “That’s what Jason Blum does so well, identifying when to spend and when not to spend.
“We don’t do it as well as him,” he adds, “but we are working on it.”
Love is in the Air is on Netflix now.
Contact the author at [email protected], follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.
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