A V T Shankardass
It is a crisp afternoon in early summer and we are talking crunching numbers, in between, admiring the views of Lutyens’ Delhi atop the eighth floor of the Taj Mahal Hotel. A V T Shankardass, 35, Hollywood’s film financier and fund manager points out the Bahai Temple to Gurinder Chadha, 58, the London-based filmmaker of Indian origin renowned for her films like Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice, who takes in the trivia in gusto.
They are here for their recent endeavour – the Bend It Media Fund (BIMF) – $30 million Cayman Islands-registered open-ended investment vehicle, which will invest across four platforms – films, television, live theatricals and digital. The maverick Hollywood financier, Shankardass prides himself on bucking the studio system and wielding the clout to finance films around the world.
With his slick, pulled back hair and crisp formal dressing, it is hard to imagine that the sure-footed Shankardass had almost stumbled into film financing. His father is the renowned lawyer Late Vijay ST Shankardass who practiced both in India and the UK, with clients Nizam of Hyderabad, author Salman Rushdie, actor Michael Douglas, to name a few. “Although I was always enamoured by my father’s profession, I never saw myself to be one,” he says, adding, “neither was it ever suggested to me”.
He had once aspired to become an actor in Hollywood but found his race to be a stifling point in his career. “Actors of Indian origin, at a time before Irrfan Khan and Anupam Kher, were notoriously typecast to be cab drivers or nurses,” he says, adding “I figured, I couldn’t give Tom Cruise a run for his money, so I decided to go behind the screen and started directing plays in London.” He gave direction a shot after graduating but agrees that he didn’t take to the craft. “Unlike my friend Gurinder, here, I can’t think in frames. So I decided to stick to the stage,” he says.
Stage proved to be fairly successful with plays like ‘The Missing Link‘, ‘Artists do not Park Here‘, and others that he directed during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. But he wasn’t satisfied. “I have been taught since childhood that whatever you do you must give it your best and reach the pinnacle… I couldn’t see myself doing that (directing plays) in future,” he says.
While dabbling in stage direction in the UK, he networked well and earned some friends in Hollywood. Oscar-winning producer, Jake Eberts, of Gandhi fame, was among his first mentors who suggested that he looked into the prospect of funding projects. Eberts saw a rare talent in him: an astute mind and sharp demeanor that was persuasive and convincing at the same time. Raising funds were never a problem given his networking prowess but he needed to learn the ropes of investing them right in films that mattered.
Shankardass’ career as a producer and financier took off with the UK-based Victory Productions in 1998, which he bought in 2000. Between 1999 and 2001, he learnt to quickly adapt himself in the independent film financing environment: a time that was dominated by the studios. His first big ticket film came with the Harrison Ford- and Liam Neeson-starrer K-19: The Widowmaker, an $80 million film that saw a modest release but was better accepted as home video, making Shankardass a known film financier in Hollywood. From 2000 onwards he financed successful films such as Spy Game, Fly Boys, 21 Days, Ball & Chain, among others.
Film director Gurinder Chadha with A V T Shankardass
By the turn of the decade, Shankardass’ producing stint opened up a significant second chapter in his career. After several film funds — some success stories like Las Vegas (with a corpus of $50 million that earned 26-27 per cent returns annually), and some disasters like the Munich fund that collapsed during the recession and had to be shut down — the newbie had become a seasoned financier, while in the background the dynamics of film financing in Hollywood was also changing.
“The recession put a tight leash on filmmakers, forcing them to slash the budgets considerably. But the viewer still goes to watch his film,” he reasons, saying, “Entertainment definitely makes for a more attractive and responsive investment portfolio, as compared to, say commodities.”
Realising the investment potential that emerging markets can bring to Hollywood, he brought Global Entertainment Partners (GEP) fund in India in 2009 – a $300 million, five-year close-ended off-shore fund – that served as a multiple Hollywood productions investment vessel with a promise of 25- 30 per cent per annum returns to its investors, plus tax benefits. The investors put in the money without involving themselves in the movie making process. The films that the fund co-invested in were big-budget blockbusters – Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol, Captain America: The First Avenger, and Man of Steel.
While BIMF is riding on the success of GEP, the investment portfolio is quite different this time. “The core of my motivation here is not profiteering, it was in the case of GEP, with BIMF, my efforts are to be fiscally responsible while creating meaningful content which is independent of the studio formula,” he says. Gurinder Chadha, the creative head of the BIMF fund, too pitches in. “The fact that he was once a content creator (during his stage directing days in London) Shankardass has the right sensibilities for this kind of a project,” she says. The fund will be investing in Gurinder Chadha’s future projects that include Bend It Like Beckham – The Musical, that she has co-written with her husband and creative partner Paul Mayeda Berges.
The investor’s bar has also been kept relatively low this time with BIMF, with the minimum being at $500,000. “If someone is passionate about this kind of a project, even with limited means, we are open to consider, given the investor has off-shore assets,” he says.
This may come across as hard-selling the idea but Shankardass assures that the team – Chadha, Shankardass, and Elisa Alvares, formerly the director of structured finance with UK-based Future Films Group – came together almost a year back and intentionally kept the fund amount low (as compared to other funds that he raised in the past). “This kind of niche content, if you invest too much, you’re going to lose as it does not rely on the kind of big hoopla, special effects, and marketing drive. We want investors so see that we’re feeding content and not just profitability,” he says.
It’s may sound strange that Bollywood, with its 1000-odd films annually and a flourishing industry that’s set to touch Rs 12,800 crore by 2015, according to ASSOCHAM, has never beckoned him. He says that he purposely kept himself out of Bollywood film financing, his major gripe with the Indian film industry being largely grey. “When you have people’s money involved, you must have some bit of surety in terms of the returns. I can’t be sure of that here in Bollywood,” he says.
He draws an anecdote from the year 1999, when, while looking for newer pastures in the business of filmmaking, landed up in Mumbai to meet two trailblazers of absolutely opposite genre of filmmaking – Shyam Benegal and Boney Kapoor – and learnt a valuable lesson. “Shyam Benegal told me that if you want to make films on your own terms here, you may land up in a worn out kurta like mine. He said that what you’re trying to do is make my kind of cinema and make his (Boney Kapoor) kind of money. That’s not going to happen here. Not now.”
According to Shankardass, unlike Bollywood, entertainment industry in the West follows a proper system by which financiers can do business in a more professional way that lowers the risk factor to a 5 per cent and promises an upside of 30 per cent. “Bombay will get there,” he says, “it is getting more regularised with conglomerates putting their money in the industry. A decade back I couldn’t imagine investing in Indian films, I am a little closer to doing that now.”
Filmmaking is fickle business – here or abroad; but Shankardass looks like the guy who you want to trust your money with. “The task of the producer and film-executive is twofold. Firstly to assist artists in actualising their vision, and secondly ensuring that at all times this vision has an established market,” he surmises his job. And going by his past record, he has been fairly successful in whipping returns on his investor’s money.
(A version of this story appread in The Telegraph newspaper’s Graphiti).
Image Courtesy: Rupinder Sharma
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