Neon chief and co-founder Tom Quinn has watched the last six Palme d’Or ceremonies from the same spot: gathered with colleagues around a laptop on the breakfast tables at his Cannes hotel.
“I think we upgraded a couple years ago and connected the computer to a TV,” Quinn says. “I wouldn’t want to do it any different.”
Quinn has good reason to keep any good luck charm. In all six of those awards ceremonies, Neon has won the Palme, the prestigious top honor of the Cannes Film Festival. It’s an unparalleled streak for one of the most sought-after prizes in movies, second only to the best picture Oscar. No other studio has ever come close to anything like it.
“No one ever believes it, but we’ve never gone to Cannes thinking we were going to win the Palme d’Or,” Quinn says. “It’s been a surprise every single year.”
When the 79th Cannes Film Festival gets underway Tuesday, Neon — a 60-person company founded in 2017 — rides in as an unlikely heavyweight. It’s backing more than a quarter of the 22 films in competition for the Palme. Its odds of making it seven in a row are good. Some of the most hotly anticipated titles — including Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden,” Korean auteur Na Hong-jin’s “Hope” and James Gray’s “Paper Tiger” — are Neon’s.
Altogether, the indie distributor has nine films in Cannes. All, Quinn notes, they signed on for before the films’ Cannes invite.
“I hate to break it to everyone but don’t hate us for our good taste,” says Quinn. “Who’s chasing who here? Thierry (Frémaux, Cannes artistic director) is going to make up his own mind and we’re going to make up our own mind. It just so happens that we agree.”
Big studios are absent at Cannes, but Neon is everywhere
When Frémaux announced the lineup of this year’s festival, he lamented the almost nonexistent presence of Hollywood’s major studios. “When the studios are less present in Cannes, they are less present full stop,” he said.
While studio releases like Warner Bros.’ “One Battle After Another” and Universal’s upcoming “The Odyssey” can be major Oscar players, a wide swath of the most original movies of the past decade have been released by specialty labels like Neon and A24.
Both have risen to prominence at international film festivals like Cannes and at the Oscars by focusing on filmmakers, not IP.
“It’s not rocket science and there’s nothing secret about it,” says Quinn. “It’s pursuing the directors and films we want to be a part of.”
Quinn had worked at Samuel Goldwyn Films and Magnolia Pictures before, in 2011, launching Radius, a boutique label with Harvey Weinstein. Though, at Neon, Quinn expected A24 to be his chief competition, he found himself often bidding against Netflix, on movies like Neon’s first acquisition, the Margot Robbie-led “I, Tonya” and Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”
“We did not outbid them but we out-passioned them,” says Quinn.
Neon does produce films (like the upcoming “I Love Boosters”), but it largely sticks to distributing movies in North America, often with awards campaigns attached to their releases. It has boarded its Palme d’Or winners — “It Was Just an Accident,” “Anora,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Triangle of Sadness,” “Titane” and “Parasite” — in a variety of ways.
Some were acquired in Cannes. Some, like “Parasite,” Neon boarded at the script stage. Quinn signed up for the body horror freak-out “Titane” even though the script made no sense to him. He just believed in its writer-director Julia Ducournau. In that way, Neon is the ultimate anti-algorithm studio.
And yet faith in filmmakers and good taste have carried Neon to the greatest heights of Hollywood. Both “Parasite” and “Anora” won best picture at the Academy Awards after winning the Palme. Neon nearly swept the best international Oscar category last March, with four of the five nominees: the winning “Sentimental Value,” “Sirāt,” “The Secret Agent” and “It Was Just an Accident.”
Breaking subtitle barriers
“Parasite” famously became the first non-English-language film to win best picture — a triumph for the “1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles,” as Bong Joon Ho noted in his acceptance speech.
Neon, majority owned by Dan Friedkin’s 30West, is far from competing with studio blockbusters at the box office. (Its biggest ticket seller thus far was Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs,” with $75 million.) But Neon has proved there’s a larger audience than many would have expected for daring, often international cinema.
They are, Quinn says, “agnostic” about where its titles come from, and the company’s small size means they can give each movie a bespoke rollout. And by the end of the year, Neon will gather its releases into a DVD box set, even though many voters don’t have DVD players anymore.
“Audiences are desperate, desperate for creativity,” Quinn says. “Films are not packaged goods. The idea that this art form that is so subjective is treated as a P & L (profit and loss statement), I don’t know how you can make good creative decisions when you’re dealing with billions of debt looming at your door.”
Neon’s slate in Cannes is typically wide-ranging. Also up for the Palme is Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” with Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve; Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Sheep in the Box”; and “The Unknown,” by “Anatomy of a Fall” cowriter Arthur Harari. It also has Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Her Private Hell”; Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri’s “Clarissa” and William and David Greaves’ already lauded documentary, “Once Upon a Time in Harlem.”
Some of the movies that escaped Neon’s grasp still irk Quinn. He missed out on Kore-eda’s “Shoplifters,” the Palme winner in 2018.
“The idea that we would have won seven Palmes in a row is completely outlandish,” Quinn says. “But that’s a huge regret.”
