Rivulet Films Co-Heads Rob Paris & Mike Witherill Talk Fully-Financing David Gordon Green’s TIFF Opener ‘Nutcrackers’ With Ben Stiller

EXCLUSIVE: One year ago in Toronto, with the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes still in full swing, Rivulet Films co-founders Rob Paris and Mike Witherill were in the throes of packaging a project with David Gordon Green attached to direct a WGA script. Unable to secure an interim agreement to get the go ahead, that project fell apart. But all was not lost because the next day, Green called Paris and had a non-WGA script for him that he wanted to direct but they had to move fast because the director had a Q1 2024 commitment.

That project was a script from Green’s friend Leland Douglas called Nutcrackers about Mike, a straight-laced workaholic who has to travel to rural Ohio to care for his four nephews after their parents die in a car accident. After weeks of farm-life mayhem, Mike realizes he won’t have to find a new home for the orphaned children – they found a home for him.

The film, which sees Ben Stiller star in his first lead movie role in seven years after Brad’s Status and The Meyerowitz Stories in 2017, is world premiering tonight as the opening night film at the Toronto International Film Festival with two screenings – a 6pm ET screening at the Princess of Wales Theatre followed by an 8pm premiere at Roy Thomson Hall.

Rivulet has fully-financed the project and produced it with Green’s banner Rough House Pictures. UTA Independent Film Group is handling sales for the title and it is wide open to U.S. and international buyers. Deadline can exclusively reveal that Rivulet Films is re-teaming with Stiller and his Red Hour production banner on another film, which will be announced soon.

“It’s not often that there’s an untethered Ben Stiller project available to market,” says Paris, who adds that tonight’s debut will not only be the first time it’s screened to audiences, but also to buyers. Stiller has spent the last seven years focusing on directing and producing with 2018 miniseries Escape at Dannemora and then sci-fi thriller Severance.

Paris, who describes the film as “Bad News Bears meets Billy Elliot”, says Nutcrackers is “illustrative of what makes us very competitive in the landscape of finance now – speed to market and flexibility.”

“A lot of companies would not have been able to shoulder the risk that we took on with this movie because they would have needed pre-sales, a verified tax credit and all of those things – that’s how 90% of financiers are based out there right now,” he says. “It’s a pretty standard operating procedure for risk mitigation.”

But Paris, a former CAA talent agent who segued into production with credits such as Osgood Perkins’ breakout films The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the Housesaw an opportunity and was keen to “thread the needle.”

“David said that if we could go right away, he could do it,” recalls Paris. “And we said yes, and we did that on the basis that we wanted to be in business with David Gordon Green.”

Witherill, whose background is in finance and has produced a raft of titles ranging from John Wick to Joe Swansberg’s Drinking Buddiesadds: “This business is wrought with risks on a bunch of different levels, in different places throughout production and we want to back director-driven films so this felt like a perfect fit.”

He adds: “We’re also very budget conscious in how we do things and we like to think that if we put the right pieces in place, we’ve got a really good chance of making money if we make it for the right budget.”

Rivulet beginnings

Paris and Witherill met right before the pandemic struck. Witherill was raising money for a Catherine Hardwicke project and Paris was brought aboard to help with casting and packaging. While Covid-19 brought that project to a standstill, the pair decided to join forces to form Rivulet Films.

“We found we could cover a lot of ground the two of us and it really set the tone for the company in terms of scope and size,” says Paris. “The first three years of any startup in the film business is aggravatingly painful – it’s all cash out and very little cash in and you have to have a real stomach for it, and you have to have investors who have a real stomach for it. What Mike presented to me was a model whereby we did the opposite of SPACs [special purpose acquisition companies] which were very in vogue at the time.”

He continues: “We curated a specific list of investors that Mike was able to find who were in it for the right reasons and the long game and who were looking to build something sustainable that could span decades. What we did was we acquired a company that was already active on the stock exchange but not free trade…but still an FCC-regulated entity. So, rather than do an IPO, which is an enormous amount of work, painstaking and expensive and time consuming, the very intelligent choice was to roll into a company.”

Witherill adds: “We backed into a public company shell and then just expanded on that as we expanded our slate of films.”

The idea, they say, is to accumulate more IP and more properties to “create value across all of our platforms and divisions.”

Elsewhere on its slate, Rivulet is working on a sequel to Law Abiding Citizen with Village Roadshow and Derek Kolstad’s original screenplay Acolyte with Ascot Elite Entertainment.

“Most financiers would derisk a situation with presales and tax credits and mezzanine finance but that’s all expensive,” says Paris. “You can derisk it by being fiscally responsible with the budget and being opportunistic with prudent speculation at the right moment, at the right time and with the right creative partners. That, for us, is our derisking mechanism – at least it was on this one – and we’d like to apply that metric to as many pictures as we possibly can.”

He adds: “We know it’s a fickle marketplace, but we like our odds and that is exciting.”