Tanya Seghatchian

10 Producers to Watch

Breakthrough: Discovering the “Harry Potter” books

What I learned the hard way: “To try to hold on to one’s rights.”

There’s not much that the “Harry Potter” franchise and Pawel Pawlikowski’s low-budget prize winner “My Summer of Love” have in common, aside from producer Tanya Seghatchian.

It was Seghatchian who brought the little-known Brit kids book “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” to the attention of David Heyman at Heyday, and courted J.K. Rowling’s agent for the rights.

Meantime, she formed Apocalypso Pictures to develop movies in partnership with Pawlikowski, with whom she had briefly shared an office at the BBC documentary department. So when the third “Potter” was shooting, she was adopting very different guerrilla methods to get “My Summer of Love” off the ground.

“Whilst it presented entirely different challenges to those that I was experiencing on ‘Potter,’ it was unbelievably refreshing to be making the two films alongside one another,” she says. When the two movies went head to head for the British Academy of Film & Television Arts’ Alexander Korda honor, it was Pawlikowski’s pic that won the day.

“Tanya has a great sense of smell for material,” Pawlikowski says. “She’s carried by enthusiasm, not by love of money. There can be days when I lose faith in something, and it’s great to have that energy, that dynamo pushing you forward.”

Her tastes are evident on her development slate, which includes a screenplay by Lee Hall (“Billy Elliot”), about cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin; a new film from French auteur Francois Ozon; and the Steve Kloves adaptation of bestseller “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” with Heyday.

And, of course, she’ll be producing the next Pawlikowski movie, which looks to be a very loose adaptation of the Magnus Mills novel “The Restraint of Beasts.”

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Update: 2024-07-31

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