France’s big-name actors can kiss adieu to their million-euro deals for starring in state-funded French films under new rules drawn up by the guardians of the country’s cinema.
Government funding of French cinema, via the Centre National du Cinéma (CNC), is a long and celebrated part of France’s “cultural exception”.
But now, following concern that French taxpayers were footing the bill for increasingly generous celebrity salaries, the CNC has reportedly decided to make film funding dependent on keeping the wage bill down.
The financial daily paper, Les Echos, said the CNC would remove subsidies, brought in after the second world war to promote French cinema, in cases where there was a “disproportionate artistic cost”.
Under the new guidelines approved last Friday, producers must not pay a wage to star actors, directors or screenwriters that exceeds five per cent of the budget for films costing between €7m-10m (£5m-£8m) if they want to qualify for a CNC subsidy. For bigger budget films, no salary should exceed €990,000.
For lower budget films, the figures are slightly more generous: salaries are restricted to 15% of the total cost for films below €4m and 8% of those between €4-7m.
Producers are still free to pay their stars whatever salary they wish, but if they break the limits they will not be given CNC subsidies. In turn, the stars can still boost their salaries with deals on ticket sales and reproduction rights.
The row over actors such as tax exile Gérard Depardieu being overpaid erupted two years ago when Vincent Maraval, a film distributor and founder of Wild Bunch films, complained that making French films had become too expensive and that in some cases French actors of limited international renown were being paid more for each film than their Hollywood counterparts.
“The scandal is: French actors are rich from public money and from the system that protects the cultural exception,” Maraval wrote in Le Monde.
“Why is it that well-known French actors, be they Vincent Cassel, Jean Reno, Marion Cotillard, Gad Elmaleh, Guillaume Canet, Audrey Tautou [or future Bond girl] Léa Seydoux, are paid between €500,000 and €2m for a French film whose market is limited to our borders, when they are happy with €50,000 to €200,000 when they appear in an American film whose market is global?” Maraval added.
He pointed out that Cassel had been paid €226,000 for the American film Black Swan (which made €226m at the box office) but €1.5m for the French film Mesrine (€22.6m at the box office).
In December 2013, at the request of the French ministry of culture, the CNC commissioned a report on the financing and distribution of films. It found that the wage bill for star French actors and directors had leapt 29% from €49m in 2011 to €62m in 2012.
It wrote of a inequality between the “opulence of certain ‘stars’” compared with the “majority of actors who receive only low wages and occasional work”.
“In the United States, a country of absolute economic liberalism, the box office dictates to a great degree the salaries of actors that can explode or collapse in a record time. In France, the ticket sales do not influence, except in the very long term, the remuneration of actors.”
It suggested “moderating the stars’ excessive pay” and linking their wages to verifiable success such as cinema ticket sales, thus inciting them to share the commercial risk of a film.
The CNC’s €700 million budget is raised from specific taxes levied on the audiovisual sector, including a tax on television companies who must pay more than 3.2% of their resources to produce European films, and a tax on video distributors.
A CNC spokeswoman refused to comment on the new rules and said she did not know when or how they would be brought in.
