FilmNation Entertainment Founder and CEO Glen Basner will receive the Game Changer Award this evening at the Zurich Summit, the annual industry event aimed at fostering transatlantic connections taking place within the Zurich Film Festival.

As part of the honor, Basner participated in an onstage conversation on Saturday moderated by German Oscar-winning director Edward Berger.

Over the course of an hour, the pair dug into Basner’s trajectory from sales rep at his father’s garment business, to heading up one of the world’s top international indie sales, financing and production companies.

Basner and Berger go back a long way, having first met at the beginning of their film careers in the early 1990s at famed New York production company Good Machine.

Basner arrived there from a five-year stint selling ladies knitted sweaters. He had been bitten by the movie bug while helping childhood friend Edward Burns in his spare time on his first film The Brothers McMullen. Burns then invited Basner onto his second feature She’s The One, which was produced by Good Machine. The rest is history.

Berger spent a year and a half at the company from 1994, where his paths crossed with Basner. They have stayed connected ever since, with the pair joining forces professionally again on Berger’s 2024 $100M global box office and streaming hit Conclave.

“32 years later, it’s such a full circle moment,” said Berger as they kicked off the conversation.

Looking back at his time working with Ted Hope, James Schamus and David Linde at Good Machine, Basner said the lessons he learned there had carried him through his career.

“I was taught that you could sell movies around the world and not lie to people… that you can value and appreciate the relationships that you develop around the world and treat people not just as if you’re selling them a product, but that you are really delivering them a work of art, and that you’re there to help support them as they go and release the films country by country.”

Berger suggested working there had also taught them reliance, recalling how just prior to their arrival, the company had nearly gone bankrupt after it wrapped Ang Lee’s romantic comedy The Wedding Banquet.

“It taught us to go through hard times and get stronger… around the time of The Wedding Banquet, the company was basically bankrupt… they decided let’s cancel the photocopier and scrape every last bit together and go to Berlin,” said the director.

The film went on to win the Berlinale’s Golden Bear and then took off at the box office to gross some $23M, against the $1M budget, making it the most profitable U.S. film of 1993.

After subsequent stints heading up sales at Focus and then The Weinstein Company, Basner created FilmNation in 2008, initially uniquely as a sales company.

He said creating his own company had been a natural move for him given his family background.

“My father had his own business, and I wanted to be like my father, so I always had this entrepreneurial bug that I wanted to go out and sort of really test my mettle by being on my own and developing something and seeing if it could succeed,” he said. “So that was something I thought about since the first day that I started working in film.”

Eighteen years later, the company has expanded organically into finance, production and TV, with bases in New York and L.A., and string of award-winning features in its filmography including The Big Sick, Promising Young Woman, Anora, Conclave, Maria and upcoming pictures Bunker, Talent for Murder and I Play Rocky to name but a few.

“The opportunity was clear in 2008. In those days, there were only two strong and dominant, excellent American international sales companies that were unaffiliated with U.S. distribution,” said Basner.

“Pretty much at the same time, they both became U.S. distributors. Summit, which was run by Patrick Wachberger, became a U.S. distributor, and Mandate, Joe Drake’s company, was bought by Lionsgate… so there was this big hole for an American, unaffiliated-with-distribution sales company.”

Sales craft

Talking about FilmNation’s recent slate, Basner said he had wooed Florian Zeller ahead of getting involved in Bunker.

“I told him to his face he was my filmmaker crush of the moment,” he joked.

“You said that to me too,” replied Berger in mock disbelief.

“I know. It was a different moment,” fired back Basner jovially.

He recalled how Zeller had been on the cusp of approaching Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz as FilmNation quietly putting out international sales feelers.

“He had said, ‘If they say yes, we’ll move forward. If they don’t do the movie, I don’t think I’m going to do the movie.’ Fortunately, they said yes, and then we just really started the work,” said Basner.

The film took a traditional pre-sales route thanks to Zeller’s track-record with Oscar-winner The Father, followed by The Son, it’s A-list cast and a “exquisite” script, with the bulk of the international sales tied up at Cannes in 2025. The U.S. deal to Sony Pictures Classics was sealed in collaboration with CAA Media Finance later on, on the basis of the completed film.

“There were distributors that were willing to take the risk. It’s not the easiest thing to say: ‘Here’s the script, here’s the director, here are the actors, and here’s your price’. They don’t really get to sit and have hour-long conversations with the filmmaker to fully understand the movie,” said Basner .

“They have to trust us to be able to articulate exactly what the movie is and what the intention is of that filmmaker, so that they can then decide to take the significant risk on a movie like this of pre-buying the film.”

Talking about their collaboration on Vatican-set thriller Conclave, revolving around the secretive Vatican process of electing a new Pope, Basner said part of the challenge had been conveying Berger’s vision for the film to buyers.

He suggested that on the basis of the screenplay alone – it felt like a story about “a bunch of old men talking in rooms” with a potential $12M to $15M price tag.

“But that really wasn’t the movie that you were looking to make… You talked about The Parallax View being a point of reference for you,” said Basner, referring to Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 political thriller.

“You talked not just about the architecture of the locations, but the architecture of how you wanted the camera to move and the film to feel… all of a sudden this became a political thriller,” continued Basner.

The sales veteran said estimating a value of a film, country by country, came down to a mixture of experience and expertise.

“You’re responsible to hit these estimates. And human nature takes over, and sometimes you can get a little bit conservative to make sure that you deliver,’ he said.

“What we’ve learned over the years is to trust the business acumen and the marketplace experience that we have, and not be too conservative, but actually just deliver the valuation that we think, and be prepared to stand by it in a real way because it’s our money that we’re investing.”

“Part of that is, instead of talking all the time about what the market says and what the market will bear, it’s really about just sitting and listening to the filmmaking team so that you really understand, not what I, Glen Basner, thinks the movie is going to be or should be, but the movie that the filmmaker wants to make.”

Basner revealed he was wary of going down the packaging route of attaching known talent when helping get big projects of the ground, suggesting attempts to mitigate risks on films, whether via the cast or other factors, can sometimes lead to less exciting films.

“Sometimes we have to take more risk on an unknown actor because they are the best person for that role to make the best version of the movie, and we have to trust that filmmaker to deliver on that, not in a naive way, in a thoughtful way, but really trust that that’s really what’s going to drive the value for that movie,” said Basner.

“I really am encouraging everybody to look around, look at what’s working in the marketplace. There are a lot of films that, on paper, did not make sense. The history of our company is predominantly on films that did not make sense to the marketplace at the beginning.”

Conclave clash

Berger revealed they had not always seen eye-to-eye in the final stages of bringing Conclave to fruition.

“After quite a long edit… I was basically done with the film. I’d run out of ideas… I really wanted to go to Venice or at least show them the movie and see if they’d show it,” recalled Berger.

“This was in in May. Glenn got on the phone and made me furious. I hated him. He just kind of said, ‘I’m not sure the movie’s ready, don’t rush it…Venice is going to be expensive, and we don’t have American distribution in place’,” he recalled.

Lead producer Tessa Ross also felt the movie was “missing something” and after test screenings with friends and family sparked an “ok” response, Berger went back to the edit suite and even reshot one or two scenes.

Berger credited Berger and Ross for pushing the extra mile on the film, while his energy levels were low after an arduous months-long edit process.

“We just edited and edited and edited and made the music again and revised it, and finally something cracked… little things, just shifted and gave us the confidence that the movie was ready. But it was really half a year later.”

It was another full circle moment for Berger

“This is going back to Good Machine, and what I took from Good Machine… which was you can always do better… whether its budget, contract or the cut of the movie.”

Organic expansion

Taking stock of FilmNation’s trajectory since 2008, Basner said the expansion into production and TV had been organic.

“We never really anticipated becoming the company that we have over time, but things changed. One, as we continued to do our jobs and have success, we gained confidence through experience, and we were ready to do things like fund our own films,” he said.

A second development was the convergence of film and TV and other entertainment formats, which has seen the company also embrace TV, podcasts and theater, while retaining its original mission of being a place that enables filmmakers to not just make their film, but to make the very best iteration of their film.

“When we’re at our best, that’s exactly what we’re doing. It’s no more complicated than that. And when we are doing it, nothing feels more rewarding than doing that job well,” he said.

Looking to near-term goals, Basner said the company was ramping up its productions in the arrival of former 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks and Universal Pictures exec Stacey Snider in the new role of Chief Creative Officer in January.

“We are being more ambitious by investing more and making more films. This year we will make four films and a television series, and next year we already have four films in pre-production and hope to make another three,” said Basner.

“The arrival of Snider as the Chief Creative Officer was an articulation of our desire to take more risk and to be more productive,” he continued.

“Working with her these last nine months, you see this incredible creative talent, you see a skill set and a maturity that we don’t have ourselves, or that I don’t have myself, and it is definitely building confidence to invest further. But it’s really also, as she would say, it’s about making it better. The conversation that you had before: let’s take another look at this. Let’s do it a little bit better. That’s something she reminds me pretty much every day.”