![]() IM Global would finance the entire film, largely through foreign pre-sales, and would cover the gap with their own equity.Ī film about two people as massively recognizable as Michelle and Barack Obama simply doesn’t work without the right casting, and as Tanne and Sumpter were working to secure financing, they had also been searching for their Barack. Ford responded enthusiastically, and after a single meeting in which Tanne pitched his vision for the film, a deal was reached quickly in early 2014. Sumpter had a longstanding friendship with Stuart Ford, then head of IM Global, an independent financier, production and foreign sales company, and sent him Tanne’s script. The pair approached a handful of producers and were met with some interest, but it took time to find the right team. “You have to make certain cinematic sacrifices to bring it in on budget,” he admits, but at the end of the day, the most important factors were the chemistry, the substance and the heart.” ![]() With Sumpter on board to star and produce, Tanne calibrated his expectations-aiming at first for a $3 million budget and settling eventually on a goal of $1.5 million. “Once I finished, it wasn’t even a question-it was going to need a proper budget,” he remembers. It was Sumpter’s excitement for the film that first convinced Tanne to see it as something bigger than a micro-budget indie that he’d have to shoot guerilla-style. When they first met, she expressed interest in playing Michelle Obama, but believed so much in Tanne’s vision that, regardless of an acting attachment, she hoped to come on board as a producer. Sumpter had read Tanne’s early outline and been immediately taken with the project. ![]() While he wrote, Tanne had encouragement from actress Tika Sumpter, to whom he’d been introduced by a mutual friend. I was less concerned with the actual accuracy of the first date and more concerned with the emotional accuracy of the characters.” Working from this principle, he completed the first draft in one month. And then let those details take the conversation and the themes in whatever direction the characters wanted to go. But I thought it was important to infuse the fictionalized first date with as much truth and detail about each of their lives as possible. “The very fact of putting dialogue in their mouths makes this a fantasy,” he admits. For example, in order to illustrate the relationship’s development, Tanne included a scene at a community meeting that had helped to change a reluctant Michelle’s perspective on Barack-though in actuality the event had taken place on a subsequent date. He had no access to the real and very recognizable people behind the story, which meant the film would have to be heavily fictionalized, though the Obamas had been open enough in interviews to allow him to construct much of the date as it had actually happened. Tanne researched and outlined for roughly two months, and quickly discovered he’d have to make some bold storytelling choices. “I started reading everything I could about them.” The filmmaker was intrigued by the pair, both individually and as a couple, and though the idea continued to brew in his mind, he didn’t sit down to write it in earnest until late 2013. “It felt like it was ready-made for a movie,” Tanne remembers. In 2007, writer/director Richard Tanne read an interview with a promising Presidential candidate named Barack Obama and his wife Michelle-about their first date. Website: DEVELOPMENT AND FINANCING Leads Tika Sumpter and Parker Sawyers During Production Producers: Tika Sumpter, Richard Tanne, Robert Teitelįinancing: Foreign Pre-sales/Private Equityĭistributor: Miramax/Roadside Attractions
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