Andrew Ruhemann: The Way I See It

Co-founder and MD of Oscar-winning film company Passion Pictures, Andrew Ruhemann wanted to be an actor, trained as a singer and developed a love of storytelling through listening to tales about his heroic grandfather, a Romanian prince. He tells Joe Lancaster about the joys of twitching in London and the sorrows of working under pressure with a severed spinal cord.

I was born in London in 1963 to refugee parents who met here. My dad’s father was Jewish and his family got out of Germany in 1933, just in time. My mum’s parents were a Romanian prince and princess. In 1940, when my mother was eight, my grandfather sent his family to England with only what they could carry but he stayed behind, intending to follow after the war, but the communist regime closed the borders. He never made it out. He tried to escape several times but was put in a labour camp on the Danube Delta, where he died.

It had a huge impact on my upbringing. There was always a sense of loss. Even though both my parents got to Cambridge University and did incredibly well to go from having nothing when they arrived in England to achieving a firm middle-class foothold, they never lost that sense of having left things behind.

My mother’s father is kind of a hero figure in Romania and all the fantastical stories – of escapes and attempted escapes – that I’d hear as a kid, I’m sure started my love of storytelling and fantasy, of creating worlds.

My dad’s father was a top restorer of paintings and worked for the National Gallery. During the war he looked after their paintings in caves in Gloucestershire and Wales and after the war he restored them. I remember him in our house with the the Laughing Cavalier under his arm.

My earliest memories are of when I was two or three years old and my grandmother pushed me around St John’s Wood in a pram, telling me stories of the Great Train Robbery. One of the robbers [Roy James, the Weasel] was found hiding out in a house on our road, Ryders Terrace, and I found that very frightening. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I was pretty sensitive and vulnerable early on.

I thought I was destined to become an actor. I excelled at it at school but I studied French and Drama at Bristol University and lost my confidence because I was surrounded by people who I thought were better than me technically. I also realised that acting could potentially be a miserable career.

I’m not naturally a passive person. I don’t like to wait for people to call me. I absolutely don’t like being at the beck and call of an agent or a director casting me. I spent some time in the film department at university, though, and David Puttnam lectured us – he was very inspiring.

When I started in the film business it was actually quite hard to get a job. It was still unionised, so you needed certain cards or special ways in. I asked my parents who I could go and see for ‘advice’, and one of the people on the list was Richard Williams, who was the god of animation. I benefited from the fact that he was magnificently eccentric because he took a chance on me as somebody to train up to run his studio.

I was supposed to get a year’s training but after two weeks the MD, who was responsible for me, disappeared. Instead of bringing someone else in, Richard gave me the job. I was about 24, with a fortnight’s experience. I went around the studio and said to everyone: “He’s going to put me in charge. Isn’t that funny? Um, I’m going to need your help.” And they were fantastic. I still work with some of those people now.

A few months after that Steven Spielberg and Robert Watts walked into reception and said they wanted us to make Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Richard wasn’t around so I just did my best to convince them they’d made the right choice.

Roger Rabbit was a watershed moment in cinema and when we were making it I would often sit in meetings with Richard, Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, listening to them storyboard it. I would have to pinch myself.

Animation is a brilliant storytelling craft because you start with a blank sheet and you can actually do anything. It can be a blessing or a hindrance but I like it because you have to be rigorous about constructing your story, because with animation you don’t do multiple takes. I learnt from Richard Williams that as an animator, as a filmmaker, you’re editing up front. You have to know how a story fits together in advance. That is brilliant training for any kind of storytelling. The other thing I learned from Richard is that a drawing for an animation has to have appeal. It took me a year of watching him dismiss work that I thought was brilliant because it had no appeal before I understood what he could see that I couldn’t.

Appeal has got nothing to do with how good your line is and how well you draw. It’s about the fact that you know how to breathe life and energy and charisma into a design or a drawing that people can connect with. Some animators have it and some designers have it. Others don’t. That’s how I hire – I look for whether they’ve got that because what I know is that I can’t teach them it. Nobody can.

In 1987 I set up Passion Pictures with Alan Dewhurst, another ex-Richard Williams producer. Our first job was a Count Chocula cereal ad through Saatchi New York. We ended up doing lots more General Mills cereals films out of Saatchi and Passion grew out of that. Count Chocula is still one of my favourite cereals – it’s about 90 per cent sugar.

Passion has been successful for 25 years because we’ve always had an absolute passion for doing what we do at the top end. All we ever thought about was working with the best people.

It was madness to open up in Paris if you look at it on paper – nobody sets up a business there, it’s a tiny market – but I followed a philosophy, which was you go to where the great talent is. I set up around Pierre Coffin, who’s the most successful French director of all time from a financial point of view, thanks to Despicable Me. He’s a shareholder in Passion Paris and he’s a one-in-a-million talent and I thought, ‘that’s all I need’. Why are we in New York now? We’re in New York because that’s where [director] Pete Candeland is.

I’ve gone against every rule in the book, in that I work with friends. I run the company with John Battsek, whom I’ve been great friends with since I was 12. It’s worked beautifully – we’ve have had very few fights. About 10 years ago my father showed me the manifest from the ship he came to England on. There was a Battsek on it and it turned out to be John’s grandfather. All those years we’d never realised our relatives had escaped on the same boat and now here we are in Soho, running a film company.

The company has been through two or three major blips but I don’t think you can avoid that in 25 years. My dad got ill with cancer a year-and-a-half ago and the company ran into a lot of trouble because my priority had to be with him. Sadly he died and, for six months, that’s where my attention and energy was going. We [Passion] definitely sailed close to the wind that time.

I used to be very gung-ho about taking things on and just saying, “we don’t know how to do this right now but we’ll figure it out” and I’ve never been let down by that but one time, about 10 or 15 years ago, we bit off more than we could chew with a giant stop-frame Reebok job for Lowe. It practically killed us.

I got out to Australia with a week to go before we started shooting it and the director was in a weird state and wouldn’t tell me where he’d been for the 10 days I’d been trying to contact him. Only one of the 12 sets had been built and it turned out a senior staff member had a major drug problem. I had also, unbeknown to me, almost severed my spinal cord in a skiing accident and was slowly becoming paralysed. The agency was threatening to sue me, understandably, because it didn’t look like we were able to deliver.

I fired the director then flew back for emergency spinal surgery and luckily my producer at the time, Hugo Sands, went out and saved the job. Somehow from hospital, with my accountant and my dad, who was a management consultant, I just about kept us afloat until I could get back on the bridge. It was the closest we’ve ever been to going under.

I’m not sure if winning an Oscar for co-directing [animated short] The Lost Thing in 2011 was the best moment of my career. The first time we won an Oscar for [Passion’s first feature-length production, the documentary] One Day in September in 2000 was almost better because I was a bit more remote from it. When you’re the one in the driving seat and it’s your baby, like The Lost Thing, it’s a bit of a nightmare actually.

There’d been a lot of politics about who was getting tickets where. I ended up not sitting with my wife because I’d had a row with my team, even though I was sort of the boss, it got very small-minded and bickery. You’re trying to pretend you don’t care whether you win or not, but whatever anybody says, it does matter. Once you get there, it’s not enough just being nominated. You want to fucking win the thing.

If you ask me how good the moment was when you’re back in the green room and Sandra Bullock is sitting on her desk over there relating stories to Natalie Portman and including you in her anecdotes and it’s super casual, and you’re all having a drink and chatting and Ben Affleck’s wandering in and joining in the anecdotes and you’re part of it… that feels pretty bloody good.

I definitely want to direct more but it’s got to be something I’m really into. I have to be really into the story I’m telling because it’s like sweating blood for me. I live, sleep, eat, breathe it, and that comes with lots of consequences.

I’ve been very privileged. The way I’ve been brought up, I’ve never lacked anything. In many ways you can say I’ve been spoiled. As a result I’ve never been driven by money, but I’d say I’ve been driven by status.

When I was younger it was important to me to have awards and drive a nice car and wear designer clothes. I definitely had my fair share of being ego-driven. You kind of need it for the competition and the battle that it is to stay in this game and be competitive. Now I’m driven by occasionally having the real honour and privilege of trying to inspire or move people through storytelling.

When he presented the BAFTAs, Stephen Fry was out–and-out rude about the animation categories, but it’s always been seen as the poor cousin, until people see the box office figures. It’s seen as a lowly, children’s medium, which is unfair. I understand though. I can’t say it’s always my favourite medium but I’m very fond of it. Do I look forward to a Jason Bourne movie more than the next Pixar movie? Yeah, I probably do.

The best ad I’ve ever seen is Bear, created by Paul Silburn through Leo Burnett for John West Salmon, directed by Danny Kleinman. I know it wouldn’t be in most top 100 polls but I don’t care, I think it should be. I could see it over and over again and wet myself laughing at how beautifully done it was.

My family is a wife and two stepsons, 18 and 19, who I’ve lived with for 10 years, a three-and-a-half-year-old boy who is my own flesh and blood and a Jack Russell. The latter two have brought out a second childhood in me.

I think I got an easy ride with my stepsons. It helped that I knew my wife from university – we were friends before we became romantically involved – so I’d known the boys all their lives. I think they were pleased to have a male presence permanently around. I tried to be sensitive about not trying to replace their blood father, as it were, and I think we’ve got a very strong relationship.

I live in London and hanker for the wilderness, so make sure I get plenty of it. I’m a twitcher, I do a lot of bird watching. There are actually a lot of birds in London. I love to get up early and take my binoculars and see who’s out there.

I’m a classically trained singer and if I could be as successful in another profession as I am in film production, I’d be a singer – preferably Eddie Vedder.

Lots of things make me really angry, especially people causing other people, or animals, suffering. I have an awful lot of anger towards Tony Blair. I would like to see him on trial for war crimes. It makes me angry when people aren’t called to account, not that I’m into revenge, but I think people need to be held accountable. Inequality too – the unequal distribution of wealth makes me really angry.

I’m afraid I have Googled myself, to see what kind of coverage we got for The Lost Thing. My self-esteem is in a very good place at the moment. I don’t need too much outside affirmation.

My proudest achievement is getting married and having a son and, if it’s not too sentimental to say, looking after my dying father. That was a real challenge, which I was terrified of, but somehow I overcame the fear and got really, painfully stuck in.

My biggest fear is losing people that I love or my Jack Russell, Skylar.

The greatest human invention is religion. When it represents a gateway to spirituality and faith, a belief in something beyond the material world, I think it’s an extraordinary thing that we have conjured and created. I include all the anonymous fellowships in that category.

The most evil human invention is religion. In its fundamentalist form it has been magnificently misused over history – bastardised, corrupted – and is responsible for so much violence and destruction.

My professional ambition is to direct an animated movie and I want Passion to claim the space as the ‘UK Pixar’.

My personal ambition is to be a good dad, husband and to age gracefully.

If I was prime minister for the day I’d look at the inequality of our wage structures. Bankers would definitely be called to account. I would investigate the whole lobbying system too. We don’t talk about lobbying and basically it’s veiled corruption – these people are causing untold damage to us, our children, our environment. I’d part re-nationalise the railways and I’d nationalise the energy and water. Who the fuck needs a competitive water company that’s got no competition? It would be a big day.

I’d like to be remembered by my kids as somebody compassionate, motivated, kind, generous, inspired and inspiring. That will do.

I’d like to be remembered by the rest of the world in the same way.

At the end of the day what really matters is being present, being true to yourself and having integrity and compassion. Of course love matters, but these things are a prerequisite.