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Oscars 2024: How Dublin’s Element Pictures has set new records for Irish film

Analysis: Relationships with director Yorgos Lanthimos and Disney-owned backer Searchlight Pictures have been key to Irish production company’s success

In her element: Emma Stone stars as Bella Baxter in the Element Pictures film Poor Things, now on release. Photograph: Searchlight Pictures

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Laura Slattery
Tue Jan 23 2024 - 18:17

When it comes to being on close personal terms with Oscar, no Irish company is in touching distance of Element Pictures. The securing of 11 Academy Award nominations on Tuesday for the splendidly bizarre Poor Things brings the total haul of Oscar nods earned by films made by the Dublin-headquartered company to an incredible 26.

Its films have already won two gold statuettes: best actress for both Room and The Favourite. The 96th Oscars ceremony, which will be held in Los Angeles on March 10th, may well add to that tally. Poor Things will compete in best picture, best director, best actress, best supporting actor, best adapted screenplay, best cinematography, best editing, best production design, best original score, best hair and make-up and best costume design.

Whatever happens on the night, Element founders Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe – who are two of the four named best picture nominees for Poor Things alongside director Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone – can raise a glass or several to an impressive track record.

It may not have been shot in Ireland, nor is it set here, but Poor Things, produced and developed by Element, now takes the title of most nominated Irish-made film at the Oscars. It has already scored 11 Bafta nominations and claimed two Golden Globes.

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When it was announced as the surprise winner of the Golden Globe for best picture (musical or comedy) at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles earlier this month, Guiney and Lowe, both from Dublin, were among those racing to the stage.

The pair’s O’Connell Street-based production company was already known for its awards pedigree, but its now long-standing partnership with the left-field Lanthimos, and in turn the director’s repeat collaborations with Stone, has pulled it closer to the heart of Hollywood. Element “made it happen” said Lanthimos of his offbeat fantasy Poor Things – a wild tale featuring much “furious jumping” (sex). The “c***s” alone would have the twitchy censors of Ireland’s Catholic past turning in their graves.

Victory at the Golden Globes – achieved over what Guiney called the “absolute juggernaut” of Barbie – provided a commercial boost to Poor Things just as it was on the cusp of its release in Irish cinemas.

“It makes a huge difference to people going: ‘Oh, I think I should go see that movie, it won best picture at the Globes, we should go and see it.’ That has a really material impact on our box office and the commercial success of the film,” Guiney told RTÉ Radio 1′s Morning Ireland hours after the Globes win.

Its Oscars nominations triumph should now secure a fresh influx of curious cinemagoers.

Guiney and Lowe, who sold a majority stake in their company to Bertelsmann-owned UK production giant Fremantle in 2022, are no strangers to the awards circuit. In 2016, Element’s power to attract the sort of name actors who can get projects financed was substantially elevated when Room, directed by their even longer-standing collaborator Lenny Abrahamson, garnered an Oscar nomination for best picture and a best actress win for its lead, Brie Larson.

It repeated that achievement at the 2019 Academy Awards, when Lanthimos’s hilarious The Favourite secured the best actress gong for Olivia Colman, with the film, co-starring Stone, racking up a total of 10 nominations.

Although past winner Stone – who has been much-praised for her performance as Bella Baxter, an adult woman with the (literal) mind of an infant who “falls in love with life” – is the second favourite for best actress behind Killers of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone, it is not unthinkable that the star of an Element film might claim that prize for a third time.

The only other Irish company to have bothered the Oscars even nearly as much in recent years is Cartoon Saloon, the Kilkenny-based animation studio. As far as live action Irish production companies go, Element is in a league of its own, with a much-expanded roster of television interests to complement its distinctive film business.

Guiney, the creative powerhouse, and chartered accountant Lowe, who oversees the finance end, set up Element in 2001, having first met as teenagers then crossed paths again while both were working on the film Sweety Barrett (1998).

Ed Guiney at the screening of Poor Things during the 67th BFI London Film Festival

They recognised early on that they needed to take what Lowe described to The Irish Times in 2019 as “an entrepreneurial approach”, meaning they alternated between projects they could “genuinely co-produce” and be creatively involved in – such as their string of wonderfully weird films with Lanthimos, which also include The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer – and those for which they would provide more basic production services, paying the bills.

In 2007, it got involved in film distribution, then in 2012 it added an exhibition arm, taking over Dublin’s Light House Cinema and later opening Galway’s Pálás. On the television side, it made soap opera Red Rock for TV3, but the big breakthrough came during the pandemic, when its adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People became an early-Covid hit. Commissioned first by the BBC, Normal People was backed by Disney-controlled Hulu.

Selling a majority stake to Fremantle valued Element at €109 million, with the deal yielding a not-so-poor upfront cash payment of €45 million and €10 million in contingent consideration.

But this is an industry with inbuilt lag times, and Poor Things – which also counts Film4 and TSG Entertainment as backers – was in development long before the sale. The more material relationship, as far as the higher profile of Element’s more recent projects with Lanthimos are concerned, is the one with distributor and financier Fox Searchlight, which Element formalised into a “first look” agreement in 2018.

Once the indie offshoot of Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight was then in the process of being acquired by Disney, which has since renamed it Searchlight Pictures.

“We’re not relaxing types,” Guiney assured Morning Ireland. That’s just as well in a fast-shifting industry with little time for standing still – proving the point, another Element-produced, Searchlight-distributed Lanthimos project starring Stone, Kinds of Kindness, will be on its way to the big screen soon.

An earlier version of this article was originally published on January 12th.

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