Pair Set Scene for Filming Overseas

It was an exercise video starring model Claudia Schiffer that brought Greg Gold and Howard Woffinden together as business partners. The pair, a longtime director and an independent producer, were filming in Prague when they realized that a company with Western sensibilities and important local connections could smooth the way for filmmakers to shoot in difficult overseas markets. The key to their success over the last two years, Woffinden said, has been in choosing the right employees to run their offices in the Czech Republic, Mexico and Canada. Woffinden was interviewed by freelance writer Karen E. Klein.

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Greg and I met when we both worked for Propaganda Films doing music videos and commercials. We chose Prague as a location and we had a stellar experience--the physical site was breathtaking but largely unknown in the West, the price was excellent, and the film community that had existed there since the 1930s was sophisticated.

We knew after we were through that the experience we had could be mirrored for other productions, if they got the help that we could provide. Normally, a production company filming in another country would have to search around in the dark to find somebody local to help them shepherd their production.

What we do is provide an office here in L.A. and one in London that are connected through the Internet to production service companies in our international locations. Now our clients can set up everything they need for an overseas shoot by dealing with us.

We sought out people in the overseas film industries who we thought worked on the high level of production that American companies are used to. In Prague, we met Tomas Krejci and we joined with him to start Milk & Honey.

Connecting with the right people in the countries where we want to work has helped make us successful. Our international partners have to be bilingual, bicultural and have a thorough knowledge of the film industry, with Western sensibilities.

The film community is very politically charged, and it is always operating in high gear. Much of what is done does not fall within logical thinking most of the time, so if one doesn’t have a certain level of prior experience in the industry they could not possibly be expected to know how things operate.

Too often when American companies film overseas, the foreigners that work with them have one thing in mind: How much can I get and how little can I give in return? They look at the filmmakers as targets. We have to have people in our foreign offices that see things exactly opposite from that. They consider every production company they work with as potential return clients.

When we opened the Mexico City office, we spent time asking our colleagues and clients whom they had worked with in Mexico, both successfully and unsuccessfully. We considered several different people before we located Jose Ludlow, who had a lot of the qualifications we were looking for but was not deeply involved in the commercial advertising industry in Mexico. Jose’s background is in Mexican feature films and our backgrounds are more in commercials, so we can complement each other.

The thing we’re looking forward to now is to watch how the Montreal office will interact with the Mexico City office and how both of them will interact with Prague. We’re really creating an international network where everybody is communicating together over the Internet all the time.

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AT A GLANCE

* Company: Mike & Honey Films Inc.

* Owners: Greg Gold, Howard Woffinden and Tomas Krejci

* Nature of business: International film production service company

* Location: 910 N. Sycamore Ave., Los Angeles

* Founded: 1996

* Employees: 15, three based in Los Angeles

* Annual revenue: $3 million