Looking to Go Mainstream

David Latte’s “Killers,” which took the bronze for best picture at the 1997 Festival of Fantastic Films in England, gets its first exposure to an American audience tonight at the Newport Beach International Film Festival.

“All the festivals we’ve entered have been genre-specific,” said the 31-year-old Angeleno, who filmed the $100,000 action thriller in 12 days last year in a gutted, rat-infested warehouse in downtown L.A.

“We’re hoping for a more general audience,” he said, referring to the 10 p.m. screening at Captain Blood’s Village Theatres in Orange, one of a handful of festival venues. “Maybe it will respond to the fact that the movie isn’t as hard core, gruesome or violent as might be expected.”

Latte notes that he and producer David Rimawi, a 34-year-old Chicago native, chose to “push the suspense and terror rather than the graphic stuff.” Which is not to say the squeamish are entirely safe. At times “they may have to look away,” he admitted with laid-back cheer.

“Killers,” which had its world premiere at the 1997 Fantosporto Film Festival in Portugal, is Latte’s second full-length feature. It’s about a drug deal gone wrong. His first, “Rock ‘n Roll Fantasy,” was a romantic comedy about a frustrated college senior who kidnaps her favorite rock star.

The director and producer, who met in college during the mid-1980s--Latte went to Loyola Marymount, Rimawi to Cal State Northridge--consciously drew both the mood and style for “Killers” from “Aliens” and “Reservoir Dogs,” two of their favorite movies.

“Knowing we were working with a limited budget,” Latte said in a recent interview from the Asylum, their independent L.A. production company, “we set out to make what we call a ‘pressure cooker.’ You throw a handful of average people into a tight, closed-in area and turn up the heat. That boils their layers away and gets to their core.”

Unlike many young independent filmmakers, Latte and Rimawi started out as anything but artistes. For one thing, they haven’t burned from childhood to make these particular films, though they always knew they wanted to be filmmakers; for another, they’ve targeted particular markets before making their films.

After college, Latte published Production magazine, a monthly that lasted four years catering to film students and low-budget movie-makers, giving him a marketing background. Rimawi had expertise in movie sales at a small video production company.

Before making “Rock ‘n Roll Fantasy” in 1994, they went to the USA Network. “We knew it was paying the most money for small films of anyone out there,” Latte said. “So we asked one of their buyers for advice.”

She told them she didn’t care for 16-millimeter films, didn’t need “name” actors, but gave them strict guidelines about subjects. They could pick from one of four: “women warriors,” “women in prison,” “beach bikini” and “campus.”

Latte and Rimawi brainstormed ideas with some friends and came up with a hook for a campus film. USA bought the idea “for even more money than they said they would,” Latte recalled. “They paid $30,000.” The budget climbed to $50,000, however, because they ran into post-production problems. But they also had a deal with a distributor, A-Pix, which liked the hook for their story and released the film on video.

“That put us into profit right away,” Latte said. “The video grossed $60,000 in domestic sales. We got $40,000 of that. The picture eventually grossed about $1 million worldwide. We had a foreign sales agent, who sold all the territories he could, and we had a deal with 20th Century Fox, which bought ‘rest of the world’ rights for territories that we hadn’t sold.”

In all, Rimawi said, the picture grossed roughly $150,000 for its investors (mostly friends and relatives). Less production expenses and $25,000 more spent on marketing, the net profit came to $75,000. Most of that was plowed back into “Killers,” which has already been released in several Asian and European markets and is set for a U.S. video release through Leo Home Video in the fall.

With “Killers” not yet in profit “but very close,” Rimawi said, any theatrical release it might get through exposure at the Newport festival will be sheer gravy for their next project: “Mars,” a sci-fi action picture about the first manned landing there.

“We’ve been market driven, but we still want to go with what attracts us as filmmakers,” Latte said. “We like the idea, and we think it will appeal to audiences, even though we were told to make it strictly action and forget the sci-fi.”

So maybe they’re artistes after all?