Peccadillo MD – Tom Abell

Out of the hundreds of American independent films that are made each year, how do you take just one and make it a box office success in the UK and the ROI? It’s much harder than it sounds.

Cecilia Frugiuele the producer of APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR approached us four years ago with a project (it had a different title then – we’re forbidden to mention the old name!) which was loosely based on a web series made by and starring Desiree Akhavan called THE SLOPE, where Desiree played one half of a superficial, homophobic lesbian couple. The web series is extremely funny, Desiree was simply fabulous and so was the film script, Peccadillo Pictures was definitely on board.

APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOUR premiered in Sundance January 2014 and we finally saw it during the Berlin Film Festival in February 2014, the film was simply a breath of fresh air that blew away the winter cobwebs along with all the competition. We were in love. But how do we bring our love of the film to the UK and Republic of Ireland and make all of you love it too?

After meeting Desiree during last year’s London Film Festival the answer was clear, the only way to market the film effectively was to show the rest of you how amazing Desiree is. We needed to make all of the British Isles love her too. And how do we do that when nobody knows who she is?

When you don’t have millions of pounds to spend on a marketing and publicity campaign it comes down to good old determination and perseverance from our team mixed with Desiree’s natural charm.  Very early on there were publicity references to Lena Dunham and GIRLS and comparisons to FRANCIS HA and to a smaller degree ANNIE HALL. We had to play to all of these in order to get initial press interest; it is so difficult to get the establishment to embrace something new, but if it sounds like something they already like they’re more likely to take a look.

Once we had their attention the next step was to take Desiree and the film beyond the comparisons and allow the press to “discover” something new. And in the months following the LFF that’s what started to happen. The realisation struck that Desiree and the film were none of the above, that they were very much their own entities and there was a brand new talent here with a unique, subtle voice that demanded to be heard.

Ladies and gentlemen, a star is born.