{"id":334032,"date":"2025-12-07T00:11:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T00:11:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/334032\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T00:11:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T00:11:07","slug":"osgood-perkins-on-moving-to-canada-vancouver-is-real-sweet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/334032\/","title":{"rendered":"Osgood Perkins on Moving to Canada: ‘Vancouver Is Real Sweet’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOsgood Perkins<\/a> is on a hot streak after releasing Longlegs<\/a> and The Monkey for Neon, both of which filmed in Vancouver, and he\u2019s shooting his fourth movie locally with The Young People, after a rare stumble at the box office with Keeper this fall.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe found success. I found my people and collaborators and we\u2019ve had the success it\u2019s so hard to achieve in anything and in our theatrical movie business,\u201d Perkins told The Hollywood Reporter on Sunday ahead of doing a master class in horror movie making at the Whistler Film Festival.<\/p>\n

\n\tPerkins has teamed with Vancouver producer Chris Ferguson (Backrooms) of indie banner Oddfellows, and they\u2019re backed by a first-look deal with Neon. That deal has Neon serving as the home for Perkins\u2019 projects that he and Ferguson will produce.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat leaves Hollywood\u2019s latest horrormeister with no plans to return to the U.S. after applying for permanent residence status in Canada to keep himself and his wife and young son living in Vancouver, and he and Ferguson making small-budget horror films locally one after the other.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPermanent residency is a really nice deal. It gives us some financial perks. It gives my family a sense of roots. I have a young son who\u2019s six, who goes to school in Vancouver, and feeling like you belong here. You\u2019re not just visiting,\u201d Perkins explained. Ferguson added Vancouver has embraced Perkins and the production team he\u2019s amassed around him, much as Toronto has welcomed fellow horrormeister Guillermo del Toro and his family after years of making titles like The Shape of Water and Frankenstein locally.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s been cool to see Vancouver accept Oz the way Toronto accepts and celebrates Guillermo del Toro. Here\u2019s he\u2019s keynoting the Whistler Film Festival. We just need the government to accept him in the same way and give him PR (permanent residency),\u201d Ferguson adds. Perkins calls the production team he and Ferguson have formed around themselves a \u201cfamily,\u201d which makes dropping roots in Vancouver all the more important.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019d like to hug my editor every day, instead of going in and seeing a stranger who\u2019s hired by the studio or something, and that I need to interface with and I don\u2019t know anything about them. I\u2019d rather think that my editors are adorable human beings who I know and are in the office next to me,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n

\n\tPerkins has also found success in Canada, as the bottom appears to have fallen out of the U.S. theatrical release market for indie films. \u201cEverybody is failing, and it\u2019s been such a privilege to be able to say, oh, we\u2019re doing things that are breaking through. And so if you\u2019ve got it, if it\u2019s not broke, don\u2019t fix it,\u201d Perkins insists.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat means he and his family aren\u2019t returning to the U.S. anytime soon, especially as America\u2019s position with the world, including Canada, changes, says Perkins. \u201cIt\u2019s funny to have to admit as an American, very early on you\u2019re indoctrinated into a certain sense of America as super great, and everyone else is kind of silly. When you spend time in another country, for most of us, there\u2019s an eye-opening epiphany of, oh man, that\u2019s actually a bunch of bullshit. The world is huge and beautiful and varied,\u201d he argued.<\/p>\n

\n\tPerkins will continue to produce projects with Brian Kavanaugh-Jones of Range, who introduced him to Ferguson. Settling in Vancouver has also seen Perkins partner with Mike Flanagan, Oscar winners Sean Baker and Samantha Quan, Zach Lipovsky (Final Destination Bloodlines, Freaks) and Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things, It), among a group of private investors backing the rescue of Vancouver\u2019s historic Park Theatre on Cambie Street.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s a very vibrant, liberal, expansive artistic city that cares about its people,\u201d Perkins insisted. His journey to Canada began in late 2022 when he came north with a script for Longlegs. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAt the time, I didn\u2019t really have a lot going on. I had made some movies, and the business had been slow. And then there was Covid. As the industry contracts, people are getting sloughed off, and I was sort of in danger of being sloughed off,\u201d Perkins recounted. But making Longlegs with Nicolas Cage<\/a> and as a tense FBI procedural steeped in occult horror and nightmarish visions got Perkins onto winning ways.<\/p>\n

\n\tLonglegs, released by Neon, earned strong reviews and $128 million globally on a $10 million budget. A $75 million domestic haul made it the top grossing indie film of the year. So rather than return to the U.S., Perkins decided to stay in Vancouver \u201cand keep the party going.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHis punch bowl overflowed again with The Monkey, which opened to $14 million domestically, Neon\u2019s second-highest opening of all time, only behind\u00a0Longlegs, and earned $68.7 million globally. But before that, Perkins and Ferguson quickly made Keeper.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe were just, we could make another movie. Let\u2019s make a movie. So, we formed the movie in our minds, and got all the department heads working at the same time, figured out a movie and then finished that,\u201d Perkins recalled. But before he set about cutting Keeper in the edit suite, Perkins and Ferguson went into pre-production on The Monkey, ahead of its production and successful release.<\/p>\n

\n\tPerkins hit a speed bump with Keeper, his third collaboration with Neon, which has only pulled in $4.8 million to date globally, according to Box Office Mojo. But that hasn\u2019t phased the horror director. \u201cEvery movie has its purpose, every movie has its flavor, every movie has its value and its content. And Keeper from the get-go was just a smaller movie. The specific intention was not to blow the doors off the box office. The fact that Keeper has had a life is great,\u201d Perkins said.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAnd Keeper made enough money for its crew. We\u2019re all participating,\u201d Ferguson adds. The duo also produces other filmmakers\u2019 movies for Neon, which releases these projects theatrically in the U.S. and represent international rights.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe horror meister also dismisses outright any talk online about slowing his filmmaking pace after the box office disappointment for Keeper.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe train is going, and the opening through which the train is travelling is closing. The theatrical window is closing on all of us. So the more we\u2019re able to output and slip through this really tricky gauntlet of a time for the industry, where everything\u2019s being killed and compacted and turned into some corporate thing, that\u2019s a good thing,\u201d Perkins added.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Whistler Film Festival wraps on Sunday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Osgood Perkins is on a hot streak after releasing Longlegs and The Monkey for Neon, both of which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":334033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,140072,206,67449,23244],"class_list":{"0":"post-334032","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-longlegs","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-nicolas-cage","12":"tag-osgood-perkins"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}