Producer Sigurjón “Joni” Sighvatsson has worked on so many different projects that it’s hard to sum up his career. The trailblazing Iceland-born, U.S.-based film, music video and TV producer has been behind David Lynch film and TV hits, Julian Schnabel’s groundbreaking Basquiat (1996), a soccer documentary, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Weight of Water (2000) and K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), as well as Lynch’s landmark series Twin Peaks (1990-1991) as well as iconic 90’s hit Beverly Hills, 90210.
The principal of Palomar Pictures also famously co-founded Propaganda Films in 1986, which, back in the day, produced a third of all music videos in the U.S., including early works by Zack Snyder, Spike Jonze, Gore Verbinski, Michael Bay and co-founder David Fincher.
This week, Sighvatsson is attending the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival, where he will be honored with the Raimondo Rezzonico Award in the Swiss town’s Piazza Grande on Thursday evening, Aug. 6. The festival will also be screening two key films from his career: Lynch’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Wild at Heart (1990) and Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon’s French soccer doc Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait (2006).
In a Zoom interview before traveling to Locarno, Sighvatsson talked to THR about the power of Lynch and Bigelow, how Donald Trump’s talk about cryptocurrencies could play into film’s future and his work on a 2022 film about MKUltra, the CIA LSD project that is also getting the David Chase series treatment.
Some producers focus on a very specific niche of content. However, you have been behind this broad range of films and series, along with music videos. Why has your work covered so much different ground, from David Lynch and Kathryn Bigelow to Beverly Hills, 90210?
I’ll tell you that it was more accident than plan. When I was entering the business, it wasn’t very open. So you just had to take whatever you could get. I was never that big a fan of big Hollywood films per se, so I started doing music videos and TV commercials, and then went into television a little bit. It was a very different time in television. In some ways, it was an open time because cable was opening up many different opportunities, and many different things were going on.
You started Propaganda. Did having a company help?
It was small and became large, but I would say that in the beginning, it was a disadvantage. People ask: Do you do horror? Do you do comedy? Do you do action? And I’m like, well, I just do good things and good stories. I have always tried to focus on good stories — it doesn’t matter what genre.
I have a literary background. I wouldn’t say I’m widely read, but I’ve read enough to know what I think is a good story and if it is adaptable for the cinema. A lot of my work is based on some kind of literary material. Candyman, for example, is based on a short story. And for K-19, it was not a novel, but it is based on a documentary by the BBC about the true story of the first nuclear submarine in the Soviet Union. And Wild at Heart is based on a novella. Maybe because of my literary background, I’ve always been drawn more to stories that I feel have strong characters and strong resolutions. A good story is a good story, no matter the genre.
Do you think that is also why you have often worked with auteurs, such as Kathryn Bigelow or David Lynch?
I think so. These kinds of directors are storytellers. And David created a lot of his work. But with Wild at Heart, David was looking for material, and I owned the rights to this novella that was relatively unorthodox. I thought maybe David would like it because he likes things that are not orthodox. Wild at Heart has a very strong character arc because it’s a really twisted story, but it’s still a love story. David wasn’t necessarily known for that, but he certainly was known for how he could fashion something out of [anything]. And it’s the same with Kathryn and other directors that I have worked with.
It’s often a good gateway into a film to have something to base it on. But that doesn’t mean it has to be same, right? It can be completely reinterpreted. I don’t know how anybody else would have interpreted Wild at Heart. But I don’t think anybody could have done it like David Lynch.
Given the trend of nostalgia, do you get a lot of requests to remake David Lynch movies or other films or series you have produced in the past?
They have already remade some of my things. Candyman is a good example. They did a great job [with the 2021 remake, written by Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld and Nia DaCosta, of the 1992 movie]. They are very talented guys. But it’s basically the same story set today, but the focus is slightly different.
Have you seen remakes of your past creations that you didn’t like?
Netflix contacted me and wanted to do Tales of the City, which at the time it came out [in 1993] was quite controversial. It was a gay soap opera, and that didn’t go over so well everywhere. But I wasn’t interested in doing it again because I thought it would be difficult, and I don’t think the Netflix version turned out very well. Because unless you reimagine the story, it’s just the same story, and they just didn’t have the quality. I think [too much] time had passed. The original was great because it came at the right time.
So I think unless you find a new twist and get new filmmakers who have a new vision, remakes don’t [make sense].
There have been a couple of 90210 remakes or reboots. How did you feel about those?
I think very few [elements] compared to the original because they didn’t have the freshness. When we first did 90210, there were no rules, so we could do whatever we wanted. It was like lightning in the bottle. Nobody knew what Beverly Hills, 90210 was, and, in fact, it was more of an experiment than it was supposed to be a hit because none of the kids were stars yet.
Do you have any other thoughts on remakes that you would like to share?
I wasn’t involved with Twin Peaks: The Return, but I would say it was the only sequel or continuation of a series that I know that came 25 years later and is so different. I thought it was fantastic.
I don’t think Twin Peaks: The Return has been seen as much as the original, but it is as original. And it really takes the whole idea of binge-watching and turns it upside down because if you try to binge-watch Twin Peaks: The Return, your head will just explode because it’s so non-linear.
You had a film project about the “Bitcoin Bandits,” who stole around 600 computer servers used for mining cryptocurrency in data center raids in Iceland in the planning stage. Is that still in the works?
Yeah, but it’s a little complicated. What made the project unique is that it was a victimless crime. Nobody came forward and said, “We own those Bitcoin mining computers, so give them back to us.” And the [thieves] were never found. So that’s why we’re still working on it, and that’s also why it’s very, very interesting and unique, because there aren’t that many victimless crimes. I mean, when you steal something from the Louvre, it’s a tangible object that disappears. Here, it was intangible, but what was most surprising there was that nobody claimed to own those bitcoins, so maybe they weren’t stolen at all.
This story interested me in the context of this new financial instrument. But obviously, Trump has made it more relevant and more tangible. But when we started the project, nobody really knew what Bitcoin was.
The Sopranos creator David Chase recently discussed the status of the HBO series that he has in development about Project MKUltra, the covert CIA program that explored weaponizing LSD. You executive produced a film about that a few years ago, right? Tell me a bit about it and how you feel about this new series being in the works from a high-profile creative!
Well, this was a very small film that a friend of mine was making. This is a topic that really hadn’t been covered that much, and I got involved to basically help him finish it. He had so much amazing real footage. So I thought, let’s focus more on that real footage. He had a big fictional element, but I thought it was more interesting to focus more on the secret CIA footage, public footage that he could access. It’s all about conspiracy, so I felt it needed some work. I didn’t really get involved until the post-production, and then I helped fashion it into a movie that was much more reality-based than his original concept. I actually need to send the director an email and say, “Hey, Joe [Joseph Sorrentino], have you noticed this David Chase MKUltra project?”
Will you keep working on films and series? And how do you feel about receiving the honor at Locarno?
It’s great. It’s nice to get that recognition for your work from the past. But I keep doing films, not in exactly the same way as I used to. But I still base them on strong material. I often use my background from music or literature. If I have a great film now, I make sure that I have everything. For example, if I don’t get a great actor, I’m not going to start the film, even if I have the money. Because why start a film if you don’t have all the great elements?
