As Emma Thompson’s ‘Dead of Winter’ Debuts, Producers Augenschein Discuss Star-Led Slate, Including Films With Anne Hathaway, Russell Crowe, Ethan Hawke (EXCLUSIVE)

At Locarno Film Festival on Friday, Emma Thompson will be honored and her latest film, Brian Kirk’s thriller “Dead of Winter,” will have its world premiere. Variety spoke to the co-chiefs of Augenschein, which produced the film alongside Stampede Studios, about its slate of star-led, director-driven English-language films.

Locarno has a special place in the hearts of Augenschein’s founders, Jonas Katzenstein and Maximilian Leo, as it was there that their company first demonstrated that it had undergone a transformation.

Up to that point, the German production company was known for foreign-language arthouse films, such as Berlin Silver Bear winner “Ana, My Love,” but all that changed with the 2019 Locarno launch of Patrick Vollrath’s plane hijacking thriller “7500,” starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt. From that point on, English-language, director-driven, star-led, elevated genre fare would be their sole focus.

Leo says that when he read the script for “Dead of Winter,” formerly known as “The Fisherwoman,” he saw it as the kind of story that you could imagine having Clint Eastwood as the lead, but that instead a 60-plus year old woman would be in that role.

The film centers on a widowed fisherwoman, travelling alone through snowbound northern Minnesota, who interrupts the kidnapping of a teenage girl. Hours from the nearest town and with no phone service, she realizes that she is the young girl’s only hope.

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Leo says that the fact that she’s nothing out of the ordinary, just a fisherwoman, “led to more tension.” Aside from the genre elements, at the film’s core there is a story full of heartfelt emotion. Once Thompson was on board, it felt like it was “a home run,” he says.

North.Five.Six represents international rights, and CAA Media Finance handles North American rights, with Augenschein Sales working alongside both. Most of the worldwide rights have been pre-sold, including North America, which was picked up by Vertical. Leonine holds German rights.

Also, on the Augenschein slate is period epic “The Weight,” starring Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe, which is shooting now in the forests of Bavaria, Germany. Set in Oregon in 1933, the film is directed by Padraic McKinley.

Hawke plays Samuel Murphy who, after the death of his wife, is imprisoned in a labor camp run by Clancy, an unscrupulous overseer (Crowe). Murphy only wants to escape and regain custody of his daughter, Penny, but becomes entangled in Clancy’s perilous gold smuggling scheme, facing threats from both the treacherous wilderness and potential betrayal within his own group.

The film is produced by Simon Fields and Nathan Fields for Fields Entertainment, Ryan Hawke for Under the Influence, and Katzenstein and Leo at Augenschein. WME Independent and CAA Media Finance co-represent domestic rights on the film while WME Independent is handling international rights.

Leo jokes that he is superstitious about film titles as he suspects they act as an “omen” to suggest how the film’s financing and production are going to pan out, and this was vindicated with “The Weight.”

“I think ‘The Weight’ is pretty accurate, because it felt like a lot of heavy lifting that Jonas especially had to do in the last months, because the market is terrible at the moment, in terrible shape,” he says. “There’s a lot of volatility, even more than there used to be.”

He adds, “When we took the plane to Cannes [this year] it felt like the movie was dead, to be honest. But Cannes was very good for us, because when we took the plane back, it felt like the film was saved.”

Asked what the cause of the difficulty in the market is, Katzenstein doesn’t hesitate. “We think it’s the streamers, because the streamers are not paying crazy prices anymore. So, the backing in all the countries is missing. And that means all the presales are going down, which means all the equity investors are more cautious.”

Another reason it was difficult going into Cannes was Trump’s comments on tariffs. “There was a lot of fear,” Leo says.

More generally, the market has been getting tougher for producers. “Financing costs have increased, we have higher labor costs, we have a lot of additional costs in legal, while there’s a higher volatility in the market, and fewer equity investors are happy to invest eight million [dollars] or more in a project. So it becomes very, very shaky,” Leo says.

However, he adds, “At times like these it is very important that we can get 40%-60% [of a film’s budget] covered from the German market plus funds, and doing this makes it possible to keep the line. I’m a surfer so it feels like it’s a very rough sea, and you need a lot of skill and a good nose to pick the right spots where you still can catch the wave that makes a project go. We feel [the challenging conditions] as well but at least we are still doing a lot of projects, and we are still growing, but it’s way more difficult than two years ago.”

In parallel to “The Weight,” Augenschein is shooting action thriller “The Hive,” starring Franka Potente and Sophie Cookson, directed by Spain’s Martin Rosete. Two female agents are tasked with preventing a terrorist attack during an economic summit, but a power struggle erupts between them. The film is shooting in Germany and the Canaries. Plaion Pictures is handling German distribution.

Meanwhile, David Lowery’s epic pop melodrama “Mother Mary,” starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, is in post-production. The film explores the relationship between fictional music icon Mother Mary (Hathaway) and the legendary fashion designer Sam (Coel). Augenschein is producing with Sailor Bear, A24 and Homebird Productions. A24 will handle worldwide distribution.

Also in post-production is a horror movie with the working title “Bloody Tennis,” directed by Germany’s Nikias Chryssos. The film follows 16-year-old Sophie, who is accepted into an elite tennis academy in Spain, but the price of success is high and may even claim her life. The cast includes Sandra Guldberg Kampp (“Electric Child”), Elina Löwensohn (“Amateur”), Zlatko Burić (“Triangle of Sadness”), Lucie Zhang (“Paris, 13th District”) and Helena Zengel (“News of the World”). Port au Prince Pictures is handling German distribution. Augenschein is looking to launch it at a genre festival in the fall.

Leo describes the project as a “weird movie,” in a positive sense, that’s “a quite visceral and brutal metaphor for professional sports training.”

Despite the changes in the market, Katzenstein and Leo remain optimistic. Jan-Ole Gerster’s thriller “Islands,” starring Sam Riley, Stacy Martin and Jack Farthing, will launch at the box office in various territories following its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February this year. The BFI is releasing in the U.K., and Greenwich is releasing in the U.S. The film was nominated for four German Film Awards.

Augenschein has two larger-scale projects moving toward production: one with a “top tier” U.S. distributor on board and a “really big cast” attached, and another with a “top tier” cast. Both are likely to move forward in Q1 or Q2 next year. The company is also developing projects with McKinley, Gerster and Vollrath.

One project that is dead in the water is Justin Kurzel’s sci-fi movie “Morning,” which would have starred Benedict Cumberbatch and Laura Dern. “Unfortunately, it added a ‘u’ to the prophetic title,” Leo says dryly.

“I would say we feel confident about 2026 but it’s also true that 2025 was not the easiest year,” Leo says, “because the end of 2024/beginning of 2025 was a bit difficult because of the volatility, and a lot of projects that, like ‘Morning,’ didn’t really go but I think now we have chosen projects even more carefully and it is looking very optimistic going into next year.”

Augenschein has strong relationships with the U.S. talent agencies and its reputation as a reliable partner is growing.

Katzenstein says, “We are not repped by anyone. We’re still free, independent, so we work with all of them, and we have a close relationship to all the financing departments, the talent departments. They know our way of combining European funding money with our physical production knowledge and financing abilities. But also, we can develop and start this stuff from scratch. So, it comes from both sides. We contact them with our projects, and they contact us with their projects.”

Leo adds, “I always make the joke that some of the agents have a speed dial 911 Augenschein; if projects are not coming together, they reach out. That’s one way over the bridge, and, as Jonas said, the other way is that we can then use that relationship where we stepped in and saved projects, as was the case with ‘The Assessment.’ There we joined at a later stage because the project was threatening to fall apart, and then with our way of financing it, we could bring it together and keep it together, and once you have done this once or twice, agents reach out more often, because things actually get made.

“So, we now have a reputation that we can keep things together, or even bring things together. And that’s, of course, making it easier when we approach them with projects that we are putting together and then when we are casting, we can always ask somebody to tell the talent representative that we are a legit company who gets things made, and that can push the directors we bring forward.

“And that’s our long game plan, because we want to use these relationships to nurture and develop European directors into something where those independent productions can still work, and those directors don’t have to move over the ocean and enter what we call the U.S. limbo, waiting for years for their projects to be greenlit. We can do this by combining both those worlds. And if that works, it can pay off very, very well, and that’s why I think we are actively seeking deeper relationships with all of the agents we are working with.”