Filmmaker Chris Robert Riegel Manages His “Expectations” In His Companion Piece Of The Charles Dickens Classic (Part 1)

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Chris Robert Riegel:

Part 2

Filmmaker Chris Robert Riegel has a unique background as both a financier and filmmaker through his Rainmaker banner. He is known for being involved with award-winning feature films including Dallas Buyers Club, Stealing Cars, and Stowaway. Furthermore, he has worked his creative muscles by directing movies including Another You and Ten and has recently completed his take on the beloved Charles Dickens classic, Great Expectations, simply titled Expectations.

Despite being a movie-hyphenate, it may appear that Riegel has a broad swathe of unrelated skills in the entertainment industry, but for Chris, the business and creative skills overlap and place him in a uniquely enviable position. We spent some time with him to discuss his segue from film finance, credit, and real estate into a director and creative executive roles.

“For me, I believe in the idea of everything being in balance. I’ve begun to learn and give myself permission to be creative. Most of that came from me taking the time to understand the creative process,” muses Riegel.

“Filmmaking is a team sport. Whether it’s a financier, a producer, a studio, individual creatives, department heads or the actors themselves, everyone playing a specific position on the field.”

His background allows him to have an aerial view of the entire filmmaking process, both as a totality of the whole process and as an individual artist. “As I apply the logic of each component separately, it’s important for me to understand how they all link together,” he adds.

Creative or Executive?

“On the executive side, it’s the vision from being able to look at the entire process and seeing it through to the end. From the producer side, it’s about being out in front and being able to problem solve. And from being the creative, it’s about having the ideas that power the engine to make the entire thing go.”

Although Chris Robert Riegel expounds the collaborative nature of filmmaking, he considers his brain to be 90% creative and 10% on the executive side. He also adds that it may not always have been that way until he found his calling in writing in directing. During his executive days, his thought processes would have been 90% on the executive side, and 10% on the creative side.

The creative didn’t have a yearning to become a director while he focused on business activities. It was something that organically blossomed from being in a creative environment.

“Being on the business side gave me an access point, not just to the people that did it, but that part of myself where if you work on a project as a producer, there are always creative fixes that you have to come up with to solve a problem, or to get the tools to be in the most successful position as possible. And when you do that, you open yourself up to a whole other creative process.”

“That’s something that I’ve been finding out. Because for me creatively, the thing that attracts me to storytelling the most, is to grow, to get a little bit better, but also to understand myself a little bit more every time out,” Riegel continues.

This mission informs his decision on what project to pursue next. “The connectivity between expectations and what film I might do next are the central themes of family and identity.”

Chris Robert Riegel first read Dickens’ Great Expectations as a teenager while he was growing up in Brisbane, Australia. “At the time, it was an acquired taste. It was a commitment to read it at a time when I just wanted to be outdoors playing sports. So it was something that I had to really dial into,” he recalls.

Being an orphan was one of the reasons Chris claims to have attracted him to Great Expectations. “Dickens writes a lot of orphan characters, and so, finding a little bit of connectivity of myself and exploring the central part of being an orphan, made me appreciate him.”

 - As an orphan, you don’t really have a biological family. You go through a family process, and you’re trying to build your identity as you’re growing up.

But when you’re an orphan, there are so many unknowns and you don’t always know your origins. “Sometimes we write, not just what we know, but we write the things that we aspire to know, or aspire to create, or aspire to see out the world,” opines Riegel. This exploration of the unknown is another key driver of the film and television projects Rainmaker selects.

Aside from choosing projects that excite Chris, Rainmaker Films must also make sound business choices about their project selections in terms of viability, production and distribution vehicles. “Many people have a lot of negative things to say about what’s happened to the entertainment industry at large especially what’s happening to theater, theatrical and versus streaming, and what’s the future going to be? To me, the audience is still king.” The audience will pay for their movie tickets, their streaming subscriptions, and their on-demand services. They will also become part of the cultural conversation and share their thoughts either online or in person. They become part of the expanded viewing experience.

Most production companies aspire to be part of the public conversation. They may target certain demographics and remain as faithful to the source material as they can, but they also need to grow by expanding their audiences. That can be a challenge.

For Riegel, growth also means pushing his creative boundaries. “So for us, to select a project that is exactly what we’ve done before, to stay exactly the same, doesn’t really scratch that itch,” states Chris.

To Adapt Or To Not Adapt?

Source material has cemented its place in the film and television space. In the case of Riegel’s rendition of Great Expectations, the story was in the public domain so there were no rights to be secured. “IP is important. But There are some debates about the waning nature and value of intellectual property. Does something that has a great readership, a great viewership, or a great overseer really deliver?,” ponders the filmmaker.

“Is that really what everybody wants to see right now? Or do they just want to see actors portraying things that maybe are not the obvious choice of role? Sometimes seeing an actor do something completely different than what they’re known for is extremely refreshing and exciting.”

Rather than perceiving Expectations as a faithful adaptation of the beloved Dickens novel, Riegel considers it to be a companion piece. “Expectations actually takes place at the end of the source material and doesn’t require you to be familiar with it.” This is what excites Chris about his film because it shows people a version of the story they haven’t seen before rather than a re-interpretation of it. It asks the audience to relate to it in a different way.

So, when Chris Robert Riegel and his co-producers Andrew Panay and Jared Iacino from Panay Films and Clay Pecorin from Rainmaker Films first met to discuss Expectations, the first thing they had to decide on, was what it wasn’t going to be. “The fact that it’s a comedy probably lends itself to being seen through a different lens. Sometimes familiar is good, but familiar with a taste of the new, hopefully provokes thoughts of the conversation,” concludes Riegel.