Chantal Fehghli

From a tiny mountain village in Lebanon to the cut-throat business of Hollywood film-making, Chantal Feghali rose through the ranks of the biggest L.A. movie studios to become one of the industry’s most respected producers. With some momentous blockbusters to her name, including the recent epic Alexander, Hala Droubi talks exclusively to the woman whose been dubbed “Hollywood’s queen of post-production”.

Hollywood. A world of mystery and wonder, where fairytales become realities, where superstars are made and where Arabs are not allowed. At least that’s the assumption. After all, we just don’t have the skills to make it. And secondly, if local wannbes have their silver screen dreams crushed on a daily basis what hope does your average Arab have? Right? Well, Chantal Feghali would like to disagree. Not to be deterred by assumptions and clichés, one woman has forcibly cast aside the barriers and is proving that we too “can make it there”. Confident, smart, meticulously professional and in her own words, a lady with “guts”, Chatal Feghali is “Hollywood’s queen of post production”. More importantly Chantal Feghali is Lebanese

Her list of impressive achievements include the block-buster hits Enemy At The Gates, As Good As It Gets, I Know What You Did Last Summer and Donnie Brasco. Born and raised in Lebanon, Feghali is a child of the civil war. It was against this tragic backdrop that she grew up watching her country being torn apart. At the age of 11 she escaped with her family from North Beirut to the small village of Feghal, deep in the heart of the Lebanese mountains. Despite her love for her home country and an upbringing firmly entrenched in Lebanese values and pride, her dreams were far too big for Feghal. “I knew that I was going to reach out to something that would make a difference, and I knew I was not going to be able to do it in Lebanon,” she says.

The flickering light of the big screen was always a source of fascination and inspiration for the young Feghali and the ability to move people through silver screen storytelling was a constant preoccupation. “It is because of the war in Lebanon that I felt this way,” she explains wistfully. “It made me want to tell the story of a building that kept falling apart one floor over another. I felt this said a lot about a society that was degraded and dying, yet kept fighting and struggling.”

Being an artist who in her own words is “also logical”, Feghali went on to study Maths, Physics and Film with a focus on French, German, Italian and Swedish cinema in France. She even learnt about Swedish Cinema at the prestigious Sorbonne University in France. “I wanted to use my creative sensibilities and put them to work by combining them with my logic. You have to really focus on what you feel at first and then put it into practice.”

Feghali decided to continue her studies in the States. She enrolled at Columbia College, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Cinema in 1986. “When I went to the states, I had to work all day to put my self through school. It was very difficult for me to do it on my own. I went through lots of hardships and difficulties. But I did it.”

Chantal started her career at Roger Corman’s Concorde Pictures, the edit suite proving to be a second home as she cut her teeth on different low budget films and trailers. “When an editor called the dean of my school asking him for a student to work on a movie, the dean nominated me. I worked as an assistant for 70 hours a week, at $200 dollars a week. Then I went to work with Roger Corman, who at the time was the king of B movies in Hollywood at Concorde Pictures. I was a fresh graduate back then, and it was very difficult because I had to pay for my school debts, and to start my life.”

Within a year, Feghali was promoted three times, soon becoming the head of her department. “I stayed there for two and a half years, till Columbia pictures called me one day.

They had just formed Sony Pictures and were looking for a post production supervisor. I was the first post production supervisor they hired at that time when the studio was formed. I was just 25 back then,” she explains. “I really wanted the job at Sony, and I knew that taking it would change my life and career. Of course at the interview I didn’t want to seem like I was desperate! I walked in, sat down quietly and confidently. Garry Martin, who is the president of Sony pictures, was at the interview. He is a very intimidating man and he started asking me questions, yet I was not intimidated by him. He asked me how I managed a film, and how I managed talking to a director, so I simply told him. I listen to them, and see what it is that they need, but I know how to say no. And this is what got me the job! I was the youngest senior vice president of post production at the studios in Hollywood, and the only Lebanese!”

Twenty years later, Feghali has not let success go to her head. She still finds pleasure in spending her short vacations with her family in the mountain village she calls home, however admits that “Lebanon has changed”.

“It is just a different country for me,” she explains, the melancholy evident in her voice. “It is a beautiful country, but a different one for sure. It is not the country I was raised in. And do I want to go live there? Well I don’t think so. However my little village, Feghal, has not changed. My family haven’t changed either, which is very important. We still have the house that we were raised in and the principles that we were raised with.”

These are grounding notions for a woman who has just completed the mammoth task of post-production and supervision on Oliver Stone’s master piece Alexander. “Working with Oliver Stone was an utterly enriching experience,” she explains, referring to the film as the turning point in a career spanning thirteen years. “I am thankful that Oliver Stone looked at me and said, ‘I need your help’. There aren’t many artists that allow you to work so closely to them, Oliver did. I used every inch of talent, knowledge and experience to the fullest. In fact I had to create new systems to resolve totally unfamiliar situations.” Feghali created her own post production company, Estena Films in 2003, and Alexander was the first project she handled as an independent producer. In doing so Feghali managed a 150 million dollar movie all on her own. “I was not only creatively helping Oliver, I was helping him on the budget level on the organisational level on the supervisory level, everything, even the music, the sound, the visual effects…I was leading all of it!”

Feghali explains that even though the final outcome was beautiful, the means to that end were not so pretty! “Everything about the film was just magnificent, but working on it was very complicated; because of the artist, the story and the nature of it etc. I had to deliver the film to the studios in three weeks, which is a very short time for such a huge film. I didn’t go home during that whole time! I was working 24/7 literary. I breathed and I lived Alexander.”

However Feghali’s industry experience meant that she was more than up to the daunting task. She was formerly the senior vice president in charge of post production at Mandalay Pictures from October 1996 till December 2002. There she worked on some of Hollywood’s biggest hits including, Enemy at the Gates, The Score, Sleepy Hollow, Seven Years in Tibet, Donnie Brasco, I Know What You Did Last Summer ,Les Miserables, Desperate Measures and Wild Things.

She was also post production supervisor at Sony Pictures from 1989 to 1996, where she oversaw work on My Best Friend’s Wedding, First Knight, Avalon, As Good as it Gets, Legends of the Fall, Flatliner, Awakening, Little Women, Single White Female, Higher Learning, Matilda and Boyz N the Hood. In doing all this Feghali has had the chance to work with some industry legends including Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, Frank Oz, Jim Brooks, Penny Marshall, Joel Schumacher, Richard Donner, Jerry Zucker, Danny De Vito, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Sydney Lumet, and Academy Award winning film editors such as Thelma Schoonmaker, Walter Murch and Richard Marks.

When Feghali speaks it’s obvious that the secret to her success is quite simply her obsessive need for absolute perfection coupled with an overwhelming passion for what she does. “I have never taken a project and let it fall, never, not even once. And you can call everyone I’ve had the pleasure to work with and the first thing they would tell you is ‘she is excellent at what she does’. You see there is no place for flaws in this business, millions of dollars are on stake, and thus perfection is an obligation and not an option. I take filmmaking very seriously, and I am so passionate about it, that I only will make something that I feel deep inside is worth putting on the screen.”

Nevertheless when it comes to the more superficial side of Hollywood, Feghali prefers to stay firmly out of the picture. “When I decided to have my own company, develop my own projects and produce my own films, I realised that success might not simply be about how good you are at your work. Other factors come into play, such as hanging out with the right people. I just couldn’t do that,” she explains. “I said to my self, I don’t have to do anything to survive, I just have to be me. It was harder that way, but definitely not impossible, because I had already established a reputation in the film making business. In Hollywood you run into so many people who literary do not know how a film is really made.”

Like her father, a professor, a teacher and an adviser, Feghali finds pleasure in helping and guiding people. “I am not afraid of showing people who I am and what I am about. I have assistances who have worked with me and helped, and are now ahead of me. I help them, teach them and guide them, just like my father used to do.” In fact she also occasionally teaches at the UCLA Film extension programme.

In the process Feghali has become a leader in her field and a favourite among the world’s filmmakers. And so it is rather appropriate that a line in one of Feghali’s own films, Little Women, is so symbolic of her life. “Wouldn’t it be fun if all the castles in the air which we make could come true and we could live in them?”, says a character in the critically acclaimed movie. Well while Hollywood may be one of the hardest places in the world to succeed, it’s also, as Chantal Feghali proves, one of the few places in the world where if you dream big enough and work hard enough you can go from a little Lebanese mountain village to being the queen of your dream castle.

PULL-OUTS: “I knew that I was going to be something, and I knew I was not going to be able to do it in Lebanon.” “I am thankful that Oliver Stone looked at me and said, ‘I need your help’." “Perfection is an obligation and not an option.”