Dusseldorf Oliver Ziegenbalg is a career changer, so to speak. The son of a family of mathematicians initially studied business mathematics before he discovered his love for film in a secondary course. Without studying at a classic film school and without the relevant contacts, he says it was incredibly hard and tedious work to gain a foothold in the business. Today Ziegenbalg is the producer of “The Billion Dollar Code”, a series with a budget of millions.
It owes this to the success of streaming services like Netflix. It was only through that that made him an entrepreneur, says the scriptwriter. Because Netflix and Co. compete with each other and with TV stations and cinemas not only for viewers, but also for filmmakers and their ideas. Netflix alone plans to spend 500 million euros on 80 productions in German-speaking countries over the next three years. “There has never been so many possibilities,” says Ziegenbalg. Even small production companies like his two-man company Sunny Side Up Films are awarded the contract for productions of millions.
Ziegenbalg and his small business are not inexperienced. The debut film “25 km / h” from his production company reached more than a million moviegoers and received a nomination for “Best Feature Film” at the German Film Prize 2019. But working with streaming services is a completely new experience for him and his colleagues in the industry – and it changes fundamentally the role that writers play in film production.
In the cooperation with Netflix and Co. showrunners have completely new artistic and entrepreneurial freedom. Ziegenbalg can choose whether to implement an idea as a series, a feature film or a television film.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
He used these opportunities to tackle a major project for Netflix – the result has recently been shown on the platform: The series “The Billion Dollar Code” tells the story of a group of Berlin hackers and artists who are suing Google for a billion sum. The accusation: The internet giant is said to have stolen its algorithm and built its “Google Earth” service on it.
Even if some of the friendship story of the protagonists in “The Billion Dollar Code” is “a bit too good” to be true, according to Ziegenbalg, the plot is based on a true story. The model is the Berlin design agency “Art + Com”, which hardly anyone knew about until now. The legal dispute over the rights to Google Earth between the development team on the one hand and the US company on the other actually took place in 2014. Coincidence would have it that Ziegenbalg met one of the Berlin protagonists in this dispute over a barbecue in the allotment garden – and recognized that his story was ready for film.
“The great thing about Netflix: If they want that, then they just want it”
At first, Ziegenbalg wanted to bring it to the cinemas. He said he had been writing the scripts for a year when Netflix showed him the alternative. And that suited him: his idea of retelling the exciting court process in detail worked better in the series format than on the screen. And: “The great thing about Netflix: If they want that, then they just want it,” he says. Where others still wanted to see scripts and securities, say Netflix: “Here’s the money, we believe you can do it.”
The result proves the streaming service is right, as most of the critics agree. Ziegenbalg and director Robert Thalheim take viewers to Berlin after the fall of the Wall and into a world in which power on the Internet was not yet clearly distributed. At that time, at least among Berlin computer nerds, the prevailing belief was that a new place was emerging on the Internet with the primary purpose of making knowledge available to everyone around the world.
“There are mistakes where you immediately know that you have made a mistake,” Ziegenbalg lets one of his protagonists say right at the beginning of the series. And there are mistakes that are not mistakes at all when you make them. “They only become mistakes because the world in which one lives has changed, and suddenly these are the biggest mistakes one could ever make.” Talking about “Terra Vision” freely in Silicon Valley.
You can tell the film that Ziegenbalg feels for the role models in his series. His script is based exclusively on “3000 pages of court files” and the “30 to 40 hours of material” from interviews with the people who describe themselves in the series as “Germany’s first start-up”. Ziegenbalg does not even try to take the perspective of Google, which cannot be pleased with this series. This is one of the reasons why the author has not added anything to the presentation of the court case. “You can read in black and white how the process went,” he says.
You see things a little differently on Google. The series is “far removed from reality,” says Google company spokesman Kay Oberbeck: “In the case brought by Art + Com to court, the court needed less time to reach a verdict in favor of Google than it takes a single consequence fictional series to watch. “
At Netflix, writers play a bigger role in production
The jury finally decided in favor of Google. Ziegenbalg and the audience are ultimately inclined, if not the judgment, then at least to question the behavior of the US company. It fits into a time when the large US tech companies have long had the image of abuse of power rather than innovation due to antitrust proceedings and regulatory debates. It is almost a bit ironic that with Netflix, of all things, another US tech company can, so to speak, turn this anti-Google mood into a business.
For Oliver Ziegenbalg, the number of views of the series does not play a role, at least financially. While the producers of a movie only really earn money when it rakes in at the box office, Netflix production companies always receive a fixed share of the budget for their series and films. According to scene circles, about five to 15 percent of the budget should go to the producers. Those who manage their business well and do not make planning mistakes will ultimately be left with more. In the meantime, costs that have not been taken into account must be paid from this share.
On average, the budget for a Netflix production is just over six million euros. It is usually much higher for series than for films, because they also cost more. However, Ziegenbalg feels that dealing with budgets in the millions is beneficial: “That inspires me,” he says.
Because Netflix also requires authors to play a larger role in the process of making films and series. “The showrunners that I get to know on Netflix don’t withdraw into the author’s corner offended because something is not what they want it to be,” says Ziegenbalg. When you work with Netflix, you have it in your own hands.
More: Netflix boss admits: “RTL will be very successful with its streaming offer.”