The Wild Bunch: Natural born producers

"They seemed the salvation in a world of inveterate liars and thieves," producer Don Ranvaud says of The Wild Bunch, the Paris-based film outfit responsible – over the three years of its existence – for galvanising the seemingly moribund independent film world. This is a company whose movies truly raise hell. Look through its recent credits and you come across such titles as Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Afghanistan-set Kandahar, Baise-Moi (Fuck Me), Virginie Despentes' "bad girl" road movie which caused French censorship laws to be re-written, Eloge de L'Amour, Jean-Luc Godard's best film in years, Larry Clark's Bully, Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards and Gaspar Noe's scandalous Irreversible.

Now, in its boldest move yet, The Wild Bunch is partnering with Oliver Stone on his documentaries about Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat. Thus far, the Castro film – which will be ready by the early autumn – has caused remarkably little fuss. With the Arafat project, however, it has been a different story. Still in gestation, it has already been attacked by the Israeli press. "Stone is notorious for films that bend truth and invent facts in the service of his message," the Jerusalem Post stated on learning of his meeting with Arafat and went on to brand the US film-maker as "execrable".

By coincidence, Stone had arrived in Palestine in the week that the Israeli tanks invaded Ramallah. "For him, this changed completely the direction of the documentary," Wild Bunch boss Vincent Maraval explains. "It will not be about Arafat but what he witnessed while he was there."

Stone shot over 80 hours of material. He interviewed Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu as well as Arafat and Hamas leaders in a bid "to provide materials for the broadest possible overview of the conflict".

It's striking how often Wild Bunch movies spill over onto the news pages. When Baise-Moi was released in France in 2000, protesters from Carpentras, a National Front stronghold in the south, attempted to have the film taken off the screens. Kandahar was shown in The White House last November. Irreversible, with its already notorious 9-minute rape sequence, provoked an outcry in Cannes, and seems bound to do the same when it is shown at the Edinburgh Festival next month.

Revealingly, Maraval talks about cinema in terms of class warfare, portraying himself and his colleagues as the revolutionaries pitted against the big, multi-national behemoths who dominate the industry. Always keen to provoke, The Wild Bunch staged an alternative opening night at its first Cannes in 2000. While the stars were flocking into the Palais du Cinema to watch Roland Joffe's costume pic, Vatel, Maraval and co were holding their own screening of Uneasy Riders, a film shot on video and using disabled, non-professional actors.

"For us, Vatel was everything we hated," he says now. "It was a very classical movie coming from what we call the aristocracy of cinema. We're not from that culture."

The Wild Bunch was founded in 1999 by Maraval and London-based producer-distributor, Alain de la Mata. Its name, cribbed from the Sam Peckinpah movie, signals its intentions clearly enough. "We liked the political content of the movie, which was a kind of anarchy," Maraval explains. "The first sequence of The Wild Bunch is very explicit for us, which is the ants attacking the scorpion. For us, to see that with many efforts, the small ones can challenge the big one, was important."

The philosophy was very simple: to provide an alternative to standardised studio-style fare. It didn't matter where the movies came from as long as they were kicking against the mainstream. In the early days, the idealism was palpable. As Don Ranvaud recalls, "at the beginning, there was a real sense of wonder and pleasure at doing the job, like the old days of festivals and events in the late 1970s, when it all mattered". Overheads were kept low. Rather than compete with Hollywood, the Wild Bunch bypassed and ignored it. The goal was to make and sell "different films differently". While their rivals would operate out of expensive offices and hotels abroad, the Wild Bunch was as likely to do business out of a local coffee shop. The money, it was always apparent, went on the movies themselves.

"When we started," Maraval remembers, "we knew we were going against the natural evolution of our profession. It was a period of mergers and alliances between big organisations. Producers were a bit lost, a bit pessimistic, a bit depressive about the evolution of their work and they found in Wild Bunch a possibility to resist."

The Wild Bunch very quickly struck up relationships with like-minded producers all over the world. Often, the least likely projects were the ones that worked best – for example, Fernando Meirelles's astounding City Of God. Set in the Rio shanty towns among the young gangsters and drug dealers and shot with handheld cameras, this might best be described as the Brazilian answer to Trainspotting – but on a far bigger and brasher scale. It's being heavily hyped by Miramax (who will be releasing it in the UK and US later in the year).

It's only in the UK that Maraval and De la Mata have drawn a blank. Although a co-producer on Peter Mullan's new film, The Magdalena Sisters, Maraval sounds dismayed by British film culture. "I think the dream of each English director is to move to Hollywood. They want success in order to be able to work with big actors on a major budget. We are not interested at all in that."

The paradox about his own company is that it belongs to the corporate film business that Maraval claims to despise. It is owned by StudioCanal, part of the troubled Vivendi Universal empire. Some critics accuse The Wild Bunch of over-hyping its movies and overcharging for them. Nor has it always spotted winners. (It declined to support the current Argentinian hit, Nine Queens.) Back in 1999, Maraval was guaranteed creative freedom by StudioCanal's boss, Brahim Chioua, but he concedes that wasn't the same as being truly independent. "I was working against the policy of a big group inside a big group. It was an uncomfortable situation," he admits.

Now that Chioua is leaving StudioCanal, Maraval and his colleagues will also cut their links with the company to form Wild Bunch Independent. Not that they will change their philosophy. Maraval's advice to film-makers remains the same as always: "Forget TV, forget the market, forget what we can sell – just make the movie according to your own vision."