With seven nominations, Robert Altman's Gosford Park is one of the frontrunners in the countdown to the Academy Awards. Yet, while the grand old man of Hollywood still has to bite his nails in anticipation, Sharon Harel and Jane Barclay, the founders of the British film sales and financing outfit Capitol Films, who put together the bulk of the movie's $19.8m budget, are already popping the champagne corks.

"What's so wonderful about Gosford Park is to have a film that receives brilliant reviews, and to see those translate into box office around the world," beams Harel in the Holland Park office she and Barclay have shared since they set up shop 13 years ago.

"You really wouldn't see a Hollywood studio making Gosford Park, as it's seen as 'difficult'," says Barclay. "In fact, it's hugely commercial and the studios are desperately trying to buy the remaining territories. We're having a lot of fun with that."

Working around the mainstream market and taking risks that studios are not prepared to is exactly what Harel and Barclay have come to specialise in. Even Gosford Park, despite its stellar cast, was a gamble. Altman's last two movies, The Gingerbread Man and Dr T. and the Women, had not lived up to expectations at the box office, so there was a good deal of worry over whether he would deliver the goods.

"There is always a risk in what we do," explains Barclay, "but it's where you decide to put your energies. And where you think potentially - never guaranteed - there is the possibility of it working."

The same philosophy saw them make Death and the Maiden with the notoriously unpredictable director Roman Polanski, and rescue David Cronenberg's new $12m feature, Spider.

A story of Freudian horror and schizophrenia, Spider was not exactly blockbuster material. Cronenberg's backer pulled out at the last minute and Harel and Barclay jumped in.

"In financing a film you put all the financial pieces together - it might be a combination of anything," Barclay explains. "It might be a sale-lease-back, it might be one or two pre-sales, it might be our own money. You then take the whole lot to a bank with a completion bond and they get to discount it, and that's how it's actually cash-flowed. [With Spider], because of all the complications we couldn't close the bank loan, so we financed the entire pre-production and five weeks of shooting with our own money! We were hysterical, completely beside ourselves." However, the buzz is that Spider is brilliant and, claims Harel, international sales are going great.

Of course, Harel and Barclay are no strangers to coming up with creative solutions for ever-changing financing patterns. "Of all the 90 films we have worked on, the financial set-up has never been the same. It's always different - that's what keeps it interesting," says Harel.

Since they founded Capitol, Barclay and Harel have financed and co-produced about half of those 90 titles, and handled the other half as a sales agent. "Our first feature was an action movie called Cover-Up starring Dolf Lundgren. It didn't win at the Oscars that year, but it made money and it put us on the map," Barclay explains. "That's a reputation we guard quite jealously. So even if people ask us only to work on a movie as a sales agent, if we don't think it's going to make any money, we won't touch it."

Over the years, Capitol has built up a library comprising a hodge-podge of commercially viable arthouse titles such as The House of Mirth, star-driven fare such as A Good Man in Africa and generic B-movies to fill the gaps. Recent productions include the The Gathering, with Christina Ricci.

So what makes them decide to go ahead on a project? "Pragmatism is a guiding principle," says Barclay, "but I wouldn't do anything without a discussion. If I really liked something and Sharon was less keen it would make me question myself. And she would question herself, so you always arrive at a consensus somehow."

Two women at the top of a multi-million-dollar company is not something you often see in the movie business. "People used to call us 'the girls'. I always liked being called that - I thought it was quite affectionate." With Gosford Park, however, there's no doubting Harel and Barclay's adulthood.

katjahofmann@compuserve.com

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