In College, when someone owns big ticket items like a colour TV and a kind-of-roadworthy car, friendships can form that last decades. Paul Wiegard and Tim Anderson (both 1988), met in first year, then shared houses after College. Despite individual clothing challenges, their strong bond was taken to the next level when they co-founded highly successful Madman Entertainment in 1996. Together, having distributed films such as Kenny, Spirited Away, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, The Australian Dream and Animal Kingdom, and creating streaming services DocPlay and AnimeLab, they are committed to both their friendship and the entertainment industry.

Paul

I will never forget the first time I saw him, he was this man (boy) mountain with a big head of curly hair, spotted cheeks walking in front of Eakins Hall. I came into Queen’s keen to play football, and I thought, ‘Well, we have our ruckman’. And I would later learn he struggled to get off the ground and was a handy step ladder for some opponents.

We were both there for four years but it was the summer of ’89-‘90 when we started to row together, that we really cemented our friendship. When you spend a lot of time together in a river boat you best get along.

He had a car. That was a rare commodity in those years. I didn’t have my licence so I wasn’t going anywhere and he’d been driving since he was 12. It had been thrashed in the paddocks of Willaura where he is from, and I learned why steel radials are called that, you could see the steel wire jutting out of the worn-out tyres. The first time I was in a car doing a handbrake turn was in the Queen’s College car park, it was quite a hair-raising moment. What appealed to me about him was my need for transport.

I came in with a cohort from Peninsula Grammar and the wonderful thing about College was the 50:50 representative mix of country and city kids. This was Tim and I and we just got along. It did help that he also had a television in his room. Tim introduced me to The Simpsons, which was very early days for the show, when they were piloting episodes.

He also introduced me to Village Cinemas, where he was working part time as an usher. Specifically, the back corridors, so we were be able to jump in and out of screenings, bypassing the Box Office. He was interested in pop culture and I was more into the auteur cinema playing at the Carlton Movie House (before there was Cinema Nova). In terms of taste we didn’t necessarily fully overlap, we just both enjoyed storytelling.

Our other shared passion was rowing.  Tim could pull an ergo like no-one else, he broke an ergo machine in front of the Oarsome Foursome one time which became the talk of the Melbourne University boat shed. He won’t remember the year, he’s hopeless with dates, but in 1991 we were selected to row in a Melbourne University crew to race in Japan on the Sumida River against crews from Keio, Waseda and Sydney Universities, and for both of us it was our first time overseas. Nowadays, I use a plane like a bus but back then it was rarefied air. We spent a couple of weeks together there and were introduced to anime which became a big passion of Tim’s.

Initially, my first job after uni involved importing magazines from all over the world, like The Village Voice, from New York, NME, Sight and Sound, etc for the major Australian Music promotors. It was pre-internet and they’d write about movies that were being released that would never make their way to Australian shores. That got me thinking. Concurrently, Tim was trying to get access to anime and sci-fi movies you couldn’t get in Australia. The first seed of Madman was born.

Going into business together came down to trust, and of course that’s easy with Tim. His caution has been good for me and vice versa, I probably push him into doing a few things. He’s quite methodical and I’m more about ideas. We didn’t have a business plan per se. We organically grew, trying to find the balance between creating demand and meeting demand with the films, labels we represented across a myriad of distribution channels.  And like many successful entrepreneurial stories we were fortunate with timing.

There’s never been a delineation between our work life and our friendship. We are friends first and foremost, and we just happen to work together. Everything we have done he has been straight down the line. It may be cliched but it doesn’t feel like work when you are doing something you have a deep understanding of, passion for and genuine interest in.

Tim’s remarkably balanced. He is the most stableperson I know, it’s not that he lacks emotion, he has gift for compartmentalising life, not worrying about the stuff he can’t control and never being caught up with competing against the guy next door.,

He was the best man at my wedding, and I was his best man. What was completely random was he had me wear a kilt. The only time Tim’s ever been Scottish was for his wedding. To this day, I don’t know what was going on with the Scottish thing, but we were freezing up at Albury that day.

He’s the most extroverted 6’8” bloke I’ve come across but he’s also very humble. He is not looking for endorsement or any public worship. He’s very comfortable being himself.

When you’ve known someone for so long, they don’t drive you mad, you just know who they are. He’s interested in the things he is interested in. Not to say he’s not curious, there’s just a whole suite of things he is not interested in, let’s say he is on his own orbit.

He had a nickname for himself: Pig, because his family had a piggery. He stamped “PIG” in silver studs across the back of his denim jacket, which he wore to a couple of music gigs, including The Angels.

I can picture that jacket so clearly. At one gig, Tim was standing front and centre, his towering figure silhouetted against the stage. The lights suddenly went out. When they came back on, The Angels’ lead singer, Doc Neeson, was sitting on Tim’s shoulders. As Doc launched into another song, the concert spotlights hit the back of Tim’s jacket, and the word “PIG” suddenly lit up in silver behind him. Unforgettable sight.

He is a friend for life. I can talk to him about anything. You can have your mates you see just in a social setting but to work with someone and have your own friendship outside, you really see the person. He probably knows me better than I know myself. We are very lucky.

Tim

At Queen’s, we were both participators, we would do everything on offer. Never played rugby before, off we go playing College rugby, learning the rules mid-game. We played football, Paul was good, I was so-so. I had rowed, he hadn’t and he started rowing. That’s when we got to know each other most, started doing a lot of things together, and became very close over the four years. I had an old XB Falcon that I inherited from the farm which I drove adventurously when I was young, we had lots of road trips together.

Paul is a very agreeable, inclusive sort of character. He always had a positive word for everyone, knew everyone. He didn’t take anything for granted, worked very hard to support himself with bursaries. Paul mowed lawns and would tow the mower behind my bike to get to a job. People might say I’m driven but Paul is really driven, motivated. I admire that about him.

We also bonded over movies, of course. My job at Village gave me free tickets so Paul and I would drive out to Airport West where they had eight screens and see any movie that was on. It was a fun thing we did together, and has obviously taken both of us in a positive direction.

My College room was famous because I had a home theatre set up. I was fiddling with surround sound, buying cheap speakers from the Trading Post. Everyone chipped in for my 21^st birthday and bought me a big 24-inch TV, which these days would be terrible. We would sit around in my room watching The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Detective’ and Conan the Barbarian.

I provided the TV and the car, I don’t know what Paul’s contribution was…. he probably pitched in some petrol money back then. He did pay me back years later, he was the one who had a car when all my family’s old cars had died. Ever the negotiator, and advising the car salesman he knew nothing about cars but planned to leave the showroom with one, he even got free floormats thrown in when he bought his grey Holden station wagon. A few years later the paint started flaking off and the metalwork rusted, but he drove that same car for many years with great pride, long after Madman was highly successful.

The business came about because we were both very interested in movies from a young age. Paul leaned in a more art-house, educated direction whereas I leaned towards science fiction and comic books. I gradually lost interest in uni and spent my spare time starting up small businesses. One of them was a mail order company for movies and Japanese animation that you couldn’t get in Australia, sowing seeds which became Madman. The opportunity came up to not just import but buy the rights to Neon Genesis Evangelion and it has been one of our best series. Initially running the business from our student share houses, we reinvested every dollar back into it. Madman’s first official VHS release was in 1996, and within about 5 years we had a team of more than 50 people and released hundreds of films each year.

The transition from friends to business partners was remarkably positive. There has always been mutual respect and trust, so over the four decades we have never had a fight, it’s not in either of our personalities. It’s because we spent so much time together at College, in share houses, in rowing boats, and somehow connected and accepted each other, almost like a sibling relationship. Work and personal life are intertwined.

We have lots of fun together. On my LinkedIn it says I like to work with passionate, smart, funny people and Paul is passionate and smart. We have a joke that Paul has a quota of how often he is able to be genuinely funny and it’s about three times a year.

Paul and I both agree, one of the wonderful and amazing things about the time we had in College, was the opportunity to do silly things. In Madman’s culture that has really come through. We are always working hard and striving to be better but the culture of the business is simultaneously relaxed, irreverent and fun.

We do differ in some ways. I’m an incredibly clear, quick communicator, particularly in a business situation. Paul likes to paint a picture and take you on a journey. It seems like he’s not really answering the question, and you can be left wondering, but because I know Paul very well, I understand how he communicates. Quite often I find myself acting as his interpreter. I step in and say, ‘What Paul really meant by that was this.’

The pig jacket…. I think I was a bit of a show off then. What was I thinking?  But over the years, Paul should have done washing more often. He would come to an important business meeting on his bike in a dirty T-shirt he’d been wearing for the last week, and unwashed jeans. Because Madman was all about results we have never pretended to play business with the sharp dressing. In our share houses, Paul’s damp rowing clothes would build up into a smelly hay stack and when my dear mother visited, she would wash them.

I’ve had a fairly fortunate life and I don’t have bleak moments or feel fragile so I haven’t needed to lean on him. That soft and fuzzy, warm stuff between us is more unspoken; a punch in the arm and a nuanced way of saying something, but at the same time you know you are there for each other. He is quite a stoic, typical strong male. In challenging times, he works harder. He doesn’t openly fray, you just might get glimpses of him managing something under the surface. We are both fairly steady characters along those lines.

As best man at his wedding I made a joke of comparing the sum total of all the time we had spent together through College, share-houses, rowing boats, car trips, global travel, movies, and workdays, which outstripped both his mother, wife, and anyone else present by a vast margin. 

Our relationship is equal parts friendship, acceptance, respect and trust. I loved all parts of my Queen’s journey, but consider my fortunate partnership with Paul its greatest gift.

 L-R Tim with Monty, Paul with Sammy