The following appeared in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 2000 edition accompanying All Tomorrow’s Yesterdays, an article in which four filmmakers reflect on the work of Alain Resnais. — Editor Anatole Dauman, through his company Argos Films, produced or co-produced many of the masterworks of postwar European cinema – including Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog; Hiroshima, Mon Amour; Last Year at Marienbad; and Muriel.Following his death in 1998, his daughter, Florence Dauman (herself a producer of A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Cinema), assumed control of the company, which today houses the greatest collection of independent cinema in France. Ms. Dauman […]

In television, the position of the showrunner covers so much territory and entails supervising so many different jobs that it can be difficult to define. Many showrunners are writers who create their series. Others are hired to execute a creator’s vision, but all have vital responsibilities stretching across the entirety of a season, from pre-production work with writers to supervising the directors and production team during shooting and overseeing vital post-production work. One showrunner from a writing background is Soo Hugh, who began her career on the feature side of the industry but switched to television when she was hired […]

“Producing is an identity,” said producer Karin Chien in her keynote speech at this year’s virtual Sundance Producers Brunch. She continued, “It is a tribe, it is an active community and is it is an artistic practice that encompasses more than can be communicated. A producer solves problems and creates problems, good problems. A producer questions why things are the way they are. We are independent producers because we subvert, and we complicate the status quo, with the intention of forwarding new thoughts, ideas voices and stories, our culture, our communities and our industry depend on us to do this.” […]

Max Walker-Silverman’s A Love Song pits a pair of reconnected childhood sweethearts—both now widowed—against the backdrop of an intimate American West. Shot in rural Colorado in the midst of the COVID pandemic, the film required precautions in excess of what was stipulated in then-new union guidelines, necessitating everyone involved to enter and form a “bubble” for the duration of production. First-time producer Jesse Hope discusses the difficulties and rewards of such an approach and how his experience working on sets with directors like Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers prepared him to take the reins. Filmmaker: Tell me about the […]

The Sundance Dramatic Competition entry Nanny, a horror story about an immigrant domestic child-care worker in New York who’s saving to bring her own young son over from Senegal, is the first feature produced by New York-based Nikkia Moulterie. It’s her reunion with writer/director Nikyatu Jusu after producing the writer/director’s excellent 2019 short, Suicide by Sunlight, and it follows a decade-long career producing shorts, UPM’ing features and producing commercials and music videos. Below, Moulterie discusses the way she met and bonded with Jusu, the challenges of producing a feature during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the advice she’d give to new producers […]

The big sale — to Apple for a reported $15 million — of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Cha Cha Real Smooth is writer, director and lead actor Cooper Raiff’s follow-up to his 2020 debut, SHITHOUSE. Again essaying a twentysomething young man navigating the indeterminate period before real life and real romance takes hold, Cha Cha Real Smooth finds Raiff’s character, Andrew, working a dead-end fast-food job while working side gigs as a bar mitzvah party starter and babysitter. When he demonstrates a rapport with a 12-year-old autistic girl (Vanessa Burghardt), her mother, Domino (played by Dakota Johnson, also a […]