Producers
Interviews - Producers
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The ’80s NYC Art Scene, DIY Doc Filmmaking and the Hustle of Self-Promotion: Director Brian Vincent and Producer Heather Spore on Make Me Famous
There’s a moment early in director Brian Vincent and producer Heather Spore’s documentary Make Me Famous when the ’80s downtown New York artist Edward Brezinski is described by the late artist Duncan Hannah as the guy with the flyers. Brezinski would show up at openings, drink the cheap wine and press flyers for group shows at the Magic Gallery (his own barren apartment on East 3rd Street) into as many palms as possible. In a world where the most successful artists managed to self-promote while simultaneously adopting a pose of understated remove, Brezinski’s old-school hucksterism was memorably uncool. As the […]
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“It Really Does Take a Village”: Ted Schaefer on Giving Birth to a Butterfly
Our projected identities—and the constant performance inherent in presenting ourselves—fuel the surrealist philosophy of Ted Schaefer’s Giving Birth to a Butterfly. The filmmaker’s directorial debut, from a script he co-wrote with author Patrick Lawler, delves into a psychedelic psychology of what truly constitutes “the self” (very fitting for a collaborative duo who met through a mutual therapist). Giving Birth to a Butterfly largely consists of a roadtrip odyssey shared by Diana (Annie Parisse), a pharmacist stuck in an unfulfilling marriage to aspiring chef Daryl (Paul Sparks), and Marlene (Gus Birney), a heavily pregnant young woman who’s dating Diana’s son Drew […]
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“It’s a Good Thing We Didn’t Shoot in New Zealand”: Writer-Director Laurel Parmet and Producer Kara Durrett on The Starling Girl
The following interview first ran as part of our Sundance 2023 coverage. The Starling Girl releases in theaters today in NYC and LA via Bleecker Street, with more cities to follow. — Editor Telling the story of Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen), a 17-year-old living in a Christian fundamentalist community in rural Kentucky, Laurel Parmet’s debut feature, The Starling Girl, has been years in the making, Parmet first began writing the screenplay in 2017, soon after the premiere of one of her shorts and the wrap of another. Like her previous work, The Starling Girl positions the viewer within the complex […]
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“Being an Outsider to Palm Springs Was an Asset”: Sara Newens, Mina T. Son and Courtney Parker on Racist Trees
Sara Newens and Mina T. Son’s provocatively titled Racist Trees begins as an innocent investigation into the root (no pun intended) of a half-century dispute over a line of 60-foot tamarisks separating a historically Black section of Palm Springs from its historically white (and now overwhelmingly gay cisgender male) neighbors on the other side of a city-owned golf course. The film morphs into something much more shocking than merely another example of systemic inequality and the longstanding “polite” racism of white liberals who prefer gaslighting to admissions of culpability. Indeed, in the slyest and boldest of moves, the white and […]
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An Interview With Glass Onion Producer Ram Bergman
In the early 1990s, the playbook for beginning independent producers used to be this: Find a budding auteur, make their first ultra-low-budget film, sell it at a festival, then partner with the director on larger, increasingly successful projects, allowing both careers to grow symbiotically. Independent film does contain such partnerships—Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes is a notable one and, more recently, the producing team of Toby Halbrooks and James M. Johnston and director David Lowery—but countless others fizzle out. Sometimes, the stress of a first feature generates behavior from either party that shuts down any thought of future collaboration. Other […]
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“What Would Resnais Bring Back from Japan? I Had Not a Clue”: Producer Anatole Dauman on Alain Resnais, Night and Fog and Hiroshima Mon Amour
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 […]
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Emotional History: Pachinko Creator and Showrunner Soo Hugh
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 […]
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Sundance First-Time Dramatic Competition Producers Discuss Career Paths and the Challenging Producing Landscape
“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.” […]
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“The Biggest Challenge Facing Producers and the Film Industry at Large Is an Unhealthy Relationship to Labor”: Producer Jesse Hope on A Love Song
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 […]
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“When Building a Team Around Your Film, Don’t Forget to Build Your Own”: Nikkia Moulterie on Producing the Sundance Horror Drama, Nanny
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 […]
