As We Speak, the directorial debut from J.M. Harper, follows the growing phenomenon of rap lyrics being used during legal battles both in the U.S. and abroad. Rapper Kemba acts as a guide through the murky waters of the First Amendment, investigating who it protects—or doesn’t—when musicians and their art stand trial. First-time producer Sam Widdoes, who currently works as an attorney and was formerly a journalist, chronicles how he came aboard As We Speak and the myriad ways that his career background acted as a boon during the development of this documentary. See all responses to our questionnaire for […]

A French co-production shot entirely in Iran, In the Land of Brothers follows three Afghan refugees who struggle for decades to make Iran feel like a real home. The film is the debut feature of Raha Amirfazli and Alireza Ghasemi, who previously co-directed the short Solar Eclipse together. The film was produced by first-time producer Adrien Barrouillet, who discusses how he came up in the industry and recalls the moment he knew the film was in a good position. See all responses to our questionnaire for first-time Sundance producers here.  Filmmaker: Tell us about the professional path that led you to produce […]

In the Summers follows two sisters who, during their formative years, spend the summers visiting their caring but volatile father in New Mexico. The film is the feature debut of Alessandra Lacorazza and also the first producing credit for Daniel Tantalean. Below, Tantalean details the long journey in getting the film made, extols his mentors and community, and shares what he learned. See all responses to our questionnaire for first-time Sundance producers here. Filmmaker: Tell us about the professional path that led you to produce this film, your first? What jobs within and outside of the film industry did you do, […]

Premiering at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, A Different Man depicts a man who has a drastic surgery to alter his appearance, only to find out another actor is playing the person he used to be in a stage production. The film is director Aaron Schimberg’s follow up to the acclaimed Chained for Life and is produced by first-time producer Gabriel Mayers. Below, Mayers recounts some of the challenges in casting and makeup and sings the praises of her mentors and collaborators. See all responses to our questionnaire for first-time Sundance producers here. Filmmaker: Tell us about the professional path that led you […]

Attending boarding school in the Himalayas, 16-year-old Mira (Preeti Panigrahi) begins to embrace her emerging sexuality in Girls Will Be Girls, the feature debut from Indian writer-director Shuchi Talati. Mira’s exploration of desire is stunted by the middling presence of her mother (Kani Kusruti), whose disapproval likely stems from an inadequate coming-of-age process during her own youth. First-time producers Richa Chadha and Claire Chassagne—based, respectively, in India and France—share the challenges and rewards that came with working on Talati’s film. See all responses to our questionnaire for first-time Sundance producers here.  Filmmaker: Tell us about the professional path that led you […]

When the Payne family experiences a personal tragedy, they must leave the home they love in the remote Norwegian wilderness and enmesh themselves in the society they once felt so strongly opposed to in A New Kind of Wilderness, the latest documentary from filmmaker Silje Evensmo Jacobsen. First-time producer Mari Bakke Riise, who also served as the film’s editor, discusses how her long-time collaboration with Evensmo Jacobsen led to her multi-pronged involvement on this project. See all responses to our questionnaire for first-time Sundance producers here.  Filmmaker: Tell us about the professional path that led you to produce this film, your […]

A strange late-night TV show entrances teen loners, played by Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine, in I Saw the TV Glow, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s sophomore feature. The program depicts a supernatural world existing underneath the duo’s suburban sprawl, hinting at the horror that lurks just under the surface of white picket fence aspirations. First-time producer Sam Intili shares how they came on board the project and their pride in the finished film never compromising on “the queerness or explicit transness” of the material. See all responses to our questionnaire for first-time Sundance producers here.  Filmmaker: Tell us about the professional path […]

Thelma spins a real-life experience of director Josh Margolin’s grandmother into a comedic action film. The eponymous character, played by veteran character actor June Squibb (The Age of Innocence, Scent of a Woman, Far from Heaven) falls victim to a phone scammer claiming to be her grandson and begins a literal quest for justice. The film also marks the first producing credit for Chris Kaye, who recounts his long road to the gig, which began in earnest just as he was ready to throw in the towel and embark on a new career. See all responses to our annual Sundance first-time […]

Near the end of Matewan (1987), socialist union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper), a guiding light and galvanizing force for a West Virginia town of striking coal miners under siege, attempts to console frustrated young Danny Radnor (Will Oldham), a nascent preacher and union man. Overwhelmed by the violence and hardships they’ve suffered, the boy gives into despair, declaring in rage and desperation that it’s every man for himself. Joe’s stirring reply is that they must all look after each other, no matter what. Though followed by a long-brewing scene of climatic violence, this quiet but deeply moving moment between […]

At a small gathering recently at New York’s Posterati in honor of Jeremy Thomas, the legendary producer sat surrounded by international posters of the classic films he’s made over the course of his nearly 60-year career. Nodding at one for David Cronenberg’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s Crash, I tell him how much I love the film, whose Criterion re-release Joanne McNeil recently wrote about for Filmmaker. “You couldn’t make it today,” Thomas leans over to say to me. I know he’s right, but why exactly? Business reasons, cultural ones, or a confluence of the two?  “Every reason,” he tells me […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]