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P. 38 DOCMAKERS SARA BERNSTEIN, LISA ERSPAMER AND TONYA LEWIS LEE HELP SHINE THE LIGHT ON EVERYDAY HEROES
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VICTORIA ALONSO Marvel Studios’ production maven dons the heavy cape of responsibility with seemingly effortless ease and grace
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VICTORIA ALONSO ENJOYS SOME DOWNTIME WITH EXEC PRODUCERS STEPHEN BROUSSARD, LEFT, AND CHARLES NEWIRTH ON THE SET OF IRON MAN 3.
FEATURES 24 GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE
50 THE FANTASIST
Victoria Alonso, Marvel Studios’ president of physical production, postproduction, visual effects and animation, dons the heavy cape of responsibility with remarkable grace.
Lindsey Weber, an executive producer on the eagerly anticipated Lord of the Rings sequel, The Rings of Power, knows a thing or two about shepherding big IPs to fruition.
38 ONE-ON-ONE ENCOUNTERS
58 EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE
Two pairs of producers, Ian Cooper and Emile Gladstone and Max Borenstein and Erica Lee, talk horror and sports dramas, respectively, in the second of a Produced By series.
Docmakers Sara Bernstein, Lisa Erspamer and Tonya Lewis Lee help shine the light on everyday heroism as a galvanizing force against social justice.
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EVA LONGORIA AND CHARLES D. KING TRADE INSIGHTS AT THE PGA’S ANNUAL PRODUCED BY CONFERENCE IN JUNE.
DEPARTMENTS 14 TOGETHER AGAIN
66 MARKING TIME
After two years of remote confabbing, pros and acolytes alike gather on the Fox Studio lot for the PGA’s annual Produced By Conference.
Ellen Goldsmith-Vein shares her insights on the making of the upcoming Wendell & Wild, which earned her the Producers Mark.
19 A DAY IN THE LIFE
69 MEMBER BENEFITS
Gabriela Rodriguez, who runs Alfonso Cuarón’s production company, Esperanto Filmoj, measures her work routine by her coffee consumption.
Belonging to the Guild brings multiple rewards.
23 NEW MEMBERS
On the 25th anniversary of Titanic, we examine how James Cameron and producing partner Jon Landau proved their naysayers wrong with a blockbuster for the ages.
As you flip through the pages of Produced By, get acquainted with the PGA’s newest members and discover what makes them tick.
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TOGETHER AGAIN PRODUCED BY CONFERENCE 2022, JUNE 11-12, FOX STUDIO LOT After two years of remote confabbing due to the COVID pandemic, the 13th annual Produced By Conference once again brought together a wide spectrum of industry pros of all stripes, this time on the Fox Studio lot. More than 1,000 invitees attended over the course of a sunny weekend, with topics that ranged from freewheeling (“Creative Producers From A to Z,” “Pitch Perfect”) to the highly technical (“Virtual Production for Independent Filmmakers,” “Artificial Intelligence Dymystified”); and panelists both famous (Viola Davis, Eva Longoria, Seth MacFarlane) and revered among their peers (Redwagon partner and PGA president Lucy Fisher, Rideback CEO Dan Lin, Netflix head of scripted series Peter Friedlander, Amazon Studios head of development Marc Resteghini). There was also much discussion about diversity across several panels. The Hollywood Reporter’s Rebecca Sun posed a conventional wisdom-vs.-myth question to Longoria, the founder of UnbeliEVAble Entertainment, about the assumption that there are either not enough qualified members of underrepresented groups when it comes to recruiting for key positions, or “they’re not hiring white people anymore.” “The second one is not true,” asserted the actor-producer. “You see it in the statistics.” But she also said that producers have to do the work by giving novices a chance to gain valuable experience, citing her hiring of a Latino DP, Federico Cantini, on her theatrical feature directorial debut, Flamin’ Hot. “They kept saying, ‘He’s never done a movie of this size.’ I said: ‘I’ve never done a movie of this size!’ You haven’t done it until you’ve done it.” Photographed BY Jordan Strauss/Invision
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A DAY IN THE LIFE
LONDON CALLING Gabriela Rodriguez’s work routine is measured by her coffee consumption. In the producer’s Own Words
Gabriela Rodriguez has worked with the Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón for the better part of two decades, and has the distinction of being the first female producer of Latin descent to earn an Oscar Best Picture nomination, for Cuarón’s semi-autobiographical feature Roma (2019). She’s currently an executive producer on the series Disclaimer—written and directed by Cuarón, and starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline—which is shooting in London as the first project of an overall deal between Apple TV+ and Cuarón’s Esperanto Filmoj, which Rodriguez heads. She describes a typical work
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routine, fueled by caffeine, but not of the typical British variety.
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A DAY IN THE LIFE
G
rowing up in Venezuela, I wanted to be a producer since I was 13 years old. I didn’t even know what the job entailed, but now that I’ve been doing it for so many years, I realize that my 13-year-old self was right. I’m incredibly privileged to be able to work doing what I love. Based out of London, I run Alfonso Cuarón’s production company, Esperanto Filmoj. Currently my working life revolves around juggling our development slate, while also being on set every day for the past five months–with many more to go. Truly, no two days are alike as of late. That’s why when I was asked to describe what a day in my life looked like, I had to stop and think about how to describe it. I’ve noticed that since I started running Esperanto Filmoj— where my responsibilities include developing an extensive and eclectic slate of projects while also producing the project that Alfonso is currently directing—I have definitely been drinking a lot more coffee. So I thought what better way to summarize my work-life balance than by describing how I take my coffee that day? So, the Gaby coffee rulebook proceeds as follows:
Small & Potent If I’m holding a very small cup of coffee on set, it means it’s a double espresso kind of day, and that I need highly concentrated coffee. It’s likely already a tough morning—apart from the fact that I’m not a morning person, so every morning is already tough. When COVID cases are high and the crew is forcibly reduced, or when the set is taking longer to light, or a location is proving tricky to shoot in because of neighbors or weather conditions, then that’s a day when the strongest coffee consumption starts before call time. I’ll probably carry on at that rate during the day.
Medium & Mellow If I have a medium-size cup of coffee, it means that the day started well. We have a full crew, our DP and director like the set, and actors are ready on time. This scenario means I can add milk to my coffee. On days like these, I can also have meetings (mostly on Zoom) with my Esperanto team, and we can talk about our slate of projects that are at different stages of development or production. We get to plan pitches, discuss literary and scripted submissions, and strategize on the best way to move each project forward. It’s a great privilege to actively be on set producing a show directed by Alfonso Cuarón with Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel as DPs, and at the same time, be able to work with a team that is developing and overseeing our other productions. It’s truly a first for me, and I never thought that I would be able to juggle so much.
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Spiked! Lastly, if you find me with a carajillo (my all-time favorite drink—a shot of espresso with Licor 43), then it’s likely that I am having a very relaxed weekend and can spend some time reading submissions and listening to podcasts. These past few years I’ve realized that my favorite way to unwind is through podcasts. I can spend an entire day listening to a series, like binge-watching a show, and at the same time be able to cook— although I am a terrible cook—and organize drawers, closets or any version of a menial task that can help me clear my head. Up until five years ago, I didn’t drink any coffee, but now it’s the engine that keeps me going at work. However, what truly keeps me sane is my weekly canasta card game with my gal pals, which is genuinely the biggest highlight of my week.
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P G A AT YO U R SERVICE
NEW MEMBERS Produced By trains the spotlight on some of the Guild’s newest members, and offers a glimpse at what makes them tick.
PRODUCER’S ROLE IN A NUTSHELL
“Hustlers, ha ha ha ha. You have to be a hustler in order to get your project made. It’s a tough job, but it can also be fun and rewarding at times.”
ZOE, CISELY AND MARIEL SALDAÑA Moviegoers are familiar with Zoe Saldaña from her key turns in Avatar, as well as the Star Trek and Marvel Avengers series. But she’s also part of a sister act, having cofounded Cinestar Pictures with siblings Cisely and Mariel in 2014. They view their mission as “broadening the American narrative and creating meaningful, character-driven content,” with the added incentive to present “honest portrayals of women and giving voice to the underrepresented.” Their credits include the feature The Honor List (2018) and the miniseries Rosemary’s Baby (2014), in which Zoe starred as Rosemary. Currently airing for the production company is Gordita
Chronicles, a series about a Dominican family who immigrate to Miami in the ’80s. It premiered on HBO Max on June 23. The sisters, who are of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, answered our questions collectively via email.
LIGHTBULB MOMENT THAT CONVINCED YOU TO BECOME A PRODUCER: “There has always been an unwavering desire to tell our own stories—whether they’re stories that reflect our intersectionality, or stories that represent important themes in our respective lives. We love storytelling, but being at the helm of a story is empowering and we are all for that.”
PRODUCER INSPIRATIONS: “We are very inspired by powerhouse female producers such as Victoria Alonso. She has the backing of an immense studio like Marvel. With that we understand it must carry great responsibility, and Victoria executes with precision. We are producing a show with her currently about the empowerment of the women in the Marvel universe. She is teaching us so much about what it takes to be a great producer.”
BIGGEST MISCONCEPTION ABOUT PRODUCERS: “That producers are artless and all corporate. We are not those producers. We handle all the corporate work so that the art can grow and reach the people.”
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GUARDIAN of the UNIVERSE
Known for her acute organization, stringent attention to detail and overall fearlessness, Marvel production maven Victoria Alonso dons the heavy cape of responsibility with remarkable ease and grace. Written By Erin Maxwell photographed By kremer johnson
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GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE
V
iewers who’ve waded through more than a few tentpole franchise closing credits know that it takes a village, if not a province, to help steer these big-screen behemoths from start to finish. And though managing a crew of thousands, with budgets of well north of $100 million average—all while simultaneously handling several different productions for both television and theatrical—might be a tad challenging for some, at this point for Victoria Alonso, it’s a Tuesday. “People always ask what’s the secret sauce that has worked for you guys,” says Alonso, the president of physical production, postproduction, visual effects and animation at Marvel Studios. “I think the secret sauce is collaboration.” It’s not an unusual observation from someone whose first instinct is to deflect credit away from the individual, especially herself, to the collective. “We’re pretty good at collaborating with each other and leaning on each other depending on what the needs of the movie or the show are,” she adds. “That has never changed. It was there from the very beginning, and it has continued to be there 17 years later.” Marvel Studios is a beast with many masters. A subsidiary of The Walt Disney Studios, Marvel has been churning out blockbusters and event programming since before the Disney merger in 2009, when Iron Man (2008) signaled the beginning of a new era for the company previously known as Marvel Films. In its present incarnation, Kevin Feige—president of Marvel Studios and chief creative
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We’re pretty good at collaborating with each other and leaning on each other depending on what the needs of the movie or the show are. That has never changed. ”
officer for Marvel Comics, Marvel Television and Marvel Animation—and Marvel co-president Louis D’Esposito, oversee the beast, which now spans an empire of comics, movies, television, marketing and theme park attractions. The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s stock-in-trade is the superhero, and the challenge has always been expanding its audience beyond its comic book fan base. It’s not as easy as the box office returns might indicate. How does one balance big-screen battles and complex otherworldly environments with compelling narratives and conflicted characters? It’s an especially difficult task when new spandex-wearing, breast-plated supers pop up with increasing regularity in theaters and on television. For Alonso, the trick is not being overwhelmed by the bigness of it all. “It’s like eating an elephant,” she jokes with her characteristic, unflappable ease. “You’ve just gotta get through that first bite, chew it, and keep on going. It’s one step at a time. I think the same way that you attack an indie film, where you have a crew of 50 or 20, you attack one of these very large productions, which has 6,000 people worldwide. I don’t mean just the shooting portion of it. I mean all that it takes—from prep to the last frame that goes into the movie theaters or Disney+.” Alonso cannot emphasize prep and planning enough, but also having a fallback plan. “It’s about having not just plan A, because plan A mostly doesn’t work,” she points out. “You have plan A but also you have plan
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These actors, and the wonderfully delicious
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GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE
B, plan C, plan D, and hopefully one of them will work.”
WORKFLOW GEEK The Marvel executive’s propensity for organization was apparent early on, when in 1991 she moved from Seattle to Los Angeles, where she was asked by an AD friend to work as a PA on a movie. This led to Alonso working on commercials for Ridley and Tony Scott’s company, RSA Films. Digital Domain, which was doing VFX on one of these spots, took notice of Alonso’s initiative and her inquisitiveness and offered her a job helping out the company’s longtime executive VP of production, Ed Ulbrich, after his assistant broke her leg. What began as a temporary stint lasted four years. She started out as an assistant coordinator on commercial campaigns. But soon she moved on to big-screen, big-budget affairs, ending up as a visual effects producer on Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003) and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005), among other key credits. As she told VFX Voice, the magazine of the Visual Effects Society, in 2017: “I started asking a lot of questions, and they seemed to think, ‘This girl seems smart enough, friendly enough, cares enough.’” In terms of learning the intricacies of the VFX process, she called her time at Digital Domain onthe-job training. “I figured if I could understand how they did it, I could help them maximize the efficiencies of how we get the image where it needs to go so that we have happy clients,” she told VFXV. “My entire process was in breaking down how to get things done in hours it didn’t appear we had and reassembling the workflow to get ahead of the curve.” Alonso has referred to herself as a
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“workflow geek” who was self-taught, eventually figuring out “how to achieve the artistic vision with the team.” “That was the beginning,” she tells Produced By. “(After that) I never left visual effects. Once I was bit by the visual effects bug and realized that you can create anything—anything— out of nothing, I saw the true magic of what that department can do. It’s the language I understand most: sound and images.” But making the jump to VFX wasn’t always easy. Luckily, she happened to pick an industry filled with folks who spoke her language. “I wasn’t mentored,” says Alonso. “I sort of stumbled through, but I was very curious. The beautiful thing about nerds and geeks, who are my favorites, is if you ask, they’ll teach you, because they love to share their knowledge and to connect with someone who is interested. So I sat for hours on end with a number of digital supervisors and visual effects supervisors, who were all men, and they taught me. They were pretty wonderful. It wasn’t exclusive whatsoever.” It might have been largely a man’s world, but there were exceptions, which fed Alonso’s determination to succeed despite the odds. “It was mostly male,” she reminds, “but Digital Domain did have a number of female producers. And we did have the head of features, Brooke Breton. I remember watching her—she was pregnant—and she was walking into work and I kept thinking, ‘That’s really cool,’ that she can come in with her big belly and she can do her job.’ I looked up to her as a mom who could do the job she loved.” As a high-ranking woman in the VFX field, her visibility as a trailblazer helped lay the groundwork for others to follow her path.
ORIGIN STORY As with all good heroes, there is a compelling origin story. Raised in Argentina during a time of great turmoil due to the military dictatorship of the era, Alonso’s childhood was plagued by violence and instability. At age 19, she moved from Buenos Aires to Seattle, where she studied psychology and theater at the University of Washington. “I tried acting a little bit because I thought I loved the theater,” she recalls. “The theater in Argentina saved my life. Because when I wasn’t marching during the military dictatorship, which could become pretty deadly, I was at the theater. So the theater felt very much like a safe place for me to go.” It was in the theater that Alonso got her first taste of production. “The moment that I started learning what production was, I was hooked.”
THE JUMP TO MARVEL In 2006, Alonso joined Marvel as the chief of visual effects and postproduction and received her first feature producer credit, as coproducer in 2008 for Iron Man—the film that would launch Marvel Studios into the stratosphere and make it a dominant force in the moviemaking industry. In September of last year, Alonso was promoted to president of physical and postproduction from her previous position of executive VP of production. As such, Alonso surveys the slate of films and series for Marvel Studios, overseeing its vast crews and postproduction. “She is one of the most dynamic, candid and accessible executives in the industry, and we’re thrilled that she’ll continue to be by our side in this elevated role as we lead Marvel Studios into the future,” Feige said about Alonso at the time of the announcement.
GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE
COURTESY WALT DISNEY STUDIOS
Victoria Alonso confers with director Taika Waititi, right, and exec producer Brad Winderbaum on Thor: Ragnarok (2017).
During her tenure at Marvel Studios, the films she worked on have hauled in more than $25 billion at the box office. In just the last few years, she served as executive producer on such megahits as Spider-Man: Far from Home, Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel, Eternals, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Thor: Love and Thunder. For Disney+, she worked magic on the MCU series slate including WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, What If…?, the docuseries Marvel
Studios: Assembled, Hawkeye, and Moon Knight.
IN THE LABYRINTH Perhaps one of the most brilliant plays in recent years from the Marvel playbook has been its ability to use all assets at its disposal to fully flesh out the stories of its superheroes— and the occasional villain. By using Disney+ series, Marvel is able to make large, more complicated aspects of the Marvel universe understandable to the uninitiated.
For example, labyrinthine ideas such as the multiverse or the Time Variance Authority can get convoluted if explained to a casual movie fan who has never picked up a Marvel comic. But by using the small screen to break down the concept and explain it in bite-size bits flavored with tasty character story arcs, the audience is given what they need to conquer the next big-screen effort that fully embraces those hard-tograsp mythologies. To make sure everything stays on the right storytelling path, it takes
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GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE
ONCE I WAS BIT BY THE VISUAL EFFECTS BUG AND REALIZED THAT YOU CAN CREATE ANYTHING—ANYTHING—OUT OF NOTHING, I SAW THE TRUE MAGIC OF WHAT THAT DEPARTMENT CAN DO. IT’S THE LANGUAGE I UNDERSTAND MOST: SOUND AND IMAGES.” a veritable army of creatives under the guidance of Alonso, Feige and D’Esposito, who head communication between the troops—and among themselves with weekly meetings— making sure the fabric of the Marvel tapestry remains intact. “We have our slates and our movies and our storylines plastered on walls,” says Alonso, “and we weave through the different fibers of the MCU. Then it is crafted based on where we are with that story in particular. It is intricate. There’s not just three people (overseeing it). There’s a lot of people taking a look at where things are so that we don’t make mistakes. We have an amazing team of creatives that is consistently saying, ‘Hey, but if we do this, if we put that string there, it will affect these three things that we’re doing here.’ So when one thing starts affecting the other, then we know if it’s going to trigger the domino effect of disaster or if it’s really going to get us through in the way that the story is supposed to be told.” And what wondrous stories have been told. Thanks to Marvel Studios, longtime fans of the brand finally got to see their favorite Silver Age heroes swing between skyscrapers, enter mystical and magical wars with evil sorcerers, witness the rise of Ragnarok,
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and wage grand battles with alien beasts in New York. All were made possible with the groundbreaking VFX under Alonso’s watchful eye. Each constituted a considerable challenge, but a few were perhaps a bit more arduous than others because of sentimental reasons. “The end battle of Avengers: Endgame was not only challenging, but emotional,” recounts Alonso. “I think it’s such a responsibility because we have this saga that has taken over 10 years of telling stories, and all eyes were on every single thing we had ever done.” Adds Alonso: “We had over 44 characters that we had to pay tribute to. We had to include the head to tell a part of the story. And it had to be so you were not numb by (the time of) the fight. How do you make it emotional when you’re going to lose two of your most important Avengers? How do you not let the emotion of that loss get the most of you as a filmmaker and still tell the story that people want to see over and over—but also that are moved in the way that you are moved? We live with these characters. They become our friends, as they do for other people.”
EARNING A LEGACY The end result is a legacy for the ages— not just what is on the screen, but also
Alonso herself. To Marvel fans she is part of a credit scroll, but to peers and those in the know, she is seen as an innovator. “Victoria is a great combination of fearlessness, demanding, and trusting,” says Lynwen Brennan, executive vice president and general manager of Lucasfilm. “Marvel has such a breadth of work in the pipeline that it can develop consistent relationships with VFX vendors. And Victoria works so closely with us; she knows and trusts what we are capable of doing. We have been fortunate enough to work with her and the Marvel team since the first Iron Man film, and it has been a wonderful collaboration. Victoria has always been there to encourage us to innovate and go further—whether that be the very first Iron Man, or the digital acting advancements in Smart Hulk, the world warping of Doctor Strange or the complex battle scenes in Avengers: Infinity War.” Brennan says there’s a reason why Marvel films “have been nominated for a Visual Effects Academy Award almost every year for the last 14 years. Not only do they contain fantastic visual spectacle, but the spectacle is always in service to the story. That is where Victoria is unique. As an executive producer on all the films and one of the leaders steering the MCU, she is not only in the details of every shot, she knows
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why the shot is important.” In 2017, Alonso became the first woman to be awarded with the VES Visionary Award, recognizing her contribution to the industry, the art of visual effects and her leadership at the studio. It is a badge of honor she is proud of, particularly as one who constantly advocates for more women in the VFX industry. “Victoria has elevated visual effects as an integral element of the art and business of moviemaking,” said VES board chair Mike Chambers at the time, adding that Alonso’s leadership “is paving the way for future generations of artists and producers” by redefining “the profile of visual effects on a global scale.” Chambers added that Alonso’s status as a pioneer has to do with her
fearlessness. “She doesn’t shy away from a challenge and she makes sure that she is able to get the resources needed to make it happen,” he explained. “Her honesty builds trust both with the VFX vendors and her teams, and with the directors and her co-executive producers. She will say things that others may not say, but that need to be said. She will push for change and be a champion for those who are not yet equally represented in our industry.”
EQUALITY AND VISIBILITY Creating a better tomorrow is exactly what Alonso has in mind. Recently, she was honored with the Visionary Award at the Outfest Legacy Awards for her contributions to LGBTQ+ representation
and media visibility, an important acknowledgement for an exec who wants to “stir up” conversation about equality and visibility in Hollywood. “Diversity and inclusion is not a political game for us,” said Alonso, who is married to a same-sex partner, in her speech. “It is 100% a responsibility because you don’t get to have the global success that we have given the Walt Disney Company without the support of people around the world of every kind of human there is.” When Alonso looks back at her 30 years in the industry, she emphasizes that there is not one road to success. “Just because it’s worked for others or for me doesn’t mean that you have to follow that road,” she offers. “Follow
COURTESY WALT DISNEY STUDIOS
Alonso, center, huddles with actors Richard Madden and Gemma Chan on the set of Eternals, directed by arthouse darling Chloé Zhao in her Marvel debut.
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Alonso interacts with Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow during production of Iron Man 3 (2013).
your own path. And when you’re not allowed in certain rooms, create that room for yourself.”
HOPE AND FAITH In addition to hero stories, Alonso is in the business of telling human stories. Though she is not by any means taking a break from Marvel, Alonso is taking a moment to tell a different kind of story—a passion project called Argentina, 1985 about a public prosecutor, an inexperienced lawyer and a legal team that dared to prosecute the heads of Argentina’s military dictatorship despite the personal danger to themselves. Directed by Santiago Mitre for Amazon Studios, Alonso will act as a producer on the film, which is a story that is very near and dear to her heart. “This is the story of a group of attorneys that took the military dictatorship to court,” she explains about the successful prosecution of many of the junta’s offenders. “There’s an outcome, obviously, that is historical—the first time in history a non-military court got this done. They were heroes in their own way.” The story mirrors Alonso’s youth in Argentina, which she describes as an “incredibly sad and heinous chapter of our history. I’m a survivor of the military dictatorship. And I think for my daughter and every other new generation, it’s important for them to know that the kind of genocide that was committed should be talked about, and people should be reminded of, because if we don’t remind ourselves of the historical past, then we may fall into those hands again.” In all the movies Alonso helps create,
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GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE
NEW MEMBERS PRODUCED BY TRAINS THE SPOTLIGHT ON SOME OF THE GUILD’S NEWEST MEMBERS, AND OFFERS A GLIMPSE AT WHAT MAKES THEM TICK.
CATHERINE PAPPAS Catherine Pappas’ TV credits run the gamut from casting (Wife Swap) to director (Undercover Boss, Auction Hunters) to consulting producer (Jerseylicious, Glam Fairy) to field producer (The Voice) to supervising producer (Cake Boss: Next Great Baker) to showrunner (Get Out of My Room) to executive producer on the current Disney+ series Family Reboot, which premiered in June. She says she came to producing from the performance side of things. “As an actor I always loved being part of the ensemble that helped to tell a story, and soon realized that producing carried the same joy for me,” she recounts. “As a producer you are the connector, the glue, and you work to build a team and establish an environment that allows people to thrive and bring their best creative work to the table. It’s exciting to watch it all come together and know that you had a part in bringing a project to life.” BUCKET LIST
“To produce a project on every continent. I have two left: Australia and Antarctica.” PRODUCER’S ROLE IN A NUTSHELL:
“There are so many variables in this industry that you can’t control, but what you can control is the heart you put into your work and the team you put in place to make that happen. Show up, do the work, and surround yourself with a diverse team. A variety of perspectives and life experiences bring creative solutions you may have never considered before—and that brings even more depth and heart to the project. Be the connector.”
JUST BECAUSE IT’S WORKED FOR OTHERS OR FOR ME DOESN’T MEAN THAT YOU HAVE TO FOLLOW THAT ROAD,” SHE OFFERS. “FOLLOW YOUR OWN PATH. AND WHEN YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED IN CERTAIN ROOMS, CREATE THAT ROOM FOR YOURSELF.” particularly Marvel movies, there is an underlying message of hope and faith. Between the action sequences, battle scenes and spectacular visual effects, there lies a very human story that touches almost everyone who has ever loved a Marvel saga. This is due to the carefully constructed backstories given to not just the heroes, but the villains as well, fleshing out the world in which they live beyond the concept of good versus evil. This is not an accident. In each Marvel character, the possibility of change for the better lies at the core of their being. For villains who survive to live another day, there is the hope that they will become better people, or gods, and live up to their full potential. “I think that there’s no point in living if you don’t have hope,” says Alonso. “So of course that in some way is going to seep through our storytelling. I think it’s also important for any mind, especially the young minds, to see themselves and
to see that even though at times we all have doubts and we may stumble, a slip is not a fall. Sometimes you just have to get up and get up and get up, like Captain Marvel did. You get up and you get up and you go out again. Because there’s always that chance that if you take that one step again, you’re going make it through.” Alonso views this ray of hope not just as a through line in the Marvel universe, but as a responsibility. “We’re quite conscious that we have the eyes and the ears of a global audience,” she says, “so a message of positivity and hope is incredibly important. For some kids, the only hopeful moment they have is when they see these movies, because everything else happening in their lives perhaps is of a different kind. “So to be able to do that, to be able to give that to a kid—or the kid within you—that’s the gift of telling these kinds of stories.”
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IN THEIR OWN WORDS In the second of a series that pairs producers to discuss their modus operandi, Emile Gladstone (The Invitation) and Ian Cooper (Nope) talk horror, and Max Borenstein (Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty) and Erica Lee (Bruised) talk sports dramas.
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WITH A SOCIOLOGICAL SUBTEXT Producers Ian Cooper and Emile Gladstone are in the horror business, but they approach it from different angles. Cooper, with a fine arts background, is Jordan Peele’s partner at Monkeypaw Productions, the company behind the recently released Nope, a mashup of alien invasion movie, contemporary Western and meditation on moviemaking. Gladstone hails from the talent agency world, where he was a partner at ICM as co-head of its motion picture literary department. When he and Cooper sat down via Zoom to talk shop for Produced By, Gladstone was in post on The Invitation (August 26), a modern-day vampire tale born in the #MeToo movement. Compared to Nope, The Invitation might be considered a scrappy indie film, having shot in Budapest, where it benefited from tax incentives that shaved $6 million off its $21 million budget. Nope, photographed by Christopher Nolan’s DP Hoyte van Hoytema, is composed of a series of stunning and unsettling set pieces, one of which will end up as a Universal Studio Tour attraction—pointing to the enormity of the Peele brand.
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Lacking Monkeypaw’s multipronged apparatus, Gladstone—whose previous credit was the well-received supernatural thriller The Curse of La Llorona (2019)—must piece his movies together from scratch with no safety net, a fact of life for most in his profession. Interestingly, both Cooper’s and Gladstone’s movies use race and class as a subtext to underscore the tensions between the haves and have nots.
was even before he finished writing. We also brought on our sound designer and supervising sound mixer early to do some sound development. It was a luxury, but it was so important in the end.
COOPER: A nightmare.
GLADSTONE: It dovetails exactly
GLADSTONE: As you know, this
of the final mix. We’re still approving the effect shots. I literally just left a spotting call to jump onto this call. It’s a race to the finish, as sometimes they are. A good release date is worth its weight in gold, and Sony feels great about 8/26. So despite wanting and needing more time, it’s just not an option, so we’re working overtime to make sure we deliver.
business is serendipitous sometimes. I had pitched an executive a different project and the executive passed. But he whispered in my ear that he really wanted to do a Dracula movie, specifically a Bride of Dracula movie. I knew that Dracula was the ultimate narcissistic monster who thought he was a god and that women were lucky to be terrorized by him. So I folded Dracula into the idea and pitched it to a bunch of writers. Blair Butler jumped on it and brought it to life. We brought it back to the executive, Scott Strauss, who thought it was great and he brought it to his boss, Steve Bersch. They bought it and we developed it. How about Nope?
COOPER: You’re singing my
COOPER: Hearing the condensed
GLADSTONE: Nice to meet you,
buddy. I’m a huge fan of your movies.
COOPER: It’s such an honor,
Emile. You’re still in post, right?
GLADSTONE: Yeah, it’s the last day
exact tune right now, Emile. We had the same kind of situation on our movie, so I totally know what that means. But tell me a little bit about how this picture came to be.
GLADSTONE: The origin of this
project was born in the #MeToo movement. I was thinking about romance and subverting it. For me, horror is about subverting joyful things. Jaws is my favorite movie, so I wanted to do for weddings what Jaws did for the beach.
COOPER: Right. GLADSTONE: Weddings can be kind of archaic. In the old times, women were possessions and were given to men in these ceremonies. Since I
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wanted to subvert romance, I thought, “OK, what’s the worst nightmare for a woman? Well, what if they’re invited to a wedding but they’re the bride? And I was like, ‘Oh, that sounds really horrific. I like that.’”
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version of that is so inspiring because I can imagine how many in-between steps and lengths of time and work went into it. Nope was the seed of an idea a long time ago when we were gearing up to work on a project that we were really pumped and excited about. Then COVID intervened. Jordan and I pivoted to this other project (Nope) we had talked at great length about. We went full steam ahead on finishing the development, and for Jordan, the writing. His tenure as an improv comedian makes him so good at being able to make that kind of call and just fully shift. Then it was just one foot in front of the other. A very long, soft prep with a lot of early collaborators to do design development, concept art. Jordan loves storyboarding, so we had two storyboard artists on pretty early. It
into one of my philosophies, which is fix it in prep. Everyone talks about fixing stuff in post. Well, that’s too late. Having that luxury of soft prep to explore ideas and go down roads that you might not be able to afford to go down later is so beneficial. We are different in that you have a producing partner and I don’t. And I hire directors along the way. But we’re the same in that the idea is the first big choice you have to make because you know you’re going to put it on your back for three yearsplus, carry it through storms, and, you know—pick your metaphor. You’re never going to stop having to sell this idea. You sell it to a writer, you sell it to the development team, you sell it to their boss, you sell it to the director, you sell it to the actors, you sell it to the marketing team, and then you sell it to the audience. You’d better love this thing and have a clear vision of it. The second biggest joy is who’s going to direct it. Ultimately that director has to be the personification of the movie.
COOPER: Totally. GLADSTONE: Then it’s about
serving that vision and making sure that you do whatever you can to give that filmmaker whatever they need. So I envy that you have this (relationship). Jordan is a master of the craft and defies a lot of convention. Together, your movies are amazing.
COOPER: You know, this is
only—this is my third movie and, you know, the movie in between Us and Nope was Candyman, which was Nia DaCosta’s movie.
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Emile Gladstone and Ian Cooper
GLADSTONE: Yet, it’s cool. COOPER: That was really such a
different experience, and I imagine a lot more like what you are doing on each project—finding someone to, as you said, become the movie. Keeping them feeling supported and loved is huge.
GLADSTONE: Yeah, keeping that
momentum is so important. It also dovetails into another story of philosophy that I have in terms of the hiring process: You look for volunteers, not recruits, right?
COOPER: Yes. GLADSTONE: If you recruit somebody into your project, you’re screwed. But if they’re a volunteer, they’re going to work 26 hours a day. They’re going to be obsessed with the movie; they’re going to be thinking about it as they go to sleep and when they wake up. It is not a job anymore. It’s a calling. It’s something beyond just a paycheck.
COOPER: It’s so true. Another thing I
always think about, Emile, is every little detail is as good as every ingredient in the film. We had an amazing on-set dresser whose precision in continuity was amazing. Our set was like a fucking mile-long valley. So it was him on an ATV, sweating, fighting for continuity and detail. Jordan and I would joke, “That’s maybe the most important guy in the movie.”
GLADSTONE: One of the coolest
things about the gig is that you meet people who are so good at what they do that it’s inspiring. Everyone’s telling the story through their craft. You can’t help but be inspired by the designer, the set decorator, the art directors, everybody. And, if you make the right hires, the sum of the parts is greater than each individual. The prop master who spends weekends at thrift stores because they love it. You ask for a cane, and they bring 15 canes out of their trucks with like lion heads or a dragon head, and you’re like, “I’m enthusiastic about these canes now!”
COOPER: I love a good prop master—
especially one who can both execute on-the-fly problems and creative suggestions. Like the helmet on this guy on a motorcycle in our movie. It was fully fucking chrome, with a custom eye hole. I agonized over the diameter of the circle in the rigging of it, but he’s just like, ‘yes!’
GLADSTONE: I love it. We had a tough build because our movie’s about a posh, Gatsbyesque destination wedding.
COOPER: Uh-huh. GLADSTONE: It’s stunning and beautiful
and then we subvert it all. Everything that’s beautiful at the beginning of the movie is by the midpoint dangerous and ugly. Even the wallpaper is predator wallpaper. The designer, Felicity Abbott, was able to stretch the dollar because we did not have a lot of money to make the movie. Ultimately we’re all in service of the audience. We’re delivering experiences so they’re going to get both the beauty and the danger.
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COOPER: It’s so critical, because
especially with production design, it is alchemy. First of all, we are obsessed with our own visual style and that sort of high/low pop collision of our brand—the look and feel of it. But also it’s like one of the things we did on Us when we were looking for a designer. We were both, “We need a designer who’s never done a horror movie.” To avoid the tropes. I had been obsessed with Ruth De Jong’s work because she had worked on Paul Thomas Anderson movies. She had worked on Malick films. She was the designer for the latest season of Twin Peaks. She’s very into historical accuracy. The alchemy really sung because no one was operating on default.
GLADSTONE: Then if you spend
enough time with somebody and if you observe enough, their actions are going to speak really loudly.
COOPER: Just to switch gears slightly, I’m going to fan out on you about a key moment in The Curse of La Llorona.
GLADSTONE: Production is very
arduous. It’s very long. It’s very stressful. And before you get to that stage, you’re in the scout phase and you’re all enthusiastic. It’s such a great part of the process when you’re finally seeing it come to life. It’s really about creating an environment where the best idea wins. And you’d better leave it all on the field. I quit my safe job where I was going to be paid safe money. There is no plan B. I’ve burnt the ships. There’s no coming home. So I better land this.
COOPER: I have that feeling too.
I came out of the contemporary art world. I was teaching art and making art, exhibiting, and was a part of that world until Jordan asked me to come to LA and start working on Us with him and be the creative director of his company. I’m going to give it my all. I’m also not hedging my bets.
GLADSTONE: “When you ain’t got
way, on that shoot—that hospital shot.
nothing, you got nothing to lose,” as Mr. Dylan said. Because I was a writer before I was an agent, I consider myself a great observer of the human animal. I want to bring that intensity to each show because I’ll never make another Invitation again; I might make a sequel, but I’ll never make that movie. You’ll never make another Nope again, so it’s now or never. It’s that intensity.
COOPER: Dude.
COOPER: Totally—now or never.
GLADSTONE: That mirror was
GLADSTONE: I have a question for
GLADSTONE: OK. COOPER: The convex mirror
hallway—the push-in shot on the convex mirror in the hospital hallway. That’s my favorite.
GLADSTONE: That was day one, by the
not in the script. It was in the scout and we used it. You find things. That’s what (producer-director) James Wan taught me—not to be so locked to your storyboard.
COOPER: It’s like when you were
in high school and you’d talk to a friend on the phone and you’d picture
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their room. Then when you finally go to their house, you’re like, “Oh, it’s different. But this is the room now.”
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you. So Candyman was an astounding movie, very provocative, but everyone was standing out on that animation, that short (a shadow puppet teaser short was partly used in the movie to tell the origin story of Candyman).
COOPER: Oh yeah.
GLADSTONE: Holy cow, was
that the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I think it really helped your marketing. It caught everyone’s eye.
COOPER: That came from Jordan,
actually, because we’re tangling with a preexisting IP. Since the conceit of Candyman is about storytelling, you need to have storytelling that existed in the original movie. So you need to deal with the flashback situation. And then the whole movie exists in the art world. Our main character is a painter, so his thought process is visual. So we’re like, “OK, what if the flashback is like a storybook, with a childlike quality?” The shadow puppetry just came in naturally. Jordan had actually studied puppeteering when he was in college. Then when we were in Chicago, my production designer, Cara Brower, ended up connecting with this shadow puppet company. We all were like, “This is either going be genius or feel too didactic.” Then in the edit, we were like, “Holy shit, this is working!” Then for the marketing, Jordan and I were like, “We need to do a trailer that’s full of this, right?”
GLADSTONE: It was gorgeous, it was provocative, it was cool. It was brave. It was unique.
COOPER: Thank you so much, Emile. GLADSTONE: People have been
making weird horror movies since horror movies have been getting made. The ’70s had so many fucking weird horror movies. The Wicker Man was the original Hereditary or Midsommar. There have always been commercial horror movies that are more scare-driven. And (others) more set piece-driven. What’s so interesting and unique to yourself is that you can do both. I can’t afford to do both. We have to pick a lane from the get-go. Continued on page 70
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as Metaphor for Life Max Borenstein and Erica Lee go toe-to-toe on the highs and lows, triumphs and tragedies of sports projects. Sports-centered productions are often vehicles for tackling the trajectories of larger-than-life icons like Muhammad Ali and Lou Gehrig. But such stories can just as often underscore more sweeping, societal issues such as racism (42, 2013; King Richard, 2021), gender bias (Battle of the Sexes, 2017) and even mere survival (Unbroken, 2014; The Survivor, 2021). In the case of our two One on One subjects, their projects couldn’t be more different from one another. Max Borenstein is the co-creator/writer/executive producer of the HBO Max series Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, a freewheeling, occasionally debauched saga set in the go-go ’80s and filled with colorful, real-life characters—some of whom have cried foul over their on-screen portrayals. (“Winning Time is not a documentary and has not been presented as such,” states HBO.) Erica Lee served as a producer on Netflix’s Bruised, a gritty, low-budget fictional drama about a mixed martial artist (Halle Berry), who finds redemption with a title shot and a chance to make amends as a mother. Both culminate in a climactic contest that amounts to a battle of wills—a trope that’s often part and parcel to the genre. Lee admits sports is not her thing, but that it can stand as a metaphor for overcoming adversity. Borenstein
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describes sports as a “secular religion— it’s utterly irrational, and that what’s beautiful about it.” The following exchange was conducted via Zoom, with an occasional assist from Produced By. They started out by talking about their respective projects’ origins.
BORENSTEIN: Jim Hecht, one of
our executive producers, optioned this book (Jeff Pearlman’s Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s). He’s from LA and loves the Lakers. He makes my fandom look absurd, because he fell in love so young and so fully that it’s a formative thing for him, and he desperately wanted to tell the story. He found his way to Adam McKay’s company, Hyperobject Industries, which is McKay and Kevin Messick, and they brought it to HBO. HBO wanted to find a writer they knew who could adapt it. Jim, who is rightfully proprietary, didn’t want it to go to just anybody. We had mutual friends, and he found out that I was a Laker fan. So we sat down and talked about it and I sat down with HBO and talked to them. They waited a long time for me to write it because I was doing some other stuff for them. For a while I just assumed it would be a yearlong miniseries. When I finally started working on it, I realized that it could be so much more—that it has this potential to be a great American epic. It’s a dynasty story. It’s a window into this incredibly rich cross-section of American characters, all of whom are bonded by this ambition of trying to use
this particular athletic achievement as a source of fulfillment in their lives.
LEE: Well, you find other entry points. I’m not a sports person.
BORENSTEIN: I think sports can be
an allusion and a very clear metaphor for life. To me, the big access point for understanding the characters in my show is that they are like us in that way.
LEE: To do what we do (as producers/ filmmakers), and to be a professional athlete—they’re not normal careers. There’s something in the DNA.
BORENSTEIN: Even for people who
don’t have those careers, sports is such an externalized idea. There’s clarity, it’s something that everyone else can experience vicariously, and it’s great on film.
LEE: Yeah. And people just want
to win. I mean, it’s nature. Bruised was a spec script that Michelle Rosenfarb had written. Her manager sent it to us in 2017. When we got it, Blake Lively was attached to it and the script was written for a 27-year-old Irish girl. But Blake hurt her hand shooting (revenge thriller) Rhythm Section (2020). She called and said, “I can’t play a fighter; I can’t physically do it.” We had been working with Halle (Berry) on John Wick 3. We had started training her, so we knew she had this voracious appetite to train; fitness had become an incredible work ethic. Her agent,
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Warren Zavala, the same agent as Blake, gave Halle the script and she read it and called us and was like, “I know this sounds crazy. I know it was written for a 27-yearold white girl. But this is my movie.”
compelling story about how it was an older woman who had a kid later in her life, had given him up because she had come from cycles of abuse, couldn’t be a mother, and this was her last shot as a mixed martial artist—one last attempt to get herself together to raise her son. She met with the writer and they worked on the script and handed it back to us and it worked.
person. One day we were in a meeting and (fellow producer) Basil Iwanyk was like (to Berry), “You should direct it.” We’ve worked with a lot of first-time directors, a lot of actors-turned-directors, and she had a very clear point of view. Then she came on and made tons of changes creatively. So with her as director, we made the movie pre-pandemic in November-December of 2019 in a gnarly fashion—30 shoot days in New Jersey. The movie fell apart close to 17 times. Then we sold it to Netflix for double the cost of the movie, which was great for everyone. Netflix really believed in Halle. They wanted her on the platform and have since given her a deal. Then we worked on cutting the movie. But the movie was really Halle’s.
BORENSTEIN: Oh, cool.
BORENSTEIN: That’s so cool.
LEE: In the Halle version, massive
LEE: What’s interesting, or challenging,
BORENSTEIN: Wow. LEE: So she pitched us this very
amounts of changes were made to the script. Then when we started looking for directors, we weren’t finding the right
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about Bruised is that it’s half sports movie, half drama. And it’s really her vision. Thematically, it’s not about her win-
ning or losing; it’s about her being back in the game, believing in herself.
BORENSTEIN: There’s healing that’s gone on.
LEE: Right. BORENSTEIN: I’m excited to watch that. Not every producer can support a firsttime filmmaker like that. Most producers would not have the courage to say, “Let’s take that risk.” But you got great rewards from that.
LEE: Yeah, and it’s been amazing.
Although the story is all fictional, we always knew we wanted real fighters in the movie, so she approached (UFC flyweight champ) Valentina Shevchenko to play one of the roles (Lucia “Lady Killer” Chavez, whom Berry’s Jackie Justice faces in the film’s climactic fight). Halle lived with the part. She would go to all of the matches. She went to Vegas many times. She trained. She had started
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training for John Wick 3 and then continued with our fight coordinator, Eric Brown, who is a jujitsu-martial arts specialist, and he helped her find her way into it.
BORENSTEIN: She could star in any
movie, particularly one where there’s so much extra commitment physically. It has got to be incredibly difficult.
LEE: The logistics required that we start
with the end fight, which was the first thing we shot because she had been in the best shape and was the most energized.
BORENSTEIN: Sure. You know you’re going to be exhausted at the end of the shooting.
LEE: Exactly. She had also broken ribs
and fingers on John Wick and in training for the movie. So we were really playing with fire. The other thing we did that was super helpful was the John Wick director Chad Stahelski came and directed second unit, basically for the final fight. He came out to Atlantic City, where we were able to shoot. So Chad came up for two weeks and helped direct that and kind of set the tone for the fighting, and that’s how we pulled it off.
BORENSTEIN: That’s brilliant. That’s
a great idea. All really smart, producorial moves. Were any of the fighters that you guys cast, the nonactors, did they have to act much or was it mostly just fighting?
LEE: Mostly fighting. Valentina had a couple of lines here and there.
BORENSTEIN: We had the challenge
of how to cast unknown actors as these famous basketball players.
LEE: I saw that. The guy who plays Magic Johnson…
BORENSTEIN: Yeah, he had been an
athlete in college—not a basketball player but a football player, Quincy Isaiah. We were desperately trying to find someone to play Magic, which is an extremely challenging role. Everyone knows what he looks like, but Magic also has a particular personality that people are aware of, like a charismatic movie star.
not linked with NBA careers. This kind of opportunity was exciting for them because they were entertainers.
LEE: Yeah.
BORENSTEIN: Yeah, it was crazy fast.
BORENSTEIN: So it was difficult. We
knew immediately that there wasn’t going to be anyone we knew that would fit the bill. So it was all on Francine Maisler and the casting team to find someone. Quincy had never acted professionally. We got his tape, and we were like, “Wow, he’s got that smile,” and he’s a fantastic actor. He was able to play at a movie level. Suddenly he was thrown in with John C. Reilly and Jason Clarke and all these guys, and he holds his own in an incredible way. In the case of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Solomon Hughes had never acted before at all. We found him because a mutual friend heard about the search and knew he might be interested. He has a Ph.D. in higher education, had played on the Cal team. He was a good player, but didn’t want to go pro. He was an academic (teaching at Stanford and Duke), which fit the bill perfectly for Kareem. Now his life is utterly transformed in a way. He’s done amazing work. But it was a big question mark for us. That meant these guys who have not acted much are going to do some heavy material that’s as demanding as the stuff we’re giving Sally Field or whomever, and they really pulled it off.
LEE: The logistics of working with real athletes and their schedules is challenging.
BORENSTEIN: Oh, yeah. When
you’ve got guys who are in the major leagues it’s extremely difficult. A lot of our stunt doubles and other actors are guys who retired or were playing with one of the various (minor) leagues, but
LEE: And was it from like the minute you wrote the script to the (start of) shooting? Was it that fast once you actually wrote it?
I had never met with Adam McKay in person, because he was going to produce it but he wasn’t necessarily going to direct it. That was the dream, but with a filmmaker as in-demand as him, the odds are always low.
LEE: Yeah. BORENSTEIN: Within a week, maybe
even a few days later, McKay calls—he and Kevin Messick, his producing partner—and he said, “I want to do this as my next thing. I love it so much.” He is an enormous basketball fan and had always wanted to find a great, unique basketball story. And so we shot the pilot prepandemic in the summer of 2019—shot it, cut it in the fall, got the green light to make the series at the end of the year, and then we were writing scripts and getting ready to go into prep in March 2020 when the world shut down. It was the biggest blessing for the show in the long run because it gave us a year to perfect scripts, to write, to do all the work you never get to do in TV because you’re under the gun timewise. We were able to spend all that time really discovering the characters. By the time we started production, we had a pilot that we loved and nine really solid, mature scripts. They were what we wanted the show to be. There were things set up in episode 2 that pay off in episode 10 by design, without having to make it up as you go along—the way that you almost always do in a TV show, because you’re running as if the train’s behind you in the tunnel.
LEE: Are you guys writing a season 2 or where are you?
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BORENSTEIN: We’re almost halfway through writing season 2, which is going to be great, but it’s full of its own challenges.
see these characters and watch them grow and evolve over the course of a decade, you’ve got to put in the time. You’ve got to really sink into them. It’s stuff that’s behind closed doors and it’s underneath rather than moments that people expect. It’s a sweeping epic and we know where it goes. It takes 10 years, so it may take 10 seasons. But it’s not going to be two seasons. Maybe, but that’s only if we fuck it up and no one wants to watch anymore.
different people. In the beginning, we were definitely helping with the script, and we hired another writer to help actualize her vision and make it feel more like it was Halle’s world. Then along the way, we had this first AD, Gerard DiNardi, who was like her right hand to try to help make the days. I mean, it was really a village that helped. Halle was very smart about her coverage, very smart about how many takes it would take within the shots, because she could rely on herself as an actress. And also because the movie was like a $10 million movie, which amortized is not very much, so we were always rushing. She didn’t have a lot of time or resources or bells and whistles. It was really run and gun for most of the movie. She found Danny Boyd Jr., the actor who plays her son. She really shepherded all of them as a seasoned actress and someone who has been on sets for 25 years. She knew the ins and outs of it. But places like editorial were harder, where you’re cutting your own performance and staring at your own face day after day. I think it’s also hard for actorsturned-directors, because as actors they (normally) come into the process much later. They get a finished script and are told to be there a week before. But now, as a director of an independent movie, they’re seeing how the sausage is made, and that can be very unpleasant and heartbreaking. We pushed many times— she was training, she was acting, she was directing...
LEE: Well, you’ve got to take a big
BORENSTEIN: Right.
LEE: Yeah. BORENSTEIN: It’s ambitious because
it’s shot on a soundstage where we built our own basketball court and about 12 rows of seats. It looks amazing in the final cuts, but it’s as complicated visually in terms of VFX and complexity as a scene with dragons in Game of Thrones.
LEE: Yeah. BORENSTEIN: The bar is high because people remember what the (Fabulous) Forum looked like. That asset was extremely time-consuming but very cool when you see it come together.
LEE: But you didn’t expect to have a second season, right?
BORENSTEIN: No. But if you want to
swing to penetrate these days because there is so much out there, so much material, so much content.
BORENSTEIN: Definitely. PRODUCED BY: Erica, Halle Barry’s a seasoned actor, maybe the elder statesman in the cast. But as a firsttime director, who did she lean on for guidance?
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LEE: So I think it was a very frustrating
process. It was long, and there was COVID involved, so we didn’t have a traditional editorial process. She was editing at home with an editor in New York on Zoom. There was a lot that was lost. There were things that hindered us even more—that made it harder for her as a first-time director. So it was really a labor of love.
PRODUCED BY: Max, in terms of the style of the series, did Adam McKay, who directed the pilot, create the template for the look of it? Were there certain things like the breaking of the fourth wall that he initiated? Or was that in your script?
BORENSTEIN: No, all that stuff was
from the script. I didn’t even have a conversation with him. All I heard from him prior to writing the script was a message passed down that was like, “Oh, just be creative. Be free. Do whatever you want to do to tell the story.” I took inspiration from a lot of his work, and then just took the freedom to do whatever felt like a fun, freewheeling, showman-like way of telling this story about entertainment and sports. We shot the script word-for-word. But when Adam shot a scene, I’d sit next to him and, at the end of a scene there’d be an idea. He would pitch me, like, “Hey, what about this line?” And I’d be like, “Oh, that’s great.” Or I’d pitch another line, and started realizing that this is a great method. So I would pitch him lines. He has a voice-of-God-like (demeanor). He rarely gets up from his chair. He just sits at the monitor and everyone hears the line, and it keeps everyone engaged and involved in the process in a joyful way. John C. Reilly (who plays Lakers owner Jerry Buss) is one of the great improvisers, period. He’d throw in a little line here and there; wonderful stuff. But essentially it was just the script and all that wall-breaking, animation, the text on screen—it was all part of the script. Adam hired incredible people. He expected them to do their best work and be free to come up with interesting stuff. So in the case of the visual aesthetic, there’s three parts to it: There’s that aspect in the script where I felt free and knew no one was going to tsk-tsk me if I broke the fourth wall or animated a logo or whatever it might be. Continued on page 72
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Lindsey Weber, executive producer on the eagerly anticipated LOTR prequel The Rings of Power , knows a thing or two about shepherding big IPs to fruition. Written By Robert Abele
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A
sking about the intangibles and tangibles of being a successful producer gets an appropriately wideranging answer from someone for whom seeing Amazon’s massive, billion-dollar The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series to completion is their current preoccupation. Or, considering the source material, let’s use the term “quest.” So what’s an intangible tool? “It requires an enormous amount of patience,” says Lindsey Weber, an executive producer on Amazon Studios’ foray into old-yet-new Middle-earth territory that will premiere September 2. “Obviously we all do our best, and I try to remember how hard people are working for the show. Having a company trust you with this undertaking, then being an employer yourself, it’s sort of humbling, and something I think about a lot. These jobs are a privilege, and this one requires literally thousands of pairs of hands.”
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And something tangible? “Muddy set boots are always in the car, available at all times,” she says, laughing. “Because you never know when your fancy dinner shoes need to go away and you have to be standing on a hillside somewhere with no notice!”
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HONORING THE SOURCE Those elemental locations may have changed in the last few years—the first season filmed in New Zealand, where filmmaker Peter Jackson made his six Tolkien epics—while further seasons will be based in the UK. But for Weber, the mission is the same: honoring a beloved intellectual property, fostering the artists making it, and helping firsttime showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay deliver a knockout show for Amazon on time and on (a still-enormous) budget. “There’s nothing that’s not your problem,” says Weber, who has toiled on the project since 2018. “Which is sort of why I like producing. Because it’s never dull. Every day is different.” The era of big IPs is different, too, from when Weber was at Bad Robot and in the thick of JJ Abrams’ shepherding of such treasured franchises as Star Trek, Star Wars and Mission: Impossible. “I learned an enormous amount about IP management,” says Weber, who joined Bad Robot in 2007 when Abrams was ramping up its movie division, and eventually worked her way to running the film department. “I got to see a lot of thought and care around how these things are handled on the studio side, the production company side, and by the filmmakers. I learned to never stop fighting for the best version of a thing.” But she describes LOTR as “another level of fan engagement and deep passion. On Star Trek, we were not speaking to the
As expected, Tom Cruise performs one of his own stunts on Mission: Impossible -Rogue Nation (2015), one of the IPs that Lindsey Weber helped oversee as head of the film department at Bad Robot.
“GOOD PRODUCERS ANTICIPATE PROBLEMS AND WORK ON SOLVING THEM BEFORE THEY CROP UP. AND MOMS MAKE GREAT PRODUCERS BECAUSE THEY’RE CARETAKERS.”
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Roddenberry estate all the time, as we are (to the Tolkien estate) on this show. So it’s been a really different journey. It calls for a level of craftsmanship and attention to detail because it has stood the test of time for so long. It’s just an enormous amount of pressure.”
NURTURE IN HER NATURE Weber’s move to Amazon and LOTR speaks to how closely she nurtures talent and develops relationships as a creative producer. She first met Payne and McKay at Bad Robot, working with the up-and-coming screenwriters on a variety of projects, always championing their storytelling and invention. When the pair were crafting their LOTR pitch to Amazon after the streamer plunked down $250 million for the rights to JRR Tolkien’s books, she became their biggest cheering section and a valuable sounding board. “I knew their writing, how ambitious and extravagant it is, and their take was amazing,” she says. “Their phrase was ‘a 50-hour mega epic.’ It was film on TV, at the highest possible level. I could only picture how much fun it would be to work on, and when they were hired, I was like, ‘OK, make sure you do this, start this way as producers.’ Then the people at Amazon were calling me saying, ‘Well, you know JD and Patrick really well, how should we help them?’ I wound up talking to both sides, truly just as a friend of the court.” It was also, she grasps now, an inadvertent employment application. Weber’s belief in their vision, and readily available advice, eventually spurred Payne and McKay to ask her to come on board for real. Weber says she didn’t it see coming. “I loved television, but pictured my life being in film,” she says. “Those were the stories I was most interested in growing up. I worked in a video
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Star Trek Beyond (far right) was made on Lindsey Weber’s watch at Bad Robot.
COURTESY JASON BELL / PRIME VIDEO
COURTESY KIMBERLEY FRENCH /PARAMOUNT PICTURES
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store when I was 16. My first Hollywood job was at Ed Pressman’s company. I love script development. But as things became more about the preexisting franchise in the film world—with the focus on big opening weekends narrowing the field of the kinds of movies being made—things became less interesting sometimes. It was JD and Patrick who talked me into TV as the future.” Now, as the lead creative producer and an in-house television producer at Amazon, she’s overseeing an operation that’s requiring her and the producing team to find ways to blend the feature acumen required for maintaining high values with the episodic-minded efficiency needed for longform narrative. Having a fiveseason commitment helped when it came to setting up the show’s infrastructure, and so did throwing out preconceived notions of how a series is made. “We’re able to take the longer-term eye to it all and do some really forward-looking things on the technological perspective and the resource perspective in terms of sets and costumes,” says Weber. “We really have to look at this as its own beast.” She’s realizing, also, that a career like hers never stops evolving. “The more you learn, the more there is to know,” says Weber, who is already
implementing what was gleaned from making season 1 into the filming of season 2. “It’s what I really love about television. There’s always another level of proficiency you can get into, whether it’s technological or structural or how you work with a crew, or information flow.”
CHANNELING GALADRIEL Now that she’s immersed herself in Tolkien’s Second Age of Middle-earth, Weber knows which of the author’s characters she’d most like to be: regal elf Galadriel, who, played by Morfydd Clark, will be seen in The Rings of Power hunting down a gathering evil and needing to convince others of her concerns. “I really love how in touch with her gut instinct she is,” says Weber. “It’s beautiful to watch. Producers tend to be a cerebral, neurotic bunch, and watching her charge through the world of the show, determined to achieve her goals, is really satisfying.” Asked if she believes women naturally make great producers, Weber says yes. “I think it can be easier to hear difficult news from a woman,” she says. “Women are generally emotionally intuitive, and that can be helpful in situations where lots of people are working together in high-pressure situations. I’ve found that men will often let down
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NEW MEMBERS
their guard more with me than maybe they would if I were a 6-foot-tall man.” Weber is a parent, too, of an 8-year-old daughter and 5-yearold son, and she can easily draw a line from a mom’s radar to a producer’s mindset. “All day long, we walk into rooms and assess what’s going on, thinking about the big picture, trade-offs,” says Weber, whose husband, Mike Weber, is a producer too. “Good producers anticipate problems and work on solving them before they crop up. And moms make great producers because they’re caretakers. You need to know how to instantly toggle between a firm hand and a loving shoulder to cry on.” Though working on The Rings of Power has meant acclimating to episodic storytelling, navigating a pandemic, moving her family twice—first to New Zealand, now to London—and often spending long hours away from them, she doesn’t see her work as stressful. “It feels joyful,” she says. “I’m doing something I believe in. I’ve learned how much I love it.” ¢
PRODUCED BY TRAINS THE SPOTLIGHT ON SOME OF THE GUILD’S NEWEST MEMBERS, AND OFFERS A GLIMPSE AT WHAT MAKES THEM TICK.
ZAK KILBERG Zak Kilberg, an executive producer on such films as The Mauritanian (2021) and Buena Vista Social Club: Adios (2017), credits his parents for his choice of career path. “My parents introduced me to live theater when I was very young,” says the founder and CEO of the production company Social Construct. “I immediately gravitated to creative storytelling and performing arts. It took several forms over the next few decades, first as an actor, then writer and director. When I realized it was the producer that ultimately selects the stories that are told, I began focusing my energy exclusively toward that work and skill set.”
The filmmakers behind Amazon’s upcoming series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, perform their magic on a New Zealand soundstage.
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Kilberg describes Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once, which he saw at SXSW in March, as a model project for “the way that it combines genres so effectively while holding together a complex and deeply moving human narrative. Completely absurd, crazy and fun. It just felt like the impossible film to make. For my bucket list, I'd like to make a few impossible films.”
“Simply working closely with great producers and witnessing the way they navigate the countless obstacles and challenges that come along with the work we do has been invaluable to my experience. To name a couple names, Bruce Cohen and Bill Horberg have both been incredible mentors and collaborators to me over the years.”
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ROAD TO ENLIGHTENMENT:
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DOCMAKERS SARA BERNSTEIN, LISA ERSPAMER AND TONYA LEWIS LEE HELP SHINE THE LIGHT ON everyday heroism as a galvanizing force against social injustice. Written By Steve Chagollan
here’s a scene in Ron Howard’s documentary We Feed People—about José Andrés’ disaster-relief heroics with his organization World Central Kitchen—when Andrés loses his temper with one of his volunteer workers and later apologizes for his “grumpiness.” As selfless as this world-renowned chef has proven to be, even in the face of personal danger, these moments in the film point to the fact that humanitarian stems from the word “human,” in all its imperfections. “I think for Ron, and certainly for the team and for Nat Geo, you could easily just make José a hero and almost deify him,” says Sara Bernstein, a producer on the project. “But I think it was important for people to see he has struggles like anyone else.” We Feed People is one of three recent documentaries that shines a light on heroes in different ways. These include Aftershock, about the high maternal mortality rate suffered by Black women in the U.S. and a trio of surviving family members determined to effect change; and Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down, about the Arizona congresswoman who was shot in the head by an assailant in 2011 and her subsequent efforts to encourage safer gun legislation despite aphasia and paralysis.
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mother to examine how neglect stemming from racism played a role in the preventable deaths of two Black women while giving birth. “Our health and wellness is the crux of everything,” says Lee, who’s been involved in women’s health advocacy since 2017. “If you focus on the most vulnerable in our communities, then you make it better for everybody.” But when a film is issue-driven like Aftershock, whom you train the camera on is just as important as the message. In Shawnee Benton-Gibson, the mother of Shamony Gibson— whose death we first encounter in Aftershock—the filmmakers found a galvanizing and empathetic force.
Clockwise from above: Aftershock codirectors/ producers Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt; Shawnee Benton-Gibson and Omari Maynard bond over their shared loss; Benton-Gibson and Bruce McIntyre demand change.
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YUBY HERNANDEZ / COURTESY OF AFTERSHOCK
These films point to societal problems that can’t be easily solved, like food inequity, systemic racism and gun violence—issues that have divided Americans for centuries. But by focusing on inspiring individuals who have turned tragedy into activism, and whose resilience in the face of adversity can’t help but move the viewer, these films tug at the heartstrings while pressing their case for reform. In other words, it’s not just politics; it’s personal. “You’ve got to tell the human story before you tell the story of the statistics,” says Tonya Lewis Lee, codirector/ producer of Aftershock with Paula Eiselt. The two decided to center their film on two surviving spouses and one crusading
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people in my life.” The filmmakers behind We Feed People also benefited from footage they didn’t plan on tapping into to the extent that they did, says Bernstein, who heads Imagine Documentaries with Justin Wilkes, her fellow producer on the film. “Originally, the idea of the film would be to embed with World Central Kitchen and to follow them, very much verité style—a trajectory of an activation from start to finish,” says Bernstein. “And then the world shut down due to COVID, but the World Central Kitchen did not shut down. It really forced us and forced Ron and our wonderful editor Andrew Morreale to think about the archive and the wealth of footage (1,000 hours’ worth) that we had been sitting on that fortunately the organization had filmed over the
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it is about the issue that defines Gifford— responsible gun legislation. That Giffords’ husband, former astronaut and current Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, supplied footage of Gifford’s recovery—including her early struggles with physical therapists and speech therapists—went a long way in illustrating the consequences of gun violence not just on families of victims, but on survivors. “I get choked up when I’m around her because I’m so moved by her and the effort she puts into every day of her life and work,” says Erspamer, who first encountered Giffords in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, and eventually introduced Giffords to Cohen and West. “I don’t know anybody who has that level of endurance,” adds Erspamer, “and I’ve been around pretty extraordinary
COURTESY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/DYLAN DUGAS
“Shawnee is so awesome when she speaks,” says Lee. “She’s a clinician. She’s a healer; she’s a therapist. And she speaks from such passion and straightforwardness. “To have people who are able to communicate their experience so clearly and authentically in a way people really feel it, and put themselves in their place, (is important). And then you can see these women (who died) in the film. They were alive. They’re not a number. They’re not data. They’re real people.” In Giffords, the filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West benefited from a protagonist whose gregariousness and optimism are undimmed by a condition that leaves her unable to speak the words that are in her head. As producer Lisa Erspamer points out, this is as much a love story and portrait of perseverance as
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years, and to think about the project in a different way.” Two of those who followed WCK around, with the idea of filming their activities, ended up joining the organization: Nate Mook and Sam Bloch rose to CEO and director of emergency response, respectively. “There were moments when our team put down their cameras and started helping World Central Kitchen,” says Bernstein. “For Ron, that was the point of making the film. The mission of World Central Kitchen is truly infectious. We really shined a light on the importance of volunteerism. And the idea of one plate, one meal—even by one person—can actually make a difference.” Enlightenment and passion about an issue is one thing, but signing petitions and posting on social media only go so far. Lee, who points out Aftershock is about institutions and individuals, asks rhetorically: “Where do you fit in in this? What’s the call to action? I mean, for us, we made a film. For some, it’s about protesting on the street.
Everybody has a role to play. We are saying that the system is flawed but the system needs to fix itself and so how do we do that? Person by person, right?” At the very least, Lee hopes Aftershock can start a conversation, “so that those within the system can examine their practices and really think about how they can be better.” That motivating effect documentaries can have on a viewer cannot be taken for granted. In Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down, Giffords comes across as the poster gal for the audacity of hope, Barack Obama notwithstanding (it’s no coincidence that the filmmakers scored an interview with the former president). But Giffords proves that hope itself is insufficient; it must be bolstered by hard work. “She really makes me want to do better and try harder,” says Erspamer about her subject. “When I think about Gabby, I never want to complain, because she never, ever complains. Her optimism is unmatched.”
The hero who leads by example has become a through line for Howard, Bernstein and the people at Imagine, whether it’s the astronauts in Apollo 13 (1995), the first responders in Backdraft (1991) and Rebuilding Paradise (2020), or the rescuers who came to the aid of the teenagers who were trapped in a Thai cave in the upcoming feature Thirteen Lives. “There was always such an emphasis on human stories and people overcoming insurmountable odds,” says Bernstein about Imagine’s track record in both scripted and nonfiction. “I think it’s inspiring to think about that as we embark on documentary projects. Rebuilding Paradise was a turning point (for Howard) because it was the first time he was embedded in the verité documentary process and following ordinary people, and he wasn’t really sure where that was going to go. It’s all part of a common thread that looks at human stories that can be inspiring: real
COURTESY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/CRIS TOALA OLIVARES
Far left, World Central Kitchen’s CEO Nate Mook and founder José Andrés in We Feed People; center, director of emergency response Sam Bloch in the film; right, an Indonesian beneficiary of WCK’s relief efforts.
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people making a difference.” It’s a form of advocacy journalism that preaches to the choir. Who doesn’t feel that federal disaster relief programs could better meet the needs of victims in need? More than two-thirds of Americans support stricter gun control laws. Who would argue with the numbers that suggest the U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate in the industrialized world? Or that Black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women in this country, and we need to do something about it? The lives of the victims in Aftershock slipped away in hospitals due to negligence. But these institutions are not confronted, nor pressed to defend themselves. “There were other people in hospitals that we did interview that we just couldn’t add into the film,” explains Lee. “There just wasn’t enough room for that. We tried to be balanced. But as much as we at one point thought we would have a broader story, it really came down to telling the story of these women and the experts, whether Dr. Neel Shah or the midwife Helena Grant; they sort of were filling in some of the
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Top: Gabby Giffords and husband, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly; the filmmakers Julie Cohen and Betsy West.
information for us.” For the makers of Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down, it was enough to show clips of NRA statements on gun policy. Getting countervailing opinions on gun control was beside the point. (Between the time the film was finished and its July 13 release in theaters, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which includes background checks, was signed into law.) “I think what’s kind of amazing about
Gabby is she’s really good at when she speaks about the issue,” says Erspamer. “Ninety percent of Americans want background checks, as the Giffords organization talks about a lot. But obviously politics gets in the way. I do think she’s good at bridging that gap because she is a gun owner, as she talks about in the movie. This film was intended to be about Gabby and her story, so that’s what we leaned into.” ¢
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MARKING TIME Producer Ellen Goldsmith-Vein shares her insights on the making of the upcoming Wendell & Wild , which earned her the Producers Mark, and “the immersive and magical experience that animation provides for a viewer.”
Wendell & Wild
Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, p.g.a. Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, the founder and CEO of The Gotham Group—a management/production company based in Los Angeles—might be best known as the producer of The Maze Runner trilogy, a series of sci-fi action/adventure films that collectively have grossed almost a billion dollars worldwide. But her animation roots run deep, dating back to a time “when no one gave animation talent a second thought,” as she puts it. The upcoming Wendell & Wild (being released in October via Netflix), which she produced with Jordan Peele and writer-director Henry Selick, continues a fruitful association with animation that began with the TV series Creature Comforts, which aired from 2003–06. Wendell & Wild has been described as “a dark horror fantasy.” She’s currently in production on My Best Friend’s Exorcism, based on the novel of the same name by Grady Hendrix, for Amazon Studios, as well as the animated series The Search for
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WondLa for Apple TV+, based on the sci-fi fantasy series of books by Tony DiTerlizzi.
YOUR FIRST PRODUCING CREDIT, AS AN EXECUTIVE PRODUCER ON THE ANIMATED SERIES CREATURE COMFORTS , WAS ALSO STOP-MOTION. WOULD YOU CONSIDER WENDELL & WILD A FULL-CIRCLE RETURN TO YOUR ORIGINS? Stop-motion has always been one of my favorite animation styles because of the handmade quality of the work. It’s incredibly hard to make an animated film or television series, and the artists that work in this unique discipline are in high demand. Alongside Netflix and with Henry Selick as the visionary leader on Wendell & Wild, we’ve been able to assemble the best of the best in every department to make this movie. Henry always tries new things on his movies, things that have not been done before, so he is creating while he is creating. To see the artistic and technological advances that have been developed in both instances has been revelatory.
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HOW DID YOU GET INVOLVED WITH WENDELL & WILD ? We’ve worked with Henry Selick for over 20 years. His auteur status was always apparent, and it’s been a highlight of my career to encourage and support his cinematic vision. His idea for Wendell & Wild was, like Henry himself, a true original with the potential to attract a wide audience. That’s exactly the type of project that we as a company champion. When Jordan Peele came on board as a producer, co-writer, and star alongside Keegan Michael Key, Lyric Ross and Angela Bassett, among others, it seemed this idea had reached its fullest expression. We brought the concept to Netflix, which saw his film as the perfect debut project for a creative partnership with Henry.
HENRY SELICK HAS DIRECTED TWO OF THE MORE NOTABLE
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STOP-MOTION FILMS EVER MADE: THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS AND CORALINE . CAN YOU SPEAK TO HIS SPECIFIC WAY OF WORKING? AND HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR WORKING RELATIONSHIP WITH HIM? Henry and I have known each other and worked together for so long, we understand each other pretty well at this point. I know that he appreciates collaboration and working hand in hand with his crew to bring the best version of a story to life. I thought I knew everything about animation, but with Henry, there is always something unique and original. To see the true creative spark and then see it come to life in this magical format is pretty special.
IT’S BEEN WRITTEN THAT PRODUCTION WAS DONE REMOTELY DURING COVID IN JUNE 2020, AND THAT MUCH OF IT WAS DONE IN PORTLAND, OREGON, WHERE NEARBY WILDFIRES WERE RAGING, AND POLITICAL UNREST CONTINUED IN THE WAKE OF THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION AND BLM PROTESTS. WHY OREGON? In recent years, the Portland, Oregon, area has developed into a stop-motion hub, so it was great to tap into that substantial creative pool for Wendell & Wild. Henry was one of the reasons that so much animation talent moved to Portland in the first place, as his film Coraline was made at the then-burgeoning LAIKA Studios. There are only a handful of locations on the planet where stop-motion thrives. Besides Portland, the only other one I can think of is Bristol, England, which has been the longtime home of Aardman Animations (which worked on Creature Comforts). Portland and Bristol are similar from many perspectives, and most importantly, they are two cities that attract the largest pool of stop-motion animators. ¢
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ONE ON ONE
WITH A SOCIOLOGICAL SUBTEXT GLADSTONE: We’re going to
be really focused on making sure that our scares deliver. Because if it’s scary, you will win.
COOPER: We feel so honored and
lucky to be able to be that subversive. But the interesting thing about Jordan is that he’s so aware and in dialogue with the audience.
GLADSTONE: Yeah, he is. It’s clear. COOPER: I think Nope was a long
journey with a lot of ingredients that could have been far too esoteric. He made this amazing alchemy out of it. As you leave the theater, you’re just like, “Wait, wow!”
GLADSTONE: Well, that’s the
hope, right? You don’t want people to be thinking about the movie while they’re watching it. You want them to be feeling it.
COOPER: Right. GLADSTONE: So are you feeling
scared? Are you feeling wonder? Are you feeling fright, the thrill, the comedy? We are in the business of creating emotion for the audience.
COOPER: That’s wonderful. GLADSTONE: Theme is so important. #MeToo and Black Lives Matter were both very big in our movie. (Director) Jessica Thompson brought so much emotion to the project. And we hired Nathalie Emmanuel to play our lead, who’s magnificent in the movie.
COOPER: She looks awesome. GLADSTONE: But the part was not written for a Black woman.
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COOPER: Right. GLADSTONE: She brought this whole
other layer to it, which was magnificent. Afterward, we really want (audiences) to think about those subjects—where you’ve got the feeling in the text and the thought in the subtext. That’s what we all hope for.
COOPER: I feel like there’s kind of
a meta level to a lot of this because as filmmakers, there’s a lot of material that we are so inspired by. Almost like we’re in a lab and we’re trying to extract the feeling. If you think about something like Stranger Things, which is predicated on the quotational, which adds reference by nostalgia. Jordan and I are always talking about it, like, “Remember that feeling you had when you were in high school watching Strange Days on VHS cassette?”
GLADSTONE: I do. COOPER: With Nope, we were
trying to make something that felt like one of those movies. In a press junket interview, Jordan was like, “I feel like this movie should be released on VHS, just so I can see the spine on a shelf.” It just feels like that kind of thing. I was watching the trailer for The Invitation, and the end has just the perfect promise of being totally gnarly and cathartic, like at the end of Get Out.
GLADSTONE: I do think that the
audience wants that lift at the end. I am a sucker for a happy ending.
COOPER: Me too. GLADSTONE: There is a cost for the
victory, but you know, there still is that triumph, and I think the audience is desperate for that triumph because this
Continued from page 42
world is really fucked and everyone’s walking through shit all day long. I’m a writer at heart, so what do writers want to do? We want to complicate, so we can solve.
COOPER: I always think about
movies like Let the Right One In…
GLADSTONE: I love that movie. COOPER: Or It Follows. Just
simple; perfectly executed. Like, I wish I had made that. Or even like Goodnight Mommy.
GLADSTONE: I love
Goodnight Mommy. Also, you mentioned this sort of low-fi thing that you and Jordan like, especially with Nope. I love lowfi. There’s something so powerful about that. Like The Babadook (2014), right? That monster is so basic, yet so terrifying. Visual effects are important. For example, the mirror cracking in La Llorona. But ultimately, the best villains are practical villains.
COOPER: Totally, man. GLADSTONE: You know, La Llorona is
just an actress in some makeup. The less low-fi, the more complicated the villain, the less scary it is. We’re struggling with a piece of the movie now where one of our antagonists is crawling on a wall toward the hero, trying to get her. That wouldn’t have been too hard to shoot practically. But we just didn’t have the time, so we kicked it to visual effects, and now we regret it, because it doesn’t sell as well. There is nothing better than an actual actor, than the feeling of that evil presence through an actor. Visual effects are really important; don’t get me wrong. But creating shit from whole cloth in visual effects is a trap.
ONE ON ONE
COOPER: I’ve had some moments
their white privilege to live forever.
like that recently. And obviously, as I’m sure you can guess, our antagonist is…
COOPER: Totally.
GLADSTONE: Not human.
PRODUCED BY: There is also
COOPER: …not practical. So it’s a very
different kind of picture in that respect. We spent an enormous amount of time grounding it in the design process, and in the practice of shooting—trying to make that feel as seamless as it can be with a thing that’s clearly not there when you’re shooting. You get crunched into a production schedule, and you’re trying to make it all work. Then that thing that always happens where it’s, “Oh, well. It’s cool. We’ll fix it later.”
GLADSTONE: Yeah. COOPER: Oh my god, it’s like, if I can just have that extra half day to have shot it instead of…
GLADSTONE: And then you regret it,
over and over and over again. Because through editorial, through the test process, you’re living through it. We watch these movies hundreds of times, and all you see is what’s wrong. We don’t give ourselves credit for what’s right. I’m like, “Why didn’t I fight harder to get the time to shoot that guy?” So on the next picture, I’ll fight harder.
PRODUCED BY: There’s a parallel
between Get Out, which I know you didn’t produce, Ian, and The Invitation— these scary bastions of white privilege where nothing’s as it seems.
GLADSTONE: Get Out is brilliant
on many levels, but for me, because I’m a white, 53-year-old guy, through my lens it’s a version of Meet the Parents. Even though it’s about white people who want to inhabit beautiful Black strong bodies so they can use
an element in Nope as well. You’ve got these Black animal wranglers who are not treated as equals on the fictional film set. They’re kind of invisible in a way.
GLADSTONE: Right. PRODUCED BY: That creates
a tension that can be seen by the viewer but not by the antagonists. They have no idea what kind of subtle transgressions they’re committing. Can you elaborate on that a bit, Ian?
COOPER: Yeah, definitely. It’s
interesting because this movie is a real rumination on moviemaking. The thing we were really excited about, without being too inside baseball, is giving the general audience some sense of what it’s like to be below the line. That you could be literally right there next to a movie star or former movie star—what you may imagine Donna Mills’ character is like in our movie in this one scene—but you’re also essentially invisible. Even though the thing you’re doing is pretty crazy. You’re bringing a giant animal to a set that could be dangerous, and everyone’s like, “Yeah, yeah, whatever; you’re fine.” I think the film itself is like an unpacking of the very origin of making a motion picture—who gets remembered and who gets forgotten. Even the archetype of a cowboy in Westerns being a stolen archetype from a slave, you know? So it’s the origin of motion pictures, the origin of Westerns, the erasure of Blackness in those origin stories, and a revisionist unpacking of those. It was the overarching, thematic
fabric of the film, which is crazy for a UFO movie. But also not so crazy in the way Jordan crafted it. One of the things I love about The Invitation trailer is how Nathalie becomes increasingly alien in that environment, and I didn’t even read it as her being a Black woman in that space, but more a relatable contemporary woman. Even just by wardrobe, tattoos—just the vibe of trying to dress up when you’re not even a person who does that.
GLADSTONE: Ian, you’re 100%
getting it. We absolutely have an Upstairs, Downstairs theme that runs throughout, sort of a classist theme. It’s also very much a movie about the patriarchy and burning down the patriarchy, and exploring that through this very relatable young woman.
COOPER: I think the biggest
subversion of Us was that Jordan Peele could make a really fun Spielbergian movie with Black leads playing an upper-middle-class family. And everyone’s like, “Wait!”
GLADSTONE: And I didn’t see race in Us; I saw the duality of man. I was like, we are all good, and we are all evil.
COOPER: Totally. GLADSTONE: We are all hero. We are all villain. That’s what Us was to me. I was so into it for that reason.
COOPER: Thank you, Emile. Dude, this has been so fun talking to you.
GLADSTONE: You too. ¢
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AS METAPHOR FOR LIFE BORENSTEIN: Then when it came
to shooting it, Todd Banhazl—this incredible, beautiful soul who is one of the great DPs and just a genius—had this idea of shooting on period cameras and period stock (Mihai Malaimare was co-DP). And mixing the stock so that it would have that aesthetic and textured, layered feel that you get in documentaries. So he found old Ikegami video cameras, like a pre-Beta camera, and we shot a ton on those. We shot the rest on film, 8mm and 35mm. The video and the film were meant to be just bit of texture. The video in particular was meant to only replicate TV footage, but it was such a cool aesthetic. It brought me back instantly. It’s like looking through a time machine. You feel like you are looking at something taken 40 years ago, like a sense memory, like smelling something from your childhood. We all fell in love with it and Adam encouraged Banhazi to use it more. So all that footage went into the mix (to be edited by) Adam’s editor on his last three movies, Hank Corwin (one of six editors on the series; Corwin cut the pilot), truly one of the great editors of this generation—he did The Tree of Life and Natural Born Killers. He’s extremely freewheeling and creative. He takes risks and follows the emotion. That became a huge part of the template and editorial style. We ended up with an aesthetic for the show that feels not like anything I’ve ever made.
LEE: The world changed also. Like,
from the day we wrapped versus the day when Bruised aired, the environment was different. Audiences wanted something different and that’s something you can’t get on a timeline.
BORENSTEIN: You never
predict success. It’s a crapshoot. You aim for quality and then you just hope people like it.
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Continued from page 48
LEE: I think the world was ready
for Halle as a director, and to bring us back to Bruised, the world was ready to see that story.
BORENSTEIN: Yeah. LEE: Or more willing to, where maybe in 2017 or 2015, it wouldn’t have…
BORENSTEIN: It’s not ready until
people like you take a risk, make it happen, and then suddenly it seems like the smartest thing in the world. So I think there is an element of that. I think this town always chases what happened last. There’s always going to be that first person to do it. Sometimes it’s luck; sometimes it’s bravery.
LEE: Well, sports movies are always
challenging to make independently because they’re a very domestic play. There’s no quote-unquote “international value.” So something like Bruised, where we’re selling the international and financing independently, it’s already breaking the model.
BORENSTEIN: Then it comes out and
people love it and then this conventional wisdom changes, right? The thing about conventional wisdom is it doesn’t change until you break the mold. We’ve all done things that are less risky. But the ones that are more exciting or make a bigger splash are always the ones that had a bigger chance of drowning.
LEE: Yeah, for sure. And being a producer is fine because you can sort of mix it up, you know.
BORENSTEIN: Definitely. LEE: For every John Wick 3, there’s A
Private War or Hotel Mumbai (both 2018).
PRODUCED BY: Your biggest challenge in a nutshell?
BORENSTEIN: When you
think about the process, it’s like constant out of the frying pan into the fire, one thing to the next. The biggest challenge in a way was COVID when we were shooting, because first it delayed us and then we started shooting and it was right after the vaccines. We had everyone testing every single day for most of the production. They were like hour-long tests. People had to wait, and everyone was masked. We’re in a business where everyone was working really long hours and putting in incredible, intense work. Then to add extra hours on top of that and the uncertainty of danger, fear of COVID—it was a testament to the incredible fortitude of crews in Hollywood. We did our best as producers to provide a safe environment by having everyone test. We never shut down, remarkably. You felt like you were in The Matrix, constantly dodging the bullet. And some people didn’t.
PRODUCED BY: Erica, what about you?
LEE: The financial aspect of the
movie—almost falling apart and pushing so many times over a year and a half. The ups and downs emotionally—the rev up, the rev down. We closed the door on the financing very late. The movie was wrapped. So just the on-set drama of that. And I think when Halle broke her ribs when we were less than a week in. There’s no double for her. So we went down for two days so she could rest, and then she went back at it. Which was insane. I had never experienced that before. I mean, we had always hurt people on the Wick movies and most action movies, but not to that degree. She just dealt with it. ¢
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IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GIANTS
James Cameron Dodges an Iceberg
MAXIMUM FILM / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Written By Steve Chagollan
T
wenty-five years ago, in the summer of 1997, few could have predicted the impact of the looming Titanic. The film’s planned July release got delayed until December, fueling speculation that the most expensive film ever made—with a budget that ballooned to an unheard-of $200 million—was in deep trouble, and could never recoup its gargantuan cost. Producer-director-writer James Cameron, who gained his reputation as an action director with such VFX trailblazers as Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2 (1991), was surely in over his head, critics speculated, by attempting an epic prestige picture in the grand Hollywood tradition. Rumors of tyrannical behavior on the set only whetted skeptics’ appetite for schadenfreude. Besides, as awards season began to take shape, the smart money was on Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential, a noirish murder mystery with a knockout ensemble cast that all the major critics groups had proclaimed the year’s best. But Cameron and his producing partner, Jon Landau, had the last laugh. Titanic tied All About Eve (1950) with the most Oscar nominations (14), and Ben-Hur (1959) with wins (11), including best picture. Moreover, it quickly became the highestgrossing film of all time, and the first to hit the $1 billion mark in BO receipts. Everything about Titanic was big, from its title to its financing—by not one but two majors, Fox and Paramount. The production required the construction of a satellite studio in Baja California, where the world’s largest water tank could accommodate a full-scale replica of the RMS Titanic. Cameron, an avid diver and deep submergence technology freak, referred to the Titanic as the “Mount Everest of shipwrecks.” Considerable pains were made to underscore the ocean liner’s tremendous scale with a combination of production design and special effects. Cameron wasn’t above self-deprecation about the bigness of it all. When Kate Winslet’s Rose loses patience during a dinner table discussion about the ship’s enormity, she suggests to the White Star Line’s managing director that Freud’s “ideas about the male preoccupation with size might be of particular interest.” It wasn’t just size that mattered. Cameron’s zealous research and quest for accuracy left no stone unturned, right down to the ship’s cutlery. But the commercial elements could not be overlooked: a star-crossed romance featuring two of the big screen’s hottest up-and-comers (Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio), a clear-cut villain (Billy Zane), lavish period costumes, eye-popping special effects and an end-credits power ballad (Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On”) that sold 18 million copies. Cameron’s formative experiences as a moviegoer were shaped by wide-screen epics like Spartacus (1960) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), which combined historic sweep and tragic romance. The director suggested that Hollywood had lost touch with “that sense of religious transport that a movie is supposed to have.” And at the end of the day, what he was making was not a disaster picture, but “a love story … about the human heart.”
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