From ‘BlacKkKlansman’ to ‘Vice’: 12 Top Producers Talk Making the Impossible Possible
Tales from the front line for movies including BlacKkKlansman, First Man, If Beale Street Could Talk, and Vice.
In many ways, producers are a screenwriter’s best friend. It’s their job to support the director and production team to translate what’s written on the page into what’s on the screen. The Hollywood Reporter reached out to producers involved with twelve movies released in 2018 to recount a key challenge in the production of each of their films. Here are three quotes:
Eli Bush, Eighth Grade
When we were shooting the pool party, there was just this chaos of all these kids and the cameras and the pool and all this kind of stuff. It was sort of like, “Well, this is our movie! People will like it or they won’t, but this is what we set out to do.” [Director] Bo [Burnham] was just so ambitious and clear about what he wanted to say, and big-hearted about it. He went to these schools, he found real kids. Everyone would say, “Bo, you’re making your first movie, you’re crazy. It’s going to be with kids. It’s shorter days and it’s really hard on production.” He believed in [the kids] and he took it seriously, and they really took it seriously. They’re really smart, they’re really sensitive. They really understand what we’re trying to do and they’re really committed. [Lead actress] Elsie [Fisher] graduated eighth grade, and then we shot the movie over the summer. So it also had a vibe like this was our weird summer project or summer camp.
Helen Estabrook, The Front Runner
he poor props department had to source all of these period-accurate video cameras and still cameras. It was hilarious. Every day someone would come into my office saying, “He can ship us these four cameras.” You’re trying to track down cameras that no one uses anymore and that aren’t retro enough to be cool yet — 1980s equipment that had to be accurate for the period but is really hard to find. You walk into the conference room of our production office and it looks like a war room of 1987 [during Gary Hart’s presidential campaign], with all of these pictures of what every single location actually looked like, what every single person would have been using for the press corps — and they had to source them. The amount of time and effort to find these things that are still around but aren’t easily accessible in such quantities [was profound]. You could get one camera here or there, but to create an entire press corps for an entire campaign, it’s a lot of cameras, it’s a lot of film, it’s a lot of tape, it’s a lot of things that are not easy to find. Our props team and our production design team were tasked with some real intense sourcing and intense work.
Andrew Form, A Quiet Place
The thing we didn’t anticipate, which was honestly the first thing [director] John [Krasinski] pitched me when he read the screenplay, was the idea of the sand paths, which really leaned into the sound of the movie. What we weren’t ready for was the maintenance of the sand paths and how they get beat up every single day by people walking on them and, if your sand path isn’t there or ready, you can’t shoot. We weren’t prepared for the amount of personnel needed to maintain the sand paths, the amount of sand we needed, running out of sand, the equipment — these little things [the crew] would stand on, almost like a Bobcat, to bring the sand on — getting the sand paths perfect. If people walked on the sand, you had to rake it and make it look like it hadn’t been walked on. Any weather, any wind, all of it always was ruining the sand paths. Every day we were fighting sand paths. The amount of people we needed to get the sand paths ready was pretty crazy. It was one of the things that we never saw coming. And, by the way, [it was] so important in the film.
Kids. Pool party. 80s video cameras. Sand maintenance. Screenwriters envision a scene with specific physical elements. The production team has to that scene and those elements come into existence. The producer supports the director and crew in making the magic happen.
Sometimes it just doesn’t work as with the prison escape in The Old Man & the Gun as recounted by producer Toby Halbrooks.
Some battles you win. Some battles you lose. A screenwriter has to have strong problem-solving chops when production issues arise, but having a good producer as an ally in the struggle to get the story from script to screen is a major benefit to the process.
And when you find a good producer… work with them as much as you can.
For the rest of the Hollywood Reporter article and more tales from the front lines, go here.
