Killer Films’ Christine Vachon Says Return of Trump “Lends a Sense of Urgency” to Stories We Tell
Killer Films co-founder and industry-famous producer Christine Vachon is offering up her take on the return of Donald Trump to the White House .
Vachon, a longtime collaborator of Berlin Film Festival International jury president Todd Haynes, spoke at a fireside chat in Berlin with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Roxborough.
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“The industry has obviously been through a great deal of turmoil [with] the strikes,” Vachon began. “I can’t really make those predictions. I feel like the only thing I can do is look back at my own experience…when there was also a president [Ronald Reagan] that many of us felt was dangerous to marginalized [people]. That lent a sense of urgency to which stories were told. Perhaps we’re looking at that same kind of urgency in these coming years.”
Roxborough put to Vachon the difficulty director Ali Abbasi faced in finding a U.S. distributor for The Apprentice, spotlighting the struggle of onboarding financiers when a movie dares to get political. “I couldn’t have survived this long without having real faith in audiences and the desire to see good work and strong work and original work and provocative work,” she said.
“And The Apprentice did end up with two Oscar nominations. There’s always so many reasons that we filmmakers tell ourselves when a movie doesn’t [work]…. Sometimes we don’t consider that people just didn’t want to see a movie,” she continued. “I think, given some of the movies that we are putting together right now, that there still exist financiers who are really betting with their head and their heart.”
Vachon said character-driven drama is harder and harder to get made though it seems that audiences crave those stories the most. The rocky terrain in Hollywood is a glass half full, she put to the audience: “It’s forcing innovation. I’m seeing a lot of original storytelling that I haven’t really seen before that seems to come out of having to use one’s motivations.” And Vachon added: “[We are facing] great disruption, and that does bring new opportunity.”
On her advice for independent filmmakers, Vachon replied: “I feel like independent film is always at its most successful when it is a true alternative. I’m not sure what you distill from that as advice, you know, be original. Duh. But I guess it comes back to look for those opportunities.”
The Berlin Film Fest runs Feb. 13-23.
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