For Good and the Producer Roundtable

“There’s a red flashing light. That’s never a good sign,” assesses Marc Platt.

It was, indeed, not a good sign. But if your camera equipment is going to unexpectedly fail on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of busy awards season just as you are about to start a roundtable conversation about the joys and difficulties of filmmaking, you would be hard-pressed to find a more sympathetic group than this year’s Hollywood Reporter Producers Roundtable.

From convincing insurance companies to let Brad Pitt drive at 180 miles per hour to tracking down ultra-rare VistaVision cameras from actor Giovanni Ribisi, Nia DaCosta (Hedda), David Heyman (Jay Kelly), Joseph Kosinski (F1), Sara Murphy (One Battle After Another), Sev Ohanian (Sinners) and Marc Platt (Wicked: For Good) are used to battling setbacks and all-around problem-solving in the name of moviemaking.

With a new camera acquired, these producers got talking about their respective films — all awards-season frontrunners — and also about the state of the modern movie star, bringing productions back to California and getting audiences back into movie theaters.

Says Kosinski, “We have got to get people out of their homes, off their phones, into the theaters, and give them an experience that they won’t forget.”

What is a moment as a producer that had you sweating?

SEV OHANIAN For one of our sequences in the middle, where Jack O’Connell as Remmick has all the turned vampires conducting this big dance set to “Rocky Road to Dublin,” we had budgeted a good six hours. Due to weather delays, we ended up with only an hour and a half to shoot. We were racing up and down to the hair and makeup trailers, the [assistant directors] and locations people were helping with shoveling mud. We had 100 extras and special effects, too. The sun was coming up, and these are vampires, so we can’t have sun in a vampire movie. We barely pulled it off. I genuinely think if you watch the sequence, you can feel all the performers are feeling that pressure. We finished, and we hadn’t slept for 24 hours, but we all went and had empanadas.

MARC PLATT I was making a film with the brilliant actor Ryan Gosling, something we’d developed together called Drive, about a getaway driver in Los Angeles, and it’s a beautiful script. We were on the set the first day, and Ryan, who has a very specific process, said, “This is a character that doesn’t speak much, so I don’t think I’m going to say much of this dialogue.” It was an independently financed movie, and I froze for a moment because I thought people have put all [this money in]. So I sweat it a little bit, which never happened to me [before]. Then the camera started rolling, and I knew in an instant that he’d made such a smart, intuitive, truthful decision. That character didn’t speak, and it made him so much more powerful.

NIA DACOSTA With Hedda, we were supposed to shoot in the fall of 2023, and two days before we were supposed to shoot, the actors went on strike. Which, listen, I’m union strong, let’s go. But I was like, “No!” We shut down, and I knew that I would lose actors. I knew that we might lose our location. I knew that we might lose the whole film. I spiraled for about three days, went to Greece, came back and just was so amazed by my producing partners and the studio fighting to keep the movie alive. Two or three months later, we came back and we shot in January instead.

When it came to remounting Hedda, what were the things that were lost? And then, ultimately, what were the surprises that came out of that?

DACOSTA The owners of the house let us keep the house completely dressed for the entire time we were down. I think they also wanted to redo their roof. They were like, “Yeah, but obviously you will pay us more.” (Laughs.) But it really wasn’t that much more. We lost two of our actors. [Originally,] Eve Hewson was cast and Callum Turner was cast. They were replaced by Imogen Poots and Tom Bateman, who are all amazing actors. I didn’t feel like I was losing anything there. I just thought, “Well, this isn’t our time now, and we’ll meet each other down the road.”

Joe, how do you get insurers and the studio to get behind having your actors drive for real in F1?

JOSEPH KOSINSKI Both Brad and Damson Idris are really naturally gifted drivers. They trained for four months, and we built real race cars and shot at Real Grands Prix, all in an effort to try to capture the incredible experience of being at a Formula One race. The hardest thing to get the insurance company in their head was that these cars are safer the faster they are driven. They use downforce that pushes them down on the track. The brakes have to be hot to work, the tires have to be hot, so we spent a lot of time explaining that. Once we got on the same page, Brad was able to go 160 to 180 miles an hour.

DACOSTA Were they trying to give you a speed cap for safety?

KOSINSKI There was a speed cap initially of 140, and it just wasn’t fast enough to capture what we wanted to capture. The scariest moment was really the Las Vegas race. It’s cold that time of year, it was like 40 degrees at night. The tires got cold, the brakes got cold. Brad and Damson were not able to practice on that track before the actual shoot. We got a 15-minute window to shoot the scene. There’s no runoff on that track, so if they did make a mistake, they’d go right into the wall.

Sara, Paul Thomas Anderson places an emphasis on locations. You had one location that gets called out a lot that you all called the River of Hills. How did you find that? And how did you pull off your car chase sequence?

SARA MURPHY Paul spent several years scouting. We were looking for the film to feel like a traveling show. They accidentally found this River of Hills while looking for a different location. They were driving at night and going over these hills and all of a sudden started feeling the terror of not knowing what was on the other side. So, that very quickly got worked into the script for that final sequence. [The car chase] was a lot of coordination with Adam Somner, our AD and my fellow producer, and Brian Machleit, our stunt coordinator. We shot it over four days, and we could only shoot in the morning and the evening for the light. At the end of it, I remember Adam came up to me and was like, “We have to come back in the fall for the light. And I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me. We’ve been shooting for four days!” We did not have to go back. (Laughs.)

What was so incredible to see in your movie was how much of California is shown. There has been a lot of concern about productions leaving the state. What would you all like to see happen to bring productions back here?

PLATT Selfishly, the biggest upside [of filming in California] is you get to go home every night. I’ve used California mostly for when the story’s been in L.A. It’s a lot about economics. Dave, you’ve made a lot of studio films on sets. You’ve done more than anybody in terms of creating fantasy and worlds, and they can be built anywhere. So it’s a question of the craftsmanship [available] to build, and is the tax incentive enough to incentivize a cost of a movie that has a large construction budget?

DAVID HEYMAN Couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve shot three times recently in L.A., and the only reason we filmed here was because we couldn’t film anywhere else. It’s an economic imperative. The new rebate here or the added rebate will help, but I don’t know that it’s enough to be honest with you. The system in the U.K. is very clear in terms of how you qualify. You even get credit on backend. We shot [Jay Kelly] here mostly with an American crew because a part of it took place in Los Angeles. When I produced Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you can’t shoot that anywhere else, and we did get the tax credit. The pleasures are undeniable, the quality of the crews is undeniable, but it’s an economic choice, really.

With Jay Kelly, this is your third time working with director Noah Baumbach. How has that collaboration grown?

HEYMAN I understand now that Noah requires a lot of rehearsal, so you’ve got to carve that out in terms of the deals you’re making. He does a lot of takes, and he always makes his days, but he does many takes in searching for the exact performance. He’s a producer, too, so there’s a certain amount of pragmatic. But as a director, that pragmatism has a limit, and he is forever — as he should and as you want — pushing the boundaries of what is possible. The pleasure of now the third film is being able to say, “Please stop.” (Laughs.)

Marc, when the first Wicked movie came out, you said you wanted to fight for an intermission and make it one movie. What are the things that you are willing to fight for and the things that you are willing to let go of, and how do you decide that?

PLATT I’m not sure I said “fight” for intermission, but I had thought of that at one time, and the question is a good one. All of us as producers work to create environments for which our creative team does their best work, and it starts with the filmmaker. And every filmmaker is different. A good director will find the language and the grammar to get the actor to go where they want, and it’s no different for a producer. Some directors are strong at certain things, some are strong at everything. Some need you right next to them at the monitor, some do a little better when you step back. It’s not one-size-fits-all. I do think it’s our job in the financing and studio side to be the navigators of that, to be good partners. They are taking risks as well, but I am always aware of the line over which I don’t want to go. To give a specific example, [production designer] Nathan Crowley and [director] Jon M. Chu had come up with this train that was very significant to me that takes the characters into the Emerald City. The movie could exist without a train. The story doesn’t change, but I understood not only what their wants were there, but I felt it was, cinematically, a big moment for these characters. The budget was big, and I want to cut back, but that’s a fight I’m willing to do because it’s backed up with the intention of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. If you understand the intention of your writer and your director and something does come up that requires a solution, financially or otherwise, understanding the true intention allows, most of the time, to effect the kind of compromise that retains the creative integrity of what you’re trying to do.

Joe, as a producer and a director, at what times are you putting on your producer hat and at what times are you putting on your helmer hat?

KOSINSKI As the director, this movie came out of a dream to shoot a film at live events, but certainly the producer side understood that it’s a little bit insane to shoot your film in nine-minute windows, putting it all on the line every single day. I can’t think of anything where I didn’t get what I wanted. But certainly, there were days where I’m in the back of my head saying, “Is this insane? What am I doing?” And Nia was there for one of those days.

DACOSTA Yes, at Silverstone. Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner produced Hedda, as well [as F1].

How was it being on the ground and watching?

DACOSTA Oh, you’re insane, bro. It reminded me of when I was younger and first falling in love with film because my feeling was, “You can do anything in this medium.” To be on set when you’re having Javier Bardem and Tobias Menzies doing these takes over and over again with the camera rolling, and then there’s a race that’s about to start around you — so many people would tell you, “You can’t do that. That’s not possible.” But when you have yourself and the producers that you have, you find that actually anything is possible.

Many of your films were available in premium formats, from Imax to VistaVision. How important is having that offering to bringing audiences to movie theaters?

OHANIAN We were having one of those late nights in the edit, talking about if only there was a way that people could know how much we put into this film, specifically the way we shot it, large format combining these various types of film. [Director] Ryan Coogler was like, “What if we just tell them?” We very quickly put together this simple video that was homegrown where we just had Ryan for 10 minutes talk about different film formats, the way we shot Sinners, why we shot it that way and, specifically, what are the various ways you can see this film if you wanted to go see it in theaters. We put that out there, and I genuinely think it made a real difference.

MURPHY For Paul, it was like, well, we’ve done 70 millimeter, what else can we do? He had started looking at the VistaVision cameras years ago, and we had experimented a little bit on a music video that we did for Thom Yorke, but at the time, the cameras weren’t ready. There were very few of them and they hadn’t been properly refurbished. As we were planning the shoot, [actor and occasional cinematographer] Giovanni Ribisi actually had the best models. He has been refurbishing them for many years.

PLATT [Audiences] are eager to see the large format. At a time where so many rely on their phones and technology is evolving as we speak, the ability to bring people into a theater and share something is still a great unifier.

KOSINSKI The great thing about these premium formats is you also know the theater’s going to be set up to spec. The volume’s going to be turned up to seven, and the bulb’s going to be bright, and you’re going to get that reference quality. I’m sure we’ve all been to preview screenings where you show up at a neighborhood theater, and you see just kind of what the standard is out there. (Laughs.)

PLATT It’s horrifying. (Laughs.)

KOSINSKI We have got to get people out of their homes, off their phones, into the theaters and give them an experience that they won’t forget. The theater can do that when it’s done right.

The other conversation happening right now when it comes to bringing audiences into theaters is a lack of new movie-star talent. Is there an inherent difference in the younger talent who’s coming up in the industry right now? Or have audience tastes changed?

PLATT I’ll speak for the old people here. I do think there was a time in the film culture where you waited for the next movie of a particular movie star, and that was the brand. And I think the younger folks ask more of their brands. It’s either familiarity with the material or the source, or it is the marriage of a particular actor to a story or brand where one plus one equals three, and then that becomes the brand. There are very few actors that are automatic, but you put an actor people are aware of in the right concept, in the right story, then it’s combustible.

HEYMAN In some way, that’s always been the case, don’t you think?

PLATT Maybe. But there was a time in the ’90s and early ’00s where, what’s the next Arnold Schwarzenegger movie? What is the next Julia Roberts? That was the brand. To your point, I did a movie with Julia that’s called Mary Reilly, and that was a very challenging film. She’s lovely in it, but it wasn’t the way the audience really wanted to see her.

DACOSTA I was watching Witness for the first time, actually, last week. I got obsessed with Harrison Ford again and went through his whole filmography. And I was thinking about all those genres that have migrated to streaming. The rom-com has migrated to streaming. The smart thriller has migrated to streaming. A lot of these stars would be in those kinds of movies, and now they’re not really given the theatrical treatment in the same way.

PLATT There is a new pressure of these [theatrical] windows, of you having only that certain amount of time because of streaming. One can, on the negative side, say it has a mitigating effect against something completely original without a star. It’s up to all the filmmakers you work with to keep telling the stories that meet the moment. All of a sudden, the unexpected happens. Then it’s Hollywood, and everybody wants to go with the unexpected.

HEYMAN It is hard for originals, undoubtedly. When an original doesn’t succeed, it somehow carries more weight. Everybody’s looking for some security. Having that IP allows people who are making decisions to feel more comfortable and justify the choice. As we all say, we are competing with so many different media. You’re competing with entertainment on phones, on television screens, on TikTok and beyond. So, with all the noise, to actually have a film with awareness, it is hard.

This year, there was a media obsession surrounding box office and budgets and profitability. Sev and Sara, this narrative particularly hit Sinners and One Battle After Another. Are you annoyed by this conversation or is it ever productive?

MURPHY The dialogue specifically around Warner Bros. and the studio over this past year was unfortunate. I think that was counterproductive to the projects and the films that were being made. I am happy to see them on the other side of that now because I think to [David’s] point about original films, they were taking a lot of risks, and that was at the forefront of their agenda and it paid off. Some films did better in the box office than others, but I think the industry wants to embrace original films and the continuation of making them and supporting them. So, there’s also been a lot of support around the films even the ones that didn’t do as well box office-wise because I think we need them to succeed.

OHANIAN It makes me filled with optimism that that kind of slate can have that kind of reach. And the stories that may have been published here and there, they were fine because our audiences, in our case, really showed up, and it almost maybe made them even more vocal about their love for the film.

HEYMAN It’s not something that’s going to change because the nature of media and press is that the bad news is good news, unfortunately. So it’s something we’ve just got to live with.

Marc, when it comes to Wicked, you have been with it for more than two decades now in various iterations. Now that this second film is coming out, is there a sadness or are you excited for it?

PLATT It’s definitely been an overwhelmingly emotional experience. I started to make it as a film when I first began and really took a left turn to make it into a musical onstage first. And then I held back for many, many, many years making the film. Universal, as you would imagine, was ready to make it 20 years ago when it first opened on Broadway. There were wonderful directors who came into my office, but I wasn’t ready. A part of it was I wanted the fan base to grow, and part of it, honestly, was I was insecure. The bar had been so high for me. I waited until I felt I had the tools as a producer and I had the stature to be able to make it the way I wanted.

Can Wicked exist in another incarnation?

PLATT It will always be hard for me, as long as I’m breathing, to let go completely of Wicked. That was one of the challenges, to let really creative people like Jon Chu to come in and say, “We’re going to interpret it this way.” And for me not to say, “That’s not the way we do it.” It was a wrestling match inside me. But we will see. You never know.

I have some rapid-fire questions. What is the ideal run time for a movie?

KOSINSKI Two hours and seven minutes.

DACOSTA An hour and 47.

OHANIAN An hour and 49.

HEYMAN Whatever the story requires.

MURPHY OK, but really though. (Laughs.)

PLATT There’s no right or wrong, but that is the right answer. There’s some movies I’ve seen at 86 minutes that were far too long, and there were movies that I’ve seen at three and a half hours where I wished it would just go on.

DACOSTA But the answer is an hour 47.

If we were to look at all your IMDbs, what would be the most surprising credit on there?

KOSINSKI I did a Taco Bell commercial, which is on my IMDb.

Did you get free Taco Bell for life?

KOSINSKI I do not. I wish.

I’m sorry to hear that. I know we all love a Baja Blast here at this table.

OHANIAN I did a Chinese Mandarin-language movie that I was a junior producer on in my early indie film days coming up. I’m very proud of that movie. I don’t understand any of the dialogue, but it’s a good movie.

HEYMAN I think when I was starting off, there may be some things when I look back at the early stages of my career where I go, “Ooof.” Quite a few of those. I made a film about a blind gunslinger called Blind Justice. Not my proudest moment.

What is the movie that made you want to make movies?

MURPHY I didn’t plan on getting into film until I was working on the first set I worked on, which was Bennett Miller’s Capote. We were shooting in a car, and the grips had shoved a two-by-four under the back tire and were just jumping on the two-by-four to make the car move. And I was like, “Ah! Movie magic!”

DACOSTA It was the new American cinema era, like Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. That’s when I was like, “Oh, that’s a director.”

OHANIAN Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That movie blew my mind when I saw it for the first time. I was like, I just want to be involved in making something like that.

KOSINSKI The first film I remember seeing in the theater was Raiders of the Lost Ark as a 6-year-old. I did not sleep that night. Now, I’m realizing it was probably not appropriate, but I don’t think PG-13 existed then, so I’ll give my dad a pass there.

David, I’m not going to ask you who is going to be cast as James Bond, which you are producing, but I am going to ask everyone who, if you are dream-casting James Bond, you would cast. Let’s give David some ideas here.

HEYMAN Oh, thank you.

OHANIAN Dev Patel.

DACOSTA Jamael Westman. He was in my movie, Hedda. He originated [the title role in] Hamilton in London, actually. He’s very tall, very hot and a great actor.

KOSINSKI I’ll throw Damson Idris in the mix, having just worked with him.

PLATT I would love an unknown.

MURPHY I mean, could we have a female James Bond?

This interview has been edited and condensed.

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.