Natalie Portman, Christine Vachon and THR’s Producer Roundtable: “Make Sure There’s a Piece Inside You That Loves It Because It Will Become Hell”

From casting the CEO of the company that is financing their movie for Barbie to re-creating one of the most iconic moments of 20th century American history in 117-degree weather in Rustin, the producers behind this year’s awards films have had to navigate their share of uncomfortable, untenable and downright unbelievable situations to get their features to the big screen. 

Even with the ups and downs, there is no place they’d rather be than on set. “I feel like cynicism is the creativity killer. It’s the thing that destroys everything,” says Christine Vachon (Past Lives and May December), who along with Tom Ackerley (Barbie), Ed Guiney (Poor Things), Natalie Portman (May December), Scott Sanders (The Color Purple), and George C. Wolfe (Rustin) came together in Los Angeles for THR’s Producer Roundtable.

The producers talk about their contenders, as well as the horrors of the “soft no” and the movies that made them want to make movies.

What was the advice you got at the beginning of your career in filmmaking that sticks with you?

GEORGE C. WOLFE When you get involved in a project, make sure there’s a piece inside you that deeply, deeply loves it, because at one point it will become hell and that’s what you grab onto to push you through. 

TOM ACKERLEY We’ve been mentored by so many of our idols, and I remember [Oscar-winning producer] Dede Gardner said to me really early on: “Taste is the only currency you can trade.” It really helped us focus on not making a decision for strategy or financial reasons. You just make a movie because you think that movie is going to be the best movie it can be.

CHRISTINE VACHON I didn’t know many producers when I started, so this is advice I have given myself over the years: A crisis is only when somebody gets hurt. Everything else is just a pain in the ass, a challenge, a problem. But “crisis” — that’s the only reason to ever use that word.

SCOTT SANDERS It’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint. And what George said, I so relate to, which is you have to care about the story. You have to care about the characters and the protagonist and their journey, quite frankly, because it’s a long slog. You’re putting out little fires every day. There’s not a day that goes by that your day goes exactly as it was planned when you woke up that morning.

Scott, you have been with The Color Purple for many years.

SANDERS Twenty-five years.

You brought the book to the stage and now that musical to the screen. Were there people who needed convincing along the way that this book can live in those different mediums?

SANDERS Oh my God, a lot of people needed convincing. The Color Purple doesn’t, on its surface, seem like a story you’d want to sing and dance to on Broadway. And when you think about the cost of a Broadway ticket, that becomes even more challenging. The year that The Color Purple opened on Broadway, the African American audience attendance was 3.8 percent of all audiences combined. So I had lots of people — George knows — who said, “This show will never sell. There’s no audience for it.” I just believed in Celie. Don’t listen to nos. I mean, every once in a while, a no is helpful, but very often it’s based on fear or lack of knowledge, or they don’t understand what you are going for. Sometimes it’s very lonely. It can be a very lonely profession.

VACHON Don’t you think, in some ways, the worst thing is a soft no?

SANDERS Oh, yeah.

ED GUINEY A fast yes. A slow yes. A fast no. In that order.

When you approached Alice Walker about doing a musical, was she a fast yes?

SANDERS She was a fast no. I went to Berkeley and she said, “You seem like a very nice, smart guy, but no.” I went home and waited a couple of months and called her and said, “Could I fly you to New York and let’s spend a week and talk about why I think it’s right to do it?” And she said yes to that, which was the crack in the window. 

Todd Haynes has talked about being approached by you, Natalie, to direct May December. How did you know he was the right director for the movie?

NATALIE PORTMAN I’ve been wanting to work with Todd for a long time, Christine knows. I’ve been sending you both scripts for years. They’ve said no to me and I guess I’m a glutton for rejection.

GUINEY Fast nos?

PORTMAN They were fast and kind, but fast. When I read the script, I saw that it dealt with so many of the questions about performance and identity that I think Todd has explored in so many movies I love that he and Christine made together — Safe and Far From Heaven and I’m Not There. Very much these questions of how we construct ourselves in various aspects of performance. I thought he might take to it, and he did. It was the best luck of my life.

Outside of Todd, whom you have worked with for decades, Christine, you have made a habit of working with first-time filmmakers. 

VACHON It’s not easy because, especially as our world becomes more risk-averse, which it is, somebody betting on a first-time director becomes trickier and trickier. The reason why Killer [Films, the production company Vachon co-founded with Pamela Koffler] keeps doing it, first of all, it’s the anti-cynicism. I feel like cynicism is the creativity killer. It’s the thing that destroys everything. And when you work with a first-time director, you can’t be cynical because they’re usually telling the story that they’ve waited their whole lives to tell. Specifically to somebody like Celine [Song, the director of Past Lives], she is such an extraordinary storyteller, and I couldn’t teach her that. I could teach her how to read a call sheet, which we did. But that’s easy. That’s like: Look at the top, look at your name, now you know how to read a call sheet. But she knew the story she wanted to tell. 

Tom and Ed, Barbie and Poor Things, when it comes to producing, there is a lot of overlap. Both have big, complicated set pieces and characters. When you were reading your scripts for the first time, was there anything that stuck out and made you say, “There’s no way”?

ACKERLEY A thousand things, yes. I mean, it started with a Mattel executive being shot [in the epic battle involving toys], and then [went on to] fascism and gynecology. I remember when Margot [Robbie, Ackerley’s wife] and I got the script and we were sitting on the couch, and I’ll never forget, we were reading it and laughing and crying and every six pages turning around going, “That’s never going to happen. How are we going to do this?” And ultimately, the filmmaking process is about trust. And it was a long process with Mattel and Warner Bros. to get the movie made, but it was ultimately that they trusted in the process and they trusted in Greta Gerwig’s vision. And I think as a producer, the main thing we can do is trust our filmmaker and trust wholeheartedly what Greta was going to do with that movie, and we managed to convince our larger partners of that and went for it.

GUINEY We’d done The Lobster with Yorgos [Lanthimos], and he read the book [Poor Things] almost 10 years ago and soon after, he said, “You should read this book.” It was something that we said we’d do, but we knew that it would take a while to make the case for it. It was really the fact that The Favourite was a hit and made some money for people. Emma Stone joined the film after working with Yorgos on The Favourite, and that was the thing that unlocked it. I’m sure we probably all feel this, there’s an act of faith when you come across something and you go, “Wow, that would be amazing!” You don’t know exactly how that will become the thing that it becomes, but you go, “It’s interesting enough for me to get on board and see how we do it.” If I’d been analytical and very producorial about it back in those days, I’d be like, “Well, how do we even think about making this thing?”

George, you had a particularly difficult set piece in your film: the March on Washington. How did you go about re-creating something so iconic?

WOLFE Well, you try to do it three times. Someone came up with this brilliant idea — not! — that we should film it first. You had all these rules and regulations about filming at the Lincoln Memorial. All these rules! And 25 to 30 trucks took off from Pittsburgh, and COVID set in, we had to cancel. Then we start the permit process all over again in April, after we finished filming the rest of the film. Twenty-five to 30 trucks, again. COVID, again. We said, “OK, well, can’t we go in a month?” The next time that is available is August.

ACKERLEY Oh my God.

WOLFE By that time, I had edited the whole film together, so I knew exactly what I needed. The March was in August in 1963. It was 83 degrees. For us, it was 117 degrees. And at the Lincoln Memorial, when the sun would bounce off the marble, there was nowhere for it to go other than into the actor’s body. And there were these logistics of 500 extras and the wool suits, because that’s what they would’ve been in. But it turned out to be when it should have been filmed. It was complicated and a mess, but an incredible blessing in the long run because we were just this flawless, perfect team who were ready to take on the monster as opposed to using the monster to train us how to be a team. It was glorious and it was wonderful, and it was horrifying because of the heat, but it was glorious.

So many of you have worked with the same collaborators across multiple films. How do you know when you have found a lifelong creative partner?

GUINEY I often think that I’m more interested in people than ideas, if that makes sense. That if you connect with somebody’s brain, and you have a relationship that’s based on that, then you’re with them for the long haul. The filmmakers I’ve worked with, Yorgos or Lenny Abrahamson or Joanna Hogg, I don’t take it for granted at any point. I know that the next time, I need to do the job and do it really well. 

ACKERLEY Our company was born out of friendship [Josey McNamara founded LuckyChap alongside Ackerley and Robbie]. We’re 9 years old now. Why it’s had the longevity is we had a really clear vision from the start, and that was female films and female storytellers. And no matter how big the films, we have a very clear idea of what we want to do and what we want to achieve. And that won’t change and hasn’t changed.

VACHON I’m like, “Nine years is nice.” I’ve been with Todd for 30 years, and I’ve been with my business partner, Pam Koffler, for probably also 30 years. Having the partnership with Pam allows me in many ways to have the partnership with Todd because it provides such an extraordinary amount of stability. And one of the things I’d say about those partnerships is it’s better if you don’t have the same taste. You both have taste — you have to have taste — but there are different kinds of taste. I find that it invigorates me and wakes me up when Pam likes something and it makes me have to look at it again and say, “Oh, OK. I see why you do. I get it.” The relationships with directors, that’s almost a whole other panel. The relationship between a producer and a director is built out of so many things: trust, creative complicity and the ability, I think, for a producer to snowplow to a certain degree and help a director find the place that they can do their best work. But having almost a lifelong partner like Pam has just changed the business for me.

George, going off what Christine said about producer-director relationships — 

WOLFE I was thrilled to work with myself.

What do you hope or what do you look for in a producorial partner?

WOLFE A sense of safety as you’re venturing off the cliff. You’re also looking to try to create this incredible safe place for the actors, so that they can freely and joyfully walk off the cliff and discover something that’s startling and amazing and wonderful. A sense of safety is very important and a sense of feeling protected. Not obeyed, because there’s a certain dynamic of questioning.

Natalie, as an actress-producer, are there times when one of those roles is in conflict with the other?

PORTMAN It’s very empowering after 30 years of being an actress to now start producing because, when you’re just acting, you’re being protected and you can just focus on your art and not be aware of all the craziness that’s going on. But then once you get behind the curtain, you’re like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe all this stuff has been happening,” and you realize you can help make the environment that you want to work in. It’s very helpful to be like, “Oh, there’s a problem. I can help fix it.” And I think it’s similar to what all of you have been saying about de-dramatizing. That’s where the conflict can come in because you know a lot of shit and the rest of the actors don’t need to know. You really need to go back and make everyone feel like everything is just smooth and fun.

I wanted to talk about casting for a moment. For The Color Purple, Scott, you had decades’ worth of Broadway casts to pull from, not to mention being able to cast from outside that pool. How did you decide on your lead? 

SANDERS [Celie] was one of the hardest roles to cast. And there were a lot of options and a lot of conversations around it. Celie’s someone you want to root for, and Fantasia Barrino is someone you want to root for. And she really has the DNA of Celie inside her and her own personal story. All of this was done in COVID, so we did not have one personal audition. It was the weirdest casting process I’ve ever encountered. People self-taped, and there were Zooms. And finally, toward the end, Blitz [Bazawule, director] said, “I’m going to North Carolina to meet with Fantasia, personally, to make the final decision.” That’s how that happened. 

Sticking with casting, Tom, you had the interesting situation of casting the CEO of Mattel, when Mattel is a producer on your movie. How did you go about doing that? 

ACKERLEY We sat with Mattel for the first time, we told them we would become ambassadors of Barbie and we wanted to honor the brand, but equally be able to tell the movie we wanted to tell. We were very up front about that. That was Greta’s genius, that’s all her, bringing in the Mattel CEO role. There were so many things in that script that we just, over time, got Mattel comfortable with. Robbie Brenner, who was a producer on the movie and is the president of film at Mattel, was a big part of that, and Greta’s vision was a big part of that. I remember when we first read the script, Greta would read us the whole script over Zoom. We would do hours of sessions, and we got to understand the tone of it and how she heard it. Making Barbie for us was like climbing Everest, it was the biggest movie we ever did, and we were able to speak to the movie for Greta in a way that I’d never been able to experience before. And that, while having the conversations with Mattel and WB, was so helpful. As for Will, I mean, he was perfect. I mean, who else could do it? No one can hate Will Ferrell.

We have been talking a lot about the difficulties of producing and the tenacity required to produce a movie. A lot of ink has been spilled on work-life balance as of late, but does that exist in this profession?

VACHON I speak at a lot of colleges and institutions and, about three or four years ago, that question started to come up. People would say, “How do you handle work-life balance?” And the first time somebody asked me, I was like, “What do you even mean?” 

ACKERLEY What is balance?

VACHON I do feel like this new generation of people coming up through the business are restructuring it in ways where some of us — and I count myself, not everyone is my age here — but where some of us are a little like, “Back in my day.” But I also really appreciate this sense of, we understand we have to work hard, we understand that these things don’t just happen overnight, but we also do need to figure out a way to balance it in some ways that aren’t quite so detrimental to the ability to have a life. I take a lot of pleasure in my work. One of the things that got me through the pandemic, honestly, was that we were in the middle of shooting Halston for Netflix. And that went back up in October 2020. It wasn’t the first thing, but it was among the first things. And being able to focus on that and be back at work and do that for a whole crew of people — that was my balance.

WOLFE I think of the joy of the process. Particularly with the lockdown and finding the humanity and the fun and the not-knowingness of it all was this incredible great place to live inside of. It was like making a recommitment to the frailty of the human condition.

ACKERLEY When you start a project, you become a hundred percent consumed with it. But that’s the joy of it — like with Barbie, in particular, the pressure of doing that film and standing up to a 64-year legacy with Barbie and the financial investment from the studio and everyone’s careers. And there were a million ways we could have gotten the film wrong, but being so consumed and the joy of making the film, it was a dance party every day. We would have so many filmic references for Barbie, and on Sunday mornings, we would [put on what we’d call] “movie church.” Every Sunday through prep and through the shoot, we would get the crew together and we’d watch something at 11 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Did you have a favorite “movie church” movie?

ACKERLEY Playtime maybe is one of the favorites.

Christine, as a stalwart of indie filmmaking, what do you say to people who decry the end of independent film?

VACHON But is that what they’re decrying or are they decrying the end of the theatrical experience? Because, to me, what’s really gotten murky is, what is an “independent film”? I’d say all of us here have made movies with studios that have also had an independent element. We’re making films using foreign presales, equity investors, studios, sometimes all three. So I think actually deciding what an independent film is at this point … In some ways I just say it’s the result of a singular vision. Because I don’t really know what else to say. I did an interview a million years ago with [Die Hard and Feild of Dreams] producer named Larry Gordon where we were interviewed together and he said, “I just thought an independent film was a movie you took to market.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s as good a definition as any, really, when you get right down to it.” So in some ways your question to me is about the theatrical experience, which we are all grappling with, I would say. Not to speak for all of you, but I know I’m grappling with it and trying to figure out what makes something theatrical. How important is it to sustain that experience and what do we have to do as producers to keep it relevant?

What do you think that is?

VACHON When I first started out, theatrical was all there was available to us, so we didn’t have to think about it that much. It’s like you made a movie, that’s what happened to it. And then over the years it’s been parsed. And Ed, I know you do TV as well, so we find ourselves asking, really, “What makes theatrical? What makes television? How do you figure out that precise storytelling path?” And that’s been a lot more work, but it’s not really work. It’s more about training a different instinct for me that I didn’t maybe have at the beginning of my career. 

In terms of theatrical this year, there was nothing bigger than Barbie. Tom, at what point did you know it would be the hit it became?

ACKERLEY I don’t think you ever know until you see it. 

GUINEY And even then.

ACKERLEY And even then. I’m still trying to work it out. That first weekend it opened, we were in London, Margot and myself, we were going cinema to cinema and we saw the lines. I always remember that Spielberg/Scorsese story that when Jaws came out, they’d go drive around the block and they saw the lines. I didn’t think that could exist anymore. But we saw it. We saw the lines of pink, and we saw how people of different socio backgrounds and shapes and sizes and colors and religions came together and shared that experience. And it was just mind-opening. It was incredible. And it shows that however hard a movie is or however long a movie takes, to bring people together for that two hours is something that gives you goose bumps.

GUINEY I think that weekend was a really significant weekend, at least I hope it was a really significant weekend in moviegoing and the theatrical experience. I was saying to Tom that we’ve run theaters in Ireland, and the week of Barbenheimer, excuse me using that, we had 50 percent more people through the door than we’d ever had, ever, any weekend before. It was just this absolute phenomenon. 

SANDERS George and I started our careers in the theater, and we’ve known that magic of a communal experience. There’s nothing like it.

WOLFE And the potency of the scale. My analogy is that when you’re in the theater and a play is working, you lean forward. When you’re watching a movie and the film is working, you lean backward, because of the scale. Because, you see, in theater, they’re the same size as you. I recognize what that is. And then in film, you’re going, “They’re bigger than me,” and “Can I find my way inside their story?”

What was the movie that made you want to make films?

SANDERS The Wizard of Oz.

WOLFE Nashville. A film could be ridiculous and political and emotionally fragile. It was effortless. At one point [Robert] Altman asked me to write a movie for him. He was interested in doing something about Amos ’n’ Andy, and I went, “I don’t think I’m going to be … I’d love to, I’d love to, I’d love to, but …” He’d seen a show on Broadway that I did called Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk, and he wanted me to create something with comedy. It was extraordinary conversations, but no. Humble, humble, an honor, but no.

PORTMAN Bring in ’da Noise was so important to me. I would stand in line and get tickets when I was 8. My parents and I went three or four times.

SANDERS That’s the show I took Alice Walker to, the first show I took her to in New York when we were together. And at the end of that week, she said yes [to The Color Purple musical]. So thank you, sir.

PORTMAN Safe was a really, really important movie for me, as a film and as a performance. I was just so blown away by how much I could recognize an experience that I didn’t have words for — and I didn’t have words for it after, either. It was just a feeling. It was a tone of life that just made me understand things and in a different mind- and soul-expanding way.

GUINEY The thing that actually made me think this is possible was My Left Foot, Jim Sheridan’s movie. That was like Ireland winning the World Cup. It was so exciting because there wasn’t a big history of filmmaking in Ireland, and the idea that this movie, which was intensely Irish, an Irish story and Irish filmmaker, Irish producer, the whole thing, could go the distance.

ACKERLEY I knew I wanted to work in film when I got onto a Harry Potter set. I got to see, in my early teens, Alfonso Cuarón at work. [Editor’s note: Ackerley was an extra on the set of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.] I got to see the scale of it and the cameras and the machine behind it. And that’s when I went, “That’s what I’m going to do.” And I was 12, 13, and I still get that feeling when I walk on set.

VACHON The movie that made me decide I wanted to be a producer was the other Barbie movie, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, which was Todd’s first short film. [Haynes’ short film about the singer uses Barbie dolls as actors.] I didn’t produce it. I helped him finish it, so I got to see it in the edit room and I just had an epiphany. It was so provocative, it was so original, but it was entertaining. And I realized that’s the nexus, that’s where I want to be, and then I just turned to Todd and said, “What are you doing next?”

What do you think you all would be doing if you weren’t producers and filmmakers?

WOLFE I’d be a historian.

VACHON I’d be a short-order cook.

SANDERS I was going to say restaurateur.

VACHON I see you have bigger visions than me.

SANDERS It’s putting all these things together and then trying to please an audience.

PORTMAN The thing that comes to my head is just being a full-time parent, because I feel like it’s very similar skills of making sure everyone is supported, so they can become their best selves.

GUINEY I actually don’t really know, but my mom and my dad were doctors. Weirdly, very early on, I had this instinct around wanting to produce. I was in my teens. But then when I was a little older, when I was in my mid-20s, I was like, “God, should I have done this? Should I have been a doctor?” But I don’t know if I would have made a very good doctor. 

PORTMAN You wouldn’t be a filmmaker?

GUINEY No, not a director. I don’t have the patience for it. 

This story first appeared in a January standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.