Every producer has a story to tell when it comes to revealing the challenges they faced when making an awards-worthy movie, but it was Weapons‘ Miri Yoon who hit the nail on the head during a celebration Saturday for this year’s PGA Awards nominees for Theatrical Motion Picture.
“Everything’s hard. Producing is hard. It is ghetto. It is difficult. There are problems to fix every damn day. It never ends,” Yoon said during a panel at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. “Even with us, it was like with a lot of people on this panel. We had a cast, we had a budget, we had a schedule. We’re ready to go. The strike hit. We had to rebuild the entire cast. We were shooting in beautiful, wonderful Atlanta, with an incredible crew, but in the dead ass of summer, while we were trying to be the fall in the Pacific Northwest. And then we had kids, 17 of them, and their parents.”
“So yeah, it was freakin’ brutal, guys, but it’s amazing,” continued Yoon, who was joined on stage by Bugonia‘s Lars Knudsen, F1‘s Jerry Bruckheimer, Frankenstein‘s Guillermo del Toro, Hamnet‘s Pippa Harris, Marty Supreme‘s Eli Bush, One Battle After Another‘s Sara Murphy, Sentimental Value‘s Andrea Berentsen Ottmar, Sinners‘ Sev Ohanian and Train Dreams‘ Teddy Schwarzman. All are up for the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures at tonight’s PGA Awards.
“At the end of the day, the way I see our jobs as producers is that we’re in the service industry,” Yoon told moderator Jess Cagle. “We’re in service of a crew that’s busting their asses for us. We’re in service of actors who are putting their craft front and center. We’re in service to whomever is financing the movie. And we’re in service of the filmmaker and the vision they’re bringing to the table.”
The other nominees got a chance to share the types of challenges they faced while making their memorable movies. For Bugonia‘s Knudsen, it was time; it took eight years to remake the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan. For Bruckheimer, it was getting the F1 screenplay right, considering how many drivers, races and promoters were involved in the worldwide production. For Bush, it was teaching a sea lion how to play ping pong. For Murphy, it was having to deal with the passing of producer Adam Somner and the temporary absence of Benicio Del Toro, who had to go off to shoot The Phoenician Scheme for Wes Anderson. For Harris, it was rebuilding the Old Globe Theatre. And for Ohanian, it was dealing with the unexpected appearance of gators on location and making the horror movie’s surreal montage. “I hope we got an A,” he said.
The producers were then asked to explain how they got their start in the biz. Nothing could beat Del Toro’s childhood memories of shooting a Super 8 film about a killer potato who ultimately gets run over by a car, but stories from Ohanian, Ottmar and Schwarzman came close. The Sinners producer recalled how his 2007 YouTube video about an Armenian dad who chews out his son for crashing the car went viral; Ottmar explained how she pivoted from studying engineering at the University of Washington to working as a personal assistant for the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in the aughts; and Schwarzman, a former lawyer, regaled the audience about how he concocted a 20-year plan that went from attending law school to somehow managing to solve a big Hollywood problem while riding up an imaginary elevator with Tinseltown muckety-mucks.
“I knew that they were going to have a problem that they were talking about in the elevator, and I would give them my idea, and then they would realize that there’s, like, creative merit, and I could get into the creative side of filmmaking,” Schwarzman said. “So that was my plan. That’s why I was a lawyer, which again, tells you that I am a terrible student and a terrible employee and probably a terrible strategist.”
“But a good storyteller,” remarked del Toro.
The Producers Guild will honor a trio of industry heavyweights with career honors this weekend. Blumhouse’s Jason Blum will receive the Milestone Award, Spider-Verse franchise producer Amy Pascal is set for the David O. Zelznick Achievement Award, and Mara Brock Akil will be presented with the Norman Lear Achievement Award.