“That goes, I think, directly to the core of what we do as producers is there are going to be problems, there are going to be setbacks. That is guaranteed,” says “Rustin” producer Bruce Cohen about managing the challenges that arise on any film set. “If we’ve done a good job of prepping the film, that’s really our job on the set is you’re literally just standing there waiting for people to bring you the problems of the day.”
We talked to Cohen as part of our “Meet the Experts” film producers roundtable along with his fellow “Rustin” producer Tonia Davis, James L. Brooks and Julie Ansell (“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret”), Elizabeth Raposo (“Creed III”), Justine Conte (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and Fred Berner (“Maestro”). Watch our roundtable discussion above. Click each person’s name to watch an individual chat.
“It’s a simple fact. Every movie has problems and that’s okay,” Raposo agrees. “It’s what you bring to the table in terms of the solutions and making sure the artists are supported, and if you can handle them without taxing the director or actors’ time too much, then that’s a win.”
Ansell adds, “I think part of it too is the team that you have around you,” so that for “the myriad problems that you cannot foresee that suddenly appear in front of you, you have everyone who has the same vision and the same, hopefully, love for the material that you come together and figure it out.”
“The thing that’s hard is if anybody doesn’t have the passion for it that you do, because you go nuts,” Brooks explains. You have to be “legally insane” to embark on a film. “The movie counts more than it should in any rational universe. But you want people to join you in that.”
For Berner, producing is “very literal. People say, well what does a producer do? And I just go back to the word, which is you produce, you make something from nothing. There’s an idea, or there’s a groupthink, or an appetite, and then there is this thing, and you nurture it … You bring it into being in the end and use everything you got.”
“I think that none of us would really be doing this if we didn’t all actually love all these problems and challenges,” Conte suggests. “It’s kind of why we chose to produce and not do something else behind the scenes.” On “Flower Moon,” she felt that “the process was as important as the product … so all the problems we had on the days and all the setbacks, it was all part of that process. And it’s really special.”
And Davis says, “I think that producing actually is protecting a film before it exists and protecting the space for it to become, and protecting the space for the artists to work … So it’s this insane belief that this special thing is going to exist, that it’s going to be meaningful, that it’s going to hopefully make people laugh and feel and think and emote somehow.”
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