What Does a Producer Actually Do? Hear from Six Top Executives Who Explain It

The SCAD Savannah Film Festival, held every year, assembles the best in above- and below-the-line talent for an audience primarily composed of Savannah College of Art and Design (that’s SCAD) students. This year, IndieWire’s Future of Filmmaking partnered with SCAD to host the Behind Their Lens: Producers panel at the festival, which featured six top Hollywood producers, all women, to discuss the challenges and successes of their industry, and hopefully impart some career-learned wisdom to the students, too.

As moderated by IndieWire Executive Editor Ryan Lattanzio, the panelists were: Ellen Goldsmith-Vein (“Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” “Wendell & Wild,” “The Maze Runner”), CEO and founder of the management and production company Gotham Group; Carla Hacken (“Hell or High Water,” “The Book of Henry,” “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone”), president and founder of Paper Pictures; Debra Hayward (“Les Misérables,” “Good Grief,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary”) and Alison Owen (“Back to Black,” “Ghosts,” “Elizabeth”), who joined forces to form Monumental Pictures; Riva Marker (“Reality,” “The Guilty,” “Beasts of No Nation”), CEO of Linden Entertainment who previously co-founded Nine Stories with Jake Gyllenhaal; and Kaila York (“Gridiron Grind,” “Sightless”), founder of Headlong Entertainment.

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Before the panelists each unpacked their individual achievements, they began by answering a basic question: What does a producer actually do? It’s one of the most misunderstood jobs in the business, and one for which few film schools offer a degree.

“Have any of you flown on an airline lately?” Ellen Goldsmith-Vein said. “Here are two ways that I would describe being a producer. One of them is being an air traffic controller. So you’ve got to make sure that you’re landing and taking care of all of the aircraft and in the air and all the souls on board. And really, at the end of the day, you’re keeping the pilots on their course. The other way I might describe it is: Does anybody watch this incredible television series called “The Pitt”? You know Noah Wiley’s job? Sometimes you do end up in a corner crying like he has on that show. At the end of the day, there are a series of steps and one is identifying a story that you want to tell… and then it’s beginning to figure out how to put that story together, and assembling a group of people to help tell, and then finding somebody who wants to actually make that come to life. It’s really ultimately about passion and persistence.”

“I would add to that having oceans of patience and perseverance and the ability to take rejection,” Hayward said.

“I used to say that the producer did everything behind the camera, and the director did everything in front of the camera, but it’s more than that,” Owen said. “Sometimes, you have producers who are very centrally creative and find the projects. They option an article or a book and really shepherd it from the beginning. There are other producers who are more concentrated on the finance and are really good at financing projects. And there are other producers that are brought on maybe halfway through a project to shepherd it. And then obviously you have line producers as well, who are much more physical. So it’s quite a hard job to understand, because there’s so many different aspects to it.”

“Producers are often the people who come up with the idea for the project, or they find the book that they love, or the play they love, or the musical they love, or the comic book they love, and then they assemble that whole team,” Marker said. “I always say, probably because I am a woman, but you ‘mother’ the project. You give it love where it needs love. You give your crew members love where they need love. You have to be disciplined. You have to also always what the vision, what the emotional impact, what you see the vision for the movie being, and sometimes that can be having conflict with different people … whether that’s your filmmaker, whether that’s the other crew members, whether that’s the studio, but always with the goal of ‘this was the vision we all started with. This was the reason we all said that we wanted to tell this story.’ And that can be like the most rewarding part of being a producer, and also the most challenging part of being a producer.”

Hear more from the panelists in the video above.

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