Queen of the Indies reigns in Karlovy Vary

Producer Christine Vachon: 'Producing in many ways is like childbirth and you forget how difficult it is' Photo: Film Servis Karlovy Vary

In her 30-year career of helping diverse voices from outside the mainstream reach the screen , producer Christine Vachon has accumulated a roll call of honour including Todd Haynes (Carol), Todd Solondz (Happiness), Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol), Kimberly Pierce (Boys Don’t Cry), and John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig And The Angry Inch).

Reflecting on her achievements at the Karlovy International Film Festival where two of her most recent titles Celine Song’s romantic drama Past Lives, and Emma Westenberg’s I Sing Loud, You Sing Louder (with Ewan and Clara McGregor) were screened, she said: “Producing in many ways is like child birth and you forget how difficult it is.”

Vachon co-founded with Pamela Koffler her production company Killer Films in 1995. She agrees that most people have no idea precisely what a producer does. She decided to explain: “Producers are is the engine on the film, but each train is different and so you do different things on each film. When we came on to Past Lives the actors were already attached or about to be attached. But when you work with first-time directors sometimes you have to vouch for them and prove to the various talent agencies that the director is somebody who has got the goods. The shorthand for that is we have to be the adults in the room.

Christine Vachon: 'I want to produce films that I want to go and see' Photo: Richard Mowe

“Then it is about doing whatever we can to keep that project move forward. The cast has to be finalised and then assembling the creative department heads. And, the finances, of course. So on Past Lives we were lucky that A24 [an independent distributor] were already on board. But producing I Sing Loud was a different enterprise. On the one hand we had Ewan McGregor as a name. We had been doing Halston [about the fashion designer] with him - my second project with Ewan after Velvet Goldmine. And he came up to me on set and said, ‘Please don’t hate me … but would you read this script?’ And I did read it and thought it was strong and original. So we found a first-time director [Westenberg] and the next job was to surround her with people who would help her do her best work. Then I had to convince financiers to part with their dollars.

“I responded to the script because I felt it was a fresh take on that kind of relationship. And the fact that they could bring their own relationship to bear on it made their performances that much deeper and more meaningful.”

She was responsible for putting Todd Haynes on the road to fame and modest fortune. Their latest collaboration May December (presented at Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and with a planned autumn release) deals with family dynamics unravelling under the pressure of an outside gaze and features Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore (working with Haynes for the sixth time).

On the relationship with Haynes, Vachon said: “We are both naturally very loyal people and I think in a long-term relationship you decide that if there are any differences then you are going to work through them or you are going to walk away. And we decided to work through them. The result is that we have a real shorthand, tremendous amount of trust, and I have an ability to figure out what will help Todd do his best work, and what actors will work best with him. His films are always extraordinarily challenging but that is the fun of it. We figure out the points of contention, if there are any, before we start. I always say that the real problems that happen on a movie is when everybody is not making the same film.”

They met first when he made a short film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. She helped him to get it finished but she was not the producer. She found it “so original and provocative and entertaining” that she determined to produce his next film, which was Poison. Next up was Swoon, Tom Kalin’s first feature about the Leopold and Loeb kidnap case, shot in black and white.

Vachon sees her job as “creating an environment that shows off talent to the best of their abilities.” For May December it wasn’t an obvious choice. “On the one hand you have a world class filmmaker [Haynes] and great actors but on the other hand you have a kind of subject matter that some distributors might not want to touch. We have to do a column A and a column B and add them up find a way forward. There are things we look at which just seem too hard to make, more to do with a director who we feel might not get a level of cast that would get it done. Sometimes it is just that the movie is too big for the subject matter and the audience. But if we really believe in something we go headlong into it. With any movie you make you have to remember somebody is putting money in it because they want it back. They are doing it because they think it is an investment. So the responsibility is enormous.”

I asked her how important she considered a title was in driving a film to production and finding an audience. “So many of our movies come with a title baked in and when they don’t absolutely we agonise. Boys Don’t Cry [for which Hilary Swank won an Oscar] had a different title. The original title was Take It Like A Man. When the film was in post production we got a letter from a company which was turning into a movie Boy George’s memoirs called Take It Like a Man. I presume they had copyrighted the title.

Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in Todd Hayne's May December. Christine Vachon on working with Haynes: 'We have a real shorthand, tremendous amount of trust, and I have an ability to figure out what will help Todd do his best work' Photo: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival

“Our director Kimberley Pierce was devastated. She said there is no other title in the world which would work. And we were devastated too because we had been using Take It Like a Man from the get-go. We came up with the alternative Boys Don’t Cry - at the time we felt it was such a comedown and now I cannot imagine the movie being called anything else. So at some point a title takes hold and that’s it. Normally I would tend towards shorter titles, actually.”

Within her small team she likes to give opportunities to young people. “We bring them in and give them a lot of responsibility and they go on to become more successful than we are. They have new ideas and energy. And the people who are in the office have a passion for the kind of stories we want to tell. Of course we support the writers in their current action. I remember the 2008 strike and how devastating that was and Killer barely got out of that intact.”

One of her remaining pet projects is to do something about the Eighties and Nineties in New York. “Everything I have seen so far hasn’t gotten it right. It was a time of extraordinary collision of art, music and cinema and also the Aids crisis and I’d like to be involved in a film that treats all of that.”

She harbours a very simple credo: “I want to produce films that I want to go and see. If you want to have a sustainable career in filmmaking, the trick is to be as entrepreneurial as possible. What that means is being open to as many different kinds of storytelling and platforms for storytelling as you possibly can be. There is no crystal ball and the industry has changed in a million different ways, and what matters is the ability to adapt.”