Tod Lippy: Did you enjoy growing up in New York?

Christine Vachon: I loved it. I think I had a lot more freedom than my counterparts did in the suburbs. I was fairly independent and mobile from the time I was eight or nine years old. And one of the cool things about growing up here was that you could walk to the movie theaters. So many of my friends who grew up in non-urban environments had to constantly arrange to be driven from one place to the other. It’s like me when I go to L.A., because I still can’t drive—I guess I’m having the suburban experience in my later life. [Laughs.]
   Also, I grew up at the time when the repertory theaters in New York were really at their height. My family lived on the Upper West Side near the Thalia and a cinema called the Olympia, where your feet stuck to the floor. When I was 11, me and a school friend wandered in to Cries and Whispers at a theater on 42nd Street. There were theaters on 42nd Street where you could go in and see movies for a dollar—and it wasn’t a pornographic movie, you know? So we would go see movies just because they were there.

Didn’t you go see Patton when you were seven?

Yeah. I loved it. Also when I was seven or eight, my older sister was told to take me to see Oliver, which I was dying to see. Once we got outside of the building, she said to me, “You really don’t want to see that stupid kid’s movie; let’s go see 2001 instead.” So I saw a lot of movies very young.

Did you go to any of the more experimental stuff?

Well, my older sister was actually one of the founding members of the Collective for Living Cinema, and she made experimental movies. I remember going to one of her screenings—I must have been 11 or 12—and afterwards telling her how dull I thought it was. Actually, it may not have even been something that she had made, but it was in that vein. She said, “Uh! Why do you think that something has to happen in a movie?” It’s funny, because now I make movies that most people would consider wildly experimental, but in my family’s eyes, I’m very mainstream.

When you started Apparatus Films with Barry Ellsworth and Todd Haynes in the late eighties, wasn’t one of your goals to meld narrative cinema with a more experimental approach?

Totally. And to some degree, we were successful. But I also discovered a snottiness in the New York so-called experimental or avant-garde film scene that was very unwelcoming when I first came back to New York after college. I remember that Superstar was turned down by several venues who wouldn’t show it—it was considered crassly commercial. Superstar! That film, in a way, crystallized what we were trying to do. It was relentlessly entertaining, but at the same time, incredibly provocative and interesting on so many levels. And it still holds up—I mean, it’s almost 12 years old. It’s still amazing how fun that movie is.
   Around the same time, I remember reading the application for the Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival—you know, the one founded by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman—because I had done a short film and was hoping to submit it. It said something along the lines of, “The movie must have some other purpose than to entertain.” And I was like, “What’s wrong with entertaining?” Anyway, it kind of blew my mind how closed that world was. And in some ways, it forced me more towards mainstream filmmaking.

But you must have been quite aware of the critical theory that informed that kind of attitude from being a semiotics major at Brown. And didn’t you also study with the film theorist Christian Metz in Paris?

I did, and I’m glad that I did all of that. When I first got out of Brown and people asked me my major and I said “Semiotics,” I was either met with a blank stare or a “Who do you think you are?” look. Those were the years when deconstruction wasn’t so prevalent—I mean, now it’s everywhere. Sometimes it was easier just to tell people I was an English major.

When you returned here after Brown, what did you do?

Well, for about four years, I bounced around doing PA work, and assistant editor work. I also did a little bit of location managing, and music videos, which were just starting.

What were some of the films you worked on?

I worked on Jill Godmilow’s Far from Poland, Bette Gordon’s Variety—a bunch of them.

Can you talk a bit about your experience on Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances?

Well, in films it’s all about ignorance being your best friend. What you don’t know kind of can’t hurt you in a way. You take experiences as they come, and you use them as you will. Bill totally operated that way on Parting Glances. He really had no idea how it was done, he just knew what he wanted it to be. And that approach got that movie made. Because one of the things about filmmaking—which is kind of a drag—is that it’s so stanched in a “This is how it’s done” mentality, especially when you get into the union shit. You know, that kind of old-school stuff. And it’s very refreshing to work with people who are just coming at it completely sideways.

When did you and Todd Haynes get together?

We met at Brown, but we weren’t really friends there. He took a little longer to get through school than I did; he took some time off. I didn’t, because I was subsisting to a large degree on Social Security checks, which at that time, because my father was dead, meant I couldn’t stop my education for a second or the money would disappear. So I had no choice but to go all the way through.
   We re-met in New York a few years later. I saw Superstar, and I realized what somebody like Todd could do. The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that we met each other at the beginning of our careers. So that was kind of the beginning for me of doing what I really wanted to do.

So Superstar was made after Apparatus had started?

It was being made. Though a lot of people give me credit for producing it—which I didn’t do—I did help Todd a lot with finishing the movie, because I had worked as an assistant editor, and there was a lot of that process that Todd was not familiar with. So it was a good entree into the movie.

Can you go into the specifics of the founding of Apparatus?

Actually, Barry Ellsworth approached Todd and me separately. At that point, he was friends of both of us, and we weren’t really friends with each other yet. Barry was from a reasonably well-off family, and had made a decision to use some of this money to start an organization. The three of us met several times, and figured out what kind of company we really wanted to start. It was a tremendous amount of fun. It’s so stupid that it doesn’t still exist, and what I really was angry about was that we were doing something so original, and so interesting, and it just didn’t fit into any grid. It was, like, if you were giving grants, grants were supposed to regard the filmmaker as this kind of pristine artist who can’t be interfered with, but of course all the movies that the NEA and NYFA and NYSCA were financing were falling apart because there was nobody there steering the ship. 
   So what we were saying was that we would offer grants where we would actually produce the movies, helping the filmmakers make them in the best possible way. But the funding organizations were, for the most part, not interested. NYSCA gave us some money one year, and then the next year took it away. It was frustrating. And we also hit the bad grant time, after all the NEA stuff in the late eighties. I think Barry got cold feet and thought, “Am I going to spend the rest of my life begging for money?” It’s too bad, though, given what we accomplished in three short years. The body of work was really cool, interesting. We gave a lot of technicians their starts—people like Ellen Kuras and Maryse Alberti, and Th­érèse DePrez. We used it as a launching pad into feature films, but we would have kept it going if we could have.

How did you select projects?

People submitted stuff. The first year, we got forty or fifty, and we selected the three that we wanted to do. And we played by the rules—I mean, we participated in deciding what the movies would be, but it wasn’t solely our decision; we brought in a committee or panel or whatever you call it—I’m so unused to grant-speak now I can barely do it anymore. And then, the second year, we were like, “Wow. Is it that nobody wants to make movies, or are we just not getting them?” So we made a huge effort to get new projects, and then, something like 30 or 40 percent of our applications were from women, or people of color, and that was really cool. It was a really cool organization.

And it ended in, what, 1992?

Something like that. I made Poison, and got a taste of feature filmmaking, Barry got sick of it, and Todd was clearly going in a direction of making his own movies. It just kind of lost steam.

Jonas Mekas told me in his interview that he felt grants were causing the death of the independent film.

I don’t disagree. I can really argue both sides of the case. On the one hand, I see these mealy-mouthed producers who basically aren’t dealing with anything I have to deal with—foreign sales, and this actor as opposed to that actor, and this union deal, and should we shoot it in Toronto, etc. etc.—and they’re just filling out their application and mailing it in, you know. I met this Canadian filmmaker a while ago who’d just gotten a million and a half dollars to make his first feature, and he said to me, “I don’t really care who sees my movies.” I mean, I do believe in a certain degree of art for art’s sake. Some of my filmmakers, like Todd Haynes and Todd Solondz, should really just be given the money to do whatever they want, because they’re national treasures. But I also do care about who sees my movies. If you make a movie for the right budget, then you will probably be able to get it to a place where it’s not devastating anybody financially. And that’s part of the trick—it’s a commercial art form, and that’s part of the process.
   You know, a “low-budget” movie is under two million dollars. Well, two million dollars would immeasurably improve my style of life, and I’m sure it would improve yours, but you hear people say, “Uh! We’ve only got two million.” These numbers are insane. I’ll read a script, and say to Pam Koffler, my partner at Killer, “What do you think. Ten, twelve?” She’ll say, “Ten, maybe nine if we shoot it this way.” And we’re little! I mean, if you want to express yourself, be a modern dancer.

How did you and Pam meet, and when did you decide to form Killer Films?

Pam did some work for me on one of my least-seen films—Postcards from America—and then when I did Kids, she was our line producer. Then I had this sort of extraordinary period where I did three features back-to-back in New York City.
   By the way, it’s getting harder and harder to shoot in New York. It’s such a drag, because I hate not shooting here. I hate having to go away.

Why is it harder?

Because you used to be able to work non-union here, and you really can’t anymore because the deals are so tough—they include certain kinds of deferrals that a lot of studios and distributors just don’t want to assume, so you end up having to make your film for significantly less. And then there’s the border; there’s Toronto. So you show your budget to your filmmaker, and they’re saying, “Must stay in New York, must stay in New York,” and you tell them, “Or we can go to Toronto and you can shoot for an extra week, or have this much more money for your art department.” What do you think they choose? I hate it; I feel like I put in my time here—I trained a lot of these people—and I should be reaping the rewards from the fact that they’re finally moving up.

Do you see any solution?

Well—although I’m not as close to it as, say, a line producer is—I think there needs to be a real redress of the kinds of deals unions can make with the kinds of movies that we make which allow them to get made. Because in my movies, things really aren’t out of whack. I understand if a movie comes here and Travolta’s getting paid twenty million bucks, or what have you. But with my movies, there’s always a certain parity across the board. The director’s not taking an outrageous amount of money, and there’s a certain passion involved. I don’t know how you can measure that, and I’m sure the union would say, “Well, cry me a river.” But there has to be a way to redress it so that those under five million can be made.

The way you put it, it almost sounds like a moral issue.


Well, maybe it is. Maybe it’s back to the old “Certain movies have a right to be made” argument.

I imagine it wouldn’t be so easy to convince the Teamsters of that one…

But what if its members aren’t working? No one likes to leave their home, unless you’re, like, 19, and you want to go on vacation and get laid.
   Anyway, Killer was founded because Pam and I did Kids, Stonewall and I Shot Andy Warhol in the space of a year. It was great—a lot of continuity, and we built a team. At the end of that, I said, “I want to keep this together,” and asked Pam to stay with me and she did. We called it Killer Films from the Cindy Sherman movie we were doing at the time, Office Killer. I just really liked the name.

What draws you to a project?

Three things. The script or the concept, depending on how it’s being pitched to me. Is it interesting, provocative, original? Is it something that gives you that feeling in your stomach you get when you’re reading something really good? That’s number one.
   Number two: the director. Is he or she a psychotic? We’ve had a few along the way. Are they collaborative? Killer is tremendously director-driven, and we never impose our will on a movie, but we try very hard to make the movie as good as it can possibly be. Sometimes that means protecting it a little bit from the director—especially first-timers, who get terrified to cut their films down, for instance. Sometimes it’s just about working somebody through that process until they feel confident enough to go to that next step. And most directors continue to come back to us—or they go away for a film and then come back and say, “Oh my God, I didn’t realize how good I had it.”
   And also, are they somebody who is going to be able to articulate their vision in a comprehensive and efficient way to a film crew, or production designer, or DP? They don’t have to have ever done it before—we work with a lot of first-timers. And I’m not saying I need a director to sit there and go, “Yes, I know the difference between a grip stand and a flag.” Who the hell cares? Somebody else can do that. But I do need them to have a sense of what it’s going to look like, and how they’re going to accomplish that—they need to be able to communicate their vision. So that’s number two.
   The third thing is, Can I sell it? And that’s not so obvious, because, you know, sometimes something can seem like the most anti-commercial movie in the entire world, but it has a part in it that a great actress will make her own, or there’s something about it that will appeal to a particular group. Some of that’s just gut. Sometimes, the director is somebody who’s incredibly impressive, who will be able to get great talent into his or her movie. Those kinds of things.
   It’s hard to put your finger on it. Sometimes things have come to us that we’ve turned down. We turned down You Can Count on Me, for instance, because I didn’t see it in the script. It was a beautiful lesson to me. I loved the movie when I saw it at Sundance. It just shows you that a script is just a piece on the way to the movie, and that with the right things—beautiful casting, beautiful direction—it all went to a completely different level. Sometimes I see it, sometimes I don’t.

How did you first hear about Boys Don’t Cry?

What happened was—this was around five years ago—Rose Troche called me and said, “I met this girl, she’s really smart, and she’s going to give you a call.” So Kim Peirce came by the office, and she’d shot this short as her thesis film at Columbia, based on the Brandon Teena story. The film was at DuArt, and she couldn’t get it out because she didn’t have any money. I paid to get it out. And it was good, but it wasn’t like, “Oh my God, this is the next Bertolucci.” It was a competent film, with some spotty performances, but some surprisingly strong ones as well. But Kim is what impressed me the most.
    So we started out thinking, “Maybe we can take this footage and make it into a feature.” But after talking to her over a period of time, and seeing her grow so much in leaps and bounds—she went from point A to point Z and then back to point A again—it was clear that the footage just wasn’t good enough anymore. Her vision was expanding and growing, and the movie needed to, too. So she started a long process of working on the script. We went through many drafts with her—she worked with a couple of different writers, one of whom is suing us right now—I guess it’s a sign of success, right? Anyway, it kept getting better and better. And actually, what happened to it was, it started out that she wasn’t sure about the legalities of using real-life characters—she’d begun with made-up names and fabricated situations to a certain degree—and as she started delving deeper and deeper and deeper and getting to the heart of what really happened, the reality of it—as always—became the most fascinating thing.
   And no, we didn’t see the documentary film, by the way. Those filmmakers really treated us like we were trying to steal something from them.

They started up around the same time you did?

I don’t really remember. I think they might have. I remember I wanted to see their footage at one point—I figured in the best of all possible worlds we’d help each other—and I think we’ve actually helped the documentary quite a bit. At some point, though, I read some nasty things they’d said about Boys Don’t Cry on the web, which sort of stunned me. I thought, “Man, I only ever go out of my way to say nice things about your documentary”—which is dull—

Nice things up until now.

Up until now. [Laughs.] Anyway, Kim went to Nebraska; she spoke to a lot of the people there, hung out with the kids. Meanwhile, I was trying to get it financed, and having no luck. I had it set up and it fell apart, like, three times. Arrow was going to do it at one point. Lakeshore was going to do it at one point. I couldn’t get it over that last hump. Finally, the script was better than it had ever been, and I submitted it to MGM as part of our first-look deal, and they green-lit it. Kim quit her job. We started up, we cast, and we set up the first day of shooting for November 15 or whatever it was. I remember Kim was experiencing a syndrome fairly common among first-time directors: “Oh my God I’m not ready!” And I suddenly had this little bit of a vision: I was hearing that there were other Brandon Teena projects in the pipeline—there was a Fox Searchlight movie with Drew Barrymore, and New Line had a Neve Campbell one—and I was just like, “Kim, I don’t care if you’re ready or not, it has to happen now.” She was really kicking and screaming.
   And then, MGM un-green-lit the movie. I had this conversation with them where they told me, “We really wanted a more universal story”—I couldn’t figure out what had happened. It was awful. The train had already left the station—that’s always my metaphor. The great thing about film is that there’s a certain point where it’s just too late—“Can’t stop it!” It’s like an army marching in to conquer a territory. So we were kind of at that point—or maybe I just wanted to make us feel like we were at that point; it’s always hard to tell in retrospect.
   Across the hall from us, Hart Sharp had put together equity financing for You Can Count on Me, which was supposed to go into production, but there were some problems with the script or casting or something, and suddenly it looked like it was going to be put off for another six to ten months. So the financing was sitting there without a movie. I went in and told them about the film—which I had pitched to them, like, ten times—and they bought it. They got into it. So we were off to the races.

What was your budget?

A little under two million.

You mentioned a lawsuit from one of the writers. Weren’t there others as well from the people whom the characters were based on? I guess it’s always sort of tricky dealing with real-life situations…

Well, basically, when you commit a crime, or are the victim of a crime, it kind of becomes public property. Aphrodite Jones had written a book about the incident which Diane Keaton optioned, and which was going to be the basis for the Drew Barrymore script, and I think they sued Fox. Everybody was suing everybody, basically, and accusations were flying. Also, I really think everybody else thought our movie was going to be bad.

Why?

Well, I think that there was a perception that, you know, Drew Barrymore wants to be in a Brandon Teena movie, and then there’s this little indie film with a first-time director happening. I mean, which one would you back?

How did the production itself go?

You know, it was tough. I wasn’t there the whole time. Eva Kolodner was really the on-set producer. I spoke to her and to Kim practically every day. It was hard, but in a way, even though every movie’s different, they’re all kind of hard in the same way. The same old stupid story—“Blah blah blah…but we got the shot.” “Blah blah blah…but we made the day.” It certainly wasn’t the hardest one we’ve ever done.

Why did you choose to premiere the film at Venice?

Well, we were clearly not going to be ready for Cannes. The guy who runs Venice now, Alberto Barbera, used to run the Torino Festival, which showed some of our work early on. I’ve known him for a long time, and always liked him a lot. I was in Cannes, walking down the street, and I saw Alberto and congratulated him. He thanked me, and said, “So what have you got?” And I told him we had this movie called Boys Don’t Cry—actually, it still might have been called Take It Like a Man at that point—and he said he would have his New York person call me. She did, she saw it, and it was in. They showed it opening night of their Directors’ Fortnight-y kind of thing. And it was a wonderful experience.
   Venice is so different from Cannes. It’s easier for me—particularly that year before at Cannes, with Happiness practically opening the Directors’ Fortnight and Velvet Goldmine at the end. I was just herding in one load of actors, directors and parents through all the paces and then the other. I’ve never been through anything so stressful. It was horrible; I was pulling my hair out. It was like planning a wedding in four days. Of course, I guess I would temper that by saying, “Well, on the other hand, I hope I have such problems every year.”

The “wedding planner” analogy is a pretty broad definition of the producer’s role, isn’t it?

A great producer needs to produce everything about the movie, from the very beginning to the very end. For me, the experience that a director has at that stage is definitely part of it—helping them deal with how the film is perceived, all those kinds of things, are part and parcel of what I do.

Do you feel like you’ve carved out a certain position of power in the film industry?

Well, it’s always yes and no. I get my calls returned a tiny bit faster, but I don’t necessarily feel like much has changed. I still back the movies I’ve always backed. People say to me, “Now that your track record’s so good, won’t people just get behind you and say, ‘It’s a Christine Vachon movie—I want to be a part of this.’” But the same problems are still there: “I don’t know, I’ve never seen a film like that before,” or “But who’s in the lead?” or “Has this director done anything before?” because most of the movies I make tend to fall into the dreaded “execution-dependent” category.

While you’ve produced a number of unconventional, challenging films like Swoon, Postcards from America or Poison, you’ve also been involved with what many would see as more “mainstream” fare, like Kiss Me, Guido. What goes into your decision to make a film like that?

I’ve never made a movie because I thought, “Oh, this will be commercial.” The criteria are pretty much the same for every film. I thought Kiss Me, Guido was hilarious, and I still do. I’ve been criticized for it by the gay community, who said it was an obvious attempt to be commercial—except that it wasn’t particularly successful. [Laughs.] When it came out, it was competing with films like The Birdcage for audiences. The gay niche market had already been created, and people at that point seemed to want material that was more sophisticated.
   And then other people were critical of it because they found it “offensive.”

Why?

Oh, I get that on every film. I don’t think we’ve ever made a movie that somebody hasn’t been offended by. On Boys Don’t Cry, a female producer who I won’t name, but who is very well-established in Hollywood, was at a screening of the film at CAA. I really wanted to meet her, but I couldn’t find her afterwards. Somebody told me later that she was “really offended” by the rape scene, and was so pissed off that she left immediately afterward. I was, like, “Man, you cannot win.”

What would you say is your most successful film?


Financially?

Actually, I was curious to hear how you would define “success” in your answer.

Well, I can answer it in two ways. I would say that the most successful film I ever produced would probably be Safe, because it was incredibly difficult to do—it was a movie that somehow, against all odds, got made—and looking back now I truly can’t figure out how we got those people to give us money. And it’s an extraordinary film that will live way past its makers. If you get one of those, then you can die happy. Financially—in terms of how much it cost in relation to how much it made—Go Fish was probably our most successful film. Maybe Boys Don’t Cry will give it a run for its money.
   I mean, I think all our movies are great. But when other people think so, too, it’s fabulous. As Pam said the other day, “The Oscars don’t mean anything until you win one.” Then you say, “Wow—these awards are the be-all and end-all!”—because, of course, they are. In a way, the fact that Safe didn’t get those accolades when it came out was really difficult, but in another way, we still got it made, and it’s living on.

There’s all this revisionist history going on with that film. It really came to a head last year when it topped so many critics’ “Best of the Decade” lists.

Right. All those people who now say they “knew the minute they saw it” how great it was.

In your book, you say, “I know that my reputation is more in the direction of being of a bitch than a fount of niceness.”

I do have that reputation, but I feel that at a certain point in my career I made the decision that I wanted people to earn my respect—I think that’s important. And it’s not so much that I’m a woman in a man’s business, you know, so I need to show everybody how tough I am.
   It’s not a popularity contest. Ultimately, when you are only ever making decisions for the good of the film, you’re gonna piss people off. You’ve got to get the shots that you need to make the film as good as it can be. And the summer camp atmosphere that prevails on film sets these days really gets on my nerves. You know, who cares if the crew gets ice cream?

Do you feel a part of the indie film community here, if such a thing still even exists?

I feel a part of it, definitely. I find it very small, though—there’s very few of us. Ted Hope and Larry Meistrich and I really began our careers around the same time—Larry actually worked for me on Larry Carty’s Oreos with Attitude, one of the short films Apparatus produced, and Ted and I started AD’ing at the same time—we were often up for the same jobs.
   On Happiness, when the crew was being really obstreperous about the hours and all of that, Ted was waxing sentimental about the “old days,” and I remember being a little dismissive about that. But I see what he was getting at, and he’s right: There was a certain spirit from the mid-eighties and early nineties in New York City independent filmmaking—a real sense of camaraderie. You were making really cool movies that had a right to be seen; there was a sense of mission. You know, everyone on the crew read the script.
   A lot of crew members will tell me what a great experience Poison was for them, and they think it was because of something I did, but in fact it was because of something they did, and now they’re not doing that anymore. They cared about the work they were doing, and cared about the director, and cared about how good it was going to be. Now, they’re like, “Ha! We’re running over—meal penalty!”

How do you account for that attitude?

Well, to be fair, people grow up, and they have to start thinking about doing stuff for more than just the joy of art. I think that’s definitely part of it. And I think also that film is perceived differently now. One of our hardest problems on Happiness was that there was a perception that there was an endless fountain of money because Welcome to the Dollhouse had been a financial success. So when we said, “We’re making this movie for so little money”—which we were—people didn’t believe us. There was this feeling that somebody was making money. And besides, you can really only ask somebody for that great favor so many times.

Killer Films recently made a deal with John Wells, the producer of the television series ER. Could you talk about the specifics of that?

Well, we had a great two years with MGM/UA—that sounds like a sound bite for Variety, but it’s true. It really allowed us to stop worrying about how we were going to pay the rent, and we were able to really concentrate on development—we could think big picture, long-term, etc. And we actually made a movie with them, too—Crime and Punishment in Suburbia—which is pretty unusual for these kinds of first-look deals. Usually that means they’re the first people to say “no.”
   Anyway, at the end of that, this fall, Killer suddenly found itself in a position it had never been in. Maybe I’m being a little disingenuous—we’ve got a great reputation, and directors love us, and we’re talent magnets—but suddenly Boys Don’t Cry put us on the radar in a way we’d never been before. We really could have made a deal with anybody. And we decided to sit back and think about what we really wanted. We had recently decided to get represented, which we did, by CAA. Kevin Huvane thought, “This is totally off the wall, but why don’t I put John Wells and Christine together?” John’s a fabulous guy; he’s really smart. It’s an equity investment in our company. We’re completely free agents. It’s fantastic.

Are you spending a lot of time in Los Angeles now?

I go there a lot, but I still can’t drive. We actually have an apartment there now—the “Killer bungalow.”

Is there anyone there full-time?

No, not yet. I actually think it’s better for us to stay New York–centric. Pam spent a lot of time there doing Crime and Punishment; I think we’ll continue to be out there several days a month. Laird was just there for the AFM, and Brad goes out to do agent meetings every two or three months. But New York is really where it’s at for us.

Is there a particular producer/director relationship you’ve used as a model?

I don’t really have any role models. I mean that in the sense that you never really hear about producers, except the ones who are big meddlers, or assholes, or enemies of production. The producer as auteur, the producer as creative force, is sadly maligned. John Waters once told me I was the Ross Hunter of independent production, which was a wonderful compliment. Dan Minahan, who just did a fantastic digital feature for us called The Contenders, wanted to do a Ross Hunter show for AMC, and he found out a lot about him. He was an amazing producer, and really let Sirk do those incredible things. So maybe he’s a role model, without knowing a whole lot about him. But if I could die with a body of work like his, I’d be happy.
   I think, though, that the relationships I’ve developed with directors I’ve kind of invented myself. And now, interestingly, that’s looked on as a model. It was reported back to me recently that some ego-swollen filmmaker I’ve never heard of, who was getting badgered by some company to cut his movie, told them, “Christine Vachon doesn’t make her directors do this.” I guess that’s a good thing…

I think of preview screenings as being associated with more studio-generated films, but I was wondering if you also use them.

We do previews constantly. But not NRG screenings—I’m suspicious of those. We do our own kind—we bring in an audience, have them fill out questionnaires. We do it fairly rigorously, and we make—no, we strongly encourage—directors to use that as part of their process. Todd Solondz does, totally; Todd Haynes does, totally. Kim became a total convert, also. You have to start with the supposition that the movie’s going out there to be in front of an audience, and to work for an audience. And if it isn’t, then you aren’t doing something right. So what better way to find out?
   Does that mean that we sit there with the results and say, “Well, Kim, this questionnaire says that the rape scene’s too long”? No. But it means you take on a sense of what the general zeitgeist of the screening is, and you act accordingly, if you want to. Usually what happens at those screenings it that something you never, ever would have thought was confusing, or was a stumbling block, or got in the way of what you wanted somebody’s experience of the movie to be, becomes apparent, and then you say, “Thank God we did this.” Or you realize you could make it so much more affecting if one little thing changed, you know? Or you find that nobody’s liking a particular character, and it’s interfering with their ability to process something else.
   NRG screenings are about “the numbers,” and our movies never test well in that way. With Velvet Goldmine, those NRG screenings were probably the last nails in the coffin. I just remember this poor person from Miramax—can’t remember her name, but she had an Australian accent—saying to us over and over, “And thees score is beloy ehvrage.” And I was like, “Yes, but if you took Last Tango in Paris, 400 Blows, whatever, and subjected it to that, of course it would be beloy ehvrage.”

What do you think happened with Velvet Goldmine?

It’s the tragedy of my life—it broke my heart. When a movie doesn’t work, it’s easy to blame the distributor, and I really don’t want to do that. I do have to say that at a fairly critical point, I felt like a lot of confidence was removed. I don’t know what would have happened if 17 times as much money had been spent; I can’t make that assessment. The critics were more split than anyone had originally anticipated. I was so angry at some critics who said it was “too ambitious.” I mean, in this day and age, when a movie is actually about something, actually tries to do something, to slam it for that? I’m not saying it’s unflawed, but I think it is one of the richest experiences you can possibly have in the cinema. The last time I checked, there were 75 websites dedicated to the movie alone—basically all teenage girls!

I was wondering if you find any cross-pollination between the indie world here in New York and the more established filmmakers who live and work here.

Absolutely not.

Olivier Assayas said something similar about the divide that separates most of the New Wave directors in Paris from his generation…

Yeah. Boys Don’t Cry was the first little chip of bigger-deal people telling me “I’ve admired your work for so long.” About four years ago, I went to do a meeting with Jean Doumanian—they were looking for somebody to line-produce Woody Allen’s movies, and they brought in everybody. I took the meeting as a sort of “Why not?” kind of thing. But when I got in there, it suddenly dawned on me that she had absolutely no idea who I was; she didn’t know anything about me. I mean, at that point, we’d made I Shot Andy Warhol, Kids, Stonewall, Safe—but she had no clue. Actually, I only went in because I wanted to see the office.