‘Past Lives’ Producers Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler & David Hinojosa On Indie Film Scene’s Rebound From Covid & Perpetuating “A Healthy Ecosystem For Serious Adult Dramas To Exist”
Amidst a disrupted industry at the start of the Covid pandemic, the hope amongst producers Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler and David Hinojosa was simply to stay engaged. This, they accomplished by reading the best scripts at their disposal — among them Past Lives, which would mark the feature debut of playwright Celine Song.
When the trio were sent the script as a sample, they were told that the project was not available for producing. “And then just a year later, we were offered the opportunity to meet with Celine about producing it,” says Koffler, “and it felt sort of cosmic.”
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A meditation on roads not taken that generated huge buzz at Sundance before going on to the second-best limited opening of the year earlier this month, Past Lives, Song told us in Park City, is heavily inspired by events in her own life, as “a bilingual and bicultural person.” The A24 film tells the story of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), two deeply connected childhood friends, who are wrest apart after Nora’s family emigrates from South Korea. Two decades later, after the playwright has married another writer named Arthur (Magaro), she’s reunited with Hae Sung in New York for one fateful week as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life.
Part of what made the project “glorious” for Koffler, who with Vachon founded the renowned indie production company Killer Films, was the opportunity it presented for a reteam with Hinojosa. A longtime colleague at KF who had just recently departed to co-found the production and management company 2AM alongside Christine D’Souza Gelb and Kevin Rowe, Hinojosa had in his decade at the company worked alongside Vachon and Koffler to bolster such emerging voices as Josephine Decker, Janicza Bravo and Brady Corbet. And in Past Lives, the producers had the chance to help cement the career of another. “We know exactly how to work with each other,” says Koffler, “and together in that kind of confidence, we were able to learn how to work with Celine.”
Ahead of Past Lives‘ nationwide expansion set for this Friday, June 23rd, Vachon, Koffler and Hinojosa spoke with Deadline about navigating the film through Covid, working within the quite different filmmaking culture of South Korea as part of the shoot, the indie film scene’s rebound from the pandemic, achieving box office success at a difficult time for arthouse titles, the situation of their companies amidst the writers’ strike, their drive to perpetuate “a healthy ecosystem for serious adult dramas to exist,” and more.
DEADLINE: As producers who have long collaborated with up-and-coming filmmakers, how do you know when someone like Celine, from a sphere like theater, will be able to successfully make the leap into film, beyond just the writing of a great script?
CHRISTINE VACHON: I think it’s an ability to effectively articulate her vision, which she was really able to do. The first time we met with her, she made it very, very clear that she understood the story she was trying to tell, and the fact that she could articulate it so well to us made us feel like she could really articulate that to department heads as well and get it done.
DEADLINE: Tell us more about those initial conversations with Celine. What did she describe, in terms of her vision?
VACHON: The movie that you just saw.
DAVID HINOJOSA: It’s an incredible thing, how clearly she spoke about it two years ago, to what you go to the Angelika and see now. It’s a pretty extraordinary, straight line.
PAMELA KOFFLER: I also observed that Celine is very aware of what makes a play work as a play and what makes a movie script work as a movie script. There’s just an uncanny sense of the form of each story. She knew her story through and through, but she also just had, I think, a natural instinct around the cinematic way that she wrote the script. I mean, the script was very cinematic from the get-go, and [there was] an understanding of how to make it even more so in its execution. So that’s what she talked about.
DEADLINE: Was there a process of further developing her script ahead of production? Or was the one you read initially the version that made it to the screen?
KOFFLER: I feel like pretty much the script we got is the one we made, if I’m remembering correctly, barring a few production-related need-to-change things that had to do with logistics. And not fixing things that weren’t working, by any means.
VACHON: There’s always that kind of pass as you progress from the script to what you can physically do.
DEADLINE: Celine has spoken about the challenge that came with shooting in South Korea, after coming to discover that the filmmaking culture there is somewhat different. How was that part of the shoot, from your perspective?
HINOJOSA: We had tremendous partners in [producer/co-financier] CJ Entertainment. They gave us a lot of logistic support and were full partners throughout the process, continue to be. So, I think for us, there were interesting anecdotal things. Like, how you book your actors is very culturally different than how it works in Los Angeles. Dressing rooms and trailers are handled slightly differently; the actors wait in their cars when they’re not being used. Like anything, you just pick up the rhythm and the style of the new place. But I think from a practicality standpoint, it was quite different.
DEADLINE: What did you find to be the biggest challenges in bringing the film to fruition?
VACHON: Covid.
KOFFLER: Yeah. That said, we were spared pretty much the worst of what can happen on a Covid shoot, but we were certainly making it in the fall of 2021. It was like post-Delta but pre-Omicron, but on the edges of either of those strains. So, high levels of anxiety, international travel for a lot of our cast, which is always difficult in those Covid times. Honestly, I think we had our fair share of normal production challenges. But Celine rolled with them incredibly well, given it was her first time making a film. You know, we had a hurricane on the first day, but that’s okay. We dealt with it. We had…
HINOJOSA: Great clouds in that scene, with the hurricane leaving.
KOFFLER: Exactly. I would say it was challenging because every movie is challenging, but really a fantastic team of people.
HINOJOSA: The one that that was a hurdle for me every day is, I don’t speak Korean, and most of the movie is in Korean. So, you’re sitting there at the monitor with the sides, and I only know where they are because I’m following along line by line like at karaoke. So, if you get distracted or someone asks you a question, you lose your place.
DEADLINE: While Past Lives has scored the second highest limited opening of the year to date, it seems challenging these days for specialty films to get to a reasonable level of financial success, even if they’re Oscar winners. Why do you think your film has broken through in this way?
KOFFLER: I just think at the end of the day, it is causing people to feel deeply. So, that’s number one. Number two, its execution is excellent. It’s just a great film; plus, it makes you feel, across so many generations. It’s so emotional, and it’s so good. So, that’s a lot. It has a lot of things, and I’m seeing the level at which the audience is almost doing the work of promoting the movie.
VACHON: That’s word of mouth.
KOFFLER: It is the old-fashioned word of mouth. Like, “You need to see this movie. Even though I know you don’t go to the movies because you have little kids, or you don’t go to the movies because you’re worried about Covid, you’ve got to see this one.”
HINOJOSA: I also think Celine understood something. I had a sense that she understood it more profoundly, which is that the movie is so universal, and it fascinates me how people watch it and connect to different dimensions of it. But it’s a movie about making choices, and literally everyone can relate to that. Whether you just moved, or [it’s] the partner you chose or the job you did or didn’t take, you relate to, “Am I on the version of my maximum happiness? Is that the version of life I’m in right now?” And I don’t think I saw that until the movie was done. I didn’t really understand it.
DEADLINE: Do you think the film’s marketing has played a role in the way it’s connected? Certainly, A24 is highly skilled at accessing what it is that’s special about a project and getting people to take notice.
KOFFLER: I guess the thing I’d say is I have observed, and they did such a good job in this way, is keeping it special every step of the way. There’s respect for the theatrical experience — for anticipating a movie, waiting for a movie, thinking about it until you see it. And it also delivers. If that was a bait and switch and the movie wasn’t as good as it was, I don’t know if it would work so well. But in conjunction with the excellence of the film, and as David said, how universal it is, they really did create a sense of, “This is a special thing.” So, hats off to the studio for having the discipline and the foresight to roll it out this way.
HINOJOSA: I think they’re very good at inviting you to discover something — opening it up to you, creating that space for you to interact with the thing. And then they know that that audience that loves it, because they support the thing, will talk about it, and it’ll go back to the word of mouth.
DEADLINE: How has the indie scene changed in the rebound from the pandemic? I imagine there have been noticeable effects, as the Covid-related costs that made some projects impossible to pull together have been reduced or eliminated.
VACHON: Are we actually dropping them off yet?
KOFFLER: No, we don’t have to budget for Covid anymore.
VACHON: We really don’t?
KOFFLER: We really don’t. Covid definitely was an extraordinary cost that felt like an existential threat to a certain kind of movie…That is behind us, at least the Covid costs…But you know, inflation, the cost of money, the cost of living, the cost of food, gas, it’s all really conspired to make filming feel extraordinarily expensive in a way that was not quite the same before 2020. So I feel relieved about the Covid piece of it, but it’s still shocking. And I understand why. It just costs a lot of money to live in the United States, and in a city, and you feel it when you try to make movies in major U.S. cities. It’s just a fact.
DEADLINE: I’d seen you say in an interview, Christine, that you were concerned you might have to shutter Killer Films at the time of the last writers’ strike. What’s on your mind now that we’re into week seven of another one? Are there particular concerns for you?
VACHON: I think we take it a day at a time. In our natural kind of cycle, this was the time where the movies were going to start to come out. Like Past Lives, May December, She Came to Me, Ewan McGregor’s movie [You Sing Loud, I Sing Louder]. It just kind of worked out that we weren’t going to be in production now anyway. So, I think we’re just watching and waiting and taking the temperature, and doing what we can to move our projects along.
DEADLINE: In a recent episode of our Strike Talk podcast, Billy Ray and Todd Garner made the argument that even if some might perceive independent producers as being closer to the side of the AMPTP, they in actuality are in much closer kinship with writers. What do you think about that?
VACHON: I did hear about that podcast, and somebody even sent me the exact minutes to listen to. Look, I haven’t listened to it yet. But I would say, why are we closer to the AMPTP? Why would people think that? People think that because they don’t actually know what we do. And if they did know what we did, they would know in fact that nothing could be further from the truth. And that if anything, we’re walking on an even thinner ledge.
DEADLINE: What are the issues within our business right now that are most concerning to you?
KOFFLER: We think a lot about wanting there to be a healthy ecosystem for serious adult dramas to exist. They’re movies we love and we care about, and a lot of the directors that we’ve spent years and years developing relationships with, it’s their natural habitat. So, to hear that dramas are dangerous and “don’t call it a drama” is definitely a little heartbreaking. But I don’t believe that’s true. I just feel like we have to figure out how to keep them going, where do they need to live, being responsive to how the market tells us they need to exist, but also pushing. [If] you take a chance on a really good one and it’s really well made and it has a lot of the components of what makes Past Lives work, there’s a path for it. So that’s what I think a lot about. We just can’t give up on those.
HINOJOSA: I think we’re all just watching, viewing patterns are changing, and where people are finding things, how they want to experience them, and length of time episodic. I think on the creative end, you’re trying to be conscious of that without abandoning what you loved doing in the first place.
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