What’s the impact of the pandemic on you, your company, your approach to doing business in the future? What practices emerged that you will continue even as restrictions are loosening?
The crisis pushed everyone to trim the fat, decentralize, and recenter our priorities. Our ability to be nimble and keep overhead low prepared us for the sea change -- and with our roster and team spread around different continents and time zones, the pandemic reinforced many practices we already had in place in terms of remote collaboration. While producing during the pandemic required contingency plans and flexibility, it opened up new ways of thinking in terms of doing production on a global scale. There’s now more trust and respect in the remote process since agencies/clients still can’t always make it to set. In some ways, this new way of working feels more like a team effort. I’m glad to see this change. Lastly, I think this experience has made our business a bit more humane and understanding, as working from home forced us to really focus and be more efficient than ever. There’s no time for BS when you’re juggling kids at home and other personal priorities.
How has the call for equity, racial and social justice affected, honed or influenced your sense of responsibility as a company in terms of the content you create and/or your commitment to opening up opportunities for filmmaking talent from underrepresented backgrounds?
It is great to see more creatives and producers are paying more attention to underrepresented directors. In the past, I sometimes felt it was done to check the box, and I’m glad to see agencies and clients taking this seriously now. There’s more of a willingness now to give emerging directors a chance, too, and look at the work in a different way. We’re not only seeing more bids for underrepresented talent, but it’s also happening in casting -- briefs for real people, real diversity, and real characters. It’s equally important for us as a production partner to do our own due diligence in assembling diverse teams and crews. If diversity begins at the top of the production chain, then there’s a better chance for diversity to extend on set when crewing up for a shoot.
While gazing into the crystal ball is a tricky proposition, we nonetheless ask you for any forecast you have relative to content creation and/or the creative and/or business climate for the second half of 2021 and beyond.
It’s been picking up since the vaccines. I hope this will last. But I’m nervous about the lack of collaboration on a global scale to help slow down the emergence of new variants. We can’t be truly safe and back to “business as usual” until developed countries help other countries reach their vaccination goals. There’s a false sense of security and we could easily fall back into a Groundhog Day scenario.
This is affecting us and limiting our options to produce campaigns, not to mention endangering the local production ecosystems. Some of our favorite offshore shooting destinations are having a hard time recovering from the pandemic, such as South Africa and many countries in South America. And I won’t even go into the various international travel bans, which have been a pain to deal with.
From a creative standpoint, I think - and hope - we will see bolder concepts, fun, and cinematic stuff. It’s time for agencies and clients to be bold; it doesn’t help the audience and clients to play it safe.
What are your goals, creatively speaking and/or from a business standpoint, for your company, division, studio or network in 2021?
As a relatively young company, we want to continue developing our roster and opportunities for our directors. We’re in the mix with A-list directors and established companies, something we achieved in a relatively short amount of time. This is fun and exciting. I’m glad to see our vision and the voices of our directors matter more and more. I can’t wait to see what’s next.
What trends, developments or issues would you point to thus far in 2021 as being most significant, perhaps carrying implications for the rest of the year and beyond?
It’s been a strange year. It feels like the world has gone mad. The distrust in institutions, politics, science, and media as well as the fracture in our democracies will have lasting effects. It does make me worried -- for my kids, our society, and our industry, too. We all need to think long and hard about how we are contributing to this problem -- and what we can do to fix it. Brands and advertisers have a big responsibility in finding ways to help their consumers regain trust in the media and not aggravate the divisiveness in our society.