We spoke with Charles D. King (CEO and Founder), Poppy Hanks (SVP, Development and Production) and Kim Roth (President of Production) from MACRO about producing Dee Rees’ latest film “Mudbound” at the New York Film Festival.
How did you get involved with this project?
Kim: I came to the project after joining Macro and my amazing colleagues, Charles King and Poppy Hanks, and read this script and was blown away by it and the fact that Dee Rees was attached to direct it. I was very pleased to come on board to this company that had this incredible project.
Speak about collaborating with Dee.
Charles: I had an insider perspective on the brilliance of Dee Rees, prior to launching this company, MACRO two and a half years ago. I was a partner at WME and Dee was one of my clients. I knew how brilliant she was from the first time I saw Pariah, the very first time I sat down with her and tried to convince her that we should represent her. I was hanging on set with her when she shot Bessie with Queen Latifah. We were percolating and incubating this company even while I was still a partner and I couldn’t tell her. Then to launch the company a year later, and this beautiful script to be brought to us by Cassian Elwes, who’s our partner on this film. Poppy was the first one to read it and then when he said, “Hey guess who’s going to be attached to direct this?” “Dee Rees!” To collaborate with her was a dream come true. It was one of the reasons why we started this company, which was to empower incredibly brilliant, talented film makers to make stories like this that are going to resonate, they’re going to bring communities together, they’re going inspire, and they’re going to uplift our communities, and I knew she would be the perfect filmmaker for a project like this, just given the right vehicle and tools. It was an amazing process. She was so dead on, so prepared. Her instincts every step of the way, casting wise, shot selection, you name it. First on set, wrapped almost every day early, she was amazing.
You read the script first, speak about your impressions and what blew you away about it.
Poppy: So many things blew me away about it. I read it, the relationships with the characters, these were characters we hadn’t seen … As much as there had been other projects dealing with race, these were well rounded, fleshed out characters that were showing both sides of the fence, but it was also for MACRO, this is exactly what we set out to do. This is the kind of script, at any other company I had been at, I’d say “Damn. It’s period, it’s got black people in it, who’s the star? No one’s going to make this movie.” It’s the fight you always fight. This one was exactly What Macro’s about: representation, empowering Dee, it was perfect.
Speak about your choice to go over and start your own production company after being on the agent side of things.
Charles: It was a long term vision even before I went into the agency world, to ultimately go and get the experience, the exposure, work with brilliant filmmakers and artists and then ultimately go to the other side and really build something and utilize all of those relationships and experience to go and do that. It was a natural transition, it was one that was originally going to be a 10 year plan that turned into 20 years, but what a great time we’re having now, 2 and a half years into the company and to have this be the first movie that we physically produced and packaged and put together, and we also financed the movie. We’re just very, very excited for so many more things to come. Last year we had Fences and we have Mudbound this year. We got Denzel’s next movie, Roman J. Israel and so, to really be able to fill a really needed space in the marketplace to tell these stories, where they’re so needed, it’s a dream come true.
I’d love to hear more about casting. It’s such an incredible cast, can you speak a little about it?
Kim: Dee had very strong opinions about who she wanted to cast, and we believed in her vision. We had the courage of our conviction and Dee being an auteur filmmaker to make this movie, so we couldn’t be more grateful that all of her top choices and our top choices, we got to be in the movie and they bonded in this film in such a beautiful way. It feels like a family now.
Mudbound will hit Netflix on November 17, 2017.
(Photo Credit: Jason Kempin/Getty/Netflix)
