Stacey Sher on Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh and the Films That Got Away

Probably, there are not so many directors who can state they influenced the movies of the particular epoch, but it is hard to describe the development of the independent movies in the 1990s without the person of Stacey Sher. 
 
“If you say, U. S. independent cinema of the ’90s, whatever film got to your feelings, your emotions, and your memory, Stacey was likely involved in it,” Locarno film festival artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro, explains the logic behind Locarno’s decision to pay tribute to Sher with its 2024 Premio Raimondo Rezzonico, or best independent producer. 
 
Thus, Sher came to the newly-formed Jersey Films, co-founded by Danny DeVito and Michael Shamberg, and became partners almost as soon as she arrived after a six-year apprentice as the apprentice to the legendary producers Deborah Hill and Linda Obst which she spent shooting Chris Columbus’ Adventures in Babysitting and Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King. At Jersey she was pivotal in insisting on a new breed of directors – that included Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, Andrew Niccol, Ben Stiller whose films would shape a generation. 
 
“I could find these people because this was my generation, my peers,” Sher reproduces. In their two-decade age difference, Danny and Michael couldn’t locate these people; but they could see talent and embrace me and in doing so I embraced them. 
 
Having worked with the Oscar contenders Erin Brockavich and the best pictures Django Unchained, Sher has persevered to nurture ethnography Sprout freshly-director Liesl Tommy on Aretha Franklin issues Respect or newly-writer Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who is preparing for the new function as a director with the movie Heretic by the A24 company with Sher as the producer. 
 
Sher will be given the Rezzonico Award during a ceremony at the Locarno’s Piazza Grande Thursday August 8. The event will also see Erin Brockovich being featured in a tribute with the screening of Django Unchained. 
 
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Sher recalled her experience which amounts to almost 40 years in the film business, the problems that the industry of independent films faces at the present and the projects that she lost “that still make my heart ache. ” 
 
Congratulations on the award! What is the experience of being awarded for the work one does throughout one’s lifetime? 
 
It’s funny. Of course, I am very honored and thankful deeply in my heart for your support of me. But I told them a story that I’ll tell you: When I was shooting Get Shorty, a friend of mine who was a costume designer Betsy Heimann who I have recently worked with, on Heretic, introduced me to Neil Young. he said she had worked for Neil Young at his ranch and they remained good friends, Moreover, she knew that I was a fan of Neil Young. It was necessary for her to bring him a suit for receiving the lifetime achievement award. I said: “Thank you so much for the lifetime achievement award,” and Neil Young said this: “I said ‘stick it back in the oven, I am not done yet’” Similarly, that’s sort of how I feel: yes I am extremely thankful and also very embarrassed. But that’s not all folks. 
 
How did you discover that you liked movies? 
 
From my dad. My father was very fond of movies though he is not alive anymore. It was something which we all shared in my childhood compound. He was my stepfather. He and my mom got married when I was six and a half and like all blended families there experiences their share of conflicts. But that’s what we came across; the one thing that we both liked and that made us whole. And it was it was movies, and so he always showed me movies. Thus, I was a fan and I was lucky to be a child in one of the best years to witness the cinema, watching ’70s films. Of course I’m not going to knock either of them because i like both, but the family that i was with went to see Raging Bull on the first weekend of its release as opposed to E. T. And in all honesty, while I know I was probably too young to actually understand what was going on I was quite engrossed in Raging Bull. I also got to know some of the early satellites like the Z channel that preceded the HBO. Well, I saw movies that transform someone’s life, my life that is. Such a movie as Clockwork Orange, which I was watching inadmissibly repeatedly. 
 
However, when I went to school, the intention that was in my mind was to go into sport and sports broadcasting. Then I had an internship and as much as the previous places were bad, this was just over the top in terms of the level of sexism. I am such a professional humorist that I refer to my move as switching to the immensely friendly movie and TV business. I was actually at the University of Maryland and a teacher I had was on the board of AFI and he directed me to a new producing program at USC called the Peter Stark program. It was rather late in my academic existence, at the beginning of the fall semester in my final year in college. And I began not being aware of what I would like to do. I wanted to get into a Stark program and, somehow, I landed myself in the program. It changed my life. 
 
Are you able to recall when you began your work in the given field? 
 
I did not have anyone I personally knew that had a job in the film business when I was a child. I had internships and separate jobs throughout my graduate school. I began shooting early music videos; I shot all of Twisted Sister’s videos. My classmate had internship at some company, which is no longer exist I think, called New World and this company was making sort of b-movies like Angel from 1983, the movie about Hollywood honor student during the day and Hollywood hooker at night. In fact they owned Marvel at that time which to an extent give you an indication of how people appreciated heroes in the late eighties. 
 
Well, this individual by the name, David Simpkins had scripted a show which he desired me to forward to Twisted Sister. That did not go well but we are friends to this day and I remember he brought me his next spec script which was Adventures in Babysitting. Deborah Hill and Linda Obst were yet to start Hill/Obst Productions I initially worked for them on trial basis When I presented them with the spec script, it turned out to be the first movie they made together and I was hired on a permanent basis. Deborah and Linda and I worked together for 6 years and this was during The Fisher King and Adventures in Babysitting which was the directorial debut for Chris Columbus. 
 
I several writers that were my friends who actually showed me how to do script notes. It is then when I met Scott Frank, [the man behind Get Shorty and Out of Sight]. It was interesting to learn story from people like Lindsey Duran [producer of The Firm and Sense and Sensibility] who was an executive at Paramount at the time but is best known as a brilliant story mind. Deborah Hill was an amazing teacher to me and I got to know physical production and a philosophy towards producing from her.

People usually connect you with Jersey Films, the production company that was involved in the making of numerous 1990s movies. What led you to this Company? 
 
I got recruited. I understood that I had to widen my focus and I interviewed with Danny DeVito and Michael Shamberg. Danny was a fortunate man because for the first time we could afford final cut as producers. That was not much in vogue in the context of global business at the time but that was why I was interested in the opportunity. It let us support new talents. We were essentially dancer out of step, We were extremely ill-suited to what people were though desiring a lot in that period were these large romantic comedies or these large broad comedies. 
 
But Danny’s a serious filmmaker, so he will find out on his own. When I said: ‘There’s your Andrew Niccol. He wrote The Truman Show, which they didn’t let him direct, he wants to guarantee that he can direct his new thing, Gattaca, ‘Danny would support me Michael, who had produced The Big Chill had the great idea to do a kind of Big Chill for people in their 20s, about Gen Xers. Steven David is a playwright, and a woman named Helen Childress a writer, who was just there graduating from USC and was so gifted. As opposed to Entertainment Weekly, I was closer in age to her and was actually able to get friendly with her and in turn, friendly with Ben Stiller to help mold that movie, Reality Bites, which is now 30 and so is Pulp Fiction. 
 
The first time we ever met Quentin he never negotiated one single aspect of Reservoir Dogs , he never shot one frame of footage of the movie; we made a blind deal with him on the project. At that times The Hollywood Reporter and Variety published a listing what is going to shooting in the US soon, which was actually for the physical production or for the casting directors to learn what was coming soon. If ever there was a film with a good choice of actors/actresses and I did not have any prior knowledge of the writer or the director, I would get the script and review them. That was my logical way to come out in the open to look for new talents among people I did not know. That is the contact I got the script for Reservoir Dogs movie. First, we proposed an opportunity to which he said no – this was an adaptation – and then we committed blindly to him on his second picture. Which was Pulp Fiction. 
 
Could such a deal be made now? 
 
An incredible amount of what we were able to do, was we had something that unfortunately isn’t in place anymore called a discretionary fund. Alas people could buy items that they always wanted. Hence, we had to use the discretionary fund to make the blind deal with Quentin Tarantino. All payments for Erin Brockovich’s life rights and Susannah Grant’s scripts, original script as well as rewrites, were made from the discretionary fund. Garden State (2004) was bailed out from the discretionary fund, we opted for the script of How High (2001) from the company’s discretionary fund. 
 
When and how did you meet Steven Soderbergh with which you did ‘Out of Sight,’ the first of several movies that you did together? 
 
This is due to Danny’s relation within the industry which let him get Get Shorty, and as for Out of Sight, writer Dutch Elmore Leonard himself came for the said movie because he believed that Get Shorty was a commendable edition of his work out of all possible renderings. Barry was not present, so as head of Universal at the time, Casey Silver recommended Steven because he had worked similarly with him. Actually, George Clooney was signed up for the movie before Steven. He said to us many times later this telling me how Steven and was and you know Stevens later told us all that he and [assistant director] Greg Jacobs worried all the time they were gonna get fired. He wouldn’t let us watch [his 1996 media satire] Schizopolis till the shooting was done. But more than anything getting a chance to work with him has been a pleasure. He is one of the most exemplary collaborators. The Locarno screenings include Erin Brockovich, which originated from an idea of Carla Shamberg, Michael Shamberg’s wife. Carla said she met this woman, through her chiropractor, and was told: It was as if her life should have been a film, but because she wasn’t Sarah Jessica Parker , at times a little too trusting and hence not cynical, she agreed. It was Erin Brockovich. 
 
What did you bring to Jersey Films when you came, whereas they were already stars, Danny DeVito and Michael Shamberg? 
 
I could identify such new voices emerging The reliance on the internet means that I could recognize these new voices coming up. This I could find because these people were of my generation, my age. Danny and Michael were twenty years my junior, and they could not locate these people, but they could observe their abilities and stand behind me and my backing of them. Their messages, Helen and Ben, which was presented in Reality Bites, was comprehensible to me. I was the oldest on that move, and I was maybe 30 years and some months old at the time. 
 
Similarly, Pam Abdy, who now co-chairs Warner’s, was working for Danny, Michael, and myself on Garden State; the movie recently commemorated its 20th anniversary. She was like: This is me, this is my generation, I believe in Zach [Braff]. Well, here is one person, so we backed her because we saw Zach’s voice and what he had to say and how genuinely it was. Otherwise, you may lose capacity to find new people, but you don’t lose capacity to recognize the talent if you stay abreast popular culture. My son two years ago introduced me to Druski and the man has now turned into an internet comedian with sold-out stands-up. I hate Instagram – I guess I wouldn’t be able to find him there, although he is incredibly skillful and laughs heartily. That is the man I am developing things with. Revitalization of the business is experienced through new perspectives. 
 
If you take a glance at the requirements set for the independent production companies at present, do you have a positive outlook on the business? 
 
Hopeful? I’m always hopeful. Which might just make me a Pollyanna crazy or something like that. But since I have joined the working force especially in the late ’80s, people have been telling me “Oh, you know it is over. ” So for the entire of my work, people have been telling me it is over. At the present time the are many shifts and a lot of them, and with shifts come always great opportunities. There is an acute problem we’ve been hearing about called the death of cinema; theaters are done. Yet to borrow Clinton “the movies are the thing. ”

I believe it is harder today as most movie studios are operating today are global multinational companies dealing with manage-ment for Wall Street, and that means they are under much pressure. It’d make me bow to the pressure that film companies and media companies have to go through, the spotlight they get. But we are not only offering math and sciences we are creating gold out of words. Nobody would have expected that a movie about a mother and a daughter and the multiverse, people with hot dogs on fingers and rocks that communicate will gross over one hundred million dollars. The lesson of Barbie and Oppenheimer is not a lesson in period films as people may attempt to draw from this production, it is in putting stock in the creative visions of Christopher Nolan and Greta Gerwig. This I always think that it’s one plus one equals three or four in our business. 
 
It can be tough. We optioned Nick Fury: Agent of shield when I was still working for Deborah and Linda, with Stan Lee. And nobody was interested. Hey, nobody cheated on James Cameron’s Spider-Man that is equivalent to saying no one faked the Indianapolising on Sherman. The studio bosses that were in power were not of the same generation as the filmmakers. However, the task to understand how to create new stars, we have to conduct at some stage of our development. Twisters is doing so well that it is a relief that there are new people, new stars, that youth comes to a theatre to watch. 
 
Does such a movie exist that slipped out of the grasp of the critics? 
 
Of course! The one that really saddened me the most is that we sold Rushmore to Disney. I knew Owen Wilson and Wes [Anderson]. I met them with Quentin when the short of Bottle Rocket was at Sundance the same year as Reservoir Dogs, the movie. As I mentioned earlier, one of my mentors, the sadly missed Polly Platt directed the feature film. When starting my work at the agency, I thought the script of Heathers was great but my supervisors never could grasp that. I did like a movie David O. Russell did called Spanking the Monkey… I saw David as a filmmaker I liked, but some of thee people that I thought were from our group could not cross that line because the movie was about incest. There are bookings that got away and films that never became bookings. They still do that to me: Homeless allies still make me see their side They still break my heart. 
 
What is your way of thinking when it comes to production? A factor that has helped you to weather all these years? 
 
Here is the catch: love it. You know, I have a 22-year-old and a 20-year-old, and I said to my 22-year-old who wants to be in our business: Someone said that ‘If you can think of anything that would make you happier, that you are more passionate about, do that’, because indeed it is quite challenging to be a producer in today’s world. What happened to the basic union tenet that we are the only people on a set who do not receive heath care or residuals, people who can work on a movie for years and still not earn any money? It should also be noted that development fees remained at $4,500, a level that was set nearly half a century ago, in 1971. They are those same 25 thousand dollars they were in 1971. If they are even paid at all. So what I would say is: Determine what you are passionate about.