Pushy Directors, Money Problems and a Prosthetic Penis: All in Day’s Work for THR’s Producer Roundtable

From building 14 blocks of ancient Rome and filling it with 2,000 extras for Gladiator II to ensuring Sing Sing 's cast of formerly incarcerated actors was comfortable shooting in a prison, the producers behind this year's best picture contenders had to navigate everything from the Arabian Desert to nervous studio executives.

Lucy Fisher ( Gladiator II ), Mary Parent ( Dune: Part Two ), Amy Pascal ( Challengers ), Samantha Quan ( Anora ), Tessa Ross ( Conclave ) and Monique Walton ( Sing Sing ) came together in Los Angeles for The Hollywood Reporter 's annual Producer Roundtable to talk about getting stuck in mud (literally) while sticking it out in Hollywood. Says Parent, "So many people are driven by fear right now. Everyone's jumping ship. As a producer, you can never jump ship."

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What did your first job as a Hollywood producer entail?

MARY PARENTIt was one of the few movies that I had the luxury of shooting in Los Angeles. That's only happened a few times. The location scout came to me and said, "They're asking us to pay again." I said, "What do you mean?" And they said, "Well, there's people that don't necessarily want us to be here and they want us to pay again." I was naive enough not to understand what that was, so I went and somehow talked my way through it and we got to stay. But it dawned on me halfway through that it was a side deal they were looking for.

AMY PASCALI worked for a man named Tony Garnett for a very long time, who was a producer. Then I became a studio executive [at Sony], and I stayed being a studio executive for a really long time. Then I got fired and became a producer. So the first movie that I worked on as a producer, I had no idea when you were allowed to talk to the director, right? Because when you run the studio, you come on the set and you can do whatever you want. But as a schlepping-it producer, I would just go up to the director, and they're like, "We're doing the master. You're not allowed to give notes already!"

TESSA ROSSIt is very different as an exec. You are involved so much in development and looking at what the budget and financing might mean, and often delivering. But as a producer, it was the on-set experience that I just had no real knowledge of. Other than being welcomed like a queen [when I was an executive].

PASCALBeing the queen was great.

MONIQUE WALTONOne of the projects that I worked on was a short film. I learned that if you are thinking you might have pickups, you should really store your set design. Several months [after shooting], we returned to the house that we were filming in, which was just someone's house, and needed the couch [we had filmed]. [The homeowner] was like, "Sure, you can come back and film." We were like, "Oh, you still have the couch, right?" She was like, "Oh! That couch is in the field out back." We had to pick up the couch in a pickup truck and try to clean whatever was growing on it by that point. That was a big lesson for me.

SAMANTHA QUANI am in independent film, so I've done everything, because my job is to make sure that the movie gets made, no matter what happens. We made Red Rocket at the very beginning of the pandemic, which was a very strange time.

PARENTI love that movie.

QUANWe made it with 10 people. We wore many hats. I was also doing hair and makeup, and probably one of the strangest things is that I would apply, when needed, [star] Simon Rex's prosthetic penis. Yes, it's prosthetic. So I would be running lines with him and …

PASCALPutting his penis on.

QUANWe got very close. There was one point where I had to make sure that it would stay on while he was running. I said, "Hey, I'm gonna take a video. Can you, like, do some jumping jacks?" So I had Simon Rex doing jumping jacks with the prosthetic penis on, but it made him look like he was naked. I was showing the production designer and I was like, "This looks good, right?" She's like, "You need to take that off your phone now."

What about for you, Lucy?

LUCY FISHERI'm asked to follow that story? I also was an executive for 25 years. As an executive, you can tell people, "You should fix this." But when you're the producer, you're the person you have to tell to fix the thing. We did have the cat's asshole fall out in Stuart Little .

ROSSYou've matched her story.

QUANHow does that happen?!

FISHERIt prolapses. But it went back in and we continued to shoot.

The hardest part of being a producer, and the most fun part, is trying to figure out the problems while 20 other things are going on. You're trying to remember, "What's the most important thing I should be paying attention to right now, so I'm not paying attention to the thing no one's going to care about and I am paying attention to the thing that's going to ruin the movie if it doesn't get fixed?" I called [Lucasfilm head] Kathy Kennedy for advice many times and she knew the answer to everything.

PASCALAbout the cat's asshole?

FISHERNo, not about that one.

Tessa, why did you decide to make Conclave independently?

ROSSYou're saying "decided," and I think that's so generous of you, as though I have control of all my choices. ( Laughs .) The movie was financed more than once. It was the second turn of the financing that led us to an independent structure, which is why it took so long. Of course, that meant we had a little less money and a little more stress. But it gave us the freedom that we needed.

Amy, you said that what drew you to the Challengers script is that it was very rare that commercial movies are about adult relationships and sex. How did you know you could get the film made in a studio system that may be averse to that type of story?

PASCALHiring Luca Guadagnino to direct the movie. He knows how to make movies about people's bodies and people being free with their bodies and who they are. He just understands human relationships. What I liked about the movie is it is an unjudgmental story about how people love each other and the different ways that people love each other in the modern world.

Did you get any studio pushback about the amount of sexual content in the film?

PASCALNo, because nobody knew how much sex Luca was going to put in the movie until we made it. The real pushback that we got was about the ending. Everyone was like, "Well, who won?" We're like, "No one won. That wasn't the point of the movie. It wasn't about tennis, what are you talking about?" But let's be honest: My first question to the writer [Justin Kuritzkes] when I read it was who won, too. So I'm a big liar. But I got really confident about saying, "It's just ambiguous!"

For Anora , Samantha, you worked with sex workers as consultants.

PASCALOh yeah, yours had a bunch of sex.

QUANYeah, you want to talk about sex? ( Laughs .)

PASCALShe is just all over that.

QUANWe had a consultant named Andrea Werhun, she wrote a book called Modern Whore . When the script was finally finished, we asked her, "Can you read it over and let us know what you think?" Then when we were in New York, I was calling around to find real dancers instead of people pretending to be dancers. I had a consultant who would connect me with as many dancers as possible. You have to have an openness and not think you know anything about someone else's house. When I would say what Anora was about, some of them would say, "Oh my gosh, I really want to be a part of this because this is very similar to something that actually happened to me" or "to a friend of mine." Everyone involved ended up kind of being a consultant. [Director] Sean [Baker] is very collaborative and very clear: "I want you to speak up," if someone thinks that something is wrong or misrepresented.

For Sing Sing , Monique, you worked with a cast that included formerly incarcerated performers and filmed in a decommissioned prison. Did you have conversations with the cast about their mental health?

WALTONMy very first thought was we don't want to retraumatize our cast. These men are putting themselves out there. They're being vulnerable for us. They're really trusting us. Some of them hadn't returned to prison. Some of them talked about how they don't even wear the color green. I started talking to a number of therapists and eventually found a therapist that had volunteered at Sing Sing and knew a lot of the cast. We invited him to set to be a resource and ultimately realized that our cast wasn't necessarily engaging with therapy in a traditional sense, but they shared with us that there were moments of catharsis. There was a moment when one of our castmembers, Mosi Eagle, had gotten lost in this prison. This was right before we started shooting, and we were scouting the location with our cast. He thought that he was going to have a pretty strong reaction, but then he realized, "I can open this door and go, and I can go wherever I want." Then he just spent the next hour wandering around the prison by himself.

It has been over two decades since Gladiator hit theaters and won best picture. Lucy, what were your concerns with stepping back into the world of such a well-known story?

FISHERI think everybody was pretty scared. That's partly why it took 25 years. I didn't work on the original movie. I was vice chairman of Sony at the time, which passed on the movie. ( Laughs .) There was no version in which anybody wanted to rush a sequel, because they were worried about it seeming like a money grab. They'd killed off the two leads, which, when you're trying to make a sequel, is not ideal. And two of the other main actors had actually died, one during the shooting, Oliver Reed [who played the gruff gladiator trainer]. Mary was around for that.

PARENTI was a young executive [at Universal] that advocated for that project, one of the first things I really fought for. Doug [Wick, Gladiator producer and Fisher's husband] called me on a Sunday to tell me [about Reed's death]. I'll never forget that call.

FISHERAt first, the insurance company said that Ridley [Scott, the director] would have to go back and reshoot the whole movie, and they already had shot more than half of it. They came up with a great idea, which is a little CGI and a little bit of a different ending. [ Editor's note: Reed's scenes were finished using a body double and digital face swapping. ]

PARENT$90 million insurance claim. They had a brilliant solution and it's a good example of producing.

FISHERYou can do everything right as a producer, but if you don't have a good director …

PASCALYou got nothing.

FISHERYou're screwed. Ridley had the whole movie in his head. He storyboarded the movie long before we even had a finished script.

We gave him a birthday party for his 86th birthday, halfway through shooting. We looked around the room and all the heads of departments were the same ones. That's the loyalty that he has.

It was a much harder movie to have to stop shooting. We had to close down for four months [during the strikes], which, when I hear about your movies, and I think about the waste that we had to incur to shut down and leave a full-size Colosseum, 14 blocks of ancient Rome, 2,000 extras, costumes, props, 450 hotel rooms for the crew, 2,000 people on the set — and the next day, dark. I think about what it takes to do the movies that we do, and how much it costs just to rent the scaffolding to hold up the Colosseum for an extra four months. The not-shooting was as hard as the shooting, in our case.

Mary, you've said that it's much easier to work with a director like Denis Villeneuve, who has a clarity of vision. For all of you, what do you do if a director doesn't yet have that clarity?

PASCALQuit. ( Laughs .)

Is there a way to help them find it?

PARENTHopefully they have other strengths. All of us around the table have the luxury of working with some of the best filmmakers working, but then also I think it's equally as exciting to support new filmmakers. Hopefully their discernible talents align with what the needs of the movie are. You can support them with all the experiences you've had, help them see the icebergs in the water and help them build that vision. But, yes, I will always vote for getting behind a strong vision and being the guardian of that always.

PASCALThere are some directors who find their ideas as they're going, and that works too, but it's harder.

PARENTThose are the best productions, where you can create an environment where people can do what's planned, but also experiment. A lot of this job is about being able to be comfortable in the uncomfortable. If you're not equipped for that, it's a very difficult job. When you are going, "This isn't working," producing is about breaking through that. If you're freaking out, it's going to freak everybody else out. You've got to keep it inside of you. I always say, "Usually, a film will be a moth before it's a butterfly." I'll quote Dune : "Fear is the mind killer." We're seeing a lot of that in the business right now; so many people are driven by fear. Everyone's jumping ship. As a producer, you can never jump ship.

FISHERTo pivot is a huge part of our job. On [2013's The Great Gatsby ], to shoot the scene where Gatsby meets Daisy, we drove two hours to our location and it was pouring rain the entire day. We left trucks stuck in the mud; it was that kind of rain. We went back again and it was pouring again the third time. We said, 'We'll shoot it in the rain.' It was not how it was in the book, but it was a great scene. We said, "We'll shoot it in the rain." Leo [DiCaprio] comes in drenched. That was what we had and that's what we used. The best producers and the best directors try to get the best from whoever they have. Newer directors — and there are some that are geniuses out of the box, God bless them — but some of them want to control it too much. For me, the biggest pleasure is when I can say, "In a million years, I could have never thought of that. Thank you."

QUANBeing open to that serendipity can make things even better than you ever imagined.

PARENTI've had trucks stuck in mud. The Revenant .

FISHERSome of those trucks I think are still there.

Lucy and Tessa, for your films, each of you had to rebuild Rome. How did you go about tackling massive set pieces like the Sistine Chapel or the Colosseum?

ROSSReading the screenplays, for me, was always about story and character. It was only once Edward [Berger, Conclave director] started that we considered casting, problems and the actual practicalities of how Rome would look. We'd thought about whether we could shoot it other than in Rome. We had done budgets for other cities where we might be able to rebuild it or use architecture that was different. In the end, it was about how he wanted it to feel. With Suzie Davies, our production designer, and a most wonderful location manager, they pieced together this patchwork that was a Vatican of mostly Roman locations, a little bit out of Naples, and then the set that was built at Cinecittà Studio. It is about opening yourself up to other people's brains.

FISHER Gladiator II was one of the few times when the studio wanted to make the movie. ( Laughs .) We did have a lot of trouble holding on to some of the big action pieces, which are part of why people see the movie. Whenever the studio got a little rough with us, we would say, "Well, we can always take out the naval battle." They're like, "No, no, no." I said, "What about the rhino?" We couldn't shoot the rhino the first time because it was too expensive to do the CGI then. Doug called the rhino wrangler, such as it is, and asked about bringing a real rhino. And [the wrangler] said, "They're not that trainable. Once they start to run, they can't stop."

Our sets took so many months to build. I keep being embarrassed about our costs compared to the beautiful movies that you guys made for so much less. Our production designer was in another country, just building away to his heart's content, and nobody was there supervising. So the first time when we went, we thought, "Oh my God, it's a little bigger than we thought." ( Laughs .) I worked for Francis Ford Coppola for a few years when he had the little studio Zoetrope in Los Angeles. [Production designer] Dean Tavoularis told a story about how he put in hardwood floors in The Godfather , and they decided to put carpet on top of the hardwood floors. Somebody yelled at him and said, "How could you waste the money on hardwood floors and then put carpet on top?" He answered, "The actors will act better knowing that there's hardwood underneath that carpet." Then he paused and said, "And they did."

PASCALI love that and I believe it.

Mary, Denis is a tactile filmmaker who likes using practical lighting and sets. What does that mean for you, as a producer?

PARENTI've worked on films ­— small scale, big scale. There's never enough money. You have to be mindful of where you're going to put that money. Films can get away from you very easily. And I find that directors are continually pushing. They're saying, "I want to do it again." Or "I've got to keep pushing." Then [you're] working with them to figure it out [and saying], "OK, now we gotta move on." And that's hard. It's a lot harder than it seems. If it were easy, every film would be great. When you're [trying to get] a movie made, you have to be like, "This is the best iteration of it." But the minute the film's getting made, you're going, "Now, what's the worst iteration of it? Where is it going to go wrong?" On one hand, you're the greatest believer, the guardian and the protector of it. And at the same time, you have to be the hardest critic.

ROSSThat's something Tony Garnett used to say: that you have to be a loving challenger. It was that idea that you put your arm around your project and you say, "I love this and I'm completely behind you and everything you want is what I want to achieve, and I'm going to be really tough."

PASCALYou know what he taught me? The only thing that really matters is the writer.

FISHERA good script never hurt a movie.

QUANCan I also just add, whether it's $1 million or $5 million or $10 million or $300 million, there are always issues. Lucy, we might not have had as much money as Gladiator , but I never had to get a rhinoceros.

WALTONOr build a coliseum.

QUANAny movie is impossible.

Interview edited and condensed.

This story appeared in the Dec. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe .

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