Let’s Not Compromise: An Interview with Independent Film Producer Maggie Renzi

Abstract

MAGGIE RENZI HAS PARTNERED IN THE INDEPENDENT film business with writer/director/ editor John Sayles since their first film together, Return of the Secaucus Seven, in 1980. Both studied at the selective liberal arts Institution Williams College located In Williamstown, in the Berkshires in northwestern Massachusetts. Sayles graduated in 1972, Renzi in 1973, the year they met through a mutual friend. At Williams, Sayles and Renzi had performed in the theater department's plays, even, one story contends, in the same production before they knew each other. Renzi began acting even earlier, as a child in the Williamstown Theater Festival, and she continued this association into her twenties. But although she has acted in increasingly smaller roles in eight of their films, her primary contribution to Sayles's feature films has been as coproducer or producer on all their films after Secaucus Seven. Renzi also coproduced Karyn Kusama's multiple award-winning first feature Girlpght (2000), with Sayles as executive producer (Kusama first worked for Renzi and Sayles on Lone Star). Because of her twenty-eight-plus years of experience with minimal budgets ($60,000 for Secaucus Seven to $5 million for Honeydripper [2007]) for often demanding, onlocation work (from Alaska to Ireland to Mexico), Renzi has gained a historical perspective few in the independent filmmaking world can equal. She has had to stretch the dollars for period pieces Matewan [1987], Eight Men Out [1988]) and science fiction (Brother from Another Planet [1984]), for Irish folklore/fantasy [The Secret of Roan lnish [1994]), and for multiple-character dramas (City of Hope [1991], Sunshine State [2002], Silver City [2004], etc.). And fortheir ideologically complex, immensely varied, and intelligent films, Renzi has proved resourceful at both financing and distribution, including working with an array of exhibitors nationally and internationally. Upon the occasion of the Saint Louis premiere of Honeydripper in November 2007, Renzi and Sayles received the St. Louis International Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award. I had the opportunity to talk one-on-one with Maggie Renzi about her career as a producer, the changes she has experienced, the current state of independent film, and the new challenges for independent filmmakers. DIANE CARSON: You've been involved with independent filmmaking for over twenty-five years now. How have it and your role in it changed most dramatically? MAGGIE RENZI: It is pretty widely agreed that in about every area in this country- in its government, in its culture, in its economy- we need change. We're in a really bad spot for just about everybody. And it is not so surprising that independent films demonstrate some of those same problems and deficiencies. For myself, there has been too much activity in the independent sector, too much uninformed money coming in. Earlier you had to talk your parents into kicking in a little money. My mother's sister, my aunt Ria, gave us $1,500 towards making Lianna, but that was a local, immediate connection to a filmmaker. Those were the days when people talked about maxing out their credit cards or maybe mortgaging their house. It was immediate and connected to the filmmaker and the filmmaker's family and the filmmaker's community. Now, just as with these S81L mortgage problems, this careless investment looking for the big bucks, as with the people who think they can make all their money in the stock market casually, a lot of casual money flooding into the marketplace to fund films has meant a lot more films made without going through a process of considered investment; that means considering the script, the team that's being put together, what that result will be. And then there's another factor. There's been this huge explosion of film schools and of film courses. Obviously, when we started, there were virtually no film schools. UCLA , USC, and NYU maybe were it. …