Interview: In Conversation With The Producers of Beasts of No Nation

On November 24th, the very day I spoke with Riva Marker , Daniela Taplin Lundberg and Amy Kaufman, the Spirit Nominations were announced, and Beasts of No Nation received five nominations including Best Picture.

Awards Daily: It was so exciting to see the Spirit Awards be announced ahead of our phone call and then to speak to you ladies. I mean I’ve got to say a massive congratulations.

Riva Marker: We’re feeling very celebratory.

Amy Kaufman: Thank you. We are so excited. It’s an understatement, we totally had no expectations and we were blown away.

AD: I do have to say one thing, it’s really nice to be speaking to you on a day like this and you’re all female film-makers, so it’s really an honor to be speaking with you.

Amy: It’s so nice to hear, and really nice to work with female film-makers, but also to speak to female journalists.

AD:  Thank you. (At this point Daniela joins in and I wish her congratulations on the Spirit Nominations).

Daniela: We’re all working on sunshine. We’ve spent the last three years trying to get the movie out in the world and to distributors in the right way, and then you hope people watch it and you hope people like it, so it’s a never ending journey.

AD: And it’s here. So, tell me about this journey, you said it’s taken three years to get here.

Amy: I had worked with Cary before, I had produced Sin Nombre, so when he shared this project with me, I was really excited, but equally fearful because Cary can do anything and he’s such an amazing film-maker, but the material was going to be really challenging to finance based on what it was.

Cary and I had originally set it up at Focus Features and then Focus changed over time, and ultimately gave it to us back, at which point we got a call from Red Crown Productions which is kind of amazing. They had read the script, and loved it, and said they wanted to do it which is unusual for them to do, it’s also an unusual call to receive from people who want to be your producing partner and financing partner.

Daniela Taplin Lundberg: Riva and I had this creative executive who had been an intern at Focus, he prided himself on having read every script. We had been big Cary Fukunaga fans and had started this company Red Crown with Dan Crown, a year prior to him working with us. We had made a shortlist of directors who we aspired to work with, and Cary was top of that list. We loved Sin Nombre and knew Amy a bit socially. This guy then asked if we had read the script, and I’ll never forget reading the script with Riva simultaneously in our offices and we started crying. I’d be like, “Are you at this part yet?” and she’d be weeping, “I just passed this part where the mother…”

I called Amy, and we sat down at the – Where did we go?

Amy: The Bowery.

Daniela: We sat down, and it was Summer. Cary was very polite, and he’s so relaxed so you don’t quite know if he’s into something or not. He said, “I really want to make this. Amy and I have been on it for a really long time, but I’m not going to make this now.” Riva and I were so devastated, but he said, “I think I’m going to make this thing for HBO, I don’t really know if it’s going to work, it’s called True Detective.” We were like, oh dammit it’s going to take him away from us for over a year. I wish he would do our movie first, but it ended up being the best thing for our film because he became a cult phenomenon.

Riva: The thing I want to add, when Daniela and I were reading the script, the impossible challenge of what this script was going to require. It’s set in Africa, the protagonist is a child, the story centers on war, there’s brutality, there’s savagery. When we’re reading it, this is the most beautiful script we had ever read, but can one actually make this?

Daniela and I had never produced a script in Africa before. Amy had, but in parts of the world where Cary wanted to make this movie, in West Africa which he was resolute about, was so daunting. Even knowing we were committed to make this movie whenever Cary or Amy were going to be ready to do it, it still seemed like there was no way it would happen. Like how are all the pieces going to come together?

Daniela: Just to add to that, we barely talked about this movie when we signed on because every time we would talk about it people would look at us like we were crazy. Like why are you making a child soldier movie? We had to talk about that after we were talking about the big studio movie we were trying to make.

When we tried to pre-sell this movie — which is how these independent films get done — you go and pre-sell several big territories so you’re assured you get some return on your investment. We couldn’t make one pre-sell on the film. So, we came back from the Toronto Film Festival with zero pre-sells having been made, and that was one of the major moments where we were like, “Are we proceeding or are we going to stop now and cut our losses?” I think we all looked at each other. We love this film, we’ve already been together for two years trying to get it started and we just decided to go full risk, meaning we just put all our cash into it. Which is really unusual, and any smart film financier would tell you never to do that.

Amy: As a producer, 100% of the time you know you’re not going to get enough money to make it, whether it’s shot in a room or shot in a few rooms, wherever it is you know you’re not going to get enough money, but this is the most extreme circumstance where everything was on the page; the people, the location, the action sequences, the military, everything was on the page and we knew we would get nowhere what we would need to make it.

Daniela: So, we finally got into prep. Amy, Cary and our line producer went and scouted a few countries in Africa. They went to Kenya and Uganda and finally Ghana. They actually ended up being in Kenya, and Amy, you can clarify this, but you were there the week of the terrorist attacks on Kenya in the mall.

Amy: Yeah. We were going to shoot in Africa, and there are places that are easier because they have more infrastructure and more money. We were going to scout, as Daniela was saying, Kenya, Uganda and West Africa. We went and flew over Nairobi, so the day after we got there was the mall bombings and everything changed, it was no longer a safe place, and all of a sudden West Africa became more real.

Kenya was on the watch list so we couldn’t have shot there had we wanted to. It aligned with Cary’s desires anyway because the book had been set in West Africa and Cary wanted it to be as authentic as possible so he wanted to shoot in West Africa and Ghana became the most desirable place.

Riva: I was just going to say, in terms of practice, even getting to the idea of Kenya or Uganda and ultimately Ghana being on the table, I think we must have spent 6 to 9 months first exploring a number of places in South Africa. There’s equipment, crew and there’s an infrastructure there so it naturally made the most sense.

We also started nailing down with Cary and all of us understanding why South Africa wasn’t going to work. His vision of what he wanted the topography to look like — the dirt, the trees, what the color of people’s skin should look like — all of that were conversations that we started having that we started having and figuring out the place and location of where we were going to shoot the movie.

It started in South Africa, that led us to Kenya and then Uganda, and finally identifying Ghana as a safe region of West Africa.

Daniela: I think that year and a half of pre-prep was really important, it allowed Riva and I to get to know Cary and Amy in a way that we might not have otherwise. A lot of times, financiers jump into a film and you have two months to get to know your director and their partner and you just take a leap of faith. In this case, because the film was so complicated we had to get to know each other much better than we would have otherwise, which ultimately served us when we landed in Ghana and everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

AD: What happened ?

Daniela: Cary got malaria, most of the crew got malaria, there was torrential rain every day, and then extreme heat. We had these thirteen film students fly over from Denmark because they had been such big fans of Cary, and these boys had never been in such extreme heat, so the first day, one of our Danish interns went down with heat stroke because he didn’t know enough about staying in the shade. We had to take all soft drinks off the set because people would constantly be getting dehydrated and getting sick. You see the footage of Heart of Darkness, so you have that footage so you understand how hard that must have been. This film was equally difficult but you don’t have that footage.

AD: Wow. That would have made for some interesting footage for sure.

Daniela: You have to trust these stories that the crew are still talking about today like old war stories.

AD: What a challenge.

Amy: I was going to say, the good stories and the things that happened on a daily basis, in many ways we won a victory because we came in to shoot in West Africa and that opened a whole Pandora’s Box. The first thing that came up was casting. There’s no casting agents, no one is creating lists, no one is sending tapes. The people that we initially started working with just weren’t prepared to work in a structured way that we needed to happen because we needed because we had a short timeframe to do it. So, we decided to bring someone from overseas. They had to be most proactive, they went into the streets, they went to Little Liberia, they went to the slums, they went to video arcades, soccer pitches. They went everywhere to try to convince people to audition for the movie.

Riva: Crewing this film was part of the challenge. Cary had people who he had worked with, but getting someone to commit to working in conditions that they were going to be working under, in a totally different continent, without their family and security of Western creature comforts, crewing the film became a much longer experience than anything we had ever seen. This is an amazing filmmaker, an amazing opportunity for such beautiful material, but getting people to commit was equally as challenging.

Amy: If you imagine what it is to make a studio film in a studio and then you go exactly in the opposite direction is what this movie was.

Daniela: The first day of our shoot, our camera operator got up on a ladder, the cameras were really heavy, the very first shot, he completely pulled his hamstring, and so much of the film was active running with the steadicam shots with the camera. Cary had to end up operating the camera for the next three weeks because it took that long for anyone to get shots and papers for anyone else that we wanted to bring into the country. Our shoot was only seven weeks long so anytime someone went down, it wasn’t like we could hire a local crew member, those people have very specific skill sets, so it was constantly pulling from other crews and people helping out when they normally wouldn’t. Cary was the cinematographer, the writer, the director, he’s now operating the camera. It was quite a feat.

You even think of things that should be simple like getting food to your crew after six hours of work. It’s a very standard film thing, but there’s no catering in the jungle, and no local store you can go to for water if you’re running low. It was impossible and our UPM’s entire job was getting food to set. I remember the first day a tree fell on the main road while we were transporting lunch and he had to figure out how to acquire rice and meat in the jungle. It was preposterous, the most simplest thing became the most impossible thing.

AD: It’s such a delight to speak to you though and hear this journey. Talk to me a little about about being pioneers and how this got to Netflix.

Amy: The amazing position was, by the time the film was almost done and it was screened for multiple buyers and there were several offers from great companies, we had choices to make. Netflix was a choice we were fortunate to have and to be able to contemplate and think about.

Riva: There were a number of things to consider, and the idea of being guinea pigs was daunting, but Netflix came to the table and understood the film in a way that excited us and moved us. They got behind the filmmakers and didn’t want to make any changes to it. They were like, “This is your movie and we just want to get as many eyeballs on it as possible,” and that was what sold us on it in the end, which was what we wanted.

Amy: Riva, Daniela and I, and Cary have all been involved in a bunch of movies that have gone through distribution and I think we were very familiar with the traditional model, and we knew that however much the people working on it love the movie, there would just be certain limitations. If we had gone with a theatrical release, the film still wouldn’t be available today, it was a risk we took and it paid off. We know how many people have seen the movie, there’s no doubt that so many more people in so many places have been able to see the movie.

Daniela: I also have to say today has been such a tremendous validation. Not that the Spirit Award nominations define a film or define us as producers, or Cary as a film maker, but just the idea that the Netflix model isn’t being shunned by the film community is so incredibly rewarding. We took a risk, and we’ve been working hard for a very long time, and especially the last four months, we had no idea if it was working or not.

We would hear anecdotal stuff, people saying, they’d seen it on Netflix last night, and how they could just push a button and see it, but you don’t know what that means in terms of the larger community. I think we’re filmmakers first and we’re not necessarily pioneers, but I think we feel ultimately this was the right choice, and it’s exciting to be exciting to be a part of this discussion about this new way of releasing films.

Riva: Because of that, they [Netflix] really wanted and valued our opinion in how to get a movie out there. The campaign was going to be something that I had never experienced prior. They wanted to hear how we thought people wanted to embrace the movie or how they wanted to see it, and that was also a novel way to be included in the marketing.

Daniela: We felt strongly that we wanted to take it to the Venice Film Festival. They heard us, they were supportive. Then the film was in Toronto and Telluride, it helps us shape what this new distribution model is.

Amy: It’s exciting to be part of a conversation that’s shaping the way people are seeing things. It feels like we’re at this stage of our lives as producers. I think it’s hard for any of us to acknowledge that we did something good, but I think it’s something we need to do more often.

It’s a risk we all took, with Cary, and this movie, had it not gone this way, could have shut down our companies or set us back in our careers. I feel every move we made on this was a bold one, and I’m proud of that. I’m proud of being on a film that’s so unique and so different and something that starts a conversation.

Riva: It’s also so important and so relevant. This is not just a movie where it’s a good story and it’s about character, this is a movie that has a point of view and has a real relevance in our world right now.

AD: That’s absolutely what I loved about it, that it is real life, it’s educational, and it’s going on. I do want to talk about the casting, and how you found Abraham.

Amy: Harrison found him playing soccer. He didn’t realize he would be making a film. He thought he was being scouted for a soccer team. He’s so young in the movie, and was untrained. He got trained a few weeks before making the film, and throughout the process of making the film and the performance is raw and amazing.

AD: Circling back to the Netflix platform, the world is rapidly changing in the way films are released, are you excited in how it challenges the traditional way of releasing a film through cinema?

Amy: I think for us as content creators, I think it’s exciting. It’s exciting to have more potential distribution entities. That’s not to say we’re only going to make movies through Netflix now, I think there are movies that deserve a traditional theatrical window and it’s not something that should just go away, but by the same token, this movie is a child soldier movie. It’s a tough subject matter. The fact that it’s on Netflix gave it a much longer life than it probably would have had otherwise.

I went into the bank the other day, and they asked what I was working on, when I told them, five bank tellers came over to me saying, “Oh my gosh, I just saw that movie yesterday and it was amazing.” I thought it was such incredible reach, these people working at the local Chase Manhattan are so excited about this movie about child soldiers is not something I’ve ever experienced before.

Riva: I was at my OB/GYN talking to my doctor about it, and he’s an amazing guy. He and his assistant are taking notes about the movie I’m working on, the next time I go back they’re like, “Oh my God…” because people can access the movie and it’s immediate, we’ve never had as many people, tell us how much they love something, or that they’ve seen it.

AD: Is it getting harder or easier for women to get movies greenlit?

Amy: [Laughs] It’s definitely not getting easier.

Daniela : [laughs] I don’t know if it’s getting harder, but it’s not getting easier.

Riva: You’re talking to three chicks who are like, “We’re going to put our heads down, we’re just going to get this done and we make things happen.” To me, it’s just, there are things we want to do and there are movies we want to make, and we’ll make them.

Amy: We had 25 investors in this film. Some people put in a million dollars, some put in $50,000 and we worked just as hard for that $50,000 as we did for that million.

I feel we all believe in putting our heads down. There are gender inequalities, but we just want to go and make movies.e gender inequalities, but we just want to go and make movies.

AD: Thank you. I’m so excited for this and it’s been a pleasure speaking with you.