‘Everything Everywhere at Once’ Producer Jonathan Wang Delivers Sundance Keynote – The Hollywood Reporter

Jonathan Wang attends the Sundance Institute Producers Awards presented by Amazon MGM Studios in Park City on January 21, 2024.

Halle Nord Shutterstock/Courtesy of Sundance

One of the biggest challenges of the Sundance Film Festival is trying to juggle everything and be everywhere in Park City at once. On Sunday morning at The Park, a group of festival insiders stayed in one place for about two hours to receive a keynote from Everything everywhere at once Oscar-winning producer Jonathan Wang and see two producers selected with prizes and $10,000 grants.

It all happened as part of a Producers Award collaboration between the Sundance Institute and Amazon MGM Studios. The awards—one for fiction and one for nonfiction—were given to producers Brad Baker Barton Stress situations And Tony Kamau from Battle of Laikipiatwo films that premiered in this year’s lineup.

Baker Barton’s other credits include Tina Sutter realitystarring Sydney Sweeney and Mariama Diallo Perfectsstarring Regina Hall, is a Sundance selection released by Amazon MGM Studios in 2022. Kamau is a PGA and Peabody-nominated film producer and director and founder of the Kenyan production company We Are Not the Machine.

Other speakers at the event include Joana Vicente, CEO of the Sundance Institute, and Amazon MGM Studios head of documentary Brianna Oh. For his part, Wang took a walk down memory lane to recall the history of Sundance that includes Swiss army man, a 2016 entry directed by his longtime collaborators Al Daniels, also known as Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. His relationships go back a little further.

“In 2015, I attended Sundance for the first time with an interactive short film called Possibilities. He noted that it was produced by some unknown music video nerds working under the alias Pretty Daniels. “Three people watched the film: two of them were Daniel Scheinert’s parents, and the third was probably due to a glitch in the technology.”

He also recalled attending the same producers’ party in 2015, when he witnessed indie multi-hyphenates Mark and Jay Duplass doing the same thing he was accused of doing this year. “I watched filmmakers support each other and welcome each other for the fact that they shared the struggle to tell stories. That was powerful to bear witness to,” Wang said. “Then things got worse when Mark and Jay Duplass took the stage to deliver the keynote that Sundance foolishly thought I deserved.” Submit it now. But Mark and Jay spoke proudly about working with small budgets, building loyal crews, sharing points generously, and having a “no assholes policy,” and I was really impressed. Those values ​​were how I tried to approach the production of my projects.

Now that he has received an Oscar, Wang’s comments about the responsibility producers bear carry additional weight. “Our work is hard, our days are long, and many of us have witnessed very traumatic things on sets and in offices,” noted Wang, whose other credits include: Dick Long dies, false positive And the next The legend of Ochi. “I want to acknowledge that we work in a very competitive, very public, very toxic business, and that we as producers – and I would also add directors – have to be aware of the way people enter our spaces, our sets and our projects.”

He concluded by challenging attendees when they arrived in town to reach more places at once. “As we leave today to watch movies, hold our meetings and enjoy this wonderful festival, I challenge us to pause and take inventory of the story we are embodying. I challenge us to be present with who we are here and make room for them to see it. I challenge us to take this spirit of care and infuse it into our lives, our collections, and our stories.” And our planet.