COVER FEATURE: CHARLES D. KING
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PRODUCED BY
“WHEN YOU BELIEVE IN A STORY, IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT THE ECONOMICS OF IT ARE. YOU’RE GOING TO POUR ALL OF YOUR HEART AND ENERGY INTO EVERY ONE OF THOSE THINGS THAT YOU’RE WORKING ON.”
From left, Mudbound executive producer Cassian Elwes, cast member and songwriter Mary J. Blige, Macro president of production Kim Roth, producer Charles D. King
You does ... to make people a little uncomfortable with the movie. It’s funny and it’s out there. It’s unique. That makes some people uncomfortable. But I think uncomfortable is good. It gets people outside of their comfort zone, thinking about things and waking them up. This is a film that so many people respond to, and it speaks to the audience that we’re talking about. It’s incumbent upon producers to think about and listen
to the marketplace, to understand the wide range of audiences that are out there for such stories. And it was important for us to work with a brilliant auteur like Boots, who is willing to take chances, to push boundaries and tell the kind of stories that haven’t been told before. That’s a part of our mission. I can 100%, for a fact, tell you you’ve never seen a story like Sorry To Bother You before. I can’t wait for the world to see this.
WENN LTD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
the labs. I met [writer/director] Boots Riley at the first lab that I was a part of, and then he was at a second one and a third one. I kept seeing him there, and I was really impressed by his vision for what he wanted to do with the script. When he would pitch the story, I could see his energy as an artist and where he was coming from, both as a musician and now transitioning into a filmmaker. It was bold, and it was audacious, and it was unique and refreshing. For me, it was about helping him channel that into a budget and a framework that I thought would make sense and then making sure he was equipped with the experience and tools to make the transition. Between all of those labs, he spent a good year or so working on the script and the budget. The other key element was partnering with great people. We’re a company that’s very collaborative. Nina Yang Bongioviis a producer who I have the utmost respect for. We had a lot of success together when she produced Fruitvale Station with Ryan Coogler when I was one of his agents, and then I gave her the Dope script and we worked together again where I was the agent and she was the producer, partnering up with Rick Famuyiwa, and she did a great job making that film. So we were looking to find something else that we could work on together. She had also met Boots at those labs. I told her, “Hey, if you ever get the budget and the range, I would love to do this with you.” And so they got it to that place and then I said, “Let’s do this together.” She, along with the other producers, drove a lot of the production. We got very involved in casting and galvanizing the town and packaging the movie. On set, Nina and her team led a lot of it. We came back in for a lot of the post process and determining who could best distribute and market the film-we were heavily involved in all of that. So once again, it was a great team scenario, which is always our choice as a company. It was great to tell a story like Mudbound. It was great to tell a story like Fences. But it was important to us to tell a more contemporary story, to push the genre boundary, the way Sorry To Bother