In the past few months, Molly Conners had attended premieres at the Toronto Film Festival and Sundance for films her company Phiphen had produced, but one of the most special ended up being the one she had to travel the least for, bringing Julia Stiles up to her home in Maine for a screening of her directorial debut “Wish You Were Here.”
“Everyone loved it,” reported Conners. “Governor Mills and a lot of people from the Maine Film Commission came to that as well, so that was pretty cool. So many times we do these premieres in New York or L.A., but it’s wonderful to take the movie to a different city like that.”
As a producer, Conners learned long ago to look outside the traditional industry hubs to get movies made, working on a variety of films where she could learn the ropes of what a production actually takes to get to the finish line and becoming a wiz at finding tax-credit rich locales where they could get the most bang for their buck. After learning the trade on such films as a producer on David Gordon Green’s “Manglehorn,” the Anne Hathaway drama “Song One” and Warren Beatty’s “Rules Don’t Apply,” she founded her own production company Phiphen where she pushed such boulders up the mountain as the Nicolas Cage western “Butcher’s Crossing,” which shot in a scant 19 days while tending to a herd of buffalo and other forces of nature in Montana, and the Peter Sarsgaard period comedy “Coup.” This past month alone has seen how productive the company has been as well as the breadth of their filmmaking tastes when “Wish You Were Here,” Stiles’ adaptation of Renée Carlino’s romance between a waitress and a dying painter, arrived in theaters in January, Katarina Zhu’s “Bunnylvr,” on which Conners and Sinisi were executive producers, hit Sundance, and “Riff Raff,” Dito Montiel’s crime comedy with Jennifer Coolidge, Pete Davidson and Bill Murray, which Conners executive produced is bowing in theaters this week.
However, in recent years, Conners and Jane Sinisi, who joined the company a year after founding, have started laying the foundation for something bigger than any one film, opening a post-production facility in New Jersey where filmmakers can come to finish their films after many of them are first developed by the company, and apart from her work at Phiphen, Conners has become the chair of the Maine Film Commission, hoping to attract more productions to the state to take advantage of the beauty to be found along the eastern seaboard. As a company, Phiphen is also expanding their range, adding a video game division to a robust film production slate that includes the recently wrapped high altitude thriller “Turbulence,” as well as the Jermaine Fowler-James Morosini thriller “Terrestrial,” Jeff Ryan’s crime comedy “Mooch” with Scott Cohen, and “Midge,” a co-production with “Sopranos” producer Terrence Winter and Leonardo DiCaprio’s production shingle Appian Way about the inventor of Freon and leaded gasoline.
In the midst of a busy time, Conners generously took time out to talk about all that Phiphen has been up to lately, as well as her own path from politics to producing films, carving out a way when there seems to be none for filmmakers and all the adventures she gets to go on as a result of the job.
You actually started out your career in politics where I understand you were a lobbyist – that actually seems to be as good a place to start as any to become a film producer, but how did you get bit by the filmmaking bug?
Yeah, I started as a lobbyist and I caught the bug from producing political commercials and just the business meeting the creative. I did some short films and then from that, one thing led to the next. One of the first movies I worked on was “Frozen River” and that went on to be really successful. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and got nominated for two Academy Awards, so that was my way into the film business. Then Phiphen came about around 2015. I really wanted to produce movies from start to finish. Prior to that, I had worn a lot of different hats, obviously in producing and executive producing and we’re going on our 10th year.
When you say start to finish, you really mean it. Phiphen has a post-production studio in addition to all your other activities as producers. How did that come about?
My partner Jane Sinisi and I embarked on that actually as a pandemic project. She’s from New Jersey and we had been really interested in moving the company from New York. We were at Kauffman Astoria Studios and right towards the end of our lease, Jane called me and [said], “I have this office space available and I called a friend of mine in the film commission and said, ‘What does New Jersey need? You guys have a lot of stages.’” And he said, “we need post[-production facilities]. Then Jane and I set off to put together a business plan and embark on Phiphen Post Studios. New Jersey has one of the best tax credits in the country, so it’s great to bring projects there and we can do everything from soup to nuts. We have office space there and we can handle all the post needs as well, so it’s a 360 experience with our facility.
You really work on a wide variety of projects and I can’t tell what your taste is at Phiphen, but I know it’s good. What gets you excited about something?
Projects that I could see a path forward in getting made gets me really excited. Obviously, there’s movies that I gravitate towards taste-wise — I love horror and thrillers, personally, but it’s really what the market is looking for and knowing who the buyer is for it already. It’s the strength of the script, but [we ask ourselves] if we can cast it and who the director is and we try to look at it from a business angle, first and foremost.
“Wish You Were Here” is the perfect example. Julia [Stiles] and I had worked on a movie together called “The God Committee,” and we had become friends during that experience. I was definitely interested in working with her again and she had sent me the book and the script [for “Wish You Were Here”], [which would be] her directorial debut and when I read the script, I [thought], “This is incredibly commercial” and I saw a path forward of getting it made. We started collaborating on it, developing it, casting it and then bringing it out to the usual suspects to set the movie up. Then we shot that, did all the post-production at our facility in New Jersey and it was beautiful how that all came to be. We had great distributors on board [from early on] and I’m super proud of how it turned out.
It’s been a busy winter since I know that beyond the recent release of “Wish You Were Here,” you were an executive producer on “Riff Raff,” which comes out this week, and “Bunnylvr,” which premiered at Sundance and I imagine those all entail different levels of support. How did you get involved in them?
Roger [Mancusi], one of the lead producers on [“Bunnylvr”] was friends actually with one of my Phiphen colleagues, so that came to us that way. We’re opportunistic on that side. We’ll read everything. We then filter it and see whether it’s right for us to produce, if it’s right for us to EP or consult on, or if it’s for the post facility. We’re always trying to drive business there because that’s where we have the whole 360 experience, but we’re evaluating everything.
On [“Riff Raff”], we wore a different hat. At Phiphen, we also have an arm of our business [where] we help with advisory tax credit consulting and advisory services. [The “Riff Raff” team] also based their whole production out of our facility, so they were there with the office space and we did all of the post-production at Phiphen Post Studios, so it was great. We get to see a lot of different interesting angles [of the filmmaking process]. It all depends on the movie.
It’s interesting to hear about the tax credit consulting. I know when I talked to Austin Stark about “Coup,” it seems like you were able to get the best of both worlds when he needed to find this particular kind of mansion and you were able to bring the film to New Jersey. Is it interesting challenge to find the right solution creatively and financially?
Yeah, obviously the tax credit is a cornerstone of independent filmmaking and Austin’s somebody we’ve worked with a couple of times and really enjoy working with him and it’s about giving [the filmmakers] options. With Austin’s last movie, “Coup,” New Jersey just had so much to offer and in terms of locations, it was pretty easy choice to get because there was so much to choose from there. With other movies, we always just try to give the directors a lot of choices and where is the most financially responsible place to make the movie and hope those kind of meetings of the mind can happen and usually they do. It’s just compromising on both sides.
Against all odds, I know you pulled off something of a miracle with the “Butcher’s Crossing” shoot given an extremely limited time frame and plenty of buffalo that literally needed to be herded. Was that a trial by fire?
That one goes down in the books as one of the more amazing and rewarding experiences. In terms of the buffalo, we had a day of shooting and [the film] couldn’t have been made without the Blackfeet tribe and that was their herd. There would be no way that we could have ever done that movie without them. I learned so much about livestock on that movie. It was a real adventure too because it wasn’t during the height of COVID, but it was after and it was still a bonded movie that was taking place in a very remote location — we were way up north on the border at Glacier National Park in Browning, Montana on the Blackfeet land — so we had supply chain issues just in terms of the location to begin with and we were getting through all the COVID protocols. But it was a wonderful, wild adventure too.
Every film must have a different set of demands, but has producing itself changed over the years you’ve been doing it?
Yes, it’s very challenging. Since I started, it’s [always a question of] what comes first, the cast or the money? Indie producers always struggle with that when you’re out trying to put a package together and that’s stayed consistent. The market is very tough, especially pre-sales and when I started out, it was a little bit better. You have to really be smart at what you’re choosing to put together because we work a lot for free as producers. It’s your sweat equity as you’re putting things together in the hopes that you get it made, so we have to be careful what we attach ourselves to and what we’re working on and really just try to sniff out what we think is going to be what the market wants.
There’s a level of discipline I think you have to have as an independent producer, because sometimes you read something really great and you think, “This is a cool character piece or this is prestigious, like wow, this is gonna be it. And then nine years later, you’re still trying to put something like that together, so it’s just something you have to be careful with.
Are there some of those projects at Phiphen that you’ve been holding onto for the right pieces to come together for a while?
Yes, because we stay on until the bitter end. It’s a marriage in terms of what you sign up for, so we do have those that we’re not giving up on and that are smaller or darker. We don’t abandon those. We try to put a different piece of cast on them or find an impact investor that might be interested in. We have a couple of those.
Is it true Phiphen has also started to enter the video game space?
Yeah, we launched a publishing division for video games this past year and we have a game coming out this spring called “Ruffy and the Riverside.” I’m super excited about that. This is the second game we’ve been involved in. Our first was called “Blue Fire.” We weren’t the publisher. We invested from our first media fund with that game and we really enjoyed the experience, so we definitely are getting more into the gaming side. We’ll be announcing more, probably sometime this year, and then it’s finding games and content that you can transition from gaming to film. Finding strong IP is really interesting to us.
As a job has it been rewarding to be able to enter all these different worlds as a producer? I know you got to go up in a hot air balloon for the first time on your most recent production “Turbulence.”
That’s definitely the perk of it. That was funny because I talked to the director and we were like, “God, we really need to get in a hot air balloon.” Which we did, and you have consultants that work on the movie that advise every step of the way. But that’s a perk because you become an expert in things that you don’t think [about]. Like I was talking about “Butcher’s Crossing” with buffalo, and I didn’t really know anything about them until I worked on that movie. Hot air balloons as well for “Turbulence.” You get to learn so much about it and it keeps the job fresh and interesting. It’s never boring.