At the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival, I was fortunate to attend an industry event featuring a conversation with producer Alex Coco, whose credits include “Club Kid,” “Anora,” and “Red Rocket.” I found the discussion so informative that I wanted to share it with our readers in support of their own indie journeys. Many thanks to Anthony Kaufman for moderating so well.
Coco also produced Megan Seely’s “Puddysticks,” and you can read our feature interview with Seely here. I’d also like to recognize Demma Strausbaugh, Julia Relova, and Jillian Green for their excellent work facilitating this year’s industry days.
The transcript below has been cleaned up for readability.
Anthony Kaufman (AK): You met (Sean Baker) at different events and introduced yourself, and a few years later you were producing his film, going from assistant to producer. That seems like it shouldn’t happen, like a dream that doesn’t actually come true, but it did. Can you clarify how?
Alex Coco (AC): I went to USC for film school, which is what got me to LA. I’m originally from the Northeast. There are so many great opportunities in Los Angeles, with premieres and festivals where filmmakers come together, you can meet people, and you can go to Q&As and hear the filmmakers or cast talk about making the film. I was a kid in a candy store, going to everything I could.
While I was in film school, I got it in my head that it would be great to work with somebody I really admired, doing work I’d like to be part of or do something similar to. It was very intentional. I went through the lists of premieres and where filmmakers would be attending, circled the events I wanted to go to, and then, as shamelessly and as respectfully as I could, went up to the filmmakers, or whoever could give me a leg up, and introduced myself to see what happened.
If the filmmaker wasn’t that interested, because they were talking to a million people, I’d find their assistant and say, “Here’s my information. When you leave, maybe I can take your place, or maybe you get promoted and need somebody. Instead of going through a stack of resumes of people you don’t know, you’ll think, ‘There’s that plucky kid who went to film school and keeps emailing me. He seemed fine.'” I’d seen at internships that hiring was so much about who you knew and who could recommend you. It’s human nature. We want to hire somebody we already know in our heads is the right fit, instead of looking at a piece of paper with credits and a school on it.
So I was always trying to find an angle with somebody. It was always filmmakers, and I felt I had something to offer because I had a sensibility. I liked what they were doing, and the films I liked lined up with their work, so I figured I could fit in. I took a few shots that didn’t land. Sean wasn’t the first person I went up to, but he was the person who gave me my shot. I stayed in touch with him between the first time I met him and the second, and then he happened to be looking for somebody to help him out. I interviewed, and I was halfway through my last year of film school doing odds and ends for him. Then he said, “You should come out to Florida for “The Florida Project.”” So I graduated and went and did that movie.
AK: How did you make the transition from assistant to producer? Let’s drill into what the learning curve was like the first time you were producing.
AC: Growing up I was always making stuff. In film school, some people tried to specialize: “I want to be a DP, a director, an editor.” I tried to learn every part of the process and be fully rounded, so there was nothing I couldn’t do. That was a great fit with Sean, because that’s how he is. He needed a second pair of hands in so many ways.
On “The Florida Project,” every task we couldn’t afford, because it was a union movie, quietly went to me. I was doing playback, all the commercials and infomercials you see on the televisions in the film. Sean assigned me that job, which is technically a union thing, but everyone said, “Just let the assistant kid do it.” I had a DVD player and a bunch of cleared infomercials burned onto DVDs, and I’d get called to set. It was a huge honor. He’d say, “Pick what you want.” He trusted my sensibility. Tasks like that kept landing in my lap, along with the standard assistant stuff: helping Sean with his shot list, organizing everything, script changes.
Then our first AD left the film the morning of the production meeting. He quit because he said the movie was impossible to make. Sean came from making a movie on iPhones on the street for $100,000, and then he was plunked down in Florida with a crew that wasn’t used to that style of filmmaking. It was tough. He needed people who understood where he was coming from and how we could move through the situation and still get what he wanted.
We flew in a replacement over the weekend, but he said, “I’m just going to run the set. I don’t know anything about this movie. I’ll manage the day.” In terms of scheduling, the previous AD had basically walked away from the schedule. Sean said, “Oh shoot, we need someone to do that,” and asked me. So I became the de facto other half of the AD job. I was 24 or 25. I had AD’d in film school, but for some reason I had the confidence. I said, “Sure. I know the movie, I know what you’re doing, I’ll work with you on it. We’ll work through the days and reshuffle the deck every single day, because Sean likes to do that.” I had the confidence to call the second AD or the line producer and say, “The call sheet that went out is wrong, Sean and I have rescheduled the day completely.” Maybe I was also naive, which helps.
It was a challenge, and that movie was hard, but Sean would throw me a task and I’d get it done, no matter what it was. On the first day he was trying to chase me off the set, because he didn’t love that I was doing the other half of his job. But Sean and I connected deeply, personally as well as professionally, and it just made sense.
AK: I want to talk about “Red Rocket,” “Anora,” and “Club Kid,” and then some bigger industry questions about how you do these things nowadays. “Red Rocket” was your first producing gig, and you were a producer on it from the very beginning. What kind of producer were you? The job is different for different people, films, and settings.
AC: It was a very unique movie. We made it with twelve people in Texas during COVID. We shot at the end of summer and early fall of 2020, so we were still very much in it. There were literally twelve crew members on set, so we wore a lot of hats. I was also AD, location manager, picture car coordinator, post-production supervisor, and VFX supervisor. When you work with Sean, who is also the editor and the writer, it’s just the nature of how we make movies, especially independent films where you’re squeezing every dollar and don’t have the backing to hire a huge crew. That’s the mindset and the kind of people you need to bring in. We make sure everyone we hire on his films is a total package.
AK: What lessons from that do you still apply to the films you’re making now?
AC: That you can make a really good movie for a million dollars. People say, “We can’t do this, we can’t do that,” and I say, “I’ve done it before.”
Take a simple car-to-car shot, where your actor is driving and a picture car alongside gets a profile of the vehicle. We did a bunch of that on “Red Rocket.” On bigger films it’s a huge ordeal: a specialized camera vehicle, all these rigs, and it balloons into this whole thing. We were just driving the van with the door open, and Drew Daniels, my DP, shooting out the side while I drove 30 or 40 miles an hour down the road trying to stay in line, because our first-time actor was trying to act and drive. Just cowboy stuff, but it’s fun, and we were very safe. Everybody knew what we were doing and we talked about it.
You can just do stuff, and you don’t need all those things. Sometimes you get something more interesting when you strip it all away and do it in a unique way that nobody else is doing. It inherently feels different from everything else. So what I always like to do with production is come up with a new way to plan how we do something.
AK: Can you point to something specific, from the film you’re working on now or any earlier one, where you figured out a new way of doing something?
AC: On “Club Kid” and “Anora,” we were crashing real locations with real people and shooting scenes in real environments. Sean is totally unafraid of that. When we went to Tatiana’s Grill in “Anora,” the restaurant staff knew we were coming, but the people dining there didn’t. We came in with our cameras, our actors did the scenes, and we got all those great faces reacting in real time. It gives the film a deeper level of authenticity, not just because it’s real, but because you’re not casting those people. When you don’t have money, if you can’t recreate something the way you want, you just actually do it, in the real place with the real people.
We did a lot of that on “Club Kid” too. We shot at real parties, in real environments. I love doing that. Sometimes it’s controlled. We didn’t have enough money to close the 24-hour diner where they’re looking for Ivan. So we closed half the restaurant and shot in that half while patrons ate in the other. You can hear a little chatter in the background, but that’s okay. Now there’s a little more sound design we can use in the mix.
AK: Are you also chasing the money to get these films made?
AC: Of course. Every film is always a challenge. Bolder films, where you don’t have cast, are harder to get financed. And everybody wants a discount now. The market is different, so what would have cost a certain amount now has to be made for about 20% less. Then it’s, “How do we make up that 20%?” And the things I’ve been describing are how we do it.
AK: I want to talk more about the current market, but first: it doesn’t seem that long ago, but it was two years ago that you got “Club Kid” made. How is producing a Sean Baker film different from producing for someone else? Sean has a name. Jordan hadn’t directed a film before, so presumably people were curious about what he had in the works.
AC: Jordan’s film was surprisingly one of the fastest to come together, besides Sean’s. He sent me a script, and we worked on it for a few months until it was ready to take out. The kernel of the idea was there, but there were a few aspects of the script we worked on. We took it out for financing, and it happened fast. Within a couple of months we had two people who were very interested, and we went with one of them and were off to the races.
AK: It’s worth explaining how “Anora” and “Club Kid” were financed. “Anora” had about a six-million-dollar budget, and FilmNation, the big international sales company, was the financier, with Glen Basner is the head of FilmNation, and their business is selling films internationally.
AC: It was pretty much just through Film Nation. Six million was little enough, I guess, that it wasn’t too much of a risk for them. We had worked with them before on “Red Rocket,” so we had a relationship with Glen. Sean, Samantha (Sean’s wife and producing partner), and I met Glen for lunch at Hugo’s in West Hollywood. He asked, “So what do you want to do next?” Sean pitched the idea, and Glen said, “Great, I’ll give you three to five million dollars.” Then I budgeted it and asked, “Can I have six?” and we got six. That was one of the craziest experiences of getting a movie financed, but we had that long-standing relationship with him, so it was a lot easier.
Glen also knew the potential, with “Anora.” He knew how he could sell the movie. We knew what we had sold “Red Rocket” for, and he knew roughly what he could sell Sean’s next film for. Glen is very smart about giving us numbers: “This is what I can spend because I know what I’m going to sell it for. I’m a sales agent.”
AK: “Club Kid” is interesting for a number of reasons. Topic Studios financed most of it, and they’re betting they can sell the movie. You took it to Cannes, but you decided not to go with a distributor up front. You went with a model that supposedly doesn’t happen anymore, where you go to market and sell it. Can you talk about that?
AC: We did take it to a few distributors at first. Jordan and I pitched to see if they wanted to do the movie. Now they’re all upset that someone in their company passed on it, and they all try to buy it. These companies are looking for things they can scale, maybe cast. It was a smaller film, so it didn’t fit neatly into a studio, even an independent one like Neon or A24. It was probably better to make these movies with equity, so we transitioned to taking the movie out for equity and pitched some people. That’s how it ended up.
There was some interest in pre-buying the film before Cannes, and some distributors reached out wanting to see it early. We felt confident in what we had, so we didn’t want to do that. When you pre-sell, you undersell, because the movie doesn’t have a chance to debut and get a response. A response drives the value up, and all of a sudden you have leverage and can really choose your partner. The price goes up too, which is great and creates a healthy market. So we stuck to our guns and decided to do it that way.
AK: And you shot the film on 35mm, which I imagine is a cost issue. Was there pushback from Topic, or did you say, “We can do this for this much,” like with “Anora,” and figure it out?
AC: I’m pretty bullish about shooting on film. When financiers say it’s too expensive, I say, “No, it’s not. We’re going to shoot film.” What you get from film is so much production value. You have to do a lot of work to make digital look good. I don’t want to criticize digital, which can look good in certain contexts, but film has a quality that’s hard to match. You get money on the screen by shooting on film, in my opinion. “Red Rocket” doesn’t look like a cheap movie, partly because of that.
It’s more expensive, but not much more, because once you’re trying to get more expensive or more competitive lighting packages, that cost goes up with digital. With film, the rental gear may be cheaper because it’s used less frequently, or you don’t need as much of it. That offsets the cost of the film stock, scanning, and processing. I’m a really strong proponent, and I push to shoot on film on every movie. Kodak is great, too. They’re always helpful in trying to make it work for every filmmaker. They can’t lose money, but they can definitely get close sometimes.
On this film I have a good relationship with everybody over there, so I spoke to them about shooting their old Rem-jet stock. They had just redone their stock technology, because there was an issue with processing that old stock: a layer on it had to be stripped off. Now they have this new Vision stock. The New York lab where we were shooting couldn’t process the old stock anymore because of issues on some movies, but Atlanta still could, and Kodak wanted to get the old stock off their books and out of circulation. So they sold me all of it really cheap. We just had to ship the film to Atlanta instead of processing in New York, which was an extra shipping cost, but it saved us a ton of money.
AK: Is everything you’ve shot in the US?
AC: Sean and I did a fashion film in Malaysia, but the features we’re talking about were all in the US.
AK: There’s all this talk that it’s too expensive to shoot in the US, and people are pushing for a federal tax incentive. How do you feel about sticking to the US rather than going to Canada, Hungary, and so on?
AC: I think location is a character in a movie. Even though a tax incentive gets you more money back, I don’t really know what the movie is then. The movie I’m shooting now is called “My Darling California,” and we were being encouraged to shoot in the Canary Islands. I couldn’t wrap my head around it, and neither could the director. It’s a period movie, so we’d have to bring over all these American period props, costumes, and cars, and the money we’d be saving gets gobbled up so fast. And when you look at the background of a shot, you wonder, “Where are they?”
I think it’s better to shoot on location even if it costs more. Really make the location sing, see as much of it as you can, because that’s so much production value. And if you’re a small team, you can sneak around a little and get things you ordinarily couldn’t, so you can pull off that scope. You get the life and texture of the place. And it’s the people, too. People forget they’ll be saying, “We’re going to shoot in this other country,” and then, “Oh no, how do I cast the extras, the supporting characters, the smaller roles? Nobody speaks English here. Now we have to fly people out.” It creates so many problems. I’m sure you can make a great movie that way, but it’s not my way. I try to avoid it.
AK: It’s interesting hearing you talk about this, because shooting on film and shooting in the US are things the industry seems to be pushing against.
AC: I know, but we have to make the movies good. It’s great to make a movie, but it has to be good, so you spend the money where it’s going to count. I think locations and shooting on film are part of that, though there are incredible movies shot digitally. Primetime and some of these films use digital in very interesting and cool ways, so don’t get me wrong. But the focus needs to be on spending the money on something you can sell in the end, or that people will want to see.
AK: We called this panel “Keeping the Indie Spirit Alive,” and it sounds like you’re doing a pretty good job of that. How long do you think it’ll last?
AC: I think it’s always going to be there, because you don’t need any money to make a good movie if you have the indie spirit. You can make a movie with any amount of people, and there are some great films made that way. My introduction to Sean was seeing “Tangerine,” which is the shining example. And there are so many others, like Curry Barker with “Obsession” and what he did. I think the lifeblood of this industry is those filmmakers, especially the ones coming up, because they’re creating the next generation. They’re proving to Hollywood that they can do it. Hollywood won’t be convinced to give them huge budgets unless they show they can deliver, and the only way to do that is to make something great, which in most cases means making an independent film.
To me, making a film outside the box, or thinking about production in different ways, is where the fun is. It gives you something special, and it helps you learn. As a young filmmaker, trying to get a huge budget and failing, versus learning how to work around things, knowing what you can and can’t do, knowing you can find solutions: that’s the learning.
Also with Sean, when we shot the scene in “Anora” where they’re looking for Ivan and they’re in the kitchen talking to his friend who works there, that was a working kitchen. The guy in the background making food was making food for someone in the restaurant. A lot of people would say, “You can’t do that, the sound.” Sean said, “It’s okay, I’m the editor. Let’s shoot it in two wides so we can do minimal cuts, and I can listen and make sure I can cut it together.” You can do anything.
I talk to filmmakers who make their first movie with a pretty decent-sized budget, and they say, “I was told I couldn’t do this or that, that’s not how it’s done.” That’s what I was saying about “Red Rocket”: yes, you can, I’ve done it before. It just takes a little willingness to think outside the box, maybe be a little uncomfortable, and get a team around you who’s willing to do that, too.
AK: You’ve talked a few times about making a good movie. In pre-production, before you’re actually in production, and I know you’ve produced films that aren’t Sean Baker’s and aren’t “Club Kid,” and you have a slate coming up, what are you looking for? What makes something good? All of us wonder whether our own film is good. How do you evaluate things early on and know a film is going to be great?
AC: I don’t know. I just do the things I like, things I want to see, and do them in a way that I think will support making them good, and make them look good and feel like a film people want to see. When I did “Club Kid,” many people said, “You just won an Oscar and now you’re making a four-million-dollar movie with a first-time director?” I said, “Yeah, but it’s going to be a good movie.” I don’t understand why I’m supposed to go do a movie with a bigger budget or a more established filmmaker. That’s a weird way to think about it. When I say “good,” I don’t mean you think it’s good. I mean I think it’s good. I can’t control how you react, so all I can do is make the best movie I can that I like, and then hope other people feel the same.
Jordan and I kept our heads down and did everything we could to make the movie as well as we could. When we were in the mix, we thought, “Oh, this is actually pretty good. I think we actually have something.” It dawned on us a little, because we’d been so head-down. And the first time people saw it was really at Cannes, because we didn’t do many test screenings. I learned that from Sean: the more you open things up, the more complicated post can be. So I keep it insular. I didn’t allow many people into the edit on Jordan’s film, though we did some. With Sean it’s zero. It’s me, Sean, and Samantha who see the film until it’s done. Sean is very dogmatic about that. You don’t have to be that way, and sometimes it’s good to get opinions, depending on your preference.
The other thing is not compromising. When we were trying to find a DP for “Club Kid,” it was challenging, because our taste level wasn’t easily going to match our budget. We wanted a DP who would really bring it and be able to shoot on film and shoot the hell out of the movie. We were pushed: “You need to hire someone now, it’s getting too tight.” We said no. We hadn’t found the person who was going to shoot the movie, and we weren’t going to hire somebody just because we needed somebody. Going through the agencies, you’ll get a bunch of people who mostly need a job, especially at a lower budget, because they want their bigger clients on bigger films where they make more money. That makes sense. So I started calling people. If I didn’t know the DP, I’d call a producer who worked with them, and get direct. You can actually connect with people. Adam Newport-Berra was someone I’d worked with on a commercial. I called him, he liked the script, and he shot “Club Kid.” That was huge. That’s another position you just have to get right.
AK: First, I want to know if it’s gotten harder. Everyone I talk to says it has. Maybe winning an Oscar helps. But there’s a merger that will probably reduce the number of people working, there have been a number of mergers that have, and there’s AI, which is now deeply affecting studio pipelines and how studios are thinking. I imagine the people you’re working with have lots of questions.
AC: Definitely it’s harder. But maybe it’s just different. “Obsession” is one example, but it worked. He did it. Even before that, I knew Curry from before I met with him, when he was cutting the movie. I didn’t know what it was going to be, but I was interested in him as a filmmaker because of his YouTube stuff. I did a panel soon after and said YouTube horror seems like a place to go. These people generate huge followings online and learn how to make something good.
I’m working with another filmmaker who puts a lot of her work on YouTube. She’s in animation. She told me she learned on YouTube, because she posts something and can see the data on when people drop off. You don’t have to have someone fill out a questionnaire. It’s right there in how somebody clicks on your video, and of course there are comments. In an eight-minute video, if people stop watching three minutes in, she can ask where something isn’t clicking, where she can smooth it out, cut it faster, or add a hook that keeps people engaged. Obviously we don’t want to get to a place where it’s all about engagement and changes everything. But these are the challenges of making films people want to watch. Maybe this is an era where that information is helpful.
It’s also something you can internalize. When Sean and I were making “Anora,” I forget how it came up, but we were in Vegas talking about whether “Anora” follows the hero’s journey. We tried to work out the first threshold and so on, and it kind of did. But we never talked about it while making it. Everybody has read that book, or Save the Cat and all that. You read it a couple of times, do the exercises, and eventually put it away, but it’s still in you. I don’t think Curry is doing analytics anymore, necessarily. He’s looking at how people pay attention, but it’s in him now, the same way you’d practice by making something, showing it to family and friends, seeing where they’re interested or not, and really hearing the crowd. So I think it’s about adapting and using the tools we have to make work people want to pay attention to and watch.
AK: Do you feel the people you were pitching for financing and distribution on films like “Club Kid,” or “Anora,” maybe not Sean Baker’s “Anora,” are as receptive to those films right now as they were?
AC It’s hard to say, because it depends on whose hands it’s in. “Club Kid” got made pretty fast. The feedback we kept hearing from financiers reading it was that they could tell there was something in it, and Jordan’s persona online helps. He clicks with people. “My Darling California” was a little harder to finance, because the cast is a little older, and people ask, “Would “Magnolia” work today?” That’s a big reference. People are always asking, “Where are the young kids, the youthful faces? How are we going to get Gen Z to watch a movie full of people over thirty?” That’s a concern. And when you’re doing something dramatic, dealing with real themes, they wonder if people will care. I don’t think these things are hard to understand, even for a young person. I watched “Magnolia” again recently, and it’s amazing. The opening is like a music video, crafted so incredibly. I think anybody would want to watch that film.
I think the problem is convincing people you can execute. That’s the challenge. We sold “Club Kid” for a lot more than we made it for, though some people looked at it and offered, say, 1.5 million, and didn’t really see the value. But we executed. So if you can’t get anybody to give you exactly what you need, maybe you just need to go execute on it and show them, and then they’ll believe you.
