A raft of Hollywood stars and industry professionals have vowed to re-locate outside of the U.S. in response to Donald Trump’s second presidency, but L.A-based Plan B co-founder Dede Gardner will not be among their ranks.
Talking in a masterclass at the Berlin Film Festival’s European Film Market on Saturday, the producer hinted that the idea had crossed her mind during Trump’s first month, which has seen extreme policy shifts around immigration, trade tariffs, DEI programs and foreign aid.
“The truth of it is that there are days, especially recently, where you think this isn’t sustainable. What’s going to happen? This seems completely nuts,” said Gardner.
“And then there are days where I think, particularly being in California, which is essentially the most progressive place in the world. Part of me thinks, ‘You know what. Stay here, be on the frontline, be around here, be near the change’,” she continued.
Gardner said she was taking inspiration from late political activist writer Mike Davis, author City Of Quartz and Set The Night On Fire: L.A. In The Sixties.
“We interviewed the great Mike Davis several years ago for a movie about the L.A. riots. He was one of the preeminent thinkers about Los Angeles,” she revealed.
“He said, everything that happens in L.A. happens 20 years before it happens in the United States. So there’s also a part of me that says you can’t run you have to actually stay here and be rigorous and keep pushing for story and story that counter-acts the erasure of history.”
Gardner is at the Berlinale as a producer on Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi drama Mickey 17, which gets a gala splash this evening with its Oscar-winning Korean director and the film’s star Robert Pattinson hitting the red carpet, as well as the low-budget drama Olmo which plays in Panorama.
“We made Okja with him and is genuinely a great master of filmmaking and also a tremendous human, which factors in because it’s years of your life and you want to be around people you love, if you can,” she said of Plan B’s second collaboration with Joon-ho.
“We were talking to Warner Bros and they had this novel by Edward Ashton’s novel [Mickey 7]. We said, ‘We’re interested in doing it, but truly you have to get one of the very best, there is no middle version of this text… let’s shoot for the moon… we had an instinct, knowing director Bong as we do, that he would respond to the themes of the book. He changed it a lot but the underbelly, the main heel is there.”
Having been originally scheduled for a March, 2024 release, the movie is set to release in South Korea on February 28 , followed by the U.S. on March 7, after premieres in London and now Berlin.
Gardner said there were a number of factors behind the delay.
“Truthfully, the tail of Covid, then the tail of the strikes, the change of regime [at Warner Bros.] and then there was an opportunity to put it in early March which is great date given the four week-run in the United States of various spring breaks. The hope is that that will create a long runway,” she said.
The company’s second Berlinale title Olmo, is a low budget movie by Fernando Eimbcke and Vanesa Garnica. The New Mexico-set drama follows a 14-year-old boy who is the main carer for his sick father and longs to go to party
Plan B produced the film with Teorema, the production company of Michel Franco, who is also at the Berlinale with Golden Bear contender Dreams.
Gardner revealed that a new financing facility provided by Plan B’s majority stake-holding partner, the Paris-based pan-European content company Mediawan, had helped finance the film.
“We have facility to finance I guess we can call them microbudget films – in the spirit of Moonlight, Minari and The Last Black Man In San Francisco – and that is what Olmo is. It’s the first movie we’ve fully financed for a very small number,” she said.
She said Plan B had been tracking director Eimbcke since his 2004 film Duck Season.
“We just fell madly in love with it and then he made a couple of other movies and then he kind of receded but we kept in touch… and then he came to us and had written this incredibly personal story… and we thought let’s make this our maiden voyage under this new facility,” he said.
Giving an update on upcoming films on the Plan B slate, Gardner shot down speculation that Joseph Kosinski’s upcoming motor-racing action drama F1 with Brad Pitt might be ready in time for a Cannes splash.
“It won’t be ready… There are like a billion visual hotshots,” she said, adding details of how the production had embedded with the Formula 1 races for the shoot.
“There were cameras all over the cars but also, we had a garage on pit lane. There were all the garages, and then the movie garage. They were on the grid walk… the sport was so welcoming. It was this incredible integration of the movie people and the people racing. We did it together.”
