Lindsay Collins, producer of Finding Dory

What took you so long to do a sequel to Finding Nemo?

I would blame Andrew first. Let's be honest, it's his fault.

How much did Ellen DeGeneres lobby to make a sequel?

Publicly she would do it on her show about once a month.

Was it nerve wracking to come back to it because a lot of Pixar sequels haven't been as beloved as some of the greats?

It was nerve wracking in a sense that anytime you embark on one of these films it's minimum of four years of work, so you have to go in with an understanding that the movie is going to haunt you. These characters will haunt you. There is no short cut through these.

How many hours of voice work did Ellen do for the role?

A lot, 60 hours or something, but that doesn't quite do it justice because it's non-stop. I think really what it felt like is that we saw her almost once a month, maybe once every other month for three years. And for somebody as busy as she is, you can imagine...

On other films you spend a lot of time not knowing who your actor is so you leave the recording until later, but we obviously knew this was going to be Ellen so we used her to test a lot of ideas.

If Ellen couldn't make it work, we knew something was wrong, we needed to change the writing because she brings such a charm to it. We kind of indulged in having her already cast.

Did you approach this story different after reports of the impact of the first film on how we think about the environment?

Andrew [Stanton, director] was never trying to preach about environmental stuff. It's not intentional. Nobody wants to go watch a movie that's making that first and foremost, it's all about the characters.

All we tried to do was base those in a reality that feels like what we know, it's the world we know and it feels like these are actual characters living in this reality. Hopefully whatever comes out of it feels like those are good lessons.

There's no greater respect than the respect we have for the ocean. If you're studying it the way we've been studying it for so many years, all you can do is just be respectful.

How tricky is it to manage the process where the actors will do something that will change the animation, then vice versa?

Yeah, a lot. We try hard to get all the recording right before we hand it off to the animators, so we do a lot of testing with the voices before we're actually locking the sequence and handing it over to them. It almost feels like the last year really is when the animators come in because we're trying to keep as much open as we can for that back and forth.

But what's always fun is when we go to the next session and play back some of what the actors just recorded with the thing they animated, there's such delight on their face at what the animators have done.

We videotape all of our sessions just for the animators to see the characteristics of the actors and see if there's any little things they can pick up on.

What's the job of a producer in an animated film? You're not doing scouting locations or all that stuff...

Andrew and have I worked together for a long time, so from the very get-go it's all about trying to figure out the vision he's got in his head, trying to get it out of him and strategise what it's going to take and the smartest way to get there.

The way he works is that it he needs to see things in context, and that's hard with animation because obviously nothing exists ahead of time. The process needs to adjust to that and we were very respectful of that at Pixar. We know he's going to find that last 10 or 15 percent in the last four or five months, he won't really find it earlier.

The only way he's going to find it is if we put 100 percent on the screen and then he goes 'okay, now I see what we're going to do'. So there's a certain amount of encouraging the crew to work a little bit differently so we can get that up there faster because we're going to make a lot of changes. It's a bit like asking how quick we can get to the dress rehearsal?

Charles Roven shepherds DC Comics to the screen

How do you bring an entire universe to screen? Are you the Warner Bros version of Kevin Fiege?

It's a team of us. The team is obviously Debbie [Snyder], Zack, myself, Jeff Johns and the Warner Bros creative guys, Greg Silverman, John Burke. The interesting and fun challenge is because even when we're making films that might have sequel possibilities we're never really in the past, people who worked on The Dark Knight never thought about what exactly is the next movie going to be. In fact when we went from Batman Begins to The Dark Knight, we ended Batman Begins with The Joker so we thought 'we should probably do The Joker', we never really had a story of anything.

Here we're constantly thinking about the future, no only how to make each individual film stand on its own, be compelling, be fun, be thought provoking, have great characters, we're also thinking way down the road about how these things are going to connect and make sense, and also leave room for other great filmmakers to be involved and make sure that while we want to get to a certain place, we don't stay too rigid and too fixed on exactly the methodology of how we get there, we have to leave room for the creative process to allow it to evolve.

How hands on can you be?

Wherever you are in the world because we're making several of these in different phases, thank God for the technology because you have to stay connected. If Debbie's in LA and I'm in London or Zack's commuting back and forth or we're making a film in Toronto, you have to stay in touch with every form of medium you can, and every day is long because somewhere on some continent, there's a portion of one of the movies you're working on.

When producers direct

We all know stories of actors who move into directing and producing, and some of them do great at it.

Not as common are stories of producers who move in the other direction, into creative roles in directing or acting. It happens (see Matthew Vaughan), but far less often.

So congratulations to longtime producer Denise Di Novi, who's shepherded movies as diverse as Edward Scissorhands ad Mad Max: Fury Road to screens, in her new career as a director.

As The Hollywood Reporter revealed recently, Di Novi has stepped into the breach on a thriller for Warner Bros after the previous director (Belle's Amma Asante) passed

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/producer-denise-di-novi-make-800376

Another former chief goes rogue

Well, it's not news that Amy Pascal walked/was jettisoned from the chiefdom of Sony Pictures in the wake of the hacking scandal that rocked the company to its core late last year.

But she's also following a rite of passage shared by many former studio heads and creative executives in Hollywood, of setting up her own production shingle.

Pascal will work on the same lot as former Warner head Jeff Robinov, whose own company has a first look deal with the studio, and try to impress new chairman Tom Rothman enough to part with money for her projects.

And if a recent story on Variety is to be believed, Sony's a good place to be right now as Rothman has taken the reigns in a time of healing that might lead to expansion of budgets and projects after the contraction and protectionism of last year;

Welcome to the freelance club, Amy.

Producer Emma Thomas

We don't want to suggest that a producer's job is ever easy but when you're working on a Chris Nolan film you must have incredible resources behind you in both financial and human terms. How does that change the job?

Well, it's interesting because when it comes down to it you never have enough money. If somebody's giving you a budget you have to deliver the absolute best film you can for that budget.

But I'd say working on a Chris Nolan film as a producer is somewhat easier on two fronts. First, we're really lucky we're working with the best people. They're at the absolute top of their game across the board, that's an amazing thing.

The other thing that makes my job easier as the producer on a Chris Nolan film is that Chris is very responsible filmmaker. He's also a producer so he has no interest in spending too much money. He takes the long term view. He wants to make the best film he can but he also wants to keep working. He's very easy to talk to about the ways we can be resourceful.

Can you talk about a particular example?

It's difficult to talk about specifics but generally speaking when you're getting down to budgeting, building a set for example, the art department might say 'it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to build this'. He'll be able to look at it and say 'well, I don't think I'm necessarily going to need to shoot this corner of it. Maybe we can just build half of it'. He's incredibly constructive.

SSN: So you combined philosophy is to do the right thing by the studio as well as the audience?

Absolutely, because ultimately doing the right thing by the studio and the audience is doing the right thing by us too.

How hands on is a producer versus the exec producer credit we see so much of?

Generally speaking in the film industry there's no real formula for what an executive producer versus a producer does. Often the line producer is credited as an executive producer and they're as hands on as it's possible to be during the shooting period. When I've been listed as an executive producer I'm way less involved on a day to day basis.

It seems like the term 'producer' can be a spectrum.

Producer can be anything. It's why the Producers Guild of America has recently started doing the PGA mark. You literally have to fill out a form and say what you did, what you had responsibility for and only the producers that had a certain number of responsibilities get the PGA mark. And they didn't just ask you as a producer, they ask the people who worked with you.

Do you occasionally get a bit disdainful of people who only have to make one phone call and they get an exec producer credit?

Sometimes, and I'm sure that all producers feel this, that it is a little galling that sometimes people have credit and don't necessarily do as much. But I will say there are different areas of the job that have different challenges, and there's a good deal to be said for difficulty of setting a project up in the first place.

If you then aren't involved in every single aspect of the production it doesn't in anyway take away from what you did at the beginning. The same thing goes for work that you may do on set, the fact that you didn't do stuff in pre-production or in post, it doesn't necessarily take away from what you did there. I've personally never worked on a film where I didn't feel like everyone who got credits didn't deserve them.

Your credits include things like production coordinator and production secretary. Is it a bit like knowing every job on the factory floor and working your way up to producer?

I was very lucky. Basically when I left college in London I did work experience (interning) at Working Title, at that point was absolutely the biggest and pretty much only film company in London.

They had a great program where they would allow people to come and work for two weeks. You didn't get paid but you learnt an enormous amount. You were basically an office runner. I kept in touch with the people who worked there and managed to get a job as a receptionist, then I took different jobs within the company as they became available. I was an assistant to Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.

I was working in the production department as in-house production coordinator keeping track of everything that the production coordinators were doing on the films they were working on. It was a really fantastic experience and I learnt an enormous amount about the way movies are made. I'd had no experience of that other than making student films at university. None of my family worked in the business or anything and I had absolutely no frame of reference for it whatsoever.

So it was a matter of getting in on the ground floor and working your way up?

Absolutely. Then while I was working at Working Title we were shooting Chris' first feature Following on weekends. When we finished Following there was no real film festival in England the way there is here, so we felt the best way to get the work out there was to bring it over here. Chris is a dual national so LA just seemed like it was the right place to be. Very fortuitously for me, Tim and Eric agreed that I could work in their LA office.

Is something the size of Interstellar or Inception more administration or more creative?

It's both. The thing I love about my job is that I'm involved in pretty much every single aspect of making a film, from the script, development, choosing the technicians that you're going to be working with, casting, the shoot and all the way through to the marketing. We're very involved with the marketing on our movies. It's creative and administrative processes that very much merge and I love that I get to stretch both muscles.

Anything you couldn't do with the space scenes that you really wanted to for whatever reason?

There's one thing we didn't get to do. There's an amazing documentary filmmaker called Toni Myers who's absolutely incredible. We talked a lot with her and we watched a lot of her films when we were researching Interstellar. She put us in touch with an astronaut that really helped us out.

She's actually making a film right now, which sounds like an amazing project, but we talked about the idea that maybe she could shoot some shots for us in space. It didn't end up working out because of the timing of when she was able to get her cameras up there.

It didn't work out for various reasons, but that would've been really fun to have a shot actually shot in space in Interstellar. But it's not anything that takes away from the film, the fact that we don't have it doesn't diminish the impact.

Did you get any tips from the guys who worked on Gravity, or at least get ideas from watching it?

We specifically didn't watch it, we were shooting Interstellar when Gravity and then it came out in cinemas and we very specifically didn't watch it because we didn't want to be reactive in any way to another film. But we were very excited to see how well it did and how engaged and excited people.

So you still haven't seen it?

Thomas: I actually still haven't seen it. But I'm going to.

What's the secret to the appeal of Chris Nolan's films?

Thomas: The thing I love about Chris' films is there's so much going on in them. I've watched his films many, many times, over and over again. Even now with Interstellar, I can't even imagine how many times I've seen it.

But I always get something new from it. And I don't think there are many filmmakers out there who are able to pack so much into their films and have their films be exciting and enjoyable experiences to watch. They can be appreciated on many different levels. Also ha makes films that he would like to watch so he's always thinking 'how would this play for an audience?'

Things have inevitably grown since the days of Memento and Following. Is there anything you miss about doing things at that level?

Every film has challenges in its own different way. There's something really great at this point to be making these big films that have very high visibility. We don't have to fight for attention in quite the same way that you are when you're making smaller films.

But I love the intimacy of those films, the smaller scale. I don't Chris is never going to make a smaller film again. One of these days he probably will when he finds the right story and that's the correct way to tell it. The Prestige was one where we jumped back into smaller scale filmmaking in between two very large ones [Batman Begins and The Dark Knight]. It was a great way of flexing that muscle and for me that's one of my favourite Chris Nolan films.

How do you keep the roles of producer and director when you're married and obviously so close?

One of the great things about working with Chris is he has an extremely clear-cut vision. He knows very much what he wants, he knows the film he's aiming for. My job in no way merges with that. My job is a facilitator for him. I help him fulfil that vision and put it up on screen. In many ways I'm filtering things out so he doesn't have to worry about things that might distract him from the pursuit of that film. They're very clearly differentiated roles in that way, but that's not to say he doesn't listen if I have opinions creatively because he does but he's definitely driving the ship.

Could you ever think about not working together?

There's a level of trust I'd really miss if I was working with somebody else. But I often think about sitting back and twiddling my thumbs and drinking cups of tea and reading a great book while he's off working.

But there's usually a time when we're tired and it's difficult to isolate our family life from the work life where I think 'maybe Chris could direct and somebody else will produce it and maybe I'll just take a break from the next one'. But then what happens every time is he'll figure out what he wants to do next or I'll hear what he's talking about and I'll think 'that sounds really fun'.

Does it make it difficult when you're parents? There must be months where you both literally never leave work.

The work/family balance is often difficult for everyone. It goes for anybody who has to make a living. I'm sure there are people who have far tougher jobs to combine their family life with than we do. We're very lucky because when we do work together we're able to bring our kids with us, which is great.

And the lovely thing about making films, that it's all cyclical. When you're shooting it's very intense and then post-production comes along and you're able to be around your family a lot more. Then there are breaks in between the movies. It's not like we work 9 to 5 every day of the year. So whatever thing you're doing at any given moment you know it's finite. You can look forward to that, but our kids might have a different answer to that question.

Do you have your next project lined up?

No.

You wouldn't tell us even if you did.

No, we really wouldn't.

How do you produce a movie when you're married to the biggest star in the world?

You'd think life couldn't be easier for producer Susan Downey (wife of Robert Downey Jr) when she wants to get a film greenlit for the new shingle she shares with her megastar husband – Team Downey.

But as she explains, there are just as many battles when your producing partner is the one everyone wants – against the pressures of family life if nothing else.

How difficult is it to work with your husband?

We've been doing this for a long time. We met on a movie 12 years ago and this is our 7th movie together.

Even though The Judge is the first Team Downey movie and that does put a little pressure on things, our personal and professional lives are so intertwined we honestly we get off on talking creative. It works out well.

During the period of production you're both tapped out by the end of the day as opposed to one doing that and one being refreshed. It can get exhausting.

But we love the process and we love working together. He's got such an incredible creative energy you want to have around and he thinks like a producer. He's very responsible as a filmmaker with all the experiences he's had. It's all we know at this point.

But isn't it tiring because you never leave work?

Sometimes when you do this stuff - especially when you find a project you're passionate about you - can never truly leave it. We've tried. We've said okay no more talk about the scene or this or that and that lasts 20 minutes and then we're saying 'one last thing before we go to sleep'.

But when you don't know any different or any better you accept it.

How hard is it being a female producer in Hollywood?

Recent studies published show it's not getting much better, especially in America relative to other countries. I found it very interesting because my personal experience is that it's only after I leave a room do I realise I was the only girl there.

I'm focused on the job at hand and I've never been shown any disrespect. I'll take that back – there's probably been one or two meetings I've been in where there's been someone I've ended up not working with and they'll remain nameless.

But that has nothing to do with me. For the most part I've always worked at companies prior to team Downey that have had very male oriented fare. So I don't know, I'm used to the boys.

I went to film school at USC. My first year in production they accept 50 kids and there were four women. I got to my junior year and they upped that to 100 kids and there were eight women. So maybe you just get really used to it. The writing programs tended to have more women.

But there's no barrier, nobody saying 'don't come in to this job'.

If you're a woman and you're going to try to have a career and also have a family you do get derailed a little bit. You have to work a little bit harder. Because as awful as it is for you to go away from your family during certain times and as difficult as it when you bring them and try to balance, the role of mum makes it even harder.

There's a reality to it that I understand, but I don't think it comes from a discriminatory place within the industry. I think it's more of a practical reality to how do you balance everything.

Is it a cultural thing where women don't even think 'I can be a producer or a CEO'?

Maybe, and that's a shame because it's not in my headspace, I've never thought like that and it's entirely possible. And that's what I mean, there's no gate keeping the girls out.

Every woman is different but it's certainly natural to me and a lot of the things that help me hopefully be a good mother are a lot of similar things that help me be a good producer.

You have to be very aware of the people you're working with and their personalities and you want everyone to feel comfortable and taken care of and listened to and at the same time you have a job you have to get done. So it's not just sitting there conducting group therapy. You've got to get through things to get results and if you ever try and get a kid down to bed there are result you need.

Do we see the lack of women in higher positions when we go to movies? Some young actresses say that because there are so few women directors and writers the roles aren't that interesting?

I have a hard time ascribing to that. First of all there are a lot of really powerful women in Hollywood, especially in executive roles. You find it less in the creative side as far as specifically directors and female driven roles in features.

In television it's huge. You go and look at writers or people behind the scenes or production designers. I've worked with equal amount of men and women in those different roles.

It's specific to directors and to a certain degree producers. Does that dictate what's out there in the marketplace? I don't know.

How the latest exec-to-producer story chases the Dragon

We've mentioned ex Warner Bros chief Jeff Robinov before on Screen Producer, back when we talked about the oft-trod path from executive to independent producer.

At the time Robinov had just got the boot from WB (and probably not a moment too soon after news has emerged about how badly the company's doing, announcing massive staff cuts).

He's probably spent the last year in his Hollywood Hills pool area, wearing shorts and fielding offers from companies all over the world.

But the story of what he did next isn't only a remake of what Jon Peters, Peter Chernin, Bill Mechanic, Lorenzo Bonaventura and every other ex studio head before him has done. It's the story of Hollywood's still-burgeoning love affair with China.

Robinov's own shingle was announced months back, and the first place he went calling for dough was China's Fosun Group, with whom he's signed for as much as $200 million.

Back in July the trades were wondering if Robinov could pull it off, saying he'd have to pull the trigger on projects quickly to keep his new partners happy.

Now, with Robinov's Studio 8 set up and having found a home at Sony with chiefs Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton, things seem to be steaming ahead.

Fosun chairman Guo Guangchang talked the talk about confidence in Robinov and Lynton told a Sony press briefing he can see Robinov delivering 18 to 22 movies a year.

It's good news for Robinov, who's set up and ready to go, and it's great news for Guangchang, who can tell his bean counters and shareholders the returns are imminent.

But it's the best possible news for Sony, who have had a dreadful couple of years thanks to some bomb projects and rebel investor Daniel Loeb calling for structural separation, performance that saw them announce restrictions on content.

Robinov promised 'visually unique' movies – whatever that means. But if he can bring directors as marketable as Chris Nolan, Zack Snyder, Ben Affleck and others who've propelled Warner Bros to the top of the box office and awards lists year after year (not to mention Legendary, which was a hit machine at Warners), it might be time to take your shares out of News Ltd and put them back into Sony – especially now everyone else is so spooked by the recent $2bn loss.