Making a film isn’t just about having a great idea—it’s about overcoming countless obstacles and having the patience and perseverance to bring that Oscar nominated vision to global audiences.
In a recent Producers Guild Of America (PGA) panel discussion, some of today’s most celebrated filmmakers revealed the daunting challenges they faced in creating their acclaimed works and what inspired them along the way to pursue a career in film.
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Samantha Quan (Anora)
The Challenge: While Samantha Quan’s specific challenge with Anora isn’t detailed in the panel, she does discuss her collaborative relationship with director Sean Baker. “I think the things that he creates in his head make me excited to produce for him,” she explains. “No matter how crazy it’s going to be, automatically I say yes. Yes, whatever you want to do, I will follow you.”
This commitment to Baker’s vision illustrates the trust that makes their partnership successful. Quan describes their production team as “this little hive of ours, this safe little hive that we say, you know what, no matter how crazy it is, we’re in. And we trust each other.”
Samantha Quan names David Lynch as her greatest influence, mourning that his passing means “he wouldn’t be making more movies or commercials.” She admires Lynch’s ability to create “an underbelly of buzzing energy” beneath the surface of his work.
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Andrew Morrison (The Brutalist)
The Challenge: Andrew Morrison faces the monumental task of making “a three-and-a-half-hour-long period drama for $7 million over 34 days.” Another significant hurdle is shooting on division technology, which is “not exactly in vogue.” This requires specialized cameras and crew with particular expertise.
The film also incorporates an intermission — a creative decision integral to the script. “Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold had always written it with an intermission,” Morrison explains. The team embraces this unusual feature as a way to “create a communal experience” for audiences, particularly meaningful when “coming out of COVID and thinking about people missing this experience of theatres.”
Morrison expresses deep appreciation for Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, mentioning that they made The Brutalist in Hungary and work with some of Tarr’s longtime crew. He singles out Tarr’s film The Turin Horse as particularly meaningful. “It starts with saying, like, we know what happened to Nietzsche, he went on and died, but what happened to the horse?” He praises Tarr as “one of the most extraordinary formalists of the last century.”
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Fred Berger (A Complete Unknown)
The Challenge: Fred Berger describes the complex nature of making a music-driven biopic film about Bob Dylan. “When you’re making a music-driven movie, you’re making two or three movies all at once… you’re making a movie in all its complexity and scope, but also you’re preparing and producing an album.”
The production team initially planned to use pre-recorded tracks, but star Timothée Chalamet insisted on performing the music live. “On day one of his first music performance, we’re doing it live,” Berger recalls. This approach spreads to the other actors, creating enormous technical challenges. “They’re playing guitar, they’re playing harmonica, they’re singing, other people have dialogue.” Despite these complications, Berger credits the live performances with bringing “magic every day” to the production.
Berger cites Jacques Audiard as a major inspiration, calling his four consecutive films “the best four consecutive movies of any living filmmaker.” He is particularly struck by Audiard’s “lack of pretension” and “crazy freedom.” Berger also mentions Stanley Kubrick’s genre versatility, “He took on political satire or horror or pure comedy or period epics. And they’re always Kubrick films.”
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Tessa Ross (Conclave)
The Challenge: For Tessa Ross, the obstacles in making Conclave are “iterative” rather than singular. “Every element is complicated,” she explains, likening the process to “holding on to crazy horses.” The primary challenge is coordination—bringing together actors from around the world, securing locations, and building sets like the Sistine Chapel.
Ross discusses her journey from discovering Robert Harris’s novel to enlisting screenwriter Peter Straughan and director Edward Berger. She tells Harris, “I’m in the business of finding the right artists to make this with you. So please don’t charge me a fortune. Let me do this in a way that allows me to build slowly and properly.” The team then “spends about five years pulling together the actors, the budget, the way we would shoot it, and where we would shoot it.”
Ross names Jane Campion as her foremost inspiration, particularly the film An Angel at My Table, which she describes as “so inventive. It’s so magical. It’s so painful. It’s so empathetic.” Ross appreciates how the film embodies formal innovation in addition to its emotional impact.
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Mary Parent (Dune: Part Two)
The Challenge: For Mary Parent, the biggest challenge with Dune: Part Two is living up to the first film. “I think the most daunting aspect of Dune Part Two is Dune Part One,” she states. As director Denis Villeneuve says, the first film “is an appetizer.”
One specific technical challenge is bringing the iconic sandworm riding scenes to life. “Now we actually have to see them ride a worm. There’s no reference point for that.” The team spends months on this element to ensure that “when Denis gets up on that worm, you’re going to feel emotion, you’re going to feel mastery, and it’s going to feel real.”
Parent cites “The Wizard of Oz” as her earliest and most influential cinematic experience: “When I was lucky enough to get nominated for The Revenant, it was a question from the Academy, which is what is the film at your youngest age that you can remember having an impact on you? And it was The Wizard of Oz on TV.” She recalls being terrified by the Wicked Witch but the film ultimately instills in her “the desire to somehow be a part of big canvas storytelling.”
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Ali Herting (A Real Pain)
The Challenge: Ali Herting faces multiple evolving challenges making A Real Pain. The initial hurdle is “how do we do a road movie for some five million dollars in a foreign country?” This is followed by “how do we shoot in a concentration camp that’s a running museum?” The production also suffers financially, “We lost like a third of our budget eight weeks before we started shooting.”
What carries the project through these challenges is Jesse Eisenberg’s script. When seeking permission to film at the Majdanek concentration camp, sharing the script convinces the authorities to engage with the filmmakers. The script also proves crucial in securing Kieran Culkin, who is hesitant after finishing Succession, “Emma Stone and Dave McCary said, just re-read the script and think about it. And he re-read the script. He said, I have to do it.”
Herting credits her father’s love of epic historical films but notes that her own taste shifts when they start watching Billy Wilder movies together. She appreciates Wilder’s ability to create “character-driven stories about alienated, weird people often, but they’re incredibly funny and charming and moving and feel really big, even though the stories aren’t actually that big.”
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Philipp Trauer (September 5)
The Challenge: For Philipp Trauer, the most significant obstacle in creating September 5 is obtaining crucial archival footage of Jim McKay’s original ABC broadcast coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. “We knew it’s so intense, and you would never be able to get an actor that can get the same tension… to the screen.”
Securing the rights proves extremely difficult. Initially, ABC refuses access until a breakthrough comes through a personal connection to Disney CEO Bob Iger. Throughout this process, the team prepares for two scenarios—with or without the footage. Trauer also reveals that the film’s focus evolves from “a huge movie with all the perspectives” to focusing solely on the media angle after connecting with eyewitness Jeffrey Mason.
Trauer, whose parents are classical musicians, draws parallels between music and film as universal languages: “They can perform wherever and people will hopefully feel something.” Rather than naming specific filmmakers, Trauer focuses on emotional impact. “If films… get me emotionally connected, if I cry and laugh at the same time, that’s the best.”
Watch The Substance trailer HERE.
Coralie Fargeat (The Substance)
The Challenge: Coralie Fargeat identifies her biggest challenge while still writing The Substance. “I wrote the script on spec, because I knew that it was an untraditional movie that you couldn’t put into one specific box.” The film’s unique vision requires substantial resources and practical effects, leading her to seek American financing while being determined to maintain creative control.
Her solution is a hybrid production model. “I knew that I needed to keep one foot in Europe.” She partners with Working Title, who have “huge experience with the US, but they are still from the UK.” To accommodate her meticulous visual approach, Fargeat develops an innovative two-phase shooting schedule, resulting in 100 shooting days on a limited budget. When studio executives express dissatisfaction with the film’s monster design, she stands firm, “Even a monster has to meet some kind of beauty standard? I have to defend my monster… because this is exactly what the movie is about.”
Fargeat names the original Star Wars trilogy as her formative influence: “It really changed my life, for real.” Growing up in Paris feeling shy and misfit, Star Wars transports her to “such a dream, powerful, adventure world with a princess who was having guns and going to other planets.” This experience shapes her directorial approach and preference for genre films over the more “realistic, psychologic” tendencies of French cinema.
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Marc Platt (Wicked)
The Challenge: Unlike many of his fellow producers, Marc Platt faces a unique challenge with Wicked: resisting pressure to adapt his hugely successful Broadway musical too quickly. “My experience is different because I was the one that didn’t want to make a film for many, many years,” he explains. Despite having a studio eagerly offering financing immediately after its Broadway success, Platt consistently declines. “It was me who kept saying no.”
This reluctance stems partly from wanting to allow the stage musical to expand globally, but also from personal insecurity. “The bar was high for me, and I was nervous.” When he finally embraces the adaptation, a breakthrough comes in splitting the film into two parts, allowing them to keep all the songs and moments they couldn’t bear to cut while aligning with the natural story arcs of Elphaba and Glinda.
Platt identifies Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Parts I and II as his primary influences. He appreciates how these films take him “into worlds that I hadn’t been” while telling compelling stories about “fragile, complicated people who are flawed.” As for filmmakers, Platt singles out Jonathan Demme, with whom he collaborates on several films. Beyond Demme’s craft, Platt values how he teaches him that cinema “can not only entertain, which is the first important part of cinema, but it can change the world.”
As these remarkable filmmakers demonstrate, the path from vision to screen is rarely straightforward. Yet it’s precisely these challenges that forge the most memorable cinema—when passion meets persistence, when inspiration fuels innovation, and when artists refuse to compromise on the stories that matter most. Their journeys remind us that the greatest films aren’t just made; they’re fought for.
