There are more glamorous things to be, in Hollywood, than an independent distribution company. For instance, an actress. Or a director. Or a screenwriter. Key grip. Maybe even that guy with a two-way radio who keeps you from walking through a movie set. Film-distribution companies tend to be important but invisible: They buy finished films, cut trailers, make posters, and put movies into movie theaters—or, more often these days, dump them onto VOD, never to be heard from again. There are exceptions to this rule, such as Miramax, the company that upended indie cinema in the ’90s, backing then unknown filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino. And there are studio subdivisions, like Fox Searchlight, that have consistently guided films like 12 Years a Slave and Birdman to Academy Awards and box office success over the past twenty years. But in general distribution is like plumbing: unseen, unnoticed, and notable only when it malfunctions.
So it was strange, if you were a moviegoer in 2013, to see the A24 logo pop up again and again before movies as varied and weird as Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers and Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now and Roman Coppola’s A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. It wasn’t just that, for a new distribution company, it seemed to have a level of taste and an instinct for cool that is atypical in Hollywood. It was also that A24 was releasing these films not with a sigh and a shrug, but with panache, style, and humor: bright neon colors, guerrilla marketing tactics, and in the case of James Franco’s Britney Spears-loving gangster character from Spring Breakers, an actual Oscar campaign. The company, improbably, was based in New York, not Los Angeles. Its trio of founders—Daniel Katz, David Fenkel, and John Hodges, who’d known each other through years of work in New York’s indie movie circuit—rarely granted interviews. If you were paying attention, you had to wonder: Who were these strange upstart New Yorkers who were making Hollywood a little bit great again?
That was 2013. Four short years later, the company’s first original production, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In between, A24 went from being a tiny, disorganized room of eight or so people to being the place where big stars like Robert Pattinson and Scarlett Johansson go to make small, strange movies, and auteurs like Jonathan Glazer and Denis Villeneuve go to make deeply personal films unmolested by studio notes or clueless executives. We spoke with the company’s friends, collaborators, and employees to make sense of how A24 became the most interesting, creative, and reliable film company of the 21st century.
Robert Pattinson (actor, ‘The Rover,’ ‘Good Time’): It’s crazy that there is an article about a distribution company. That’s completely nuts.
Harmony Korine (director, ‘Spring Breakers’): They have balls.
Barry Jenkins (director, ‘Moonlight’): A24’s the kind of company where they say, “Yeah, they don’t need to know what it’s about. They just need to know how it feels.”
James Franco (actor, ‘Spring Breakers,’ ‘The Adderall Diaries’): This is one of the things they’re great at: taking something small and delicate and giving it the kind of support that other people can’t.
Sofia Coppola (director, ‘The Bling Ring’): I really like those guys. They don’t have the personality of movie executives.
Asif Kapadia (director, ‘Amy’): I suppose most filmmakers have had bad experiences in the past where you do all the hard work, and then these guys in slick suits come along and they’re like, “We know what we’re doing now! We’ll handle it!” And if it works, it’s them; if it doesn’t work, it’s all your fault anyway. And I felt with these guys it was a dialogue. I felt like we were all on the same team.
James Ponsoldt (director, ‘The Spectacular Now,’ ‘The End of the Tour’): I’ve heard people refer to Miramax. There’s music labels I can think of as well. Where it’s like: I’m in. I just trust, you know, Drag City or Merge or SST or Dischord. There’s aesthetic and political values to the people behind the company. It’s super inspiring.
Denis Villeneuve (director, ‘Enemy’): I never saw them as businessmen.
Colin Farrell (actor, ‘The Lobster,’ ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’): They have such a great eye for these small little films and rich and unique stories that may have not found it to the big screen if it wasn’t for them.
Sasha Lane (actress, ‘American Honey’): They were like, “You guys are who you are and we’re not going to change that.” No one had to be perfected for anything. No one cared about our language or our clothes.
Daniel Radcliffe (actor, ‘Swiss Army Man’): I’ve had experiences on films in the past where they get bought by somebody who sees something in it that they like, which is nice, but it also happens to be not—and is sometimes antithetical to—what the people who made the film wanted it to be. When you can get a distribution company that likes the film for the same reasons that people that made it like the film—I’ve found that rare. They’re one of the few companies that have shown that indie films can still be viable.
Alex Garland (director, ‘Ex Machina’): They make things work that according to standard procedures really shouldn’t work. And I’m not saying they’re magicians. I think what they’ve understood is there’s a sufficient number of people out there who want more challenging or different material. And they’re aiming at them.
Brie Larson (actress, ‘Room,’ ‘The Spectacular Now’): A24 has the unique ability to find and champion authentic narratives that cut to the core in a raw and honest way.
Patrick Stewart (actor, ‘Green Room’): [The premiere of ‘Green Room’] was at the Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness. And although it describes itself as Midnight Madness, the film didn’t start until close to one o’clock in the morning. And, I mean, there was one moment in the movie when my character was booed and hissed so vociferously, I felt as though I was in a Roman arena and my life was at stake. And I was ready to say: “It was me! It was me! And I was just acting! That was just acting!” It was not like being in a cinema. It was like being in some kind of arena. So, um, well done, A24!
Noah Sacco (head of acquisitions and production, A24): I think some of our biggest movies had no stars in them at the time of release—Ex Machina, Moonlight, The Witch, Room, The Spectacular Now.
David Fenkel (co-founder, A24): We find movies [for which] our perspective, our system, our people, can act to make it something special. If it’s gonna be released the same way by another company, we usually don’t go after it.
Daniel Katz (co-founder, A24): We used to always talk about “Oh, there’s gotta be a better way.”
John Hodges (co-founder and co-head of TV, A24): It was one of those conversations where it was always like, “How would we do it differently?” And it was usually fueled by beer and things scribbled down on napkins and a lot of bravado.
Katz: Some of it was probably misplaced, don’t you agree?
Fenkel: Ignorance.
Katz: Yeah. Exactly.
Fenkel: That’s a big theme.
“None of us really knew what we were doing.”
In 2012, Fenkel, Hodges, and Katz left their jobs—at Oscilloscope, Big Beach, and Guggenheim Partners, respectively—to start A24. All three had grown up admiring the rich world of ’90s independent cinema, and they noticed a void where those movies had once been. They rented some office space in Manhattan.
Hodges: I started my career at USA Films, which became Focus Features. That company and the old Miramax and Fox Searchlight had a real brand and a hold on their audience.
Ravi Nandan (co-head of TV, A24): Paramount Vantage, which had released, like, There Will Be Blood and a bunch of other movies, was [folded into] Paramount. Focus and Fox Searchlight had become kind of isolated in what they did.
Katz: There’s all these really, really smart, capable, ambitious people that love movies. And they were like the third guy at the company. No one had a voice. I felt like there was a huge opportunity to create something where the talented people could be talented.
Nicolette Aizenberg (distribution executive, A24): It is very cyclical. Miramax, they were a huge deal, and also Fox Searchlight. They came on strong in the late 90s, really. So that was like their heyday. Not heyday. I don’t mean it that way. But more independent existed then. And then, in ’08, the bubble burst, and the economic downturn probably had a little bit of impact. And then it was consolidation. And yeah, I just think that it takes—it doesn’t happen that often that a new studio starts.
Katz: I always had dreams of [starting a company]. And on some level, honestly, I was afraid to go out on my own and try to make it work. And I was with a bunch of friends, and we were in the south of Italy, and we were driving into Rome and I kind of had this moment of clarity. And it was on the A24 [motorway]. And in that moment I was like: Now it’s time to go do this.
Jeanie Igoe (production, A24): None of us really knew what we were doing.
Hodges: The office literally looked like a pump-and-dump stock operation. The fact that we were able to sign any movies out of that office is absurd.
Katz: In LA—whatever just transpired last month, you feel it in LA. New York, no one gives a shit.
Sacco: It’s sobering and motivating in a different way. It’s like, oh, this person has no idea what Moonlight is, and it just won Best Picture.
Fenkel: In LA, every meeting is about the hot air. How great it was. You know what? We’re good.
Sacco: And people on planet Earth, you know, they go see movies that they need to want to see or hear about. I think my sister’s still only seen one A24 movie: Spring Breakers. And she said it sucked.
John Heavey (distribution, A24): Especially the first two years, we fell in love with every movie. When I was explaining to people what I was doing, it felt like a political campaign. Like, you believe in something, you fall in love with it, and then you work for three months on trying to make it work.
“Glass-Gun Bong.”
In the fall of 2012, A24 arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival with a plan to acquire several movies.
Sacco: Frances Ha was the first heartbreak. And The Place Beyond the Pines.
Fenkel: Well, it wasn’t a heartbreak, because they wouldn’t actually call us back. Place Beyond the Pines, we’d worked with the producers before. We had a good history. And we still have a great relationship now. Wouldn’t call us back. That was tough.
Aizenberg: I was already, like, putting together the distribution plans for Frances Ha.
Sacco: It was my first festival ever. Losing a movie—I wanted to jump off a bridge.
Ali Herting (acquisitions and development, A24): We were never gonna get Place Beyond the Pines. Like, no way in hell. But we got A Glimpse Inside the Mind.
In 2013, A24 released their first five films: Sally Potter’s ‘Ginger & Rosa’, Harmony Korine’s ‘Spring Breakers’, Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Bling Ring’, James Ponsoldt’s ‘The Spectacular Now’, and Roman Coppola’s ‘A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III’, starring Charlie Sheen.
Aizenberg: When I came to A24, they had Charles Swan already.
Fenkel: Charlie Sheen was in this interesting place where maybe he was on the verge of a comeback, and I’m saying that with a straight face. There was this weird time. Halfway through the campaign, I think it went the other way.
Aizenberg: Remember he didn’t show up to the premiere? It was like two hours before, and they were like, “He’s not gonna make it. He’s not gonna be able to do this right now.” Our first release.
Hodges: Charlie. He believed in us.
Fenkel: It actually went very well, for what the movie was. It’s funny. I think when movie companies get started, people want to define you immediately. And we weren’t thinking about that. We still don’t.
Aizenberg: When I started, we didn’t have Spring Breakers yet, but the whole focus of that very first meeting I went to was like, “How do we get Spring Breakers? How do we get Spring Breakers?” And then Noah got Spring Breakers.
Sacco: I wouldn’t say I got it. I…I was tasked. I woke up one morning to an e-mail from Daniel that was sent at three in the morning: “Can you go to Pittsburgh?” I come into the office, and there are interns running around like in some crazy factory. Daniel’s like, “Okay. We’re putting together a gift basket of glass guns and a gift basket with munchies…”
Fenkel: We made bongs.
Sacco: Gun bongs. And the interns are running around trying to find a glassblower.
Fenkel: An engraver, too.
Sacco: To engrave the Spring Breakers logo onto the glass-gun bong. So everyone’s wrapping up this gift basket that I’m supposed to deliver to Megan [Ellison, one of the producers of Spring Breakers, who was on location in Pittsburgh] and say, like, “This is why you should go with us. We’re passionate. We get movies.” And the only thing we could put it in was a cardboard box with duct tape. So I’m showing up to the airport with no luggage and a cardboard box with duct tape wrapped around it.
Fenkel: It looked like a bomb.
Sacco: I show up at the airport. And the guy asked me, “Is there anything we might find suspicious in there?” I said, “There’s an art piece inside in the shape of a gun.” And literally the entire security department was like, “What is wrong with you?” Long story short, it made it through.
Aizenberg: And we got the movie.
Korine: I could tell that they were on some new shit, you know? You could tell that they wanted to be great. And you could tell that it was in their reach. Hollywood is run by accountants at this point. And so anytime you speak with someone who’s not a pure accountant, is not a pencil pusher? It’s exciting. They had heart to them.
Fenkel: We test-screened [Spring Breakers] in downtown Manhattan. Probably the best place to screen-test the movie. And we broke records. With how bad it tested.
Korine: I don’t think I was there, but I heard people were walking out. It made me crack up.
Aizenberg: Nine to ten people walked out. We were watching it the whole time. It was, like, every time another person walked out, I was like, “Oh, there goes another one!”
Sacco: All my friends and family, they kept asking about this new company. “What are you working on? Oh my god, it’s new! First movie’s gonna be so exciting!” And I remember everyone came back from that test screening. I was like, “I think I need to find another job.”
Aizenberg: They were basically like, “Don’t release this movie.”
Katz: I don’t think we had The Bling Ring yet.
Aizenberg: There was a week in January where we dropped the trailer of Spring Breakers. It was our first Sundance all together. We closed the deal on The Bling Ring on the way to Sundance.
Coppola: I was a little nervous about not going with a company that I knew had a track record, but I knew that they were going to really do their best. They didn’t have a ton of movies, you know? It wasn’t going to get lost in the shuffle.
Katz: Harvey Weinstein called the agent and said, “How could you give a Sofia Coppola movie to this new…?” I can only imagine. [Sofia] was like, “Oh, will you at least partner with Harvey?” We were like, “No!”
Coppola: That was the worst. He was calling me. The whole thing was really intense. I felt bad that David had to be put through that. I think he was in Hawaii on his honeymoon or something while it was all going down, so I felt terrible. I’m glad it all worked out.
Harvey Weinstein (via email): A24 is a great company. I love Moonlight, said as much before it won the Oscar, and I’ll say it again now - I showed it to my daughters early and they loved it. A24 is cool and I know they say great things about Miramax, which makes me feel proud and old at the same time. David Fenkel and I have had some great conversations about film - the whole A24 team have a great and deep love for cinema.
Fenkel: And the Spring Breakers trailer dropped the first day of Sundance, and MTV’s servers fucked up, because we gave them the exclusive, and they stopped serving the video. Because they didn’t expect the traffic. It was millions in one day.
Ainzenberg: I remember I went and had to meet with Selena Gomez’s team to prove that we were real people and we were gonna be legitimate in releasing the film. That was a thing. We weren’t a fully formed company yet.
Franco: I remember the South by Southwest festival, the screening—it was like a rock concert. Like, standing ovation, fucking applause in the middle of the movie.
Igoe: At SXSW, we had Spectacular Now, and Spring Breakers showed there. At the same time, we get a call saying that Selena and Ashley [Benson], their hair and makeup team hadn’t gone on the private jet we had got for them, because they didn’t think it was big enough or secure enough. Their hair and makeup people, actually, are the people that had an issue with this. They wanted, like, the Disney, massive one. It was a perfectly good jet! And it was the hair and makeup people. Selena and Ashley had no issue with this. They’re on the tarmac, and we’re having to find a new jet for them within twenty minutes.
Aizenberg: That first private plane didn’t make it to Austin. We had to get a second one.
Fenkel: We knew we were releasing the movie. We just had to catch up to that idea. We tried to get the Union Square movie theater—we didn’t have a theatrical booking yet. So I just called the guy. I kept calling the guy. And we just hounded him. I remember the thing that got him was like, “Listen. Worst case, you’ll get the trench-coat crowd.” You know what the trench-coat crowd is? The gross guys…and he’s like, “All right. You know what?” “Trench coat” was enough. And then we opened.
Aizenberg: I was at the Q&As at the ArcLight [in Los Angeles], and I remember taking a picture of the screen, and then all of a sudden it was like every screen at the ArcLight: Spring Breakers, Spring Breakers, Spring Breakers. And it was like…
Fenkel: “Sold out. Sold out. Sold out.”
Katz: We broke the record that weekend. And then we drank a huge amount of red wine. I think I made out with my wife in front of people.
Fenkel: I was at the Union Square theater, and they couldn’t have had enough theaters. It was crazy. We literally didn’t know what to do.
Aizenberg: I remember that Sunday we all got on the phone and were like, “We’re going over a thousand screens.”
Fenkel: And we had a booker at the time, this big old school guy, gentle giant, he’s a sweet guy, but kind of a gangster, but levels of, like, cool gangster. Fifty-six-year-old guy.
Katz: Old school. Very Sopranos.
Fenkel: So he’s booking, what, fifteen hundred screens? On a notepad and Post-Its.
Katz: Tuesday morning, I remember, we had a little whiskey for him. We’d be like, “Heavey, just make sure he’s alive and you can get him to communicate.”
Heavey: He didn’t really use a computer. He booked the theaters over the phone. Then he had this very high-tech, nuanced process, which was printing out a spreadsheet, and then when he would book a theater, he would write it down on the spreadsheet, and then when the spreadsheet was full, he’d push it over from his desk to my desk. And that was our communication for booking theaters.
Fenkel: Do you have to be a genius to do Sofia Coppola’s movie, or Harmony’s? Maybe we weren’t geniuses with Spring Breakers, but we were the ones who said, “Let’s put it in theaters, because we could build on that.” People liked Spring Breakers. Other companies wanted to do stuff with it. But we said, “Let’s invest in it.” There’s a difference.
Franco: All the distributors knew it was great. But the back end was so crazy. All the actors had taken the risk. We took a risk on the movie, and it fucking paid off, so why should we cut down our back end? And A24 was the place that took the risk. I think Spring Breakers really put them on the map, as far as I could tell.
Zoe Beyer (marketing, A24): Spring Breakers had a whole Oscar campaign. I think that was Nicolette, actually: “Consider This Shit.”
Franco: I actually did win some awards. I won, I think, L.A. Film Critics and maybe one other. [He won at least six.] I actually tied with Jared [Leto], who obviously won the Oscar that year, for L.A. Film Critics.
Beyer: There were like a few ads that we made. Like, there was one that was like the shot—it was [Franco’s character] Alien with the two girls, and he’s holding machine guns or something. And we put in Oscar statues in his hands. And then there was another one where he’s deep-throating the gun, and we replaced it with a gold statue.
Franco: I would bet that [Alien] was one of the biggest, most popular Halloween costumes that year. This is before Wolf of Wall Street came out, but Margot Robbie, I didn’t know her, but she was working with somebody that knew my costumer or something, and got in touch with me and was like, “Can you print me a photo of the tattoos in detail, so that I can get this costume perfectly?” Because she was fucking Alien that year.
Katz: There was still, I think, the element of—they thought we got lucky.
Fenkel: Well, of course Selena Gomez in a bikini worked.
“You’re Not Going To Be 20 Minutes Late For Scott Rudin.”
A24 went on a spending spree and released 11 movies in their second year of operation. The films were darlings—including David Michôd’s ‘The Rover,’ starring Robert Pattinson; Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Enemy,’ starring Jake Gyllenhaal; and Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Under the Skin,’ starring Scarlett Johansson—and, by and large, box-office underperformers.
Beyer: It was all about this tension between, like, trying to legitimize ourselves as a real company that can handle working with, like, big…
Herting: World-class filmmakers.
Beyer: And respect them and treat them the way they would by any other company. But then also do things that other companies aren’t doing.
Villeneuve: If my memory’s good, I was amongst their, not their first movies, but they were a young company at the time. They were not the company that they are today. But I remember vividly that they had chosen some specific movies, one of which was Under the Skin. And Under the Skin, from Jonathan Glazer, is one of my favorite movies in the past 15 or 20 years, you know? So when I saw that, I was like, “Okay, those guys, they know what they are doing.”
Garland: Under the Skin is exactly the kind of movie that you would not see distributed by a major studio. It’d be very unlikely for that to happen.
Pattinson: I mean, with Twilight, the first tour we did was literally going to suburban shopping malls and doing local-news stuff. And I think that really helped the movie. But I think in experiences since then, doing mid-budget or relatively low-budget movies, if you try to do a toned-down version of that—I’ve just seen it not work, again and again and again. And so with [The Rover], they took that into account, and instead of blowing loads of money, [they did] more targeted marketing and also really sophisticated online campaigns and stuff. They just seem like they’re the first company that’s really abandoned a lot of the old models.
Fenkel: I remember we were just getting to know Scott Rudin. We were about to have two movies [Ex Machina and While We’re Young] with him. We step up to a guy we really respect.
Katz: It was early in the relationship. We wanted to deliver in a meaningful way.
Fenkel: We had a meeting. You prepare like for your dissertation at Harvard. And it was like a snowy and rainy day, and there was a ton of traffic. It took us ten minutes to get a block.
Katz: And we were all like, “You know what? We’re gonna get there on time. This is Rudin. Let’s run there. A mile and a half.” So we ran there.
Fenkel: [Katz] is a better runner than I am. And, like, within two blocks, I have to stop. I’m dying.
Katz: We get there. We sit in. And David cannot stop perspiring.
Fenkel: I just cannot stop. It was like Broadcast News. Like I had glandular problems. Scott didn’t say anything.
Katz: We have a better relationship with him now. I think he would say something now.
Fenkel: But it was like, “You’re not going to be 20 minutes late for Scott Rudin.” So you ran.
Aizenberg: [2014 was] a building year.
Katz: That was a good learning experience for us. We tried to put together a slate in, like, four months, as opposed to just really growing it, building it in the right way. And that takes time.
Fenkel: We forced it a little bit.
Katz: We did great movies. Like Under the Skin, Locke, Enemy. Right after we did those three films, I don’t think we had really purchased a film for the following year. And then over the course of, like, four months, we bought a lot of movies.
Aizenberg: We had a couple movies in there that we tried to force into making, like, event-y theatrical, and they weren’t.
Katz: Tusk, we were like, oh, Kevin Smith! Let’s do Kevin Smith horror! Let’s go wide! That’s not a go-wide movie.
Fenkel: He thought we were crazy.
“We Did This, Like, Illegal Tinder Stuff.”
A24 took ‘Ex Machina’ to the 2015 South by Southwest festival and built a Tinder chatbot with the face of Alicia Vikander to help promote the film.
Aizenberg: I think we knew we had something at South By. That was the first time it screened for U.S. audiences.
Fenkel: And we did this, like, illegal Tinder stuff. Tinder was yelling at us. They kept shutting us down.
Beyer: Alicia Vikander—I think she read about it, or she saw this photo of her that was being used. I found it so deep in Google Image searches. I don’t think it was related to her professional career. She looked great. But I think she saw this, and it hijacked her image and personality, and we didn’t ask her. And I remember hearing she was really upset. And someone was like, “Where did those images come from?” And I was like, “Google? I dunno!” I mean, it made sense at the time.
Fenkel: We may have had to fire a fake intern for that.
Katz: We did.
Fenkel: We did fire a fake intern.
Garland: I didn’t know what Tinder was until the festival. That was where I learned what Tinder was. So everything had to be explained to me, and by the time it was explained, it was over. [laughs] I remember I had to have a conversation with Alicia about it, where she was saying, “What the hell?” and I was saying, “I don’t know. Talk me through it. You know more than me.”
Beyer: I think the operating principle was, “Don’t ask for permission. Ask for forgiveness.” I think it just showed that we cared about these movies so much. It wasn’t disrespectful. There was nothing bad-spirited about it.
Igoe: Even with Ex Machina at the time, we were getting bigger, but we still had that kind of start-up mentality that I don’t know we’d be able to get away with now.
Beyer: I remember when we had Room, like, six months after Ex Machina or something, Fenkel was like, “What’s the Tinder for Room?” And I was like, “No, no! Please! There is no Tinder for Room! No!”
Films distributed by A24 ended up getting nominated for seven Academy Awards that year, including Best Picture (‘Room’), Actress (Brie Larson), Documentary (‘Amy’), and Original Screenplay (‘Ex Machina’). Three were winners.
Asif Kapadia (director, ‘Amy’): I had never heard of A24. And [my producer] kept saying it, and I kept thinking, Okay, at some point I’ll figure out what he’s talking about. I liked the fact that they had never made a doc.
Garland: I would say that if Ex Machina had been distributed by a big studio—this isn’t actually a criticism of studios; it’s actually just a statement of fact—the film would not have been remotely as well received or successful as it was.
Kapadia: There were other films that had a lot more money in their campaign and were everywhere. And, you know, partly as a filmmaker, you’re like, “My God!” I open the curtains when I’m in L.A., and everywhere I see films on billboards. We weren’t doing anything like that. But it was word of mouth. It was social media. It was another way of getting the message out there.
Aizenberg: That Oscar-nomination morning, I remember walking into the office that day, and I was like, “Please, dear God, just let Amy and Brie get nominated. Please, just let those two!”
Igoe: That morning was crazy. I think we all were kind of a bit shell-shocked.
Heavey: People were, like, crying. Drinking champagne at nine in the morning.
Fenkel: Lenny [Abrahamson, for Room] beats out Ridley Scott! And we got Best Picture [also for Room]. We all go nuts for a few minutes, and then we’re all like, “Okay, what do we do?”
Larson: I couldn’t be more grateful for an experience that changed the course of my life and career immeasurably.
Aizenberg: Ex Machina winning for visual effects was the most shocking thing.
Sacco: We were on our way to the bathroom.
Aizenberg: Yeah. We were like, “I’m pretty sure this is gonna be Star Wars, but maybe Mad Max.” That’s what I said to them right before.
“The A24 Way Of Winning.”
In 2016, A24 expanded into original production with ‘Moonlight.’ It also put out some of its weirder and most singular movies to date: Trey Edward Shults’s micro-budget family drama ‘Krisha;’ ‘Swiss Army Man,’ in which Daniel Radcliffe plays a corpse; and Yorgos Lanthimos’s romantic tragedy, ‘The Lobster.’ In February, Robert Eggers’s ‘The Witch,’ which A24 bought at Sundance for one million dollars, made $40 million and became the company’s highest grossing film to date (‘Moonlight’ has since surpassed it).
Katz: I was very concerned that people were gonna think Room kind of stepped into shit and got lucky with awards. I think when we started [2016], it was another, like, what I’d consider a building year.
Nandan: I remember seeing a screener of [The Witch], and yeah, it was like, oh, right, how’d that movie not sell for more money? Not like we should have paid more. But you’re like, “Why didn’t other people see that?” I have no idea. It’s such a really fucking well-executed movie.
Eggers: In the very beginning, when we went to Sundance initially, I didn’t think that this was going to have such a large audience. I was proud of the film but I thought it was weird and boring. I didn’t think it was terrible. I thought it would get a distributor—I thought it was good enough for that. But then when we started to screen the film at Sundance and saw the audience reactions, it was clear that there was a much larger audience for this movie than any of us thought.
Fenkel: Look at The Witch. The filmmakers were like, “I made a good movie. Put it on screens. See what happens.”
Katz: They were kind of comfortable with the Under the Skin release.
Fenkel: I think we had to sell them on, like, “Hey, we’re gonna push this thing.”
Katz: Yeah! We want to go two thousand screens.
Fenkel: And they were like, “You can’t do that! Whoa!” Because they’d made a curated, awesome, crafted film.
Eggers: People always want to do bigger and better the next time, you know? So I think they were hoping, and discovering, that they might be able to do that with The Witch.
Fenkel: If you look at our films, we bought The Lobster in February and released it in May. January, February, we didn’t know we had The Lobster. Moonlight we hadn’t seen yet. We were planting seeds to grow. Not necessarily, like, to win Best Picture and ten Oscar nominations.
Jenkins: I don’t know if [Moonlight] was a glittering jewel of a project. If anything, it was the bastard stepchild at that point.
Jeremy Kleiner (producer, Plan B, ‘Moonlight’): It wasn’t like, “Oh, this is low-hanging fruit, let’s grab on to this one.” It was a passionate embrace of the movie. Usually you talk to somebody and they tell you all the reasons they shouldn’t make something, and why it’s so difficult. But I feel that the fact that it was their first film—there was a lot of idealism around the process.
Katz: People say, “Oh, Barry, why didn’t you bring us Moonlight?”As if that was the most obvious Best Picture! People are like, “Oh, I would have green-lit that!” I’m like, “Come on!”
Fenkel: That is a thing in Hollywood.
Sacco: We had been talking about finding a person to produce for a long time. And then you meet Barry and hear Barry talk, and it’s like, “Of course! You’re incredible. Your vision is incredible.”
Dede Gardner (producer, Plan B, Moonlight): When we and Barry said it was absolutely critical that we shoot in Miami, they said, “Of course it is.” And you know, many, many others would’ve said, “Well, you can get the rebate if you go to Atlanta.” But anyone who’s read it knows that Liberty Square and that particular light and that particular culture was a character. And integral and critical for the film to rise on its own feet. And they even never uttered the words, “What would it be like in a cheaper state?
Jenkins: We shot for five weeks, and they came down during the first week. Their whole point was, “We don’t know this world.” You were in the A24 offices. You walk through that office, and there aren’t a lot of people that look like they’re from Liberty City, Miami.
Sacco: We probably saw 20 versions. And it just kept getting better and better and better.
Fenkel: I’d love to say from the first cut we knew.
Sacco: You’re not like, “Oh, we got a Best Picture winner!” You’re just like, “Oh, we got a great movie.”
Jenkins: They were like, “Look. We’re gonna put it in theaters, and we’re gonna find a way to keep it there.” Now, look, at that point, none of us were thinking, “Hey, we’re gonna win Best Picture!” But we wanted to give the movie the chance to have as much of a life as we possibly could. And with the opening weekend, with the numbers that we did, it became very clear that, yes, this is a viable strategy, to keep this very small, gay, art-house hood-ass film—like, yeah, we’re just gonna keep it in theaters. They had faith that people would continue to show up. And they did.
Kleiner: They had the movie, I want to say, 22, 23 weeks in theatrical release? That’s very unusual.
Fenkel: The world kind of shifted in its direction, where the film was for an audience, and then you realize, “Whoa, the movie is needed by other people. The world opened itself up.” And it satisfied something they weren’t getting. Whether that’s old white people in the Academy, or people all over the country, or frankly the rest of the world.
‘Moonlight’ is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor, but loses Best Picture to ‘La La Land’—wait, what? Really?
Fenkel: The A24 way of winning.
Katz: David and I are sitting next to each other. In pretty decent seats, actually.
Fenkel: Tenth row, left.
Katz: I think if you had asked us beforehand, we would have said, you know, La La Land’s gonna win.
Fenkel: More than 50 percent chance La La Land.
Katz: Maybe even greater. I remember when all the commotion started, I look at David. I go, “Huh.”
Fenkel: I stare straight ahead. I don’t even look at him. I say, “Don’t go there.” Because what happened was, someone ran out with a red envelope. We saw the red envelope. And when you’re a loser, you think for a split second, Maybe they got it wrong.
Katz: By the way, a thousand times out of a thousand, you’re wrong. You lost.
Fenkel: And then I started saying, “No way. No way.”
Katz: It was just like, “Wait. Did Moonlight just win Best Picture?”
Sacco: I used to think seeing people faint was what happened in movies. I legitimately watched people almost pass out. I don’t think that switch in psychology is supposed to happen that dramatically, or that abruptly.
Jenkins: I just would never allow myself to believe that something I made could win Best Picture.
Fenkel: You don’t know how to control yourself. I think we lost control. But you’re in a tuxedo and everyone around you is older and they’re quiet...
Jenkins: It sucks, man, because of how it happened, none of us thanked them! It was such an out-of-body experience. And we’ve been so consistent about thanking them. And then it’s like on the biggest stage, I didn’t thank anybody! I just started talking. But I do remember finally looking over, because I didn’t know where they were sitting, and I spotted Dan Katz and Dave Fenkel, and, man, the smile on their faces! I just raised the Oscar at them. I was like, “Fuck yeah!”
“Anything’s Possible.”
Through 2017 and beyond.
Sacco: I think it’s inspiring and motivating to a younger generation: “Oh, that movie cost this, and it did this. That’s an achievable budget number for me.” You know what I mean? The next day it was like, “Anything’s possible.”
Mahershala Ali (actor, ‘Moonlight’): I definitely have a lot more opportunity right now than I’ve ever had before.
Kapadia: They’ve won Best Picture. You know, they’re big-time. You look at the underdog story, I think that’s not by accident. When it happens again and again, that’s very, very intelligent work and planning. And I think that’s the main thing, I’d say. They’re super-smart people.
Franco: I hope they don’t get too big that they forget what got them started.
Fenkel: One thing we notice is now people are saying, “Oh, good job. Love that movie.” When it wasn’t us. That’s someone else.
Katz: There’s an A24 audience, and sometimes a movie connects with the A24 audience. We get credit for it even when we have nothing to do with it. Like Get Out, or Baby Driver.
Fenkel: That kind of hit. That kind of audience.
Pattinson: They’re definitely the place to be now. I mean, I have no idea what they’re doing, really. They’re just on it. They have a very good understanding of the Zeitgeist. You get a movie with them and it represents something. Everybody was talking a few years ago how cinema had died. And I think A24 and companies like that are—you know, people want to go to the cinema. People want to see movies. And I think they’re creating a kind of renaissance in filmmaking. They’re making people want to go to the cinema again to see this kind of stuff, rather than staying at home. People had thought that entire part of the industry had just died. And you can really see over the past few years, it really, really hasn’t at all. And I think it is down to companies like A24.
Radcliffe (actor, ‘Swiss Army Man’): I could see them saying, like: “We’ve got a reputation now, and have money now.” A lot of people in that position would then go, “Okay, let’s become quite conservative in our choices.” And what’s lovely is they are choosing to still channel that stuff back into supporting weird, different, ambitious ventures. Which is vanishingly rare in the film industry.
Jenkins: What they’re doing is so fluid and free-form that two years from now, it could be quite different than it was two years ago. Which, if you look two years back, there’s just no way in hell anybody would have thought that A24 would finance a film like Moonlight and release it in the way they did, to the tune of a Best Picture and $55 million in international box office. So who’s to say that, you know, A24 won’t become Warner Brothers five years from now? [laughs] I mean, I doubt that, because I know the people that work there. But I put no limitations on what they’re capable of.
Zach Baron is GQ’s staff writer. He recently profiled Conor McGregor for GQ Style.
The Oscar-nominated actor gives us his all-time favorites of film.
