MONIQUE WALTON: Spirit Awards Producers Award Winner

By Rebecca Green

Monique Walton is an Austin-based independent producer who most recently produced Greg Kwedar’s feature SING SING, which premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, was acquired by A24 and will be released on July 12. In 2019, she produced Annie Silverstein’s award-winning debut feature BULL, which premiered at Cannes Un Certain Regard, and was nominated for three Film Independent Spirit Awards in 2021. Monique is the winner of the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards Producers Award.

Monique sat down with Dear Producer to discuss how SING SING utilized a community-based financial model focused on pay parity and how she defines sustainability, both for herself and as she looks at independent filmmaking moving forward.

TIFF Portrait Studio Photo by Norman Wong

How did you get into producing?

I fell into producing through grad school at the University of Texas. There’s no producing program there and it’s a very small directing program with 12 students in each class. By design, everyone works on everyone’s projects. I started producing the films of a lot of people in my cohort. Once I started, I became the person people asked because there were no other producers.

I really enjoy the collaborative aspect of producing. I enjoy working with directors and having early conversations about bringing a story to life. Writing was a struggle for me and I liked directing, but at the time I felt a stronger pull towards producing. Producing was this beautiful blend of being a part of the film from the very early stages, imagining what it could be, and then helping it get there, which was extremely satisfying.

You produce documentary and fiction films. Have you always been interested in both formats?

I started working on documentaries even before I went to film school, which has informed how I produce fiction in many ways. Now I’m working on both formats simultaneously, which wasn’t necessarily the plan.

In choosing projects to work on, I’m driven by both the material, the director’s vision, and the process. The pace of the work on a documentary is different. There’s a lot of early work to establish relationships and build trust, and then you start shooting with whatever resources you have, and you build from there. Fundraising for documentaries can take years, and often continues throughout the entire production and post-production process. Whereas, with fiction, you raise all the money up front. It is a different cadence. There’s a different rhythm to it.

What scares me the most about documentaries is how long post production takes. I don’t want to ever force it. It takes the amount of time that it needs to take. When it’s done, it’s extremely satisfying, but the uncertainty while it’s happening can be scary. You start out with a plan, and along the way the story changes course. It’s constantly shifting in the edit as until you find the best version of the story. Whereas with fiction, you have a blueprint with the script, and you can see the finish line at some point in the editing process, and unless your film has become drastically different from the original script, you can plot out where and how it will get finished.

In fiction, it often feels like development and packaging is never-ending. 

Yes, the development period is a marathon. It takes mental and emotional stamina to keep the story fresh and not get discouraged by the rejections, the time it takes, and the lack of money. You’re just like, keep going, keep going. You can lose your way and come back. It takes so much time you just have to trust the process. The stressors are just in different spots.

When I teach, I tell filmmakers that these projects happen when they want to happen. All you can do is wake up every morning, do your work, and push it forward. Whether that’s the evolution of post for a documentary or casting and fundraising for a fiction film. For example, I produced a film last spring that took eight years to get into production.

Do you find that it’s magical when it starts to happen? Everything lines up and suddenly it’s easy. You go for so long feeling like it’s never going to happen, and then once it does, it’s like the stars really do start aligning.

It’s overwhelming because for so long you’re working with a small group of people trying to get the movie up and running and then all of a sudden there are teams of people to service with different agendas. One day you’re sitting quietly waiting for people to call you back and then the next, your phone is ringing non stop. 

Your most recent film, SING SING, premiered at TIFF and will be released by A24, which is everyone’s golden ticket dream. Tell me about that project, how you came to it, and how your experience was making the film.

I met Greg Kwedar, the director of SING SING, and his writing/producing partner, Clint Bentley, in Austin. They made the film JOCKEY on a micro-budget with a small crew. The film premiered at Sundance in 2021 and went on to be nominated for the Film Independent Spirit Award John Cassavetes Award. 

I met Greg first, who has been in Austin as long as I have, but we had never crossed paths, which is weird because the film community here is pretty small. He sublet an office space that Annie Silverstein and I had been sharing, but weren’t using because of the pandemic. He offered to take care of our plant that we had neglected because we didn’t go there anymore. He said, “I’ll nurse it back to life,” which was really sweet of him. And he did and it’s thriving.

That’s a green flag for a director.

Totally! After the sublet ended, he went on a walk with Annie and she thought we should all hang out. We went to Annie’s house and while we sat around a fire in her backyard, he discussed how they made JOCKEY and we shared how we made BULL, which was made on a larger indie budget and with a larger crew. We compared those experiences and discovered we had similar values and a similar worldview about making films. The things that excited Greg about filmmaking were aligned with what excited me. Especially the community-based side of it where you’re building relationships and potentially casting people from the community in the film. That was where he initially shared the financial model on JOCKEY, which we eventually scaled up on SING SING. 

A few months later, Greg and Clint were doing a panel at SXSW about JOCKEY that they asked me to moderate. This allowed me another opportunity to get to know them better and after the panel we went out for drinks and they pitched me on SING SING. He said, “We’re shooting in two and a half months. We have Colman Domingo attached, but don’t have a full draft yet. We don’t have financing yet, but we will.” I was like, “Okay.” [laughs]

Monique Walton with Annie Silverstein on the set of BULL. Photo by Benita Udodili Ozoude

Take a step back for those who don’t know the film and tell us a little bit about how unique it is. 

The film is based on a real theater program called Rehabilitation Through the Arts in the maximum security prison Sing Sing in upstate NY. The story is about two men who forge an unlikely connection through participating in this program. Specifically, they bond through a time-traveling musical comedy called Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, an original play they put on. The film is fiction, but it’s based on a real program and a real production of a play that they did.

The story sounded super inspiring. I told them this right when I heard the pitch. The film is about healing, which I felt really drawn to, especially after the pandemic with how intense it was for me personally and professionally. It felt like a process that I wanted to jump into because it might just be the cathartic healing experience I needed. They wanted to cast alumni from the program who were transformed by it while they were in Sing Sing. That was the right angle for me and the best way to approach the story.

After I had agreed to come on board, I truly learned that it was a sacred story because the program had helped so many people profoundly. When we started the casting process, everyone I met who had gone through this program had the same positive energy; you could feel the power of what had happened and how they had been transformed. Everyone moves through the world with a mask and I felt like their masks had come off many years prior. They were so open, vulnerable, and upfront that it felt like I had to bring that same energy. I had to show up for them how they were showing up for me. It felt really special.

Other than Colman, was everybody a non-actor and a part of the program?

The majority of the ensemble was made up of alumni from the program who were trained in theater, but had never acted in a film. But we also worked with seasoned actors, including Paul Raci, who plays Brent Buell, the program’s volunteer director and the writer of Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, Sean San Jose, who is an actor and the artistic director of the Magic Theater. Sharon Washington, an amazing stage and screen actor, has a cameo in the film. Everyone we cast had some sort of connection to the story. Having Colman at the helm was so invigorating. Obviously, he brought his incredible talent and his tools being an actor in theater and in film to the production and he was also able to help Greg set the tone on set for all of these guys who have had experience in theater, but have never been on a film set. Colman helped everyone feel comfortable in that space.

The JOCKEY financial model you mentioned is one of a community approach where everyone gets paid the same amount and shares in profit particpation. Is that an accurate description?

Yes, the model was based on pay parity. Everyone was treated equally and became a profit participant based on the phase of the film they worked on. Because we were a SAG film, the base rate was the SAG scale rate for our tier. 

To clarify, if the SAG daily rate is approximately $400 a day, your biggest actor is getting paid that, as well as your production assistants, correct? 

Right, the entire cast and crew was paid either the daily or weekly rate, as dictated by the SAG contract for our budget tier at the time, and it applied to all cast and crew.

For those who don’t know, it’s common to give profit participation (aka “points” or “backend”) to your cinematographer, production designer, and editor, but you don’t give them to your grip, gaffer, PAs, etc. In this scenario, did everybody get the same amount of participation?

Everyone received equity based on the phase of the film they worked on, so the only variable was time. It’s interesting because, as you mentioned, crew members don’t typically get to participate in the backend, and we found that many of the crew were excited about learning that aspect of the film business and had questions about how distribution works. They were asking, “What does the waterfall mean?”

I realized there’s a disconnect between the crew and the overall financial process of filmmaking.  So as a result of this model, everyone became a stakeholder in the movie. In many ways, you make these films and mitigate the risk by having really low crew rates. Sometimes, there’ll be a deferred model, but then you never see that money. The fact that everyone knew the rate and how the equity broke down made everyone more invested in the project.

John Sloss tried a similar model in the early 2000s with a company called InDigEnt. They produced a handful of films, but didn’t continue the model, and I’ve never asked him why. I’d like to hear your thoughts on whether this is a viable model in the future. From my standpoint, the issue is that when negotiating cast deals, agents know how rare it is to actually get to profit participation in the waterfall, it’s why upfront fees have gone up substantially, because everyone knows that’s all you’re going to see. You were able to make a film at a budget level where your sale to A24 got you to profit participation, a rare success story. Would you try to replicate this model again with your films?

Yes, I would like to. You gain so much in trying to rethink how these films are made. It sets the tone and creates a culture, and I want the set culture we had on SING SING on all my films. The outcome of this movie was incredible. It was everything we could have hoped for.

I know many crew members work from project to project. They forget about your movie after it’s over and are not necessarily there because they think it’s this meaningful experience. As you’ve written about, it’s a job for most people on set, not a passion project like it is for the producers and director. If this model is a way to help that culture thrive, then I want it to be possible. People are interested and excited, even with the little bit we’ve shared about it so far. It’s not like it has to be done the exact same way in every film. It’s just an invitation for people to start thinking about financial models and sustainability differently.

Monique Walton on the set of SING SING Photo by Phyllis Kwedar

Shifting gears, you are an active member of the Documentary Producers Alliance and have been on the Executive Committee of the Producers Union for the last two years. This work continues with the themes of SING SING about the value of community work. How important is your involvement in these different organizations?

It’s hard to form community with producers because everyone is super busy all of the time.   Part of my involvement in these organizations was wanting to be in a community with other producers. It feels like there’s no real scaffolding around producers unless you are working for a company. There’s no safety net if you’re independently selecting directors to work with, selecting films, and working from project to project. Not that these groups provide exactly that, but they provide a way for people to share experiences, share information, and come up with new ideas.  The industry and the way that we work are constantly evolving; I think we have to always be in conversation with each other.

One of my first questions early on around producing was, how do you make this sustainable? What we’re doing in these organizations is in pursuit of that. It takes collective energy, thought, and work for change to happen. That’s what drives me to be a part of these groups. It’s obviously not just me; it’s everyone in these groups and on these committees doing an enormous amount of work outside their projects, as you know having been the one to launch the Producers Union. That’s the hard balance, but I feel lucky that I’m at a point in my life and career where I can put this time towards it and that it’s happening now. It feels very exciting and hopeful. Many people believe that change can happen.

How are you making it work right now? How are you sustaining a living?

At the moment, I can’t say it’s really working [laughs]. My husband has played a big role in making it work. He has a salary job. I am constantly trying to figure it out; having fiction films and documentaries going simultaneously has helped to piece the puzzle together. With the model on SING SING, I’m paid a weekly rate, which means I’m being paid to handle delivery, which never happens for a producer. That has helped immensely. But I don’t feel like I’ve cracked it yet, especially considering the amount of effort and time it takes to get projects off the ground.

I have not cracked it yet, either. Don’t feel bad.

Going back to the community of it all, I became active in the Producers Union and the DPA because I wanted to hear from producers from the earlier generations, how they are making it work. It’s a different conversation because the model from the 90s and early 2000s doesn’t exist now, it is completely different, and the cost of living is so much higher now. I encourage more of that intergenerational knowledge sharing.

What are you hopeful about? What does 2024 look like for you?

I’ve been pondering that a lot. We’re in the reflective period of the year and I need to spend some time journaling. I’m hopeful that we will continue to support original voices. Original voices are what the industry needs. It’s such an important piece of the ecosystem. If we have people who recognize that, believe in it, and support it, we can get our projects done. Will they all happen this year? Probably not, but I am hopeful that they will be birthed.