NEW YORK -- Polly Cohen has been named president of Warner Independent Pictures, the post that had been held by Mark Gill, who abruptly departed the Warner Bros. Pictures specialty film division last week.

Cohen was executive vp production at Warner Bros. Pictures.

Said Warners production president Jeff Robinov, to whom Cohen will report: "I've worked with Polly for nine years now. She's incredibly talented, is great with development and has done a really good job of handling filmmakers from the smallest to largest pictures."

Although she has been working in the studio arena rather than the indie world since joining Warners as a creative exec in 1997, Cohen began her career at production company Jersey Films, where she was involved with such movies as "Gattaca" and "Living Out Loud." Approaching her new role at WIP, she said she planned to take "a little bit from each of those experiences ... making the projects people are the most passionate about."

Created in 2003, WIP weathered a shaky startup, but it appeared to have begun to find its footing last year, enjoying a $77 million domestic gross with Luc Jacquet's Oscar-winning documentary "March of the Penguins" and scoring six Oscar noms for George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck." Still, ongoing disputes between Robinov and Gill over the direction of the company led to Gill's resignation.

"Mark's already sort of said it publicly: We had a different philosophy on how to run the company," Robinov said. "Philosophically, I think we would have gone in different directions. As you see the company start to evolve and identify itself in the direction I would have gone in, I think that will become pretty clear."

While Robinov declined to elaborate on specifics, he said, "Taking nothing away from what's happened in the last three years -- because I think everybody's done a great job of building the company, and it's had success -- it really is going back to trying to build more relationships and to open a bit more communication than what we've had historically."

He said the goal is "to make it more of a team effort, to really bring people into the process of what movies we should make, how we're going to sell them, how they reflect Warner Bros., and get a sense for how to give the company a real identity, which I think has been missing."

Robinov cited Cohen, exec vp domestic distribution Steven Friedlander and exec vp marketing and publicity Laura Kim -- who all joined him on a conference call -- along with senior vp production and acquisitions Paul Federbush as "the people at WIP."

The execs said that WIP will focus more on in-house productions than it has in the past but also will remain aggressive about certain acquisitions.

Cohen said that "as far as production, we're going to have a development fund. I think that will really help us decide the films we want to make because they'll be the ones we initiate and we're the most passionate about."

Friedlander said he thinks the six films WIP has in development will go forward but that there will be internal discussions about them over the next few weeks.

He added that while the company will concentrate more on production than it has, it won't limit the number of pickups. "It depends on whatever's out there," he said.

Budgets for a slate of five to eight pictures a year are expected to stay at $20 million or less, but Friedlander said, "It doesn't mean if we fall in love with something over $20 million, we're going to say no."

Cohen said she has no plans to bring in new executives at this time. Although she officially beings her new post June 1, she will head to the Festival de Cannes this month with the WIP team to meet with filmmakers, scout films for acquisition and premiere Richard Linklater's "A Scanner Darkly."