Emile Sherman is not new to the best picture race. Under See Saw Films, with partner Iain Canning, Sherman earned the Academy Award in 2011 with The King’s Speech and was nominated again in 2017 for Lion. The producer will be returning to the awards show with Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank, a wealthy, menacing and hyper-intelligent Montana rancher who is obsessed with traumatizing Kirsten Dunst’s Rose, the kindly new wife of his brother, George (played by Dunst’s real-life fiance, Jesse Plemons). Sherman talked to THR about reteaming with Campion and how the filmmakers decided that Netflix was the right home for the drama.
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You were working with Jane Campion on Top of the Lake. At what point did See Saw come aboard on The Power of the Dog?
Jane tends to really do one thing at a time. She’ll do something, she’ll give it her entire being. She doesn’t like to feel like she has five things waiting in line afterward. She finished Top of the Lake‘s first season, took some time off, decided that she had some ideas for us for a second season and worked with Jared Lee, the co-writer, on that. Then again, she took some time off and lived her life. And then she came across this book recommended by her sister and fell in love with it. Jane lives between New Zealand and Australia. Her home in Sydney is literally a hundred meters from our office, so we’re all very close, and we ended up having regular catch-ups. We had a catch-up in a cafe in Bondi Beach, and she told me about this book and how excited she was about it. Iain and I knew that whatever Jane wanted to do, we’d obviously do. Working with her is really one of the great experiences of our careers.
Were there any notable differences in collaborating with Jane on a television series versus a feature?
Top of the Lake was part of that very early wave of filmic television. We were not experienced in television; we’ve since really moved and become a predominantly television company. But we approached the entire shoot of Top of the Lake as a film. We didn’t know how to make television, and we didn’t want to make traditional television at that point. All that said, there is something of a shift with The Power of the Dog and naturally with Jane directing the entirety of it rather than sharing the directing with someone else. [Garth Davis and Ariel Kleiman also helmed episodes of Top of the Lake.] There is something incredibly pure about film, isn’t there? A director is able to control every frame. There is also something incredibly pure about Jane’s vision in The Power of the Dog.
When you first read the script, was there anything that, from a producer’s perspective, you were thinking could be hard to pull off?
I should really say what an incredible writer Jane is. I mean, there are lots of directors who can write, but Jane is one of the greatest writers we’ve ever worked with. She delivers a script and it’s entirely fully formed. She approaches it more like a jigsaw puzzle. She sees it as a whole story and tries to get the pieces in the right place, often making very small changes that have big, cumulative effects. Reading The Power of the Dog as a script was a really thrilling moment. I think the most challenging and open-ended question was how to play with the fact that the character Peter [played by Kodi Smit-McPhee] knew more than the audience will know.
You have to read the script and the film in two ways, and it has to work prospectively and it has to work retrospectively. Knowing how to plant those clues was something we never really were entirely sure was going to land or not. The end of that process was doing a test screening in Sydney during post and getting an audience together and seeing how much people understood what Peter was doing. Were we explaining too much or too little? What we learned was that we needed to orientate people more strongly up front. Setting up the world and the characters and the rules of the world were really important. We could be more ambiguous at the end because people felt satisfied. It was not a question so much of, “What did they understand?” The key question is: “Did it feel like a satisfying experience or did people feel cheated?”
What surprised me is how little it mattered. People would come out and go, “Peter did it, didn’t he? But I don’t even know what he did.” And other people would go, “Oh, I got really early what happened.” And then other people would say, “I didn’t understand how Phil died.” But they all felt satisfied for some reason with the story. They felt that they were held by a director who was creating a work of enriching cinema.
How did you land on Netflix?
We really worked to have a package ready for Cannes 2019, which included a script. And we were working with our casting directors to cast the lead role, particularly Benedict, and have a sense of where we were going to shoot it and have a budget ready. We took it to the market and tried to find a home. We were really fortunate to have a number of bidders who really wanted to do this movie. We were in a fortunate position to have to ask the hard question of who’s going to be the right home for this film. At the end of the day, Netflix really understood and effectively backed Jane’s vision financially and creatively. [They] financially supported the film to a level where Jane didn’t have to make great compromises, and that was hugely important.
I remember talking with Jane before we made the decision about who to go to and talking about the pros and cons of both the offer and Netflix and the question of Jane being a very theatrically driven author-director. Netflix agreed to put the film out theatrically and have exceeded all commitments in terms of ensuring that the film has a theatrical presence around the world. Jane wanted to know that if people wanted to see the film at the cinema, they could. But it’s also wonderful to not feel that the success of the film is entirely dependent on box office. That is an interesting gift that the economic model of streamers gives productions. You are judged by different criteria.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
This story first appeared in a March stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
