HIGHLAND PARK, Calif. – All teams need leaders, and the producer is every movie's leader. No single position has more to do with the creative, technical, and financial aspects of making a film than the producer.
But unlike the director or the actors, who are usually the face of a film, most people have no idea who the producer is or what they really do. Producing a movie comes with a lot of responsibility and a lot of work. The job sometimes involves hundreds of people to make it all happen, but that doesn't intimidate Winnie Wong who is gearing up to produce her first feature film.
“If I chose a career that was safe, I don't know that I could sustain for very long. I think that I have the type of personality where I need to be passionate about something I need to be excited by something, I need to feel challenged by something,” said Wong.
RELATED l Screenwriter Moves to LA to Write His Own Hollywood Ending
Wong is brainstorming with cinematographer Melinda James about her vision for the film as they go over the script.
“I just I feel like we really need to work shop this,” Wong says as they go over different scenes and interpret the writer’s intentions.
Wong was on a very different path before deciding she wanted to produce movies. She Graduated from University of California Santa Barbara with a degree in pre-law.
“I thought I was going to go into immigration law and I worked for the investigators office for the public defender. And I just got really discouraged. I just thought there were a lot of injustices that were beyond my control, and beyond the public defender's control,” said Wong.
Wong change directions after seeing the film Moonlight. She walked out of the theater blown away, and with a new realization.
“I wanted to make films that make people leave the theater and think about it for the next few days. And think about, you know, the different perspectives that they saw on screen or, you know, different stories that they could have never been aware of,” said Wong.
Making art from pain and struggle is something that resonated with Wong. Her parents didn’t graduate from high school and had to work really hard to make their American dream happen. She doesn’t want to take that for granted. Wong decided she wanted to work on projects that made people have the kind of reaction she – and millions of others – did after seeing that film.
A self-proclaimed “late bloomer” with a soft spot for human connections, Wong decided her path was to produce movies with the meaning. She moved up to San Francisco, where she studied multimedia journalism and documentaries at The Academy of the Art University and spent a few years freelancing and commercials and branded content. She worked at Pandora for three years producing short music documentaries before deciding to take the leap to move to Los Angeles a year ago.
The filmmaking process is both a creative and a technical endeavor. And the producer’s job is to make all the components and all the people come together to create a final product for the big screen. From finding a good script to sourcing the financing hiring the crew casting the actors shooting and editing on schedule and then shopping around for a distributor.
“Sometimes I joke around, I say either it's everything but the kitchen sink, or it's everything else that people don't want to do,” said Wong.
Wong says being on the go all day, every day is part of the producing process.
“No day is the same. So every day it's just either I'm meeting somebody, or I'm on the phone with someone, or I'm trying to line something up for the next day,” said Wong.
Wong has learned there is no one way to become a film producer. But the one thing that all producers must have this passion.
“It's really easy for people to burn out if they don't really love what they're doing. And they're only doing it for a paycheck. For me producing just feels like a very long relationship that I want to be in. So that's kind of how I feel about it,” said Wong.
Now fully committed to being a film producer, Wong has officially “put a ring on it.”