Producer Sam Pressman Believes Public Investment and AI Have a Place in Indie Filmmaking’s Future

Sam Pressman has a vision for the production company founded decades ago by his famed producer father, Edward, and it involves opening it up to the people.

Earlier this month at the Toronto International Film Festival, Pressman Film announced the launch of a new development slate raise that will allow the public to directly invest in a wide range of upcoming projects from the company through the Web3 finance platform Republic.

“There have been a number of movies that have attempted to create a network of investors in a public offering, but to have it be a slate of projects, in our minds, allows for there to be many touch points,” Pressman told TheWrap in this week’s “Office With a View.”

“Essentially, each movie is its own startup, and the money is raised to see each of those movies, and so the community will get to watch and participate in the evolution of each of those projects as they move from conception to distribution,” he explained.

Pressman learned the ropes of film producing through his father, whose credits include Brian De Palma’s cult horror comedy “Phantom of the Paradise,” Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street,” Christian Bale’s breakthrough hit “American Psycho” and Brandon Lee’s iconic “The Crow,” which recently spawned a remake produced by Sam.

Now, Pressman is expanding the family business into television production while working on new feature projects like “AUTOBiOGRAPHY,” a film that will be the feature directorial debut of the indie pop group Shy Kids with a screenplay from “After Yang” writer Alexander Weinstein. Consisting of Toronto natives Patrick Cederberg, Matthew Hornick and Walter Woodman, Shy Kids recently made headlines with their short film “Air Head,” which was made with the OpenAI text-to-video software Sora.

Pressman talked about what he’s learned about AI from working with the group and his vision for his company’s new investment platform.

What are some key lessons about being a producer that you learned from working with your father that stick with you?

I think, first and foremost, the principles and the guiding philosophies that he approached the industry with remain as valid and as significant now as they were in the late ’60s when we started: to really go to bat for and be a ferocious ally and champion of the filmmaker and the storyteller.

Alongside that is just absolute persistence. If the independent film producer does not give up on a project, then the project can still see the light of day. We have a number of projects that have amazing potential and amazing collaborators attached that I kind of grew up with, and now I find myself in the place where I’m dedicated to pushing them up the mountain. I think that philosophical intention behind the work of a producer is the core that I take forward with me.

Is this Republic investment platform that you have created something you made out of a sense of innovation or necessity?

The impetus for doing a raise publicly was something that my father and I had spoken about, along with Paula Paizes, our COO going back a couple of years. We believe that there is an increasingly connected relationship between the creator and the consumer, and Hollywood has had a hard time thus far figuring out how to build that direct relationship.

You see certain companies in every decade, in every era, able to have this banner that signifies something to an audience. A24, Neon and Blumhouse are probably the best examples today. So going public with this raise wasn’t out of necessity. There are a number of high net worth investors in our network that are going to come in on the investment. But we’ve already seen one investor put in $100,000 from completely outside of our network.

We’re at around $525,000 after a week, and part of where it comes from is the privilege and the honor or joy of growing up inside of Hollywood and getting to have this perspective on how movies are made, and believing that in sharing that there is a galvanizing force for fans of film that we can connect with. So it’s both practical belief that there is a much broader audience ready to impact and create a new financial model for independent film, and then also purely the experiential, the belief that we can build a brand with this experiment and see how that can grow into the next chapter of the company.

Your team held a classic film screening at TIFF this year. How did that go with expanding awareness of the investment program?

The TIFF event was really awesome. We held it at the remodeled Sutton Hotel and a really great variety of people came. We featured new work from this Toronto based music and film collective called Shy Kids, who are doing their first feature project with us, and then we showed “Phantom of the Paradise” to celebrate its 50-year anniversary. And in that it’s kind of this fusion of the old and the new. We’re honoring legacy and what we’re building from, and we’re also championing new voices and the next generation. 

Tell us more about this project you’re working on with Shy Kids and Alexander Weinstein called “AUTOBiOGRAPHY.” What attracted you to that project?

I think Shy Kids are an incredible, incredible collective. They’re brilliant filmmakers, and the way they see the world inspires me. and I learned so much from the work we’ve done together. Max Loeb, our director of development, knew them going back to college. They met and formed a band, originally, and then made a short film called “Noah,” which won Best Short Film at TIFF. It was one of the first “screenlife” films where it is filmed entirely from a computer screen.

We connected a handful of years back, and we made a short film together called “Jeff” that was about an Amazon delivery drone having an existential crisis after the fall of humanity, unable to deliver anything. Alexander Weinstein saw the film as a judge at a film festival and reached out to Walter Woodman, of Shy Kids, and said, “I love this short. Let’s talk.”

And you know, Alexander’s brain is like a modern day Ray Bradbury. He sees the intersection of humanity and technology, and in such genius ways. The way that that project evolved was very organic. We had been talking about the outgrowth of “Jeff” into a feature film, and telling the story from the perspective of the internet. That’s “AUTOBiOGRAPHY.” 

There’s been a lot of discussion around AI and about its potential future impact on copyrights, the creative process and so much else in the industry. After your time working on projects involving AI, how do you see the technology developing in the short-term future, like the next year or so?

Well, I think that Shy Kids was uniquely positioned toplay in that sandbox, because they are an animation and VFX and filmmaking and music collective, right? “Air Head” was so grounded in their music and the voice of the narrator being so human, and they understood all of the tools in the toolbox of digital production and specifically postproduction. And they are a collective, so there are many of them to create renders and to go through the process of trial and error.

I think there’s so much more work to do before we reached that terrifying point of displacement of the human, and I think that the human is always going to be the essential driver of the creative process. I’m simultaneously a purist. We just shot a music film on 16mm cameras and it was so amazing working with Kodak stock. But at the same time, just as our company has always been producing film but are now moving into television, we are in this place with technology where we are expanding but there’s room for both the old ways of filmmaking and the new, just as there’s all this renewed interest in listening to music on vinyl as well as on streaming.

So I’m hopeful that rather than seeing AI as the end of days, it’s just the beginning of new days. There’s amazing new modes of storytelling and distribution that will will continue. My father would always say movie theaters are the cathedrals of our time, and had very little doubt. You know, people were terrified that the photograph would destroy painting, but it brought around abstract expressionism. All the questions of truth and how we relate to what we watch are important ones that we’ll need to really grapple with. and forge meaning from. Expansion of how many people can tell stories is an exciting one, and one that the industry should embrace.

The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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