Ted Hope is one of the towering figures of US indie film over the last 30 years. The Good Machine co-founder and former head of production at Amazon Original Movies has worked with filmmakers such as Ang Lee, Todd Solondz, Cindy Sherman and Todd Field on such classics as The Wedding Banquet, The Ice Storm, Happiness and Office Killer. In previous years, you’d have been more likely to find him at Sundance or Cannes than at IDFA.
However, he is the producer of Invisible Nation, his partner Vanessa Hope’s new feature doc about Taiwan’s first female president Tsai Ing-wen, and was talking the project up in Amsterdam last week (where it had its international premiere in the Limelight section).
Autlook recently came on board to handle international sales on the film (represented in the US by Submarine).
It has taken the Hopes seven years to get The Invisible Nation financed and completed. “Vanessa always felt there was a story there. When we started filming, the inside joke was that this is the most important story that nobody wants told,” Hope reflects ruefully on the project’s very lengthy gestation. President Tsai Ing-wen herself observed that China would much prefer if the story was kept under wraps.
This, then, has been a very different experience to working on “corporate” financed projects in which the deadline and delivery date are paramount.
“If I had to say what did I do really well in my time at Amazon, I’d say it was to fight for time for the filmmakers. Every time we did that, it made the movie better,” the producer suggests that projects often benefit from being made over an extended period.
This rule applied to Invisible Nation. Vanessa was tenacious and determined to keep on working on the documentary until it was good as she could make it. As the years passed, upheavals in global politics, among them the protests in Hong Kong and the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, gave the story a new urgency.
Financiers tend to look at producers’ track records. Given that Hope has been involved in dozens of successful films, it still seems surprising that Invisible Nation took so long to complete. “But what I have always found both as an independent producer and as an executive is that nobody ever actually seems to want to make movies,” Hope observes of the mindset of film executives. They’re keener to turn things down than to give them the go-ahead. “You [as the producer] have somehow to find the way not just to keep on coming back and pushing and pushing and pushing, but while you’re coming back, advancing your project so that people see that it’s going to happen whether they’re involved or not.”
And, no, this is far from Hope’s first foray into docs.
“I actually went to film school with the initial intention of making documentaries,” Hope corrects the idea that non-fiction filmmaking is a new venture for him. He rhapsodises about his mentors at New York University. His advisor was celebrated documentary director George Stoney and he was “totally turned on” by the class he was taught by UK documentary guru Brian Winston (“perhaps the best professor I had at NYU”). He also remembers a week when he watched multiple films by maverick directors Raul Ruiz and Sam Fuller, “one intellectual and one visceral but super-interesting filmmaker. I was like, yeah, that is what I got to do.”
Hope’s first student film was a “very straightforward” documentary about the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. As he made it, he quickly identified a challenge facing both campaigning documentaries and experimental film. “How do you get these ideas and these aesthetics accepted in a wide form…I just started recognising that the only people who would care about these certain subjects were already persuaded. They [docs] were always preaching to the converted.”
Hope was coming into the industry in a period when the Sundance Festival was taking off and Steven Soderbergh’s early films, especially Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), were “starting to pop.” He was a man in a hurry. Today, though, as he analyses the tensions and contradictions within the US and global film industry, he sounds more like a Marxist philosopher than the producer he was then, hustling to get new pictures made. The same observation can be made of James Schamus, his old colleague with whom he ran Good Machine. Schamus ended up at Focus Features, part of Universal, while Hope eventually worked at Amazon.
“It’s funny, going back to visions we had of what Good Machine could be and building that together, I always joked that James was the only poet or creative writer that actually read management books in his free time,” Hope observes of the corporate career of his erstwhile colleague. “I think where we bonded was in those concepts of how the system you are in dictates the product you create.”
Schamus lasted 15 years at Focus while Hope later managed five and a half at Amazon. “I definitely could not have got to that five and a half without a few conversations to James asking him, ‘how the hell did he survive?’”
The ex-Focus boss would always tell Hope that if he managed to get one film made each year which wouldn’t have been made without him, it justified the “fight.”
Before he went to film school, Hope worked as a community organiser. He left politics at a young age because the speed of change was too slow for him. However, he felt that films could do some of the same work, namely provide their viewers with a “design for living” and help explain some of the moral and ethical choices they faced.
Before joining Amazon, Hope was CEO for Fandor, the streaming platform for indie movies. He realised “too late” that running that platform did not leave time to build the audience base and fulfil his real ambition – which was to get more viewers watching “authored” work.
“It was clear to me that the long tail was getting crushed by the voices of the already aggregated,” Hope suggests.
When he moved to Amazon, Hope had the mission to get the streamer fully committed to awards-based prestige cinema and to back auteurs. By his own admission, he failed. Nonetheless, he broadened the types of films Amazon was producing. He cites films like Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By The Sea and Garrett Bradley’s Oscar-nominated feature doc Time.
Now, Hope is fighting to get Invisible Nation in front of viewers.
“What people love about it is that it’s a story that they don’t know and when you see it, it has urgency,” he says of the documentary. “They are already Taiwan-curious. They know it is already a flashpoint for something like a world war.”
Hope advocates creating labels and formats for marketing docs. He believes that “people crave truth and facts” and are ready to embrace challenging work but that they “need it in a digestible format…so many movies leave people feeling they stay too long.” He pays tribute to Vanessa for telling “a super-complicated story” in 85 minutes that fly by.
Several sales agents were vying to handle Invisible Nation before Hope went with Autlook. The producer is aiming for the doc to have a long festival run and to be given extensive university, community and educational screenings.
“We have to try to slow things down. Everything is more, more, more…faster, faster, faster…we forget that it is actually the experience, the engagement, the conversation [that matters],” Hope says about getting over the “chronic distraction’ that affects cinema goers. “With a film like Invisible Nation, to hear Vanessa talk about it doubles the understanding, the appreciation and the satisfaction.”
Hope wants audiences to take the time they need to think about the film. “We have all seen movies that allow us to drift a little bit and imagine things in a pleasurable way. I think there will be a growing place for films that have worm holes, escape hatches and tributaries that allow the return of ambiguity…there aren’t simple answers. Don’t we know that now?”
