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Only a handful of production companies inspire audience cheers when their name pops up in a movie’s credits. (Leo the Lion’s MGM roar comes to mind, but maybe that’s just fight or flight.) But you know when Killer Films’ rabbit hops onto the screen with its dartboard-target body that you’re about to get your indie world rocked. Recent hits like Materialists and May December are proof of this, but longtime fans of Todd Haynes and off-beat classics like Party Monster, Vox Lux and Kids can trace a long lineage of singular cinematic visions to the New York-based company, headed by producers Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler.
This August, Killer Films celebrates 30 years of movie magic with a two-week series at the downtown arthouse Metrograph, with several in-person intros and filmmaker Q&As. Five of the seven films will screen in 35mm, including Todd Haynes’ I’m Still Here and Far From Heaven, Cindy Sherman’s (only film!) Office Killer, Mark Romanek’s One Hour Photo and John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Janicza Bravo’s Twitter-world masterpiece Zola and Todd Solondz’s controversial Happiness will be shown in digital format.
(You can find a full schedule of screenings and special events on Metrograph’s website.)
The history of Killer is inextricably linked to Haynes’ groundbreaking career: his first feature, Poison, was the company’s first production. Though it helped establish the emerging New Queer Cinema subgenre that brought us Gregg Araki, Cheryl Dunye and Gus Van Sant, the gloriously weird, unpinnable anthology based on the explicitly gay writings of Jean Genet is hardly anyone’s idea of a solid first venture for a fledgling company. So how did that get made?
“I'll tell you exactly how,” said Vachon in an exclusive interview. “It was a film that could be marketed to a very underserved audience, and that audience showed up for it and the movie was profitable. In fact, it broke records at the Angelika that went unbroken for a strangely long time, considering a lot of the queer audiences that went to see it came out scratching their heads, saying, I just wanted to see some boys kissing, what was that?, because it was a very experimental film. But a lot of them came out having had an experience that really changed them, and it changed how they saw movies for the rest of their lives.”
Their success, Vachon believes, was due in part to a lack of options for queer media in the ‘90s. “In those days, it almost felt like we were all in the same goldfish bowl,” she said, recalling how she’d promote Hedwig by personally handing out leaflets at local gay bars, or on a themed float at that year’s Pride parade. (“That foam headdress was just such a great prop, it lent itself to a communal experience,” Koffler chuckled.) But Koffler also added that the audience loyalty they felt had an extra degree of intention: “This was a time when there was no streaming or TV, and more movie theaters and ways to go to the cinema and see stuff.” Everyone who went to see a Killer film, wanted to see a Killer film.
Still, it wasn’t until 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry that Koffler thinks Hollywood stopped thinking of their company as that “stinky little office in downtown New York.” Kimberly Peirce’s biodrama about the murder of a trans man brought the company overnight success, and their first Oscar glories. (Hilary Swank won for Best Actress, Chloe Sevigny was nominated for Best Supporting.) Though she was hesitant about singing their 30th anniversary from the rooftops, as Vachon said she was game to do, Koffler feels a sage peace about their role in the industry.
“The business has changed so many times, in so many ways over the past thirty years, and we really do know what we’re doing at this point,” she told me. “So if anyone’s gonna get to keep making things, I feel like we have a pretty good shot. We don’t have a crystal ball, but we at least know how to figure out the path.”
Below, Vachon and Koffler run down the history of Killer Films through a few of the movies screening at Metrograph. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Office Killer (1997)
Koffler: [Producers] Ted Hope and James Schamus had cooked up a division for their company, Good Machine, called Good Fear, which was intended to make low-budget, artful horror films. But I think ours ended up being the only one…
Vachon: I’d met Cindy a time or two through my partner, Marlene McCarty, when they were both represented by the same gallery, Metro Pictures. We managed to get to her pretty easily and just sat down with her and were like, “What do you think?”
Koffler: There’s a kind of macabre cinematic vibe to her photographs, so it felt like a natural proposition to translate that into her tone and style in movies.
Time Out: I’ve noticed its reputation has increased over the years versus the reception then.
Koffler: I mean, we love that movie. There’s something campy and out-there about it that we felt was of a piece with a sort of artifice, and some of the lines crack us up. “Did you send me something by fax modem?” We quote that a lot.
Time Out: Did you try to pull her back in for another movie after that?
Vachone: I think she had a good experience, though you’d have to ask her. It was a good crew, a great cast and people were really happy to be there. It just felt like one of those movies where we were getting what the director wanted. The reviews were not good, and I think people came after her with knives out because she’d “jumped out of her lane,” but she was sort of like, “Whatever, I got my other thing, too.” And if she ever wanted to do another movie, I hope she’d come to us, but she may have felt like she did what she wanted to do with this one.
Happiness (1998)
Vachon: There was a lot of controversy in the press around its “pedophile loving content” – I say sarcastically – and Good Machine took the movie over when October (which then morphed into USA Films, which then morphed into Focus Features) was owned by Universal, and they suddenly were longer able to distribute it.
Time Out: Would you run into these sudden drops from distributors often?
Vachon: I don’t know the last time that’s happened. I mean, we came under criticism for Swoon because it was at the height of the AIDS crisis and it was considered not a positive image. We got picked on by Stonewall veterans for Stonewall and then they all came to the after-party. And Kids had a journey as well.
Time Out: I’m so fascinated by works that were pilloried by parts of the community in their time for “negative representation.” This sounds so corny, but where did you find the strength to say, This is an artistic statement worth putting out there and hopefully, eventually we’ll be vindicated?
Vachon: You weren’t pilloried the way you are now on social media. I think we just had a very strong sense of the stories we wanted to tell and we were like, Well, what's going to happen? It was definitely, in the AIDS era, an issue. Tom and Todd and I, back in those days, talked a lot about the fact that we weren’t part of a community that had one positive image. But, like, what was that? A 40-year-old doctor who goes to the Pines every weekend? Honestly, what is that? Something we talked about on Swoon, for example, was that one of the leads, who was straight, was asked a lot how he felt playing a gay character. And he was like, Why aren't you asking me how it feels to play a child murderer?
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
Time Out: I’m realizing Killer hasn’t done any other stage adaptations other than this.
Koffler: I guess our source material usually comes through the writers, directors, actors who bring us projects that inspire them. It’s not like we’ve steered away from it. But this was such a unique underground phenomenon that felt very in sync with the kind of story we wanted to tell.
Time Out: Was John Cameron Mitchell in your orbit at the time?
Vachon: He’d actually auditioned for I Shot Andy Warhol to play Warhol. Jared Harris did an extraordinary job, but so did John. I think he and Todd [Haynes] and Tom [Kalin, the film’s producer] were friends while he was developing the Hedwig character at various nightclubs. So, we were hearing about it.
One Hour Photo (2002)
Koffler: Mark wrote that script and sent it to us, saying he wanted us to produce it. Even though it wasn’t his first feature, he really felt like this was somehow the restart of his intention to make movies, and we just figured it out. Searchlight [the distribution company] saw it as a thriller, and could be marketed like that, but creatively, Mark was really going for a dark character study and he rode that line really beautifully and made the exact film he wanted. It struck a chord, and it was our first movie that did some real box office.
Vachon: Yeah, it was number three one weekend.
Time Out: Were you interested in casting Robin Williams against type in this role?
Koffler: My memory is that Mark had a vision that he felt Robin was gifted and was that character: the right age, and an affable, approachable, kind-hearted seeming character. A lot of comedians have that dark current of something sad, and Robin actually did have that underneath. Mark saw that. It wasn’t stunt-casting the way we might think of it today, I don’t remember it like that.
Vachon: It was at a time when Robin was trying to shift into different types of movies and roles. If I remember correctly, his folks called us and said, “I don't know if you're open to this, but…” We went, huh, and Mark really felt that it was something that he could work with.
Zola (2020)
Time Out: You’ve recently been in partnership with A24, do you feel a kindred downtown New York sensibility with them?
Koffler: They’re obviously committed to the theatrical experience and very attracted to strong, original storytelling. It was just inevitable that we’d overlap in films that they’d be right to distribute and finance. And they’re in New York, so it does feel like there’s an affinity. Thankfully, there’s a lot of great distributors, and our movies are right for some and not for others, but it’s been great to get to know those guys because we’ve now done five films with them.
Time Out: How do you feel about maintaining an indie sensibility as you “level up” in terms of reach?
Vachon: It’s always hard, especially these days, to say what exactly makes a movie an indie film? Our movies get their financing in all kinds of ways, often with a studio element, sometimes with a foreign sales element, an incentive, a bank loan, what have you. But if you sell a movie like May December to Netflix after you’ve made it, is it a Netflix movie, or what is it? So I resist those terms a little bit. I guess at the end of the day, is an independent film simply defined by it being the result of a reasonably singular vision, or is it completely about the financing? I did an interview years ago for The New York Times Magazine with Larry Gordon, the big deal Hollywood producer, where we kind of interviewed each other. He had just done Waterworld, and I think before we even began the interview, he said, I always just thought an independent film was a movie you brought to market? And it’s a little, like, it kinda is.