“I didn’t consciously choose film” Christina Sibul said in our Zoom call about how she initially got involved in the film industry. It was actually her boyfriend at the time who, in a sense, started her journey. He was an advertising copywriter in New York and dreamed of becoming a screenwriter, so Sibul suggested moving to Los Angeles. While he was pursuing a career in film writing, she is said to have sought creative work elsewhere. “I had always been connected to creating – that has always been my interest in a way – but what area it is in [wasn’t] necessarily a big problem for me.”
Shortly after landing in Los Angeles, Sibul found himself in the film industry anyway, particularly in the independent film scene. “I was really lucky. I got into a relationship with a really extraordinary independent producer, who had phenomenal taste in projects and material [and] who was very nice and willing to guide you about the industry.” That producer was Michael London, who has produced dozens of critically acclaimed films to date, such as Alexander Payne’s sideways and Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen (which Sibul was also working on). “He’s always been a very profound influence. He also gave me, really, my first job in many ways in the industry.”
On discovering cinema and building her career
Sibul grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and it was here that she was first introduced to cinema through two avenues. “One was the birth of cable,” she said, notably recalling being an avid viewer of the AMC channel, which “played all black and white movies for the most part, and I fell in love with all Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant movie.” The second, perhaps more formative, avenue through which she gained access to the cinema was a place called The HUB. “I don’t know what it stands for, but it was one of the sororities” [at Penn State University]. They had a foreign movie series, and you sat in these hopelessly uncomfortable plastic chairs and watched foreign movies.”
These films from the second half of the 20th century — from the films of Frederico Fellini to those of 1986 Betty Blue – had a major impact on Sibul, leading her to attend Yale School of Drama, where she earned a degree in dramaturgy. “The essential definition of dramaturgy is trying to listen to the artistic identity of something,” she said. In terms of how that translates to film, Sibul went on to explain how her work as an indie producer often shifts between development – “that’s the idea of working with a writer/director and [trying to] listen to what they actually want to say in this piece” – and production. And sometimes both are involved depending on the project. scripts – you worked with filmmakers, and then you took those movies all the way through production, instead of just sending them to the production team.”
This may be why, in her interview with avenue for their September/October 2020 release, Sibul described themselves as the ‘Ray Donovan of independent films’. If you look at her credits, her involvement in movies like Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown, sidewaysand The visitor varies from development consultant to production manager to producer. Sibul, simply put, is the ‘fixer’, doing whatever it takes, in whatever capacity, to get a movie made. Following these feelings, Script Magazine more recently dubbed her “the indie whisperer.” When asked to comment on these titles, she said, “I think it’s partly because I’ve worked on both sides of the coin: studio releases and indie movies. [also] really enjoy dealing with filmmakers.”
Butter: Making a movie in 20 days
One of the first conversations Sibul had with writer/director Paul A. Kaufman was about her experience developing and producing book-to-film adaptations, including films like sideways — “My greatest involvement or contribution to sideways was the fact that I read every version of the novel as it was formulated.” – en House of sand and mist. Given the success of these films, Kaufman later phoned Sibul about his desire to adapt Erin Jade Lange’s novel Butter. “I read the book in a day and I thought, there’s definitely a movie in this,” she said. “I was very enthralled by the story for a number of reasons. First, because of Butter’s story and that desperate need for someone who grew up socially awkward to fit in. And then, [how] Erin Jade Lange thinks critically about the teenage herd in many ways.”
Butter tells the story of the titular “Butter,” as everyone calls him, an obese high school outcast (played by Alex Kersting) who decides to eat himself to death live on the internet and invite everyone to watch. Due to the events, his announcement attracts positive attention from those around him, which is beginning to look like popularity. This puts Butter in an awkward position as his suicide deadline approaches. “That shoot was kind of a moment in time, in terms of there was a lot going on around it,” Sibul said of the film’s 20-day shoot, which was filmed in California during the Woolsey Fire that raged in LA and Ventura Counties and , in fact, the houses of some of the cast and crew burned down. “I think we were all just really happy to be working, happy to focus on something creative and productive.”
Monica: Makes its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival
Directed by Andrea Pallaoro, with a script co-written by Pallaoro and Orlando Tirado, Monica is a deeply intimate investigation into family, redemption, identity and trauma in a story about a woman, the titular Monica played by Trace Lysette, who returns home to care for her terminally ill mother (played by Patricia Clarkson). “Monica comes home in many ways from an end-of-life crisis with her mother, but she also comes home in many real ways to meet herself, meet her authentic self, [in order to] put these pieces of what was broken in her life back together,” Sibul said. “I’m much more at ease, shall I say, in that dark, moody, personal template that Monica brings. It speaks to my soul in a very real way.”
Monica couldn’t be more different from Butter, from the tone, the story and even the aspect ratio. (“But there are similarities in that idea of exiled populations, populations that we have not fully embraced socially with the love we should have.”) The film first came to Sibul through its production partner for the film, Karen Tenkhoff. To collaborate MonicaSibul and Tenkhoff, the script’s main producers, have focused heavily on the script, “clarifying some of the discussions, in an effort to clarify the psychology of what is happening to Monica.” It is noteworthy that reading the script evoked an emotional response in Sibul that she hadn’t felt since reading the script for Catherine Hardwicke’s film. Thirteen, which was one of the first films in her career. Visceral, almost like a call to action, she knew she had to be part of bringing Monica to life.
The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last summer, and looking back, Sibul feels “the absolute joy and gratitude” to be a part of that film. Everyone on MonicaThe set, she recalled, had “skin in the game,” which is indeed not uncommon for anyone working in indie cinema. “Independent film will never be easy, but [we try to look at] how can we make this route executable? How are we supposed to push that Sisyphean boulder over the hill anyway? Indie movies are usually about pushing that boulder up and down, and then it rolls down for years. Until it eventually goes up and down.”