How Glen Basner and Stacey Snider Plan to Make FilmNation the Destination for Visionary Filmmakers: ‘We’re in the Big Swing Business Creatively’
By Brent Lang
Plus IconBrent Lang
Executive Editor
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When Stacey Snider brings her boss Glen Basner a project she wants to make at FilmNation, he analyzes everything about her pitch — from its budget to the commercial track record of its creative team to the performance of recent films in the same genre. Basner knows the business intimately, having put together financing for one boundary-pushing film after another. Over the indie production and sales company’s 18-year history, he’s helped make everything from “Anora” and “Conclave” to “Mud” and “Arrival.”
“Glen will go through with exacting precision the challenges and opportunities attached to the project, and I’ll be sure that it’s leading to a ‘not this time’ or ‘not this one’ decision,” Snider says. “And he’ll end that assessment with, ‘But this one is great, and I love the filmmaker. Let’s do it.’ And all of a sudden I’ll think, ‘Oh, my God, I thought we were dead, and we’re alive with a path that makes sense.'”
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For Basner, movies are a business, but also, you sense, a calling. He understands that all the data in the world can’t compete with the power of a filmmaker’s vision. After all, would anyone think that a movie about a sex worker and a Russian oligarch’s kid would sweep the Oscars and gross nearly $60 million?
“We want to find material and filmmakers that feel singular,” Basner says. “Our job is not to balance that out with the realities of the marketplace. Our job is to create a strategy and a plan to move the marketplace, so it understands what’s so inspired about something. We’re not looking to repeat some past success that we had. We want to do something that feels new and fresh and exciting to us.”
As he looked to grow FilmNation, Basner turned to an unlikely ally in Snider. She’s a veteran of the Hollywood studio system, having run 20th Century Fox, DreamWorks and Universal, while helping to shepherd classics like “Erin Brokovich,” “Lincoln” and “Gladiator” to the screen. But she wasn’t known for her work in independent film. Still, Basner, who first met Snider in 2003 when Universal bought Good Machine (which later morphed into Focus), believed she had the artistic vision and business savvy to help him as the company’s chief creative officer.
“One of the benefits of being in sales for your career is you get rejected all the time, so you no longer have any shame about the rejection,” Basner says. “In thinking about moving forward, one thing I’m certain of is that we need to get better each and every day. And there was nobody that I’ve spoken with over the years that had such strong creative instincts and articulated them in such a thoughtful way. We’re in the big swing business creatively. I thought we might as well be in the big swing business in terms of our team.”
For Snider, FilmNation was a chance to get back in the game of fine-tuning scripts and helping director’s hone their work. After Fox was bought by Disney in 2019, Snider helped oversee Sister Pictures, Elisabeth Murdoch’s production company, but stepped down as CEO in 2023.
“I missed this, to be honest,” Snider, who joined FilmNation last December, says. “Using my taste and my experience to help filmmakers navigate through the treacherous waters of going from an idea to a production feels really energizing. I’m grateful to be doing this work again.”
FilmNation will hit Cannes with three packages it plans to produce. They include “The Passenger,” a thriller set that follows businessman Otto Silbermann (Jeremy Strong) as he tries to escape Berlin after Kristallnacht. Magnus von Horn, a Swedish and Polish filmmaker whose previous film, “The Girl with the Needle,” was nominated for an Oscar, directs. “Jeremy is gonna break your heart in this movie,” Snider predicts.
There’s also Karim Aïnouz’s “Last Dance,” a father-daughter story set on a gay cruise ship during the AIDS crisis that stars Adrien Brody, Rachel Zegler and Ben Platt, as well as “Asymmetry,” a love story with Richard Gere and Diana Silvers that will be directed by Ed Zwick. In many cases, these are the kind of stories pitched at adults that major studios abandoned in favor of franchises. Snider sees an opportunity in their indifference.
“We like things that are highly authored, elevated in their execution and content and able to satisfy whatever audience we identify as being the most zealous for these stories,” Snider says. “But I want to broaden the aperture of what an independent film is. So if we’re making a spy thriller or a detective story or a genre where the studios had precedence, we can imagine the independent version of that genre.”
FilmNation is hoping to produce between five to seven films annually, most with budgets between $10 million to $50 million. It will do so in a shifting landscape for moviemaking. Fox, which Snider ran, is a shadow of itself now that it’s owned by Disney, and Warner Bros. Discovery is about to be sold to Paramount. Basner acknowledged all the mergers create challenges — namely, if WBD is bought by Paramount, it will bring HBO and Showtime under one roof, depriving producers of revenue they received from licensing their films in the pay-1 window. But he also sees an upside to the disruption.
“The independent film business has always been challenging,” Basner says. “At times it feels existential, but that’s really sharpened everybody’s skills to adapt and evolve, and the survival instincts in our community are very strong and powerful. And what I would say is, at a time of consolidation and great change, there’s a great opportunity for us to take filmmakers who aren’t necessarily making something that feels mainstream enough for a studio, and give them a platform to go reach heights that maybe people didn’t think they could achieve.”
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