‘A real point of view’ … Pretty Babies, written and directed by Tyler-Marie Evans and produced by Vachon Photograph: Courtesy EIFF View image in fullscreen ‘A real point of view’ … Pretty Babies, written and directed by Tyler-Marie Evans and produced by Vachon Photograph: Courtesy EIFF Film Interview ‘I love provocative stories’: producer Christine Vachon on fighting for her ‘offensive’ movies Ryan Gilbey The maker of indie classics Kids, Swoon and Poison on daring to have a temper in the 90s, what some producer credits mean – and what happened between her and Joaquin Phoenix
Prefer the Guardian on Google T railblazing producer Christine Vachon bestrides the world of US independent film-making like a colossus. She has championed idiosyncratic American cinema for more than 35 years, scoring hits such as the romcom Materialists, which starred three superhero actors (Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, Chris Evans) and grossed $108m, alongside curiosities such as Zola, a strippers’ road-trip comedy based on a string of viral tweets.
Vachon got her start in the early 1990s. Her often scandalous movies – from Poison (gay prison sex) and Swoon (gay child killers) to Happiness (paedophile dad) and Kids (delinquent teens) – dominated the cultural conversation decades before boutique studio A24 had sold its first tote bag. Her production outfit Killer Films, which she founded in 1995 with Pamela Koffler, has as its logo a cartoon bunny with a target for a body, mischievously evoking the company’s blend of irreverence and danger. “I don’t think we’ve ever made a movie that somebody hasn’t been offended by,” Vachon said in 2000.
Times change. Back then, Killer was on the brink of respectability thanks to Boys Don’t Cry, for which Hilary Swank won an Oscar for playing the murdered transgender man Brandon Teena. In 2024, Materialists director Celine Song’s gorgeous but conspicuously uncontroversial debut Past Lives became the first Killer film to receive a best picture Oscar nomination.
View image in fullscreen Delinquent … Rosario Dawson and Chloë Sevigny in Kids. Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy It has been a while, then, since Killer was the industry’s scrappy outsider. “I sometimes say we’re the adults in the room,” Vachon tells me. Now 63, the tousle-haired, New York-based producer is speaking from a terrace overlooking the sea in Trouville-sur-Mer. She is visiting family here before heading to the Edinburgh film festival for the world premiere of Killer’s latest production, Pretty Babies. Written and directed by newcomer Tyler-Marie Evans, it follows two aspiring teenage actors who run off to Los Angeles, seduced by the glamour of old Hollywood, only to slide into sex work. It is rather as if Thelma and Louise’s road trip had taken them to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
I’m not sure Joaquin would want to work with me again What makes Pretty Babies a Killer film? “We love to encourage stories that feel personal and provocative and have something to say,” says Vachon. “It was not as if Tyler’s script was utterly original in terms of the issues she was dealing with. But she approached them in an original way. She has a real point of view and she can speak about her work very well.” She can indeed: at a recent screening, Evans explained that she intends the movie “to show that sexually objectified young women ask themselves the same questions as Dostoevsky”.
It is a confident, eye-catching debut but the likelihood of a controversy equal t…