Schuyler Weiss held a masterclass at the MPA event during the Tokyo International Film Festival’s TIFFCOM market, addressing the question he’s been asked most often throughout his career: What does a producer actually do?
Weiss emphasized the protective nature of production, likening himself to “a cartoon sheepdog, pushing his flock endlessly forward together, relentlessly driven but always relentlessly positive.” “It’s about protecting the group above all else, and most importantly the creative endeavor as a whole,” he said during the session.
The producer, who has worked with Baz Luhrmann for about 20 years, said filmmaking is an exercise in balance and tension. “The most typical tension in show business is probably between art and commerce,” Weiss said. “You can’t have one without the other. You can’t tell a story for anyone. And yet it’s a hollow act to try to get people together to see a movie that doesn’t have art, soul, or story at its center.”
Weiss began her film career as a production assistant at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, landing her first job by signing up for Clipboard. Equipped with parking cones, an orange vest and a clipboard, his job is to guard 20 parking spaces on a Sydney street corner at peak hours at 4am. “From that moment on, I was hooked,” he said as he watched the film crew slowly gather around him.
Working on “Australia” with Luhrmann gave him a comprehensive education in filmmaking, from script development to global marketing. The experience included memorable moments such as karaoke with Hugh Jackman and the local Fox distribution team at 2am after the Tokyo premiere. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of it,” Weiss said.
This journey convinced him that he “didn’t want to go back to being just one part of the filmmaking process.” To achieve this goal as a producer, Weiss moved to New York City and began producing low-budget independent films. “When you don’t have money, you just have to get creative,” he said of making ultra-low-budget films in the U.S. independent system.
He has produced about half a dozen independent films, several of which premiered at Sundance, including “Pierce,” based on the Japanese novel by Ryu Murakami. Weiss explained his career philosophy of alternating between different types of challenges: “To push yourself with great experience and great strength to keep up with the fast-moving herd” and “no one can keep up with you, no one to even notice whether you succeed or fail except yourself.”
Regarding capturing musical performances on film, Weiss detailed the extensive preparation required for “Elvis.” The team began recording with Austin Butler at RCA Studios in Nashville, where Elvis himself recorded, about a year before filming began in Australia. “We don’t really believe in filming musical performances live on set,” Weiss explained. “It’s all about preparation. You commit to making creative decisions about the music long before you shoot anything, so you have to take a really big leap.”
The production created a hybrid musical language that blended Elvis’ original vocals with Butler’s voice. Only Butler’s vocals were used in the production, as the 1950s production was recorded in mono, making it unsuitable for modern atmospheric theater sound. Later concert footage, including multi-track recordings of Elvis, often blended both voices. “On set, focus 100% of your energy on capturing the visual aspect of that performance, so you can continue to build on it musically in the post-production process,” Weiss advised.
This approach proved so successful that Weiss applied a similar technique to his next film, How to Make Gravy, a sub-$10 million Australian independent starring Daniel Henshall. For the prison choir sequence, the team pre-recorded a complex arrangement that would have been impossible to film live on set.
“Elvis” faced unique challenges filming during the pandemic, particularly recreating the performer’s “signature move of stepping off the stage and kissing nearly every member of the audience.” Productions has invented solutions such as the “Extra Antibacterial Mouth Rinse Station.” Weiss acknowledged that the border closures provided an unexpected benefit, saying, “There’s something about making a film in such perfect isolation and such perfect focus that I think produced extraordinary results.”
Marketing challenges extended beyond production. As Warner Bros.’s head of marketing at the time told Weiss, “If he was going to make Austin a star with this movie and pass the benefits on to the next person when Austen became a star, he would be criticized.” The strategy was successful, and Butler appeared on the covers of major magazines around the world before its release. “By the time the movie came out, he was a household name,” Weiss said. The film received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival and grossed more than $300 million worldwide.
Weiss previewed the documentary “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” which was carefully selected from approximately 60 boxes of unreleased footage of Elvis concerts from 1970 to 1972. Luhrmann traveled to Wellington to work on the restoration with Peter Jackson, synchronizing the missing audio from prints of the work. This documentary includes approximately 40 minutes of never-before-heard Elvis dialogue. “Buzz went all out to have Elvis narrate the film, so it’s actually Elvis singing and telling his own story,” Weiss said. Completed in Imax, the film will be released worldwide through Universal Pictures and Neon in late February.
Regarding artificial intelligence, Weiss revealed that the “Elvis” team used machine learning techniques about 10 years ago, before the term AI was commonplace. To insert Butler into the classic Elvis film, they partnered with the University of Adelaide’s Institute of Technology, rather than a major VFX company that “didn’t really think along those lines.” “We didn’t call it AI. We had to look outside of our business to make it happen,” he said.
Currently, Weiss and Luhrmann are using AI as a creative tool for concept images and iterations, but never in a finished film product. “Buzz knows the difference between creative and generative. AI is just a derivative tool that can collage seemingly infinite things that are actually finite. That’s not creativity.”
Weiss sees the project as a response to Hollywood’s uncertain times ahead of Luhrmann’s biopic “Joan of Arc,” starring 18-year-old British actress Ira Johnson. “The only way to keep it going is to go back to the roots. Believe in original storytelling and believe it will win,” he said.
The story of a 17-year-old girl whose destiny is “firmly held in the clutches of powerful figures” feels timely, with “a world cracked and devastated, a nation on its knees, and the future of young people completely uncertain.” “Her ability as a 17-year-old girl to make a big difference in the world and reclaim France’s future in a time of change and crisis feels like a story that people today might see something in.”
The film aims to begin pre-production next year and begin filming by mid-2026. Weiss acknowledged that budget negotiations are underway with Warner Bros., joking that if no deal is reached, “we’ll be making a 1928 version of The Trial of Joan of Arc,” adding that Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film remains “one of the most moving and poetic stories ever told,” adding, “We’re trying to keep that spirit in mind and make our own version.”
Weiss drew a historical parallel to the dominance of intellectual property in modern cinema. “Believe it or not, there was a time when the best commercial fire movie you could make was a Western,” he pointed out. “In that respect, taste is an interesting thing. The IP boom in the Marvel Comics sense definitely seems to be on the wane.”
Weiss sees opportunity in the transition period between current commercial trends. “If we’re really stuck in a slightly marginal state between big commercial trends, I think that’s a great opportunity for original storytelling to really thrive.”
After “Elvis,” Weiss recommitted to working in Australia and collaborating across the Asia-Pacific region. Buzzmark is working on a project with an anime company in Tokyo and a record label in Seoul. “The more we can connect the dots across the region with what we’re doing on Australia’s Gold Coast, the more excited we are to be able to contribute in some small way to the huge global cultural potential of the APAC region,” he said.
As for the challenges of distributing a small film like How to Make Gravy, which is based on a popular Australian song, Weiss acknowledged that things have changed. “We have destroyed many of the old systems for promoting and distributing independent films around the world,” he said. “We are in a difficult situation right now.”
But Weiss encouraged emerging filmmakers to embrace democratized tools. “The barriers to entry for so many different things are almost at the floor,” he said, noting that Hollywood studios spend millions of dollars optimizing what individuals can accomplish through Instagram and TikTok. “We have all the same tools as Warner Bros. in terms of communicating our films through digital marketing.”
Regarding cultural authenticity and internationalization, Weiss advocated emphasizing specificity. He cited the South Korean film and the Australian animated series Bluey as examples, arguing that “stories that are more authentic and less concerned about whether a wide global audience will accept every reference” will be more successful globally. “People readily consume content that wasn’t necessarily created with an international audience in mind, and people like that content even more,” Weiss concluded.
