10 movies that wouldn't exist without the Sundance Directors Lab
Outside the film festival, the development labs held by Sundance—celebrating their 45th anniversary this month—nurtured some of the country's best indie debuts.
Sundance has always been more than a film festival. As the indie mecca stares down a move away from Park City, there’s the inclination to look backwards at the impact Robert Redford’s brainchild has had on the industry at large over its long existence. This impact reaches far beyond the actual movies accepted into and screened at its festival, extending to those made by filmmakers nurtured at its various Labs—filmmakers like Sinners‘Ryan Coogler, whose Fruitvale Station got its start at the fest (and who stopped living at his parents’ house thanks to a grant facilitated by the Institute). The development side of Sundance has kickstarted the careers of countless directors who’ve gone on to be household names, ranging from Quentin Tarantino and the Daniels to Paul Thomas Anderson and Chloé Zhao. As the 45th Directors Lab comes to a close, here are 10 projects that wouldn’t exist without this important side of Sundance.
The first lab-supported film to be produced, after being developed at the first Directors Lab held in 1981, Gregory Nava’s El Norte blends magical realism and the grounded stories of political refugees. A film that not only earned Nava and his co-writer Anna Thomas an Oscar nomination, but helped influence decades of U.S. immigration policy, El Norte focuses on people that Nava felt “were like shadows that people didn’t see. They didn’t see their heart and their soul.” A film filled with undocumented, Indigenous characters, El Norte remains viscerally relevant in addition to being bitingly satirical and remarkably shot in low light. Its early days at Sundance helped Nava achieve his vision. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, he remembered that “We worked with Sydney Pollack. We worked with Waldo Salt. One of the requests that I made to Sundance was that in order to do El Norte, we would have to bring professional actors together with nonactors. So they brought Ivan Passer, the great Czechoslovakian filmmaker who had done Intimate Lighting and who really knew how to work with nonactors.”
The poster boy for the indie wave represented by Sundance, Quentin Tarantino didn’t just launch his debut gangster movie at the fest out of the blue. Rather, the “anyone can make it” story of a video store obsessive had the springboard of Harvey Keitel, who liked the script and got things fast-tracked with his commitment. But Reservoir Dogs also had a more experienced Tarantino behind the camera thanks to the 1991 Directors Lab. There, he worked with established industry figures like Terry Gilliam, Stanley Donen, Volker Schlöndorff, and Robert Estrin to figure out the look of the feature—to “get out of his system” some overly energetic ideas that simply wouldn’t do service to the script that made him famous, as Gilliam recalled.
Hard Eight
Paul Thomas Anderson’s first feature, originally titled Sydney after its gambler-mentor played by Philip Baker Hall, Hard Eight shot the directorial wunderkind into the spotlight when he was just 23. Sydney grew from Anderson’s first scrappy short, Cigarettes & Coffee, which screened at Sundance and was similarly bolstered by the presence of Hall. That experience led to Anderson’s invitation to the 1993 Directors Lab, the expansion of the short into a feature, and then—in a sequence of events John H. Richardson called “almost mythical, a parable about the necessity of real art”—the repossessing of the film from financiers who almost ruined it. But they didn’t ruin it; Anderson restored the vision he’d worked on at the Lab, got it into Cannes, and used the ensuing goodwill to get Boogie Nights off the ground.
Love & Basketball
Gina Prince-Bythewood worked in TV for years before making her film debut withLove & Basketball. After writing on South Central and directing an episode of CBS Schoolbreak Special, Prince-Bythewood took her personal sports-romance to Sundance’s labs, where she connected with Spike Lee, who would produce the film with the same ethos he expected from his partners: total autonomy for the creative behind the camera. After a few years of work in and out of Directors and Screenwriters Labs, Love & Basketball premiered at Sundance in 2000. The indie classic didn’t immediately translate into career success for its writer-director, but 25 years since its premiere, she’s in the middle of a career resurgence, having pivoted to female-fronted action with The Old Guard and The Woman King.
Walking And Talking
Though Nicole Holofcener was born into the industry (and then further thrust into the film world through her stepfather Charles H. Joffe, who was Woody Allen’s manager/producer), she didn’t strike out on her own until more than a decade after working on films like A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and Hannah And Her Sisters—and working at a video store. But after her five-minute short Angry made it to Sundance, she entered the Directors Lab the following year to workshop Walking And Talking, which would become her debut feature. Even then, it took over half a decade to get the thing made, wrangled by super producer Ted Hope and Holofcener’s chance meeting with Catherine Keener at the gym. The simple film was a standout in a mid-’90s wave of chatty, neurotic comedies, and laid the groundwork for Holofcener’s more complex future films.
Hedwig And The Angry Inch
There was a decent chance that Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Stephen Trask and John Cameron Mitchell’s musical rebel yell from a genderqueer punk, might’ve just stayed a surprise, scrappy off-Broadway hit. Stage star Mitchell was well-equipped to reprise his role, but he also made the film adaptation his directorial debut though he had little experience behind the camera. That meant a few years of development work at the Labs, connecting Mitchell with collaborators like cinematographer Frank G. DeMarco and would-be directors like Forest Whitaker (imagine that take on the film for a second). Thanks to some of the team’s behind-the-scenes connections, the film had distribution and financing before Mitchell was ready to shoot a thing, but it took a year of ramping up and learning before he and his team were able to replicate the DIY spirit of the show.
Me And You And Everyone We Know
After getting her start doing collaborative DIY video projects in Portland’s riot grrrl scene and various oddball performance pieces, Miranda July submitted her first feature script to the Screenwriters Lab and got rejected…twice. But the third time was the charm, which led to the Directors Lab where she’d spend three-and-a-half weeks working on her debut feature, Me And You And Everyone We Know, with creative advisors like Chuck & Buck director Miguel Arteta. But once July got her foot in the door, she took full advantage of the Institute’s offerings, attending writing, directing, composing, and producing events as she was getting ready to make her film. Add in a few eccentric details befitting a July story—a Japanese broadcaster ended up helping keep the film’s financing afloat before IFC came aboard—and you have a strange underdog story worthy of the “))<>((” emoticon.
Swiss Army Man
Speaking of bodily functions represented in ridiculous ways, Swiss Army Man took filmmakers Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert from the viral music video circuit to the feature film world. Just a few years later, they’d all but sweep the Oscars with Everything Everywhere All At Once. But the road to their farting corpse comedy (starring Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe) was long. The same year the Daniels were winning awards for their “Turn Down For What” video, they had attended the Sundance writing lab, where Quentin Tarantino tried to get them to put the Gilligan’s Island theme into the film. They didn’t follow his advice (or continue on with Beck Bennett, who played the Daniel Radcliffe corpse role at the Labs), but the work at Sundance helped the film make its polarizing debut at the fest just a few years later. Or, to put it in Scheinert’s words, “Thank God [Robert Redford] bought that shitty land.”
Sorry To Bother You
It’s not like Boots Riley needed Sundance to find success as an artist. The rapper-turned-filmmaker has been making hits with The Coup since the early ’90s (no other director on this list is featured in a music video with E-40 and 2Pac) but his political, satirical writing finally made it to the big screen in Sorry To Bother You, the stylish spectacle where LaKeith Stanfield puts on his “white voice” as a telemarketer. Originally, the script simply served as the inspiration for The Coup’s sixth album, and was later published in McSweeney’s. But that was enough to get him into the Sundance pipeline, which hooked him up with a creative team (and mentors like David Gordon Green, Guillermo del Toro, and Joan Tewkesbury, as well as advisors like Chiwetel Ejiofor and Bradford Young) that helped the former film school student make his feature debut.
Aftersun
One of the strongest debuts of the last few years, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun not only helped launch its filmmaker into the arthouse conversation, but jettisoned star Paul Mescal into the spotlight. Wells, an NYU graduate who began exploring similar themes in her first short film Tuesday, worked at industry service provider Digital Orchard and then as a producer before her artistic trajectory changed. After her shorts Laps and Blue Christmas got into Sundance, she’d made the contacts necessary to get Aftersun moving, but the COVID pandemic derailed things. This freed her up to go through a virtual version of the Directors Lab in 2020, which she cites as transformative to the film. While she got “lots of practical advice about directing and prep,” Wells also ran into feedback she disagreed with around the tension (or lack thereof) between the central father-daughter duo. “Sometimes when you hear something you disagree with,” she told Deadline, “it clarifies your own position.” So she went her own way, and found herself racking up the awards for her trouble.
