Schuyler Weiss opened his masterclass at an MPA event during the Tokyo International Film Festival‘s TIFFCOM market by tackling the most frequently asked question in his career: What does a producer actually do?
Comparing himself to “a sort of cartoon sheepdog, endlessly moving the flock forward together, unrelentingly driven, but always relentlessly positive,” Weiss emphasized the protective nature of producing. “Above all, protective of the group, and most importantly, protective of the entire creative endeavor,” he said during the session.
The producer, who has worked with Baz Luhrmann for approximately 20 years, described filmmaking as an exercise in balance and tension. “The most quintessential tension of all in show business is probably between art and commerce,” Weiss said. “You can’t have one without the other. You can’t tell stories for no one, and yet to try and convene people together to watch a movie that has no art and has no soul, has no story at the center of it is a hollow exercise.”
Weiss began his film career as a production assistant at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, landing his first job by signing up on a clipboard. His assignment: defending 20 parking spaces during peak hour on a Sydney street corner at 4 a.m., armed with parking cones, an orange vest and a clipboard. “From that moment on, I was hooked,” he said, watching the film crew assemble around him piece by piece.
Working on “Australia” with Luhrmann provided his comprehensive education in filmmaking, from script development through global marketing. The experience included memorable moments like karaoke with Hugh Jackman and the local Fox distribution team at 2 a.m. after the Tokyo premiere. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of that,” Weiss said.
The journey convinced him he “never wanted to just go back to one part, one slice” of the filmmaking process. To achieve this goal as a producer, Weiss moved to New York City and started making low-budget independent films. “When you have no money, you have to just work it out,” he said of making ultra-low-budget movies in the U.S. independent system.
He produced approximately half a dozen indie films, several premiering at Sundance, including “Piercing,” based on a Japanese novel by Murakami Ryu. Weiss described his career philosophy of alternating between different types of challenges: “Pushing yourself to keep up with a fast moving herd with great experience and great power” versus having “no one with whom to keep up, no one even noticing whether you’re going to succeed or fail, except yourself.”
About capturing musical performances on film, Weiss detailed the extensive preparation required for “Elvis.” The team began recording with Austin Butler in Nashville’s RCA studio — where Elvis himself recorded — approximately a year before shooting began in Australia. “We’re not big believers in capturing music performances live on set,” Weiss explained. “Preparation is everything. You really have to take some big leaps, because you’re committing to creative decisions about the music well before you film anything.”
The production created a hybrid musical language blending Elvis’s original vocals with Butler’s voice. For 1950s material, recorded in mono and unsuitable for modern Atmos theater sound, the production used exclusively Butler’s vocals. For later concert footage with multi-track Elvis recordings, they often blended both voices. “Focus 100% of your energy on set to capturing the visual side of that performance, and then you can continue to build on it in the post production process, musically,” Weiss advised.
The approach proved so successful that Weiss applied similar techniques to his subsequent film “How to Make Gravy,” a sub-$10 million independent Australian production starring Daniel Henshall. For a prison choir sequence, the team pre-recorded complex arrangements that would have been impossible to capture live on set.
“Elvis” faced unique challenges filming during the pandemic, particularly recreating a performer whose “signature move is to get down from the stage in the audience and kiss just about every member of the audience you can find.” The production invented solutions including an “extras antibacterial mouthwash station.” Weiss credited closed borders with creating unexpected benefits: “There was something about making a film in this kind of perfect isolation and perfect focus that I think produced an extraordinary result.”
The marketing challenges extended beyond production. As the then-head of Warner Brothers marketing told Weiss, “he was going to be damned if he was going to make Austin a star with this movie and then have the next guy reap the benefits when Austin became a star.” The strategy succeeded, placing Butler on the cover of every major magazine worldwide before release. “He was a household name by the time we rolled out the movie,” Weiss said. The film earned a standing ovation at Cannes and grossed over $300 million globally.
Weiss previewed “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” a documentary culled from approximately 60 boxes of never-before-seen footage from Elvis concerts between 1970 and 1972. Luhrmann traveled to Wellington to work with Peter Jackson on restoration, syncing lost audio from work prints. The documentary features approximately 40 minutes of previously unheard Elvis dialogue. “Baz committed himself to having Elvis narrate the film. So it really is Elvis singing and telling his own stories,” Weiss said. The Imax-finished film releases worldwide through Universal Pictures and Neon in late February.
On artificial intelligence, Weiss revealed the “Elvis” team used machine learning techniques approximately a decade ago, before the term AI became common. To insert Butler into classic Elvis films, they partnered with the University of Adelaide’s technology lab rather than major VFX companies, who “weren’t really thinking along those lines.” “We weren’t calling it AI, and we had to look outside our own business to do it,” he noted.
Today, Weiss and Luhrmann use AI as a creative tool for concept imagery and iteration, though never in finished film products. “Baz knows the difference between creative and generative, and AI is just a derivative tool that can collage a seemingly infinite, but actually finite bunch of stuff. That’s not creativity.”
Looking ahead to Luhrmann’s “Joan of Arc” biopic starring 18-year-old English actress Isla Johnson, Weiss positioned the project as a response to uncertain times in Hollywood. “The only way to continue to do that is to come back to where we began: to believe in original storytelling and believe that, that will win the day,” he said.
The story of a 17-year-old girl in a “fractured and devastated world, her country on its knees, and the future for young people completely uncertain,” with her fate “held tightly in the knobbly fingered grip of a bunch of the entrenched powers,” feels timely. “Her ability as a 17-year-old girl to break that world wide open and recapture the future for France at a time of change and peril, feels like a story that people might see something in today.”
The production aims to begin pre-production next year, with shooting by mid-2026. Weiss acknowledged budget negotiations with Warner Brothers are ongoing, joking that if they don’t reach agreement, “we’re going to be making the 1928 ‘Trial of Joan of Arc.’” The 1928 silent film by Carl Theodor Dreyer remains “one of the most poignant and poetic tellings of the story,” Weiss said, adding “we carry the spirit of that in our hearts as we try and make our own” version.
On IP dominance in contemporary cinema, Weiss drew historical parallels. “There was a time, if you can believe it, when the most sure fire commercial kind of movie that you could make was a Western,” he noted. “Taste is a funny thing that way. The IP boom in the Marvel comic book sense definitely seems to be waning.”
Weiss sees opportunity in the current transitional moment between commercial trends: “If we are truly finding ourselves in that slightly liminal state between big commercial trends, that’s a great opportunity in which I think original storytelling can really flourish.”
After “Elvis,” Weiss recommitted to working in Australia and collaborating throughout the Asia Pacific region. Bazmark is developing projects with an animation company in Tokyo and a record label in Seoul. “The more that we can connect the dots between what we do in the Gold Coast, Australia, all throughout this region, we feel like we are so excited to play even a small part in the enormous global cultural potential of the APAC region,” he said.
On distribution challenges for smaller films like “How to Make Gravy” — based on a popular Australian song but difficult to sell internationally despite featuring Hugo Weaving — Weiss acknowledged the landscape has changed. “We’ve broken down a lot of the old systems for disseminating and distributing independent cinema around the world,” he said. “We’re in a challenging spot right now.”
However, Weiss encouraged emerging filmmakers to embrace democratized tools. “The barrier to entry for so many different things is sort of reduced almost to the floor,” he said, noting that Hollywood studios spend millions trying to optimize what individuals can accomplish through Instagram and TikTok. “You have all the same tools that Warner Brothers has in terms of communicating their movie through digital marketing.”
On cultural authenticity versus internationalization, Weiss advocated for leaning into specificity. “The stories that lean into greater authenticity and are less concerned as to whether a broad international audience is going to pick up every single reference” succeed globally, he argued, citing Korean cinema and the Australian animated series “Bluey.” “People readily consume content that wasn’t necessarily made with an international audience in mind, and people like it all the more for it,” Weiss concluded.
