“I wanted to learn about editing, visual correction, and sound mixing,” she tells me 25 years later.
“我想学习剪辑、视觉矫正和混音,”25年后她如是跟我说道。
Not long after, she worked as a production assistant on the 1995 Denzel Washington film Devil in a Blue Dress, helping with casting, among other things.
That inquisitiveness, as well as nearly three decades in front of the camera, has made Witherspoon one of Hollywood’s most astute producers.
她的好奇心,以及近三十年来面对镜头,使得威瑟斯彭成为好莱坞最精明的制作人之一。
She turned Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl into a $369 million worldwide hit in 2014.
2014年,她将吉莉安·弗琳《消失的爱人》制作成为全球票房3.69亿美元的热门电影。
Then came HBO’s Big Little Lies, executive produced with costar Nicole Kidman; the cultural bellwether about female relationships and domestic abuse, based on a novel by Liane Moriarty, swept nearly every category for which it was nominated at the 2017 Emmys.
But Witherspoon is also laying the foundation for a direct-to-consumer brand, one that is already beginning to speak to women through a website, social media, YouTube and Facebook videos, audiobooks, podcasts, and newsletters.
But as one of her coworker remarked: “She’s bubbly and perky and scarily smart. I thought, Oh my god, it’s Elle Woods! But ... people who underestimate her learn their mistake really fast.”
She gets teary talking about the film’s impact. “I didn’t even understand when I was making it that it was a bit of a modern feminist manifesto,” she says.
“Seeing a woman who is interested in feminine attitudes—getting her nails done—but who is also interested in promoting herself and accomplishing things was a new idea of feminine. A lot of women related to that, and the feeling of being underestimated.”
There are many female-focused production companies, and several successful digital brands that produce social content directed at women, but no entity has yet tried to do what Witherspoon is attempting: to build a premium independent film and TV studio within a direct-to-consumer, female-led brand that operates on multiple platforms.