Director Molly O’Brien has signed with WildLife Management, a division of OneSuch Films. Both shops are bicoastal.
While O’Brien has no commercial experience, she has been a documentary filmmaker for the past 10 years. After graduating from NYU’s film program in the early ’90s, O’Brien became an associate producer at PBS. She later worked on documentaries for TNT and National Geographic. O’Brien is one of the makers of the soon-to-premiere FOX documentary series American High, about students in Chicago. She has also been tapped by the fledgling Oxygen network to direct two one-hour documentaries for Sixteen, a series focusing on several groups of teenage girls.
But it was O’Brien’s ’98 short film, Some Common Things That Happen To Corpses, that jumpstarted her spot directing career. So far, the 17-minute movie about a woman stuck in a mortuary has been screened at the Montreal, New Orleans, Hollywood and Sao Paolo, Brazil film festivals. After being courted by several companies, Los Angeles-based O’Brien decided on WildLife.
The idea of directing spots first occurred to O’Brien back in ’98 when she visited a friend on the set of a commercial he was shooting. O’Brien recalled, "I just had the best time, sitting next to him and watching him work. It seemed like a great place to explore lot, of different stylistic things and ideas."
O’Brien had wanted to diversify into fictional storytelling for some time: "As a director, I started studying acting about five years ago; I fell in love with it. That’s what made me want to branch out from the documentaries: I wanted to work with talent again and to get a bit more control over the storytelling."
O’Brien and Brian Donnelly, executive producer of OneSuch Films and WildLife Management, met for the first time last year after a colleague at TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, sent Donnelly a copy of Some Common Things. "I was really intrigued by her creativity and her ability to work with talent," Donnelly said. "But then, while we were talking, she got this gig on American High."
Working on the documentary meant moving to Chicago for a year and "following these high school kids around," said O’Brien. "It wasn’t feasible to pursue spot work."
O’Brien hasn’t received any boards yet because "she’s basically been unavailable to us until about a month ago, and then she picked up these two pictures for Oxygen," according to Donnelly. However, he believes she will find a niche without much difficulty: "I think that where Molly will fit is working with real people and talent."
O’Brien credits her family with giving her the skills to pursue a career in film: "My mom’s a psychologist and my dad’s a writer, and I think I inherited a gift for empathy from my mother and a gift for storytelling from my father," she commented. O’Brien’s devotion to the medium of film comes from her grandparents George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill, both Hollywood film actors.
O’Brien’s approach is unusual in that shes not an adherent of any one style: "Someone just asked me, ‘What’s you visual style?’ and I always find that question a little odd because the idea is more important than the style. I think that the ideas that the agency and the director bring to the project are much more important than the way that it’s shot. The ideas are what I’m interested in, really. My documentary and narrative backgrounds and styles are very different because you do what’s appropriate to the idea."
Theatrically, O’Brien is represented by Jenny Fritz at the William Morris Agency, Los Angeles.
WildLife’s other directors include Mark Celentano, Max Da Yung Wang, Paul Freedman and Jay Torres. OneSuch Films’ directors are Bruce Nadel, Bill Scarlet and John St Clair.
WildLife Management and OneSuch Films are repped bicoastally by Necessary Evil’s Debra Roberts Sher, Jennifer Iversen and Jacquie Jones. The Los Angeles-based Sher handles the West Coast, while New York’s Iversen and Jones cover the East Coast. Chicago-based Doug Stieber and Lynn Mutchler serve as Midwest reps.
