The Queer Queen of the Indie Scene

Being the pretentious cinephile that I am, I'm always on the lookout for new cinematic discoveries — the obscurer the better. I want to go deeper than the Quentin Tarantinos, Kevin Feiges, and Margot Robbies. I am on the search for the people behind the people; the people that keep the dream of what cinema can be alive. When researching for my last article, I discovered a new person of interest.

As I read the Wikipedia page for Safe, one name stood out: Christine Vachon. I'd seen the name before. It popped up during my postcredits deep dive of Materialists. I was surprised that these two movies, 30 years apart, had the same producer.

My noir-detective side kicked in. There was something more to this coincidence. I had to investigate further.

Vachon's personal life, as far as Wikipedia knows, is nothing extraordinary. She was born in the 60s. She's from New York, and still lives there. Her father was John Vachon, a somewhat renowned photographer who'd taken pictures of some celebrities like Marilyn Monroe. Her life partner is Marlene McCarty, a multidisciplinary artist.

But what is extraordinary is Vachon's production credits. Independently and through her company, Killer Films, Vachon's filmography plays like a highlight reel of all the best indie cinema of the past 30 years. Some of her credits include:

• Poison
• Safe
• Kids
• One Hour Photo
• I'm Not There
• Carol
• First Reformed
• Zola
• Past Lives
• May December
• A Different Man
• The Brutalist

Needless to say, her filmography left my head spinning. How had this person produced so many iconic movies, yet slid under my radar? I had to know more. I had to read more Wikipedia.

Most great creators in Hollywood have attached themselves to other great talents early in their career. Scorsese had De Niro. Altman had Gould. Vachon had Haynes. The producer met Todd Haynes at university, and they, along with another friend, formed a non-profit production company that was heavily inspired by the anti-Hollywood sentiment of New York's film scene at the time. She was deeply moved by Haynes's first movie, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Although she didn't directly produce the film, Vachon saw the movie as the type of thing she wanted to see more of on the screen.

As she told Variety, “By the end of the movie, you can’t believe what a great performance the Barbie dolls gave ... I guess seeing that film was a bit of an epiphany for me, because it made me realize that that kind of filmmaking, which was incredibly provocative and subversive and meaningful, but also incredibly entertaining, were the kind of movies I wanted to make.”

In the early 90s, Vachon recognized the underrepresentation of the queer voice in cinema, and sought to change that. This urge to amplify queer voices was, as Vachon tells it, a direct response to the AIDS epidemic of the 80s. In that decade, queer voices were silenced or pushed to the margins over fear spawned from a misunderstanding of HIV.

It was during this era that Vachon created Killer Films with her producing partner, Pamela Koffler. The first movie produced by Killer was Haynes's Poison. Its gay themes were pretty cutting edge at the time and spurred some controversy with culture war conservatives. At Sundance, Poison won the Grand Jury Prize. With an early reputation for quality and representation, Vachon became a prominent voice in queer cinema, especially as it related to independent production.

In Sight & Sound, writer B. Ruby Rich noticed the winds of change in early-90s' film representation. She coined the term "new queer cinema," and Vachon's movies were at the forefront. Some movies that have come to embody new queer cinema in the 1990s include Poison, Swoon, Go Fish, and Postcards from America (which is based on the memoirs of David Wojnarowicz), all of which are produced by Killer.

“I discovered that if you made a movie that had queer content — and the queer audience at that time was so underserved — people would go to it. People flocked to it, because they were so desperate to see themselves represented on screen ... And I discovered that if you made a film for an underserved audience and just marketed it directly to them, and you made it for the right price, you could make your money back and you could make another one.” (Variety)

Now, in 2025, Vachon is as busy as ever. A Different Man was one of my favourite movies of 2024, and Materialists was one of my favourites from this year. She currently has three more movies in different stages of production:

• The Last Day, which is loosely based on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. It is the directorial debut for visual artist Rachel Rose. It stars Alicia Vikander and Wagner Moura. Shooting wrapped in October, 2024, but we're still waiting for the first trailer.
• Late Fame, which has a script by Samy Burch. Samy's last script for May December was nominated for an Oscar. The movie stars Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee. It is expected to premiere at this year's Venice International Film Festival.
• Lone Wolf, which stars Lily Gladstone, Bryan Cranston, and... Chet Hanks!? However, this movie has had financing difficulties. Production was halted, and apparently some of the actors are still owed their wages. Cranston even went to Deadline to say he wouldn't work or promote the film until the wages were paid. Indie film production is not always pretty. Based on my preliminary research, it doesn't look like Vachon is being a bad business partner, but that one of the other production houses went bankrupt and owes its creditors a lot of money. Whatever it is, hopefully they fix it soon and this movie can continue working toward a premiere.

These days, Vachon is surprisingly easy to find. She has a small following on her Instagram (@kvpi), where she mainly reviews airport lounges. She's also, apparently, very open to doing interviews with smaller interviewers. One of her most recent interviews was with Daniel Fee33, a YouTuber with 3,000 subscribers. Despite this interview having under 300 views at the time of writing, it's still an interesting chat which I happily listened to in its entirety.

It was in this interview that I learned that Todd Haynes shot lists months in advance, and that Celine Song had never been on a movie set until they started production on Past Lives. Song's inexperience didn't bother Vachon, though. As she puts it in the interview, "When I speak to a director and they tell me about their story, sometimes I see 'mm they're not really sure, they're not really certain.' And those aren't directors I liked to work with. I really like to work with directors who are very clear about what they want to do."

Vachon has been such a champion of proper representation and making movies with unique perspectives that I'm a little ashamed to only just now be learning about her. I hope she keeps producing for many more years to come, and never loses sight of her independent spirit. And, maybe one day in the not-so-distant future, I'll see her take that long walk up the Oscar stage to accept the award for Best Picture.