So what exactly does a producer do? The industry legend demystifies a career of award-winning collaborations with Ang Lee and others

Producer, screenwriter, director, studio head, film professor…Detroit-born, Los Angeles–raised filmmaker James Schamus has done it all. But he is perhaps best known as Ang Lee’s right-hand man: writer-producer on Lee’s enduring classics like Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), The Ice Storm (1997) and Lust, Caution (2007), and producer on the taboo-busting, eight-time Oscar-nominated Western Brokeback Mountain (2005). There’s also been Academy Award recognition for his epic martial arts screenplay for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), an adaptation of Wang Dulu’s Chinese wuxia novel.

Schamus’s reputation for bringing artist-led masterpieces to the big screen was burnished during his time as top dog at Focus Features, a studio he co-founded in 2002 and left 11 golden years later with a back catalog boasting Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven (2002), Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges (2008). In 2015 he stepped behind the camera with panache as writer-director of Indignation (2016, shot by Christopher Blauvelt), a take on Philip Roth’s campus coming-of-age story. He hopes there’ll be more. 

Artist-led indies are where Schamus’s heart lies, but his journey to producer started, incongruously, with a clammy hostage thriller—of sorts. Freshly arrived in New York, Schamus found work as a $50-a-day production assistant, constructing dramatic re-creations for an ABC news program. “We built the dungeon, in which we had assumed a bunch of American hostages were being held in Beirut, on a soundstage on East 33rd Street and Eleventh Avenue,” he remembers. “I should check my IMDb page to see if I ever got credit for it.” Schamus also teaches film history and theory at Columbia University. Erudite and affable, even when being interrupted by the honk of trucks outside his Upper West Side apartment, he took time out of an intensive TV writers’ room to provide an insider’s guide to the misunderstood art of being a producer.

Read Phil De Semlyen's interview with James Schamus on GALERIE