Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler shared a Best Picture nomination for Past Lives in 2024. On Sunday, the Academy is honoring the partnership behind the film. The two built Killer Films in New York and spent three decades producing independent movies, from Todd Haynes’s suburban drama Safe to Celine Song’s story of two childhood friends reunited as adults.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will present the Killer Films co-founders with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the November 15 Governors Awards at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood. The board also voted to give honorary awards to Glenn Close, animator Floyd Norman and director Ridley Scott. The dinner is a separate event from the competitive Oscars. The Academy’s board chooses the Governors Awards, which also include a humanitarian award. Its rules allow at most one Thalberg award in a year. The recipients can share that one award, as Vachon and Koffler will.
An award for a producer’s body of work
The Thalberg award is named for the Hollywood producer Irving G. Thalberg and recognizes sustained work in motion picture production. The Academy’s award roster lists figures including Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg. It also shows how recently women joined the list. In 2018, Kathleen Kennedy became the first woman to receive the award, sharing it with Frank Marshall. In 2024, Bond producer Barbara Broccoli shared it with Michael G. Wilson. Vachon and Koffler are the first pair of women to share it.
The Best Picture nomination was for a single project and credited them alongside producer David Hinojosa. The Academy’s 2024 awards record also lists Celine Song’s original screenplay nomination. The Thalberg award recognizes what the producers have done across many films. Past Lives gives those two kinds of recognition a point of overlap, 29 years after Vachon and Koffler founded the company.
Todd Haynes and the early films
The two founded their New York production company in 1995. Todd Haynes’s Safe, released that year, stars Julianne Moore as a suburban woman who experiences a series of symptoms she cannot explain. Vachon was a producer. Its suburban interiors and retreat setting give Haynes room to turn a domestic drama into a story about isolation and the search for an explanation. Haynes returned to work with Killer Films on Carol and May December. By the time May December played in competition at Cannes in 2023, almost three decades had passed since Safe. Moore returned too, this time playing a woman whose past comes under scrutiny when an actor arrives to study her for a film.
John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch tells its story through music. Mitchell plays a rock singer who tells her story through the songs she performs. The movie brought Mitchell and composer Stephen Trask’s stage collaboration to the screen in 2001. Criterion’s credits list both Vachon and Koffler as producers, alongside Katie Roumel. The songs carry much of the singer’s account of her own life, with animated and staged sequences that take the film outside a conventional concert format.
From Past Lives to Barbara Forever
In Past Lives, Song’s 2023 feature debut, the story begins with childhood friends in South Korea whose lives diverge when one moves away. A reunion in New York brings them back together as adults. Song later made Materialists, a film about a New York matchmaker whose clients put explicit terms on the choices that Past Lives leaves largely unspoken. The Academy lists both films among the pair’s productions.
Killer Films still works across features and documentaries. At Sundance in January, Vachon and Koffler were there for Barbara Forever, Brydie O’Connor’s documentary about experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer. The Sundance account describes O’Connor going to Hammer’s own archive for footage and recordings. Hammer’s own recordings help tell her story, even though she died in 2019.
