Angles: Women Working in Film and Video (1996)

Holidays. Rajski, who was developing Matewan with her partner at the time, Maggie Renzi, asked Green to be her assistant on that job. “She needed a strong production person behind her. I knew what I needed to learn and I could do it with Peggy. So I did that with her, and I kept production managing.” Among Green’s projects were several segments of the American Playhouse series, “Voices and Visions,” about American poets. Green continued to work on Sayles’ projects as well. She was assistant production manager on Eight Men Out. When Rajski and Renski went separate ways, Green and Renski became producing partners for Passion Fish and City of Hope. Green also produced I tend to do more of the day-to-day line producing kinds of things because that’s my background. When John writes a screenplay, I schedule it and budget it. I figure out a structure for it. We tend to do the crew together. Maggie is more involved with the casting because she lives with John, she certainly has his ear in a more direct fashion. She does a lot of supporting of him and translating of what he needs. She knows what’s going wrong or what’s going right. She’s his voice in a lot of ways. ANGLES: What’s involved in line production? GREEN: In a lot of bigger pictures the producers are just putting the deal together, or they’re creative A 10-year-old girl (Jeni Courtney, above left) learns about her roots from her grandfather (Mick Lally) in “The Secret of Roan Inish,” produced by Sarah Green and Maggie Renzi. David Mamet’s Oleanna. Other credits include A Thousand Pieces of Gold and the American Playhouse production, Andre’s Mother. ANGLES: How did Peggy Rajski’s mentoring help you? GREEN: Part of it is simply systems — that there are systems for things. She taught me basic things like how to break down a script and how to structure a budget. A very important thing I learned from her was to never try to do a budget without breaking down the script and scheduling it because you can’t begin to guess what you're going to need until you do that process. It was a lot of practical things. ANGLES: Describe your collaboration with Maggie Renzi. GREEN: Our jobs were far more distinct when we began, but since then we’ve learned a lot from each other and they overlap even more. 10 @ ANGLES producers and working closely with the directors, whereas a line producer is often someone they hire just to run the day-to-day business. It’s a hired gun. We keep it small enough that we don’t hire someone outside to do that. I cover that as well as my producing responsibilities. ANGLES: Could you go through what you did on Roan Inish? GREEN: It began quite a long time ago. Maggie read Rosalie K. Fry’s book when she was a kid, and the book always stayed in her mind. John agreed to do it after we did Passion Fish. She showed it to me when we finished City of Hope. I read it and fell in love with it as much as she had. It spoke to me at a very spiritual level about the connection with nature and animals. The first thing we needed to do was find Rosalie and get the rights to the book. That was something I did. It was quite a lengthy process. She’d written the book 40 years ago. Publishers no longer even had her contracts on file. Nobody knew where to find her. Eventually after months and months of searching, close to a year, I found her through the British Society of Authors. I wrote to Bob Marshak photo