When Kara Durrett and Jesse Burgum, the duo behind the production and financing company Pinky Promise, first met, it was 104 degrees. They were filming in the attic of a church in Decatur, Georgia, for Honk for Jesus: Save Your Soul, the first Burgum-financed film on which Durrett served as an independent producer.
“A lot of people were focused on where they were sitting in relation to the monitor. Kara was finding the fans and the AC guy. I was like, 'OK, this girl is the real thing,'” Burgum recalls. The film played at the Sundance Film Festival, sold to Focus Features. And Durrett and Burgum went on to form a partnership that has included such titles as Andrea Arnold's Cannes-nominated Bird, Scarlett Johansson's directorial debut (upcoming via Sony), and Gia Coppola's Pamela Anderson film The Last Dancerpremiered at TIFF on September 6.
Before landing in Canada, Pinky Promise met DAY to talk to Arnold about the state of independent funding and dance at Cannes.
How did Jesse contact you, Kara, on the set of Honk for Jesus?
KARA DURRET Most financiers would come in and just bring their friends or try to pretend they know so much. Jesse would come in and be like, “I don’t know, I’ve never been on a set before.” Towards the end of the movie, Jesse was like, “Hey, I’m actually going to go out and raise a ton of money for women and POC filmmakers, LGBT filmmakers, and start a company. Do you want to join us?” I remember thinking, I’d met so many financiers at the time who were saying that. I had so underestimated her. I walked away and left, and I made another movie, where I was in a quagmire. The whole time, Jesse was building and raising money and hiring and calling me, keeping me updated. In 18 months, he raised $26.5 million. That’s when we started our producing partnership and thought, “How do we find these filmmakers who aren’t making their movies and how do we make them?” We’re always going to be funding the Andrea Arnolds of the world. We're always going to take risks with those kinds of movies because we don't know who else is going to make them when times are this bad. And then we're always going to make stuff that feels new and exciting. [projects].
Jesse, your family has a background in business and investing. [Burgum’s father is North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a tech developer and investor.] How has all this influenced the business behind Pinky Promise?
JESSE BURGUM I always say that Pinky Promise is the result of what happens when you grow up in a family full of businessmen because it really is the intersection of those things. There are a lot of things that you pick up at the dinner table that I think you wouldn't necessarily know based on my resume or my education, which is a classical acting degree. So I definitely learned a lot from them, and definitely through relationships and their past experience I was able to get an email address. But then it was like, “OK, good luck.” [I started] cold email people.
DURRETT There was a five-second rumor mill in the industry when we first started four or five years ago where people thought it was Jesse's dad's money or Jesse's family's money. His dad is not an investor in the company. The money is raised completely outside of his family, and Jesse spent months putting together a business plan and building an actual structure and a model that made sense. In the beginning, I used to be very protective as a friend, like, “How dare you doubt what she did.” Now it's really funny to me to see other people realize that they just completely underestimated a woman who went out and raised that much money on her own.
How do you decide which projects to fund and which projects you also want to produce?
Burgundy Because we are functionally a VC on the financial side, we have a very disciplined selection process that we approach in the traditional way that any VC investing in a startup would. We have due diligence sheets. We have a process called the four Ps, which are kind of the four factors that determine whether or not Pinky Promise is going to do something. Progress, because we are a mission-driven company. Profit, because we are not a nonprofit, we want to make money and continue as long as possible. Prestige: we want to do work that feels like it can hold its own in the zeitgeist. And then partners: you basically get married to someone for several years. If there’s one thing I would say we are completely uncompromising about, it’s the character of the people we work with, because life is too short.
DURRETT We went to Cannes and had a party for BirdAndrea's film. There were 300 people, and they are all standing outside the building watching us [on the dance floor] — the three girls from Pinky Promise dance as if no one was watching. Then Andrea arrives in a one-piece. And the four of us danced for an hour. It’s one thing to make a film now, and another to distribute it. How do you navigate the current distribution landscape?
DURRETT Jesse and I made a decision about a year ago. We want to learn more about distribution. We want to learn more about what the landscape looks like from their perspective. We’ve decided now that for every film we dive into, the best thing for the film is to figure out how to get it seen, first. Over the last year, we’ve almost flipped the thinking. It’s no longer, “How do we make a film?” Now it’s, “How do we get this film seen?” And then once we know that, then it’s, “How do we make the film?” Even if that means having a conversation with a distributor upfront, asking, “Is there a way we can share the risk? Can we do better marketing? Can we put more money into certain aspects of the film that will make it feel bigger for you?” Even with the Scarlett film, when we built that film and Scarlett attached, we all took it to Sony and TriStar first. Not just to pay for it, but to really plan the distribution. Also, [Sony] The classics have launched and now we're making them all, along with Wayfair [Justin Baldoni’s company, which worked with Sony on It Ends With Us] as a financier.
You said that Pinky Promise is agile and that it has helped you ride the waves of the last two years in Hollywood. What are your thoughts on scalability?
DURRETT I will say Jesse's super strength is hiring and growth. That's where I think his family's business background is in his blood. Because I'm a person that, like, every six months is like, “Buy! Buy! Buy!” I just want to always grow. Jesse will say, “Let's talk about what we need for six months, and then if we still need it, let's hire.”
Burgundy Every ambitious company has to plan for what it can do now. I'm not the first person to say this, and I won't be the last, but you have to have a higher tolerance for uncertainty for a startup, but also in this industry. So you also have to choose people who are willing to be in the same boat with you. We're in a moment where it's like we have to look at what we can do and also where we want to be. We don't want to start a distribution company, but we definitely want to be part of the solution to a problem that we're seeing, where right now there's this glut of product, there's a lot of great movies that aren't being seen. There's a much smaller number of people who are able to bring those movies to their audiences. The industry is obviously ripe for disruption. Entertainment is such a tradition-driven industry, which can be great, but maybe we're not that quick to change, especially when people have been burned by [other] Industry disruptions like the streaming economy change overnight. So many conversations about the problems the industry is facing right now are about, “How do we get back to those good old days?” I think that's a really dangerous way of thinking because it wasn't perfect back then either.