The wonderful Katie Holly got a very nice write-up in Variety no less over the weekend. You can read the article from their website or you can just read it below as i have shamelessly copied and pasted it here.
I edited a short film several years ago that Katie produced which you can watch here
Spinning a little low-budget Celtic sorcery, Irish producer Katie Holly has parlayed her first feature — the post-apocalyptic “One Hundred Mornings” — into an attention-grabbing indie that won a week’s run in downtown L.A. (courtesy of the cutting-edge Workbook Project). Her second feature, “Sensation,” created precisely that in Toronto this fall. And her next project “Citadel” is a dystopic thriller set in Scotland, whose central character is an agoraphobic. Will it draw the chronically housebound into theaters? “That’s going to be tricky,” Holly says with a laugh.
Holly chalks up much of her tyro success to timing: The Trinity college grad happened to be looking for work when Screen Training Ireland was doing its annual executive education sessions, leaving desks empty at various production companies. “It was just my luck that Treasure (Films) rang up,” said Holly, who after a certain amount of grunt work became an assistant to Treasure’s Rob Walpole (“I Went Down,” “The Eclipse”) and even spent a six-month stint making a Roddy Doyle-authored stop-motion animation film at a castle in Westmeath. “I was off buying Play-Doh and all this stuff,” she said. “We shot a minute a week.”
Four years later, when Irish director Kieran J. Walsh (“When Brendan Met Trudy”) and his producing partner Richie Smith wanted to set up Blinder Films, they called on Holly to establish an inaugural slate of projects to undertake. “Then, after we’d been up for about two minutes,” she said, “the film board announced this Multiple Project Development program, which was basically a slate-funding scheme. It was really the game changer for us.”
“One Hundred Mornings,” helmed by Conor Horgan, takes place after some unspecified horror has beset the Irish countryside (it was funded by the film board’s Catalyst program). It went to Slamdance this year, where Holly says she came to appreciate the plight of American independents. “They’re so incredible resourceful compared to how I’ve been able to raise money,” she says. On the other hand, “there’s only so much money we can raise in Ireland — broadcasters don’t put anything significant in, so it does make you very outward-looking.”
One way she looked was toward the Workbook Project, and its inaugural Discovery and Distro award, which provided the week’s run in L.A. “I think it’s really important what they do,” she says. “Building communities for filmmakers — not just social networks, but a lot of event-based talks and screenings and open-source technology, and sharing information with filmmakers and not looking for recompense for it.”
Holly represents a new generation of creative producer who understands the new models, but appreciates hard work. “You still kind of have to bang on distributors’ doors and show them how you can make something work,” she says. “Or do it yourself. For me, I would like to do it myself — if I could find someone else to handle the paperwork. Because I like producing.”
John Murphy 