For Producers Will Ferrell and Jessica Elbaum, It’s Ladies First

Watch the closing credits of May December, and a surprising name stands out. How did Will Ferrell, king of the eminently quotable bro comedy, wind up producing Todd Haynes’s moody melodrama? The short answer: It was Ferrell’s Gloria Sanchez Productions that acquired the script, long before Haynes or stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore were attached.

But the long answer starts around a decade ago, when Jessica Elbaum, Ferrell’s former assistant, pitched the comedian on starting a company focused on female-driven projects. At the time, Ferrell was making movies and TV shows with longtime partner Adam McKay through their Gary Sanchez Productions banner. “Honestly, it was a bit of a selfish moment,” Elbaum tells Vanity Fair. “We had done Bachelorette, and I had such a good time working with all of those women. At that point in time…there weren’t a ton of movies like that being made, so I was like, I want to make more with my female friends and female creators. But I also want to do it with Will, because I can’t imagine working with anybody else.”

Thankfully, Ferrell agreed. “I’ll toot her horn,” he says. “She really had this foresight of where there was this need—and this was well before the MeToo movement.”

With Ferrell and Elbaum having assembled, in just under a decade, a slate that includes Booksmart, Hustlers, Theater Camp, and May December, it’s unlikely that their efforts would have stayed under the radar for long. But their ambitions—and profile—grew a few years ago, when Ferrell and McKay dissolved Gary Sanchez and the former moved all his projects under the Gloria Sanchez umbrella. It’s there, with a team of nine women led by Elbaum, that Ferrell now produces starring vehicles like Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga and the Apple TV+ miniseries The Shrink Next Door, while also using his years of experience to help up-and-coming filmmakers get their projects made.

When it comes to that, the comedian is learning the power of staying silent. “It is really exciting to be able to lend whatever currency I still have in this business to new voices,” Ferrell says. “In so many ways, the biggest job I have is really just listening.”

That’s largely what he did when Elbaum brought in writer Samy Burch’s May December spec script. “Samy’s such an exciting original voice, and we read it and we were so drawn to her and the story and the tone,” Elbaum says. Initially, they gave the script to Portman in the hopes that she would direct. But as Portman told VF ahead of the film’s Cannes premiere last year, she couldn’t imagine the film in the hands of anyone but Haynes because it needed “a vision to match the subtlety and nuance of the script.”

May December has a few laugh-out-loud moments, but Ferrell says that has little to do with him. “The sign of being a good producer is to be somewhat open with our involvement,” he says. “It just coalesced, in a way, with the collection of performances and with Todd’s direction and his scoring.” Adds Elbaum, “Our goal was just to protect Samy’s vision, and the good news with this team was that everybody wanted to make the same movie. The creative marriage of all of these different groups could not have been better.”

With the Netflix film hot on the awards trail—it picked up four Golden Globe nominations, three Critics Choice nominations, and a Gotham Award win for supporting actor Charles Melton—Ferrell now finds himself experiencing all the red carpets and dinners and awards shows not as a star, but as a producer. “Jess and I both pinch ourselves that we’re actually supporting things that are getting looked at in a creative light,” he says. “To have this as a moment where we get to sit at a table for a film like May December, they’re kind of special moments because they don’t happen all the time. So we’re trying to soak it all up.”