Team Downey On What’s Ripe For Theatrical, ‘Sympathizer’ Origins, ‘Sherlock Holmes 3’ & More: “Our Job Is To Get People To Say ‘Yes'” – Crew Call Podcast

Anthony D'Alessandro
·2-min read

What works theatrically? And how do you turn a ‘no’ into a ‘yes’ for a passion project in an everchanging entertainment landscape where there’s a push and pull between the big screen and streaming?

On today’s Crew Call we talk with Susan Downey and Amanda Burrell of Team Downey, who are behind the HBO limited Park Chan-wook series The Sympathizer, about knocking down walls in today’s Hollywood in order to get smart, elevated projects off the ground.

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Says Burrell, who is the President of Team Downey, “Our job is to get people to say yes and that’s with our passion, with our pushing.”

Adds Downey, “The marketplace is fickle, everybody is trying to get people in theaters, or in this case, watching on their streamer…So many things contribute to you getting a ‘yes’ (on a project). Even Robert (Downey, Jr.) gives us a ‘No’.”

While genre is still surefire for the big screen, mid-budget action films are tricky. But there’s hope for auteurs: “There’s an appetite for risky things that get in a conversation,” says Burrell about A24-like projects and their potential to work in cinemas.

You can listen to our conversation below:

With post Covid and the dual strikes impacting consumer supply and demand, producers find themselves in a situation where projects that they were passionate about two years ago, may have expired. What then? Sometimes, there’s a silver lining. Read, the Team Downey HBO series Perry Mason started as a feature project at Warner Bros before it shifted to a limited series; that pivot due to moviegoers’ and TV viewers’ changing nature.

‘The Sympathizer’
‘The Sympathizer’

We talk with Downey and Burrell about how Chan-wook built out The Sympathizer, what attracted Downey Jr. (who plays several characters on the show) and how the Vietnam-war era series speaks to today. The Sympathizer follows a plant who was embedded in the South Vietnam army, but flees to the United States. Even though he’s living in a refugee community, he continues to secretly spy and report back to the Viet Cong.

Team Downey also gives us an update on their projects including the status of Warner Bros’ Sherlock Holmes 3.

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