John Schimmel · Executive Producer

I was between jobs and Hollywood was in a strange time, so you took what you could get. And I was about to go to work with somebody who is written up in more than one book about Hollywood as the worst person in the world to work for. And I had met a guy named Hawk Koch. He was the line producer on the Schwarzenegger movie Collateral Damage that I helped produce. And Hawk called me up and said, 'You can't do that.' And he had just become a partner in Ascendant Pictures, which was Chris's film company, which was the venture that he did between the Wing Commander stuff. And so I met Chris and his partners at the time, and he brought me on as president of production at that company. It was a really interesting company. We were somehow the American agents for a German tax fund. And for anybody that knows about filmmaking, we had 20% first money in, last money out to contribute to movies, which made us incredibly valuable. And we did Lord of War and we did Outlander and Lucky Number Slevin and a bunch of interesting films. And then that company went the way of production companies. The distribution deals make it really hard to survive. And then after that went away, Chris and I had lunch once a month for a while while he was putting this together. Chris and me and his giant dog, Paddington, who we would walk to lunch and then feed bread, his favorite bread from the restaurant we always ate at. Anyway, at some point, Chris said he had put this together and asked me if I wanted to come run narrative. And I said, 'Yeah, sure.' That was 10 years ago.