Hannah Canter Goes to Hollywood

Hannah, Lucy, and David

LUCY BURDETTE: I love all of our guests (or we wouldn't have them visit!), but today's is especially dear to me. Hannah Canter is my darling nephew's bride--we figured he'd choose someone cute and smart as a whip, and boy were we right! Hannah's a Hollywood woman with so many exciting projects in the works, it was hard to narrow down the questions.

LUCY: You worked on the Netflix's SEEING ALLRED, a documentary about women's rights activist, Gloria Allred, which made its debut at Sundance last month. What a moment for that to happen, with #metoo going viral! Can you tell us a little about making the film, and then the experience at Sundance?

HANNAH: The synchronicity of the entire filmmaking experience could not have been better or more profound! In fact, the directors Roberta Grossman and Sophie Sartain approached Gloria three years before Gloria eventually gave her blessing for the documentary, and I find myself constantly thinking about how if she had given the go-ahead when she was originally approached, we would have made an entirely different film – one that still captured her tireless fight for the oppressed but I doubt it would have felt as resonant and relevant as it does in this #metoo era. And when we did eventually start shooting, the Cosby case wouldn’t break for another couple of weeks, an event that we see as the earthquake that brought on the tsunami of #metoo. 

L to R: Marta Kauffman, Hannah, Roberta Grossman, Gloria Allred, Sophie Sartain, Robbie Rowe Towlin

We feel really lucky and really proud to have been able to capture a soldier on the front line of this movement as it was building. And then, on top of this production journey, to be in the US Documentary Competition at the first post-Weinstein Sundance Film Festival – Gloria happens to also represent a few Weinstein accusers – on the one year anniversary of Trump’s Inauguration and the Women’s March, with Gloria making impassioned remarks at the Park City Rally for Respect… it was kismet. An absolute dream.

LUCY: The TV show Grace and Frankie launched its fourth season on January 19th and its fifth season was just announced. Congratulations! Tell us a little about your role as this launches and what it's like working with those icons.

HANNAH: Thank you! It’s hard to believe we’ve been at it for over four seasons now. I am a producer on the series, but my involvement actually goes all the way back to the development of the show, over four years ago, when we at Okay Goodnight (our production company) caught wind that Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin were interested in doing a television project together. I had just starting working for Marta Kauffman at the time, and we were in the car together and I turned to her and said “What if their husbands are gay and leave Jane and Lily for each other?” 

From there we fleshed out the concept that became GRACE AND FRANKIE, pitched it to Jane and Lily who loved it, and not long after we set it up at Netflix. That whole process was totally surreal for me, a veritable newcomer to producing. I felt like it was the epitome of beginner’s luck. Since then, my role as producer is essentially to maintain the vision for the show throughout all the elements of the creative, always in deference to our Showrunners, Marta Kauffman and Howard J. Morris. In practice, that means everything from giving feedback on stories and scripts, to working with the production departments like art and locations to make and approve creative and budgetary decisions, to working in the cutting room with the editors to execute our internal and studio/network notes. Luckily, between myself, Marta, our colleague Robbie Rowe Tollin, and our incredible crew, we are able to divide and conquer to preserve our sanity, and the creative collaboration is off the charts. 

Devorah Herbert (production designer), Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Allyson Fanger (costume designer)

It’s hands-down the most fulfilling and inspiring professional experience of my young career, in no small part because of Jane and Lily themselves. They are consummate professionals, always prepared, always on time, always eager to do their best work. They are so immensely talented and elevate everything they touch with their work ethic and their spirit – it makes you feel like you’re a part of something big, something meaningful. And work aside, they still manage – at 78 and 80 years old! – to carve out time to volunteer and organize for causes they hold dear to their hearts, that benefit the victimized and underserved. AND they’re hilariously funny! I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for them, and I hope a small fraction of their vitality and amazingness has rubbed off on me over these past couple of years.

LUCY: We have both writers and readers who regularly visit our blog. I suspect we'd all be interested in the process of how you choose projects to develop. Where do the ideas come from, and how many books do you look at, and what catches your eye about something that might translate well into film or TV?

HANNAH: For us, it’s all about passion. The ladies of Okay Goodnight (myself, Marta Kauffman, Robbie Rowe Tollin, and our two amazing coordinators) are voracious readers, so the way we typically find the books we want to adapt is just by working through the towering stacks of leisure-reading books on our nightstands. When one of us falls madly in love with something and we think it might be a viable adaptation, we stop the presses and make sure everyone at our company gives it a read to see if there’s consensus. An adaptation is really hard work – it requires so much heavy lifting creatively – so whatever the book is has to completely consume us, mind and soul. Being a small and very hands-on production company, we only have the bandwidth to pursue a handful of projects at a time, so we only take on the projects that we feel in our bones, the stories that we can’t imagine not telling, content that has an important and rightful place in the culture at this moment. We tend toward female-driven content, which I don’t think is a coincidence, us being a company of women, but I think it’s also because we see a need in the culture for more stories by and about women. 

So to answer your question more directly – we are constantly reading fiction, but at any given time we are seriously considering only a few books to adapt. These books would ideally have some dynamic female characters, compelling visual setting or style potential, something about it that feels totally unique or never-before-seen on screen, and the story would have substance and sophistication and its telling would promote our core value of common humanity.

LUCY: I could ask a million more things, but here's one last question. You've had a little experience with screenwriting and are probably interested in doing more. what are the challenges of adapting a book to a script?

HANNAH: I’d say the biggest challenge I personally faced is how to externalize or dramatize internal thought and character development. For example, if you have an introverted protagonist in a book, the way you get to know her or him on the screen would have to be creatively reconceived in order to achieve the same intimacy with the character. In a book, being let into a character’s thought processes, or an anecdotal memory where its significance is explained to us in its unfolding, or any tangential musings that are never spoken aloud can hold our attention for hours and hours on end. In a visual medium like film or TV, we learn about them more by what they’re doing and saying, unless you employ voice over narration, which is a slippery slope but when used thoughtfully can be very effective. I also think that translating tone provides a special kind of challenge – because so often when we fall in love with a book, what we’re enamored by is so much more than the beats of the story or the arcs of the characters. It’s the unfolding and intertwining of it all, the atmosphere and world building, the unique combination of our synapses that fire off in symphony. And sometimes in order to recreate that intoxicating experience you have to move away from the source material, which can be a painful but necessary step in honoring the book you fell in love with in the first place.

LUCY: Reds! Isn't she amazing? She's got a busy busy day and is of course on California time, but will try to pop in to answer comments and questions as she can, so fire away...