"Before high school, I really had no indication of what I wanted to do," Carter says. "But then I had a history project where we had to make a video reenactment of a historical event, and I ended up taking the task way too seriously. I worked with the community college to help me put in titles and music, and we brought somebody on board who knew how to edit. Through this sophomore year project, I realized that [filmmaking] was a combination of everything I loved: art, storytelling, history, science, technology, leadership and collaboration."
She started looking for film schools after her successful school project and ultimately enrolled at Florida State University. When Carter enrolled in the film program, she had considered trying her hand at writing or directing, but as soon as her classes started producing short films, she was immediately drawn to the position of producer.
"Basically, a producer has their hands in every single department and creative problem-solving aspect," Carter says. "I have a very organized brain, which helps a lot with that, so I kind of just started producing a lot of short films in film school and then moved to Los Angeles to learn the business. It was being in L.A. for three or four years that sealed the deal for me that I wanted to be an independent film producer and not work within a studio system. I wanted to make really daring, challenging art that told personal stories. So I moved to New York after L.A. because, at the time, New York was very much a hot spot for indie films and was the place to be if you wanted to make them."
Allison Rose Carter was also a co-producer for Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Courtesy of Allison Rose Carter
Carter has a long list of professional accomplishments to her name, including co-producing 2022's Everything Everywhere All At Once, which won multiple Academy Awards; executive-directing the 2020 film Shirley, which starred Elisabeth Moss; co-producing the 2020 indie hit Zola; producing dozens of short films; and, most recently, releasing The Adults, which was written and directed by Dustin Guy Defa and starred Michael Cera, Hannah Gross and Sophia Lillis.
The Adults follows Eric (Cera) as he returns home for a brief visit and is torn between reuniting with his sisters and chasing a victory with his old poker group. As the trip goes on, Eric finds it more and more difficult to avoid conflicts and revelations as his carefully crafted adult persona begins to resemble his old childhood quarrels. Eric and Rachel (Gross) are confronted with the gap between their youthful selves and the adults they have become, while Maggie (Lillis) tries to re-create the private world the three of them once shared.
This is the first official film produced by Carter and her longtime production partner, Jon Read, under the Savage Rose Films banner. Savage Rose Films — the moniker is a combination of each producer's middle name — is dedicated to telling stories "centered on the human experience, each character filled with complexity and contradiction." Since 2012, the two have produced or co-produced more than twenty films together; they formed Savage Rose Films to take their collaboration to the next level.
According to Carter, The Adults has been "ten years in the making. Jon and I worked with Dustin Guy Defa on his previous film, which was shot in 2015, called Person to Person. ... When COVID hit, he was thinking about making something smaller and more contained. Over the pandemic, Dustin had been playing poker with Michael Cera, and during these games, they started working on developing a character for him."
Once Defa finished the script, he approached Carter and Read about producing it in early 2021.
"And we read the script, and it was just one of the most lovely things I've read in a really long time," Carter recalls. "His working through the concept of what it means to be an adult and adult-sibling relationships is something that I just hadn't seen in film in a really long time, in a way that was as meaningful as this. And so Jon and I were pretty quick to say, 'Yes, we love this. We want to work with you again.' And it's just really rewarding to work with a director a second time. It's something that unfortunately is kind of rare, but it's awesome because we know everybody's strengths and weaknesses and how to support each other."
The team spent the first half of the year preparing so they could begin shooting The Adults by the fall of 2021. Although they were in the thick of COVID, the script was written with a small cast and crew in mind so they could keep the set contained.
"We all sort of stayed and lived in a hotel in Newburgh, New York, together for the duration of filming," Carter says. "We were like a real family; we stayed in, played board games and hung out when we weren't shooting."
Carter appreciates that Variance Films was always on board with a theatrical release. "Our industry changes every six to twelve months, and so finding the right path for an independent film is a bit of a moving target," Carter says. "I think that the end game is always to find your audience and do whatever you can to find people. It breaks my heart to think that there are brilliant movies that nobody's seen but that I know probably exist. And so as a producer, my role is to make something worth something and then get it in front of as many people's eyes as possible."
To build buzz about The Adults, it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival back in February and hosted its North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this summer. Variance Films opened it in select U.S. theaters on August 18 before its digital release later this year.
"One of the most amazing reactions that we've gotten from our festival audiences is just that everyone has a deep relationship with either their siblings or their found family and comes out with a feeling of appreciation for them," Carter says. "You have all these people in your life that love you and care about you; they have seen you at your youngest and most immature and are still with you. My first reaction when I read the script was to call up people I love. And it's been really exciting to hear that's how people are responding to this movie, and so I hope the general audience and everybody that experiences it will have that same reaction."
The Adults is playing in select U.S. theaters now. Find more information here.
