VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Oscar-Winning Producer Peter Spears Reveals How Late Bill Paxton Inspired ‘Drift’

Drift, which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, follows the story of war-refugee Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo) as she struggles to survive on a Greek island. There she meets an American tour guide, Callie (Alia Shawkat), and battles with her past troubles to form a friendship.

In an exclusive interview with uInterview, producer Peter Spears, who won the Best Picture Oscar for Nomadland, revealed why he wanted to make the film.

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“It goes back pretty far to Bill Paxton, the actor, had been the first one to option the book and had recognized in it the profundity of the story and what could possibly be a very beautiful movie and universal story,” Spears said. “And he had seen Call Me By Your Name and really admired it and known we had put it together in this sort of European coproduction paradigm, so he asked if I would help him with that. This was a few weeks before he passed away.”

“After he died, we sort of, in his memory, continued to sort of push this up the mountain of all movie mountains that then and I reached out to Naima [Abed] and Emilie [Georges] and said, ‘let’s go make this movie’ and they said, ‘great, what about Anthony Chen?'” Spears continued. “We’ve worked with him on a couple films and I’m a big fan of Anthony’s work and especially about the interior lives of women in particular. I felt that he had this very particular and beautiful way to tell those sorts of stories so we just continued the challenge of all these kinds of films and brought on our European coproduction producers and last spring shot it in Greece and cut it all year and now sort of here in Park City and sharing it.”