How Culture Impacts Craft with Marina Stabile, Producer of Sundance Winning Film "Josephine"

Marina Stabile is a Brazilian-born, Swiss-raised producer and line producer with over 20 years of experience in film, documentaries, commercials, and digital content. She is also one of my favorite humans and I'm lucky I get to call her a friend. She grew up in São Paulo, moved to Geneva at 10, attended an international school with 118 nationalities, and knew she wanted to produce after watching the Irving Thalberg Award presented at 3 a.m. on an Oscar broadcast. She studied film and international relations at USC, produced documentaries for the United Nations in Geneva, and returned to the U.S. to earn her MFA in producing at AFI, where her thesis film The Response won a Student BAFTA. Marina's credits span indie and studio, including Miguel Arteta's Beatriz at Dinner starring Salma Hayek, the Sundance Grand Jury Prize–winning Clemency starring Alfre Woodard, Harrison Ford's The Call of the Wild (as VFX supervisor), Searchlight's Hold Your Breath starring Sarah Paulson, The People We Hate at the Wedding, and the pandemic-shot Untitled Horror Movie alongside fellow producer Bronwyn Cornelius. Most recently, she produced Josephine — written and directed by Beth de Araújo and starring Channing Tatum and Gemma Chan — which won both the U.S. Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival before being acquired by Sumerian Pictures in a competitive seven-figure deal. The film went on to screen in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival. In this conversation, we explore how culture impacts your craft, define once and for all what line producers really do, why the best career moves sometimes look like steps backward, and whether Los Angeles is still a special place to make movies. Enjoy!! CG