We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Chayah Masters a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Chayah, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
In 2018, I launched my production company, Rumination Road, because I wanted to collaborate with filmmakers and tell stories that contribute to our world in a meaningful way. I’m a film producer because the power of story has the ability to teach, guide, heal, empower, hold accountable, and achieve a form of social justice when often judicial justice isn’t able to be found within our society. Movies have the ability to shine light on themes relevant to our understanding of the world and offer ideas for how to live and/or be better human beings within it.
Take for example, an award-winning script I’ve just optioned, Scent of Marigold, that is a narrative drama ripped from the headlines in 2018 when the first Trump administration had the immigration policy of putting children in cages after separating them from their parents and families when they crossed the border into the United States. This story highlights the failings of those policies and the heartless stupidity of the bureaucracy in dealing with children who happen to be immigrants. In this story, we’ll follow a female Mexican immigrant border patrol guard as she wrestles with her Americanization and watches the treatment of children that could’ve been her when she was brought to the United States by her parents. This story will push her to the point of no return where she’ll have to decide between doing what’s expected of her and what’s right for a 5-year old girl caught in a system with no care for her well-being and dismissive of the soul residing within her. This is an important story to tell as we are about to experience a second Trump administration. President-elect Trump is telegraphing his immigration policy already with the hiring of Stephen Miller as his White House Deputy Chief of Staff – a man who was in the first administration and took part in the policy-making to separate children from their parents the first go around. Silence is acceptance of this policy; and this policy was, and remains, unacceptable. Content creation is a way to combat a society that would choose to discard honor, hope, and truth for greed, power, and hate. It’s going to be all the more urgent in the coming years to tell stories that entertain while also showing that people who are different from each other all matter, all have value, and all should be respected and loved. It’s my hope that the projects I produce will do this in some way, shape, or form. This is a meaningful purpose for me.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
An Executive Producer of the Sundance World Premiere, After the Wedding, starring Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams, I’m proud to be producing a slate of films that reflect my goal to tell meaningful stories that not only entertain but also offer insight into how to change the world for the better and combat hatred and injustice.
I began my career in production working for Miramax and Dreamworks Animation in Los Angeles, CA before relocating to Atlanta, GA in 2020 to work in production on films for Amazon/MGM, Disney+, and others. In recent years, I’ve moved into line producing and audio producing and have been successful in working with independent and studio backed films and television series. I’m the person people call when they want their production to run efficiently and their financier’s funds to have an honest accounting for maximum value realized on the screen and upon release.
I was selected for the Women in Film Producer Mentorship Circle and was mentored by Michelle Raimo-Kouyate (Silver Linings Playbook, The Emoji Movie) before going on to mentor emerging screenwriters in the Women in Film Writers Circle. For the past seven years, I’ve volunteered for the Austin Film Festival Screenplay contest judging scripts in their annual competition.
I am a graduate of Loyola Marymount University and attended film school at UCLA Extension.
I have wanted to be part of the film industry since my dad took me to see Star Wars in 1977. I was a small girl and didn’t fully understand the movie but I understood good vs evil and saw what true friendship was in Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, C3PO, and R2D2. I didn’t really understand what a film producer was until I went to college and interned on my first independent film many years later. I loved the art of filmmaking and collaboration and knew I wanted to be part of it. Attending film school, I studied screenwriting, producing, and directing and as I participated in student films, my natural talent for developing material, raising funds, and production coordination and budgeting, led my friends and mentors to encourage me to pursue producing.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
A project I optioned several years ago was financed to go into production in the spring of 2020 when covid hit our world. The financier went bankrupt and the foreign pre-sales market for financing independent films began experience a significant contraction and made an already difficult task of financing an independent film that much more difficult. The next year, I made a deal with a new financier to finance the film only to have them require us to reduce the budget to the point that it was going to be very difficult to make a quality film for various production realities at the price point they were requiring. However, wanting to be a good partner and producer, we did manage to reduce fees and get the budget to the number they were asking us to get to. This was nine months into the relationship and yet they still wouldn’t do what they were supposed to do in greenlighting the film and transferring the funds to make the film. So, I cancelled the deal and was told by the male CEO of that company that I would never get the film made if I didn’t do it with him and that I was making a huge mistake. I told him the only mistake I’d made was losing a year’s time of nothing moving forward because he didn’t do what he promised he would and as a result I had arrived at that relationship with zero in the production bank account and would now be leaving that relationship with zero in the production bank account and a year gone by. Next, I was about to make a deal with a German company to finance the film however somehow a man I’d never met before found out about my project and took it upon himself to call this company and suggest this was a great script and they should do it and then thought it just fine to insert himself in my production budget for three times what the producers were making on the film that had been on the project since the beginning. I’d never spoken to this man until we got into the negotiation of the deal and when I called out his fee in the budget as being unacceptable, the company wouldn’t adjust it. So, once again, I walked away from a deal that was predatory in nature and would have me sign over total control of the project to this company and this interloper would become the lead producer on the project I found, developed, and had shepherded for five years at this point.
That brings me to May 2024. An old acquaintance with a checkered past contacted me. I was reluctant to engage with him but he shared with me pictures of his kids and supposed legal documents showing he hadn’t done the things he’d been accused of in an article published a year before in the Los Angeles Times. I’m not a perfect human being, and I believe in second chances, and he seemed to be sincere. He played on my emotions for the friendship we’d had several years prior and while I was skeptical, he eventually won me over and we spoke on the phone. He shared with me he’d created a film fund and was doing great things for independent filmmakers financing their films with debt-financing loans to get their films made. I was running up on a deadline for my project and it felt like time was running out. I asked this acquaintance to send me proof of funds that he could actually fund my full budget. He sent me proof of funds showing he had access to just over $5M. This would be enough to cover the budget for my film to shoot in Budapest, Hungary. He said he wanted to do the deal. We engaged our lawyers. We negotiated the deal. I flew to Budapest and we began to prep the film. I was sent five wire confirmations with a combined total of $2.4M over the course of two weeks as I was staying in a hotel in Budapest waiting for the production funds to land in my production account so we could fund the movie. However, no funds ever arrived. After the first week in Budapest, hiring crew, scouting locations, etc. it was becoming apparent that this so-called financier may not be real and I was spending money that was not covered in the production account and my production service company in Hungary was covering the expenses. In the second week of no funds arriving, I had to make the difficult decision to shut the production down and withdraw $60,000 from my retirement savings to repay the production service company and make them whole. In the subsequent weeks, there were a lot of emails and text messages flying back and forth with this fraudster financier to hold him accountable for the people he hurt, aside from me, who’s hopes he’d dashed by his dishonest dealings. Eventually this person text me that he’d never gotten over how I ended our friendship several years earlier after he behaved badly in a prior situation where his lack of character in business dealings was demonstrated leading me to abandon our close friendship at that time. In addition, he was angry about a picture that he’d seen posted with me and a mutual acquaintance he was in a legal battle with regarding a different film and felt I was disloyal for being friends with this person. He admitted those wire confirmations he’d sent me were actually never sent. He’d never wired any funds in accordance with the deal we’d executed and the lawyers had negotiated. The whole deal had been a fraud. Everyone wanted me to go after him legally. However this is a person who’s already in legal battles on several fronts. One more legal battle wouldn’t mean anything to him. And the only people who benefit from lawsuits are the lawyers. Instead, I did what I knew this person wanted – I gave him an apology for hurting his feelings. As angry as I was with him, I had to do what was right for the life of film I wanted to make. I had to find a way to right the course of this project for the sake of the screenwriter who entrusted me to produce her script. So, over the next few months, I was able to get this person to reimburse me the funds for what I had to cover due to his fraudulent dealings and remove him from my chain of title on the script. Now, I’m revamping the project and am in a new financing relationship with quality financiers with proven track records and we’re anticipating filming this project in 2025!
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
I don’t mean to be apocalyptic but I see my nation, the United States, descending into a state of mind that is taking us backwards. We’re regressing from advances made for women, diversity, LGBQT rights, and more. I was raised by Reagan Republicans that taught me that a trickle down economy works for everyone. And after decades of waiting to see that trickle-down work, I’ve realized I’ve been sold a bill of goods not worth the air it’s been spoken in.
Storytelling and filmmaking allows me to tell the stories of how the world should be, should work. How we should love each other regardless of race, sexual orientation, and political beliefs. I want to be part of the solution to make our world better and more just and by finding scripts and producing stories that shine light on the heroes of our world and the way they’ve done things to make the world a little bit better, I’m hopeful we’ll find a way to be better in real life. My mission is to entertain and help society find a better path at the same time!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://chayahmasters.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hiya_chayah/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chayahmasters/
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@hiyachayah
Image Credits
All images were taken with my camera.
Group picture of team at Moonshine Post and BOOM post audio in Atlanta, Georgia; I’m in the back row and was an Audio Producer with this team.
Photo of the FrightFest premiere in London, UK for The Last Podcast which I’m an Associate Producer on the film
Photo of The Last Podcast director, Dean Alioto, myself, and Sound Designer and Executive Producer for The Last Podcast, Chris Basta during the final sound mix at BOOM Post Audio in Atlanta, GA
Women in Film Producers Mentorship Circle brunch – Michelle Raimo-Kouyate is seated next to me and my dear friend, and fellow female producer, Marisa Vitali, is on my right.