Elizabeth Olsen wants you to know: Todd Solondz needs money to make a movie

Nicole Kidman recently lamented that “everything” is hard to get made in Hollywood right now. And if Nicole Kidman, one of the most working-est actors in the biz, is having trouble getting projects off the ground, imagine how it is for everyone else! In this case, “everyone” and “everything” includes Todd Solondz and his movie Love Child, which is set to star Elizabeth Olsen if they can get a greenlight. “I’m not a producer on it, but I’ve never hustled more for a movie that’s having a hard time getting made,” Olsen admits in a new interview with Vulture. 

“There’s so many things I could say about that in private. It really comes down to having really responsible budgets. But not every movie can be made with favors for crews, right? You can’t ask crews to be paid a really shitty wage. So I don’t know. I find it all to be really frustrating right now, specifically for film,” Olsen frets. “I just have to remember that there are studios that do quite a range—Searchlight being one of them. But every project I want to do usually is a little adjacent to a genre or whatever, and everyone wants to know, ‘What’s that genre?'” As the actor notes, not every film (like the one she’s currently promoting, His Three Daughters) slots perfectly into a genre, but “I find that that question is part of raising the money, and it’s so boring.”

Solondz has earned his place in cinema canon for movies like Welcome To The Dollhouse and Happiness, yet even he can’t get the funding for a movie—not even with a Marvel star on his side. But he’s not alone, as Kidman has proven. This week there were rumors that John Waters’ movie Liarmouth, which was set to star Aubrey Plaza, has been put on the backburner; he apparently told The Houston Chronicle that he’s moved on to other projects. In May of this year, Waters shared that “every person said, ‘No, we don’t have a penny of the budget,'” but “Hopefully that will change.” But as of earlier this week, he told the Consequence podcast Kyle Meredith With… that “it might get made one day, it’s not getting made right now.” There’s nobody left “to wait for” that might give them money (“they all said no”), but on the bright side, “Things change, studios, they change every six months, so we’ll see.”

That’s an optimistic way to look at an industry that is in its current iteration so incredibly risk averse that iconic, award-winning directors can’t even get the money to make new films. (Oscar winners Kevin Costner and Francis Ford Coppola both had to self-finance their latest movies, though the critical and commercial performance of those films didn’t help their cases.) It is indeed a sorry state of affairs. For now, Olsen has nothing to share about Love Child, but tells Vulture that “if anyone’s writing about this interview, if you guys want to make a big, bold notice that says, ‘Todd Solondz needs money to make a movie,’ that would be great!” We’re happy to do our small part.