[This article is part of an ongoing series profiling New York films and filmmakers at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Click here for other features in the series.]
As far as scenic routes to Sundance go, Sólo Dios Sabe executive producer Christian Ryan followed one of the more unconventional ones. A former management consultant and high school physics teacher, Ryan had dabbled in writing and producing when he received a telephone call from an old business school friend in San Francisco.
“We hadn’t been in touch,” Ryan explained. “But he called me up and said, ‘Hey, a script just crossed my desk.’ He works in private wealth management, and that world of high net- wealth money management kind of intersects with the independent film world. That’s people with money, and independent filmmakers are always looking FOR money. There’s some connection there–not always a natural fit, but sometimes.”
The script was Carlos Bolado and Diane Weipert’s Sólo Dios Sabe, and for Ryan, the fit was pretty much perfect. The film was already in an advanced stage of development, with Diego Luna and Alice Braga cast as the story’s star-crossed lovers and the screenplay on its ninth draft, but the funding had yet to be locked down. Bolado, an internationally acclaimed filmmaker with an Oscar-nominated documentary and Mexican Ariel award-winning feature to his credit, flew from San Francisco to New York in 2003 to meet with Ryan.
The neophyte producer leveled with the director right away. “I said, ‘Hey, you know, I don’t have experience in independent film that I can bring to the project,’ ” Ryan told The Reeler. “But I know how to run Excel, and I can make PowerPoint presentations if we need those. I don’t know anything about cameras or anything like that, but I’m totally happy to learn.”
That was enough for Bolado and fellow producers Sara Silveira and Yissel Ibarra. Ryan made his first trip to Sundance in 2004, relentlessly networking and familiarizing himself with the festival dynamics. Sólo Dios Sabe, meanwhile, took shape as a genuinely international production. The filmmakers took advantage of incentives in Mexico and Brazil (indeed, Ryan informed me, Sólo Dios Sabe is the first-ever co-production between the two countries), while Ryan scrambled to keep up with conference calls that often comprised participants in four time zones.
“The sort of things I’ve been helping to do are raising money and negotiating deals we’ve cut along the way,” Ryan said. “Basically, after talking to other people who’ve had the title of executive producer, I think that on any independent film it means any and all things. It’s pitching in on almost every aspect of the film down to, as one of the other producers and I put it, sometimes mopping up the coffee.”
But it primarily means that when Ryan attends his third Sundance Film Festival this week, he will officially be there as a New York filmmaker. “It’s kind of funny that here I am in New York involved with this thing,” he said. “I guess it sort of points out the international nature of independent film now or something. And hopefully, it becomes a launching pad.”

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