Bill Pohlad

Bill Pohlad (birthname: William Pohlad) is an Oscar-nominated producer who’s a late arrival as a writer-director of international regard, with his third feature, Dreamin’ Wild, premiering out of competition at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. In his first eight years as a producer/executive producer, Pohlad was instrumental in making three films winning or nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: Brokeback Mountain (2005), The Tree of Life (2011), and 12 Years a Slave (2013).

Born into great wealth as the youngest son of three in the Pohlad family—currently the third-richest in Minnesota—Bill desired to not follow the family way into banking, bottling, and sports ownership, and instead make movies. At 32, he founded River Road Entertainment with two friends and funded his first film as writer-director-producer, Old Explorers (1990), starring José Ferrer and James Whitmore. Though well-reviewed, the movie’s financial failure stopped Pohlad from pursuing a filmmaking career; instead, he returned to the family business in the marketing department.

However, Pohlad returned to the film business over a decade later as a producer, with enormous success: His first film as executive producer (via River Road’s two-year deal with distributor-producer Focus Features) was Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), with Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway, which was Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and won for director, adapted screenplay and score, and also earning $178 million worldwide on a $14 million budget.

This solidified River Road’s reputation as a backer of quality American cinema, leading to a fine run for Bill Pohlad as producer and executive producer. He developed strong associations with Sean Penn and his filmmaking projects, such as Into the Wild (2007); with Terrence Malick for his highly acclaimed The Tree of Life (2011) and his paired non-fiction projects about Earth and the cosmos, Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey (2015) and Voyage of Time (2016), as well as executive producing Malick’s return to narrative filmmaking, A Hidden Life (2019), with August Diehl, Valerie Pachner, Matthias Schoenaerts, Franz Rogowski, and Bruno Ganz; and filmmaker Steve McQueen, with the universally acclaimed slave-era drama, 12 Years a Slave (2013), with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Lupita Nyong’o, and winning three of nine Oscar nominations including a win for Best Picture.

Other fiction and documentary filmmakers with whom Pohlad has backed as either producer or executive producer include: Steven Shainberg (Fur in 2006), Brett Morgen (Chicago 10 in 2007), Robert Kenner (Food, Inc. in 2008), Floria Sigismondi (The Runaways in 2010), Doug Liman (Fair Game in 2010), Jean-Marc Vallée (Wild in 2014), Oren Moverman (Time Out of Mind in 2014), J.A. Bayona (A Monster Calls in 2016), Spike Lee (David Byrne’s American Utopia in 2020), Tasha Van Zandt (After Antarctica in 2021), Patrick Mark (Stewart, date to be announced), and Billy Luther (Frybread Face and Me, date to be announced).

24 years after Bill Pohlad’s first film behind the camera, he returned to directing with the sensitively realized biopic on Brian Wilson, Love & Mercy (2014), co-written by Oren Moverman and staring John Cusack, Paul Dano, Elizabeth Banks, and Paul Giamatti. Eight years would pass until Pohlad’s third project as director (as well as producer and screenwriter), Dreamin’ Wild (2022), starring Casey Affleck, Walton Goggins, Zooey Deschanel, Noah Jupe, Chris Messina, and Beau Bridges, and like Pohlad’s Love & Mercy, is a biopic about American musicians—in this case, the forgotten and recently rediscovered duo of Donnie and Joe Emerson.