There’s no question that Hollywood is in the midst of a slowdown. But despite the industry upheaval, Amanda Burrell and the production company she runs, Team Downey, have never been more hungry. As president of the Venice, Calif.
-based firm founded by actor Robert Downey Jr. and his wife, Susan Downey, Burrell is, by her own admission, “voracious” for new projects. The company has had several major successes lately, with HBO’s Vietnam War-era miniseries “The Sympathizer” and Netflix’s fantasy drama “Sweet Tooth.
” Burrell is optimistic that the entertainment industry will figure out where audiences are and what they want to see. “The reality is the audience is there and they’re voracious,” she said. “So we just have to figure out how to reach them and how to get them into it.
” What gets you excited about a project? We often ask ourselves over here at Team Downey what marching orders should we give the industry in terms of what to bring us, and it’s actually kind of challenging because we have “Sympathizer,” we have “Sweet Tooth” and we have “Perry Mason.” We run the gamut. For us, it’s really about things that are ambitious, things that are challenging, things that we know will be thematically rigorous and get into a conversation with an audience.
And then for me personally, it’s really about the people that we engage, people that we’re talking to every day. Often, it’s just jamming with a writer on an idea that just lights me .
