Specht’s true story
Proudfoot is well known to those who work at the intersection of marketing and film, and he is the only documentary filmmaker to win two Oscars. He’s not affiliated with any particular holding company, and his previous films include several produced with Publicis Sapient.
“If you’re going to fund a documentary or you’re going to support a documentary—trust the documentarian, right? Let them go out and make a film. And then on the filmmaker side, you have to obviously tell the truth, no matter what it is that you find,” Proudfoot told ADWEEK.
Having known Proudfoot for years, Brendan Gaul, IPG Mediabrands’ global chief content officer and Traverse32’s global president, was waiting for the right opportunity to partner together for the first time.
Proudfoot directed and produced The Final Copy of Ilon Specht alongside his Breakwater Studios partners, Kirstin Falk and Rachel Greenwald.
“I called Ilon, and she immediately said, ‘Absolutely no way. I’m not interested,’ and told me a litany of things that she didn’t like about or that she had a negative experience in the 1980s with [at] McCann-Erickson or L’Oréal. But she kept talking to me,” Proudfoot told the panel audience.
Eventually, Specht decided that she could tell her unabridged story, in her own words.
