The walls of Christine Vachon’s new office in Chelsea are lined with posters of films produced across her long, peerless career. The dreamy key art for this year’s Past Lives catches the eye instantly, as Vachon’s first post-COVID arthouse triumph. Right near it hangs Happiness, Todd Solondz’s defiant suburban satire from 1998 which, rather infamously, examined pedophilia as a central theme. But another Todd’s filmography looms largest, since Vachon has worked with Todd Haynes going back to Superstar, a 1987 short in which Barbie-esque dolls act out Karen Carpenter’s tragic life. (The film has been effectively banned since 1990, when Karen’s brother, Richard Carpenter, won a copyright-infringement lawsuit.)

Haynes and Vachon teamed up once again for his new movie, May December, which opens the New York Film Festival on Friday and was loosely inspired by the story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who committed statutory rape with her 12-year-old student (whom she later married). Vachon and her Killer Films producing partner, Pamela Koffler, keep a naughty logline for the dark comedy to themselves, with a certain taboo subject back on their screen: “Pedophile Barbie.” She booms with laughter as she speaks it aloud to a prying journalist. “That probably shouldn’t go in there,” Vachon says, eyes on my notepad. “That’s something Netflix will get mad at me for saying.” Her static grin suggests it’s worth including anyway.

The Manhattan-born Vachon isn’t one to pull punches. Though best-known for producing Haynes’s Oscar-nominated prestige hits Far From Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015), as well as groundbreaking social dramas like Boys Don’t Cry (1999), she came up as an avant-garde figure in New York’s burgeoning indie scene, backing polarizing movies now regarded as cult classics like Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), Todd Graff’s Camp (2003), and John Waters’s A Dirty Shame (2004). With Haynes and others, she emerged as a pivotal tastemaker in the New Queer Cinema movement, producing scrappy and transgressive visions borne out of the AIDS epidemic (1992’s Swoon; 1995’s Stonewall) while intensively working alongside ACT UP. “It was devastating, the percentage of people I knew that didn’t make it,” Vachon says. “That lent a sense of urgency to the movies that we made—you can’t wait around, people are dying, you’ve got to tell the story now.” The movies got attention, the cause got advanced, but she rarely got the credit. “All these gay male directors of these movies that she produced—the attention was on us,” Haynes tells me. “Yet with all these movies, she was making them happen.”

At a certain point, the tide turned. I have no doubt that the bluntly clever Vachon sitting across from me, wearing a baggy black tee on a muggy July morning, is the same woman who fearlessly pushed American filmmaking forward in the bygone era of Blockbuster rentals. The difference is that, today, Vachon is on the cusp of a ridiculously overdue first Oscar nomination, with both Celine Song’s Past Lives and Haynes’s May December critically adored and in the hunt. She’s fresh from receiving a career tribute in the Czech Republic, will soon receive a lifetime achievement award in Mill Valley, California, and has amassed a global fanbase for everything from her Twitter reviews of wine and her love of combat boots to her cinematic contributions. She feels the love, but may be the least sentimental person I’ve ever interviewed. “I’m not nostalgic,” as she likes to say. And yet: “It’s stunning to me to take that step back and realize how extraordinary some of these movies are.”

Vachon once described her reputation in the industry as “dire”—inevitable, maybe, for a rising queer female producer with a bent for controversial material and a respect for true artistry. “I was such an anomaly,” she says. “There really weren’t women who did what I did.” Vachon’s admirers perceive her as a kind of Hollywood rebel, unafraid of calling out the sexist and homophobic dregs of show business. You meet her expecting a certain unfiltered candor. But Vachon knows how to play the game. Her career is so vibrant, her list of collaborators so diverse—how could she not? Haynes says her ability to partner with almost anyone—her “pragmatism”—is essential to her longevity: “This has been true through her entire life.”

So, though Vachon comes armed with opinions—she found this year’s Theater Camp “totally fun,” but wondered of the filmmakers, “How many times did they watch Camp?”—she’s learned how to package them. In sales meetings for Haynes’s provocative 1991 debut feature Poison, Vachon noticed potential buyers exclusively addressing the movie’s executive producer, James Schamus, rather than her. After Samuel Goldwyn’s Tom Rothman acquired the 1994 lesbian hit Go Fish, Vachon met with “a room full of men” from the company who asked her, “Can you tell us the cities that have the most lesbians in them?” (Vachon replied, “I don’t know, North Hampton?”) Even now, certain producers refer to Vachon and Koffler as “girls.” This will go on as long as Vachon plans to make movies.

“I had to make a decision early on: I could burn up with anger and bitterness, or I could take a deep breath and try to make it work for me,” Vachon says. “I just grit my teeth and bear it.” Plus, it helps to have a true business partner in Koffler: “It’s just great, after a tough day like that, to be able to call somebody and say, ‘This fucking motherfucker was fucking fucks.’”

“It was like meeting a historical figure,” Celine Song says of her first encounter with Christine Vachon. Song had been a noted playwright long before deciding to helm her first movie, a semi-autobiographical love triangle between a Korean American woman, her American husband, and her Korean childhood friend who’s flown across the world to find her. Its specificity and its New York–iness made Vachon the dream collaborator, a fantasy that turned suddenly real when Song pitched her on Past Lives—and won her over.

Distributed by A24, the achingly romantic Past Lives enjoyed a successful box office run this past summer—a rarity today for films of its scale—and is a strong Oscar contender headed into the fall. Betting on new filmmakers requires a bigger leap than ever—theatrical windows have shrunk, streaming has reduced the potential to stand out—but Vachon and Killer can take credit for launching the careers of everyone from Boys Don’t Cry’s Kimberly Peirce to Zola’s Janicza Bravo. “Every day, I would show up and say, ‘I believe this,’ and then Christine would be, like, ‘If you believe that, that’s now my belief,’” Song says of their dynamic on the Past Lives set. “She just believed in me.”

Vachon monitors social media to see how Past Lives is reaching viewers. Two years ago, she found Twitter a crucial barometer for the COVID-afflicted Zola, whose story originated on the platform. Her instincts have everything to do with an intimate understanding of audience and engagement that dates back to Killer’s launch: “Everybody’s pointing to Oppenheimer and Barbie, and saying, ‘See? See? That’s what people wanted all along.’ But we knew that’s what people wanted all along!” Vachon remembers Poison bringing LGBTQ people in droves to the theater back in the early ’90s simply because that group hadn’t been represented in movies much at all by that point. “Half of them walked out of the theater, going, ‘What the fuck was that?’ and some of those guys were, like, ‘I just wanted to see some boys kiss,’” Vachon says. “But I realized that, if you made a movie targeted specifically to that audience, it didn’t have to cross over if you made it for the right amount of money. That was an incredibly liberating feeling—the true collision of art and commerce.”

That unique Hollywood alchemy remains core to Vachon’s value system, even as she navigates a tumultuous period for her industry, between COVID’s extended impact and the year of labor strikes. She’s waded through decades of uncertainty: the move from VHS to DVD, the end of video rental stores, the shift to digital. “The only reason Killer is still standing is because we are very good at listening to the marketplace and pivoting quickly,” Vachon says. “I don’t cry about, ‘We aren’t shooting on film anymore’…and I don’t know what’s on the other end of these strikes. I’m just trying to figure out the way that we can keep switching seats on the Titanic.”

Haynes’s 1995 masterpiece, Safe, marked the first time Vachon cast a big star, in Julianne Moore. Before then, she ran audition ads in Backstage magazine; now she was on the phone with Moore’s agent and manager, learning about Hollywood dealmaking in real time: “I remember them yelling at me, ‘You have to make her ‘pay or play’! And I was like, Okay…what does that mean?” (Vachon calls this moment her induction “to dealing with the wonderful world of representation.”) The film kickstarted a shift into the mainstream for both her and Haynes. “We were enlisted in a cultural moment together,” Haynes says. “That’s a unique way to start a creative life and a professional life.” They’ve become very close friends.

Now we’ve got May December, which welcomes Moore back into the Vachon-Haynes fold, and introduces Oscar winner Natalie Portman and Riverdale alum Charles Melton to the company. It premiered in Cannes to rave reviews; Netflix promptly acquired rights in a splashy deal, aiming to mount perhaps the biggest awards campaigns ever for both Vachon and Haynes. How far this pair of queer New York outsiders have come from a doll movie so demented it led to a successful cease-and-desist lawsuit. Nearly 40 years later, here’s another wild movie—if also caustically funny, gorgeously lensed, and sensationally acted, as it studies the dynamic between a deeply repressed homemaker (Moore), the husband she first met and had sex with when he was a seventh-grader (Melton), and the actor assigned to play her in a movie (Portman). It’s somehow both a big-studio release and a brilliantly weird indie. “The hot dogs are going to be the first gay meme,” Vachon guesses. No spoilers as to what moment from May December she’s referring to here.

Haynes’s lone Oscar nod for his Far From Heaven screenplay feels strange enough, but, when it comes to awards, Vachon is in an overdue class of her own. She has produced films that have won top critics’ best-picture prizes, like Haynes’s Carol and Safe; films that have won major Oscars, like Boys Don’t Cry and Still Alice; cultural landmarks like Hedwig and the Angry Inch; and hidden gems like I Shot Andy Warhol. Her résumé ranks among the best and deepest of any living producer. Her lack of an Oscar nomination is more glaring by the year.

Is this the year that changes with either May December or Past Lives? (Or, hey, for true justice, both?) She admits to me that she cares about being recognized. “Two things can be true at once—you can say, ‘I don’t make movies for the awards,’ and you can also say, ‘It would mean an extraordinary amount to me to get a best-picture nomination,’” she says. “I’m not writing my speech or anything, although sometimes I feel like the only time I’m ever going to be up there is when they finally have no one else to give the Irving Thalberg [Honorary Oscar] to. They’ll wheel me out, and I’ll gum an acceptance speech.”

On the sixth floor of a Chelsea office building, though, Hollywood’s awards machine feels impossibly far away. We are surrounded by posters of films that haven’t gone the Oscar distance exactly but have lived remarkably long lives. And we are in New York, Vachon’s birthplace and her only professional home. Vachon believes there’s a New York movie no one has made, or at least gotten right—one about granular life in Manhattan during the mid-’80s. She teases the idea, then ruminates a bit on the city’s evolution. “Everybody who comes to New York is always told that they just missed the good New York, like, ‘Ah, it’s 1935—you know when it was really good? In 1928!’” she says. “It’s happening right now. It has been happening since New York was New York.”

This city is the key to understanding Vachon’s drive, her idiosyncrasies, her endurance in an industry transforming by the hour. No amount of economic disruption or viral outbreak or technological change can keep it down for long, Vachon argues. Its next chapter is always right in front of you. “That is New York,” she says. “It relentlessly moves forward.”